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Please stop these sad stories. I don't want to hear about one more old old black person who died on Monday. I am sure there were plenty more, but really this is too sad.
I hope Obama will invite him to the inauguration, poor old guy.
My grandmother is 90, and she's been a widow now almost as long as she was married, and she seems absolutely content, but there is something too sad about when it happens so late in life, and especially for a man. The men are supposed to die first.
A neat story, thanks. Not only moving, but just very interesting - I never gave much thought to the upstairs/downstairs aspects of the work of the White House. It is so very interesting to imagine this staff, which the Stevenson guy in the article says was largely black, opening doors, setting tables, cooking and cleaning, and running the whole household while the nation went through the arc of the whole Civil Rights movement. That while the nation blundered about flailing toward equality, its seat of government was always being maintained, day in and day out, by a largely black staff who turned on the lights and ministered to the daily duties of a formal household. I was thinking it would make a seriously amazing oral history project, but it would probably be pretty hard to get people to go on record about stuff, especially if they still work there.
I wonder who hires all those people. Who's, like, the head of White House operations? It seems like it's a pretty damn secure job.