On November 11th I was inspired by a column in my local paper to write a post in honor of Veterans day:
Honoring American Vets with Guest Blogger Bill Mauldin.
It seems Gordon Dillow and I were not the only ones to to write about the great Bill Mauldin. ;-D
Written for the newspaper on the 10th the article above is a a tribute to the ingenuity of the American GI in Italy, the joys of Kickapoo Joy Juice ans the artistry and humor of Mauldin.
Pinned down along a broad stretch of coast for months, the American troops "were fixing up their own distilleries with barrels of dug-up vino, gasoline cans, and copper tubing from wrecked airplanes," Mauldin recalled in his memoir "Up Front." The result was a rough approximation of grappa. "The doggies called it 'Kickapoo Joy Juice,' " named after the fierce moonshine in the "Li'l Abner" comic. "It wasn't bad stuff when you cut it with canned grapefruit juice."
The grappa-grapefruit combination is not something I would have come up with on my own. But if you use some decent, professionally made grappa, the drink is downright tasty and a good way to toast America's veterans this weekend.
Mauldin immortalized the soldiers' effort in some cartoons, one showing a crew of scruffy dogfaces excavating a vast barrel of chianti that had been buried to hide it from the Germans. The barrel had been found with what the soldier in the frame calls the "Best little mine-detector ever made." Another shows a G.I. hard at work feeding chianti into a Rube Goldberg still.
Read the full story:
HOW'S YOUR DRINK?
Here's to GI Ingenuity
By ERIC FELTEN - November 10, 2007; Page W7
Oh, and don't forget to scroll down to the footnotes, hee, hee...
Now, I ask you...
Just how cool is THAT! ;-D
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