FROM THE NIAGARA GAZETTE

LIFE 101

My grandfather turned 101 last week and later this month will celebrate, with his still young bride, their 80th wedding anniversary. Tough as nails, he toiled in the coal mines of Pennsylvania as a young man before moving to Niagara Falls to work factory jobs, sometimes two or three at a time, back when men did the heavy work now assigned to machines. In his lifetime he's seen the first cars and the first airplanes. He's seen men walk on the moon and may yet see Mars colonized. (Those coal miners-turned-laborers were built to last.)

Now maybe it's because his standards are old school (where a man's word is his bond), or perhaps because he's lived in Niagara County so long (where legislators can get caught stealing and cheating and have the nerve to threaten lawsuits when they're removed from office), but the political opinion most often shared in broken English by this wisest of men (if indeed with age comes wisdom) is that politicians are "alla buncha crooks." He may have a point; he's certainly seen a lot of them. He voted for Woodrow Wilson for president. And to paraphrase Mark Twain, the older I get, the smarter he seems. For him and many, many others of all ages, our elected officials have lost their credibility. "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me," he'd say.

Now we read that newly declassified documents from the Kennedy administration confirm that, yes, the CIA did offer organized crime figures $150,000 to assassinate Fidel Castro. (They offered to do the job for free.) That despite years of heated Pentagon denial, US soldiers were exposed to debilitating chemical agents in the Gulf War (although medical benefits are still being denied the exposed personnel and their birth-defected children). Maybe aliens crashed in New Mexico, maybe not, but the Army has admitted that the parachuted crash dummies it dreamed up to account for the "confusion" weren't deployed until years after the alleged Roswell incident. I won't even mention the contradictions and back-pedaling on flight 800. Grandpa's never looked smarter.

Now, we only know what we read and see and hear about most things, but who are we to believe about most of what we take for fact? As the old adage goes, history is what the historians say it is. Was the Lincoln assassination a government plot? How about Kennedy? (I mean Bobby; we already know about John.)

What we know for ourselves, we know. That words can make truths of lies, we know also. James Thurber may have been right when he said you can fool too many of the people too much of the time, but not MY grandfather.