Columbus: The anti-Jewish protests/riots interfered with students’ rights to attend class in peace. Then the presidents of several universities let the chaos damage a highlight for students and parents: graduation day.

Columbia and USC canceled graduation. Emory and a couple others canceled their controversial commencement speaker.

And Ohio State University wished they had canceled their speaker. He wrote his speech while hallucinating on a psychedelic drug. Then, in Ohio Stadium, in front of 70,000 people (new grads, their moms and other family members), he delivered it as if he was auditioning for a diabetic drug commercial. He was booed more than a Michigan quarterback.

Those Ohio moms and Mothers everywhere are celebrating. The one day a year when mom might get breakfast in bed and not have to wash the dishes herself.

        Will Rogers paid tribute to Mothers twice on his Sunday night radio programs: on Mother’s Day in 1930, then again in 1935. Here are a few excerpts:

“My own mother died when I was ten years old.  My folks have told me that what little humor I have comes from her.  I can’t remember her humor but I can remember her love and her understanding of me. Of course, the mother I know the most about is the mother of our little group.  She has been for twenty-two years trying to raise to maturity four children, three by birth and one by marriage. You know, there ought to be some kind of a star given to any woman that can live with a comedian.” 

“Mothers, it’s a beautiful thought.  I was just in here listening to a friend of mine, Rabbi Magnin, a very popular Jewish rabbi.  He was delivering a beautiful thing over the radio about Mother’s Day, and I felt ashamed to come in with my little words.  I mean well, but I ain’t got the words.

 But Mother’s Day, it’s a beautiful thought. And someone said, ‘Let’s give Momma a day. We’ll give her a day.’  And then in return, why Mother gives you the other 364.

I doubt even then if the thing would have gone through if it hadn’t been for the florists. Of course, florists, they got mothers, too. But they’ve got more flowers than they’ve got mothers. And they’ve got a great organization.

The florists, they’ve just practically corralled this Mother’s Day business. They have led us to believe that no matter how we have treated our mothers during the past year that a little bouquet of hyacinths or daisies will square it, not only with mother but with our conscience, too, when as a matter of fact you don’t have to be squared with your mother. She knows you better than you know yourself.

A mother is the only thing that is so constituted that they possess eternal love under any and all circumstances. No matter how you treat them, you still have their love.

But to get back to this flower business, there’s nothing in the world more beautiful than flowers. And every home that can possibly afford ’em should have flowers. But they’ve just got one drawback. You can’t eat ’em. And I imagine an awful lot of mothers today would not have rebelled if you’d sent ’em a ham. Yeah, a cut of beef or a whole lamb. Suppose the meat growers had been on the job and linked Mother’s Day up with their organization like the florists have. If they’d done that, instead of receiving a bunch of hollyhocks, she’d receive a cluster of pork chops. 

Father had a day, but you can’t find anybody who remembers when it was. It’s been so confused with April the first.”