Dam(n) That's Pretty

After Christmas, we drove to Georgia to see my parents at the farm. We took a different route, one which takes us right over the Strom Thurmond Dam across the Savannah River which forms the boundary between South Carolina and Georgia. The dam was built in the late 1940's and mid 1950's by the US Army Corps of Engineers (a division of the armed forces responsible for the nation's water and related environmental resources). It was built for flood control, hydropower, and navigation, and the resulting lake, Lake Turmond, is more than 70,000 acres, has more than 1200 miles of shoreline, and is surrounded by more than 80,000 acres of land. It is the largest lake east of the Mississippi River, and is one of the 10 most used Corps lakes in the US. But I don't really care about all of that. I like it because it is a pretty place to stop and rest during the 5 hour trip south.

What is interesting, perhaps, is the person for whom the lake and dam were named, Strom Thurmond, a South Carolina politician and US Senator, known for his conservative politics in public, and his rather hypocritical behavior in private. A Civil Rights opponent and segregationist, a great campaigner with a "family values" platform with a very strong anti-abortion stance, he fathered his first legitimate child at age 68. For the first time, at age 100, he became a grandfather publicly. I am not sure just how many children he fathered (who is?), but it must have been quite a lot since he was so often called "Sperm" Thurmond. Don't laugh. It gets better: Shortly after he died, it was revealed that Sperm's, perhaps, first (??) illegitimate child was a girl he fathered by the Thurmond family maid, who at the time was a tender 16-year-old black girl. Strom was then 22. Interesting, isn't it, in light of his vehement campaigns against equal treatment for blacks, abortion and reproductive rights for women, and for "strong family values"? I shouldn't judge, I guess. Maybe ole Sperm felt it better to decide for everyone else whether integration and equality of the races (and sexes) was a good thing, since he himself had such intimate knowledge of mixing and mingling and the consequences. Where would the world be, after all, without such moral superiors making the decisions for the rest of us?