Was at the self checkout at a local supermarket.  It was only for 15 items or less and we had maybe 18 items.  But the full service checkout lines were jammed up with people with carts full of stuff.  I wondered if the system would let us scan more than 15 items.  If not I figured I would just pay in two batches.

We also bought two sandwiches and a pint of coleslaw at the deli.  The guy making the sandwichs stuck labels on the polystyrene clamshell containers and told us we could take two bags of chips that came with the sandwiches, a lunch special.  So we did.

Halfway through checking out an alarm goes off.  I noticed there is an overhead video of us scanning and bagging groceries.  Two green boxes on the screen highlight me putting the two small bags of chips directly in our shopping bags.

A woman who worked at the store came over and asked: why didn’t you scan those chips? (but in a nice, even tired, way).  They came with the sandwiches. Well, you still have to scan them.  Ok, doesn’t really make sense, but whatever.  The woman used her badge, overriding the AI shoplifting detector, and let us finish bagging. I never did scan the chips.

I saw in the news that they were tearing down the old Lindy Boggs Medical Center in midtown New Orleans.  I have to admit I didn’t know where this was at first.  It had been abandoned since Katrina.  I learned this was the old Mercy Hospital, where I was born.

Most people of my generation know Lindy Boggs as a member of the US House of Representatives from Louisiana, or more likely as Cokie Roberts mom.  But she only held that seat because her husband, Hale Boggs, went missing in a mysterious airplane crash in Alaska.

At the time of his disappearance, Hale Boggs was the House Majority Leader, probably the most powerful person in Washington.  He was a long time Democrat, but had shifted his views, especially on race, to line up with LBJ’s Great Society programs.

He was also notably a member of the Warren Commission, which investigated the JFK assassination.  He was said to have disagreed with its findings and made himself unpopular with J. Edgar Hoover.  He was also at odds with the president, Nixon.

Hale Boggs plane crashed in October 1972, just a few months after the Watergate Scandal broke. I still remember the news of his disappearance but I was all of 9 years old at the time. It was a big mystery and people expected the wreckage would be found in the spring after the snow in Alaska melted. But no wreckage was ever found.  And Boggs faded from the public memory, especially given the events of those years.

If it weren’t for the recent demolition of the Boggs hospital I don’t think I would have thought about Hale Boggs and his disappearance again.  You would think the strange disappearance of such a powerful man in such times would be remembered, at least by the conspiracy theory crowd, if nothing else.  But today, reading the Wiki pages, his disappearance is more suspicious than ever.  Maybe it’s time to look for that plane wreckage again.

Hale Boggs