Another Obituary

December 18, 2004

Pauline Gore, Al Gore's mother, and wife of the grand old political orator from Tennessee, Albert Gore Sr., died on Wednesday.  May she rest in peace, however, we wouldn't be blogging the event but for one of the unique functions of this blog.  Any blog.

The Times reports that Mrs. Gore was a familiar figure in the campaigns of her husband and her son. One of the regular correspondents of Good&Happy, indeed, a real Contraption-Savvy working journalist for many years, sends this recollection of a moment with Mrs. Gore and others.

I made [some notes] in my journal about the death of Pauline Gore. Her death struck me forcefully about the passage of time and the dinner I had with Pauline Gore and Lyndon and Lady Bird in the Hogg Room of the Driskill so long ago in the Sixties.  After dinner, LBJ got down to brass tacks:  "[Name of reporter], I don't want to read in the paper tomorrow about how handsome Albert Gore is.  I want to read about the dangers of strontium 90."  (And, of course, LBJ got what he wanted!)  Mrs. Gore had flown on Air Force One with the Johnsons, and her husband came the next day to speak at some event here.)  Mrs. Gore was young and beautiful then.  Now she's dead at 91.

So, the blogging enterprise is about both the passage of time (even the least personal of blogs being a kind of on-line diary); and the opportunity to gather and publish [here by permission] otherwise lost morsels of accomplishment and memory, from those folks out there who are a treasure of past treasures, with, even now, perhaps, more and even better things to do.

Contextual addendum: 
Strontium-90, an unhealthy metal constituent of nuclear waste and fallout, was a key meme in the Johnson campaign against Barry Goldwater, as recorded in descriptions from political ad archives.

LYNDON JOHNSON FOR PRESIDENT: little girl eating an ice cream cone while a woman voice-over explains that Cesium, Strontium-90, and other radioactive compounds will reenter the food chain if Goldwater is elected and [revokes] the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

Associated with the much-remarked:

LYNDON JOHNSON FOR PRESIDENT: the "Daisy commercial"―little girl plucks petals from a daisy and H-Bomb explosion occurs.

Update:
According to a 1999 report, halting nuclear testing seems not to have affected  strontium-90 absorption levels.

Baby teeth from children born in New York, New Jersey, and Florida in the 1980s have been found to contain a radioactive element at levels similar to those seen in the 1950s, when aboveground atomic bomb testing was taking place.

History is important. Thanks for the memories.

Second update: 
Non-performance of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization monitoring staff, absent, in the face of warning information on the disastrous 2004 tsunami.  Those computers are for, what?