President's Message
On behalf of the League, best wishes for a Happy Thanksgiving and bountiful end to 2021 (otherwise known as the year 2 A.H. (Annus Horribilis). Hope springs from the darkness and chaos. And, when we open our hearts, gratitude will rise from change and challenge.
Change is coming to the League. We wish best wishes to Tania Mandigo as she departs for new opportunities in North Carolina with her fiancé. We are so grateful for her contributions to the League and her dedicated service to all of you. With Tania’s departure, we welcome Lissette Comstock to the League compliance team as a shared compliance specialist and will no doubt prove herself to be a valuable member of the team here. There are more exciting announcements to come in the months ahead as we position to further help you “bring home the bacon” in 2022.
In 1936 Connecticut Governor Wilbur Lucius Cross penned a particularly poignant Thanksgiving Proclamation. It was written in the depths of the Great Depression and eight months after the state had endured the worst flood in its history. Several small merchants had been wiped out and14,000 people had been left homeless.
It must have been tough for the state to feel much gratitude that year. Yet Gov. Cross' soothing evocation of the Connecticut countryside, his thanks for the virtues that had gotten the state through a rough time, was what people needed to hear then — and now.
Proclamation issued by Governor Wilbur Cross on Nov. 12, 1936
"Time out of mind at this turn of the seasons when the hardy oak leaves rustle in the wind and the frost gives a tang to the air and the dusk falls early and the friendly evenings lengthen under the heel of Orion, it has seemed good to our people to join together in praising the Creator and Preserver, who has brought us by a way that we did not know to the end of another year. In observance of this custom, I appoint Thursday, the twenty-sixth of November, as a day of Public Thanksgiving for the blessings that have been our common lot and have placed our beloved State with the favored regions of earth -- for all the creature comforts: the yield of the soil that has fed us and the richer yield from labor of every kind that has sustained our lives -- and for all those things, as dear as breath to the body, that quicken man's faith in his manhood, that nourish and strengthen his spirit to do the great work still before him: for the brotherly word and act; for honor held above price; for steadfast courage and zeal in the long, long search after truth; for liberty and for justice freely granted by each to his fellow and so as freely enjoyed; and for the crowning glory and mercy of peace upon our land; -- that we may humbly take heart of these blessings as we gather once again with solemn and festive rites to keep our Harvest Home.
Given under my hand and seal of the State at the Capitol, in Hartford, this twelfth day of November, in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and thirty six and of the independence of the United States the one hundred and sixty-first."
Wilbur Cross was an educator and politician who served as governor of Connecticut during one of the most turbulent and challenging times in America's history. Growing up in Mansfield, he earned his doctorate from Yale in 1889 and spent several years as a schoolteacher and principal in Westport before accepting a position as an English professor at Yale in 1894. After retiring, Cross took an interest in politics and accepted the Democratic Party's nomination for governor in 1930. Serving as Connecticut's governor for two terms (1931-1939), Cross helped see Connecticut through the Great Depression, pushed for the repeal of Prohibition, and even presided over the opening ceremonies for the newly constructed Merritt Parkway in 1938.
[excerpted from Tapping the Scales of Justice - A Dose of Connecticut Legal History and the Hartford Courant, Nov 26, 2015]
With deep thanks to all of you,
Bruce
