I am in love again.

I knew if I waited long enough, it would happen. This time, it is with fleece. What a wonderful invention it is! Between fleece and flannel, I could have it made this winter. I might not need to see the oilman at all. One of my sisters who has always had an affinity for comfortable napping, gave me a fleece jacket recently and now I will be combing the racks at Goodwill to see what else I can find. I’m not kidding, this stuff is wonderful. And I think it’s made out of recycled plastic, but I’m not sure about that.

While at the Windham Historical Society I often come across some little treasure in the files which captures my attention. So it was this week when I got sidetracked and read about the Rev. Thomas Smith of Portland, the father of Windham’s Parson Peter T. Smith. The elder Smith, it seemed, also ran a “truck house,” or a store of sorts which provided supplies to those who were settling Portland and environs in the early 1700s.

Being aware of the recent flap about the team name for the Scarborough Red Storm being reverted to the derogatory and prejudicial slang, redskins, I was particularly intrigued to read that Rev. Thomas Smith was recounting to friends his “take” on a recent scalping expedition “I received 165 pounds … my part of scalp money,” reads his 1757 diary. He had supplied provisions and ammunition to a scalping party made up of his parishioners, whose goal was to kill American Indians and take their scalps.

The French introduced scalping, it is believed, but shortly thereafter, all Europeans were scalping – sometimes each other.

During the Revolutionary War, the bounty for a male adult American Indian scalp was 100 pounds sterling. Some people survived scalping. One settler in Windham had two pieces of skin taken from his scalp and lived to a ripe old age. The scalps were referred to as red skins, covered as they were in blood. It doesn’t take much of an imagination to see how the term “red skin” evolved to an ethnic slur. Many nationalities have unsavory “nicknames” once in common use. I hope some day we Americans move beyond perpetuating this ignorance.

It is ironic that while we are bending over backward to be politically correct and enrolling everyone in a class on diversity, that any energy would be spent justifying the return to a possibly offensive team name.

Of course this is an opinion column and others may not share my view, but we can learn a lot from history and some of it needs to be reinforced from time to time. With a maiden name of Kathleen Kelley, I sure wouldn’t appreciate being called a dumb Mick – or worse.

See you next week.