Douglas Whaley

I keep running into people who tell me that they won’t vote for Hillary because she’s so “crooked” or “dishonest” or “corrupt.”  My handyman told me this, and so did a nurse during a medical procedure I was recently enduring.  To both of them I replied that I’m a Hillary supporter, but I’d never vote for someone who fit any of those descriptions.  What exactly did she do to earn these labels?  Hey, I’m a lawyer—I want facts before I make up my mind. My questions produced puzzled silence.  “Well, everyone says that” was more or less the reply I always get.  “Do you believe everything you hear without checking?” is mine.  Hillary has flaws, of course, as any candidate would.  She mishandled her emails badly, but the intensive investigations of this brouhaha concluded that she did nothing criminally wrong and was only guilty of bad judgment.  If you don’t vote for her for that reason, okay.  But if bad jud...

As I’ve explained before, my father’s side of the family were English/Scottish, and my ancestry-minded sister, Mary Beth Colpitts, has traced the Whaleys back to the Battle of Hastings and before; see “A Whaley at the Battle of Hastings: The Fun of Genealogy,” February 22, 2016; http://douglaswhaley.blogspot.com/2016/02/a-whaley-at-battle-of-hastings-fun-of.html ]. My mother’s side of the family, the Kunkels, were pure Germans, coming to this country from Bavaria in the 1840s and settling in the City of Jasper in southern Indiana.  They were devout Catholics, and many of their descendants still are, producing very large families.  Here is a picture of my mother, Lenore Kunkel Whaley, with me and my great grandparents, Philip and Matilda Kunkel.  I vaguely remember them because they had a large parrot who screamed “ Pa, Phone! ” whenever the telephone rang. Their son Jerome Kunkel, who, later in life (when he decided to run for mayor of...