Year: 2013

Bill Tilden 1935-2013: Tribute to a Friend

Bill Tilden 1935-2013: Tribute to a Friend

Writ­ten for the Soci­ety of Auto­mo­tive His­to­ri­ans Journal

U.S. Coast Guard Base, Glouces­ter City, New Jer­sey, July 1965: A call from the Ops office—“Sir, there’s a civil­ian here ask­ing for you. He’s dri­ving the weird­est car I’ve ever seen.”

It was Bill, of course. We clicked from the start. With­in a week he hied me off to north Philadel­phia to help strip the odd­ly attrac­tive, faux lizard skin uphol­stery out of a rusty old car. It turned out a bad mistake—we’d junked an ultra-rare 1951 Kaiser Emer­ald Drag­on. They built maybe six….

Bill’s auto­mo­tive tastes were catholic, rang­ing from the E-type Jaguar he bought new and raced—probably the old­est in the hands of its orig­i­nal owner—to a 1941 Cadil­lac Six­ty-Spe­cial, sev­er­al Con­ti­nen­tals and late-mod­el Mopars, which he acquired as “future col­lectibles” from Chrysler, where he then worked, build­ing deal­er­ships.…

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Churchill and Health Care (2): An Ongoing Discussion

Churchill and Health Care (2): An Ongoing Discussion

"A question Churchill had to face in his time was: if you are for the social safety net, includ­ing health care, how do you pre­vent that from build­ing a soci­ety of "drones" (his word), ulti­mately dom­i­nated by a bureau­cratic elite? Churchill answered that ques­tion in many ways: the social safety net is sim­ple jus­tice, he said; with­out it the 'peo­ple will set their faces like flint against the money power'  A con­sti­tu­tion should pro­tect the peo­ple against this ten­dency."

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Syria: Stop the Churchill Comparisons!

Syria: Stop the Churchill Comparisons!

Mr. Brent Budows­ki adds to the long list of Churchill com­par­isons over the Syr­ia tragedy by com­par­ing Pres­i­dent Oba­ma to Sir Win­ston (The Hill, Sep­tem­ber 13th). Sen­a­tors Ted Cruz (R., Tex.), and Rand Paul (R., Ky.), and Rep. Alan Grayson (D., Fla.) “lit­er­al­ly offer no pol­i­cy and no ideas about how to stop the slaugh­ter of inno­cent peo­ple with chem­i­cal weapons.”

Oba­ma by con­trast “has made the hard call and pro­posed the strong action that would take a real stand and make a real dif­fer­ence.” Just like Churchill in the 1930s, “when the Span­ish fas­cists with sup­port from Hitler and Mus­soli­ni began their attacks against the Repub­li­can gov­ern­ment of Spain.”…

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