{"id":23448,"date":"2019-02-05T11:35:35","date_gmt":"2019-02-05T18:35:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=23448"},"modified":"2019-02-05T11:45:16","modified_gmt":"2019-02-05T18:45:16","slug":"my-sweethearts-a-mule-in-the-mines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=23448","title":{"rendered":"My Sweetheart’s a Mule in the Mines"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"110th_Bomb_Squadron_-_Emblem\"<\/a>I’m continually\u00a0taken aback by\u00a0how little I\u00a0know about my own family,\u00a0things my sisters all\u00a0talk about but for whatever reason\u00a0are revelations to me.\u00a0Vast portions of the life and times of my father Charles, my mother\u00a0Eileen, and dad’s second wife Lois\u00a0… who passed away over the weekend …\u00a0are a mystery to me.<\/p>\n

Today I heard, for the first time, a\u00a0great anecdote about Lois.<\/p>\n

By way of background, here’s part of a post I wrote in 2007<\/a>: \u201cMy father did an interesting thing a few years back. He had assumed, like most Missourians, that the mule was the state animal. Not so, it turned out\u2014Rebuplicans in the state government had resisted repeated attempts to enshrine the mule as state animal, fearing that people would confuse the mule with the jackass, symbol of the Democratic Party. My dad took it on as a project, mobilizing his American Legion Post, crisscrossing the state to speak at public meetings and press the flesh with politicians, and in 1995, then-Governor Mel Carnahan signed the bill naming the Missouri Mule state animal. My dad did that. How about that?\u201d<\/p>\n

What I didn’t know until today was that Lois was a key player in dad’s campaign, at one point standing\u00a0in front of state legislators in Jefferson City\u00a0and singing\u00a0My Sweetheart’s a Mule in the Mines<\/a>.<\/p>\n

My sweetheart’s\u00a0a mule in the mines
\nI drive her without any lines
\nOn the bumper I sit
\nAnd I chew and I spit
\nAll over my sweetheart’s behind<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I cannot but believe\u00a0her performance is what finally won over those small-minded Republican state legislators, and it’s just the kind of home-spun humor Lois would from time to time surprise me with. I wish I’d known this story earlier.<\/p>\n

I should have known it earlier.\u00a0Everyone says I’m just like my dad, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself it’s\u00a0that\u00a0when it comes to\u00a0persuading people\u00a0to do\u00a0things they aren’t naturally inclined to do, my own powers\u00a0are rarely enough\u00a0…\u00a0I need Donna by my side, and her help is what makes the difference.\u00a0Why should it have been any different\u00a0with my dad and Lois?<\/p>\n

The mule patch, by the way, is that of the 110th Bomb Squadron,\u00a0a\u00a0B-2 Spirit-equipped unit of the\u00a0Missouri Air National Guard’s\u00a0131st Bomb Wing based at\u00a0Whiteman Air Force Base\u00a0in Knob Noster, Missouri.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m continually taken aback by how little I know about my own family, things my sisters all talk about but for whatever reason are revelations to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,14,2],"tags":[2669,2671,2670],"class_list":["post-23448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-military","category-personal","tag-missourimule","tag-personalhistory","tag-rip"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23448"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23448\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23459,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23448\/revisions\/23459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}