Some Family History From My Sister Carolyn That You Might Find Interesting

 ROOT BEER IN GRANNY’S BATHTUB

 by Carolyn Cramer Goldwasser Oct. 1, 2026

 Yes, I got to help my Granny Annie Langley Naylor make and bottle root beer. I was 8 years old in 1950 and she was 65 years old. She did things in an old fashioned (even for then) kind of way. Her cook stove was a huge cast iron, woodburning stove, (meaning the heat to cook on the top and in the oven came from pieces of wood burning inside one end of it). Out of the top of the other end of it rose a curved shiny metal smokestack that fitted tightly into a hole in the actual brick chimney, thru the kitchen side of the wall. Next to the smokestack was a cast iron shelf on which a very big tea kettle sat, keeping water hot.

 On the living room side of the wall, there was a heater which burned “fuel-oil”.  It was about two feet away from the wall and it had a similar smoke- stack that fitted into a hole on the other side of the same chimney. All the smoke and fumes from both stoves went out of the brick chimney (which extended several feet above the top of the roof) up into the sky.

 I don’t think there was a separate water heater in that house. But there was plumbing, and cold water would flow into the kitchen sink, bathroom sink, and bathtub. The water in the kettle above the cook stove was always hot, so granny would grab it and pour some hot water into the cold water in the tub to warm it up enough for us kids to take a bath. Only on Saturday nights we got baths. Other times we washed in the sink, with less water.

 So how did we make Root Beer? First, you save the glass soda bottles from last year. Then you gather or buy roots (from which the name root beer comes). Wintergreen is the only root I remember granny naming, but it seemed to me there were several different kinds of roots involved.  She roasted and boiled the roots to make a dark brown liquid in a giant pot. Then she added a big bag of sugar and boiled it some more.

 She did tell me how they had dug and roasted chicory roots to make “coffee” during the Depression – chicory is bitter, and so is dandelion root, which they may have used for the root beer as well as for the “coffee.”

 So, then the bathtub was scrubbed clean and rinsed well.  The stopper was securely put in place and several gallons of the dark brown, warm sweet liquid were poured into the tub to ferment for a week or so.  She stirred it every day watching for bubbles to form when it was ready. The root beer got the bathtub. It was summertime, warm weather, no school, no baths. Warm weather all day and all night was needed for the fermentation to proceed properly. So we made root beer in summer.

 Next step: last year’s glass bottles were put in the giant pot covered with water and slowly brought to a boil, to be sterilized.  They then cooled, in the water. A funnel and a ladlecargol helped us fill the sterile bottles, as we sat on thick towels on the bathroom floor.

 We moved to the kitchen table and the heavy steel bottle capping tool was brought out, as were the many thin discs of soft metal that would become lids for the bottles.

 The bottling tool worked with a handle on a lever, which we older kids could pull down, to exert force onto the top of the metal disc, which we had set on top of the full bottle; the bottle was held securely in place below the lever, by a clamp, which was a part of the boxy form of the tool.  The soft, thin metal disc was forced over the top of the bottle, bending into a bunch of evenly spaced little crimps around the edges, holding it securely onto the top of the bottle, keeping the liquid and the bubbles inside for many months. 

 Root beer has no alcohol content. It is bitter and sweet and fizzy and it was considered healthier than regular beer with alcohol in it. And kids could drink it!  My grandparents were members of the Salvation Army and were against alcohol. My mother was an officer in the Salvation Army before she married my father. There were no alcoholic beverages in our house, ever.

 I think it is not a coincidence that after I was grown and married with kids, I studied and learned to make several kinds of fermented foods: including Kosher dill pickles (lots of bubbles, sour but without vinegar – just salt, garlic, dill and cucumbers), sourdough bread, raising without yeast; and Amasake, a drink. 

 Amasake is made from whole grain glutinous rice cooked soft, with extra water, and then fermented with koji (a fermentation starter), in a warm oven, for a couple of days, just long enough to let the starches (carbohydrates) in the rice chemically change into sugars. It gets stirred from time to time. The fermentation breaks down the skin of the whole grain, and it gets mushy and sweet. It can have a similar taste and consistency to a milkshake if it is pureed and chilled. I helped some macrobiotic folks at the Grainaissance mochi factory, near Berkeley, make amazake to sell, flavored with cooked fruits and nut butters. Yes, a good substitute for milk shake.

 Quickly stopping the fermentation (by boiling it) prevents the sugars from progressing to become alcohols. “Amasake” means Sweet Sake. If you let it ferment past sugars, then you have regular Sake – the Japanese alcoholic drink. 

 Miso and soy sauce are made with soybeans and grain, fermented in the presence of salt, which controls the fermentation.  The soy proteins become more accessible, being already partially digested by the fermentation process. Not just a flavoring, but they are good high protein foods. And they are an important part of a vegan macrobiotic diet.

 Miso and soy sauce are dark brown, like root beer. And here I am, many decades later, still involved with dark brown fermented foods!  Yesterday, I cooked my breakfast soup with miso in it. Today I flavored my breakfast porridge with a splash of soy sauce.  Thanks, Granny for teaching me how to cook and how to grow food in your garden. And for saying grace before every meal: “Bless this food to our bodies and make us grateful, teach us how to be kind and to help each other. Amen.”

 

 

 

Warning Signs Ignored

 

Torrance, Cal. (1973)

02/11/1973: Police investigated a missing person report and four theater employees. They were at first unsure if the victims were shot or stabbed to death It turned out that he used a gun to get compliance but used a knife to slit their throats. They could not be identified at first because of the amount of blood on their bodies. The safe was open.

Subsequent investigation into a similar business robbery that only resulted in one murder and the suspect’s suicide in jail led police to surmise that a long-time criminal, 30, with an extensive psychiatric history, which included repeated warnings that he was a murder-in-training. Police arrested him for misdemeanor traffic warrants; he committed suicide in jail. He committed the murders after a detailed casing of the theater. He told his roommate that “if he didn’t come back there was no reason to feel guilty. If everything went right, he would have $2,000 owed to him and his roommate would read about in the newspapers.”

Category: public

Suicide: no

Cause: robbery

Weapon: knife[1]

---

[1] "4 Found Murdered At Theater Office; Vault Cleaned Out," Los Angeles Times, Feb. 12, 1973, 1; “Society Ignored Danger Signals in Maheu’s Life,” [San Pedro, Cal.] News-Pilot, Sep. 25, 1973, 5; “Maheu’s Death Sealed The Fully Story of Mass Killing,” [San Pedro, Cal.] News-Pilot, Sep. 25, 1973, 5.

A Whole Universe of Time & Hurt in One News Story

 

Kerrville, Tex. (1973)

02/06/1973: Wife returned from work to find her husband, a justice of the peace shot to death. When police went to inform his son, they found the son and daughter-in-law also shot to death. Police were reluctant to suggest a motive, but another local justice of the peace described this as a “grudge killing.”

Category: family non-resident

Suicide: no

Cause: unknown

Weapon: firearm[1]

---

[1] "Triple Murder In Texas Kills Judge, Couple," [Eau Claire, Wisc] Leader-Telegram, Feb. 06, 1973, 7.

I could find no other coverage about this obscure rural justice of the peace or his murder. A rather complex novel is waiting to be written about these three lives ended prematurely. Mafia? Philandering judge? Inherited oil well stolen in legal proceedings? It could be anything. There is a saying from Judaic thought that:

Therefore the man was created singly, to teach that he who destroys one soul of a human being, the Scripture considers him as if he should destroy a whole world, and him who saves one soul of Israel, the Scripture considers him as if he should save a whole world.

Trace back all the lives touched by this J.P., his son, daughter-in-law and their orphaned daughters. There is a universe of human living, suffering, joy, and meaning there. 

 

How Did I Miss This Craziness?

 3/21/1977 Time:

The heart of the capital was under siege. Everywhere, it seemed, was the wail of sirens, snarled traffic, milling crowds, police marksmen poised on rooftops, swarms of reporters interviewing one another in the glare of floodlights. Extra guards were posted at Government buildings; on the Hill each member of Congress was offered an armed police escort. The Washington Monument was temporarily closed to visitors: it was within the range of snipers. Affairs of state moved forward—cautiously. At the end of his visit with President Carter, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin left quietly with no farewell ceremony; incoming British Prime Minister James Callaghan did not receive the traditional 19-gun salute, for fear it might trigger a slaughter. All this was the work of a mere dozen men who held 132 hostages in three Washington buildings for a chilling 38 hours. The terrorists made dramatically clear what has become all too obvious: anybody with a cause and a gun, be he mad or madcap, fanatic or eccentric, can seize and hold national attention by kidnaping and threatening to kill innocent victims.

The Washington assault was the culminating event of a spate of terrorist acts that have bedeviled the country. It proved again how vulnerable the society is to such attacks. Given the circumstances, it was wondrous that the drama ended with so little blood spilled: one dead and four wounded by gunfire, a dozen others cut and beaten. That the toll was not higher was in part a tribute to the primary tactic U.S. law enforcement officials are now using to thwart terrorists—patience (see box). But most of all, perhaps, it was due to the courageous intervention of three Muslim ambassadors, Egypt’s Ashraf Ghorbal. Pakistan’s Sahabzada Yaqub-Khan and Iran’s Ardeshir Zahedi.

The Washington siege was an explosive mixture of gangsterism, revenge, racial hostility and religious bickering elevated, as the participants proclaimed, to the level of a holy war. The terrorists were members of a sliver-sized religious organization called the Hanafi—a rival of the much larger Black Muslims, a group that has been plagued with violence over the years but has recently become more subdued (TIME, March 14).

Fresh Scalps!

 U.S. v. Aleman-Lozanociting Vazquez-Ramirez, 163 F.4th at 719 (Bumatay, J., concurring) (quoting Clayton E. Cramer, Colonial Firearm Regulation, 16 J. on Firearms & Pub. Pol'y 1, 23 (2004) upholding bans on illegal aliens possessing arms.

U.S. v. Vasquez-Ramirez, 163 F.4th 706, 720, 721 (9th Cir. 2026)(Bumtay, J., concurring) upholding bans on illegal aliens possessing arms.

I am still thrilled to get my work cited. There are few pleasures in life; I take 'em where I can get them.

Chris Miller Chip War

Not Chip Wars, a different book 

I am almost done reading it. This remains a fascinating and very readable book. Many aspects of this are not new to me, for obvious reasons. Many of the fine technical details, such as how photolithography was invented, were news to me. (I remember seeing a book in the Computer Literacy bookstore in Silicon Valley, at the center of the nerd universe) about how to do your own photolithography at home.

Trump Administration gets high marks for taking seriously Chinese efforts to dominate chip industry for both economic and military reasons. 

Because the book was published in 2025, the more recent stuff does not appear such as how AI is raising the importance of chips. Also, Trump’s successful wooing of TSMC into building a fab in Arizona was just as this book was going to press.

UPDATE: I am in the last chapter and the TSMC fab in Arizona appears as well as discussion of AI's impact.

Stalking Poseidon

If you know the Odyssey, you know why the name matters. Over the years, as my daughter has acquired robots to vacuum the house, mow the lawn, and clean the pool, she has named each of them.

So far, we have only one robot: an Auquabot that cleans the pool which we named Poseidon, which we hope is less vengeful than the Greek god of the sea.

Lillie, our hyperactive Springer Spaniel, has decided that Poseidon is prey of some sort. She stands at the edge of the pool, barking and growling as it crawls the walls of the pool. Even though she loves to swim, she has shown no willingness to enter Poseidon's domain.  Look how it worked out for Odysseus!

The Odyssey: Awesome

But loud in places. Worth seeing in theaters. Unfortunately, the Sea Peoples are again getting blame for the collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age societies. If you recall my review of 1177 B.C., we now know that climate change likely disrupted complex globalized trade networks, causing collapse of all but Egypt  

Names That Just SCREAM South

 The town is Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

I confess that because this was a Christmas gift from a progressive relative, I had some misgivings. It does seem to take a traditional view of what happened: too many people who could not afford to buy stocks using margin accounts, which when prices fell caused widespread margin calls, which caused immediate selling pressure, which caused a feedback loop of margin calls and more panic selling.  While catastrophic for ordinary people in over their heads (like Winston Churchill) and some speculators who lost millions more than they had, what really sank the economy was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930.

Where the book is weak is money supply discussion. The Austrian school argument about N.Y. Fed Chair Strong inflating the money supply 1920-28 to bail out the Bank of England is not examined although he acknowledges that inflation in the 1920s played a part in creating the bubble.

Where it is strong is describing the people involved in the disaster: their quirks, their weaknesses, their greed and sometimes their well-intentioned efforts to prevent the disaster and then to alleviate it. That many of the speculators and political figures who created the Federal Reserve System were Democrats who tried to blame Hoover as a distraction from their roles in this is mentioned, and not subtly. Hoover comes across as a well-meaning person who got stuck with a mess properly blamed on Coolidge, Harding, and a lot of greedy, shortsighted speculators.

I am about halfway through.

On p. 321, he quotes FDR that the gold standard would be "unflinchingly maintained."

Another Citation

Barnett v. Raoul (7th Cir. 2026) citing "Knives and the Second Amendment".  Alas not with the desired result.

Paducah Kentucky Dog Park

Yet another small town with a lovely dog park. Somehow, I lost the picture, but shady with a hose for watering down the logs.

My g-g-g-grandfather invaded Paducah (along with several other regiments) in 1862. A Southern woman (emphatically not a lady in his view) made some disparaging remarks about the Union. A general heard her and announced that her house would make a fine hospital and requisitioned it for that purpose. 

Trigger Warnings Gone Wild!

 I hope you remember College Girls Gone Wild! From The College Fix:

TRENDING: Libraries attach trigger warnings to historical resource catalogs 

This may hurt to know but people in the past had no idea that some day, people who imagine themselves to be intellectuals would be so injured by language that today we consider hateful and offensive that even reading a description would be problematic.

A couple years ago, I used a small news clipping in an American History class that referred to a "Negro banker." I had at least one student who apparently thought the N-word was "Negro." I shudder to think what their reaction would be to the United Negro College Fund or the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum 

If you cannot read a catalog entry with some offensive antique words without blowing a gasket, maybe history or even academic study is not for you. Find a field more appropriate to you: unicorn breeding.

A Fascinating Book: Tamed

Alice Roberts. Tamed: From Wild to Domesticated, the Ten Animals and Plants That Changed Human History. 

This is a popular history of the domestication of the animals and plants that to a large extent created our civilization. My wife found it interesting but not as well written as her English Composition teaching standards required. Yes, there are areas where I found the structure less than satisfying but it tells stories so interesting that I can forgive some minor issues.

If I fault this book for anything, it is that for many of these stories, it recounts the early attempts to understand the domestication process, then the later attempts, and now today’s theories.  While that development process has a certain detective story interest to it, it is far less satisfying to me and much wordier than just presenting current theory. 

Since I teach Western Civilization, these domestication events are of great importance. There is a bit of wit and humor scattered through the book, although not as thoroughly entertaining as Mary Roach's similar popular science books.

One surprising deficiency, since the author is a professor is that the lack of either traditional footnotes or endnotes. The bibliography is detailed, but if i am curious about one little detail, I should not need to read through a dozen books and journal articles to find it.

The chapter on humans I thought might examine the futile attempts of eugenics but it is an examination of how for a variety of reasons, humans have changed genetically in ways that have tamed us, making us more able to get along with each other.  Also along discussion of why GMO is the Island of Dr. Moreau disaster that many Greens assume but of course it turns into evil greedy corporations cannot be trusted with this, only the selfless universities and other nonprofits. 

I Knew the Date Seemed Important

A high point of Western Civilization, America, and Humanity.  Another reminder of the importance of metric system.

The Butcher's Tale

By Helmut Walser Smith. This is what historians call "post hole history." To say that is a very deep dive is an understatement. The sources are interrogations, court transcripts, and census records associated with Konitz, a small town in what was then German East Prussia. 

The crime was horrendous: an 18-year-old boy was suffocated or strangled and then dismembered expertly and wrapped and tied as though he was coming from a butcher. Bad enough, but rapidly this turned in the popular imagination of the town into a Jewish sacrifice of a Christian for blood to make matzohs. Antisemitic journalists soon arrived to throw liquid oxygen on a gasoline fire. 

This book examines not only the crime itself but how the assumptions of the locals spun this positively medieval blood libel into a widely believed story. While some local prosecutors pursued the blood libel idea, responsible aristocrats and bureaucrats recognized it as an absurd claim and provided troops to protect Konitz's Jewish community when local police were overwhelmed by numbers. Amazingly enough, it did not turn into a pogrom.

He examines in detail the underlying questions of how neighbors turn against neighbors and why the blood libel persisted into remarkably recent times in Europe, in spite of strong papal opposition.  Much of this discussion is not spectacularly interesting to me, but as detective story, it works well. 

Fortunately, Democrats are looking for other ways to demonize the Jews; blood libel is even too much for MSNOW.

Bizarre Reasoning Screaming for Cert

 Barnett v. Raoul Nos. 24-3060, 24-3061, 24-3062 & 24-3063.(6th Cir. 2026). Curiously:

Contrary to the dissenting opinion's efforts (often without citation) to conclusively link Bowie knives to criminality, however, Bowie knives were both widespread and used for lawful purposes. One expert in the history of arms in America, for example, explained that in the nineteenth century, "European visitors who ventured beyond the Appalachians found [the Bowie knife] such an integral part of the American way of life that they felt compelled to comment on it at length in accounts of their adventures.... In many communities, no man, whether hunter, gambler, tradesman or political leader felt himself fully clothed without one." Peterson, supra, at 25. Similarly, the historian who (literally) wrote the book on Bowie knives noted they were "widely carried by Americans of all stripes"; "served everyone equally, upstanding citizens and villains" alike; were "wide[ly] popular[], in the North and South" during the Civil War; and were "common[]"—"a weapon carried by men of all walks of life." Norm Flayderman, The Bowie Knife: Unsheathing an American Legend 20, 125, 130 (2004). Other scholars agree. See David B. Kopel, Clayton E. Cramer & Joseph Edward Olson, Knives and the Second Amendment, 47 U. Mich. J.L. Reform 167, 184 (2013) ("During the nineteenth century, Bowie knives were commonly present in many areas of the United States. Contemporary sources leave no question that Bowie knives, Arkansas Toothpicks, and similar knives were a common part of American life until well after the Civil War....").

The test that Heller imposed recognized that arms in common use are protected. Their dangerousness did not matter; their commonness did matter.

Memories of Being a Cool Kid

Remember these?

All the cool kids listened to these after 8-track went the way of the buffalo.  There were pre-recorded ones made very cheaply and short-lived. Or if you had the most minimal of technical know-how, you recorded from your turntable onto a cassette tape deck for your car. 

I had one of the highly hyped Pioneer AM/FM/Cassette decks in several of my silly cars as a young adult: 1977 Chevy Nova; 1978 Camaro Z28; 1979 Pontiac Grand Am.

The case was 1970s cool also:

Making a 1970s period piece? Let me know or in the trash it goes.

"We Fought a War for This?"

Our dogs are losing their sanity from the fireworks." In the closing years of the 19th century, cynics begin to make fun of the solemn speeches associated with the Fourth. I would like more of that and less of this.

Reparations

6/29/26 Tilting at Windmills discusses the current demands by Africa for slave reparations from Europe and America. The transatlantic slave trade is "the greatest crime against humanity" unlike the longer and larger transondian slave trade.

As most of you know, slaves were usually sold by Africans to Arabs and Europeans. This had severe bad effects on Africa. Largely agricultural societies were militarized to take prisoners of war for sale.  Much of this wealth was spent on repeating the process and buying alcohol, tools, and cloth. At the end, African slave traders exported several generations of workers in prime working years and failed to sensibly invest the capital. 

In England, some of the wealth from the slave trade was sensibly invested. Thomas Sowell says the role this had in capitalizing the Indistrial Revolution had been greatly exaggerated.  Over the years, I have seen many docum5 about Georgian building by slave owners that absurd vanity project:  capital wasted. It made England no better off.

In America, much of the wealth was sensibly invested. Lots of that invested capital was destroyed during the Civil War. Is that unfortunate? Yes but that wealth that Africa wants is just as gone as that which the slave traders wasted.

Stop whining and ask why a continent awash in natural resources remains poor today.