From the Editor

    Traditionally, the first-person singular pronoun, subject case (I) or object case (me), is avoided in formal expository writing, but many of the most interesting papers submitted to The Torch draw not only on scholarship and investigation but also on personal familiarity with the topic at hand. Several of these are in our Spring 2019 issue.

     Barton C. Shaw of the Lehigh Valley club has a special connection to the “Ghost Army,” the subject of his “Uncle Sam’s Con Artists: World War II's Ghost Army”—his father served in it. That is Alvin Shaw on the far right in the photo on this issue's (on-line) outline page.

    The historical watershed of the Second World War appears from a different angle in "The Day Before the Day of Infamy" by William Beachley of the Hastings, Nebraska club, who takes a look at life in the heartland on the sixth of December, 1941.

    The personal experience of Dr. George Paulson during a long career of working with the mentally ill stands at the core of his look at historical trends in the treatment of that population, "Closing the Asylums: The Causes and Continuing Consequences."

    Robert Johnson of the Winchester club examines a crucial episode in the history of the United States’ involvement with the rest of the globe in "The Temptation of Empire: The Great Debate over America's Role in the World at the Dawn of the 20th Century."

    Speaking of empire, "Skipping Mars" by longtime contributor John Fockler of the Youngstown club takes up the question of extraterrestrial colonization raised in “Mars Fever” (in our Spring 2018 issue) by Charles Darling, also of the Youngstown club and also a longtime contributor. (I was sorry to hear from John that Charles passed last summer; I will miss him and his unfailingly fascinating articles.)

    Our relations with that part of the globe that lies directly to the south is a much-discussed topic at present, including the question of refugees. Robert Neuhauser of the Lancaster club writes of his own experiences with that issue in the 1980s in "Working on the (Overground) Railroad."

    Finally, Deborah Bauserman of the Winchester club, drawing a bit on her own experience as well as on wide reading, considers humankind’s long fascination with the capacities of our own minds in "The Continuity of Consciousness."

    Happy reading, and I hope I will be meeting some of you this June at the Convention.