Christmas Lighting 1955

As the Advent month progresses,
I again wax nostalgic to a simpler time . . .
December 22, 1955, LeRoy, NY











































To see the entire page click here.

Strange Tree

I thought I got a better picture of this, but this snap from the front seat of my old Ford Explorer will have to do. We again saw this solitary does-not-fool-anyone pine(?) on the Hutchison Parkway near the CT line on our trip down to NYC. There is another one up in the median of the highway just outside of Boston. Of course they are cell towers with fake branches. Blends right in with the other trees, eh? Actually, at this distance they look their best. As you get closer they look increasingly ugly since they are so obviously fake. I just wish I had a wise and witty statement about them, other than, "Why do they bother?" but if you can come up with any, please add a comment.

Floral Flickr Flick

I found a neat slide show flash thing that shows pictures that you have uploaded
to Flickr.

Here is what it looks like:

The Quiz is to tell which photos were not taken by us.

Flash Slideshow

Instructions on how to do this are here:

L'Attitude Women's Barbershop

My sister got to the national semifinals of the Sweet Adelines this year!
Great quartet called L'Attitude.
Watch and listen. Captured from the webcast.

NEWGATE PRISON

(Sorry, this is a long post, but an interesting bit o' history- rgb)

"Attend all ye villains that live in the state,
Consider the walls that encircle Newgate."

NEWGATE is the name of a famous prison in London. It is called "Newgate" because it was first built, centuries ago, over a new gate in the wall of the city. Later, when these rooms over the gate became too crowded, a larger prison was built near by and called by the same name.

There was once a Newgate prison in Connecticut. It was named for the old English one, but, instead of being up over a gate, it was down underground in a copper-mine. There was no entrance to it except by a shaft thirty feet deep, and the colonists chose this place for its security, yet the history of Newgate in Connecticut is full of tales of the daring and successful escapes of its prisoners.

Copper Hill, where the prison was, is in what used to be the town of Simsbury, but is now East Granby. The copper-mines there were opened early in 1700, and were worked for about sixty years. The copper is said to have been of good quality. In 1737-39, coins were made from it - some say by Dr. Samuel Higley who owned a mine near his home. These coins were never a legal tender, but were used as "token money," because small change was scarce in the colonies. They are valuable to-day because they are very rare. Granby coppers have on one side a deer standing, and below him a hand, a star, and III, and around him the legend, "Value me as you please." On the other side are three sledgehammers with the royal crown on each hammer, and around them either the word "Connecticut," or the legend, "I am a good copper," with the date 1737. A third kind has one broadaxe and the legend, "I cut my way through." There is a specimen of each of the three kinds of Granby coppers in the Connecticut State Library at Hartford

The mines were quite successful at first, but, as the colonists were not allowed to smelt and refine the ore in America, they were obliged to send it all the way to England, and this was very expensive. Sometimes, too, the ships carrying copper did not reach England at all. One was wrecked in the English Channel and another was seized by the French during a war with England. So in 1773, a few years before our Revolutionary War, the mines were given up and the largest of them was changed into a prison.

At first there were no buildings at all. There was nothing but a hole in the ground, closed by an iron trapdoor that opened into the shaft, where a wooden ladder was fixed to the rock at one side. At the bottom of the ladder there was a flight of rough stone steps leading farther down into the mine. All was dark and still except for the dripping of water along the galleries that led away into the heart of the hill. One cavern was blasted out to make more room and was fitted with wooden cells and bunks for the prisoners to sleep in, and at night a guard was set to watch the entrance up above and prevent any one from climbing the ladder and getting out. When everything was ready, the committee in charge of the work reported that it would be "next to impossible for any one to escape from this prison."

The first prisoner sent there was a man named John Henson, who was committed on December 22, 1773. He spent eighteen days alone in the mine; then, on the night of January 9, 1774, he disappeared. No one could imagine how he got out. But there was another shaft leading up from the mine, a very deep one, where the copper ore had been drawn out. It had no ladder in it and its opening had not been closed, because it did not seem possible for a prisoner to escape that way. Yet a woman drew John Henson up eighty feet through the shaft in a bucket used for hoisting copper. After that, this shaft, too, was carefully closed and a strong wooden guardhouse was built over the entrance to the other one.

More prisoners were soon committed to Newgate.

"Burglars, horse-thieves, and counterfeiters," according to the law, were sent there and they were set to work mining copper, but instead of doing this, they dug their way out with the mining tools; so workshops were built aboveground where they made nails, boots and shoes, wagons, and other things. They slept in the mine as before, but at daylight they were called and came up the ladder in squads of three at a time under a guard, climbing as well as they could with fetters on their legs. They took their meals in the workshops and were chained to the forges and workbenches until late in the afternoon, when they went down again into the mine for the night.

When the Revolutionary War began, in 1775, political prisoners were sent to Newgate in Connecticut, just as such prisoners had often been sent to old Newgate in England. These men in America were the Tories, or Loyalists, who sympathized with the British and were often found giving them information and help. To protect themselves the Americans arrested them. Some of the first were sent by Washington from the camp at Cambridge where the American army was besieging Boston.

Here is a part of his letter to the Committee of Safety at Simsbury; its date shows that it was written several months before the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia:-

CAMBRIDGE, December 7th, 1775.
GENTLEMEN:
The prisoners which will be delivered to you with this, having been tried by a court martial, were sentenced to Simsbury in Connecticut. You will therefore have them secured so that they cannot possibly make their escape.
I am, etc.
GEORGE WASHINGTON.

But the Tories were just as anxious as any other prisoners to escape if they could. Three times the wooden guardhouse over the entrance was set on fire and burned down. Once, when there were a great many Tories in Newgate, they made a concerted plan and carried it out successfully. The wife of one of them had permission to visit him, and came to the prison one night about ten o'clock. Only two guards were on duty then at the mouth of the shaft. When the trapdoor was lifted for her, the prisoners were all ready and waiting on the ladder. They rushed out, overpowered the two men, took away their muskets, and got possession of the guardroom. The rest of the watch, who had been asleep, hurried in, and there was a desperate fight; one man was killed and several were wounded. At last the prisoners succeeded in putting all the guards down into the mine and closing the trapdoor upon them. Then they escaped themselves, and few of them were ever retaken.

A story is told of a Tory prisoner who, about the year 1780, made his escape in a remarkable and unexpected way. There was an old drain in the mine which had once carried off water, but when the mine became a prison it was stopped up with stone and mortar, except for a small opening where the water still ran off between iron bars. The outlet of this drain was far down on the hillside beyond the sight of the guards. The prisoner, Henry Wooster, who worked in the nail-shop, contrived to hide some bits of iron nail rods in his clothes and carry them back with him into the mine. He learned, with their help, to take off his fetters at night. Then, with the same bits of iron, he worked at the bars of the drain until, little by little, he loosened some of thorn and took them out so that he could crawl through into the drain. But the drain was too narrow in some places to let him pass, and he was obliged to loosen and remove some of its stones. This was a long and hard task, but he was not easily discouraged. Each night ho took off his clothes and his fetters, crawled into the drain, and worked until morning. Then he replaced the iron bars, dressed, put on his fetters, and was ready when the guards came down to go up to the shops with the rest of the prisoners. By and by he got neary to the end of the drain. Then one night, while he was down there, a stone, which he had accidentally loosened, fell behind him and blocked his way back. He could not turn to reach the stone with his hands, for the drain was too narrow, he could not stir it with his feet, and he dared not cry out for help; time passed, and it was almost morning; he would be called and missed, and he shuddered to think of the consequences. At last, as he was about to give up in despair, he felt the stone move just a little. Bracing himself against the sides of the drain, he pushed it vigorously with his feet. Slowly, inch by inch, it rolled back until it fell into a slight depression so that he could pass over it. Bleeding and exhausted, he got to his bunk and into his clothes and fetters again just as the guards came down the ladder. A few nights later he finished his work and, with several other prisoners, escaped through the drain.

Some of the Tories in Newgate were well-known and educated men. One was a clergyman named Simeon Baxter. He preached a sermon, one Sunday, to his companions in the mine, in which he advised them, if they could, to assassinate Washington and the whole Continental Congress. This sermon was printed afterward in London and proves how bitter the feeling was in those days between the Americans and the Tories.

After the Revolution, Newgate was the state prison of the State of Connecticut until 1827. New workshops and other buildings were added from time to time as they were needed. The wooden guardhouse was replaced by one of brick, and a strong stone room over

the mouth of the shaft went by the nickname of the "stone jug." There was a chapel and a hospital, but the hospital was seldom used because there was very little sickness. The pure air and even temperature in the mine, where it was never too hot in summer nor too cold in winter, kept the prisoners well in spite of darkness and confinement, and men who were sent there in a bad state of health often recovered.

At one time there was a strong wooden fence, with iron spikes on its top, around the enclosure, but in 1802 it was replaced by a stone wall twelve feet high, with watch-towers at the corners and a moat below it. Some of the prisoners helped to build this wall, and when it was finished they were allowed to take part in a celebration. One of them, an Irishman, gave this toast at the feast: "May the great wall be like the wall of Jericho and tumble down at the sound of a ram's horn."

But the wall is still standing on Copper lull after more than one hundred years and, although the prison is empty and the mines deserted to-day, a great many people visit the place every year because of its interesting history. Guides take the visitors down the steep ladder in the shaft and lead them through the under ground galleries where copper was mined, and show them the caverns where the prisoners once slept in old Newgate Prison.

From: Caroline Clifford Newton, Once Upon a Time in Connecticut

Is this a crime?

There is just something so clever about this Grafitti artist - it is a way of getting around things that is somehow so great:

Paul Curtis aka Moose is no regular graffiti artist. In fact, he’s the reverse-graffiti artist. He created his street art by *cleaning* the dirt and grime off of surfaces!

Authorities are baffled: is selective cleaning a crime?

The tools are simple: A shoe brush, water and elbow grease, he says.

British authorities aren’t sure what to make of the artist who is creating graffiti by cleaning the grime of urban life. The Leeds City Council has been considering what to do with Moose. "I’m waiting for the kind of Monty Python court case where exhibit A is a pot of cleaning fluid and exhibit B is a pair of my old socks," he jokes.

Warren Barker

Warren Barker has died at the age of 83.
Well known as one of the great composers and arrangers of concert band music, he also was one of those people that everyone loved, and like to tell personal stories of their contacts with him.

A surprising percentage of the music in today's concert band repertoire was arranged by the master, Warren Barker. He was great at producing pieces for band that were medleys of musical selections from different genres, such as "Big Band" or "Show Tunes", or Andrew Lloyd Webber" and the like. He also composed original works. However he actually had such a deep career in music that went well beyond concert band music.

Earlier in is career he was in Hollywood, as arranger and musical director for movie studios and for TV studios as well. This is where he got the fame and credit for the "Bewitched" theme, and was responsible for adding the little ringing sound for the nose twitch (deetle-deetle-deeet). His dramatic style and flare from those days often showed up later in his band medleys and arrangements. You can see many things on the web about him, but here is a starting point.

Here is how "Space Age Pop Music" describes Warren Barker:

Best known for his jazzy score and best-selling soundtrack album from the television series, "77 Sunset Strip", Barker played piano and trumpet in school and then attended UCLA, where he studied under the composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. After serving in the Army Air Corps, where he played in a band, he returned to Los Angeles and began a long association with radio, television, and movie studios. He worked as staff director for Warner Borthers Record for nearly a dozen years, leaving in 1960 to focus on television work.

His TV credits include musical direction for the TV series "Hawaiian Eye" and orchestrations for such Nick-at-Night classics as "Bewtiched," "Daktari," "That Girl," and "The Flying Nun"--including that little xylophone thing that plays whenever Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery) wiggles her nose to cast a spell. He imprinted a bit of 1970s cultural history into a generation's genetic code with his theme for the "Donny and Marie Osmond Show," "A Little Bit Country, A Little Bit Rock-n-Roll." Barker also wrote the scores for the films Strange Lovers and The Zebra in the Kitchen. He retired from the studio scene in the early 1980s and now devotes his time to writing and conducting original compositions for concert bands and wind ensembles.

My own personal story was that when I lived in Richmond Virginia, I was on the board of Richmond Concert Band when we commissioned Warren Barker to write a march for us for our 25th anniversary. He did so, and it turned out to be "Capitol Square March" now distributed nationally. Later he even came to Richmond from his home in South Carolina to guest conduct. I wrote him a letter last may, and his wife responded (by email, but apologized for that medium) telling me that Warren was ill, and was not able to reply himself, but my letter was a morale booster for him. Here is her address if you want to send condolences: Mary Barker 161 Rolling Green Cr Greenville SC 29615

Progress

Well, I am a few weeks out from my last chemo session and still have one main evaluation appointment this week with the docs.

I know I am too impatient a patient, but I want to be back to whatever "normal" will be.

This disease has left me with problems that keep me on the disabled list. I am still out of breath all the time, my legs are still very painful and feel numb and "asleep" and stiffen up so that I walk very slowly and non-nimbly, afraid that I will fall. I also have that tingle and asleep feeling in my hands, and the loss of feeling in my fingertips makes even buttoning up a shirt a harder task than it should be.

I am saying this, not for sympathy, but that I have a hard time celebrating the otherwise successful chemotherapy when I don't feel cured at all, I feel like my body has not recovered from a beating in a burlap bag or something.

However, my hair is starting to return! Little dots of mustache hair and fuzzy dome hair:

Richard Feynman

For years, I had a favorite memory of a little TV chat with Richard Feynman on PBS TV, that I really wanted to recall, and had hoped that it would have been in one of the books I read about him, but I never had found it. Of course when I got down to it, it took 10 minutes of Googling to find it.

As I remembered it rightly, Feynman amusingly described how we accept without amazement our ability to see, interpreting light waves going into our eyes, but would almost think it impossible if we knew how complex it really is.

Please, Please watch the video at the bottom of this link. It is magical, I think, especially how this guy whose mind day dreamed in advance mathematics and quantum theory, and beyond, could be so delighted and amazed, and be able to chat about these things. He explains on a simple level, things that are so complex. Imagine how it would have been to have him as a teacher!

the link: http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/~masmith/mainsite/Feynman.html
the video: http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/~masmith/media/feynman_long.mov

Good Oncology News

The news is good. I have just had my appointment with the cancer doc for an evaluation of the six chemo sessions, the cat scan of a week ago, and the most recent blood tests, as well as an assessment of how they think I have fared. Everything is above expectations!

The tumor has been virtually eliminated by the chemotherapy. From reading the notes, it turns out that it had been bigger than I had been told before. If you hold two CD cases back to back, that is about the original size! A few nodes in other locations have also disappeared. The negative effects of the chemotherapy they had seen, like red and white cell counts, and certain imbalances have normalized. They still need one more PET scan and more blood tests this month to check a few possibilities, but things are looking good.

I should be celebrating and dancing, but somehow I know that I haven't yet escaped this prison I am in, since I am still disabled to a degree with the stiffness and neuropathy in my legs, tingling and numbness in my hands, shortness of breath and the continual pain that I still have. These keep me in bed some days, and dragging around weak and hurting many others. Instead of declining as the chemo end came in view, they actually increased.

It is not clear how these conditions relate to the cancer and/or the chemotherapy, but at least they made it worse, and the timing of the main troubles are far too aligned to be coincidence. So I am now on a track to check what is going on, and willl see a vascular doc and other ideas. Both my primary doctor and the specialists have told me to slow down a little, and let the chemo effects get out of the way, because some of it might still be my body reacting to all that. After all, they dumped 7 poisons in me every three weeks for 5 months, designed to destroy part of me, and I did have a rough time, so maybe I should be more in awe of that.


Here is a picture of me on a navy boat on the Saigon River in 1968 when I came in contact with Agent Orange stored at a depot down the river. I know it was a long time ago, but the government has agreed that that is the likely cause of my disease. Thank God that the VA has been there for me, providing care perhaps better than I could ever have expected. I have lost some weight, but my goal is not to match, but get closer to that youthful 1968 profile.

Latest Chemotherapy News

Well, Friday's CAT scan showed that the tumor had been reduced to less than half size, said the Docs. That means that the formula they were using for chemo is right, they think, so they are forging ahead with it. I had the start of the forth session yesterday, and am taking the oral 5 days at home. I also have to give myself the shots each day to improve white and red blood cell count.

I do feel I jumped up a level in my feel-good factor, and even went to play in the sphinx band last night, but I am still taking morphine to keep down the pain, and all those pills(!) so who knows what I really feel like underneath?

Here are pics from yesterday. Note the tube that goes from that pump on the left into my implanted port in my chest. My new hair-doo is a beauty. And the doctor's order for the Chemo drugs.

Topsy Part II

As I expected, time marches quickly on, dominated by the saga and treatment of my cancer.

After the discovery of the tumor, I was kept in the hospital all of the month of February. There was continuous monitoring and seemingly endless extended tests and probes. I had scans;, CAT, PET and possibly other barn yard scans. Biopsies and vampire rivaling blood work. In my head I hear a version of "Alice's Restaurant" with Arlo makin' up the words as he goes along to my custom folk tumor story.

They determined that it was a stand alone tumor, Fibrous Lymphoma, Non Hodgkin's mass in the back of the abdominal cavity, not intruding, but wrapped around the Aorta, Vena Cava, and just behind but between my kidneys, definitely an unwanted visitor in the neighborhood.

Too near and mingled with vital organs to consider surgery.

So this led to a plan of chemotherapy, a five day plan, (CHOP+Rituxan) of intravenous and oral chemicals dumped into me; to be repeated every 3 weeks until the thing disappears.

All the analogies apply: Pac-man thingies eating up the tumor, search and destroy mission zapping the thing to smithereens, and ray guns shooting to just make it shrink back bit by bit until it is gone.

I did the first chemo session with seemingly good acceptance and not too much discomfort. The first session was in-hospital, but after three more days it was going so well they send me home with the hope that I would be OK on Morphine pills they let me take and wait for the next Chemo.

It Didn't work that way. My appetite had vanished (actually is a good thing - lost a lot o'weight) BUT: I got to feeling worse and had a fever and a cough all of a sudden, and yadda yadda, when I got admitted back to the hospital it was because despite countermeasures and testing to prevent this, my bone marrow decided that since it disliked being treated rudely, it would stop making white cells. In other words my entire immune system was wiped out.

I was the boy in the bubble. Until they pumped new antibiotics by the ton back into me over the next few days, I could and did catch anything around. Fever and pain yo-yoed for the first few days, and finally got stable and I pulled out of it, counts getting back above normal and pain under control.

So here I am waiting for the next round (out-patient) of chemo next Tuesday. I wonder what surprises each round will bring? But the plan is to be at home now.

The good news is the chemo looks like it is working to shrink the mass, though later news will tell better. My early PET scan results showed no spreading to other places Other news department, the last two nights showed strands, bunches and rows of somebody's hair on my pillow, my sheets, and anything that touched me. I can still run my fingers through my hair and come back with a handful. So the fun part is coming on. I have never tried the billiard ball look yet. Looks like I won't have to wait long. ~

Reminiscing

Where were you December 1955?













Where were you March 1962?

It has not sunk in yet

Well, I have some bad news that will probably change this blog permanently, as it is changing my life the most dramatically since I appeared the day before FDR died, April 11, 1945.

I was diagnosed with some kind of a abdominal tumor monday night. It is there in the cat scan, so there is no doubt about its existence, but over the next week or so of tests I will find out about its malignancy or lack thereof, effect on other systems in my body, and options. It is 9 cm and in a terrible location and very serious. It might have even caused the terrible debilitating pain in my legs and other mischief over the last two years that has limited my ability to do physical or interactive jobs.

It confounded the doctors when I went in the last two weeks with pains in my body all over, like side pains and sort of non-specific body pains, including my chest area. but they were not heart-ailment-like chest pains, and my blood pressure was sky high. They thought it might have been an infection, but that did not turn out to be so. Indeed my EKG and other things showed they thought my heart was strong, I had high O2 saturation so my lungs and heart were not raising an alarm, my blood sugar and other tests were negative for diabetes, the disease that would most explain a lot of my adema, tingling, etc. but it just didn't seem to be that. My overweight condition has been an easy thing to blame for much of my problems, but it was going further now. Finally I kept complaining of the pains and they did a cat scan to see if there might have been some blockage or abdominal thing that didn't show in x-ray. They found it. With this as a backdrop, they agreed to prescribe some real pain medicine for me that is keeping me fairly straight for the time being. The state that the pain medicine returns me to is not a really normal nor a comfortable one, leaving me without good sleep and even during the day, I have to sit very still or shift to find a position that relieves the strange feelings.

Sorry to pass on this news this way, but somehow it helps me to put it out there. I will speak to everybody personally soon.

Almost Never told Vietnam story

In 1967 I had signed up for an extra year beyond my Army 2 year draft notice time in an attempt to stay out of the infantry. Against the backdrop of my high school friend Gary Scott being killed as an infantry officer timed with my going in, I nixed my OCS path that would have made me his replacement, most likely, and got into supply instead. I should have joined the band, but I didn't think of it. This actually turned out to be a good move, since even though I was in Vietnam by January of '68, "Tet", I ended up in "Automated Supply", a computer services operation in a relatively safe area in Vietnam, if there was such a thing. We tracked, stocked and ordered replacement parts for all of the helicopters in the country. Some of the operation was classified secret, and everything was top priority. Several times had to urgently have a special delivery of a needed tail rotor or something from St.Louis with nothing else on the flight but that one part! Our Army suply unit was in a compound called "Tent City B" just outside the Ton-Sun-Nhut Air Force base, the busiest airport in the world at the time, and we were not too far from the place that Westmoreland stayed. Due to the IBM 360-40 mainframe computer in the building (today's desktop computers are more powerful), we enjoyed air conditioning and secretaries and fairly lax controls, by army standards at the time. After our day "at the office" we walked or jeeped a half mile to the barracks, where we had bunks and lockers and mama-sans to shine boots, wash and iron , clean up during the day. We were in a relatively safe area. There were the occasional snipings on the edge of the base, grenades being found with pulled pins in the back of trucks passing through crowds outside of town, mortar rounds hitting in our near area, the closest to me was when one VC 120mm mortar fried a helicopter not 100 yards from where I slept, and other hazards of living in the midst of a war zone, but by and large we were relatively safe. I mean especially compared to the vast majority of army people who were scattered out in remote places of the country, and carried guns and were more exposed to danger all the time. I can tell stories of notable other exceptions, but we were even relatively safe when we pulled rotating guard duty all night long every few weeks. This guard duty is my story for today.

Tent City B, with its chain link and barbed wire exterior would have nestled right up into a residential suburban saigon area except for a buffer zone of about 100 yards or more that was sort of rolling grassy area like the edge of a golf course or something. These residential areas beyond the fence had low shacky houses with adobe looking walls, wooden boxy houses with long sloping roofs, multi family it looked like, or at least many people disappeared into the houses . During the day you could see people scurrying around, men in their dull clothing and women in those silky pajama-like things and the conical architypical hats, and the sad eyed kids by the scores. These residential areas near cities were supposedly friendly south vietnamese population, but there was no way to know if they were infiltrated with VC or sympathisers as well. As I learned about half way into my stint there, the south vietnamese that we were there fighting for weren't uniformly happy about us either. A light bulb went off for me when a local girl who keypunched for us told me that she couldn't even ever tell her neighbors that she worked for the Americans on the base, so she told them she worked for the South Vietnamese officials. If they knew, she would be scorned.

Anyway, we clerks and computer nerds and others in our operation had to pull armed guard duty in this buffer zone every night just to keep an eye out and be there I guess in case we were needed. The way the rotation worked, I think I had to do this every three weeks, but I can't recall. Did I mention we were not seasoned soldiers? Sgt Bilko would have recognized us. We were issued grenade launchers, flares, rifles, live ammo, and those big machine guns on tripods for the end bunkers, but we had had minimal training on any of these things. I had an M16 the first night I was out there. We would form up and string out along a line next to the base perimiter out on the grass, and in bunkers and foxholes that were already there. You went out there about dark, and stayed awake until morning. Nobody really told you what you were supposed to do, or under what conditions you would use the guns or whatever. It was a really strange setup. I'm sure there was a chain of command to higher authority if something really started happening, but we felt like we were on our own. I was one of the higher ranking, since I had made seargant by being able to read 80x80 computer cards efficiently.

Well this one night I had opted for a flare instead of a rifle, and secretly had decided I was going to shoot it off, if I could figure out how it worked. I noticed that they didn't account for these very precicely like the guns and ammo, and they were expendable. I figured If somebody asked, I would say we heard something out there and wanted to light it up to see what it was.

It was in a canister tube thing about two feet long and 3 inches in diameter. The way it worked is that you took a cap off of one end and put it on the other end. That cap had a firing pin in it, and striking it would fire a flare out of the tube. I had seen these flares used at a distance, and they were really bright. A phosphorous ball or something shot out and up and spread light like an umbrella over a big area. This would be good to light up a target for helicopter fire, or investigate movements, or whatever. I was nervous for a couple of hours thinking about trying one out. Here's a sketch of how the cap fit on the other end and was rapped to shoot off the flare. Also, I wan't sure how to aim it. Since I was sitting down, I figured a safe way to do it was to pound it on the ground in front of me, to have control of it as it shot upward, like this:
___.___________

Well, that's not the way it happened! As I struck the ground in front of me, I couldn't keep the the bottom from sliding towards me, and the business end of the flare aimed straight out like a howitzer!
______

The phosphorous ball, instead of shooting aloft, streaked forward about 1 foot off the ground, whoooosshshshsh and struck like a fireball right through the wires and slam into the wall of some poor local person's house about a football field away from us! All heck broke loose.
Men and women came out with blankets and buckets and put it out with much hubbub. Luckily nobody was hurt as far as we could tell, bravely cowering in the bottom of the foxholes hoping that they wouldn't shoot back.

My version of the High Point story

When I was in first grade, (1951?) Dad moved the family from Eggertsville (Buffalo NY) to North Carolina. He had been personnel manager hiring people for a new Sylvania plant there, and apparently when the hiring was done, we moved back up north to LeRoy NY, and he similarly opened the Sylvania plant in Batavia. Here is a googleshot of our house we lived in then, 708 Montilieu Ave. High Point NC: The view is looking south. I am a little confused about which house is which, but I'll figure it out. Below is sort of a brain dump of my memories from that short time being a young tarheel.



Upper left is the woods I started on fire playing with matches. The Ray Street School, which Merry and I went to was torn down years ago, but was about a mile to the right here. I found the vacant lot for that school when Martha and I went back there. I also found Armstrong Park, where I remember catching crawfish and learning to make boondoggle lanyards in the summer at sort of a day camp.

I think I remember sitting in the living room watching TV with ads for Lucks Pinto Beans and Orville the Orkin Man, and probably the Howdy Doody show.
I remember the "Why you shouldn't drink water" animated lamp stashed in the upstairs closet.
I remember there was a Mulberry tree right beside the garage that we climbed to get on the roof.
I remember setting rat traps in the back yard and prying the rats out. Is that possible? I was in first grade.
I remember in school the teacher made some kind of jelly trays as some part of preparing masters for the mimeograph machine. It seems like I can smell it now.
I remember going out from the classroom to take the chalk whitened erasers from the big black blackboards that lined the room and pound them on the grate that covered the window wells beside the playground. I think it was a reward, not a duty to do this.
I remember a little one-roomed red school house in the back of the school, which had been the previous school, and it was still used for something.
I remember being teased by two kids at school for chewing on my pencil, and got a bucky beaver nickname.
I remember the plastic tokens they used for lunches in the cafeteria smelled like throw up to me. (or was that later?)
I remember that we knew of a family that lived nearby that the kids supposedly ate soap sometimes.
I remember that we had a black cat named Yose-mite who we left behind by mistake at a fair far away and she found her way home by herself.
I remember a few times Dad drove us out in the country to a fish fry restaurant and we had hush puppies.
I remember Dad bringing a movie projector and screen home from work and us sitting in the dark living room watching a travelogue type movie about a car trip through the south, including the blue ridge mountains.
I remember I was allowed to go by myself by bus downtown to the YMCA for some sort of swimming or sport of some kind. Is this possible?
I remember too well being bit on the lips by the neighbor Mrs. Johnson's collie. I had tried to chase it down with a rope, and it got me in the struggle. I remember crying and thrashing as the doctor and my parents tried to make me lie still for them to sew my lip. I felt guilty years later about that, because from time to time I felt self conscious about that scar, and realized I had probably made it worse by resisting.
I remember Dad and Mom hired a Mayflower Moving Van to move us to our next home on Summit St. in LeRoy, and the driver was Mr. Sullivan, who according to legend was very good to us. Some things were packed in cardboard barrels that had metal clamped hoops holding the tops on.
I remember these things, but what did I have for lunch yesterday? Not a clue.

Pet Peeves

Plastic Baseball cap brims?
I don't like the way they make baseball caps now with that stupid plastic in the brim. Any boomer kid can tell you that the idea of wearing your cap (of course not backwards) is to wear it in and get the curve of the brim and the peak of the front just right. Sort of like breaking in a baseball glove. The problem with the plastic brims is they are too curved for one thing, and you can't change the shape. No personality.

You would fit the cap to your head, and each time you take it off or adjust it, you give it a little curving, a little bending, and you work on it from time to time when you are just fiddling. The cardboard in there had a memory. If it wasn't shaping up, you could get it wet and let it dry with some newspaper stuck in it to help block it.

The sad thing is that I worry about this, but almost never wear a cap.

========================

Centigrade vs Celcius??
When I was a kid, you had farenheight and centigrade scales on thermometers. If push came to shove, I think we might have known that celsius was another name for centigrade, but the media and everybody today has forgotten about centigrade and switched to celsius. Who did this and why? And why didn't they ask me?

I bet Mrs.Fortmiller, my H.S. math teacher would not believe that I still can on paper convert back and forth. Tc=(5/9)*[(Tf-32)] . . . . .Tf=[(9/5)*Tc] +32


=======================

And when did they start calling the planet Ur a'nis Ur' uhn is? It seems to me it was because people didn't like the snickers when they mentioned the rings around Uranis. Understandable, but we shouldn't let the jokesters force us to change our whole language.

=======================

While I am on words, how about "Pointsettia?" In the old days we knew that there was an "i" in there when you spelled it, like for spelling bees, but the i was silent! As I remember it, everyone said "point-set-a" without fear of mispronouncing it. Then the ignorants took over and in a mistaken effort to look smart, started pronouncing the "i" to prove they were literate. Enough people were embarassed to pronounce it the old way, so the "i"s took over.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Update: Oh, yeah, Leah reminds me that "There's no point in poinsettia" Ummm, Should I use my bad memory excuse or my ignorance excuse? Umm . . . let's see.

Japanese theme computer

There is a kind of one-upsmanship among some young (at heart) techies to modify computer cases to wild themes, many times involving neon lights and all that. Here is one that goes a more artsy direction.

Opportunity knocks?

I got two funny telephone marketing calls today on my second line. They did have a valid referral from a company I know, and I had foolishly put that second line number on a registration form one time, and they were calling me by the fake name I had used. So I didn't blow them away but cautiously let them start the pitch, partially for curiosity.

The first one said they had a really interesting moneymaking opportunity (which I do need) and they didn't sound too pushy, and asked me if I wanted to listen to the details. I said yes, as long as it wasn't some crazy Amway type thing where they never tell you what it is they are selling, just that you can make tons of money to buy a yacht and isn't that great. By the time I was through that sentence I was laughing because they had hung up.

The second one was offering an "Online Pharmacy" of my own.
Pitch girl: You do know that millions of people are looking for alternative sources for pharmaceuticals, don't you? --yadda yadda-- You do have a major credit card and would be willing to invest around $300 in a business of your own wouldn't you?
Me: No, I'm not so sure about that.
Pitch girl: "-click-"

Gordon E. Miller

I've been meaning to put up something about my Grandfather, my mom's dad, who gave me my "G". He died when I was a kindergartner, (b1877, d1952) but I have vague memory of him digging deep in his suit pockets for goodies, and even a fuzzier memory of him carving an acorn pipe and a willow whistle for me in a park in Mercer, but this may be from stories from mom. We have that old wire recording of his voice singing a Canadian Indian song, for he came from Washago, Ontario.

He was an artistic man, and at this time court stenographer at the courthouse in Mercer Pennsylvania, the county seat, which seemed to be quite a distinguished position. I looked up an old map of the area and it is remarkable to see that all the roads went out from Mercer like the spokes of a wheel to all corners of the county.

We have some interesting art work that he drew in 1913 when he apparently attended "The Stevenson Art School at Wood Dr. and Third Ave." in Pittsburgh. He liked to draw little ant-like figures along with witty comments. Here is "Sharps and Flats"



Here is the front and back of what you might call a courting postcard to (my Grandmother) Miss Eleanor Kohler with a cartoon about Smith's dress shop. No date on it.



Next, check this newspaper clipping from 1937 of a notable murder trial with a court scene showing Gordon seated in front of the Judge.

________^^^____(click for large original)