Wives of Spanking Husbands
Form Girls’ Auxiliary to Club

SIOUX FALLS (S. D.) Jan. 25 (AP) — Wives of Spanking Husbands’ Club, organized in Sioux City, Iowa, and parent organization of fifty-nine such clubs throughout the nation according to its own figures–reached out for another slice of territory today.

The Iowa housewives who consider it a mark of esteem for their husbands to wield a disciplinary hairbrush once in a while, announced plans today for a junior auxiliary–Daughters of Spanking Parents.

ELIGIBLE GIRLS

A letter received here from Sioux City and signed “Rita Rae, general delivery,” told of plans for the new organization for which she claimed an initial membership of seventeen. Any girl above the age of 11 years is eligible to join, Mrs. Rae wrote.

“We think all parents should spank their daughters when they don’t behave,” Mrs. Rae wrote. “Some girls won’t admit it, but the really know it is better to get spanked than scolded and nagged. Spanking creates a better understanding between parents and daughters.”

MERELY SPANKED

Mrs. Rae is the president of the Wives of Spanking Husbands, which was organized last June 26 under the broad-minded slogan “Spare the hairbrush and spoil the wife.”

“Our husbands don’t beat us,” the Sioux City woman was careful to explain. “They just turn us over their knees and give us a good sound spanking.”

It was the office workers leaping from the towers to escape the flames that firefighter Maureen McArdle-Schulman could not block from her mind.

“Somebody yelled something was falling. We didn’t know if it was desks coming out. It turned out it was people coming out, and they started coming out one after the other…. We saw the jumpers coming. We didn’t know what it was at first, but then the first body hit and then we knew what it was. And they were just like constant…. I was getting sick. I felt like I was intruding on a sacrament. They were choosing to die and I was watching them and shouldn’t have been. So me and another guy turned away and looked at a wall and we could still hear them hit.”

Emergency medical technician Mary Merced was transfixed. The images remained vivid. “I see debris drop. And I look and it was people. I could tell you almost every color clothing all the people that I saw fall had on, how they fell, if they tumbled, if they swan-dived.”

 

[Fire Chief Mark] Steffens could not shake the memory of a lone probationary firefighter he encountered on the street.

“I saw one proby — he had proby on the helmet — by himself, walking by himself. I tried to get him to come with us. He said: No, no, I’ve got to go back. We washed his eyes. I gave him something to clean his face. Then he turned and went back into the cloud. I never saw him again.”

“Do you recall his name?” a member of the administrative panel asked.

“No, young, young guy.

“I didn’t want him to go back and he wouldn’t listen to me,” Steffens said. “He just walked back into that big black cloud.”

— From a Los Angeles Times article on New York firefighters’ recollections of 9/11

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I read something like this.

Thus spoke The Programmer.