GEORGIA PEACHES Chapter Three

I don't want you to think Patrick Henry did not suffer tragedy in his life.  Shortly after the birth of her sixth child Patrick's  beloved wife Sarah became so depressed she could work up no interest in her new child, and in 1771 the doctors diagnosed her as being possessed by demons. Two centuries later it seems likely she suffered from post partum psychosis. Over the next 4 years Sarah was kept locked in a cellar “apartment” beneath her own home (above) where she was kept (below) and cared for by a slave woman who shared the cellar with the lady. 

The standard treatment – exorcisms, restraints, regular enemas and laxatives, bleedings and beatings – probably hastened her death in 1775.  Just as the American revolution was starting.  They buried her in a since lost unmarked grave someplace in the backyard - unhallowed ground. 

On 15 July, 1788, Federal Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton (above) suggested that Georgia cede her “vacant territories” west of the Apalachicola River to the Federal government.  In exchange the Federal government would assume Georgia's entire war debt. But Georgia politicians said “no thanks”.

Instead, on 21 December, 1789, Georgia Governor Edward Telfair (above), signed grants of five million acres between the Apalachicola River and the Mississippi River, selling the land to the Virginia, Tennessee and Carolina Yazoo companies. 

In exchange, within two years, the Yazoo companies were to pay Georgia $207,000 – or about 24 cents per acre.  The first payment was to be made in six months. 

A disinterested observer might ask, when undisputed land in the same swamp was selling for two pennies an acre, how could the investors in the Yazoo swamp lands, where the claims were likely to be disputed by the Spanish crown and the residents of other states, and perhaps even by the very civilized native populations, expect to to make a profit after paying 24 cents and acre?  Well, there was the golden foundation rock of all capitalism -  Caveat Emptor. 

The concept has officially been a part of English law since 1603, when a goldsmith named Lopus sold what turned out not to have been the magical gallstone of a wild goat (above) to a Mr Chandler, for 100 pounds. When Chandler realized he had bought a useless chunk of cholesterol with a little bilirubin,   he sued.  And a court ordered Lopus to give Chandler his money back. 

But on appeal the case was thrown out, because the higher court said it didn't matter what the sales pitch had been - “for everyone in selling his wares will affirm that his wares are good...(yet) the warranty ought to be made at the same time of the sale.” In other words, without a written guaranty (the warranty), there was no legal promise.  What the salesman tells you is just so much horse manure. Or gallstones.

That was quite a barrier to justice when the vast majority of the population could neither read nor write. But almost two hundred years later, in 1790, buyer beware was the business model for all three of the Yazoo companies, never mind that the buyers were unsuspecting investors and Revolutionary War veterans who had never seen the waterlogged swamp land they were buying.

But again, how do you make a profit buying swamp land for 24 cents an acre, when adjacent dry land was selling for 2 cents an acre? The answer to that is simple - you pay in play money. And in 1789 there was a lot of  funky paper floating around.

At America's lowest point in the revolution, a desperate Continental Congress had created the Bank of North America, and it had furnished the financial framework to support Washington's army. The BNA was the great unsung hero of the revolution. But in 1785 the new Confederation Congress withdrew the bank's charter, leaving the Federal government $11 million in debt to France and Spain, and the states about $48 million in debt to their own citizens. In exchange the moneyed class got “free market” banking, which they have been trying to sell again ever since.  And it was utopia. Right?

Within 2 years bonds issued by the American government were selling for ten to fifteen cents on the dollar, and most state bonds were selling for less than that. State legislatures were reduced to borrowing money just to pay the interest on earlier loans. There were more than fifty currencies in circulation, including English pounds and Spanish “pieces of eights”.  

Individual cities were chartering banks, which then issued their own money. And in the woods of western Pennsylvania, where their were no banks, the standard medium of exchange was home brewed whiskey. The collapse of the American economic system was the major reason the Articles of Confederation were scrapped in 1787; free banking.

Under the new Constitution, establishing a stable economy was the job of President Washington's bright-eyed boy, Alexander Hamilton (above). Having been orphaned twice while growing up (even his adoptive parent had died), the new Secretary of the Treasury had an aversion to chaos. Hamilton's imposition of economic order was simple, brilliant and realistic. And he had a little help when reality kicked the money classes right in their pocket books.  

That summer, when agents for the Virginia Yazoo Company showed up in Georgia to make their first payment for the Yazoo land grants, they were carrying a huge pile of paper money.  Some of it was Federal bonds, but the rest was cash and bonds issued by various state banks, all bought at a discount. It was sort of the 19th century crypto-currency. None of it was gold or silver.  Still Patrick Henry and friends expected their payment to be accepted at "face value".  But the state of Georgia refused to fall for that.  They deemed the offer insufficient and canceled grants to all three Yazoo companies – No sale.

That left Patrick Henry, David Ross and Thomas Jefferson, et al, holding huge piles of paper which had just been officially declared worthless. Which is when Alexander Hamilton (above) offered to exchange their “worthless” paper “at par”, meaning at the best rate offered in the open market - for new U.S. government backed bonds.  In other words, he was offering them something for nothing. And all they had to do was convince the state of Georgia (and the other 13 states) to give up claims to any western lands. 

Oh, and Hamilton also wanted to set up a new Bank of North America - this time to be called The First Bank of the United States. It was the deal which saved the Virginia and Georgia speculators' collective behinds, but it was a bitter pill for the would-be capitalist to swallow. Thomas Jefferson, a life long land speculator, would later say bitterly that Hamilton had fooled him. But he still cashed the check.

And when Georgia accepted Hamilton's offer, it seemed  all of the Yazoo swamp land deals were dead and buried.  Except they weren't. Like movie zombies the capitalists would rise again. It is the nature of capitalism that its keeps screwing  the very people who have the most faith in it.  Have I mentioned that greed makes you stupid?

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GEORGIA PEACHES Chapter Two

The next scheme the leaders of Georgia tried,  in the fall of 1788,  was the infamous Pine Barren Land Speculation, in which a dozen rich white men surveyed (badly) about thirty million acres of Georgia and sold it off (quickly), mostly to smaller speculators,  Everybody thought they were going to get rich. 

The problem this time was that the 85,500 white Georgians occupied about nine million acres, with most of them living in the 11 counties closest to Savanna . And for the new vast spaces claimed by whites but occupied by native Americans, there were a lot of duplicate titles, with five or six owners claiming every section of land. Over night land prices went from sky high to bargain basement,  inspiring a fake advertisement, offering, “ Ten millions of acres of valuable pine barren land in the province of Utopia, on which there are several very sumptuous air castles, ready furnished”.

This business model would later be called a Ponzi scheme, and the only people who got rich were the ones at the top, and precious little of that money trickled down to the taxpayers of the state of Georgia. So in 1789, this time under the Governorship of an arrogant fire plug named George Mathews, they tried it for a third time,  only bigger. And this was when Patrick Henry got into the game.

It is enough to make you wonder why the American people continue to have such childlike faith in capitalism, considering how often they keep getting screwed by it. It's a morality play, and the moral is "Greed makes you stupid".

Patrick Henry (above) had never been much of a business man. When he was 18, the “indolent, dreamy (and) procrastinating...ill-dressed young man” impulsively married the equally impulsive, plump and buxom Sarah "Sallie" Shelton.  He went to work for Sarah's father in his Hanover Tavern, but after a few months as a barkeep Patrick decided on a career which would not require so much physical labor. With only six weeks of study he passed the Virginia bar. The parents of the bride were so thrilled, they set the fecund couple up with some land and slaves – an instant entrance into  First Families of Virginia.  It was the perfect foundation for a politician. But, alas, Patrick would be short of money his whole life. Which is why he formed the Virginia Yazoo company.

The 53 year old Patrick Henry assembled a slightly odd group of investors. At 53, droll and humorless, Paul Carrington, (above) was a long time member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, and a judge of the Court of Appeals. At barely 30 years old, Abraham Venerable was an up-and-comer in Virginia society, while 50 year old Francis Watkins was the clerk for the local courts.

But the key investor, the actual money behind the original Virginia Yazoo Company was Pennsylvanian David Ross, who had already assembled 100,000 acres in Virginia, buying up plantations and slaves, abandoned by loyalists during and after the revolution.  Ross also owned 200,000 acres of Kentucky, and several thousand more in what would become Tennessee (claimed at the time by North Carolina). He was a very land rich young man. And, oddly, he was Scottish.

See, after the 1746 battle of Culloden, Scotland was under the royal lash (above), and David Ross stood to inherit nothing from his father's now looted Scottish estates. So in the middle of the 1750's he joined the horde of Scots emigrating to the American colonies. But where most Scotsmen chose the less settled Carolinas, and arrived with little but the clothes on their back, David Ross chose Virginia and arrived with contacts in the colonial government, and with cash,  

Almost immediately he invested in the Oxford Iron Works along the Potomac River and the Antietam Iron Works in Maryland. He then began buying land and planting tobacco. It is hard to escape the suspicion that David Ross's family had sold out their fellow Stuart supporters, perhaps his own cousins. It is what the losing side of a rebellion often has to do to save the family fortunes.  And it also speaks to the way New York banks supported slavery by offering generous terms on humans beings held in bondage as collateral. 

Most years the iron works struggled to get by, and the tobacco barely covered operating expenses.  To really build a fortune, Colonial Virginia planters - such as the gout ridden George Mason - used their large plantations and slaves as collateral to buy cheap Indian land north of the Ohio River. The new owners then surveyed it quickly, subdivided it in haste and sold it off in 100 to 600 acre sections to land speculators at inflated prices.  To quote from Wood Holton's 1994 paper in 'The Journal of Southern History:  “Land speculation was a principal source of income for the Virginia gentry, the 2-to-5 % of families who stood atop the colony's pyramid of wealth and power...During the frontier years, absentee landholders owned three-quarters of the region's total acreage...little acreage was left for residents. ”

The only draw back was that the invasion of American farmers set off the French and Indian War, which brought the sale of western lands to a halt for nine long years.  Then  in 1763 (above), after the peace was signed, King George III issued a Royal Proclamation that henceforth no colony could lay claim to any land west of the crest of the Appalachian Mountains. Individual farmers were still free to buy acreage on Indian lands, but their property rights would not be recognized by the English crown, meaning the land could be handed down father to son but could not be resold, ending speculating. 

Wood Holton argues it was this loss of income which spurred Virginians, like the “great land-monger” George Washington, and speculators Thomas Jefferson, George Mason and Patrick Henry, to support the American Revolution

Even before the American victory at Yorktown, in June of 1779, Virginia and her governor Patrick Henry (above), joined the other southern colonies in reviving virtually all of the land claims rejected by George III's government.  

George Mason rehired his old employee Daniel Boone (above) to began “exploring” new lands to the west of Boonesborough, paying him in land -  from which Boone earned $20,000, a hefty fortune during the revolution. 

And on 20 November, 1789, the Virginia Yazoo Company, headed by Patrick Henry and David Ross,  along with the Tennessee Company and the Carolina Company, formally applied for land grants from the state of Georgia for tracts along the Yazoo River/swamp.  

To the wealthy speculators who were also the founding fathers, this is what they meant by the word “freedom”. And that is the morality play we shall now follow.

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GEORGIA PEACHES Chapter One

 

I have always been confused by Patrick Henry. He is famous for saying, “Give me liberty or give me death”, a bold statement that should have gotten a lot of press. Yet nobody at the time recorded him saying it.  

He also supposedly said “If this be treason, let us make the most of it”, another bold statement which, again, nobody wrote down at the time. What is fact is that he was always suspicious of the power of government. We largely have him to thank for the Bill of Rights, today a beacon of freedom for billions of people world wide. But he was also the CEO of the Virginia Yazoo Company, which sold swamp land to war veterans, trusting customers and unsuspecting tax payers. The Yazoo Company and its fellow scams shows that from the moment it was born the United States was a nation dedicated to the success of rich liars cheats and thieves.

My guess is the Yazoo Indians were only joking with French explorer Robert de La Salle.   In 1682, la Salle asked about the water at the edge of their town and the Yazoos told him it was a river, A 180 mile long by 100 mile wide “river” which did not so much flow into the Mississippi River, as seep. It was a swamp.  But the last laugh was on the Yazoo Indians because La Salle named the “river” after them. And after the Revolution, that patriot Patrick Henry used his freedom of speech to fleece a lot of unsuspecting would be capitalist by selling them Yazoo swamp land.

Now, even in 1789 nobody was interested in buying a swamp, So the American crooks decided to call their inventory the Yazoo Lands, instead.  Besides patriot and ex-governor Patrick Henry's Virginia Yazoo Company, there was the Tennessee Yazoo Company and the Carolina Yazoo Company. And together they formed the first American lobbying firm, what they called "The Combined Society".  It's stated purpose was  “By means of certain influences...to obtain from the State (of Georgia) large grants of land...for the end of making a large sum of money...” They were certain they could obtain a deed from Georgia, because although Georgia did not claim the swamp, Georgia was also flat broke.

Georgia had paid for its share of the American revolution by claiming lands westward to the Mississippi river and beyond, and used them as collateral to borrow gold and silver from European speculators. The problem was that land was mostly swamp during part of the year, and during the rest of the year was completely swamp. And that sliver of semi-dry land was was already claimed by the King of France.

The solution was first suggested by an ex-militia Colonel named Thomas Marston Green, sr. (above).  He'd been farming out in the Pine forests when a bunch of Spanish soldiers and surveyors showed up looking to inventory the lands they had just bought from the French. Colonel Green realized that after such an inventory would come the taxes. And Thomas hated paying taxes.  Luckily Green had no objection to collecting taxes. 

So in the fall of 1784 Green showed up in the then state capital of Louisville, Georgia, suggesting the state take over his plantation as "Bourbon County", now encompassing all land between the present Georgia border and the Mississippi river south of the Yazoo river. Thus it would be the largest county in the United States, and Marston Green would, of course, run it, selling any land he did not want and splitting the take with the state. And on 7 February, 1785, the rich white men running Georgia passed the Bourbon County Act, and waited for everybody not as smart as them, to buy into this hairbrained scheme. 

The greedy Thomas Marston Green decided to speed things along. He gathered a little army of 32 gullible fools  and led them on a march into the Spanish outpost of Natchez (above) on the Mississippi river. 

Once there he informed the Spanish Governor Manuel Gayoso de Lemos (above) that the American state of Georgia now owned everything south of the Yazoo river, and the Spanish should just get out.  

Governor de Lemos wasted no time in having all the idiots arrested, and shipped down river to New Orleans (above) where they could safely rot in a prison (below)

The state of Georgia lifted not a finger to rescue their new governor of Bourbon County, let alone his little army.  The only person who showed up in New Orleans (above) to plead for the release of any of these idiots was Martha Green, Thomas' long suffering wife. The journey to New Orleans left her in such a pitiable state, that shortly after her arrival she died. Governor de Lemos felt so sorry for the late lady and her now motherless children, that he sent Thomas home with a warning - don't do it again.  

But de Lemos also decided the upstart Americans could no longer use the port of New Orleans to ship their produce to market. That made the settlers in western Georgia, very unhappy.  In 1788 the state of Georgia backed down and repealed the Bourbon County Act. The port of New Orleans was re-opened to Americans.  But that still left Georgia flat broke.

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CARPE DIEM, CARPE RODENT

I begin by asking why is this day different than all other days. That question,  in Jewish families, is the beginning of the Passover Seder. But if you have Celtic markers on your genomes, it is the beginning of Imm'ulk, the second quarter of the year.  As you might have noticed this is a pagan calendar, the way the ancient Celts marked time, and Imm'ulk was the season the female sheep start to drip milk from their teats. And, no, that is not why a female sheep is called a 'Yew”.

Lactating sheep may seem like a rotten reason to have a holiday, unless you are heavily invested in lamb futures, or, if sheep or goat milk makes up a large part of your children's protein intake. The word Imm'ulk in old Irish means “in the belly”, as in baby lambs, or goat kids. And that brings up the Celtic lady of fertility, Bree-id.  

The people of the pre-Christian British Isles, and particularly the center of the Bree-id cult around Kikdare, Ireland, felt the need to invoke a goddess because every year without fail the sheep milk drip seemed to always begin about halfway between the Winter Solstice (22 December) and the Spring Equinox (21 March).  And a thousand years ago that was a magical and mystical event.  

Today we know its just a little nut of coincidence, the product of the Earth's 365 and ¼ day elliptical orbit around the sun and its 23 degree angle of tilt and a hundred million years of precedent. Change any of those numbers and you get a different coincidence, and different holidays.

On her facebook page - if she had one - Bree-id would have listed her interests as biology, poetry and heavy metal. Believe it or not, that made her a pacifist among the otherwise violent and argumentative Celtic gods, thus her association with fertility and motherhood. When the Romans arrived they recorded her name as Brighid – which seems to be where the English word “bride” comes from - again fertility. 

It was easy for the Irish to convert to Christianity. They just made Brigid a saint.  The Christians faced a harder problem converting the Celts of Scotland, in part because they still had snakes. Their fertility spirit was Cailleach,  a shape shifter, AKA a hag. An ancient Scottish proverb says, “The serpent will come from the hole, On the brown Day of Bride, Though there should be three feet of snow, On the flat surface of the ground.” The Scots would not scan a good poet until Robert Burns in the 18^th century.

The Scots told their children that on the first day of Imm'ulk the hag would go out to gather firewood for the rest of the winter. And since she also controlled the weather, if Caileach made the sun shine that day, it meant she was trying to gather lots of wood, which meant winter was going to last another month and a half or so. But if it was cloudy on the first day of Imm'ulk, then Caileach was planning on an early spring and she would not need extra sunlight for her search. In other words, if the old hag saw her shadow, it would be six more weeks of winter. And if that sounds familiar to you, its because that is the straight line, the set up to a joke retold year after year. Allow me to explain:

The Christians later co-opted the Irish goddess as Saint Brighid, spinning the story that she was the mother of St. Patrick, who drove the snakes out of Ireland. They just made that up of course, and later dropped her as a saint, but then they also made up the part about the snakes and Saint Patrick too. 

But because the Romans recruited both Irish and Scottish Celt's as soldiers and used them on the Rhine River frontier (above), the blended legends of Brigid and Caileach became embedded in Germany. 

And because the descendants of those Roman/Germans  became coal miners, and because the German miners' descendants  later moved to America (above), drawn by jobs in the coal mines of Pennsylvania, where, for some reason, the Germans were called “Dutchmen”, that is how Irish ewes dripping milk from their teats, and an ugly old Scottish woman scrounging for firewood, combined to produce a Pennsylvanian German immigrant festival celebrating the largest rodent in North America – Ground Hog Day.

See, a ground hog is a rodent, but its not a rat. They are much closer to a squirrel in need of weight watchers. And, without the expressive tails. This 4 to 9 pound animal, is actually a marmot. There are marmots living among the rocks and mountains of South Africa, and the Middle East, and central Europe, and along the foothills of the Himalayas. The ones living in North America are actually some of the smallest marmots anywhere, in part because living on flat ground, they are surrounded by foxes, wolves, coyotes, bears and hawks and eagles – all of whom find groundhogs very tasty. On the treeless great plains, they evolved into prairie dogs. And back east, they became groundhogs – grass eaters all. Look at it this way; if God were a rodent, cows would look more like ground hogs.

This plump, furry, generally irritated little beast is known by a number of nom-de-rodents. They sequel when injured and whistle to warn their mates (Ground hogs and Whistle-pigs), and the native Americans called them “wuchak” (woodchucks). They hibernate over winter below the frost line, emerging from their extensive Chateau marmots only in the spring. And since they don't have calendars, they respond to changing temperatures. When their dens warm up, they wake up and go looking for something green to eat. 

Any brief respite in winter like, say, around the end of January or early February, might draw some of the hungrier ground hogs out to look for some take out.  If it is an early spring, they get a jump on their fellows at early mating. If not, if its a normal or late spring, they become fuel, keeping hungry predators alive until real spring finally shows up - thus proving that individuality is an adaptation for the survival of your species, just not necessarily you.

As far back as 1841 a local storekeeper in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania named James Morris had noted in his diary, “Last Tuesday, the 2^nd... The day on which , according to the Germans, the Groundhog peeps out of his winter quarters and if he sees his shadow he pops back for another six weeks nap, but if the day be cloudy he remains out, as weather is to be moderate.” Again, that's the set up. The guy who delivered the punch line was a local funny boy, a bachelor with a quick wit and the good German name of Clymer H. Freas. Clymer had been raised by his older brother, and after graduating from a local collage, he got a job working at the Punxsutawney Spirit, the only newspaper the town of Punxsutawney has ever had.

Sitting halfway between the Allegheny and Susquehanna rivers Punxsutawney for decades been the local center of the first great American pastime – guns, beer and shooting things. In this case the “things” were ground hogs, and the beer was referred to as “ground hog punch”. And after shooting the whistle pigs, the celebrants then barbecued and ate them. Surprisingly, spending a cold morning killing a large rodent did not catch on with the Pennsylvania womenfolk.  But after the Buffalo, Rochester and Pittsburgh Railroad began regular service into town in 1883, lots of wealthy men from Pittsburgh began to journey the ninety miles to tramp through the woods around Punxsutawney, blasting away at the large non-aquatic beavers, while getting blasted themselves. The town, evidently, needed the attraction, since in the language of the Delaware Indians, Puixsutawney actually means “Town of mosquitoes”.

Young Clymer evidently did not at first participate in these festivities, because in February of 1886, he first mentioned Ground hog Day in the “Spirit” by merely noting, “up to the time of going to press the beast has not seen his shadow."   However, next year the 22 year old Clymer was invited to his first ground hog soiree at the “hunting lodge” up on Gobbler's Knob, about a mile southeast of town. Clymer had so much fun that two years later he was one of the founding fathers of the Groundhog Club, elected Secretary and poet laureate.

As poet he waxed lyrical about the 1907 GHD; “Promptly at 12:22 O'Clock...a rift was riven in the overhanging clouds and B're Groundhog sallied forth, casting a shadow which shot through a shimmering sheen and sent a shaft of effervescent and effulgent rays...”. Clymer went into more depth describing the speeches given later at the barbecue as “eulogizing the flesh of the only Simon-pure vegetarian on this planet, and each, under the subtle influence of partaken woodchuck and assimilated punch, grew eloquent and combed the earth sea and sky with metaphor and simile, couched in the most beautiful phraseology.” That particular celebration continued past one in the morning. Not a bad punchline.

However the ladies and children must have complained, because in 1909, they held what Clymer described as a “Circumgyratory Pageant of the Astrologers, Horocopists, Magicians, Soothsayers and meteorological Attaches”, also known as a parade. It had floats representing the four seasons and because you would have be drunk to stand outside in the dead of winter, they held it in August, and called it “Old Home Week”. But because there was a lot less drinking, and no groundhogs to justify the thing, the parade never caught on and was soon dropped.

By now Clymer was editor of the paper, and the groundhog day celebrations and his joke had begun filling hotel rooms and restaurants. It was now a serious matter, and as editor Clymer was expected to be a civic booster. It was around now that the groundhog became the town's official symbol, and Clymer named him “Punxsutawney Phil,  Seer of Seers,  Sage of Sages, Prognosticator of Prognosticators and Weather Prophet Extraordinaire.” They stopped shooting the rodents (officially), and concentrated on the ridicules legend. But they would have to continue without their poet. In the teens, Bachelor Clymer married Miss Moss Rose Wall. And after that, as a man with responsibilities, he decided to put his skills for hyperbole to a job with more financial remuneration than that offered to a newspaperman and poet laureate. He abandoned Puxsutawney and its mid-winter freezing rodent festival, and moved to balmy Florida where he switched to selling swampland around Tampa. He died there in 1942.

But his work was done. The punch line for the joke had been written down, the dirty words removed, the telling civilized so as to render the joke acceptable to women and children. It didn't happen overnight, of course. In 1920, the first year of prohibition, Phil supposedly threatened not to offer another prediction for 60 weeks, unless he was given a drink. He was not, but he went right on predicting. A mere 37% accuracy rate (not much better than sheer chance) has so far failed to kill the joke, but it  now barely elicits a chuckle, but that will not kill it either. Besides, how much chuckle would a woodchuck chuckle, if a woodchuck could chuckle a chuck? That doesn't seem to matter, either.

The little town never had more than 10,000 residents, and after the mines closed, today it has barely 6,000. Still it is held together by this rodent. In the gift shop down at 102 West Mahoning Street, they sell “Gobbler's Knob Hot Chocolate Mix”, which you can drink from your “Amazink Shadow Mug”, featuring a “Punxsy Phil” and his shadow, which disappears when hot water fills the mug You can also buy Punxsy Phil Mardi Gras beads, and "Punxsutawney Phil in a Can." (above). Pull the pop top and a little plush Phil pops out, holding one of two signs predicting 6 more weeks of winter or not. You can even buy a bag of Ground Hog Poop - actually its malted milk balls, but the kids love it.

You can head south on Highway 36, turn right on Woodlawn Avenue for about a mile to the crest of the hill, to Gobblers Knob. If you go there any day of the year other than Groundhog day you will likely find it abandoned, a empty stage set. The star resides year round downtown, in Barlay Square, at the memorial library, in his newly labeled Phil's Den, complete with below ground level window viewing. For the humans. The rodent of unusual size finds humans rather unentertaining.  Human beings travel thousands of miles just  to see a marmot sleep -that is the real joke. And that is funny. Everybody should laugh at themselves, even PETA. And everybody should do it at least once in your life, like going to Mecca or Jerusalem, or to see the World's Largest Ball of Sting.

Do Ground hogs laugh, I wonder?  I doubt it. Otherwise, they would be getting a much larger share of this largess, than they are.  Just remember. They are cute. But they bite. They always bite. And they have never been noted for their intelligence.  Which is sort of the point of Groundhog Day, since neither have humans.

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