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"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

"I do apologise, Mr. Hutchins, Dookie's not usually quite this bad."
"Wurf."

Polychrome

-Droken

The seeds of that introduction appeared while I was working on the profile documents and had to look up everybody's birthdate. My grandparents' ages have been on my mind for a while now, for various reasons we don't need to go into here, and so when I was doing that and I noticed that Sanya Litvyak was born in 1930, it occurred to me then that most of the main characters are of their generation. Some of them are very close in age indeed - Erica Hartmann, for instance, is four days older than my grandmother.

On top of that, when he first joined the Army Reserve in college in the early '50s, my grandfather originally intended to be a pilot (despite the recent founding of the Air Force as a separate service, the Army still operated its own fixed-wing aircraft for reconnaissance and artillery spotting at the time - may still do, for all I know), but the assignment didn't come through and he wound up an infantry officer instead. One assumes the wartime Liberion Army Air Forces are a little more careful how they manage their witches' MOS paperwork. :)

Amusingly, in real life my grandmother didn't actually know she was Canadian until she applied for a border crossing card a few years ago. She always assumed she was born in Fort Fairfield, Maine, like Gramp was. Even U.S. Social Security never noticed; it took the State Department digging around to discover that she was actually born just over the border in Grand Falls, New Brunswick. (In 1928! Canada wasn't a fully independent state until 1931. I think that technically makes her a British subject, although the point is moot since the U.S. government basically said, "Ah, the hell with it, nobody knew any better in '28 - have a passport." :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I felt like checking so:

She was a Canadian citizen, which in 1928 was a special class of British subject<1>, (created by the 1910 Immigration Act). However she probably lost that citizenship long ago due to the ten year limit on living abroad imposed by the 1947 Immigration Act.

Depending on her parentage she may have US citizenship on a jus sanguinis basis.

<1> This is a sense of British subject that is no longer in use. These days "British subject" only refers to subjects of the Crown who are not citizens of any Commonwealth nation.

This is probably why the State Department decided not to press the issue when the paperwork was getting done a few years ago.

The thing is that the Maine-NB border was absurdly porous in the early 20th century. A bit ironically, given that there was a very small war fought over it in the early years of statehood (no, seriously), nobody, neither locally nor in Ottawa or Washington, gave a damn about the border from the time it was fixed by treaty in 1842 until... probably the 1960s? And nobody really cared until 2001.

So Gram's parents, in the '20s and '30s, lived... wherever. Sometimes in Fort Fairfield, sometimes in Grand Falls, depending on how the farming was that year. I think the farm they finally settled on may even have straddled the border. That kind of thing was not in any way uncommon back in those days. It was not considered an imminent threat to national security that a few Canadian and American potato farmers weren't entirely sure which country they were in or belonged to at any given moment. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Gryphon has many, many unpleasant memory associations with hamdingers.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

The worst of which may involve actually trying to eat them. O_O

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

Well, quite. And a big part of that shudder is probably from his imagination trying to extrapolate what a hamdinger made as a field ration for the United States Army in the 1940s* would be like.

--G.
* This does, admittedly, assume they weren't left over from NW1. Or the Hispanian-Liberion War, for which - not a lot of people know this! - they were invented as a replacement for the hated beefundibulum.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter