Posts with the Gettysburg National Military Park tag

Barris Beat

New Normal or B-Western

Written by Ted Barris on . Leave a comment
What normal looks like now. cbc.ca

Some friends and I got together this week. We were abiding by the no-more-than-10-in-a-bubble rule. Actually, there were only about five of us, and we weren’t even in the same neighbourhood. We’d gathered – as so many of us do these days – for a Zoom chat. After we’d caught up on all the latest, somebody sighed and wondered when we might all gather at a favourite watering hole again. There was a pause.

“Geez, I wish things were back to normal,” one friend said.

There was general agreement that sitting face-to-face, having the chance to give hugs to family and good friends, or enjoy a cool one on a patio together really would be great to have back. Later, however, I concluded there’s a great deal about the old normal I’d rather not return to. (more…)

Barris Beat

Statue of limitations

Written by Ted Barris on . Leave a comment
Col. Henry King Burgwyn Jr. – photo University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The basics of the story were chiselled into the brass plaque in front of us. It described the heroic advance of a young colonel in the Civil War. More important, beside the plaque, in this little gulley known as Willoughby Run in the middle of Gettysburg National Military Park, one of my dearest historian friends, Paul Van Nest, described the final charge of an officer with the 26th North Carolina Regiment on July 1, 1863.

“His name was Henry King Burgwyn Jr.,” Van Nest said. “He was just 21 years of age, the youngest colonel in the Confederate Army. It was his last charge.” (more…)