Thanks to Wallace Alcorn, and to the Herald, for this column in the Aug. 31 edition. Alcorn’s piece is meaty, as usual, but this one has a lighter touch that helps the medicine go down. I can’t get too excited by the “silly indiscretions” of our youth persisting and embarrassing us and perhaps injuring our reputations forever.  (And maybe the not-making-his-bed story was told tongue-in-cheek, and I missed the boat.) But I do get excited about the fact that our past actions, be they good or bad, can surface, in ways that we don’t know about or count on. Alcorn tells us that what put William Henry Brisbane’s name in more than 30 books of history was not that he failed to make his bed on Sept. 24, 1825, but that he rose above his native culture and recognized slavery as evil.

Now, 183 years later, it comes to light. An 18-year-old cadet at a military institute neglected his bed-making duty. For shame. Brisbane and his buddies also did not sweep their rooms and were caught napping elsewhere. But then Willie went ahead and grew up and exercised a strong influence on others to free their slaves and, later, as Alcorn tells it, to accept the emancipation of all.  (He became a reverend and an MD too.)

Alcorn tells us there’s a biography coming on this man.  I’d like to read it.

Betty J. Benner

Austin