RE: TOLEDO SHOW and ETOC 2012
It being Sunday morning and stuff, I could not help but put together my thoughts.
Last night during the opening ceremonies of the ETOC, a gentleman gave a beautiful rendition of the Star Spangled Banner. I was sitting next to Seth Arnold's dad and we got to talking about the national anthem. Now, you have to understand I've spent a lot of time in Baltimore, MD recently and was having lunch at the Rusty Scupper- one of the best restaurants in Baltimore inner harbor. I happen to notice something that looked like a crane sitting in the middle of the harbor, which looked quite the eyesore. I inquired to the waiter about the item and he indicated that it was a dredging rig. Now I had to explain to my kids what dredging is (Joseph had to learn this term when he was putting together his 6th grade science fair project last month). So the waiter tells me they are dredging the inner harbor in preparation for this big event in June. He says there will be hundreds of ships sailing into the inner harbor to celelbrate the 200 year anniversary of the Battle of 1812 (actually the battle of Baltimore harbor took place in 1814) and they have to make room for some of the larger vessels. In any event, lets go back a couple of hundred years and imagine how the British felt when we sided with the French (or at least attempted to remain neutral). After the British ended that war they decided to come on over here and give us a drubbing. After burning Washington DC (to include the White House) they moved their fleet up to Baltimore to do some more punishment. Well, Baltimore at that time of our country's history was one of the most important ports we had. You see all the coal from Pennsylvania and grain came by rail right up to the Baltimore harbor and, well, for goodness sake we were feeding those French and all... so up comes Ross (if I remember his name correctly) with his fleet to plunder Baltimore but wait, a Major (I believe he was a Major) named Armistead (I believe a related to who became later either his son or relative, a famous general Armistead from the battle of Gettysburg) who said no way. He got about a thousand men and piled into the fort called Fort McHenry.
Now, there was this Washington DC lawyer- a young whipper snapper sharp young guy who had a buddy (or such) that was captured on one of the ships in the British fleet. Now he went up to the fleet with a truce ship
To Be continued....