With Presidents Day coming up in nine days Balladeer’s Blog will be taking a look at the military service of America’s Commanders-in-Chief. For presidents like Washington, Grant and Eisenhower it would take thousands of words to cover their military service so I will save them for separate articles of their own in the future.
GEORGE WASHINGTON – Extensive service in the French & Indian War plus the Revolutionary War. Separate article to come.
JAMES MADISON
Conflict – Revolutionary War
Service – Madison was a colonel of Virginia’s Orange County Militia from 1775-1776.
JAMES MONROE
Conflict – Revolutionary War
Service – William & Mary Militia, taking part in the June 1775 raid on the Royal Governor’s Palace which seized several hundred muskets and swords for the rebel army. In early 1776 he became a lieutenant in the Continental Army and served in the New York & New Jersey Campaign. Continue reading
FLASH COMICS Vol 1 #1 (Jan 1940) 
Jay’s love interest Joan Williams asks him to find her father, who has been abducted by enemy spies called the Faultless Four and led by the French Sir Satan. The Frenchman and his British, Russian and Slavic colleagues want her retired major father to reveal the secrets of America’s new Atomic Bombarder.
BEYOND THE ETHER (1898) – Written by W. Cairns Johnston. This little honey is so jam-packed with enjoyable weirdness that it’s sort of like “If Ed Wood wrote Steampunk.” 
THE CHAMPIONS (1968-1969) – This British series from ITC featured three secret agents whose plane crash-landed near Shangri-La, the secret civilization in the Himalayas. They were granted enhanced physical strength and superior senses as well as ESP. They used their new abilities in their role as secret agents for an international organization called Nemesis. 
THE BEGINNING – Pilot Craig Stirling is flying himself and his colleagues Dr. Sharron Macready and William Gaunt out of Communist China after completing their latest mission. The Chinese Air Force damages their plane to such a degree that they crash-land in the Himalayas and learn Shangri-La really exists. The three are granted paranormal abilities and return to the world at large. Burt Kwouk guest stars. 
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO JAMES JOYCE! His works got me hooked in my teens when I really related to his character Stephen Dedalus as he rejected his religion and indulged what I call his “young and pretentious side” in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). I wore out my copy of Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) and continue to mark Bloom’s Day to this very day.
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