I told some people recently that I really like to play bridge and chess and cut up with other old people, but that is not enough to cause me to want to keep waking up each morning.
I told some people recently at the large bridge club where I play in Birmingham, that I had played a few times at a small bridge club in a city south of Birmingham, and whenever there was a rule infraction, the players at that table resolved it among themselves instead of calling the game director to resolve it. Someone said I must be mistaken, I wasn’t paying attention to all that went on in the small bridge club. I said I paid very close attention, those people are good bridge players, they know the rules of the game, they are grown ups, and they don’t need the game director to help them when one of them messes up.
A bridge player at the large bridge club told me yesterday that my uncle Leo Bashinsky was her pediatrician, and I said he was my pediatrician and my children’s pediatrician. She said Leo was kinda intimidating, so large that he filled a doorway. I said I met many women, who said Leo was their children’s doctor and Leo was really hard on them, but their children loved him and they put up with him; and many other women said Leo was really hard on them and their children loved him, but they changed pediatricians, and I told them their feelings were more important to them than their children’s welfare, because he was the best baby doctor, ever.
Leo treated babies, not mommas. His chapter in A FEW REMARKABLE ALABAMA PEOPLE I HAVE KNOWN (https://afewremarkablealabamapeople.blogspot.com/?m=1)
is at the bottom of this post.
For a number of years, Joyce Vance was the US Attorney in Birmingham, Alabama- her Social Discourse newsletter yesterday.
Jack Smith Asks for More Time
Late today, lawyers in the Special Counsel’s office and lawyers for Donald Trump filed the joint status report that wasn’t due until tomorrow in the Trump election interference case in the District of Columbia. The Special Counsel advised the court that it “continues to assess the new precedent” laid down by the Supreme Court creating the doctrine of presidential immunity and went on to ask the court for an additional three weeks to file “an informed proposal regarding the schedule for pretrial proceedings moving forward.” Trump’s lawyers didn’t oppose Jack Smith’s request. Now the timeline is up to Judge Chutkan...
Click this link to see entire article:
https://joycevance.substack.com/p/jack-smith-asks-for-more-time
Sloan Bashinsky
Sloan’s Newsletter
Joyce-
I subscribed to your Civil Discourse newsletter after a University of Alabama School of Law grad amiga emailed me your August 2 post: Does "Conservative" Have Any Meaning Today?
After graduating from the University of Alabama School of Law in 1968, I clerked for U.S. District Judge Clarence W. Allgood in Birmingham, Alabama. By arrangement with the other two U.S, District Judges, Seyborne Lynne and Hobart Grooms, Judge Allgood presided over every federal criminal prosecution in the United State District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, where you later were the US Attorney, whose office handled federal prosecutions in that Court’s jurisdiction.
Given the current makeup of the United States Supreme Court - five white Christian-right justices and one black Uncle Tom Christian justice, who look as close to Jesus as me sitting in my car makes me an automobile- I think the federal prosecutions of Donald Trump are in gave jeopardy, and at the snail pace those prosecutions are proceeding, it seems unlikely there will be federal trials and jury decisions before the November election, and if Trump wins, it seems unlikely there will be federal trials and jury decisions regarding him.
We have the Democrats to thank for what’s become of the U.S. Supreme Court, because the Democrats ran the candidate Trump could beat in 2016, totally unaware of the dirt on Hillary Clinton, but she knew about it. Hillary got nominated by the DNC because of what she knew about Vice President Biden and his son Hunter- no possible way drug addict Hunter got rich off Ukraine without his Vice President father’s help.
It looked to me that the State of Georgia RICO prosecution was the most dangerous criminal prosecution of Trump and his accomplices, because the U.S. Supreme Court has no jurisdiction over state criminal prosecutions.
It looked to me that the Georgia chief prosecutor Fani Wills would lock Trump up good and proper, but she could not keep her vagina in her pants, and Trump’s lawyers found out about it, and Willis turned herself into a femme fatale victim of white supremacy, instead of being a grown up and firing her boyfriend assistant prosecutor and recusing herself so a new chief prosecutor could be appointed and the RICO prosecution could proceed expeditiously.
Your August 2 Does "Conservative" Have Any Meaning Today? Laid bare Project 2025, Opus Dei and America’s right-wing White Supremacy Christian Party and Donald Trump’s deep connection to it, yet I think you did not go far enough.
Trump and his base are very similar to Adolph Hitler and his Nazi Party leading up to World War II. Trump and his base want to make America a right wing Christian Reich, and presently Trump, who is no more a follower of Jesus than Adolph Hitler was, is their Führer.
Trump keeps saying he has nothing to do with Project 2025, but his vice president running mate J.D. Vance wrote the foreword for the Project 2025 book, which is yet another of countless examples of when Trump’s lips are moving, he is lying.
The Project 2025 and Opus Dei people think they are pulling Trump’s strings, but he needs them to get back in the White House where he cannot be criminally prosecuted in federal court, and he knows a sucker is born every minute, and he pulls Project 2025 and Opus Dei people’s strings- he could care less about any of them, if they don’t click their heels and heil him. He feels the same way about MAGAs, who are not part of Project 2025 and Opus Dei.
To anyone who says Trump is not the Führer of a white supremacist American cult, I say, look at photos and film footage of white MAGA rally mobs, the January 6, 2021 white mob's attempt to overthrow the presidential election, the white mob rally where the sniper barely missed killing Trump, and Trump-Vance white mob rallies. Res ipsa loquitur, the thing speaks for itself; a picture is worth a thousand words.
I hope, Joyce, that you and your readers will start chanting what JD Vance said about Donald Trump in 2016: Trump is like Hitler. He wants to be Führer of America’s Aryan Christian Nation (Third Reich).
HE CALLED A SPADE A SPADE
I wish to tell you of my father’s older brother, who, when he and I first met, had just finished his residency at Duke Medical School. It was back when he entered his freshman year of medicine there that Leo’s family and medical school professors discovered he was a genius. He was also the greatest fisherman in the world, as far as I was concerned later in my young life. But for now, not even six years old, I was simply in awe of a six-foot-four giant, weighing about two-hundred-forty pounds, whose hands looked to be about the size of Goose Tatum’s of the Harlem Globetrotters, who could palm a basketball and a cabbage in one hand, I supposed when I saw him play in Birmingham a few years after I met Leo. I actually would see Leo palm my youngest daughter, Alice, by her bare butt and lift her high above my head squirming sort of like a baby seal when she was just home from the hospital being born, and say in his gruff laughing way, “Now that’s a fine baby!
Leo was blessed with an inheritance that allowed him to practice medicine in whatever way he wished. He had patients from over the mountain, Mountain Brook and Crestline Heights, two burgs south of Birmingham where mostly rich folks would eventually congregate, or people wanting to be rich folks. That’s where I grew up, and my friends. Leo and my father grew up on the Birmingham side of the mountain, in Forest Park, when that was where the rich folks lived, or folks wanting to be rich. By the time Leo got out of Duke Medical Scholl and came home to be my and a lot of other babies and kids’ doctor, the migration over the mountain was getting pretty well underway.
Actually, Red Mountain wasn’t really a mountain but was merely a ridge at the tail end of the Appalachian range, where once industrialists had mined iron ore, coal and limestone to make steel in Birmingham mills. The mills closed one by one after the raw materials ran out and it became cheaper to make steel elsewhere, than to ship the raw materials from Mobile up the Warrior River to Birmingham. But long before that demise, a very large cast- iron statue of a scantily-clad Blacksmith named Vulcan was given to Birmingham by some place or folks I don’t now remember, and it was erected on top of Red Mountain, over the cut where 20th Street went over the top and down into Homewood, which lay just west of Mountain Brook.
To my little boy eyes, the first time I saw Leo and heard him bellow about scarlet fever and how it and whooping cough were primary killers of children, he looked about as big as Vulcan and made about as much noise as I thought Vulcan might make if he could really talk, and I sort of wanted to migrate somewhere . . . else. For I’d already had my taste of penicillin from another doctor, when my younger brother was nearly dead from pneumonia, while Leo was still studying to be a doctor. I was burning up with something trying to eat me alive from inside out, and they gave me the shots, too, only to later learn I had the world record case of the red measles. My brother and I didn’t cross-pollinate and kill each other, and we both lived to have Leo come around from time to time when we were sickly and eyeball us and pretty well size up the situation before he even felt our throat and neck for lumps and made us stick out our tongues and get that awful wooden flat gag stick in our throat and “ahhhhhhh” shit would have been how we really felt about it if we were old enough to know such words.
I remember one day Leo came calling when I was home sick with something he figured a needle would take care of and my mother was not there but my mammy Cha was, and I decided no way was he going to stick that needle into me and I fought him tooth and nail, really a great plan, him weighing about four times what I weighed; but it was more tussle than he or I realized I had in me, and finally he nearly had to hog-tie me and was huffing and cussing, a leg over me, an arm sort of around my waist, or maybe it was my neck, when he injected me and, yep, I thought it was going to hurt like that: it was penicillin after all, if it hurt like that. But I started getting better pretty quick, maybe because I got so hot and bothered that the sudden fever of it killed off whatever it was in me that had summoned Leo to poke that needle in me in the first place, or maybe it was just the desire for him not to come back and do it again that caused me to get better.
Leo gave up on doctoring me when I was about twenty and had contracted some sort of deadly dysentery while running a summer vacation route for my father’s potato chip company, Golden Flake, but I didn’t yet know I had contracted some sort of deadly dysentery because the runs hadn’t yet started. I was so tired that I could barely move and felt nearly dead when Leo got there, called in by my mother from a party of some kind, accompanied by another doctor I’d heard a lot about, named Keehn Berry. I’d been wanting to meet Keehn because I’d heard from Leo that he was a great fisherman, but not under such circumstances as these. I suppose Leo had ESP’d it from afar at the party, I wouldn’t put it past him; or maybe he just figured this was the last time he wanted to be called at night to come see me, one of his oldest patients. He would make house calls until the day he retired, for babies and children.
Anyway, neither Keehn nor Leo had yet figured out what was wrong with me by the time they headed back to the party. The figuring out would take my throwing up and crapping all over everywhere for the rest of the night, and then for Keehn to see the wretching remains of me in his office the next morning, which was Saturday, they still worked on Saturdays in that time, for him to announce that I had dysentery and was headed for the hospital without passing Go. Shigella was the bacteria breed they assayed in the lab, and tetracycline, as I recall, was the killer drug they used on it. I was in there nearly ten days, barely able to even move until the very end of it. Keehn was an internist and taught medicine at the nearby University of Alabama Medical School. A doctor’s doctor, Leo had called him. Leo never got to treat doctors, but if he had, he would have been called that, too, I imagine.
Well, I say Leo never got to treat doctors. Who knows what he and other doctors talked about privately? Or at the Birmingham Country Club, where Leo loved to play cards: gin rummy, hearts, bridge, as he chain-smoked. I always thought the cigarettes would get him, and maybe they somehow did, but that is not what I want to talk about in this moment. I want to tell a story I heard from perhaps the greatest plaintiff’s lawyer the Alabama Bar ever produced, at least up to this man’s departure from this world. Francis Hare told me that Leo was the greatest doctor who had ever lived, and while I already knew this might be so, I wanted to hear Francis’ reasoning. It was because he had said to Leo, over a card game one afternoon, I think this was in the 19th Hole, that he had been having headaches for years and had never been able to get much relief. Leo reached out a giant paw and took off Francis’ glasses and bent the stems a bit wider and put them back onto Frances’ nose and said, “How’s that?
Then was the time my oldest daughter, Nelle, was outside playing with neighborhood friends, and all of a sudden there was this great yelling and shrieking and in she came holding her right arm, dislocated at the elbow from some other kid swinging her around in the air holding onto her wrist. I called Leo at home, I believe it was a weekend day, and he was there in about ten minutes. Not exactly how Nelle had hoped would be the way her day went, as she also had a close association between Leo and the needle, and as he still was about as big as a grizzly bear, Nelle was not in the least disposed to him ever getting his mitts on her again. But Leo was not a bit concerned about how any child felt about him; as far as I could tell, he was only concerned about them getting well, if they were feeling poorly. He picked Nelle right up from behind, sat down in a straight-back chair with her in his lap, her little back to his giant torso, and did some sort of manipulation on her right arm, bringing her hand and forearm up to her chest and then twisting it a bit inward, I suppose. When he then asked if that didn’t feel better, the grateful look on Nelle’s face said she would always be glad to see Dr. Leo after that.
The only time Leo did not treat Nelle for pediatric stuff was one time he was out of town and another doctor had to cover for him and I ended up taking Nelle away from that doctor and to Children’s Hospital, and the residents agreed with me that she indeed had pneumonia and they took over until Leo got back and took over, and she got better. There was one other time, not pediatric, when at age five Nelle got run over on her bicycle and nearly lost her left foot above the Achilles, and an orthopedic surgeon saved her leg. Leo said we were darn lucky Dr. David Vesley was on call that day at the hospital. I don’t say that to flack other doctors, only to say what Leo said.
I mentioned in another of these little vignettes that I once had wanted Leo to be my father because he loved to fish as much as I did. Leo’s two sons didn’t care all that much about fishing, and many years later Leo told Rick Ruoff, a Florida Keys fishing guide friend of mine, to whom I had introduced Leo, that I should have been his son. We really did spend some close time together, bonded pretty tight, but after I went through a lot of changes, it wasn’t so tight outwardly, but inwardly I still feel much the same about that gruff old bear of a man. Maybe that’s where I got some of my gruffness; maybe that’s why not long ago I was told in a dream Leo had died. Twice in that same night I was told that. But then, maybe it was because he was no longer my doctor even in spirit ways, which he had done some of over the past couple of years in my dreams, to help me see things a bit differently when I was in tight places. That man sure could see, and I wonder if it will be okay to tell some stories about how well he really could see? I’ll test those waters, to see how the angels who monitor me 24-7 feel as I ease into it. They have their ways of letting me know.
I believe a good place to start is a morning I chanced into Leo and his second son, Bo, also a pediatrician, at a local breakfast place one morning. After being in private practice for a few years, Bo had recently gone to work for an HMO and was feeling a great weight had lifted off him. Bo always was a more business-like doctor than had been his father, many of whose patients were from poor black, Italian, Greek and Lebanese families, who often paid Leo’s doctor bills in fresh vegetables, home-baked bread, pies and cakes, and so forth. Leo made house calls in those families’ homes too. Some of the mothers, especially those living over the mountain, took not to liking Leo because he was wont to tell them he was into treating babies and not mommas, and for the nervous mommas to sit down and be quiet while he examined and figured out what was wrong with the patients, that is, the babies. Sometimes he told mommas a lot sterner stuff than that: like it was their own over-heatedness that was playing out in their babies. And once I heard him tell a momma on the telephone that she had a lot of gall calling him on Sunday afternoon about her child’s fever, after it had started the preceding Wednesday, and it was because of people like her that he was retiring from the practice of medicine. Then, as he figured something really was wrong with this child, he told her to meet him with the child at the hospital. Later, Leo’s wife, Betty told me that the real reason Leo had retired was because he had contracted encephalitis and it had affected his memory and he was forgetting things like who was still sick, when he was supposed to see them, and so forth. So, he took himself out of the calling to which he had dedicated his life.
This morning over breakfast, Bo wants to talk about a new drug on the market that reduces fever in children and makes mommas happy and his life easier. I, now being a somewhat self-appointed expert on various forms of disease and wellness, pipe up that I think fever is what kills infections, and so why take a pill for it unless the fever is really high and putting a child at risk? As I smugly wait for Leo to nod approval, he says softly, “It’s babies who couldn’t make a fever that worried me.” Thus ended the lesson for that day from the master who now has Alzheimer’s, which breaks my heart but I suppose he doesn’t suffer too much from it. Last time Leo and I had a frank talk, which was before he knew of the Alzheimer’s, he said he was waiting on the Lord to take him. Why the Lord has now waited so darn long, I don’t know, but I sure do hope the Lord doesn’t wait much longer, even though Leo is a lot like Noah in that wonderful movie, the name of which I can’t now remember [The Notebook], but Noah’s wife was named Allie, and she got Alzheimer’s and he moved into the nursing home with her and looked after her.
Despite being a giant, Leo was a great dancer, talked women off their feet, made them laugh, flattered them, romanced them, but never beyond play-pretend. He once told me a story, I was about twelve, as a shapely red-head crossed in front of the car he and another man and I were in, during a fishing trip for speckled trout in Pensacola Bay. The fishing was awful and the woman was striking, and the other man and Leo were both gawking, even as Leo said that once he had done something he ought not to have done and Miss Betty had told him that if he ever did that again she would wait until he was asleep one night and would get a big rusty knife out of the kitchen and slit his throat, and she really meant it, too, he said. I wonder if it really was his throat that Betty told him she would slit. I know her well enough to wonder that.
One time I got involved in doing some legal work for them, the subject matter of which I’ll not get into other than to say and I was doing it for nothing, just as Leo had treated me and my brother and sister and my children for nothing; and I was doing it because I loved Leo and Betty. But eventually I let the situation get away from me; I was far too close to it, to be detached and professional, and I had to tell them to seek help from their regular lawyers and that took a while and some money but it worked out okay in the end, I hope. It would have worked out a lot better if they’d had the other lawyers to begin with, because the other lawyers would not have let them even get involved with what I let them get involved in. Betty was the leader, Leo was following, and I was tagging along, and it was during the darkest hour of it all that I heard Leo say things to Betty about how he would see it to the end, protect her interests, and he told me that he loved her (and for me to lay off her).
I have written to Leo and Betty that I do not wish to attend any funeral but would love to throw a party for whoever goes to the other side, and the one left behind and all the relatives and friends will be welcome at wherever I throw the party. Leo himself never was much for funerals: he told me he was glad his father, suffering a long time from leukemia, had finally crossed over and was now out of pain. I never heard Leo express concern about the state of his own soul, nor did I ever hear him talk about the state of anyone else’s. If he liked something, he complimented it. If he didn’t like something, he said so. He seemed, when I heard him speak of the Bible, to enjoy the Old Testament more than the New. He was one-quarter Jew, through his father and paternal grandfather. Like Old Testament men of God, he called a spade a spade, and some people didn’t like that.
[Leo finally crossed over in 2006, and I stayed in the Florida Keys and wrote an eulogy which left my heart heaving.]
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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