Lions in the Street: And Other Stories

By James Schneider

Lions in the Street is a compilation of poems, short stories on education, letters to the editor, unfinished novels, children stories and political and historical essays by the late James Schneider. The writings presented in this book are a compilation on a wide range of topics with an underlying thread of a love for family and children, a desire to improve the society in which we live and need to present an alternative point of view close to that of the common man which has been all, but ignored in the mainstream media.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 21, 2009
• ISBN: 9781462824984

James Schneider

James Schneider co-founded Momentum in 2015 and went on to serve as Jeremy Corbyn's spokesperson and head of strategic communications. He is communications director for Progressive International and a regular voice in the UK media.

Book preview

Copyright © 2009 by James Schneider.

Edited by Hans Schneider

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

62156

Contents

Dedication

Introduction

POEMS

A Southern Indiana Lost

Love Never Dies

SHORT STORIES

Lions in the Street

A Soft Hand in a Hard World

Motivation: Key to Learning

NOVELS

GUN LOBBY AMERICA

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

IN THE WAY

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

CHILDREN’S STORIES

Grandma’s Anonymous

Don’t Make Fun of Kids

POLITICAL AND HISTORICAL WRITINGS

A Protestant Viewpoint

Predicted Growth in Religion from 1960 to 2000

Editor’s Comments on

A Protestant Viewpoint

Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg and Neutrality: 1939-1941

The Failure of the

West to Take Berlin: Confusion or Conspiracy

From a Russian’s

Point of View Written November 27, 1965

Bibliography

SOURCE NOTES FOR Senator Arthur H. Vandenerg and Neutrality: 1939-1941

Endnotes

Dedication

This book is dedicated to Kierstin Rose Stinson and all of the future grandchildren of Jim Schneider. If he were here today, he would have many more stories to tell you.

Introduction

As many people know, my father, James Schneider, was a legislative writer for numerous firearms publications and concerned himself with politics for the better part of his life. At Gun Week, he was an editor for over 30 years and the legislative editor there for over 25 years. He also wrote for numerous publications belonging to the National Rifle Association. He was a regular in Guns and Ammo and Women and Guns along with being the district director of the Indiana Sportsmen’s Council. When he passed away in 1998, the June issue of the American Rifleman quoted then NRA vice president Wayne LaPierre in calling my father the dean of legislative gun writers. Anyone who knew my father knew his passion for preserving our freedoms. Although my father was most known for his passion for the Second Amendment, he coveted the preservation of all freedoms from an ever encroaching government.

He graduated from Evansville College (now the University of Evansville) in 1966 with a Bachelor of Arts in History and minors in Journalism and Political Science. He then attended Indiana University where he received his master’s degree in 1968 with a major in European History and minor in Political Science.

In the 1968-1969 school year he taught English and History at Preble Shawnee High School in Camden, Ohio. My father was a born teacher and he loved educating young people. However, he soon became frustrated with the regulations and lack of support that he received. His frustration and concern about the state of the educational system in the United States can be seen in the three articles in the short stories section of this book.

In September 1969, he went to work for Amos Press originally working as a sports writer (1969-1972) and then farm editor (1972-1973). In 1973 he began working for Gun Week and was promoted to News Editor in 1974. He carried his love for sportsmen into other endeavors as well. While he was a script writer at Rainbow Productions in Evansville, Indiana he convinced them to make a film about Friendships’ National Muzzle Loading Association’s annual meetings. He wrote the script for the video and can be seen in the backdrop of several scenes.

Through my father’s writings he was able to reach thousands, if not millions, of firearms enthusiasts. Although my father was successful in getting his message out about the preservation of the Second Amendment, he was less so in his views of education, history and society as a whole. He wrote poetry, short stories, children’s stories, and even wrote a book about management as a favor for some friends at Bristol Meyers Squibb.

Now that many of my relatives in my generation are having children—I found myself longing for way to pass on some of my father’s wisdom. A wisdom, which fortunately for all of us, my father decided to put into words. This is my father’s opportunity to get his views expressed one last time.

The initial problem that I faced in compiling this book was what to include and what to leave out. It wasn’t as if my father had one large novel that I could publish, instead he left me with children’s stories, poems, short essays on education, political and historical writings, two uncompleted novels, and several letters to the editor. In addition to what I have included here, there were numerous other uncompleted stories and fragments of writings. Anyone familiar with my father’s habits can be assured that there were plenty of yellow legal tablets with scribbling everywhere.

This led me to the dilemma of how to organize the writings most coherently and in a fashion that maintained the attention of the reader. This book begins with two poems that my father wrote: A Southern Indiana Lost and Love Never Really Dies. One of the key points in all of my father’s writings is a longing to hold onto the past while holding fast to the love that we have in the present.

This is followed by three of my father’s writings on the state of education—Lions in the Street, A Soft Hand in a Hard World and Motivation: Key to Learning. All of these were written in 1970 shortly after my father stopped teaching and began his writing career. It is interesting with all of the perspective some almost 40-years later to think how bad the situation has become and the foresight of my father to see what was coming. I decided to honor my father’s foresight by naming the book after the title of one of these writings Lions in the Street. When I read this, I could feel my father reaching from the grave telling me to look around to see if he was right and unfortunately, I do agree with him.

Next, I included two unfinished novels that my father was working on throughout his life—Gun Lobby America and In the Way. Both novels deal with firearms and religion—two topics that were very dear to my father’s heart. Unfortunately, my father was never able to finish either. There were two versions of Gun Lobby America that my father wrote and although neither was complete, the second was more complete than the first (or at least longer in length). However, I chose to include the earlier version from 1988. This was later modified through some continuing education courses which my father took through Indiana University. The later edition, although having my father’s fingerprints on it, did not have the clarity and aspirations that anyone who knew him could see in the earlier version included here. In a sense, the later version was schooled perhaps for a potential larger audience while the earlier contained a purer glimpse into my father’s heart.

The unfinished novels are followed by a series of letters to the editor of the Evansville Courier and Courier and Press. I couldn’t publish a book of my father’s writings without some attention to his views on firearms issues and I felt that these were a good representation to remind the reader of how hard my father fought to preserve the Second Amendment. Many people who read my father’s writings will never know the threats to my father’s life and his family that were produced in response to my father’s stand. I have met many men who were strong physically in this world, but few that are as strong morally as my father was.

These are followed by the children’s stories Grandma’s Anonymous and Don’t Make Fun of Kids. My father tried in vain for years to get these stories published and even had descriptions of the pictures that were to go along with them. Instead of trying to compress the children’s stories into full pages, I decided to leave them in their original form with several lines of text per page. I felt that this left the stories closest to their original intent.

The book ends with four political and historical writings, all of which I presume my father to have written during his time at Indiana University. If there is one thing that my father taught me growing up, it is that the people in power only tell us what they want us to hear and that if you want to know the true story you need to do your own research. I believe that these stories provide a view on history and politics that the mainstream would prefer to have us forget about. The first A Protestant Viewpoint looks at religion and projections of the growth of religion from the 1960’s. This is followed by a rather long writing entitled Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg and Neutrality: 1939-1941, The Failure of the West to Take Berlin: Confusion or Conspiracy and From a Russian’s Viewpoint. These writings must have meant a lot to my father as he kept them in his desk drawer as long as I can remember.

I hope that you enjoy all of the writings. I can still hear my father’s voice when I read them—I hope that you can too.

Hans Schneider

POEMS

A Southern Indiana Lost

As I walk through the streets that were once fields,

And glance where concrete has replaced the clover,

I wonder what the advancing future yields,

Knowing that a wonderful past is clearly over,

With the sounds of the suburbs now everywhere,

No more can a horse or cow or even sheep be heard.

For today only radios and televisions blare,

Where yesterday romped the squirrel and the bird,

Those soft, melodic German accents forever quiet,

Their carefully groomed flower gardens no longer bloom.

Replaced by middle-aged women constantly on a diet

And desperate corporate men drowning in their gloom,

The once close, happy familiar families now scattered,

In their place, Yuppies whose only god is their boss,

A whole happy, beautiful way of life totally shattered!

No wonder, I shed a tear for my Southern Indiana lost.

Love Never Dies

Sometimes when I’m busy and the pressure’s really on,

I pause to think of a smiling face from the past

And am reminded love dims but is never completely gone

From a corner of my heart where memory holds fast.

SHORT STORIES

Lions in the Street

A teacher looks at the world and wonders—wonders why he is teaching. There is no escaping the fact that discipline in our schools, indeed in our society, is breaking down.

Many of our big-city schools are hardly more than zoos where the teacher’s main problem is to survive. Physical assaults upon teachers are climbing at an alarming rate in all types of schools. Recently, a teacher in Cleveland was shot while walking down the street and then buried alive.

The farmer can still escape this breakdown of discipline by simply turning off his television. A businessman may deal with problems from a distance through a committee which listens to witnesses and studies the situation—from a nice, safe distance, of course. But for the teacher there is no button, there are no bars. For the teacher, the lions are already in the streets.

One very interesting article on the problem of discipline is The Decline of Authority by Mortimer Smith, Executive Director of the Council for Basic Education. The writing appears in the October, 1969, issue of The Educational Digest, pages 5-7.

Smith would never make a good Prussian. He does not believe that blind obedience to authority is a sign of individual honor. He insists that authority of all kinds always needs watching. What bothers him—and what bothers me—is that today, the very idea of authority has come into serious question. And although the troubles on the college campuses have received the most attention, perhaps a more ominous phenomenon is the breakdown of authority among adolescents, of both affluent and disadvantaged varieties.

The question remains, why has the very concept of authority come into question? At the risk of being declared a right-wing fanatic, I don’t think that one can completely discount the work of certain radical political groups. As Eric Hofer points out in The True Believer, before a new political group can gain power and install its ideology, it must destroy the old regime by proving it unworkable. Yet it would be foolish to think that organizations such as SDS and the Weatherman can, at the present, do little more than take advantage of the situation. They have relatively few followers in the high schools or on campuses. Extremists, at best, pick up a few crumbs of our troubled cake; and they certainly do not bake it.

Political activists are hardly more than a mild tooth-ache in our society. Nevertheless, something is obviously wrong; and when one is performing an autopsy on what is left of the battered corpse of discipline, he doesn’t list the things that didn’t kill the victim.

Parents may be the real culprits in the breakdown of authority. Smith states that some parents actively encourage defiance of authority. Recent samplings have shown that many campus extremists have parents who are highly permissive and have themselves encouraged, or been active in, civil disobedience.

Yet most parents don’t encourage disobedience. They simply are too passive and lack the character to assert reasonable authority. A group of junior high faculty in Washington D.C. recently spoke bitterly of parents who complain about the ills of the ghetto without lifting a hand to make things better and who cannot or will not make their children behave and don’t want school officials to do so. The same attitude prevails in many middle-class families.

Why should over-permissive parents cause youth to revolt? Certainly the young cannot say that they are being oppressed. As Smith says, the child-centered school and home have long-since become the child-dominated school and home.

I tend to believe that there is a natural order of things, including human relationships. Thus, I agree with Professor Robert A. Nisbet’s analysis and solution for the problem. He says that the current disorder is the result of boredom and that this boredom is the result of natural authority dissolved—starting at home.

Regarding the solution to the question, he declares that:

A beginning can be made in lower schools where parents, teachers, and administrators can forge a partnership that will recognize the difference between authority and power. The assertion of authority is not an adult conspiracy against children. It is part of the moral responsibility one generation owes another.

History indicates that chaos is not natural and that power vacuums quickly disappear. Where the toe of anarchy touches, the heel of tyranny soon follows. It is professor Nisbet’s opinion, as well as that of many others, that the current trend—if it continues unchecked—must lead inevitably to dictatorship.

This makes it even more