I went to kindergarten in Lafayette, Indiana while my dad went to Purdue. (My teacher’s name, appropriately, was Mrs. Paine. She was really mean. When I was coloring my duck using a circular motion, she came over to me and said I had to color side to side. And she spanked me with a ruler just because I cut Brad’s hair during art when she left the room (OK, I cut his finger too). The Girl’s Monitor told on me. Little bitch. He did dare me to do it. It’s a miracle I ever liked school again.)
Most of you probably don’t know who Lafayette was, so here’s a chunk of Franco-American history for you, from a HuffPo article by James Gaines called Lafayette: A Remembrance:
Today is the 250th birthday of the Marquis de Lafayette, whose name is on more than four hundred U.S. cities, towns, counties, parks, squares, and streets, not to mention floor tiles, radios, a line of window shades, at least one meteorite, and an excellent college in Pennsylvania. A Google search for “Lafayette” returns more than twenty-nine million hits. America is a place where everybody knows his name but seems to have forgotten who he was. When he died, John Stuart Mill wondered if there would ever be another conjunction of character and circumstance that would allow anyone to live so large a life. It deserves to be remembered. More.
I read somewhere not long ago that the founding fathers, out of gratitude for his help during the Revolution, guaranteed automatic American citizenship to all descendants of General Lafayette in perpetuity!
Not that any French person of sound mind would want that these days…
[quote]
“Much of the economy of the city of Lafayette and the surrounding area is centered around the academic activities of Purdue University”
Even in kindergarten you were close to that altar of wisdom :-)
Regarding the descendants of General Lafayette: I guess they (along with the founding fathers) would turn in their graves when confronted with the ongoing rape of the US constitution.