In secret, behind locked gates, our Nation's Oldest City dumped a landfill in a lake (Old City Reservoir), while emitting sewage in our rivers and salt marsh. Organized citizens exposed and defeated pollution, racism and cronyism. We elected a new Mayor. We're transforming our City -- advanced citizenship. Ask questions. Make disclosures. Demand answers. Be involved. Expect democracy. Report and expose corruption. Smile! Help enact a St. Augustine National Park and Seashore. We shall overcome!
Thank you! I am honored by the October 19, 2026 endorsement on Facebook by beloved former St. Augustine Beach Mayor S. Gary Snodgrass. He wrote "Ed and I may not always agree, but I have never doubted his commitment to doing the work, understanding the issues, and doing what he believes is right. He is a hardworking advocate for mosquito control, open and honest government, and accountability. He listens, speaks plainly, and is willing to hold elected officials responsible to the people they serve. Ed’s commitment to mosquito control is also deeply personal, shaped by what malaria meant for his family. I strongly support his candidacy for the Anastasia Mosquito Control District of St. Johns County. I hope you will join me in voting for Ed on or before November 3."
Guest column: Robin Nadeau worked for a more sustainable world
We moved to St. Augustine on November 5, 1999. I was first contacted, encouraged and empowered by Robin Nadeau in 2000, after Robin read my December 3, 2000 St. Augustine Record column, “Democracy under pressure,” about the strange case of Bush v. Gore (Florida election recount lawsuit). Below is my 600 word guest column about Robin Nadeau, from February 5, 2012 St. Augustine Record (coincidentally, I saw my first butterfly of 2012 while walking that morning):
Guest column: Robin Nadeau worked for a more sustainable world Posted: February 5, 2012 - 12:32am
By ED SLAVIN St. Augustine
Hundreds of Robin Nadeau’s friends joined her family, celebrating her life on Jan. 23.
“Thinking globally, acting locally,” always young at heart, Robin knew “freedom is never free.” “Speaking truth to power,” she worked for positive change and a more sustainable world.
Citizen Robin Nadeau (1926-2012) was a zealous environmentalist, peace activist, government reformer and free speech defender. Robin won the Daughters of the American Revolution National Conservation Award for work planting/saving thousands of trees (where greed once endangered them all).
Robin supported “Medicare for All,” Solar/Wind energy, Progressive Taxation and Environmental Justice. She opposed polluters’ promiscuously weakening our environmental laws. She exposed the horrors of nuclear power plants, offshore oil, and dirty money in politics.
She succeeded in convincing governments to buy park land, including a now-threatened 6.1 acres at St. Augustine Beach.
Robin was kind, logical, thoughtful, winning progressive victories with information, research, diplomacy and tact. Robin had what Ambassador Andrew Young calls “soul force.”
Few said “no” to Robin Nadeau.
A faithful convert to Roman Catholicism, she supported Occupy St. Augustine, Grandmothers for Peace, NAACP, League of Women Voters and Sierra Club. She championed equality for gays and lesbians.
Robin encouraged and nurtured so many people.
Robin knew that “decisions are made by those who show up,” showing up for decades. Her work was a tale of two cities (St. Augustine and St. Augustine Beach) and St. Johns County, persuading all to adopt tree protections, serving for decades on city and county boards and as TREES VP for 13 years.
In December 2006, Robin persuaded me to help investigate our Mosquito Control District’s luxury jet helicopter purchase and organophosphate spraying. Together, we helped kill the $1.8 million, no-bid helicopter, winning a refund. It took us nine months, enduring AMCD’s then-chair’s insults and arrest threats. The people won. Robin wrote in her autobiographical note, “I contributed to an ultimately successful effort to replace use of organophosphates to control mosquitoes in St. Johns County with environmentally friendly techniques.”
In 2007-08, Robin and I sought ballot-petition signatures for Democratic Congressional candidate Faye Armitage in local parks. Someone threatened to have us arrested, exclaiming, “I know the law!” Gently, Robin and I stood our ground. First Amendment rights prevailed.
Robin believed in hope, forgiveness, democracy and Democrats: as precinct committeeperson, Robin worked hardest of all.
Robin Nadeau lived with joy, wit and style, getting things done (often working until 3 a.m.). Like Thomas Jefferson, she loved beauty and she designed her own home. She had an infectious laugh, threw wonderful Twelfth Night parties, and made the best orange marmalade.
The Record printed a cognitive miser’s 2004 letter, attacking “the Robin Nadeaus of the world.” I responded, “thanking the Robin Nadeaus of this world,” who bring us moral strength.
“Robin Nadeau family values” are based on love, reality and kindness — the opposite of “faux FOX-TV family values,” based on prejudice, ignorance and hatred.
With all of her beautiful heart, soul and “PBS mind,” Robin Nadeau avidly supported the St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore since 2006. St. Augustine Beach Mayor Gary Snodgrass remembers Robin telephoning him about the proposal two months ago — he was in the shower, but took her call.
Robin’s inner strength showed on Nov. 1, as park supporters were called “Nazis” and “Communists” by angry, misguided “Tea Partiers,” who momentarily scared off our County Commissioners from supporting the Historical Park and Seashore. Enough. errant nonsense!
Give Robin Nadeau the last word. She wrote, “I think my greatest achievement lay in my contribution to enactment of the St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore Act of 2012.” Let’s do it for Robin! www.staugustgreen.com
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Ed Slavin has a bachelor of science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University and a Juris Doctor from Memphis State University (now University of Memphis).
To St. Johns County voters: May I please have the honor of your vote for a seat as Commissioner of the Anastasia Mosquito District of St. Johns County?
Endorsed by both Historic City News and St. Johns County Democratic Party (2024).
Here's my 2024 Q&A with the League of Women Voters:
What motivated you to run for office?
It's our money. I've been a watchdog on mosquito control since 2006. Mosquitoes could bring us the next global pandemic. We will be prepared with data, research, education, and environmentally-friendly, non-toxic natural pesticides. My dad was an 82nd Airborne Division paratrooper, infected with malaria in Sicily. Dad recovered in Army hospitals, but we saw dad suffer lifetime effects. LWV's Ms. Robin Nadeau asked me to help her investigate Anastasia Mosquito Control of St. Johns County, buying a $1.8 million no-bid, luxury Bell Jet Long Ranger helicopter incapable of killing a single skeeter, not unlike buying a Porsche to use with a snowplow. We persuaded AMCD to cancel illegal, no-bid helicopter contract, saving $1.8 million in 2007.
What do you see as the most pressing issues for this office and how do you propose to address them? Advancing research and education while protecting scientific integrity and employee whistleblower rights; safeguarding the independence of AMCD, an independent scientific and technical organization; protecting public health, the environment and public funds. Let's assure that "whistleblower" ethical employees are heard and heeded whenever they raise concerns. Let's resist any further effort by the St. Johns County Board of County Commissioners to take over independent AMCD, as attempted by former SJC County Administrator Michael Wanchick and County Commission Chairmen. I oppose allowing arbitration clauses in AMCD contracts, Yes, I've been a watchdog of mosquito control environmental protection and spending since December 2006. What training, experience, and characteristics qualify you for this position? Helped persuade our independent mosquito district to cancel unwise, no-bid luxury $1.8 million helicopter contract. Won declassification of our frail planet's largest-ever mercury pollution event (Oak Ridge, Tenn. Y-12 Nuclear Weapons Plant),triggering nationwide cleanups; recommended for Pulitzer Prize by DA. Clerked for USDOL Chief Administrative Law Judge Nahum Litt and Judge Charles Rippey. Staffer for Senators Ted Kennedy, Gary Hart & Jim Sasser. B.S.F.S., Georgetown U.; J.D., Memphis State U. Your watchdog, termed an "environmental hero" by FOLIO WEEKLY (after reporting City's illegal dumping of landfill in lake and illegal sewage effluent pollution of our saltwater marsh). Shall we ask questions, demand answers & expect democracy?
How important are environmental concerns when making decisions for the Anastasia Mosquito Control District? Very important Explain your answer. Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" informs good science and use of non-toxic natural pesticides as much as possible. Amid global climate change, the next pandemic could be a mosquito-borne disease. Let's protect AMCD independence, education and applied research to protect public health and our environment. I support AMCD's leadership on natural pesticides. I once reported FEMA and AMCD to federal environmental law officials when bald eagles were exposed to organophosphate pesticides. Support AMCD working with other mosquito control districts and officials to share scientific knowledge to protect all of us "non-target species": mosquito control workers, residents, tourists, pets, horses, livestock, bees and other pollinators, flora and fauna. St. Johns County is growing rapidly. How does this impact the management of mosquito control? Overdevelopment increases the expense of mosquito control and increases exposure of families to mosquitoes from wetlands. St. Johns County Commissioners, developers and their big money clout decide way too many unwise development decisions. This requires our nimble small mosquito control special taxing district to innovate, with sensitive adaptation of mosquito control techniques to protect entire new neighborhoods, which seem to spring up overnight, adjoining wetlands. Public education, applied research, sound science-based policies and non-toxic mosquito control methods, are all essential to protecting public health from mosquito-borne diseases. AMCD exists to prevent any outbreaks of deadly mosquito-borne diseases. We must do it right!
My Father helped liberate the first French town from the Nazis, before the sun rose that day. My Father was a proud anti-fascist. So am I. So are the people of the United States of America.
I am the only offspring of a proud anti-fascist.
My Father was almost 32 years old. Dad was put in charge of morale, the "morale non-com" (non-commissioned officer) in F Company, 505th Parachute Infantry Division (P.I.R). My Father's fellow soldiers called him "the old man." Most were much younger.
My Father was part of the 82nd Airborne 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment (P.I.R.), which jumped out of C-47 airplanes and "parachuted in"+ with our United States Army paratroopers around 1 AM: those who survived swiftly took over the first Nazi-occupied European town before the sun even rose that day. +
Fun fact: Walt Bogdanich, heroic three-time Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter, spent 59 days in St. Johns County during 2013, investigating the murder of Ms. Michelle O'Connell in the home of St. Johns County Deputy Jeremy Banks. ButKATHY NELSON, then an ignorant newly appointged St. Augustine Record "Editor and Director of Audience," accused three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Walt Bogdanich of "parachuting in," asking him if he had any "regrets." Long part of the Establishment, so often propagandizing for Sheriff DAVID SHOAR f/k/a "HOAR," the fetid St. Augustine Record was part of the coverup, never covering the murder until the PBS Frontline and New York Times stories appeared, serving as a willing accomplice to SHOAR's propaganda.
Update: On June 5, 2025, President DONALD JOHN TRUMP met in the White House Oval Office, told German Chancellor Friedrich Merz that D-Day was "not a great day for you." Chancellor Merz disagreed, thanking America for liberating Germany from the Nazis, and calling on continued support for Ukraine against the Russian invasion.
It was 82 years ago, on June 6, 1944, that my late father, Edward Adelbert Slavin, Sr., who had been a proud teenage union organizer and son of Polish immigrants, parachuted into the little town ofSainte-Mère-Église, in Nazi-occupied France, with the 82nd Airborne Division, 505th Parachute Infantry Division, F Company.
It was the first town in France that was liberated from the Nazis.
His 505th P.I.R. was the first to jump that night. Dad was one of 11,000 American paratroopers; he was a non-commissioned officer (non-com) with our 82nd ABN DIVN, 505th PIR, F Company. Dad landed on a roof at a French farmhouse. The farmer offered him refuge, thinking dad was a pilot who had been shot down. Dad thanked the farmer, but declined, saying "No, I have to go fight" the Nazis. The Southern New Jersey Chapter of the 82nd ABN DIVN ASSN is named for my dad, the "CPL EDWARD A. SLAVIN Chapter." I sometimes wear dad's "CPL EDWARD A. SLAVIN Chapter" jacket to events, including occasions when our City of St. Augustine is violating human and civil rights. In his spirit, we band of brothers and sisters in St. Augustine have repeatedly defeated the forces of oppression more than 75 times since 2005. In his spirit, we wear oppressors' scorn as a badge of honor.
Fun fact: I have a degree in diplomacy. Biggest laugh line I ever got from St. Augustine City Commissioners under prior mismanagement.
My dad was present at my graduation from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service when I got the B.S.F.S., the same degree that Bill Clinton got. Sure, call it BS For Sure. But based on my dad's stories, I understand what happens when nations and people stop talking and start killing.
In honor of my dad and millions of other veterans, alive, wounded and dead, we still fight for freedom daily here in America.
And in the words of UN Iraq weapons inspector Hans Blix, like any good diplomat, "we won't take no for an answer."
Footnote: My heroic late civil rights journalist friend Wm. Stetson Kennedy, who infiltrated and reported upon the KKK in Georgia and Florida, including KKK speeches by the House UnAmerican Activities Chair, Martin Dies, Jr. Fun fact: an old friend from Texas is one of Martin Dies' descendants, whom I first met in 1994. Before he died, global civil rights hero Wm. Stetson Kennedy was kind enough to sign one of his books to me, inter alia calling me a "freedom fighter." I am flattered. I blushed.)
Reemember the words of the "weather prayer, written by a Roman Catholic priest for Third Army General George S. Patton, Jr. before the Battle of Bastogne: "Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies and establish Thy justice among men and nations."
From Military History Online:
Sainte-Mère-Église
Sainte-Mère-Église stood in a pivotal location between Cherbourg and Caen whose capture fell to the 82nd Airborne. Unfortunately, sections of two planeloads of parachutists (2nd and 3rd Battalions of the 505th Parachute Infantry) were dropped directly over the village. To make the decent even worse, a farmhouse had caught fire either from tracers or the preceding aerial bombardment and illuminated the entire surrounding sky - making perfects targets out of the descending paratroopers. Many were killed on their way down, at least two were drawn into the fire itself, and many more were killed by the Germans after becoming entangled in trees and roofs. The few who did make it alive to the ground were almost immediately taken prisoner. After the initial excitement, curiously, the Germans went back to bed after the immediate threat subsided.
The commander of 3rd Battalion, 505th, Lt. Col. Ed Krause, had landed one mile west of the village and quickly began gathering stray men. Within an hour, he had managed to round up around 180 men and began heading straight into the village. As mentioned above, after all the immediate paratroopers were either killed or captured, and the fire had been put out, the German garrison went back to bed. Krause entered the town unhindered and was shown the German billets by a local Frenchman whom they ran across. 30 Germans were captured and about 10 were killed - while others fled to the nearby woods. By 6 A.M. Krause had secured the village and thus, cut off German communication and the main route between Cherbourg and the rest of the German Army.
Stained glass window in the chapel of Sainte-Mère-Églisedepicting the Virgin Mary and three paratroopers, one of whom is John Steele, my father's friend, who played dead after Nazis shot him in the foot as he hung from an architectural feature (he was played by Red Buttons in the movie, The Longest Day.
June 6, 1944: Sainte-Mère-Église
Wikipedia reports:
The 82nd Airborne's drop, mission "Boston", began at 01:51. It was also a lift of 10 serials organized in three waves, totaling 6,420 paratroopers carried by 369 C-47s. The C-47s carrying the 505th did not experience the difficulties that had plagued the 101st's drops. Pathfinders on DZ O turned on their Eureka beacons as the first 82nd serial crossed the initial point and lighted holophane markers on all three battalion assembly areas. As a result the 505th enjoyed the most accurate of the D-Day drops, half the regiment dropping on or within a mile of its DZ, and 75 per cent within 2 miles (3.2 km). Another website states: "The paratroopers jumped prior to the actual start of the invasion "H-Hour". Because of the tradition of being the first into the fight, the 505th Regimental motto is "H-MINUS". For their performance in the invasions the 505th was awarded the Presidential unit citation, the unit equivalent of the Medal of Honor awarded to individual soldiers. In the words of author Clay Blair, the paratroopers emerged from Normandy with the reputation of being a pack of jackals; the toughest, most resourceful and bloodthirsty in Europe."
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Freedom is not free.
The U.S. Capitol 1/6 insurrection taught us that freedom must be zealously guarded by all of us. My dad taught me, as JFK's dad taught him, that you have to stand up to people with power or they walk all over you. As the German immigrant, Civil War General and later Wisconsin's Republican U.S. Senator Carl Schurz so eloquently said, "My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”
On D-Day, I'm fondly remembering my late father, Edward Adelbert Slavin, Sr., a WWII 82nd Airborne Division paratrooper, sole surviving son of Polish-American immigrants who fled Russian oppression and pogroms.
Dad volunteered for military service the day after Pearl Harbor was sneak attacked by Japan. (The Navy would 't take him because he was color-blind. So he volunteered to be one of the new paratroopers in the 82nd Airborne Division.)
One Memorial Day, my dad bought American flags for every row house on our block in Pennsauken, N.J., just before we moved to a ten acre former farm in Mantua. The Cathoic Star-Herald ran an evocative photo of my dad holding me up as we adjusted one of the American flags he bought for Norwood Avenue. I learned from the caption or "cutline" of that ancient newspaper photograph that my dad was a machine-gunner with the 82nd. He never told me that.
With the 82nd, my dad jumped into Nazi-occupied territory on two continents, in North Africa, Sicily (where dad caught malaria) and Normandy (where dad was wounded).
My dad recovered from his knee wound in U.S. Army hospitals, including one in Amarillo, Texas. Dad later taught map-reading to soldiers at Fort Benning (where he and my mom were married after VJ-Day).
My dad was sometimes called "the old man" by his much younger 82nd Airborne comrades. He was the "morale non-com."
Research confirms that my dad was one of the oldest men in the 82nd, at nearly 32, when he and the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment helped liberate Sainte-Mère-Église, the very first French town taken back from Nazi tyranny, before dawn on June 6, 1944.
The South Jersey Chapter of the 82d ABN DIVN. ASSN., INC. is named in his honor, the "Edward A. Slavin Chapter." He served on the 82nd ABN DIVN ASSN. Board of Directors for years,
Dad did a lot to find 82nd veterans and enlist them in chapters and conventions. Dad and I researched newspapers using the Editor and Publisher yearbook we borrowed from the Woodbury Public Library, sending press releases around the Nation. Dad was grateful when many fellow former soldiers would read articles in their local newspapers (in North Dakota, or wherever). Inspired, they attended conventions, joined nascent chapters, and relived their experiences with former comrades, at a time when Americans had not yet come to grips with PTSD among our veterans,
As a Georgetown University student, I was proud to receive an 82nd ABN DIVN ASSN, INC. scholarship to help pay for my tuition and expenses.(A few years before, during the Vietnam War, my dad proudly stated that I was "anti-war" on national television, in an interview by Joe Garragiola with three 82nd veterans during their annual convention, on NBC's Today Show circa 1970 during the Vietnam War. It appeared Mr. Garragiola was trying to bait combat vets into condemning anti-war protesters. My dad calmly replied, "My son is anti-war," ending Garragiola's divisive line of attack.)
Here is a photo of my dad's company commander, the remarkable Col. Benjamin Hayes "Vandy" Vandervoort, recently located by Col. Mark A. Tolzmann, U.S.M.A., 1984 (Ret.):
Col. Benjamin Hayes Vandervoort was portrayed by John Wayne in the movie, The Longest Day.
* Footnote: My dad won three Bronze Stars, a fact he also did not tell me, and which I did not learn about, until Memorial Day weekend of 1998, when I saw a program on local television interviewing three veterans of three wars, while I was visiting at home during the recess of a nuclear powerplant whistleblower trial in Camden, N.J., where I was born,
Airborne All American
Benjamin Hayes "Vandy" Vandervoort (March 3, 1917 − November 22, 1990) was an officer of the United States Army, who fought with distinction in World War II. He was twice awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. He was portrayed by John Wayne in the 1962 war film The Longest Day. Vandervoort transferred to the newly established paratroopers in the summer of 1940, and was promoted to first lieutenant on 10 October 1941. Promoted to captain on 3 August 1942, almost eight months after the American entry into World War II, he served as a company commander in the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR), commanded by Colonel James M. Gavin. He was promoted to major on 28 April 1943,[2] a few weeks after the 505th had been assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division, then commanded by Major General Matthew Ridgway, and served as operations officer (S-3) in Colonel Reuben Tucker's 504th Parachute Regimental Combat Team in the Allied invasion of Sicily and in the landings at Salerno. Promoted to lieutenant colonel on 1 June 1944, he was the commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion, 505th PIR, during the American airborne landings in Normandy. Vandervoort led his battalion in defending the town of Sainte-Mère-Église on 6 June in "Mission Boston", despite having broken his ankle on landing. During "Operation Market Garden" in September 1944, he led the assault on the Waal Bridge at Nijmegen while the 3rd Battalion, 504th PIR, made the assault crossing. Ridgway described Vandervoort as "one of the bravest and toughest battle commanders I ever knew".At Goronne he was wounded by mortar fire, so was unable to take part in the 82nd Airborne Divisions' advance into Germany in 1945. He was promoted to colonel on 7 July 1946, and left the Army on 31 August. After studying at Ohio State University he joined the Foreign Service in 1947. He served as an executive officer in the Department of the Army in 1950-54, acting as joint political adviser to the commanding general United Nations forces and UN ambassador, Korea, in 1951-52, and studied at the Armed Forces Staff College (now the Joint Forces Staff College) in 1953. He served as a military attaché at the US embassy in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1955-58, and was assigned to the Department of State in 1958-60. He then served in the Executive Office of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), from 1960–66, also serving as a consultant on politico-military affairs to the US Army Staff in 1960, and as a plans and program officer on the Army Staff, Department of Defense, in 1964. Benjamin Vandervoort died on November 18, 1990 at the age of 73 years at a nursing home from the effects of a fall. He had two children with his wife Nedra; a son (Benjamin Hayes Vandervoort II) and a daughter (Marlin Vandervoort). Photo courtesy Michel Detrez D-Day Experience, Saint Côme du Mont
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Sainte-Mere-Eglise: The 82nd Airborne Drops into France
In Normandy on the night of June 5/6, 1944, the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division overcame countless SNAFUs to take a key village.
By Flint Whitlock
The night of June 5, 1944, was pretty much like every other night in Sainte-Mère-Église since the Germans had occupied Normandy and the Cotentin Peninsula in the summer of 1940: dark, quiet, chilly, and mostly boring.
While there had been innumerable overflights by Allied aircraft (probably taking reconnaissance photos) and the occasional aerial bombing, Normandy was still considered good duty for anyone who had had his fill of war on the Eastern Front and was recovering from wounds psychological and physical.
Here in Normandy there was plenty to eat and drink (especially Calvados, the strong brandy made from apples), scenery that hadn’t been mostly destroyed by heavy fighting, and French people who seemed to, if not exactly warmly welcome, at least be resigned to and tolerate the presence of foreign soldiers on their soil.
When not on actual watch, looking for the first signs of an invasion that might or might not come to this location, the soldiers in Normandy had busied themselves by following Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s orders to so strongly fortify the coast that the Allied invaders would not stand a chance, that they would, as Rommel had put it, be driven back into the sea.
This night, with the peninsula cloaked in darkness, and the farmers and villagers fast asleep beneath the cloud-obscured moon and the German soldiers—who were on watch in their observation bunkers straining with the help of strong French coffee to keep their eyelids open and scan the black horizon or sound asleep in their barracks or making love to their French mistresses—had no idea what was about to hit them.
If the Allies Could Control Sainte-Mère-Église, They Could Control the Cotentin
A glance at a map of northwest France reveals a basic truth: there are no large cities in the arc between Cherbourg and Caen; only Carentan, Montebourg, Bayeux, and Valognes can be regarded as sizable. A spiderweb of roads connect one town and village and hamlet to another. One town at the center of a web of roads is Sainte-Mère-Église. But the roads—mostly narrow farm roads suitable for bringing produce to market or for driving herds of slow-moving cows from the barn to the fields and back again—also made it hard to move large formations of military vehicles and large numbers of troops.
For centuries—ever since the Vikings or Normans first set foot here, giving the region its name of Normandie—the area has been pastoral and bucolic, with time measured by seasons rather than by the clock. The sturdy homes, shops, and churches are built solidly of stone—a whitish-grayish-yellowish limestone native to the region, capable of fending off the strong winds that blow in fiercely from the North Atlantic and sometimes rattle the shutters and windowpanes. Although treated to the same warm currents that can give southern England a semi-tropical feel (there are, after all, palm trees growing along the English Channel), the winds can sometimes be bitter, and the cold can penetrate through multiple layers of fabric like a gunshot.
The people, too, like their buildings, are a sturdy lot. Hard-working like any agrarian populace, the dour Normans typically rise at (or before dawn), put in a full day’s worth of physical work, eat a hearty dinner topped off with a glass or two of Calvados, and retire at sunset.
Aerial photo of Sainte-Mère-Église after its capture. Note American military vehicles lining the main street.
The stolid citizens of Normandy were not happy, of course, when, in June 1940, the gray-uniformed Germans marched in and took over, but they accepted their fate the way they accepted most everything that came their way. For the most part, they did not go out of their way to welcome the occupiers, nor did they collaborate with them. They merely tolerated them and went about their usual business of growing the apples that went into the making of Calvados, pulling fish from the Channel, and pasturing their cows, extracting the milk to make into cheese.
It was Sainte-Mère-Église, roughly halfway between Montebourg and Carantan, that had caught the eye of American military planners as early as 1942. Control Sainte-Mère-Église and you control the Cotentin, the planners saw. No fewer than five roads pass through it, plus it was only seven miles from the westernmost amphibious landing beach known as Utah. Drop an airborne division or two, along with their glider-infantry regiments, into the area and you stood a good chance of preventing German reinforcements from Cherbourg in the north and Brittany in the west from slamming into the troops coming ashore at Utah. The western end of the 60-mile-long beachhead that ran from La Madeleine to Ouistreham would thus be secure and the seaborne troops could move inland after overcoming local German opposition. Yes, Sainte-Mère-Église would definitely have to be taken in the early hours of D-Day.
Alexandre Renaud’s Dilemma
In the days before D-Day, Alexandre Renaud was a man with a dilemma. Besides his full-time job as the local pharmacist, the World War I veteran was also the mayor of Sainte-Mère-Église and, as such, he was expected by the occupiers to cooperate with them—and by his constituents to resist. Whenever the Germans gave him an order to do something, such as provide tools, transportation, and laborers to assist in the building of some defensive work, and he could find no one willing to perform the work, punishments would follow.
In May 1944 the Germans were demanding all sorts of things. It was obvious that the local Germans were expecting an invasion and that Sainte-Mère-Église would likely be caught up in it. The roads through the town were filled with trucks towing artillery pieces and carrying troops in all directions. In the fields cordoned off by hedgerows, holes were being dug and large poles were being planted—Rommelspargel (Rommel’s Asparagus) some wag called them—designed to discourage glider landings. Trenches were being dug, and anti-aircraft guns emplaced.
When Renaud spoke clandestinely with townspeople, everyone seemed to have an opinion: the Allies—if and when they attack—will cross at the Pas de Calais, Cherbourg, Le Havre, Dieppe, Boulogne, Dunquerque. Brittany will be the target. No, it will be the Cotentin. Ridiculous—the Allies will feint at Normandy but land on the Belgian coast. Few thought that Sainte-Mère-Église was in any real danger unless Allied bombers decided to target the anti-aircraft batteries that were being installed around the town. After all, air attacks had struck at the bridges at Beuzeville la Bastille and Les Moitiers en Bauptois. Someone else pointed out that leaflets were recently dropped over the area hinting at paratroop landings and showing illustrations of Allied tanks and jeeps and what British and American paratrooper uniforms looked like, and giving instructions on what to do in the event of an invasion. The Allies are probably dropping them all over France, someone else pointed out, just to keep the Germans guessing.
Renaud noted that the digging of trenches around Sainte-Mère-Église was almost completed, but that the Germans didn’t seem to be in any rush. “With the means of punishment at its disposal,” he said, “[the German command] could have made the work go five times as fast, and could have demanded that it should be done by June 1st.”
Their faces displaying a variety of emotions, these paratroopers from the 101st Airborne prepare to take off in a C-47 “Skytrain” on D-Day.
Throughout May, the presence of German troops increased. Renaud said, “We have seen encamped in our fields infantry, artillerymen, Aryan Germans, and also Georgians and Mongols with Asiatic features … commanded by German officers. In the latter part of May, the artillery units quarter in Gambosville [less than a mile south of Sainte-Mère -Eglise]. The officers come to see me at the Town Hall. They need spades, picks and saws immediately. The town is to be secured, and the work has to be finished in five days.
“I reply that there are no more spades or saws in the neighborhood and that they will have to canvass all the houses in order to find a few tools. They phone the Feldcommandantur at Saint Lô to get instructions about what punitive measures to take. He gives an evasive answer. Discouraged, they finally go to a hardware store where, after threatening to loot everything, they manage to obtain a few tools. Guns are then installed at all the town approaches; on the Carentan road, on the La Fière road, before Capdelaine, on the Ravenoville road.
Heroic William Stetson Kennedy was born on October 5, 1916. Here's my 2011 St, Augustine Record Guest column.
The day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, my Father,Edward Adelbert Slavin, Sr.volunteered for military service. The Navy refused to enlist him, because he was color-blind. My Father joined the 82nd Airborne Division, jumping out of perfectly good C-47 airplanes in North Africa, Sicily and Normandy. My Father helped liberate the first French town from Hitler and the Nazis on D-Day, June 6, 1944, before the sun even rose that day.
My dad and dozens of other mentors taught me a lot about heroism and patriotism. My Father told me, as JFK's father told him, that "you have to stand up to people with power or else they walk all over you."
One of my mentors was a St. Augustine and North Florida native, Wm. Stetson Kennedy, who successfully infiltrated and exposed the Ku Klux Klan and wrote books about it.
In Northeast Florida, there's a four acre St. Johns County Park dedicated to the memory of
my late friend and mentor, civil rights journalist and activist Wm. Stetson Kennedy, who infiltrated and exposed the Ku Klux Klan. https://www.visitstaugustine.com/thing-to-do/beluthahatchee-park It's a special place where Stetson and Woodie Guthrie fought off the KKK with shotguns. (Stetson later donated one of those shotguns to Woodie Gutrie's son, Arlo Guthrie, at an event in Jacksonville.) Stetson called me a "freedom fighter" in a book inscription, and Stetson once called me "Stetson Kennedy, Jr." as we examined his unreacted FBI files about the Christmas Day, 1951 KKK murders of Harry and Harriette More in Mims, Florida. Stetson dedicated his life to working for civil rights, justice and equality.
Stetson was so proud when President Barack Obama was elected President. But he knew the formidable forces of racism and fascism, and worked all of his life to expose them. He died on August 27, 2011, (anniversary of Ax Handle Saturday in Jacksonville, Florida in 1960, which Stetson mentioned on his deathbed).
In Stetson's honor, we are honored to continue working to remedy injustice and organized crimes against nature and human rights, including those perpetrated by the convicted felon in the White House.
Here's my column from the St. Augustine Record September 3, 2011, after Stetson Kennedy died:
Guest column: Stetson Kennedy was a true hero, ahead of his time
Posted: September 3, 2011 - 11:49pm.
I
By ED SLAVIN
St. Augustine
My friend and mentor, Stetson Kennedy, died last Saturday at the age of 94. Stetson was a true American hero, of whom Studs Terkel wrote:
"Stetson Kennedy, in all the delightful years I've known him, has always questioned authority -- whether it be the alderman or the president. He has always asked the question 'Why?' Whether it be waging a war based on an outrageous lie or any behavior he considers undemocratic, he has always asked the provocative question. In short, he could well be described as a ''troublemaker'' in the best sense of the word. With half a dozen Stetson Kennedys, we can transform our society into one of truth, grace and beauty."
Nearly six years ago, I was introduced to Stetson Kennedy by our mutual friend, David Thundershield Queen (now-deceased Native American advocate) at Stetson's birthday party at Beluthahatchee. Stetson impressed me with his courage, intellect and dogged determination. I enjoyed the pleasure of his company, whether talking about life or poring over FBI documents. Stetson was a kindred spirit. I was humbled and flattered when Stetson called me "Stetson Kennedy, Jr." upon our second meeting.
I had lunch with Stetson Kennedy earlier this year, at Athena (local Greek Restaurant, across from the former Slave Market, where two civil rights monuments now stand). I asked Stetson if he knew where our City Manager was that day. "I don't usually follow him," Stetson said. I told him that City Manager John Regan was visiting three Civil Rights Museums, then on his way to meeting our former UN Ambassador Andrew Young, to discuss a National Civil Rights Museum here. Upon hearing the news, Stetson Kennedy was so proud -- he almost cried. Our City of St. Augustine has come so far in such a short time, and Stetson Kennedy got to see it all. Stetson exemplified Mahatma Gandhi's precept: "Be the change you want to see in the world."
Stetson Kennedy was proud that our Nation's Oldest European-founded city will soon have a National Civil Rights Museum, thanks to the courage of the people who demonstrated here in 1964, including Ambassador Andrew Young.
Stetson Kennedy lived to see an African-American elected president of the United States and another African-American elected to be mayor of Jacksonville, Florida. That's where it all began for Stetson, as a young boy who heard about his African-American nanny raped by vicious Klansmen, retaliation for asserting her rights on a Jacksonville bus. Kennedy helped end the Klan as he knew it: the motto of his life might be "Eracism."
Stetson Kennedy's ideas live on, in the spirit of the character Tom Joad from John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath: "I'll be all around in the dark -- I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look -- wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build -- I'll be there, too."
Stetson Kennedy didn't live nearly long enough to see all of his goals achieved, but he pointed the way for future generations. He was a true hero, ahead of his time. As Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Bernard Malamud wrote in The Natural, "Without heroes, we are all plain people, and don't know how far we can go."
*
Ed Slavin received a B.S. in Foreign Service, Georgetown University; a J.D. from Memphis State University, now University of Memphis, and is a leader on environmental justice issues.
Florida Supreme Court Justice Carlos Muñiz Credit:State of Florida
On Nov. 3, Florida voters will find a question near the bottom of the ballot that most will skip: “Shall Justice Carlos G. Muñiz of the Supreme Court be retained in office?” Don’t skip it.
We do not make this recommendation lightly, but vote “No.” Merit retention is not a referendum on whether voters like a judge’s politics, and we have long resisted treating it as one. It asks something narrower: Has this justice done the job the way it is supposed to be done? The answer this time turns on a principle older than any of the controversies before the court today.
That principle is stare decisis, Latin for “to stand by things decided.” When a court has answered a question, it keeps that answer unless there is an overwhelming reason to change it. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis put it plainly nearly a century ago. In most matters, he wrote, “it is more important that the applicable rule of law be settled than that it be settled right.”
That can sound strange. Shouldn’t courts always get it right? But Brandeis understood something essential. Every judge believes they are right; that is why judges disagree. If each new majority were free to undo the work of the last, the law would mean whatever the most recent appointments say it means. Families, businesses, doctors and patients could not plan their lives around a law that shifts with the court’s membership. Settled law is not a concession to error. It is the backbone of the rule of law, the principle that courts are bound by more than just the fleeting preferences of whoever holds power at the moment.
Florida’s Supreme Court once took that principle seriously. Before overruling a precedent, it asked a series of questions. Has the rule proved unworkable? Have people come to rely on it? Have the facts or the law changed? In 2020, shortly after Justice Muñiz arrived on the court with no prior judicial experience, the DeSantis appointee joined a majority that discarded that framework. From now on, the court said, it would overrule a precedent whenever a majority found it “clearly erroneous.” Reliance and stability would no longer carry independent weight. The case was a death-penalty appeal, but the rule it announced reaches every area of Florida law.
Nowhere has the cost been clearer than on abortion.
In 1980, Florida voters did something most states never did. They added an explicit right of privacy to their constitution, protecting every person’s right “to be let alone and free from governmental intrusion” into private life. Nine years later, in “In re T.W.,” a unanimous Florida Supreme Court held that this right protects a woman’s decision whether to end a pregnancy. That court included justices appointed by governors of both parties, and one member who had helped shape the privacy amendment itself.
The ruling was not an outlier that slipped by unnoticed. The court reaffirmed it in2017 and again in 2003. For 35 years, Floridians, their doctors and their legislators organized their lives and laws around it. Whatever one thinks of abortion, that is exactly what settled law looks like.
In April 2024, Justice Muñiz joined the majority that swept it away. The court held that the privacy clause had never protected abortion at all. That decision immediately triggered a six-week ban, earlier than many women know they are pregnant. Nothing in the constitution’s text had changed. The facts had not changed. What had changed was the court’s membership.
At oral argument, Justice Muñiz openly questioned whether the court should keep recognizing the right. In a separate opinion that year, he wrote of a “pre-constitutional, objective moral reality” in the constitution’s Declaration of Rights. Anti-abortion advocates read that passage as a signal that the court might go further still. A justice who treats a 35-year-old precedent as an open question, and invites the next challenge in the same breath, has not settled the law. He has unsettled it.
Justice Jorge Labarga, alone in dissent, did not mince words. “Roe v. Wade” had dominated public debate for seven years when Floridians adopted their privacy amendment in 1980. That dominance, he wrote, “makes it inconceivable that in 1980, Florida voters did not associate abortion with the right of privacy.” He lamented that the majority had supplanted “Florida voters’ understanding—then and now,” and he dissented “with deep dismay.” Justice Labarga was appointed by a Republican governor and has served as chief justice himself. For six years he has been the court’s lone voice warning that Florida law is being rewritten not because the law changed, but because the court’s membership did.
The same approach has reached the civil courthouse. In 2020 the court, on its own initiative, abandoned a summary-judgment standard Florida had followed since 1966. That standard kept genuinely disputed cases before juries. Unable to call its own precedent clearly erroneous, the court simply rewrote the rule. Justice Muñiz joined. Justice Labarga “strongly” dissented, warning of the intrusion on the role our Constitution gives to juries.
Some will argue that a “no” vote politicizes the courts. The opposite is true. Merit retention exists so that voters can hold accountable the justices they never chose. No Florida Supreme Court justice has ever lost a retention election, which means this check exists in theory only.
Readers who welcomed the court’s abortion ruling should ask themselves a question. Would they accept the next majority reversing it just as easily? A right that lasts only until the next appointment is no right at all. That is true of every right, not just the ones we favor.
Better that the law be settled than settled right. Justice Muñiz has chosen otherwise. Voters should decline to retain him.
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