American Minute for July 22nd:
"A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on," wrote poet Carl Sandburg, who died JULY 22, 1967. A son of Swedish immigrants who worked on the railroad, Sandburg left school after 8th grade, borrowed his father's railroad pass and traveled as a hobo. He volunteered for military service, was sent to Puerto Rico in the Spanish-American War, and then attended college on a veteran's bill. Carl Sandburg wrote children's fairytales, called Rootabaga Stories, and mused of his wanderings in American Songbag. In 1926, he wrote Abraham Lincoln-The Prairie Years, and in 1939 he wrote Abraham Lincoln-The War Years, for which he received a Pulitzer Prize. In 1959, Sandburg was invited to address Congress on Lincoln's birthday. In his Complete Poems, for which he won a Pulitzer, 1951, Carl Sandburg wrote: "All my life I have been trying to learn to read, to see and hear, and to write. At sixty-five I began my first novel...It could be, in the grace of God, I shall live to be eighty-nine...I might paraphrase: 'If God had let me live five years longer I should have been a writer.'" Carl Sandburg wrote: "I see America not in the setting sun of a black night of despair...I see America in the crimson light of a rising sun fresh from the burning, creative hand of God."
