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On our way north from St. Louis about 30 years ago, we stopped at Galena, Illinois. It was our second trip to the lead mining city whose grateful citizens gave General Ulysses S Grant a home after the Civil War. He had spent seven futile years before the war in the town running a store.

Channeling my history-loving dad I was taking our now adolescent children to see the home of the 18th president. As the rest of us got out of the car our son, Robb, told us he was staying put. He did not want to see “another dead president’s house.”

I blamed myself. After losing my first history teaching job, my stab at life insurance ended quicker than Grant’s turn at shop keeping. 

Still, smarting from my failure in front of the chalkboard I gave teaching another shot. I wasn’t a half bad substitute teacher. Convinced that my initial failure was due to too little book learning, I devoted myself to history books.

Of the 30 books I read in 1979 while subbing, 24 were history related. I read books at every prep hour while subbing from Floodwood to Two Harbors.

I was insulted when a Duluth principal told me he knew I wasn’t taking my job seriously when he saw me bringing books to school.

1979 was my high watermark. I never read so many books again. But even after striking out three times in the classroom I kept adding to my book list.

In 1999, after my first term on the Duluth School Board, I put my reading list online. It remains there still, mostly kept up-to-date. It is my resumé.

Donald Trump’s putrefaction of the Party of Lincoln in 2015 kicked my reading into second gear. His gold leaf desecration of America’s semi-quincentennial kicked me into third gear.

I just finished the 992-page David McCullough book Truman. It’s twice the length of Plain Speaking, a Truman bio I read in 1979.

Since December, I’ve read McCull-ough’s book; listened to 26 hours of Rick Atkinson first volume on the American Revolution then purchased volume 2 and read it.

I’ve devoured “1929’s” 450 pages about the Stock Market Crash and finished the last third of Jon Meacham’s American Lion about Andy Jackson. I listened to two books on the spy craft of the Second World War, read a short book about my great-grandfather Robb’s cousin who searched for gold in British Columbia. Soon to be read, are William Hitchcock’s bio of Eisenhower and his Bitter Road to Freedom. The latter tells of the suffering civilians who survived our glorious World War II triumphs.

The Pulitzer-winning Truman particularly made me long for an honorable and competent President.

We now have a know-it-all ignoramus busy sabotaging Harry’s Marshall Plan, NATO, his stance against Cold War dictators and dozens of enhancements to Depression Era laws that protect our most vulnerable citizens.

When I was a couple years younger than my stay-in-the car son, my parents collected my dad’s mother, my mother’s dad and we three kids. They took us on a two-car caravan to the Atlantic coast.

We visited Abe Lincoln’s home, Ft. Sumter, Williamsburg, Washington DC and the Pennsylvania Dutch.

My grandfather marveled that they still plowed fields with horses like his family did when he was a child.

My grandparents were part of my education too, sometimes inadvertently. I saw my grandmother surreptitiously add change to the insufficient tips she thought my grandfather left for waitresses.

It might have been on that trip that dad asked the former tight-fisted Kansas State Auditor, George Robb, (for whom my son Robb was named) if he could recite all the presidents in order. To my amazement he could and did. At the time JFK was our 35th president.

Today, Trump is number(s) 45 and 47. Sometimes I can manage the same feat but presidents 9-14 give me heartburn.

We had taken Robb to Galena a decade earlier when he was three months old. He was more compliant then. We picnicked in a park cupola with the 18th president’s statue standing erect in the distance. You can just make out my son’s face looking up at his mother’s elbow in a photo I took.

As Robb matured, he ignored my fancies and landed in the sciences, where number 47 is now doing his best to take us back to the stone age along with Iran.

My son has two little girls who will suffer if number 47 makes America great by turning us into a second-rate nation. That may explain why my son told me he’s been thinking about reading a little history himself.

In the end it may be my mother’s love for family lore that entices my son to look back to the past. She entrusted a family keepsake with me to give her grandson.

It is her grandfather, Thomas Robb’s copy of US Grant’s autobiography. Ulysses famously raced to finish the book while dying of throat cancer. Nearly bankrupt he hoped book royalties would keep his family out of poverty. It did. It’s considered one of the best books by a president.

Grant stuck to blood, gore and Civil War strategy. He skipped his controversial political life. I’ve not read it. I’ve got Chernow’s thousand-page Grant waiting for me. I trust Ron to explain Grant’s presidency.

I once put Santayana’s warning on a business card I passed out: “Those who can not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

I still believe that.