Launch or Pivot your Business with Libraries as

Launch or Pivot Your Business with Launch or Pivot Your Business with Libraries as Launchpads! Libraries as Launchpads!

New Mexico - July 20, 2020

- Registration for a business support program is now open to applicants across Northern and Central New Mexico. People ready to test a business idea and small business owners finding new solutions while adapting to economic challenges are encouraged to apply. Creative Startups renowned pre-accelerator program --- Libraries as Launchpads, has moved fully online and been redesigned to address the current challenges businesses face.

The program, with no cost to participants thanks to grants from the New Mexico Economic Development Department Outdoor Rec Division, the Economic Development Administration, PNM, and NMGas, equips aspiring and small business owners with the necessary skills to provide their customers what they are looking for and grow their businesses in any circumstances. “If you’ve got an idea, this program is a vehicle through which you can figure out if you’ve got a business.” said program participant Moira Gehring, founder of Boodle Body in Santa Fe.

The intensive 4 week course provides the framework to understand: who your customers are and how to reach them, the products and services they really want, and your sales model, while building the knowledge and networks to take your business 1 or 10 steps forward! “This is an incredible program. The concepts I learned have, already in just weeks, improved the way I am running my business.” expressed a Libraries as Launchpads alum.

Libraries as Launchpads has supported the launch of 74 businesses across New Mexico since 2018 who have gone on to create over 20 new jobs and seen over $240k in new revenue. Of the businesses who went through the pilot program in 2019, 83.3% reported stronger business networks; 82.5% reported gaining more connection to the entrepreneur community. This program is available in both English and Spanish. (Spanish program begins early spring 2021.)

Libraries as Launchpads is now available to participants with outdoor recreation, food/ag, and creative industry ideas and businesses in McKinley, Cibola, Harding, Rio Arriba, Sandoval, Torrance, and Taos counties. Participants meet virtually twice weekly from September 14th through October 16th.

Registration is open now through August 21st at LibraresAsLaunchpads.org

Whether you’re inventing a new part that will change mountain biking forever, adjusting how you operate your local restaurant and reach customers, or building the next hit app, Libraries as Launchpads is for you! Entrepreneurs with an idea they want to bring to life, a prototype they want to take to market, or a small business they want to pivot and grow are all invited to apply! For more information and to apply visit: http//:www.librariesaslaunchpads.org

Questions? Contact Shuangyi Li, Shuangyi@creativestartups.org

Joshua M. Whitman Experiential Learning Coordinator Octavia Fellin Public Library 505-863-1291 jwhitman@gallupnm.gov

By Martin Link

AA handful of veterans along with a dwindling number of senior citizens are proudly reminiscing, whenever they have the time to get together during this horrible epidemic, about remembering the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, which, under normal conditions, would be celebrated this summer. But when everyone is told to stay home, it’s been impractical to celebrate V-E Day (Victory in Europe), May 8, Memorial Day,

May 25, Flag Day, June 14, Independence Day, July 4, V-J (Victory in Japan), Aug. 10, or even Navajo Code Talkers Day, August 14. Maybe next year.

This observation led me to wonder just how many people, alive today, were old enough to remember the beginning of World War II, six years earlier. If it hadn’t been for my mom, I and some of my playmates would have missed out on a unique historical event.

During the 1930’s my family lived in Madison, Wisconsin, and shortly after I was born in late September, 1934, we moved to a home on Franklin Street, just about five blocks from the local school. When I was almost five years old, I was registered into kindergarten. As usual, kids my age on both sides of Franklin St. engaged in a variety of games after school was out. If I recall, the afternoon of September 1, 1939 was a pleasant fall day, and after school was out, I and a next-door boy went across the street where two girls were chalking the design on the sidewalk so we could all play hop-scotch. We no more started to recite the jingles that each participant sings as you hop and skip on the design, when my mother yelled at us from the front door of our house. It was early in the afternoon and my mom was calling at the four of us to come into the front room immediately.

We had no idea if we had done something wrong, or whatever, but we stopped what we were doing and went into the living room, where mom had four glasses of koolaid for us. For some reason she had also re-positioned our radio so all four of our chairs would be facing it. As I now remember it, the radio (along with the newspapers) were our only sources of local and national news as television was still a thing of the future. As we settled down, mom explained that they had just announced that the radio network would shortly be able to broadcast, live, a speech by the Chancellor of Germany, Adolph Hitler, explaining the invasion by German forces against the country of Poland, in retaliation for an attack by Polish forces against a German radio station that was situated on the border of the two countries. The two girls thought this was nonsense, but mother explained that this showed a major improvement in radio transmission, and also this speech might have subsequent international implications.

After a brief spate of static, the broadcaster introduced Adolph Hitler, who then spent the next half-hour explaining and justifying the invasion of Poland by German tanks, infantry and supporting aircraft. The problem was that his entire speech was in a shouting German language which none of us kids understood. By now the mother of the two girls had noticed their absence and was calling for them so they, and the neighbor boy left and went home.

Mom again explained to me that what we had just heard might only have given Hitler an excuse for taking a belligerent stand against Poland, or this may be the opening stages for something much worse. Either way, I could tell my children and grandchildren that I had heard Adolph Hitler, Chancellor of Germany in a live coverage report.

It took less than a week to determine the scope of Hitler’s announcement -- on Sept. 3, France and Great Britain, who had signed treaties of mutual protection with Poland, declared war on Germany. By the end of the month, Russian soldiers invaded eastern Poland, and for the next six years the horrors of World War II ravaged all of Europe,

North Africa and Asia, and for the last four and a half of those years, all of North America participated as well.

REMEMBERING THE BEGINNING OF WWII

Company I of the Seventh Wisconsin, Upton’s Hill, Virginia, September, 1982

State Historical Society of Wisconsin

Hitler had given his generals their secret order. "The propaganda occasion I shall supply," he had stated.

A CIVIL WAR FRIEND

About a year later, in August, 1940, my parents and I moved to a new house in South Madison and I started First Grade in a nearby school. The major street that ran through the neighborhood was Olin Avenue and Hickory St., the street we now lived on, was one of several that bisected it. Within that area there were about a dozen kids around my age, and it didn’t take long to get acquainted with them.

What turned out to be one of the most fabulous memories of that time of my life centered on a traditional, three-story house with a wide porch, facing Olin Ave. The occupants were a grizzled, bearded, grey-haired old man and his two younger, unmarried sisters who took care of him. All I can remember is that we just called him “Old Man McCay,” and that he was a veteran of the Civil War.

When the weather was nice, mostly during summer days, the two sisters would escort their brother out to the porch where he could sit in his favorite rocking chair. Just as soon as one of the neighborhood kids noticed that he was out on the porch , they would call, “Old Man McCay is out!” and it didn’t take long for a half-dozen or so of us to congregate on the steps, and the old veteran would start to tell us fantastic stories of what it was like to have been a participant in that awesome war.

From what I can remember, he had enlisted in the Federal Army not too long after the war had started in the early summer of 1861. He liked to brag that he was only thirteen years old when he enlisted in the Seventh Wisconsin Regiment, so he was made a drummer boy rather than a full-fledged soldier. However, he still went through basic training at Camp Randall in Madison (the present site of Randall Stadium, the football field on the campus of the University of Wisconsin). For starters, there were four Infantry regiments of Wisconsin recruits, and most of them spent that first winter (1861-62) encamped in fields that had just a couple of years earlier been part of Robert E. Lee’s Virginia plantation.

He couldn’t remember a lot of facts or details any more, or the right sequence of battles or events, but he did recall the furious fighting at South Mountain, near Frederick, Maryland, in early September, 1862. As a result of holding the battle line, even in spite of taking, but also inflicting, heavy casualties, the brigade that included the four Wisconsin Regiments, inherited the nickname, “The Iron Brigade.” Although McCay was still technically a drummer, he and another drummer spent most of the battle carrying a stretcher burdened with wounded soldiers who needed to be taken to the First Aid station behind the fighting zone.

It seemed that they only had a few days to recuperate, and bury the dead, and they were on the march again, with McCay and the other drummers providing the cadence. In less than a week and only twenty miles from South Mountain, both armies again collided, along the banks of the Antietam River, and September 17, 1862 became forever known as the “Bloodiest Day of the War,” with over 23,000 casualties inflicted on both sides in one day.

By early 1863 McCay, now two years older and physically improved, was positioned as a regular soldier in one of the Companies. He talked about being on the firing line and some of the skirmishes his unit was involved in, but the only time tears would still come to his eyes was when he would talk about the ferocious and bloody 3-day battle (July 1-3, 1863) he and the 7th Wisconsin had been involved in around a small town in southern Pennsylvania, named Gettysburg. At the end of three days of constant fighting, every regiment in the Iron Brigade suffered between 55% to 62% casualties, and the survivors, including the wounded who could eventually return to duty (which included McCay) were assigned to garrison duty until July 1, 1865, when the Brigade was decommissioned.

Old Man McCay apparently returned to Wisconsin and settled in Madison. He never talked about marriage but did expend a lot of time and energy helping to formulate and organize the Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.). The first post to be established in Wisconsin was in Madison in 1866. He would show us photos of himself and other veterans marching in the Armistice Day (now Veteran’s Day) parade in Madison. He also served on the central committee for the 50th Anniversary Commemoration in Gettysburg on July 1 - 4, 1913.

In the summer of 1943, at the age of 95, Old Man McCay passed away. None of us kids had ever before seen an Irish wake. On the day before the military funeral, we saw a lot of activity at his home, and out of curiosity we went to investigate. Looking through the porch window, we saw the open casket with a number of people standing or milling around, with tidbits of food and drinks, talking and singing vintage army songs. When one of the sisters saw us looking through the window, she came out and invited us into the living room.

What an experience!

In those times, in the days before television, we just had fun conversing with an Old Man. Now, almost eighty years later, I look back on it as one of my most unique remembrances.