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THE MAN WHO COULD RECITE THE SECOND INAUGRAL

RUTH FRANCE NORRICK

MY FATHER, Edward Graves Crawford, lived to be 94-"going on 95".  He liked to talk, and I usually liked to listen.  There was never any telling where a story once begun was going to end.  The turns were what one watched for, and they were often made in re-sponse to my interjection, "Why, Papa!" as an astonishing piece of the past was run into the narrative.

"Why Papa!" I would say, and he would answer, "It's the truth I'm telling you.  The truth.  I'm not saying it was right or wrong.  I'm just telling you how it was."

"And it is a fact," he said, after one of my interruptions, the one that led to the story I am trying now to record, "your grandfather enlisted three times"-that would be 16-year-old John Inskip Crawford of Philadelphia, starting in 1863, and each time his father was paid $300.  

"I don't believe it," I said.  "How could any one take money to send his son to war?"

"Well, I'm telling you they did.  The rich bought their way out of going by paying a substitute, and the poor needed the money.  Boys they got.  Boys like your grandfather-16-year-olds.  Wars are fought by boys.  The Civil War was fought by boys.  This war in Vietnam.  You can see it's true, on television.  They're just boys, those who do the fighting and the dying."

"I guess all wars are stupid, like that Frenchman De Gaulle said about the one we're in now, but somehow we didn't feel that way about the Civil War.  It was a mighty thing in our lives when we were growing up.  Why, I remember, in Clyde, New York, on Decoration Day-I was a kid there then-a man was arrested and fined $5 because

Ruth France Norrick was formerly a public relations officer for the U.S. Children's Bureau and the United Nations Children's Fund.  She was active in the 1950's in the fight against McCarthyism.  This story about her father is one of several that have been published in other periodicals, such as the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the Conservationist.

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---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-15 11:29:24