MSI Press Blog

  Excerpt from  Forget the Goal, the Journey Counts  (Stites)  Absorbing the ‘20s! (2)      Around the middle of the 1920s some head-in-the-clouds guy (that’s what Dad called him) put out the slogan “Every Day in Every Way I am Getting Better and Better,” and for a number of years it seemed the whole country stood in front of the bathroom mirror every morning and repeated that saying over and over. Everybody got better and better, and so did the country until they all got so much better that on Tuesday, October 29th in 1929, they all collapsed with being so great. They called it Black Tuesday because a lot of rich people lost a lot of money. Not enough to make the rich people real poor, of course, just poor enough to make them cancel the par ties they had lined up through to New Year’s. But it made the middle-class folks really bad off and the poor people just about done in.  There are few people around who remember when it seemed that alm...

  Excerpt from  Forget the Goal, the Journey Counts  (Stites)  Absorbing the ‘20s!   I don’t remember much before I was six years old except that as a little kid I was happy in those bubbling days of the 1920s. It was called the Roaring Twenties, and everyone seemed to be doing just great. In the 1928 presidential election, the candidate Al Smith said he would see that the whole country had a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage. Things were that good! Calvin Coolidge had been president, and my dad said he was an all right president even if he didn’t say much. Dad said they called him Silent Cal, and that he wouldn’t run for another term because he had “had enough.” He never did say enough of what. So Hoover ran and won. Dad said it was because Democrat Al Smith was a Catholic and no Catholic could ever be elected president. Dad had Hoover and Smith buttons along with buttons and rib bons from presidential elections all the way back into th...