When I was a little kid, I liked the Carpenters. Indeed, I even owned their Now and Then album (on vinyl!), which featured their home on the cover. The group is a bit of nostalgia for me.

But their home is NOT a significant historical structure -- no matter what some fans think.

Owners of The Carpenters' former home aren't feeling on top of the world about the legions of fans who keep stopping by to pay tribute.

The five-bedroom tract house, where siblings Karen and Richard Carpenter lived and penned some of their greatest hits, was featured on the cover of their 1973 hit album "Now & Then." It was also where an anorexic Karen Carpenter collapsed in 1983 before dying.

Owners Manuel and Blanca Melendez Parra have apparently grown weary of the parade of fans paying homage.

The couple have submitted plans to officials in Downey, a city about 15 miles south of downtown Los Angeles, to raze the 39-year-old main house, the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday. The Parras have already torn down an adjoining house and have begun construction on a larger home.

The proposal to level the rest of the residence has angered fans.

"This house is our version of Graceland," said Carpenters aficionado Jon Konjoyan. "When they photographed the 'Now & Then' cover here in 1973, the house was instantly immortalized."

The 57-year-old musician and promoter is heading a campaign to save the original home from the wrecker's ball. Some fans have proposed that Downey officials declare the house a historic landmark.

Good grief! The Carpenters, while good, must be retrospectively viewed as nothing more than the purveyors of cloyingly sweet pop music. They certainly have not left a legacy significant enough to necessitate the preservation of this home -- and in the process strip the owners of their property rights without compensation.

Jon Konjoyan wants the home preserved -- either through government action, purchase of the home, or requiring it to be moved.

I want Jon Konjoyan to mind his own business and quit trying to interfere with the property rights of the Parra family, who bought the home when nobody considered it significant enough to purchase.

Posted by: Greg at 03:10 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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I don't watch network news -- ever. however, I was hoping to see how NBC dealt with MSNBC's David Shuster and the sh!t-storm over his "pimping out Chelsea" comment. The didn't. But I did end up seeing one of the most fascinating stories about blogging ever -- a voice from the distant past, digitalized for our edification and education.

This is part of a convergence of events around WWI that has taken place in my life over the last few weeks.

Right before Christmas, one of the men from our church gave me a copy of his father's WWI memoir, Argonne Days in World War I. I find it humbling to read the words of an actual doughboy, who constructed this memoir from notes kept in a book of scripture given him and his fellow soldiers by the YMCA.

As i'm working my way through the book, I am also preparing to teach about "The Great War" in the next couple weeks, so I am re-immersing myself in the ins-and-outs of the conflict.

And now I this fascinating website, composed of slowly unfolding letters of a British Tommy, William Henry Bonser Lamin, better known as Harry to his family and his mates. It makes for fascinating reading, nine decades after they were first written.

Posted by: Greg at 02:27 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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It is a number that I had never really considered before -- there are some 88,000 missing American servicemen from the wars of the twentieth century, 79,000 of them from WWII.

Of those, the remains of some 35,000 are classified as "recoverable" by the military, generally meaning that they were not lost at sea.

More than six decades after the end of World War II, the families of men like Joe Huba are making a new push to find and bring home the remains of their missing and dead. After years when survivors accepted the solace of mass memorials and unknown-soldier graves, a younger generation is seeking something much more personal.

The relatives are spurred by strides in DNA matching, satellite mapping and Internet archives, and by a new advocacy group impatient with the pace of the military unit that tracks down remains.

“We owe these men for giving their lives — we can’t just leave them in jungles, on mountainsides,” said Lisa Phillips, 45, president of the group, World War II Families for the Return of the Missing, which was formed in 2006 to compete with organizations pressing for recoveries from the conflicts in Vietnam and Korea. “There’s that saying, ‘No one left behind,’ and we’ve left a generation behind.”

The search has its pitfalls, Ms. Phillips admits. Discoveries about how a loved one died can prove more disturbing than ignorance. International swindles and treasure hunters complicate the sheer challenge of identifying remains after so many years.

And some relatives have come up empty-handed after expensive private searches, like a Minnesota man who has spent thousands of dollars on underwater dives off Yap Island in the South Pacific without finding his uncleÂ’s sunken B-24.

The sad reality is that many of these heroes will never make it home. But the desire to keep looking -- to find that loved one for the surviving family members -- is strong. And even if remains are truly unrecoverable, we do have an obligation to try to honor them as fully as they honored our nation by giving their lives for us.

Posted by: Greg at 04:19 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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