Hags and Hagiography

I write and draw a monthly neighbor profile for my neighborhood paper. I think of it as a sort of people magazine for ordinary people. I'm interested in people who do interesting things, and especially people who have ideas or have made things that will let civilization endure.

The three scans come from Grosset and Dunlap's 1931 offering, Minute Biographies: Intimate Glimpses into the Lives or 150 Famous Men and Women by Samuel Nisenson and Alfred Parker, and from a show of paintings by Rob Shetterely, Americans Who Tell the Truth. Some of those 150 men's and women's stock has gone up, and some down, in the seventy-nine years since Santa gave my eleven year old father Minute Biographies; Adolph Hitler is not among the 150, but Vladimir Lenin is included as the "Russian Emancipator." Shetterly's oil portraits are attractive, and his choices are exemplars of integrity and justice. My own preferences would be of people who know how to expedite those virtues in society.