They’ll Find Out if He’s All Wet

--A record-breaking heat wave continued to scorch the nation’s midsection, sending temperatures soaring over 100 degrees and adding to the woes of farmers who face the worst drought in more than five decades. But relief is on the way, according to Leonard Crow Dog, a Sioux medicine man who conducted a rain ceremony near Clyde, Ohio. Crow Dog says he has performed 127 such ceremonies without a failure. He predicts that rain will fall on the parched fields of northwest Ohio beginning Thursday. The National Weather Service’s extended forecast said there is a chance of rain Thursday night and early Friday. Greenhouse and garden supply store owner Cliff Doebel of rural Sandusky County paid $2,000 to bring Crow Dog and eight other Indians from the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. More than 3,000 turned out to watch the ceremony, in which Crow Dog knelt at the center of a ring, which represented Earth, blew on an eagle-bone whistle to the four compass points and held an eagle feather aloft to summon the wind. Although Crow Dog performed no dance, the Red Eagles, an Indian group based in Columbus, Ohio, performed folk dances unrelated to the rain ritual. The group, which included Dwayne Sutter, also chanted and played drums during the ceremony. While the drought caused more problems for farmers, low water levels on the Mississippi River continued as a barge ran aground near Gunnison, Miss.

--Their 30-year feud with the royal family produced bitterness in the late Duke and Duchess of Windsor, which they expressed in letters. Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper has printed excerpts from 16 letters by the couple, mostly to each other, as the first installment from a book called “The Secret File of the Duke of Windsor” edited by Michael Bloch, to be published in July. The duke, then King Edward VIII, abdicated in 1936 to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson. Afterward, the duke and duchess lived abroad and the royal family refused to receive the duchess. In the letters, the duke said his mother, Queen Mary, was “hard as nails.” In March, 1953, the duke visited London when his mother was dying. Writing of doctors’ reports that his mother’s condition had improved, the duke said: “Ice in place of blood in the veins must be a fine preservative.” After the duke learned that his mother had left him only three small boxes and a pair of candlesticks, he wrote: “What a smug stinking lot my relations are and you’ve never seen such a seedy worn-out bunch of old hags most of them have become.”