By RAY ADLER
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When I was in high school, we had Sunday dinner every Sunday at Grandma’s house.
She was a wonderful cook. She always had two kinds of meat, homemade bread with apple butter, Jell-O salad with carrots and cabbage included, and a berry pie. I can still taste her ground-cherry pies. My mother was first in her class in college and sewed many of our clothes, but Grandma was the cook. I often volunteered to mow grass for her or gather items from the garden or orchard. I would arrive early enough not to miss the next meal.
While things were getting ready, I always went into the front room and marveled at the large German Bible brought from the old country. I couldn’t read the German until I took that class in college because all the German neighbors left the German language behind to prove their loyalty to America during the war.
Later, when I inherited the family Bible from my aunt and really examined it, I discovered that it was published in Toledo in 1880 and not brought from the old country at all. I had created my own fake news.
I also read the Reader’s Digest magazines as cooking finished. Grandma had saved all the Reader’s Digests from the 20s. The Digest was started in 1922 by DeWitt Wallace and grew to more than 16 million readers in 17 languages. She had several hundred issues saved by the time I was old enough to read.
It was interesting to read a 1920s article that predicted by 1967 the world would be out of oil. Other articles talked about the coming ice age although they conceded it would be a mini-ice age. Of course, we have not run out of oil – except at the local gas pumps – and the mini-ice age that was coming has turned into global warming. The Population Bomb written in 1968 predicted worldwide famine in the 1970s due to overpopulation.
Fake news, or maybe just human error.
It was Reader’s Digest that reported it is not what we don’t know that hurts us. It is what we ‘know’ that just really isn’t true. Be a Berean: search out the truth from all the competing voices.
Educational material and not legal advice, written by the team at Adler attorneys. Email andrea@noblesvilleattorney.com with questions or comments.