The New Practicum
I got into some pretty interesting stuff at my practicum this week. I can't remember if I've posted about this before or not, but the collection I'm working on is the personal papers of Chuck Stone. In the 1960's, Stone was special assistant to a congressman, Adam Clayton Powell. The papers I looked through this week were a lot of things from this period. Powell was chariman of the Committee on Labor and Education. There were inter-office memos about who was entitled to charge travel expense to the government, and memos about who had the authority to send letters out under Powell's name. There was a letter from the NAACP of Savannah, inviting Powell to speak at their meeting, and Stone's response to this. These letters were from late January or early February, 1967. Stone's response said Powell would have loved to speak at their meeting, but if they read the news they'd know "my boss is very busy right now."
Busy, indeed. He was about to get kicked out of Congress.
The best thing I think I saw though was a letter from a woman in Michigan. Apparently Robert Kennedy had spoken and used the word "niggardly." Either Powell or Stone had published something criticising Kennedy for using this word. The woman in Michigan had written in and copied the definition out of the ditctionary, pointing out that there was nothing derogatory about it. She closed her letter with "P.S. Leave Bobby alone."

Pool Open, Finally
Today I swam laps on my lunch break in the indoor pool near here for the first time since late April. It's been closed since then for some work. Originally they said it would re-open June 5, and then they changed that to June 9. I went over there Friday and it was still closed. The person at the front desk said the pool was all ready to open but the lifeguard hadn't shown up.
One day last week I swam in the outdoor pool. The outdoor pool is in the middle of an area with crummy apartment-complex style dorms run by the university. That pool is free for students and university staff, so a lot of people just go there to play in the water. I like swimming in an outdoor pool, though, so I think I will throw in some visits over there this summer.
I think it would be a good strategy to swim about a week's worth of days in a row before I attempt to lift weights again. I haven't done that since before the Texas trip in early April. After the trip I was too preoccupied with finishing my classes to even consider it. They say it's good to take breaks - well, I sure did.