WWII soldier's lost gift to mom returns home for Mother's Day

MILLVILLE, Mass. –  This is the story of a loving tribute from a soldier preparing for war to his mother on the other side of the continent, who didn't know if she would ever see her boy again.
The elaborate pillow sham he sent her, lost for more than 70 years, has finally come home, just in time for Mother's Day.
The sham, emblazoned with the word "Mother" and sent in 1942 by Dominic O'Gara from his Army base in California to his mother in the small Massachusetts town of Millville, was discovered last month by a town native on eBay.
The hope now is to put the sham on display in the town's senior center, just yards from the house where the O'Gara family once lived.
"To me, it's come back to where it belongs," said Margaret Carroll, chairwoman of the town Historical Commission. "It's as close to Mrs. O'Gara as it can get."
Donald Lamoureux, who lives in Cumberland, Rhode Island, but who grew up in Millville, spotted an envelope for sale on eBay, and even though he had no idea what was inside, he knew he had to have it when he saw the date and the Millville address. He paid $5 for it.
He was stunned when he looked inside.
"There was this pillow sham that had been sealed away for 73 years, and it looked brand new," he said.
Although it had deep creases from being folded for decades, it wasn't frayed, stained or faded.
The white pillow cover has a blue fringe, and in addition to the word "Mother" in blue, is decorated with red roses with green stems, and the words "Camp McQuaide, Calif.," where O'Gara was stationed.
It also has this famous poem, written by lyricist Howard Johnson:
___
M is for the million things she gave me
O means only that she's growing old
T is for the tears she shed to save me
H is for her heart of purest gold
E is for her eyes with love light shining
R means right and right she'll always be
Put them all together they spell mother
A word that means the world to me
___
"It was very touching," Lamoureux said.
Millville, about 40 miles southwest of Boston, had a population of about 1,800 in the 1940s. Even these days, it holds only about 3,200 people.
"My grandfather (Rodrique "Pete" Lamoureux) was a World War II veteran, and Millville is such a small town, I just knew they had to have known each other," he said. "I felt this instant connection."
Where the pillow sham has been the past 70-plus years is a mystery. The 6-cent airmail stamp on the envelope was canceled, indicating it had been delivered. But the cover appeared pristine. O'Gara's mother, Catherine, died in 1956.
Lamoureux bought it from a Rhode Island man who runs a collectibles shop and found the envelope in a box of junk acquired from an anonymous seller.
Of course, Lamoureux wanted to return the pillow cover to O'Gara's family, but he couldn't find any living relatives.
He found that O'Gara, the son of Irish immigrants, was an artilleryman who served in Italy in World War II, then lived for years in the nearby town of Milford before dying in 1998. His wife died in 1974.
Lamoureux turned to his own parents, Donald and Diane Lamoureux, and their friends in Millville, including Carroll and Council on Aging member Ellen Ethier Bowen, who both remembered the O'Gara family. But even Carroll, who has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of town history, came up empty.
The group discussed it and came up with the idea of framing the pillow sham and envelope and hanging them in the senior center. The building is a short walk from the O'Garas' former home in a section of town known as Banigan City, named for the former president of a now-closed rubber manufacturing plant who built the homes for his workers.
Bowen hopes to bring the proposal to the full Council on Aging. It would be perfect if the pillow sham could be hung by Memorial Day, she said.
"This whole story just tugs at your heartstrings," she said.

California Cartoon

Students at Texas university look to rid campus of Jefferson Davis memorial

Student leaders at a Texas university are looking to remove a statue memorializing Confederate president Jefferson Davis from its campus.
"We thought, there are those old ties to slavery and some would find it offensive," said senior Jamie Nalley, who joined an overwhelming majority of the Student Government at the University of Texas at Austin in adopting a resolution in March supporting his ouster.
As students take aim at Davis, the number of sites in Texas on public and private land that honor the Confederacy is growing, despite the opposition from the NAACP and other groups. Supports say they have a right to support Confederate veterans because of their role in Texas history, while opponents argue that memorials are too often insensitive or antagonistic, while having the backing of public institutions like UT.
The Texas Historical Commission has recognized more than 1,000 Confederate memorial sites from far South Texas to the upper reaches of the Panhandle. The Sons of Confederate Veterans are planning more monuments, including a 10-foot obelisk a few miles from the Davis statue to honor about 450 Confederate soldiers buried at the city-owned Oakwood Cemetery.
"I don't think we're trying to put up stuff just to put up stuff," said Marshall Davis, spokesman for the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Texas. "We don't want to impede anyone else from honoring their heroes. We would like to honor our heroes with the same consideration, tolerance and diversity."
Besides the obelisk, other projects include a Confederate memorial along Interstate 10 in the city of Orange will feature 32 waving flags representing Texas regiments of the Confederate army, along with 13 columns for each Confederate state. That projected started after a Confederate Veterans Memorial Plaza was unveiled two years ago in downtown Palestine, near what the NAACP claims was the site of a “hanging tree.”
Student leaders and the NAAP say the Jefferson Davis statue has not place on the UT campus since his link to Texas is primarily based on the state’s ties to the Confederacy.
“I think it's offensive that you exalt Jefferson Davis but you don't exalt Abraham Lincoln," said Gary Bledsoe, president of the Texas NAACP.
The Student Government resolution has been forwarded to campus administrators but no action has been taken, according to a university spokesman.
Don Carleton, executive director of the Briscoe Center for American History at UT, said the statue and many other memorials across the South in the early 1900s were commissioned by aging Civil War veterans who were outspoken that it was states’ rights and not slavery that motivated their actions.
Late in his life, George Washington Littlefield — a Confederate officer, UT regent and prominent benefactor to the school — had commissioned Italian artist Pompeo Coppini to build a fountain and statues to Littlefield's heroes, Carleton said. The artist sought to include a statue of President Woodrow Wilson and arrange a fountain configuration that represented the country moving beyond its fractured past and unifying behind the fight against Germany and its allies in World War I.
But Littlefield later died, money dried up and Coppini's vision was never fully realized, Carleton said. Instead, statues of Davis, President George Washington, Confederate General Robert E. Lee, Confederate Postmaster General John Reagan and others were scattered about the campus without context.
Carleton said aside from the symbolism of the statues, they're works of art and should be preserved. He suggests adding explanatory plaques that describe the original intention.
"That's not going to placate everyone, and I understand that, but I think it's a lot better in explaining them to people rather than leaving it just as it is," he said.
The Texas Historical Commission has records of the more than 1,000 sites in the state that memorialize the Confederacy — from a Confederate cemetery in San Antonio and marker honoring Gen. Lawrence "Sul" Ross at Sul Ross State University in Alpine to a building in Marshall that housed the Civil War State Government of Missouri in exile.
The effort to remove the Davis statue is ill-conceived, said Marshall Davis.
"The fact that the state of Texas joined the Confederate States of America is history. It happened," he said. "It's not a matter of opinion."

Student leaders at a Texas university?

Bledsoe, president of the Texas NAACP.

Republicans embrace new social media tech, in drive to 2016

Republican presidential hopefuls trying to break from the crowded primary field are taking to cutting-edge social media to connect with more and younger voters, in the latest sign that -- come 2016 -- GOP candidates are determined to close the digital divide with historically tech-savvy Democrats.
While still stumbling on some digital basics, the fluid procession of Republicans jumping into the 2016 race are showing a willingness to experiment. Not only blanketing social-media megaphones Facebook and Twitter, the campaigns are road-testing new apps in a bid to quickly build their circle of political friends.
Earlier this week, former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina announced her candidacy on Facebook and Twitter, but then turned to the video-streaming app Periscope to connect more directly with voters.
In the hyper-paced world of social media, Twitter-owned Periscope debuted shortly before the Fiorina announcement, and allows users to broadcast and view live events on mobile devices. And its video-streaming rival, Meerkat, has been up and running only since late February. Already, both are being used heavily in the presidential campaign.
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul -- one of more than a dozen Republicans who have either announced a 2016 White House bid or are considering one -- was the first in the pack to use the Meerkat smartphone app. He live-streamed a March 15 appearance at the South by Southwest festival, in Austin, Texas.
Craig Agranoff, a Florida-based digital marketer specializing in political campaigns, predicts that video streaming will be to the 2016 race what Facebook was to President Obama’s 2008, and to a lesser extent, 2012 victories -- reaching millions of young and previously untapped voters.

2 Mississippi police officers dead after shooting at traffic stop

Did what happen in Ferguson and Boston empower these Two?

Two suspects accused of killing two Mississippi police officers Saturday night were reportedly arrested early Sunday morning.
The Hattiesburg American reports that Curtis Banks was brought to the Mississippi Highway Patrol Troop J headquarters at around 3 a.m. local time. His brother Marvin Banks was arrested about two hours earlier.
The Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported that as reporters were asking Curtis Banks if he had shot two of the Hattiesburg patrolmen he blurted out “no sir, I didn’t do it.”
The killings prompted a statewide manhunt for the two suspects late Saturday.
Warren Strain, a spokesman for the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, said one Hattiesburg officer had initially stopped a 2000 Gold Cadillac Escalade in an industrial part of the city at around 8:30 p.m. local time Saturday. A second officer arrived afterward to assist him and that is when shots were fired. Those were reported to be the first deaths on the Hattiesburg police force in three decades.
"Obviously these suspects are armed and dangerous. There is a danger, a threat for sure," Strain told The Associated Press by telephone early Sunday from the scene, an industrial corridor fronting a housing area. He said officers had told people in the immediate area to "take shelter."
Strain said both officers died of their injuries at a hospital. He said law enforcement agencies across the state were searching for two men identified as 26-year-old Curtis Banks and his 29-year-old brother Marvin Banks.
A Hattiesburg Police Department spokesman, Lt. Jon Traxler told The Associated Press the officers who died were 34-year-old Benjamin Deen and 25-year-old Liquori Tate.
"All I know right now is that there was a traffic stop and someone started shooting at them and both of the officers were struck," Traxler said. He said he didn't know how many shots were fired, or exactly by whom, adding that was now part of the investigation.
He said the state's chief law enforcement agency, the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, had taken up the probe of the shooting. 
"That's still under investigation. The crime scene unit is processing the scene," said Strain.  .
Hattiesburg Mayor Johnny DuPree told the Clarion-Ledger he lamented the deaths.
"The men and women who go out every day to protect us, the men and woman who go out every day to make sure that we're safe, they were turned on (Saturday) night," DuPree said outside Forrest General Hospital in Hattiesburg, where the officers were taken. 
The Clarion-Ledger reports these are the first Hattiesburg officers to die in the line of duty in 30 years. It said Tate was a recent police academy graduate while Deen was a K-9 officer who had been honored as the department's "Officer of the Year" in 2012.

Obama rebukes ‘politician’ Warren as trade feud escalates

A growing feud between President Obama and Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren kicked up a notch Saturday, with the president rejecting her recent warnings about a long-sought trade deal and saying in an interview, “Elizabeth is a politician just like everybody else.”
The president and the liberal Massachusetts senator have been sparring amid an internal Democratic battle over Obama’s trade push.
The administration wants Congress to give the president so-called “fast-track” authority, which would ease the ability of the president to secure trade pacts – in this case, a major agreement with Pacific nations called the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Most recently, Warren has argued that giving Obama the new authority could open the door for a future administration to strike a deal rolling back provisions of the landmark 2010 financial industry regulatory overhaul.
The president, in an interview with Yahoo News, said that’s “wrong.”
He challenged the notion that he would have had “this massive fight with Wall Street” and then sign a provision to undo that legislation.
“I'd have to be pretty stupid and it doesn't make any sense,” Obama said. “There is no evidence that could ever be used in this way. This is pure speculation. She and I both taught law school and one of the things you do as a law professor is you spin out hypotheticals and this is all hypothetical, speculative.”
Asked if this is personal, Obama said, “You know the truth of the matter is … Elizabeth is a politician just like everybody else, and she has a voice that she wants to get out there and I understand that, and on most issues she and I deeply agree. On this one, though, her arguments don't stand the test of fact and scrutiny.”
Politico recently reported that Warren’s criticism has administration officials fuming, and calling her attacks “baseless.” It comes as the administration is trying to win over a bipartisan coalition to green-light the “fast-track” authority.
From his left flank, Obama has also faced transparency concerns. Warren recently co-authored a letter asking Obama to make public classified information on the trade deal.
While some liberal groups have urged Warren to run for president in 2016, so far she has denied interest in doing so.