Mike Tharp: It's good to be back home

Five days in Austin visiting family and friends proved to be a Texas tequila tonic for the long nights of daylight-saving time.

Had to come back to work to get some rest.

And several Mercedians welcomed back the traveler with more reminders of why this place has become home.

Bill Kirby was sitting in his wheelchair at 28th and H streets along Bear Creek. Wearing a Merchant Marine cap and a red bandanna, an oxygen tank on the back of his purple rig, the 91-year-old remembered "when this was all cow pastures." Moms used flour and sugar sacks to make skirts, and his family leaned heavily on what their milk cow turned out every day.

He handed over "Late Summer Thoughts of Two Thousand Nine," a five-page, single-spaced essay on the past, present and future. "The difference between the Depression of 1929 and now is almost beyond comparison," he wrote. "The Depression of 1929 was a lot easier than today."

That's because, in his view, the government in the '30s had no or very few unlisted liabilities. "Today, we have $45 trillion worth," he reckoned.

Just because an editor was spending time with him didn't mean he pulled any punches.

"The reason we don't have more people with virtue and integrity is because of the liberal press, which has no regard for the truth," his essay thundered. "If it serves their purpose -- print it. The key to the press is, who controls the news? Everyone has an agenda."

But Bill's no crank. When Roger Wyan's 11-year-old daughter Marissa rolled up to him one afternoon on her skates and offered to race, he turned his wheelchair around on the sidewalk. Off they went. Marissa won. Bill wants a rematch.

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Gene Lieb, the energetic publisher and editor of the Sun-Star's sister newspaper, the Los Banos Enterprise, is also president of the Rotary Club there. He invited his fellow editor to speak to the club this week.

Iraq and Afghanistan were the subjects. The question-and-answer period lasted a half- hour. The Rotarians expressed plenty of views of their own about the two wars America is fighting -- one winding down, one ramping up.

Ernie Roque, an insurance man, several times expressed "confusion" about why the president and Congress, if they knew all the reasons not to commit more blood and treasure in Afghanistan, would still go ahead and do it. It may sound simplistic, but the answer is politics.

Comparisons with Vietnam are often misplaced, but the rhetoric on both sides of the aisle, in the White House and from the Pentagon, echoes like 1965.

Gene had invited an adjunct instructor at Merced College's Los Banos campus to speak to the Rotary Club last week.

He's an Afghan, apparently with close ties to President Hamid Karzai.

Then this week's speaker showed up with equally provocative views.

"I'm going to have to mellow the programs out a bit over the next couple of weeks," Gene wrote in an e-mail.

Thanks for the invite, Gene. The Mexican food was the best chow ever at an American Rotary Club.

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Kathy Moser is principal of Farmdale Elementary School, way down at the end of G Street in Merced. Every year, on the day before Veterans Day, she arranges an all-school assembly honoring local vets. This week, 865 students and their parents turned out in lemony sunshine to sing patriotic songs and meet eight men.

After Mellissa Cortez, a senior at Golden Valley High, sang the national anthem (which she'd also sung for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in Sacramento), student council members reflected into a hand-held microphone about the sacrifices made by American veterans.