MARK | 2006-09-10
Not Spam
NOT SPAM
Bob, sorry for being off subject here, but a question:
I just read where a man named BOB WHITAKER photographed albumn
covers for the Beatles during the mid 1960's. I don't guess
youre the same BW, are you?
Okay, back to the regularly scheduled programming...
Comment by Mark
ME:
Boy, Mark, you really stepped in it!
You gave an old man a chance to talk about HIMSELF!
Thanks for looking me up, and I will no longer pan anyone for doing exactly hwat a seminar is all about. So you done good.
Bob Whitaker who wrote about the Beatles is not me. There is also a Robert W. Whitaker who wrote a book about psychiatry lately.
In fact, back when I wrote my first book, I was on Capitol Hill and the Library of Congress still had a card catalog. When I looked up my name, the drawer I pulled out consisted almost entirely of Robert W. Whitaker. Whitakers filled drawer after drawer.
In the 1960s a buddy of mine from Brazil pointed out that there was a Whitaker on the Brazilian Supreme Court.
When our family historian traced out whole family tree back to Jamestown, she had to find the names of ONE THOUSAND direct ancestors. She is obsessive, like hte rest of our clan, so she is very worried that she can't find ONE of that thousand.
But she added an important one to make up for that. Alexander Whitaker, who converted and baptised Pocahontas and wrote the first book in English America and DIED before the Pilgrims got to Massachusetts, was the brother of my direct ancestor Jabez Whitaker.
She now has a fairly complete family tree back to about 1450, with a Thomas Whitaker.
But there is a problem with us Whitakers. In all that thousand and the ones before, there is not one single FAMOUS one. There is not one who ever had a title.
My cousin, Bob Whitaker, ran Emory University for many years. Like me, he was a staffer.
My cousin Bob Whitaker was the perpetual Assistant to the President of Emory University. The President of Emory changed regularly. It was a job that was given to big money retired exceutives of the Coca-Cola company, which supplied giant infusions of money to Emory. They enjoyed hte title, but the last thing a retired executive wants to do is run the politics of a university. So they went out and made speeches and raised money for Emory.
Bob Whitaker ran the University.
One of the more ironic incidents that happened in the early 1960s, when I was a graduate instructor at the University of South Carolina, and firmly on the FBI list, was when the head of our department, who already had a very high position in academic terms, received an even better job at Emory University.
He came to me one day while he was waiting for the academic year to end and his going from department head to his better job at Emory and said,
"Bob, there is a Bob Whitaker who actually runs Emory University. Are you kin to him?"
I replied, "He's my cousin."
This seemed to surprise him somewhat. A self-proclaimed segregationist redneck from Pontiac, SC does not fit the image of families that run universities. He didn't know my father was the unchallenged top world expert on brick making and had been sent to Russia to represent the American Ceramic Society.
There are other members of my family who wrote books and ran things as second-in-command. It seems to be a family trait. Why would he bother to find THAT out?
I keep going back to Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina. He KEPT saying, "I'm just a country lawyer from North Carolina." When Senator Baker of Tennessee said to hin, "Dammit, Sam, you are a MAGNA Cum Laude graduate of the Harvard Law School, Ole Sam smiled and said, "Yes, Howard, but nobody will ever know it."
In Massachusetts they say, "The Lodges speak only to the Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God."
The Lodges and the Cabots get a real kick out of that stuff.
They can have it. We just want to rule the world.