Greetings loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader just re-read the link to the Aaron Burr biography in my last post. At the bottom of the biography was a bibliographic citation to a book by Thomas Perkins Abernathy. Your Maximum Leader studied at college with a professor who himself was a student of Dr. Abernathy. I was regaled with many stories of Abernathy while my professor (and friend, the late Richard T. Couture) reminisced about his days in college.

You may be asking where I am going with this… Your Maximum Leader noted the Abernathy citation, on the page about Aaron Burr, after I made a reference to Alexander Hamilton… Here is where I am going…

I was once able to quote Dr. Abernathy in a social situation. I was with the Minister of Agriculture at a Virginia Historical Society meeting in Richmond, VA. The Minister of Agriculture and your Maximum Leader were the only two people there under the age of 50, except this rather attractie blonde woman. The M of A and myself, naturally (as we were young and single at the time) started a converstation with this attractive blonde in the hopes that one or the other of us would be able to pitch a little woo her way later. But all this (otherwise) attractive woman would talk about is how she was the great-granddaughter of Alexander Hamilton Stephens. After a few references to her famous ancestor, I was really put out.

At that point a phrase that Thomas Perkins Abernathy once said to an uppity student at UVA popped into my mind. When this woman finally stopped talking about Alexander H. H. Stephens I said, “I would rather be a someone at the end of a long line of no-ones; than a no-one at the end of a long line of someones.”

Needless to say, any chance of either myself or the Minister of Agriculture pitching woo at this woman was ended. But, it is now a cherished memory for the both of us.

Carry on.