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JD Salinger has passed away.  ED209 called this one first, but I wanted to give my two cents.  ”Catcher in the Rye” was a great story.  Unfortunately, when it was assigned as reading in 10th grade, I had the world’s worst student teacher fumbling to smash it into my skull.  She had little to no control of the class, and really, the handle was lost when she said the infamous “Holden himself” line about 10% of the way in.  ”Holden himself” became a class joke, and that was it.  Sophomoric humor, to be sure…but remember, this was 10th grade.

Years later, I revisited “Catcher”.  I read it at my own pace instead of what the WWST had dictated to us, and was finished within days.  It is a classic, and it does deserve to be taught in school.  RIP JD Salinger; and to those of you who haven’t read any of his works, start with “Catcher in the Rye”.

A drunken note leads to a canceled holiday for hundreds aboard a Hawaiian-bound plane.  And the worse part: the plane had to return to where it started, which was Oregon.  Boo-urns!