As if you aren’t already aware of it, U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy (D. Mass.) died a week ago Tuesday. The Lion of the Senate, as he was known, was the champion for all us Little People.

Why would the last son of one of America’s wealthiest families spend his life fighting for equality for the masses? Senator Kennedy’s death will begin the searching, probing, picking effort to answer this question.

But the Senator himself long ago uttered the truest, best statement, as told by former Boston Globe columnist Tim Oliphant on the Chris Matthews tv program Wednesday evening following the great man’s death.

Early on in the Senator’s rise to national prominence, Oliphant said, he and the Senator were riding in a car in St. Paul. Just the two of them. Oliphant said he put the question of the origin of Kennedy’s compassion to him: “Where does this drive of your liberalism for social legislation and equality come from?”

“The Senator looked at me for a moment,” the columnist said. “Then he said to me, ‘Have you never read the New Testament’?”

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Sen. Kennedy was a man, a mortal being. He, like the rest of us pickles, had his warts and bumps. But he recognized them and rose upward to become one of the best friends us Little People ever had in the Capitol of the United States of America.

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I read where Oklahoma school children aren’t doing so well on test scores. The American way to correct this is to move the goal posts—closer.

That’ll work—for a while.

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Our weather is getting milder, meaning fall is coming closer. I don’t know that Oklahoma set any records this year—either high or low—but still it was a typical Oklahoma summer, one when you could almost fry an egg on the asphalt. I haven’t heard of any corn popping in the husk while still on the stalk, either.

I happened across Dad’s “What’s Cookin’ in the Cookson” column of Aug. 7, 1959. Therein, he reported: “…my old friend Zan Towner from up Sand Town way said he and Aunt Martha keep (or rather did keep) a turtle and several gold fish in a large bowl on a table in front of their picture window in the living room. According to Zan, Aunt Martha failed to draw the shades Tuesday afternoon and that evening when they came home after a shopping trip to Vian, they found a glass bowl full of turtle-fish chowder. He insists that all they did was to add salt and pepper and ‘soup was on.’ ”

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Thinking the turtle-fish chowder story to be pretty entertaining, I decided to see what else might have been on Dad’s mind on that 1959 August day. It turned out he wanted to talk about moderninty and changing views of travel held by members of the Mayo family. Saith the editor:

“I always marvel at how Mom and Dad have changed, along with the times. Here a few years back, if they had heard that one of their kids was flying around at 850 miles per hour at about 30 thousand feet above the Good Earth, they would have been throwing fits everyway but sideways. But now they both say ‘Gee, I wish I could have been along.’

“That high-flying, fast-gaited sister of mine, Billie Mayo Eschenburg, didn’t even cause Mom to ‘bat an eye,’ other than with a pretty marked degree of pride on Mom’s part when Billie wrote that she was one of a hundred Denver, Colo., women who were the guests of Continental Airways for the maiden flight of their ‘Golden Jet’ 707 super jet passenger plane one day last week. After reading sister Bill’s letter my Flossie and I wished that we could have been along on the flight. Not a bump, nor dip nor noise to make the trip uncomfortable…anyway it’s a lot faster than my old Ford station wagon will go.”

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Back to the present and speaking for myself, I would have enjoyed being there when Aunt Bill read that Dad had called her “that high-flying, fast-gaited sister of mine.”

Wow! I was there, though, when he referred to her (in her presence) as “the empress-dowager of Denver.” Swolled-up isn’t the word for her conniption. Ohh, how she fumed! Dad really enjoyed it, judging from the big grin on his face and his relaxed attitude.