A Loss For America...RIP David Dolby

This is from a forwarded email from valued Holger contributor, Henry Bowman. This was from last month.

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Last Friday, August 6th, David C. Dolby passed away suddenly in Spirit Lake, Idaho at the age of 64. Childless, Mr. Dolby had lived in virtual seclusion in the town of Barto, PA since the passing of his wife in 1997. Barto is so small and insignificant the Rand McNally Atlas doesn’t even list it in the appendix. Mr. Dolby’s passing went so unnoticed that even his hometown paper didn’t acknowledge it. His passing was announced by an organization to which he belonged. Evidently most felt Mr. Dolby’s death didn’t merit any notice at all and almost nobody gave it a thought. He apparently hadn’t done anything in his life to merit any special attention in the view of our present society.

Three days later, on Monday, August 9th, Steven Slater, a childish, immature loser, who up until that day had pretty much gone as unnoticed as David Dolby, threw a temper tantrum on a Jet Blue airplane at John F. Kennedy airport because of his personal pet peeve of luggage that shifts during flight (or maybe it was tray tables not being upright and locked). Since acting like a spoiled 16 year old he has been featured on every major news network in the country and his face is on the front page of numerous national publications. Facebook pages have been established to “honor” him, and Mr. Slater has been called a “hero” by people who, we are expected to believe, know what that term means. In today’s America, Mr. Slater will, in all likelihood, stretch his 15 minutes of infamy into 30 and end up making an obscene amount of money from some folks in our great nation. He will be interviewed by Today, the Early Show and Good Morning America. He’ll appear on Leno, Conan, and Letterman. He’ll become what we in America these days view as “somebody”. He’ll be given praise he doesn’t deserve and labels he never earned. In the view of our society he apparently has done something that merits special attention.

In the meantime, later this week a funeral service will be held at Arlington National Cemetery. There won’t be any press there and likely only a handful of mourners who had the privilege to know David Dolby. And there will probably be a few guys there that are fellow members of the organization that announced his passing...................... "The Congressional Medal of Honor Society."

There have been 3,446 such medals awarded to our country's heros and today there are only 87 living members!

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Some of the national print media finally picked up this story after the email campaign started but I did want to share a portion of what was in a county newspaper article on Mr. Dolby:

A Norristown native, Dolby was in a platoon of the 1st Cavalry Division during an attack as six of its members were killed instantly and others were wounded. In four hours of combat, he retrieved wounded men, stopped the enemy attack, reorganized his platoon and kept them covered during a counterattack. He was credited with saving the lives of many of his fellow soldiers while leaving himself continually in an exposed position, contributing to the overall success of the Army assault.

In all, Dolby served five tours in Vietnam.

Five tours in Vietnam . . .

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