| Issue #33, November 10, 2006 |
LET’S RUN DELAWARE OUT OF TOWN
By Dan Rattiner
The State of Delaware was in the news the other day. It came up at a dinner party. There’s a dispute about prayer in the schools. And it occurred to me that this was the first time I’ve heard about Delaware in years. You never hear about Delaware.
And isn’t that strange?
“Who here has been to Delaware?” I asked. No hands went up. A woman turned to her husband.
“Your company is incorporated in Delaware,” she said.
“But I’ve never been there,” he said.
It occurred to me that actually I HAD been to Delaware. But then again I hadn’t.
“Once, I was driving from New York to Charleston, South Carolina,” I said. “I had hoped to go to Delaware. I’ve been to most of the states. So I charted a course for Delaware. But at the last minute we went to the Eastern Shore of Maryland and spent the night there. Those are beautiful little towns on the eastern Shore. So I only went to Delaware in my mind.”
“One time,” a woman said, “we were driving a brand new Montero on the eastern shore. And we had some trouble with the skylight. The nearest dealership was in Dover, Delaware it said in the manual, and we might have gone there except we were able to fix it temporarily by calling the dealer on the cell phone. At least we got it shut.”
“So you didn’t get there.”
“No. We got it fixed in Atlanta.”
We were all quiet for a while. There were ten of us around the table.
The woman with the husband turned to him again. “You’ve really never been to Delaware?”
He shrugged. “We just send the paperwork down there. They stamp it and file it.”
I tried to think of anything at all about Delaware, but nothing came up. Do they have a professional baseball team? A pro football team? Was there any Revolutionary war battle fought in Delaware? Did anyone invent an electric light bulb there? Or fly something for the first time there? I could think of nothing. What do they DO in Delaware? I think it is the only state in the whole union that has no big city in it. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there’s a big city with rows and rows of corporate filing cabinets in a field there.
“There’s Joe Biden,” a man at the other end of the table said.
“He has hair transplants,” a woman said.
Late that night, I went to my World Almanac, a thick book that has in it everything about anything you might want to know. There’s a twenty-page section on all the states, with them listed in alphabetical order. Each state has about a half a page. Except Delaware which has just a quarter. I looked at Rhode Island. Half a page. Alaska. Half a page. For you young people unfamiliar with the World Almanac, think of it as Google, the Book.
DELAWARE. Population 817,491. State bird: Chicken. Famous Delawareans: Thomas F. Bayard, Joseph Biden, Henry Seidel Canby, E. I. du Pont, John P. Marquand, Howard Pyle.
Other than Senator Biden of the hair transplants, the only other person from Delaware who is famous who I recognize is E. I. du Pont, the man who, along with Mr. Alcoa, was the original cause of Global Warming.
On the other hand, here is the list of famous persons for the state next door — Maryland: Benjamin Banneker, Tom Clancy, Jonathan Demme, Francis Scott Key, H. L. Menckin, Kweisi Mfume, Ogden Nash, Charles Wilson Peale, William Pinkney, Edgar Allan Poe, Cal Ripkin Jr., Babe Ruth, Upton Sinclair, Robert B. Taney, John Waters, Montel Williams and I’m just getting started.
Major industry for Delaware: Chemicals.
No battles were ever fought in Delaware. On the Eastern Shore of Maryland, at the entrance to the tourist town of St. Michaels, there is a big metal sign describing how the residents of that town tricked the British during the War of 1812. Lookouts ran into the town to report that the British fleet was coming to bombard the place. So everybody hid. The American soldiers placed hundreds of lanterns in the trees to the south of the town, and this fooled the British into bombarding the woods. So this was a great victory.
But the British never came to Delaware. The Redcoats fought the Patriots in Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. And then, when the British were finally defeated, guess who was the very first State to coming running out to ratify the Constitution? Right. Delaware.
State Motto: First State.
Another historical fact about Delaware: In the Civil War, Delaware joined the North. But the war started with Delaware having slaves, and the war finished with Delaware still having them. Delawareans fought to free the slaves but that was for other people, not them. And for the duration, they never gave them up. Only when the 13th Amendment freed the slaves after the war ended with the surrender at Appatomax (in Maryland, not Delaware,) did they finally agree to give them up.
The story in the news about Delaware is a lawsuit filed by a Mr. and Mrs. Dobrich, who were until they were essentially run out of town, the only Jewish family in Georgetown, Delaware.
The townspeople tolerated them, at first. But when their daughter Samantha said she felt uncomfortable in school about all the prayers to Jesus and the special school prizes and awards given to the Christians in the Bible Club, a school meeting was held.
“We’d just like to have a prayer in school that everyone can feel comfortable with,” Mrs. Dobrich said, completely ignoring the fact that any prayer in school was against the law.
“If your daughter feels uncomfortable about our prayer,” another parent told her, “you tell her to give her heart to Jesus.”
After the meeting, the family received threatening phone calls and rocks thrown through the windows. So the Dobrich’s moved. And from afar, they filed their lawsuit. Joining them in the lawsuit were another couple from the town who call themselves “Mr. and Mrs. Doe” because of what happened to the Dobriches. They still live there. They’re Muslims. And apparently nobody knows who they are. Secret Muslims.
Delaware State Tree: American Holly. Delaware Song: Our Delaware. State Fair: At Harrington, end of July.
Let’s run Delaware out of town.
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