It was election day. I’d voted just about sunup, then ate breakfast by dawn’s early light. A doctor’s appointment and a pause that refreshed followed, and I was on my way home when WVXU’s Cincinnati Edition with Lucy May came on the radio. I’m an occasional, not regular, listener, and I’ve probably heard more evening repeats than live noontime broadcasts, but the show’s guest that day quickly snagged my attention. It was a retired local constitutional attorney talking about her recently published book. I was home and the radio off before the interview ended, but I had heard enough to prompt an online visit to the local library and the downloading of an electronic copy of Just 20: How Ordinary People Can Make Our Government Work Again. It is only 146 pages long and written in plain easy to understand English. I read it over the next couple of days. I have also now listened to that full Cincinnati Edition interview. It’s here.
The thing that author Patricia Foster said that grabbed my interest the most was that the rule giving the Speaker of the House nearly absolute control over what bills the House works on is not in the Constitution or any law. It is in the Rules Package that is voted on by the full House every two years when a new congress is formed. Said another way, one of the first things a newly elected or reelected Representative does is hand over their authority to introduce legislation to be discussed and voted on to somebody else.
I believe I knew at some level that it had not always been that way, but I forgot, if I ever knew, how it happened. Foster knows and recounts the steps that did it. The books first two chapters are essentially history. Chapter 1, “What Congress Was Meant to Be”, does what its title promises. It explains the founders’ careful design of a government with three equal branches: one to legislate, one to interpret, and one to execute. The second chapter, “Who Killed Congress”, identifies those steps I mentioned that brought us to the current situation where Congress does nothing that doesn’t benefit the team that that one guy belongs to. Those steps are interesting and informative. They are summed up in a single sentence near the chapter’s end, “Congress slowly rewrote itself into dysfunction.”
I’m guessing that we all have favorite examples of congress triggered frustration. One of mine is when a single individual prevented a Supreme Court appointee even being considered and gloated about it being a win for his team. More recently, another stopped a bipartisan immigration reform bill from seeing the light of day so the problem could continue to be touted as an issue by his team. The team in both of those examples is the same and easily identified, but I have no doubt that equally frustrating examples involving the other team are easy to find.
Those frustrations are not the result of something I favored being defeated by congress. They are the result of one person deciding something would not benefit their team then suppressing that something. They are the result of disruptions in the four steps that Foster repeatedly identifies as the basic original job description for congress: Propose, Debate, Amend, Vote.
As you probably know, I simply won’t waste energy reviewing something I don’t enjoy. If I hint at recommending something, it’s generally because I think you will enjoy it, too. I’m strongly recommending that you read this book and/or listen to the Lucy May interview partly because I think most of you would enjoy it, but also because I think you may benefit from it and in turn you might benefit the world. Foster doesn’t just describe the dysfunctional congress, she describes some steps to initiate repairs. They basically involve attempting to convince your representative to try to hang onto the power he has on day one of a new congress. In suggesting this, she reminds us that each representative is beholden to approximately just 0.2 percent of the population making them our most intimate contact with the Federal government. I obviously missed out on making the suggestion to my congressman while I still had my vote in my hand, but I made it anyway.
In support of the ideas in her book, Foster maintains a website and a Facebook page. Check ’em out.
Just 20: How Ordinary People Can Make Our Government Work Again, Patricia Foster, Gatekeeper Press (August 21, 2026), 8.5 x 5.5 inches, 146 pages, ISBN 978-1662976988
Available through Amazon.
Nearly all the reviews on this blog are organic, meaning they are of things I’ve read, listened to, or attended because I discovered them and chose to review them on my own. This is one of the very few exceptions. The author, Beth Bacon, emailed me and suggested that since my site was about road trips and I did book reviews, I might be interested in reviewing her latest work. Right off the bat, I was impressed that she knew road trips and reviews were involved in the site. Most of the email requests/offers I get seem pretty oblivious to that. Cryptocurrency, miracle medical treatments, and streaming services are popular—the most recent involved ancient coins.
Those names, and the places too, seem carefully chosen. A road that’s 100 years old and nearly 2,500 miles long certainly has plenty of both. It’s easy enough for adults to be swamped and even easier, I imagine, for the 5-10 year olds that are the book’s target readers. Bacon picks subjects likely to interest the 5-10 crowd and doesn’t overwhelm by trying to include everything. The book opens with a few bits of information about the entire road and about Cyrus Avery, who was instrumental in establishing it. That’s followed by one- and two-page sections on each of the route’s eight states. One of the names appearing for Illinois is Bob Waldmire, who traveled the route in a Volkswagen bus. Missouri’s pages include Alberta Ellis, who operated a hotel and other businesses where people of color were welcome at a time when that was often not the case. This brief, casual mention of the topic earns a bonus point from me. The Blue Whale of Catoosa, Oklahoma, is an obvious kid-friendly subject, and Bacon introduces its creator, Hugh Davis, and his wife, Zelta, to her readers. Bacon also identifies more key names and places for these three states, along with a handful for each of the other five. A personal favorite is Bacon’s mention that Snoopy’s brother Spike lives near the Route 66 town of Needles, California.
I have a hunch that recognizing the publisher had a little bit to do with me wanting to review this book. The list of 
I’ve known Dr. 
Three of the Annie Mouse books involve Route 66. The author is a big fan of the road and travels it frequently. That is where, of course, I met her. In Annie Mouse’s Route 66 Adventure, she applies not only the road knowledge she gained through her travels, but also photographs she took herself. The book covers a near full-length drive of the historic route from Joliet, IL, to Needles, CA. Making the journey is the Mouse family. There’s Mommy and Daddy, of course. The Mouse children include Annie’s older brothers, Sam and Bobby; older sister Jenny; and some unnamed younger siblings. The trip’s purpose is to visit Mommy Mouse’s cousins in Needles. 
Annie is the journal’s narrator. She is also its photographer. When Annie first learns of the planned trip, her excitement grows even bigger when she is told she would be allowed to take her own pictures. Those pictures appear exactly as you might expect from a young mouse making a scrapbook-style journal of her family vacation. More importantly, they appear exactly as they should to help young humans flesh out the words beside them. Sometimes, with the help of illustrator Kelsey Collins, Mouse family members appear in those pictures just as you would expect in vacation snapshots. There are also plenty of Collins’ delightful drawings in the book outside the frames of the photographs.
This book first appeared in 2003 as a real paper and ink publication. I got a signed copy in 2004, which, because it was small and easy to stuff between seats or in the glovebox, I kept in the car for quite some time. Based on the copyright dates, it was revised several times, but I never got a newer one, and my copy became increasingly out of date. Prior to February of this year, it looks like the most recent revision was 2016, so even the newer editions might not have been all that trustworthy. The print editions sold for next to nothing (I paid $5 for mine), and when Priddy updated things in February, she went beyond next and made it available for just plain nothing via Google Docs.
It’s definitely reasonable to ask why someone who is about as far from kidness as it’s possible to get, ever kept this close at hand. I mentioned the size of the hard copy. The size of the entries is another positive, as is their organization. States and the towns within them are listed east to west. The list of attractions associated with each town does not appear to be in any particular sequence. Below each attraction’s identifier is a single paragraph containing a brief description, address, telephone number, and website. The descriptions typically include cost, hours, and any other special considerations. They are not written by AI or someone following a formula who has never been there. Priddy often shares personal insights.
I was aware of this book when it was published, and I was interested in reading it. But not so interested, it seems, to actually order it. My interest in the book came from a general interest in early aviation history that anyone growing up in the land of Wilbur and Orville, as I did, should come by naturally. The lack of urgency came from the fact that its proclaimed subject was an airport in another state. It was a nearby state, but it wasn’t my state. It took a visit by the authors to a nearer and more familiar airport to finally put a copy in my hands.
I really was not surprised that Morris and Butkos begin their story long before there were any such things as airports or even airplanes. They do it with a Pittsburgh twist, of course, and tell about early inventors and adventurers connected to the city. I got a chuckle from a quote they share about a 1897 flight by Professor Carl E. Myers and his skycycle. The skycycle appears to be a balloon with a seat and pedals suspended below it. As reported by The Pittsburgh Press, it did fly and eventually floated out of sight while “The professor, if he had any control over the skycycle, did not exercise it.”
Of course, skycycles and other “Fanciful Fliers” fell out of favor once airplanes came along, and particularly after they were proven practical in World War I. Morris and Butko share the stories of several Pittsburghers involved in wartime aviation and the barnstorming that war-surplus aircraft gave rise to after the hostilities ended. It was a group of Pittsburgh barnstormers that gave birth to the airport that would be named Bettis Field in 1926. One of them, Clifford Ball, provided a slogan that would eventually be modified for a different field and some different dreams: “Build the nests and the birds will come.”
Also in 1926, Ball sold his interest in the airport to form Skyline Transportation to pursue a government airmail contract. He did get the contract and purchased three airplanes to service it. Here’s where that WACO connection mentioned earlier comes in. The three planes were WACOs named Miss Pittsburgh, Miss McKeesport, and Miss Youngstown. Miss Youngstown was destroyed in a wreck; Miss Pittsburgh hangs at the Pittsburgh Airport; and Miss McKeesport is in the WACO Museum, parked behind Sue and Brian in the photograph above. There is another view, sans authors, 
Morris and Butko have uncovered and included an impressive number of stories about people and events connected with Bettis Airfield. It was one of the stops on Charles Lindbergh’s tour following his cross-Atlantic flight, but the Spirit of Saint Louis had to be slid sideways into a hangar because its wings were wider than the door. Quite a few black pilots trained at Bettis, but for a period, had to go to another state to be licensed because the designated federal inspector simply refused to pass them. A fairly large number of female pilots, some of whom were rather famous, were associated with Bettis. Passengers were sometimes flown on airmail flights, sitting on bags of mail; then, in 1929, real passenger service — with seats — was added.
Although I have since figured it out, when I pulled Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy from my to-read list, I wasn’t sure how it got there. I was, however, quite certain that beginning it immediately after reviewing 
When I published 
