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Edenmoor records batted back and forth between Spratt, Mulvaney | Fort Mill Times - Fort Mill, SC

State Sen. Mick Mulvaney, R-Indian Land, a candidate for the Fifth Congressional District seat in South Carolina.

Edenmoor records batted back and forth between Spratt, Mulvaney | Fort Mill Times - Fort Mill, SC

LANCASTER -- The Edenmoor debacle has come back up and again been laid at the feet of Indian Land developer Mick Mulvaney because U.S. Rep. John Spratt can't talk about his record, Mulvaney said last week.
Mulvaney, a first-term Republican state senator, is challenging the 14-term incumbent congressman in the November general election. Spratt mentioned Edenmoor at a debate in Lake Wylie last month and last week began airing an ad, also available online, called "Flipped," based on the development and its woes.

The failed development is coming up again because Spratt has "nothing else to go on," Mulvaney said at a press conference he called last Thursday in downtown Lancaster.
Most Democratic incumbents facing stiff challenges from conservatives are using defense of Social Security as a big part of their playbook, Mulvaney said, adding that Spratt can't use that tactic because he has told some newspapers over the years he favors privatization of some kind.
Mulvaney said he also believes the ad is a sign that Spratt is no longer running his campaign. Some reports say this is the first time he has gone negative in his 28-year career as a politician.
Nu Wexler, a South Carolina native and Democratic operative who now lives in Washington, D.C., has returned to the Palmetto State to assist Spratt's campaign. He scoffed at Mulvaney's claim, saying last week’s press conference is a sign the Lancaster County senator is worried.
Democratic Party operatives who attended the press conference say Mulvaney did not tell the whole truth in his press conference.
York County Democratic Party Chairman Richards McCrae actually said after the press conference that Lancaster County Council Chairman Rudy Carter was "lying out of his [butt]" in defending Mulvaney.
Democratic officials are confident of their facts. One provided the Fort Mill Times with a compact disc containing a timeline, longer than a similar timeline Mulvaney prepared, an audio recording of Mulvaney speaking to Lancaster County Council, and about 34 different records related to the property in Edenmoor.
The records prepared by the Spratt campaign are lengthy.
Mulvaney also released a stack of records that he said detail his purchase of the property and the sale of it, a planned development agreement sold by his successors in the project, and records of permits issued by DHEC to those successors for initial work.
Mulvaney is still relatively unknown and has not really been vetted by voters across the 14 counties that comprise the Fifth Congressional District, Wexler said.
Wexler was upset that he and other campaign staffers were not allowed to enter the press conference, but Rainey and the other Democrats were allowed inside. The officials who went in and Wexler said Mulvaney is refusing to accept any responsibility for what happened to Edenmoor.
While Wexler took being barred from the room as a slight, Mulvaney addressed the Democrats who did get inside with cordiality at times, calling them "my Democratic friends." One Democratic aide from the state party in Columbia brought a video camera and recorded the entire press conference. That video has apparently been posted on YouTube.
A freelance writer working for the Fort Mill Times also videotaped the press conference and the entire video is available on YouTube.
Mulvaney said he hoped to put the issue behind him and move on "to the things people want to talk about, the things we need to talk about."
When asked if it indicated Spratt is having trouble this campaign season because this kind of ad was coming out so close to the election season, the Democrats at the event said it is a difficult campaign season for incumbents and Democrats.
"They could run a stray dog against Spratt and do as well as they are doing," this campaign season, McCrae said.
But as it stood, Mulvaney said that 35 days before the election, District 5 was getting half-truths and innuendo.
"This is what people hate about American politics," he said.

No way to know profit, but records show mlllions involved

State Sen. Mick Mulvaney, R-Indian Land, a candidate for the Fifth Congressional District seat in South Carolina, at a press conference he called last week.

Republican Congressional candidate Mick Mulvaney on Thursday, Oct. 7, provided copies of land transaction records detailing the time his company assembled the project for a development he called St. Katherine's, a development at the heart of an attack ad from his Democratic opponent John Spratt, a 14-term incumbent.
The development has failed and there is runoff from cleared land running off into a nearby creek. It was supposed to have thousands of dwellings, but has about 50. Bonds were used to build athletics fields, a cabana and an EMS station are in default.
Spratt's ad blames Mulvaney and said he walked away from the project after selling the land for a $7 million profit.
The first transaction was the purchase of 179.44 acres on Sept. 10, 1999. The land was bought for $713,715.60, or $3,977.46 an acre.
Two purchases on Jan. 5, 2005 for $39,583.33 of 36.8 acres completed the work Mulvaney did assembling St. Katherine's.
The development totaled 834.37 acres, bought for $4,928,077.56, or an average of $5,906.35 an acre.
Mulvaney also provided three records that detail the sale of the land from his to Lawson's Bend LLC, a partnership between GS Carolina and Sandler LLC Those sales were in May 5, 2005.
The records show three land sales:
• $659,277 if 36 acres;
• $10,689,260 for 179.4 acres; and
• $3,030,950 for an unspecified acreage.
That's a total of $10,689,260, according to a spreadsheet of the numbers.
The Spratt ad said Mulvaney made $7 million when he sold the property.
In his press conference, Mulvaney said subtracting the cost of his purchases from the price for which it was sold would provide a "gross" figure, but not a profit. It doesn't include the costs spent assembling the parcels, legal fees etc.
The difference between the cost to assemble the parcels and the cost to sell them is actually more than $9 million, according to the records Mulvaney provided.
Mulvaney said he would not say how much profit he made on the project, but showed select reporters income tax records from 2005 and 2006 that show a total annual income from one of his businesses substantially lower than the amount Spratt's ad claims he made.
However, Mulvaney has assembled the land for the development using several different companies.
The records Mulvaney's provided show 12 transactions, with parcels being bought by:
• K&J Partners of N.C.;
• Wedgewood Properties LLC;
• St. Catherine Properties LLC;
• Mulvaney Properties/Lancaster LLC; and
• Mulvaney Properties/South Carolina. LLC.
Those are different pieces of the Mulvaney family development business.
The records Mulvaney provided show he transferred all the land to Lawson's Bend from just two arms, K&J and St. Catherine Properties.
Spratt campaign workers provided a compact disc containing similar records. The records obtained by the Spratt campaign show slightly different prices for land transfers and acreage.
The Spratt record search apparently missed one parcel Mulvaney listed as being in St. Katherine. But Spratt's record show three sales to Lawson's Bend totaling the same amount as in Mulvaney's records.
Both indicate Mulvaney and family sold the land for about $9 million more than they bought it. Mulvaney said he owned just a 3.33 percent interest in the entity that sold the property to Lawson's Bend.
The Spratt disc also contains a number of other documents related in some way to Edenmoor.

Here are the figures from records released by Mulvaney.
Purchases

Date		Parcel size	Price
9/10/99		179.44	$713,715.60
5/1/01		294.7	$1,600,000.00
9/6/01		51	$100,050.00
9/6/01		(Same)	$259,920.00
6/24/02		13.89	$95,000.00
6/27/02		6.1	$24,757.20
7/29/02		23	$90,798.08
8/28/02		59.3	$435,000.00
8/28/02		138.24	$750,000.00
1/6/03		31.9	$188,836.68
1/5/05		12.8	$320,000.00
1/5/05		24	$350,000.00
Total		834.37	$4,928,077.56
Sale
Date		Parcel Size	Price
5/5/05		36	$659,277.00
5/5/05		630.93	$3,030,950.00
5/5/05		179.4	$10,689,260.00
Total sale			$14,379,487.00
Difference			9,451,409.44

Mulvaney holds press conference to dispute allegations in Spratt ad

State Sen. Mick Mulvaney, R-Indian Land, and his campaign staff walk across Main Street in Lancaster before a press conference.

Republican Congressional candidate Mick Mulvaney denied allegations made in a campaign advertisement by incumbent U.S. Rep. John Spratt, the 14-term Democrat he is seeking to unseat in November.

The ad, called "Flipped," makes numerous implications without giving him much to categorically deny, says Mulvaney. However, he says it is harmful not only to his reputation but to others as well.

"This is getting a little out of control, by the way," he said Thursday, Oct. 7.

"This is the type of thing that has to stop in this race," said Mulvaney, a state senator from Indian Land whose district includes parts of both Lancaster and York counties.

"It's one half-truth and innuendo after another," Mulvaney said of the ad and an old letter to the editor of a Lancaster County paper that attacked him.

Mulvaney said he doesn't like the attacks but expects them. But he said it is out of hand because others are now also being attacked.

Mulvaney said a Spratt volunteer said at a recent event "they know" Mulvaney bought off Lancaster County Councilman Rudy Carter, who has in the past defended Mulvaney's involvement in the deal.

Carter, a Democrat, also attended Mulvaney's press conference and said his father told a man's good name was his best attribute.

"Mick's been a friend of mine for a long time. John's been a friend of mine for a long time. I think the world of both of them," he said. "But if John Spratt knows some of his campaign people made comments like that, than John and I have a problem."

Mulvaney said it is going too far.

"This is my life, this is my family, this is how I provide for my wife and family, and I am being accused of some of the most heinous thing you can do in business, which is to be unethical," he said.

A reporter with the Associated Press and some Spratt campaign staffers arrived late and were not allowed into the crowded but not packed room at a Lancaster law firm where Mulvaney held his meeting. While the Spratt staffers were barred, a couple of representatives of the York and Lancaster county Democratic parties, as well as a Democratic campaign staffer from Columbia armed with a digital camera to record the proceedings, arrived on time and were allowed in.

The Lancaster County land deal had been in the works since 1999, which Mulvaney said was the major evidence that the property had not been "flipped," as the name of the ad says.

Flipping in real estate happens over a short period of time, sometimes with property being sold twice the same day.

Spratt's ad says Mulvaney made a $7 million profit selling the failed 500-acre development near Indian Land.

Mulvaney said he sold the land in 2005 and showed select reporters two tax forms from 2005 and 2006. The total annual income listed on the records for those years was millions less than what Spratt alleges in his ad. Mulvaney did not allow reporters to copy the forms and requested they not write down the specific figures.

Mulvaney said the forms were the S-Corporation filings for one of his LLCs.

Spratt's ad says Mulvaney secured $30 million in bonds to develop the land. Mulvaney did get permission from Lancaster County to issue bonds in that amount, but those bonds were never sold. When he sold the land to later developers, they scuttled much of the plans, including the zoning he had done for it, and revamped the overall plan.  Lawson's Bend LLC got its own bonds, and those bonds are in default.

So Spratt's ad, which says the project failed despite the bonds Mulvaney got, is not factual in that regard.

Mulvaney's development would have had apartments, more homes so a higher density. The homes would have been cheaper homes. The new developers wanted to sell fewer but higher-end homes.

The land development never materialized as either Mulvaney or the second team envisioned, he said. He blames it entirely on the collapse of the housing market.

The ad also says Mulvaney vouched for the new development team and made a promise to stay involved. The ad says Mulvaney's "partners" had defaulted on a land deal in North Carolina to the tune of $72 million right before Mulvaney vouched for them to Lancaster County Council. Mulvaney said he didn't know about that failure of one of two partners, but it is easily understood and explained.

He said IBM pulled out of a research park in the N.C. Research Triangle and it ruined the park, but the company was a sound one business with ties to Sara Lee and PYI/Monarch Foods. Parts of the land company are still in business, he said.

Mulvaney said he dealt primarily with the other partner, GS Carolina, which he said is a strong business still in the area. It has another development of the size and scale of Edenmoor that is still under active development north of Charlotte.

Mulvaney said he wanted to "bid" to remain the manager of the development process, but "that never happened." He said he hasn't talked to the company official he most dealt with for at least two years.

Mulvaney denied making $7 million selling the land, but refused to answer direct questions about how much he spent to assemble the land, first for his own development company, nor how much he made when he sold it in 2005.

"Our business is private," he said. "We don't disclose our profits. I own 3.33 percent of the entity that owned this land."

He assumes that critics of his involvement have taken deed stamps for the 12 purchases he made to assemble the property and subtracted those totals from the totals on the deed stamps from the three sales he made to Lawson's Bend.

That would be a gross number, however.

"That would be like looking at the raw materials on a car and saying that was the cost of the car," he said.

He would not detail how much he spent assembling the land. In addition to the purchase prices, he would have had to pay legal fees on the purchases, pay filing fees for zoning issues, and pay for staff time.

He admitted releasing the exact figures might demonstrate what actually happened, and said he would speak to reporters off the record. During that conversation, he showed the two tax forms, but they did not have a gross total for his purchases or for his sale to Lawson Bend.

He had earlier said that kind of information is never released in his business.

"It just isn't done," he said.

The ad, by innuendo, blames Mulvaney for all that has happened to the development since. But he said his company never turned over any dirt on the project or did any land preparation.

Any of the work done in the development was done by his successors on the project. About 50 homes, soccer fields and an EMS station have been built.  The bond obtained by the second developers paid for the fields and the EMS station.

But sidewalks are in need of repair, as is the EMS station. There is runoff from cleared tracts of land going into a nearby creek.

Mulvaney said Lancaster County taxpayers are not on the hook, neither for his $30 million bond, because it was never issued or sold, nor the later bond Lawson's Bend obtained. The bonds are not general obligation bonds, Mulvaney said. The residents in Edenmoor pay a "special assessment" on their property tax bill, above and beyond their regular county property taxes.

Had the development succeeded, thousands of households would be paying the "assessment," but instead, about 50 or so families now in the development are on the hook.

Mulvaney said the development should have been foreclosed on. He said that is how such failed developments normally proceed. But the banks holding the liens on the property are refusing to foreclose because of the collapse of the housing market and the freeze on credit and financing the country has been experiencing.

It's a case of regulatory gridlock, he said.

Mulvaney's campaign released copies of deeds for the purchases and the sale, along with a timeline of the transactions. See related post.

The Spratt campaign released a compact disc with records it says establishes that the ad is true.

The general election is "35 days away," Mulvaney said at the time of the Thursday press conference.



Mulvaney has created a website to respond to the Edenmoor ad.

Here's raw footage of the press conference, in three pieces.

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3

I want my country back

I posted this one on Facebook directly a while back. But it's still worth a look.

I want my country back; the cry has become by the Republican and conservative powerless.

Well, welcome to my world. It is time, perhaps now, for you to feel the pain that many, many others have been feeling for eight years.

I am not defending the current healthcare bill or the deficit spending going on in Washington D.C. right now. Both, quite frankly, horrify me.

We need some kind of healthcare INSURANCE reform, because, while our healthcare system is in some ways the envy of the world, too many do not have full access to it. There is no denying it.

The deficit? That is a discussion for another time, but it needs to be stopped.

But those on the right who are raising non-issues like the President’s birth certificate and “socialism” are crybabies. They lost an election, and now, suddenly, they care about deficit spending, when we built up a huge deficit in the preceding eight years, one that set record after record, without even taking the costs of the War on Terror into account.

You want your country back?

Well, I’ve wanted my country back for a while now, wanted it back since it became apparent that our leaders response to 9/11 was changing us into something we absolutely are not, something we have never been.

When I grew up there was something called the Soviet Union. Today’s children do not know about it, except as a historical fact.

It was a monolithic, oppressive nation/empire comprised of several communist/socialistic regimes that surrounded what we now call Russia. We were at war with Russia for almost 40 years. They called it a Cold War, but it got hot in some places.

We lived under a threat of nuclear annihilation my entire childhood. We developed the first atomic bombs, but after we “refined” that into the hydrogen bomb, with its megaton-possible explosive potential, the Soviets developed it too, in part because of stolen technology.

We thought we could die, any day. We thought that we would look up in the sky one day and we’d see not one, but hundreds of mushroom clouds. I grew up in New York City, and even at 14, I knew I was living in a first-strike target. There was a public bomb shelter in our apartment building’s basement with Civil Defense crackers by the box load.

Once Russia got the bomb, we had to build more bombs, and they had to build more bombs, and we had to build more bombs. It became an escalating cycle that threatened not our planet, but certainly human life as we know it on the planet.

It wasn’t pretty what we did, but through it all, we had what we all agreed was the moral high ground. We built those weapons to prevent their use against us.

We were the good guys.

Nuns in a parochial school taught me that we were the good guys. World War II was not as distant then as it is now. Korea was closer, and I remembered watching the TV news when Saigon fell.

We were the good guys. We went to Europe to free those conquered by the Nazis, putting the war in Europe at a higher priority than the war in the Pacific, even though we had been attacked by Japan. But we cleaned up the Pacific too. We went to South Korea to defend it from North Korean aggression. We went to South Vietnam to defend it against North Vietnamese insurgency.

Those explanations seem very simplistic to an older person who has read much deeper into what happened. North Korea, they now say, might never have invaded South Korea if the latter country hadn’t been left out of a speech listing who our best friends were. Still, that is the county I grew up believing in, the country I was taught to love, given good reasons to love.

And we were the good guys for another reason. Because we were actually good.

The Soviets were bad. Evil.

They put their own people in prison with show trials or no trials. They would go to other countries and pick people up, putting a black bag over their heads and kidnapping them, taking them to other countries in the Soviet bloc. People just disappeared in Russia, never to be heard from again. They kept gulags in Siberia where they exiled political opponents who were too high profile to be simply made to vanish.

They invaded other countries on pretextual reasons, or for no reason at all. They just wanted to be bigger. Hungary was one. They sent troops into Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia. Afghanistan was the most recent one when I was a young lad.

They killed innocent people. We still use Adolf Hitler, who killed 6 million Jews and perhaps 5 million others in death camps as the gold standard of evil. But Josef Stalin had a lot more time to do what Hitler did, and he was never directly opposed as Hitler was. He killed, they say, 17 million people.  Throw in a famine he helped make worse in Ukraine, it rises to 23 million.

And the other main thing the bad guys did that we didn’t do is torture.

We were attacked on 9/11 and while posturing a stance of strength throughout the prior presidential administration, our leaders have actually been acting out of pure terror.

When you abandon your principles and do things that you criticized the other guy for doing for years, that ranks as sheerest hypocrisy. We had a justified cause to go to war in Afghanistan. I might even say justification for going actually nuclear, the consequences be damned.

But we chose to divert to Iraq. I have interviewed a man who stormed the beach at Normandy more than once, and he has brought it up each time. He is against war. He was for the creation of the United Nations because the world absolutely needs an organization that is devoted to preventing war between the nation states of the world. He is scandalized by the war in Iraq.

We all know that our troops there have done incredibly brave things every day, have fought with distinction, valor and honor, but they shouldn’t have ever gone.

The country I grew up in was a country that defended the little guy, the little countries, from the big bad Soviet Bear, from the Nazis and Japanese imperialists.

We didn’t kidnap people. We didn’t take our own people and put them in prison camps without benefit of trial. We didn’t make people just disappear. We didn’t build concentration camps that people were never, ever going to leave from. We didn’t put black bags over people’s heads to take them or to mistreat them.

We did not, ever, torture them.

We weren’t the good guys just because we said we were. We were the good guys because we did the right thing, and while you could find examples of excesses in all our wars, those were exceptions to the norm.

But under the prior presidential administration, we did all those things.

To me, the most egregious sin isn’t actually the torture. I think that is the inevitable outcome when you first make a determination that the rules you hold will not apply anymore.

You know, I’d love to help you fight “socialism.” I won’t fight healthcare reform because we need the system fixed. But the bad parts of this proposal? Sure. I’ll be an ally in the fight for a sound fiscal policy, for budget restraint and against deficit spending.

But I won’t let you use all this vile language to do it.

You want your country back?

Go to the back of the line.  I’ve wanted my country back for eight years now.

I want us to be the good guys again.

We need a new political party

I saw an item on the Huffington Post.com in which former President Bill Clinton says the "new GOP" is making George W. Bush look like a "liberal."
I also saw a recent item there where Clinton "fired back" at Rachel Maddow, who said that Bill Clinton was one of the most successful Republican presidents ever.
I think Clinton might be referring to the Tea Party candidates who are now winning primaries all over the country. Now, the strength of this movement will be shown in the November General Election.
Is the Tea Party shifting the balance of the national debate? Or is it just fracturing the Republican Party? We can't know until the party shows its teeth against the entire electorate in a county or a state. In states where the traditional Republican voters outnumber the traditional Democrats, the Tea Party might have some strength.
In most states, the electorate is usually more evenly divided. Some Republicans are going to stay away from the polls because they don't agree with the extremes the Tea Party represents. So the Tea Party's success in primaries might ultimately help the Democratic Party.
And as for what Maddow said about Clinton, I find that amusing. He was elected because he was a "new" more moderate Democrat. He tried to swing left in his early first term, but the GOP Revolution of 1994 put an end to that. He then began to work with a hostile Congress and got a lot farther by compromising than he did by running and governing from the left.
I understand why he objected to being called Republican. But I think somewhere in the midst of these two stories, there lies the future of the United States.
If there was a political party that was immune to the extremes on both the right and the left, a true centrist political party, this country could work a lot better.
That's what we needs. Most of the people in this country agree on most things. They really do. But the moderate majority is the nice, peaceful folk who live on a fertile plain in between opposing armies.  When those armies want to duke it out, they do it on our land, leaving spoiled earth behind. They divide most of us, asking us to give up on most of the things we think important because we are told THIS one issue is more important than THAT other.
I turned 18 in 1984 and got to vote for president. I think I voted for Ronald Reagan.
Four years later, my choices were George Herbert Walker Bush and Michael Dukakis. I pencilled in a communist candidate, I think, because I knew Dukakis couldn't lead and Bush was stained by the corruption in Ronald Reagan's White House. Iran-Contra, the S&L crisis. It was too much to vote for four more years of that, even though the original George H.W. Bush was more of a moderate than anyone seems to remember. (Voodoo economics.)
I've flipped back and forth. I actually voted for Mark Sanford as governor of South Carolina, for his first term. But not for his second term.
I couldn't put on any particular hat for this election. Obama talked pretty but was being pulled by the extremes. At the same time, he had not done anything of note as a state senator or as a U.S. Senator in the two years of his office he spent before actually turning his attention to running.
I might have voted for the libertarian this time around. I can't remember.
Twice now I've vote in such a way that my ballot might be described as "sending a message."
Doesn't work.
This country needs to be put in the hands of the moderates for a while.We need a moderate political party.
Any takers?

P.S, There were two columns in The Charlotte Observer op-ed today. Not quite a call for a moderate political party. But definitely cries about the extreme voices on each side causing problems.
The GOP misreads American History by David Brooks is one.

We've let the verbal bombers hijack our national discourse by Leonard Pitts is the other.

Star Wars Flashback

A long time ago, in a city, far, far away …
My dad took my brother and me to a movie.
The time was 1977, to be exact. New York City, to be precise.
It was the summer. Most of our friends had already seen the film everyone else was talking about, but it was a surprise for us. My dad took my brother and me downtown, to Manhattan, in the shadow of the Empire State Building, to the Boy Scout supply store. We were soon to go to Scout camp for a week, so we needed to stock up. We spent a good part of the day there, hauled our stuff out.
We rode downtown to the store on the subway — we just loved the subway. We knew all the lines and where we needed to transfer.
When we started back uptown, back to the Bronx, we immediately knew when our dad didn't make the right transfer. He told us not to worry, so we kept going uptowm on the wrong subway line.
When we walked up the steps onto the street from the Third Avenue Station, we knew. Just down the block, on the corner of 86th Street and Third Avenue, was the Loews Orpheum. The words were on the marquee bigger than life.
Star Wars.
I've never in my life been quite so blown away by a movie experience.
I thought life in the '70s was pretty humdrum and plain. This movie was the most exciting thing I'd ever seen, but there was one particular scene that really twisted my head a little. I'd already seen blazing bolts of energy and huge spaceships.
But in the first half of the movie, the main character, clearly the hero, runs out to watch the sun set. Or, to be precise, the suns set.
There were two suns. I'd never really imagined such, but there he was, looking out at the suns set. But the look on his face suggested to me he was a bit bored. He said nothing, but the music rolling up behind that scene said this kid wanted a whole lot more than his life was giving him. He was dreaming.
In that instant, I became a bit of a dreamer myself.
John and I talked about the movie the whole way home that first time. I managed to see the movie 29 more times that summer. Movies were a buck and my Aunt Kathleen was the indulgent sort.
My brother and I wanted to ride in space ships and shoot blasters. But most of all, we wanted light sabers. We wanted them so bad that my mother and father chose not to give us the light sabers they'd bought for us for Christmas. When Mom and Dad went to wrap them, the tubes were already dented because we'd found them and started dueling.
But I wasn't content just playing. The image of the twin suns setting in my head, the sounds of that John Williams music on my worn soundtrack album, they always inspired me then to draw scenes on a sketchpad and later write down my stories.
Eventually, I started to love to write just for the joy of writing, and I didn't have to make things up.
I saw two suns setting and started dreaming. I heard that music and I guess I stopped being all kid. I was 11, but I started to want. I didn't know what I wanted, but seeing that, I wanted something more.
I was a fanatic for all the other movies that have followed. I think the first sequel, The Empire Strikes Back is the best made movie and most complete story of the series. Yet the original, Star Wars, is just hands down my favorite movie.
It gave me something.
Every subsequent movie in the series has had its merits, and I've liked them all in some way or another. But none give the charge of the original.
When I saw it originally, I wanted to know the story that I finally saw Thursday morning. How did the villain become the evil monster he was in that movie. I was shocked to learn in Empire that perhaps the villain was actually the hero's father. A little disappointed to learn it was true in Return of the Jedi. Then I had to wait a long time to get the full story.
I have greeted every Star Wars movie with such anticipation, and none have ever given me what I was really looking for.
Every time I see a Star Wars book on the shelf, a Star Wars comic on the rack, or await the next movie, my anticipation is always the same. I expect a good product and a fun time, a decent read. But it's Star Wars, and it has that something extra.
I keep thinking that this will be the film or book or story that will bring me back to 1977, to that long time ago, in that city, far, far away.
But it's never happened. As exciting as Empire was, even it failed to live up to my expectations. The special effects were better. The story was tighter.
But since that first time, every time I go to see a Star Wars film, I want to feel like I felt watching the original that first time.
Each one has had better light saber duels than the one before. The special effects improve by light years.
But no Star Wars film matches the first. None can make me feel 11 again.
I saw Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith Thursday morning, at 12:15 a.m. It was the third in the series of six, but because of the way they have been released, it is the last of the six.
I can't imagine there's anybody out there who doesn't know what happens in this movie, but you never know. I think I can say how this movie ends, and how it made me feel, without spoiling anything.
A young man and his wife hold a young boy and stand, looking out as two suns set. The movie soundtrack plays that same John Williams music again, and the movie dissolves into the credits.
This movie ends, for me, where it began, right at the place where I started dreaming, started wanting and, unfortunately, started growing up.
It's 28 years later, the movie cycle is over, and I guess I have no more excuses.
There's no going back. This movie is telling me I can't be a kid anymore.
I've got a bad feeling about this.


Originally published, in this version, in The News & Reporter in 2005. I've been writing variations on this theme since college.)