Friday, July 29, 2005

Memories of Schmidt

Acquaintance mahablog disputes some of Schmidt's hagiography.

If Schmidt is a farm girl I'm Lance Armstrong. I know exactly where the "farm" is, because my home was on the edge of it, and when I lived there 25 years ago it hadn't been farmed in a great many years. As I remember, Gus never farmed it (somebody should confirm that), but bought the land up cheap and, bit by bit, turned it into a subdivision. And from googling I found that Jean is still living in the same house (on Wards Corner Road, in Loveland), which then was a subdivision, not a farm, and I rather doubt it reverted back to farm status in the years since.

...

I remember at one point the other twin, Jennifer, went on a crusade to stop a property tax increase that would have benefited the local public schools. The school buildings were shabby, and news stories claimed the kids were using 20-year-old textbooks. Both twins believed that public schools were inherently bad, and since anybody who was anybody sent their kids to Catholic schools they didn't see any point in funding them. Property taxes were remarkably low, and the increase would have been less than $200 a year average per household, but Jennifer was on a rampage that she would be ruined if she had to pay that tax.