Welcome to Thursday Doors! This is a weekly challenge for people who love doors and architecture to come together to admire and share their favorite door photos, drawings, or other images or stories from around the world. If you’d like to join us, simply create your own Thursday Doors post each (or any) week and then share a link to your post in the comments below, anytime between 12:01 am Thursday morning and Saturday noon (North American eastern time). If you like, you can add our badge to your post.
Note: Since people participate on and off, especially in the summer, I am letting everyone know that there will be no Thursday Doors on August 10th and no Recap on August 13th.
I am going to share a portion of a blog post I published in 2014 about how I met Senator (D Minnesota) Hubert H. Humphrey. To date, I’ve only met two serving politicians, and Hubert Humphrey was the only one who was nice to me. You can read about the other one, here.
Anyway, Hubert Humphrey was campaigning for John Connelly who was running for Congress in Pittsburgh when I was working on the river boats. John Connelly was a brilliant business man, and he owned those boats. I worked for the caterer (food service) and we were serving hot dogs and beans for an ungodly amount of money—it was a fundraiser. As is mentioned in one of my books, during such an event, the crew was instructed to make themselves scarce. They didn’t want us bothering the dignitaries.
After dinner and the speeches, Hubert Humphrey started walking toward the back of the boat. John Connelly’s eagle-eyed entourage intercepted him as he got within a few yards of the kitchen. Not close enough for us to see, but close enough to hear:
“You’re going the wrong way sir.”
“I know where I am going.”
“No, sir, that’s the entrance to the kitchen.”
“I know that. If I’m going to be shaking hands, I’m going to start by shaking the hands of the men and women who made this night possible. You should remember that!”
They had gotten close enough to see that that last line was directed at John Connelly.
As Hubert Humphrey walked through the kitchen, he shook our hands, and he said something to each one of us. As he shook my hand, he said:
“What do you do here son?”
“I work for the company that prepares the food.”
“You’re doing a fine job.”
How I wished we hadn’t served hot dogs and beans. Still, I’ve never forgotten the encounter. He seemed sincere. Maybe he was good at faking sincerity, but that’s not the sense I had at the time. Besides, he wasn’t running for office and I wasn’t old enough to vote. Note: the inscription on his tomb is listed below gallery.
When I visited my brother, he picked me up at the airport in Minneapolis. I had asked him before the flight if we could visit Lakewood Cemetery before returning to Iowa. My brother, a retired history teacher and huge history buff, easily agreed. I wanted to see Hubert Humphrey’s grave.
The doors in the gallery are from some of the crypts in the cemetery. The photo below is the one I alluded to yesterday. The humor was probably inappropriate, but my brother and I had the same thought, at the same time. I think our dad was having a good laugh in Heaven.
You’ll note that not all the photos in the gallery have doors. There are some memorials that I wanted to include. If you have trouble seeing the entire caption, step into the slideshow and click that lowercase ‘i’ in the circle. Sorry, I don’t know why WordPress does this, but they do. Also, please take a few minutes to visit some of the other participants’ doors today. If WordPress is working, I will have a recap of these doors on Sunday.
I have enjoyed my life, its disappointments outweighed by its pleasures. I have loved my country in a way that some people consider sentimental and out of style. I still do, and I remain an optimist, with joy, without apology, this country and about the American experiment in democracy.
Hubert H. Humphrey
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All five of my current books are now available in audio book form thanks to Amazon KDP’s Virtual Voice process. The voice is AI generated, but I can honestly say, it’s pretty darn good. The audio books are reasonably priced (all below $7 US) and, if you already own the Kindle version and want to add an audio version, you can do that for $1.99. There is a five-minute sample on the book page for each book. If you’re interested, click on any of the Dreamer’s Alliance book links below the image or on the link below for my latest book.
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