DL Open Thread: Thursday, December 30, 2021

Who Was Winnie Spence?  She was a former State Senator here in Delaware.  That’s about all I knew about her until one of our great commenters shared the rest of the story.  I’ll quote from him:

…(S)he declined to run for reelection in 1980 the State Senate so that she could head the Delaware chapter of the newly-formed Moral Majority.

Her retirement opened the MOT –Smyrna seat. (Former Director Of Corrections) Jim Vaughan defeated retired narc (career state cop) Clarke Jester by 321 votes, among the most important outcomes in recent Senate history. This left the Senate 12-9 Democratic. Had the GOP picked up Vaughan’s seat, after beating McCullough and Ciccione,  (Sen. Herman) Holloway would have been up for grabs.  “10-10 … and the Senator,” Mike Harkins told Jack Croft of the Delaware State News before the election.

Meaning, the Corrections Commissioner who Pete DuPont fired beat the ex-cop.  Jim Vaughn, of course, proceeded to more-or-less run Corrections from the Senate for the better part of the next twenty years.

Oh, the Moral Majority, the brainchild of Jerry Falwell?:

https://www.newspapers.com/clip/91420699/the-morning-news/

The bumper sticker said it all: ‘The Moral Majority Is Neither.’

Something Else I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday.  So. My wife and I started binge-watching ‘Only Murders In The Building’. Highly-recommended.  The Hardy Boys mysteries play a part in the show.  I wondered who had written the Hardy Boys mysteries.  This is what I found out:

Eighty-five years have passed since readers first encountered both the Hardy Boys and their teen-detective counterpart, Nancy Drew, yet new books continue to be released several times a year. The novels bear the same pseudonyms as the originals: Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene.

The secret behind the longevity of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys is simple. They’re still here because their creators found a way to minimize cost, maximize output, and standardize creativity. The solution was an assembly line that made millions by turning writers into anonymous freelancers—a business model that is central to the Internet age.

If writing seems like a lonely profession, try ghostwriting children’s books. “You’re usually in touch with one person, the editor,” says Christopher Lampton, who wrote 11 Hardy Boys books in the 1980s. He sent his books not to a publisher but to a packager called Megabooks—effectively a conduit between the writer and the publisher, Simon & Schuster. When Lampton mailed in drafts, they came back with comments written in several colors. “There were other people, looking at your books, making comments. They’re phantoms,” he says.

The industry that churns out children’s books has changed surprisingly little in the last century. In 1905, a prolific writer named Edward Stratemeyer founded a network of freelance writers and editors. Though you might expect a writer collective to support writers the way labor unions support laborers, the Stratemeyer Syndicate’s central aim was simply to produce a huge number of books at the lowest possible cost. “Edward Stratemeyer was a genius,” says Greenberg. “He was like an idea machine.”

The Stratemeyer Syndicate helped prove that book packaging with ghostwriters could be incredibly profitable—for managers and owners, at least. Writers signed away their rights to royalties and bylines in exchange for a flat fee. (Early on, it was around $100 per book.) The syndicate launched dozens of series, guessing that only a few would be hits. It debuted Tom Swift in 1910, followed by The Hardy Boys in 1927, and Nancy Drew in 1930. That same year, Stratemeyer died in New Jersey, by then not so much a writer as a tycoon.

Fascinating article.

Another Pro-Trump Pastor Caught In Sexual Misconduct Snare-Trap.  We’re not talking your penny-ante garden-variety pastoral perversion either.  No, this guy was basically groping everybody within his reach.  Excellent local reporting from the local Chattanooga newspaper.

RIP: Harry Reid.  Chuck Schumer is not in Harry’s league, which is really too bad.  Reid was willing to fight–and win:

Reid was one of the earliest and most prominent Democratic lawmakers to view progressives as a key element of the Democratic coalition and cultivate a relationship with them. He identified with the left’s combative instincts, if not with every specific policy or candidate.

And his office became a storied training ground for staff who would later populate the most important progressive campaigns and offices. Alumni of Reid’s Senate office include Faiz Shakir, who managed Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential race; Ari Rabin-Havt, Sanders’ deputy campaign manager in 2020; Josh Orton, a top aide on the Sanders campaign; Kristen Orthman, a senior aide to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and a staffer on her presidential campaign; progressive activist and writer Adam Jentleson; Rebecca Katz, who advises insurgent progressive candidates; Mari Urbina, managing director of Indivisible; and progressive strategist Murshed Zaheed.

Progressives gravitated to him because he knew how to lead,” said Katz, who was Reid’s communications director from 2005 to 2006. “He didn’t back down from a fight. He understood the Senate better than anybody. And he knew what was possible if you tried.”

Need I remind you that our current US Senators are Tom Carper and Chris Coons?  Didn’t think so.

What do you want to talk about?