Best March is Done

To enjoy this post, you're going to have to read it. Not just glance at it. Sorry.

Teddy Roosevelt month was the perfect occasion to force myself to finish "TR: The Last Romantic", the grueling biography of our twenty-sixth president that I bought last summer during a season of extreme Teddy Roosevelt curiosity. I wasn't slugging at the ponderous volume for long before I realized that I should have just read Roosevelt's wikipedia entry and then decided if I needed to supplement it with further reading. Like I was saying, Teddy Roosevelt month was just the wind I needed in my sails to get this book read and I managed to finish the book sometime in the middle of the day on March 31st (thank goodness for all-the-rest-have-31!) Mostly the book wasn't super-rewarding, I liked the History channel documentary we watched more, BUT I did find in it one paragraph that struck me like a bolt of lightning...

First, you have to refresh your memory of the part of our trip to Sagamore Hill where we had a stick fight, let me paste it in for you:

This is stick-fighting, a.k.a. "When stuff started to get real fun."















New post resumes:

Stick fighting was really fun, and we've had good laughs looking back on it, wondering what the park rangers thought of the group of 28-32 year old males hitting each other with sticks on the Sagamore Hill lawn.

But look at what I read about Teddy Roosevelt during the later years of his presidency (emphasis added obviously my own):

Hiking, however, even in Roosevelt's take-no-prisoners mode, lacked the zing of more bellicose pursuits. When the opportunity arose, he liked to stick-fight with Leonard Wood. At first the two former comrades-in-arms used relatively light sticks; when these kept splintering, they switched to stouter ones. Thereafter it was calcium that shattered instead of cellulose; one especially sharp blow broke Roosevelt's right arm

Teddy Roosevelt was an avid stick fighter! We were on his lawn channeling his ghost and we had no idea! Certainly he was smiling down on our robust battle that afternoon, cheering for each solid blow we landed...or maybe the thought we fought like a pack of sissies and was tempted to pick up a log and show us a real stick fight, who knows. I'll ask him in the next world.