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The first last day of the summer

It was a calm weekend around here. There were two big highlights. Someone ordered a pickup meal from Longhorn Steakhouse in Florida and used my email as the space filler in Darden Restaurants’ data mining operation. I made fun of their meal. Why do you order seafood, in Fort Lauderdale, from a steakhouse?

And why do you order it for curbside pickup? Do you like lukewarm fish? And chowder? In August? It was 80-something degrees in Fort Lauderdale this weekend. Did you need to warmup? With a shrimp lobster chowder?

How does strawberry lemonade even figure into this? I’m no purist about lemonade flavors, or so I thought, but the more I thought about all of the bad flavors in this styrofoam box and paper bowl … lemonade should be lemonade flavored. Otherwise you’re just telling me about a lifetime of taste bud punishment you’ve inflicted on yourself.

All of this, somehow, costs 41 bucks. But not me. It wasn’t my meal. I did get a survey, and don’t you know I filled that out. I made several pointed comments about Longhorn, and their curbs. But not their service. No need to cause problems for the people working there.

And don’t you know? It worked.

I got a coupon for a free appetizer. There isn’t a Longhorn within less than a half-hour from here, so who needs an appetizer?

The other thing that happened was that my lovely bride did her first time trial this weekend. Just you and your bike against the clock. At the end she found herself on the podium. Third place is great! And enough to send her back again for more.

Otherwise, this weekend was the deep breath in before the semester begins. Classes start on Tuesday. At some point on Sunday I stopped stressing about it. It’s weird. I do more work throughout the term, of course, but I’ve spent a lot of time working on stuff and trying to layout materials and anticipate problems — and then throwing some of that work away and starting over because of, sigh, reasons — throughout August. That whole time has been worry, one stress, one series of second guesses after another. I figured that would all go away after a class or two, or a a few weeks. It usually does. But, last evening, it just disappeared. The classes will be the classes and they’ll be useful and we’ll do fine.

It’s let me do other things. I cleaned one corner of my home office this weekend. And I did a lot in the on-campus office. The Yankee and I have been sharing an office for the last two years, but she’s being moved to a different building, and we moved her this weekend. I’m keeping the old office, so we packed her up Saturday. I brought in a big box of books of my own, which have been sitting in storage for the last three years. I rearranged the desk and generally lamented losing my roomie. What, we’re just supposed to see each other at home? That’s hardly enough.

We had a nice reading date this weekend, and so I point once again to Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second installment in his Revolutionary War trilogy. I’m in that bittersweet part of any book you enjoy. You want to plow through it. You want it to last forever. This is an excellent read. Highly recommended.

But I have once again had it confirmed for me that I wouldn’t want to be an 18th century sailor. I’ve been sure of that for a long time, but that impression is confirmed.

There was a bit in here about some French sailors who had been kept on their vessels for more than a year, the details of which were inhumane. But that’s war, and that was navy life, and they didn’t have the comparative advantages of the USS Abraham Lincoln, the sailors of which, by all credible reports, have been on a nightmare service cruise.

If you have the opportunity to have three different people come out to do work on your home in one day, definitely don’t do that. We did that today. It took up the whole day, about six or seven hours, but it was productive. First, we had a guy come out to give us a quote on chimney repairs. There are a few light problems outside and, distressingly, we had some water get inside during last Thursday’s monsoon. That first guy glanced at the chimney from the ground, said we needed a new crown, that his shop would make a customized job. We talked about the stucco. He came inside to look inside the fireplace, and found some problems. He quoted us a price off the top of his head and asked for a 50 percent down payment. We asked him to put his quote on a piece of paper and sent him on his way.

We had an electrician come out, his second time here. Nice fellow. This is the end of a saga that has stretched from April to now, and involved four different companies. He stayed and worked for a long time, trying to figure out the intricacies of this, and the idiosyncratic wiring that had been done to that. Finally, finally the poor guy got things the way they should be. (One of those companies that had been … let’s say involved … won’t be getting a lot of calls from us in the future. They’ll get a letter. I’m pretty close to naming names.)

As he wrapped up his work a second chimney guy came. He deployed a drone so he could actually see what was going on up top.

The previous guy just glanced up that way. We talked about the problems and the options. He had a sneaking suspicion that he could fix that leak straight away, so I trimmed the hydrangea for easier access while he sealed up the flashing. That paired nicely with the spot weeding I found myself doing while chatting with the electrician earlier in the day. Then he, the chimney guy, did some sealing of the places where the lower levels of the chimney touches the house.

He came in with photos, and showed us the before shot of a big hole in the stucco, and someone’s slapdash silicone solution. He said he figured it’d been there for about 10 years. As ever, we muttered the previous owners’ name.

So maybe the leak is fixed. As our guy said, we can’t interrogate the water. If it comes back inside in the next huge storm, though, I’m certainly going to try.

Anyway, that was the weekend and Monday. Somehow I got done, today, all of the things I needed to do — emailing this class and that class, changing some settings on Canvas, doing a little roster prep — but none of the other things I also wanted to do. And that’s OK. They’ll be there for another day. Just not tomorrow. Classes start tomorrow!

Auburn / Glomerata / history / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
27
Aug 26

The 1926 Glomerata, part one

After a long time away from this feature, we return to the dusty old pages of old yearbooks. Enjoy a few pretty pictures from the Plains.

We go now to the 1920s, right in the middle of what might be the tumultuous era in the old alma mater’s history. Spright Dowell, who never enjoyed support as the president, was coming to the end of his time on the plains. He’d come over from the state department of education, which even, back then, referred to itself as The Department. Dowell replaced Charles Thach, an alumnus who’d been on campus for decades until 1920, just before his death the next year. They were engaged in political warfare with their cross-state university rival (with cloak-room maneuvering that went far beyond athletics.) State funds were low, there were charges of ethics problems through the Cooperative Extension Service. The university also had to survive a proposal that would move the campus 50 miles west, to the capitol city. Dowell wasn’t exactly against that idea, and that cost him in the eyes of his faculty and students. Also, the Great Depression was on the horizon. No one knew that in 1926.

Dowell knew, however, that he replaced a beloved man, and sometimes blamed that for his lot in life, because the real issues — disrepair of buildings, outdated equipment, debt, underpaid faculty — weren’t enough to blame. He wanted more money from the state, which often looked at the university as a secondary concern, despite its land grant status and importance to the region. People seemed to like him, there was a complimentary note about his welcoming style of conversation in this annual, but didn’t think he was equal to the job. He’d lost the alumni, the faculty were over him. Enrollment wasn’t keeping up with regional competition. Dowell might have been too much of a holistic bureaucrat for the moment, and didn’t bring the requisite passion for the place, but there was also the problems in athletics, particularly football. After the 1924 season the team was 4-4-1, and alumni wanted Dowell to be brought before the board of trustees, with students called to testify. This was the lever that moved alumni, but statewide politics that had nothing to do with sports were also at play. The students hanged him in effigy.

This is the cover of the 1926 yearbook.

The book was dedicated to Maj. John Everard Hatch, “who has been an inspiration to us throughout our four years of college life … in token of our love for him as a man, our admiration for him as a solider and our devotion to him as a leader.” Hatch retired as a colonel. He and his wife, Helen, are buried at West Point. They had a daughter and two sons, both of whom served as officers in the Army. They would have all been 10 or younger here. His father was a brigadier general, buried at Arlington.

Sometimes it is easy to think of the way-back-then as a monochrome moment, a sepia-toned, yellowed piece of paper is what we’ve got. That’s what we see, after all. But this book is here to show you, they knew about color. There are several plates like this marking the different sections of the book. Though, to my knowledge, we didn’t often have tigers walking a path to Samford Hall.

Nevertheless, it is the 1920s. The photos here are large shots of buildings, which we’ve discussed before, and small headshots, like these, of the senior and junior class officers.

Vice president of the senior class was Leon Nelson, who was from Gadsden. He went to Florida to coach and then to coach in south Alabama. A decade hence, he was the head football coach back home in Gadsden, and had a legendary decade-long run there. He went back to Florida in 1948, where he stayed until 1964. The stadium there is named in his honor. He died at 67, in 1970, in Miami.

Owen Frederick Wise return to Auburn in 1970 to receive an honorary doctorate. He was the director of the state’s Vocational Rehabilitation Service where he worked for more than 40 years, started in 1928. He died in Montgomery, in 1973. He had his wife, Louise, had two daughters, and at least one of them went to Auburn and would be listed as one of the Glomerata’s favorites — a fact which was mentioned in her obituary, at 88, in 2023.

Louis Howle left school and signed on with the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, where he worked for 43 years. He and his wife had two daughters. He died in Atlanta, in 1983.

Robert Young Brown went into the foreign service. He was stationed in Baghdad, Cairo, Bogota, and Panama in the 1930s. He would also serve in Montevideo, Manila, and Athens. He was named consul general in Jamaica in 1950. He retired in 1957, and served in the National Defense Executive Reserve. He died in 1964.

Dorothy Duggar was from Auburn, hers was one of those reasonably prominent families. She would become the first woman to graduate from the university with a degree in architecture. She stayed in town, and became well-known herself. She died in 1975 and is buried at Pine Hill.

Did these juniors do much? Eldon Pruett got married in the fall of 1926 and graduated in May of 1927. His wife became a teacher. He did too, becoming a coach at neighboring Opelika High. He stayed in the Army reserves, left OHS to serve in the war. At some point he did a stint in Korea. He became a lieutenant colonel, and a business manager when he returned to civilian life. He was active in local society, ran for the county school board, married off two daughters. His nickname in college was Dizzy, and people still called him that three decades later. He died in 1968.

S.H. Lynne was a track star at Auburn and was hired as a coach at Alabama. He also studied the law there, and then became a county judge in 1934. He was named to the federal bench in 1946 by Harry Truman. When he died, at 93, in 2000, he was the longest serving jurist. His obituary recalls that his order kept George Wallace from barring two black students from attending the University of Alabama, though he wasn’t known as a proponent of integration.

His classmate and fellow class officer Moreland G. Smith was a civil rights activist, and architect. He joined a Nashville firm, studied at MIT, and then put out his own shingle. He designed a city hall, and an apartment complex where Rosa Parks would later live. He served in the Army Corps of Engineers. He later designed Montgomery’s Garrett Coliseum, served on the board of trustees at Tuskegee. He also worked on a church, a library and three county courthouses. He sold most of his interest in the architectural firm Sherlock, Smith & Adams because the very racist governor was threatening a bank with which they did business. He moved to Atlanta and joined the Southern Regional Council. He and his wife, Marjorie, had three children. He died in 1989.

It looks as though Rodney G. Carter became a teacher, and then a principal. He’s difficult to pin down, however.

All of the senior headshots look like this, though Sarah Frances Blackman is the only one smiling.

If I have the right woman, it seems that she got married in 1953. It’s possible she lived in Florida. And, if I found the right one I think I’ve just stumbled upon my favorite newspaper mention in this long-running project. In 1983, Frances Blackman was demonstrating the microwave. No wonder she was smiling, decades and decades earlier.

The next woman is Mrs. Margaret H. Blair. She would go on to work at the Georgia Teachers College and the University of Georgia. By the mid-1940s she becomes nationally renowned in clothing and textiles. She’s in her 30s here, but she’s difficult to trace. She died in Savannah, Georgia, in 1973. Her sister, Agnes Harris, was at this time the dean of women at Auburn. The next year she went over to Alabama.

I only included the third guy because he was easy to find. Samuel Bonifay studied electrical engineering, became a meter tester, and eventually settled in Anniston, working for Alabama Power for almost 40 years. He served as a captain in the reserves, retired in 1966 and had a daughter and two grandchildren when died at 75 in 1977.

On that same page, at the bottom of the column, is Margaret Brown. She was studying education and, if you’ll read her blurb, was a total jock.

The varsity team didn’t form until 1971, of course, but women were doing things prior to that. And this, in 1926, is the first time I recall the yearbook bragging about it. Unfortunately, the athletic department doesn’t record or recognize those earlier teams. And Brown, of course, is quite the common name.

This is Wiliam Alton Goode, he was studying agriculture, livestock in particular. He’d eventually own a dairy concern. He died in 1979, age 75, the father of a son and two daughters. He is from one of my ancestral haunts and I bet someone in my family knew him.

I don’t profess to being an expert on the photography or portraiture of the era, but I bet this woman, Oriel Nevada McGinty, was desperately ready to be done with the 1920s.

She was the oldest of five from nearby Camp Hill. She was to become a teacher. She died at 86 in 1976.

It is a shame the photo isn’t bigger, but you can tell that the band is awfully proud of those capes. I bet they were new.

“They weren’t good, but they had rifles, and so we’ll say whatever nice things they want us to.”

Earlier we learned that the athletics were struggling. The solution was a rebuild. The university brought in David Morey, center. He was an All-American football player for Dartmouth College and a pitcher for the Philadelphia Athletics. Auburn was his third stop, where he stayed for three years. He went 10–10–1 in football, with the high water mark being a 2–0 win against Tulane in the first game of New Orleans’ Sugar Bowl. In 1927 his quarterback was expelled for sneaking into a women’s dorm after a night of drinking. (Could you imagine that headline today?) His team started 0–3 and he resigned. he went back north to coach again.

Some of these other guys would have distinguished careers on the plains. These guys all came in together, Red Brown, who coached the freshmen, Boozer Pitts, Morey, Mike Papke, and the great Wilbur Hutsell.

Pitts was a local boy, and was a standout player at Auburn in the glory days. He was a center at 190 pounds. He’d coached the team in ’23 and ’24, and would step in for Morey in 1927. Aside from World War II, when he served as an army officer, he taught math at the university for more than 30 years. He died in 1971.

Papke would coach the basketball team for three seasons and still has the second-highest winning percentage on campus.

Wilbur Hutsell was fast his whole life, being a conference champion in the 400 when he was in college. He’d been on campus for a few years as the first track and field coach. In his career he sent five athletes to the Olympics. He also coached the basketball team for a time, before Papke came along. He trained the 1924 Olympics wrestling team and was an assistant track coach for the 1928 Games. He was also the athletic director, twice. The track venue on campus was named in his honor and he was inducted into four different halls of fame.

Morey, on the gridiron, had guys like this to work with. No idea who they are, as there’s no caption. The football team began their rebuild, in 1925, going 5-3-1. The yearbook says they were a thin team. As yearbooks must do, they were incredibly optimistic about the future.

They were wrong. The team would go 5-4 in 1926 and wouldn’t see a winning season again until 1931. None of the fans knew that. Some 5,000 fans came out to see the homecoming game, a 19-0 loss to Virginia Tech. It was the largest crowd to ever watch Auburn play. In contrast, the 2026 A-Day game, the spring scrimmage, had 34,276 fans in attendance.

There were quite a few on hand for this game. Not sure where it is, but I want to say Columbus. The sports photography had a long way to go, in the 1920s, and this is the best of the shots assembled here. But, still, look at that referee running in at the end of the play.

This is the captain of the team, Edward “Red” Hawkins. He was a senior from Bessemer, studying civil engineering. He got married in 1928 to Mildred and graduated in 1929. He taught and was the athletics director of a high school for some time. He joined the U.S. Forest Service and then the war came. Overseas for more than two years, he was stationed in Calcutta, India for at least part of that time, where he was promoted to lieutenant colonel. Ten days after his 90th birthday, in 1992, he died in south Alabama.

This is the rat football team. The freshman team, and the first one in the university’s history. It says here that some 120 “freshies” came out for the team. Twenty-two of them are listed above this photograph. It looks like a pretty fierce group to me.

Cheerleading was different then. These guys didn’t merit a real mention here, but they did get this photograph. I wonder if they had to supply their own white-on-white cheer uniforms. We do learn the cheer leader is Charles Roberts, a junior from Wadley studying electrical engineering. He’s the guy in the middle.

Roberts worked at Georgia Power, where he was a vice president for a quarter century. He cheered on the Red Cross and the United Givers as chairman of the local fund drives. He’d been president of the Rotary, the chamber of commerce and the Georgia State Fair Association. When he died, at 67 in 1971, he had a son and daughter, and seven grandchildren. His wife died three years prior, almost to the day.

Here’s the captain of the basketball team, which earned a two-page spread. Bill McKinney was from Mobile. He was studying electrical engineering. The season was still underway when the Glom went to print. They finished 5-10, but were looking forward to better days. And the next few seasons were better.

McKinney came from a time before load management. We learn here that he’d played every minute in the last two seasons. He made it to 98, his time at the university and his four varsity letters, his time in ROTC, and his being a team captain are sentences three through seven in his 2003 obituary. But he was more than an Auburn Man — they for sure got that in his obit, as well they should. He was in the Rotary Club. He worked for the American Blower Corporation, which made industrial fans, for two decades. He started McKinney Associates in 1948 and, it says here, he never missed a day of work until he retired at 97.

One of the guys on the team is the great Emil “Snitz” Snyder. Streak was his college nickname for a time, and he came by it honest. He was a three-sport start, but it was the track where he shined. He held the American record for the 300 meter race for a time, at 48 seconds flat. He ran the 100-yard dash in 9.8 seconds. In two years he would become Auburn’s first Olympian. He would win a heat race in the 400 meters, but didn’t advance past the quarterfinals.

After school, Snyder coached football for 30 years. I grew up near a stadium named in his honor. The mayor said “Everyone didn’t love him — no man can claim that — but everyone respected him. Not many can claim that.” Wilbur Hutsell, who we met above, said “I never played for Snitz. I envy those more fortunate.” The newspaper wrote “He produced so many outstanding athletes for Bobby Dodd at Georgia Tech that he was often accused of running a Tech training camp.” He trained at least three All-Americans and one football national champion. He won seven state football championships. His basketball team was a state runner-up. During World War II he ran a physical fitness program on a college campus. The Boston Celtics came to town and his team beat them. He died, at 72, in 1978.

This is Cecil Stewart, captain of the baseball team. The Glom says “his uncanny ability to wield the willow and handle the horsehide is sure to carry him to the top.” Those are both baseball references, though I had to look up the first one. Stewart played seven years of minor league ball as a second baseman. Soon after he hung up his spikes he got married. He and his wife, Catherine, started their lives in Dallas. Geechie, as he was known as a young man, died at 85, in 1988.

Here’s one more baseball shot. The guy on the right is Ben Sankey. They bragged about him here as a shortstop, and they weren’t wrong. He spent three years in the bigs, playing all around the Pittsburgh Pirates’ infield. He died in Georgia in 2001, at 94 years old.

Last one for the day, these are the track and field captains. I’m not sure what the Ts mean on the uniform. Leon Lavert “Nurmi” Nelson has them, but the whole team does not wear them. Nelson was also the vice president of his senior class, we learned about him, above.

The other guy is George Clifford Murrow. He ran cross country. He got a masters degree at Alabama. He became an educator, and then a principal, which was one of his job titles for 32 years. In the summers he worked as a funeral director. He retired in 1971. He died in 1988, survived by his wife, Ola May, and two daughters.

All of these will wind up in the Glomerata section (eventually). You can see others, here. Or maybe you’d like to click through to see all the covers. The university hosts their collection here.

books / friends / history / hobby / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
11
Aug 26

There are basically three stories here

Spent the day sweating. I was in my office, and so it was only a low-grade sweat. Nevertheless, the 10 or so feet of elevation difference from the ground floor to the second floor is important in terms of the sun. That extra .2 degrees is a real nudge on the ol’ Endothermic Me Meter. I think we got up to 98 degrees today. I find I could do more of the things I need to do outside if I could get outside. It was a productive time inside, though.

I devoted the day to steps that will bring my online class into a real-world classroom. I have taught nine sections of it online, and feel confident in saying this one works well as an online class. Not all courses do, but that’s OK. The university is leaping into more online spaces. We wanted to put the class about digital media back in the classroom.

All of the material is there. It is a well designed class. (One of my colleagues built this class and she has been very kind and generous of her time and thoughts and resources and I’m just trying to do it well and make the smallest changes necessary from time to time, just for relevance. I like the class, and when I compliment it, I am complimenting her work. She certainly deserves the acknowledgement.) But I have to bring online order into a real world chaos. Or vice versa. This is how that’s going.

I have printed out a general calendar to keep track of the happenings in the course. I started by highlighting the days of the class, marking the beginning of the term, the final, and dates it will meet. I counted the weeks. I printed another calendar, one for last spring, so I could write out the proper sequence of events. This rough draft calendar helps to visualize all of the moving parts. I did this because it occurred to me, just last night, how much of the class will shake out in the classroom. I’ll take elements from the online version that would feel vestigial in a classroom and turn them into big talking points. We also have prepped lectures, reading materials, and several long videos we’ll watch over the semester. The elaborate, messy, and ultimately redundant calendar system helped me bring it all into order today. Now all I have to do in that class is make sure all of the assignment dates on Canvas make sense. (While it is an in-person class we are also encouraged to use Canvas.) I have to consider the finalized version of the module setup in Canvas. And I have to update the lectures. That’s all I have to do.

I also made a spreadsheet for the lectures, so that I might keep track of my progress with them over the course of the term. I prepped up the first lecture today, too. Fourteen more weeks of that to go.

For my other classes, I have to finish polishing one class. I made a To Do list today and that class only has three items on the list. My final class has one item. It says: Everything.

So I am caught up on everything except work, which is where I am behind.

In the evening, I went outside, just to cool down. It helped.

Let me tell you what I did last night. We watched Sunday’s stage of the Tour de France Femmes, completing the nine-day event. No surprises there, but some nice racing and the strongest rider won. My lovely bride announced she was going upstairs, which meant it was time for me to do the dishes. We had spaghetti, which was tasty, and I had a frying pan, the great big pot, and various complementary things to clean. I cleaned them with varying degrees of success. I stepped outside to retrieve the garbage can which, having fulfilled its weekly chore, deserved a happy return to the normal resting place.

Then I pulled out one of those new tape measures I bought this weekend. You have to put a little thought into what the first task will be. A stereo needs a great first song, the first movie you call up needs to be worthwhile, and tools need a meaningful first effort. And so I measured the parts of a fly rod that my father-in-law left with us on his recent visit. And, now, every time I pull out that tape measure I’ll think of that.

And probably also this. That’s a silly thing. Tape measures don’t need nostalgic firsts.

Anyway, he left this rod here and it needed to be safely stored and tonight was the night I was determined to find which bin in the basement had all of my old poster tubes. It took some doing, but I did. And wouldn’t you know it? Each one was about two inches too short.

I figured I would make do. Brought them upstairs, set about making do and found he’d also left the actual tube in which fly rods are stored. Excuse me, the fly rod carrier. And give fly fishers this: they have a strong accessory game. Inside the tub was a little cloth roll that held the actual parts of the rod. Once filled, you slide that into the tube, then put on the classy aluminum cap. The carrier is a rich dark green and the cap looks bronze and the whole thing looks like it should be in The Study.

I left this one in our library.

Some magic happened in the basement. I discovered a computer monitor I’d forgotten I had. (Haven’t we all been there? Forgetting high end computer equipment for years at a time? I know I have. How many monitors do I have? If I knew that I wouldn’t be rediscovering them, now, would I? Also, three, if you don’t count the laptop monitor.) I can do something with this, I thought. And I’ll only need to find an HDMI cable. Wouldn’t you know it, right there, in that same bin, there was an HDMI cable. These things could have stayed there, but they are meant to be used, and so they would come upstairs. But that was only the beginning! I found a few empty storage bins, and now I have started a stack of empty storage bins. And this is the beginning of reorganizing that corner of the basement. One of those empty bins just had bubble wrap in it from the last move. Couldn’t throw that away, so it stayed there. But now I wanted an empty bin. I also wanted the bubble wrap, so I set about looking for somewhere to put it and, wouldn’t you know it, at the center of the wads of bubble wrap was a plastic bag. So I laid out the bubble wrap. Then I flattened the bubble wrap.

I did not iron the bubble wrap. That’d be ridiculous. Also, it would melt.

Wouldn’t it?

Hang on.

Yeah, bubble wrap melts under the iron. Don’t do that.

So I smoothed it out with my hands, and then I folded it over. Then I stuffed the smoothed out, folded over bubble wrap into that bag and put the bag in a cabinet, where it will sit until we need to wrap something, or someone else needs bubble wrap, or I think of a better use for that cabinet.

This is momentum. Because before and after the bubble wrap diversion I found the three empty bins, I was able to re-sort a few things on shelves and I’ll remember none of this the next time the mood strikes, in four months.

Also, I changed the air filter.

Back upstairs, I cleaned the rando cabinet. Our refrigerator sits inside the wall, basically, and there are two cabinets above the fridge — one of them is famously for Poseidon) — and then there’s a vertical cabinet that holds a lot of cookbooks, but may soon get re-purposed. And below that there’s the cabinet that is the junk drawer of cabinets. It holds our flashlights, 1/64ths of the North American supply of batteries, some tools, some cat treats, and so on. It is the so on that’s the problem. I want one of those new tape measures to stay in that cabinet, with those tools. These are the basics. Two screwdriver sets, a cheaper hammer, some stuff that came with furniture, etc. They live there so we don’t have to fumble about the garage for a small indoors project. And so you can see where all of this is going. Everything is getting reorganized. Well, it is one day. Last night a handful of things that had landed in there for no reason got thrown away. I prioritized the cabinet based on assumed frequency of need. Most important things going on the top shelf and descending from there. It was not done to the degree of my recent linen closet re-organization, but I was able to find three percent more shelf space, and the tape measure or the cat snacks won’t fall out the next time we open the door.

And, thus, I am caught up on everything except work, which is where I am behind. But I have a growing awareness of that behindedness, and also some time to remedy the situation. Not much, so I must step into the task with some alacrity, but time.

I have all of the material in place for two of my three classes. I’ll probably need to add a bit more to the third class. I also need to sort some things out. That scheduling is important and busy work and, experience has shown me, one prone to overthinking. Fortunately, I never do anything of the sort. But I might start! I might step into overthinking with some alacrity.

That’s how I usually do it. The overthinking, I mean.

I also find myself in the healthy activity of dreaming about things I’d like to do. Things I want to do when the weather breaks. When there’s less to do. When I’m not busy. When I have six days in a row of not doing other things when it isn’t almost 100 degrees. But there will always be obligations and obstacles. I am thinking about the things I’ll do after my next travel trip, things I want to do on the site, but should in no way start now because, see above.

And this, friends, is how you find yourself looking into the etymology of “marcescent.” Probably Latin, but definitely also proto-Italian, or Lithuanian. Possibly Ukranian. Could be Greek. As for the word itself, look it up.

I read somewhere recently that a person should have five hobbies. This hipster think piece of Instagram-quality was implying you’d be more well-rounded, or you could keep them fresh — a new task for every night of the week! — or these things could be seasonal. So I invite you to count the things that are your active hobbies. This does not include work, sleep, family responsibilities, etc.

How many did you get?

Can you see your way into finding the time to adding that third or fourth or fifth hobby? Pretty tricky, right? I would say I have four and practice at three of them. I wonder where the fourth or fifth hobby would go. In this line of reasoning it is something like “At least one of your hobbies takes up too much of your time and gets in the way of other hobbies.”

Well, OK, I do read a lot. Got me there.

I’d like to do more with the website, which has been a state of catch-up since May. But I’m caught up. Now school work time is here. No hard feelings; work must be done. It is happy work, generally speaking.

Can’t ride less. I need to ride more! Fulfilling that hobby’s true ambition would get in the way of other hobbies. Also, there are things I need to build. Critically, there are things I need to finish building. The story of me can’t be the half-finished guy, or the ha-fin-gu, if you will.

That loosely covers the present hobbies, without digressing into their ROI, and says nothing about adding another.

Maybe it was a TikTok-quality piece. Typing this out it doesn’t seem to rise to the caliber of rigor and taste that an Instagram-quality piece would demand. It has the necessary saccharine vibes and FOMO necessary, but challenging you to pick up hobbies that TikTok element of lemmings to it. Who cares how many hobbies you have? Have one. Have 14. Be as good or as bad at them as you like. Pour exactly the right amount of time and money into it as you require. Get out of them exactly what you need.

I had a brief chat with the linguist and author Gretchen McCulloch recently when she was talking about what she called “the great joys” in realizing that she can just go learn to do a new thing once in a while. Take a weekly class for a bit, meet new people, and get, as she called it “medium proficient” at the thing.

This made me smile. I often tell students one of the perks of my job is staying in touch with former students (the one that choose to do so) because it is gratifying to see them develop interests of their own, not what the state or their parents or this curriculum insisted on. So now I have former students who are running for local office, one just received a prominent national AI innovation award (when he isn’t lawyering), softball, travel volleyball tournaments, wandering abroad, hiking close to home, and of course they spend their time with family, have side hustles, or just try new things. I talk about one former student in particular in class too, because it’s not all about curriculum. You want that Paper in college, but my point is always that there’s much, much more to it than that. This of course applies to the rest of life, too. I’m writing about those people and the rest of you and myself, too.

What do we want to do with our time? It’s not a selfish question.

I diverged at some great length into a great deal of text about Type 1 and Type 2 fun. After I deleted that I spent some time writing three more paragraphs about it, that time it was grounded in the idea of how you might find an additional hobby. There are plenty of opportunity and this should be easy, is what I was saying. First you have to define what you want — learn a process, gain a product, make more friends, try the thing that has always astounded you? You can work on these questions for a while.

I’m beginning to see, just now, where my days go.

Speaking of reading and learning new things, we return now to Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second installment in his Revolutionary War trilogy. It’s excellent. Highly recommended.

From time to time I look up the people he’s writing about. No way in the world you’ve ever come across this young man’s name. And it stands out well enough that we should be able to find him online despite the mists of time.

By the time young Barnardous Swartout Jr. played his part in the largest drama of his life at the ripe old age of 16, at least one branch of his family had been in the colonies for four generations. His great-grandfather made the trip over from the Netherlands sometime before 1660. They’d all lived and died in New York, as did Barnardous. The 2nd New York regiment was a part of the invasion of Canada, at Valcour Island, and participated in the battle of Saratoga and Monmouth, which is where we meet him. They were also at Yorktown. How many of those Swartout was at remains beyond me at the moment. We do know he survived the war. He is buried in Sleepy Hollow. I wonder if he knew of Washington Irving’s tale, which was published just four years before he died. I wonder if Sleepy Hollow itself had strong feelings about it at the time.

Barnardus was married the same year as this battle. He and his wife, Mary, had 13 children, at least 11 of which survived into adulthood. He becomes a merchant, and apparently a successful one. He was also a local tax collector, and otherwise paid close attention to politics. He had farmland on the Hudson. If you’ve ever driven over the Cuomo or Tappane Zee bridges you’ve looked down upon his land, some 300+ acres of what he knew as woods, orchards, pastures and meadows. He becomes the sort of local fixture that when other property is written about in the newspapers of the day his place is mentioned as a fixed point. He was also a charter member of The Society of the Cincinnati. He had a two-floor home, multiple barns, and good livestock when he died in 1824.

If you click around enough you can see some of his descendants beginning to move around. I looked at the grandchildren he might have known, mathematically at least. One, was a housewife in Brooklyn, who died at 71. Another stayed in Sleepy Hollow. One served in the navy and two in the army, one of whom died of an illness during the Civil War. Two of his grandchildren survived into the 20th century. (There’s one man, Steuben Jr., that did not know his grandfather, Barnardus, but did live long enough to read about the horrors of World War I.) Some lived in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa. Some had large families themselves; others, perhaps did not. Maybe having that many brothers and sisters was enough. (Online record caveats also apply.) They were Masons, Quakers, they had spiritual epitaphs, they were American. If there had only been a reference in here to a canal this man’s family would have been a complete reference to early white U.S. history.

That family name is also still in New York. Hopefully they’re in good order.

books / history / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
6
Aug 26

You know, those kinds of days

You know how, some days, you get a lot of work done? Yesterday wasn’t one of those days. You know how, though, on some days, you get some stuff done and you figure it’ll pay off later on? Maybe yesterday was one of those days. You know how, some days, you just wind up cleaning things instead of doing work. Yesterday was one of those days.

You know how, sometimes, you think “I am going to do this chore tomorrow,” and you go to bed feeling enthusiastic about it, almost already patting yourself on the back for the work you’re going to do tomorrow, but then you don’t really feel the same way about that the next day?

Just me? OK then.

Yesterday I cleaned my desk, which was threatening to encircle and collapse upon me. A few small things got thrown away. Momentum builders, I thought, with a handful of short runs to toss things into a garbage can. Also, I had some cords and cables which have been vexxing me. Vexxing me, I say. I am vexxed. Two Xs. Or, I have been. Now some of them are out of site, and I am merely vexed.

Also, I cleaned my phone off, which desperately needed some attention, moving some videos to an external drive gave me almost 40 GB of space back. Now my phone feels lighter, somehow?

While those files were transferring, and while I was moving cables, I cleaned beneath part of my desk, too. Beneath my desk is a tennis ball, which I bat around with the cats occasionally, and a stool I made in a 7th grade shop class. I wonder if any of my old classmates still have theirs.

We also had some weather, which turned into threats of threatening weather, which turned into another realization that we’ve done terrible damage to our weather forecasting abilities in the last 20 months. Meanwhile, we had our first generator test yesterday. It fired up and ran for five minutes and then turned itself off, exactly as intended. You can hear it in the house. It isn’t overbearing, but you know it is running. Given the number of lawn mowers and leaf blowers we have around us, it’ll blend in soon enough.

By the time all of that was done, and I was ready to work, it was time to knock off for the day. So I did. Tomorrow, then, I thought to myself, feeling enthusiastic about it, almost already patting myself on the back for work I’ll be doing tomorrow. Tomorrow was today. Those pats were unearned.

I had a meeting scheduled this morning, my first official work thing of the new school year, but it was canceled and will be rescheduled for September. I like how this is starting off.

Anyway, let’s return to the site’s most popular weekly feature, the regular check in with the kitties.

Despite the cleaning, I can never get ride of this box. It has been claimed by the management of this domicile. (Though we do need to hang the cool thing that is inside the box. Let me add that back to the list …)

There’s a ledge on our stairs, and I love it when the cats remember it is there. This week it has been a spot for Phoebe.

Last night my lovely bride moved an empty laundry basket, just so it wouldn’t be underfoot. This simple effort stirred Poseidon and brought him across the room to inspect the procedure. The baskets are his, I guess. Especially when they have laundry in them.

Those towels were fresh out of the dryer, so you can understand. (As I write this he is sitting in my closet, on a pile of clothes. They, too, were clean before he found them. I found this out because I was doing laundry at the time.) So he likes clothes.

But he also enjoys his private time, in his cabinet above the refrigerator.

And, yes, I leave a cabinet empty for the cat. I also put a blanket in there so he could be cozy. He sits there, happy as can be, of his own choice or if we are trying to keep him away from dinner.

So the cats are doing just fine, as you can tell. Except Phoebe needs a belly rub right now. I’ll do that, and pat myself on the back, feeling enthusiastic about the effort.

We return to Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy. It is such a terrific book and I can’t encourage you enough to get this if you haven’t already. I am into 1778 now and am trying to decide if I want to read more and faster, because it is such a nice read, or if I want to slow down because I’m through the halfway point and I’d like to delay the inevitable end. It’s the kind of book.

Anyway, the Carlisle Peace Commission has landed, and the British are packing up to leave Philadelphia and this one little tidbit gets back to that idea of public sentiment, which, somewhere in 1777, shifted rather demonstrably. And go figure. War at home, difficulties on the domestic economic front, the occasional story or propaganda about a slaughter here or a massacre there. By the time these guys showed up, the only real peace overtures that Lord North and King George offered in the revolution) everyone had picked a side. You were almost certainly a patriot ready for independence or you were strictly a loyalist and, at this point, you might be considering Canada, the islands, or the jolly ol’ isle as a better alternative. Opinions and jaws were set.

In part that’s why the British were leaving Philadelphia. There are a lot of tactical considerations, but everyone that knew what they were looking at and could see it clearly seems to have realized there were difficult days ahead for the redcoats. So it was back to New York. Several thousand loyalists and deserters would take the trek, too. The women and children by see, the rest overland. It was a huge logistical move.

Let’s look at some of the people involved here. Joseph Reed was born into a family of means. He studied law. He becomes a founding father, a soldier, an aide-de-camp to Washington. At one point he was accused of treason in the press. He was also big into Pennsylvania politics, of course. (Those two things are not related.) He was due to be returned to the congress, but his health betrayed him. He died at just 43 years old.

William Henry Drayton gives us that amazing quote. He was a founding father from South Carolina, not to be confused with the later Congressman William Drayton (no Henry as a middle name) who would have been a toddler toddler at the time of the Peace Commission. (The Draytons were cousins.) William Henry Drayton, an ambitious rice plantation owner of South Carolina was a big voice in the lowcountry politics of his time. He gets overlooked a lot, but he was one of the people who thought Independence Day should be marked with fireworks. He also commanded a frigate, served as a judge, wrote part of Carolina’s 1778 constitution and was in the Continental Congress from 1778 until his death the next year at just 37 years old. He was a polemicist, a bomb thrower, and a big, loud, quarrelsome part of that body, which might help explain the attitude that came with that message to Carlisle.

Carlisle is Frederick Howard, the 5th Earl of Carlisle. He ran that particular effort, which found itself ill-informed, ill-timed, and ultimately critical of how the British government was handling this whole thing. And here we can get into the dangerous waters of trying to understand the many attitudes of people who’ve come long before us. But let us just stay general enough and say that King George and his prime minister, Lord North, had their critics at home. While the king was more or less insulated from that, it did exist in some considerable sort of which. For our purposes, it was loud enough to be remembered 250 years later. The British opposition saw France gearing up and worried about the French allies, Spain. The problem with a big empire and a big government is a lot of voices and a lot of needs and a lot of people pulling in different directions and what is a king to do? Well, we’ll send these three guys to try to patch things up.

Dear reader, I hope this does not come as a surprise to you, but they were unsuccessful in those efforts. This reconciliation offering was somewhat comparable to where the colonies started the process, but on this side of the ocean that was now off the table.

Howard was a British statesman, diplomat and author. When this little job failed, he wasn’t blamed, though he thought. In fact, he was made the viceroyalty of Ireland, but that might not have been the most plum assignment given larger global events. William Eden was there, too, a high ranking cabinet member, a member of parliament, a spymaster. Joining them was Commodore George Johnstone, a naval officer who had also served during the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War. He was a politician, a member of parliament, a director of the East India Company, and he’d previously been the governor of West Florida from 1763 until 1767. It was Johnstone who was rumored to be offering bribes. Despite these three men, and the British Royal Navy behind them, and the rumors of bribes and whatever else, they could not succeed. They appealed to Congress, but were rebuffed. They appealed to the people, with no more luck.

Some historians point out the value in what the Carlisle Commission was bringing to the peace table, while others have focused on the idea that turning the Congress turning them away was the last obstacle to realizing the American project, even if, as others have argued, Howard, Eden and Johnstone had very little chance of success, as they seemed to think themselves. Perhaps, as some have argued, they were sent, and arrived, too late, to have any real material impact. Soon after, the British efforts in North America ground to a halt for months and the revolutionaries had to interpret that as best they can, perhaps they were leaving, distracted, or done.

Or perhaps, as Andrey Kuchkovskiy wrote in studying the commissioners themselves:

The Carlisle Peace Commission suffered from poor timing and a lack of political and military support. While the public supported their efforts, the officials initially did not, and by the end of their time in the colonies, even the commissioners expressed doubt about achieving peace. Additionally, the expansion of the war after France allied with
the Americans dramatically undercut the commissioners’ efforts. Had the commissioners remained in the colonies to pursue peace, or potentially renewed their conciliatory efforts with a new commission, they could have arguably achieved a possible agreement …

They arrived in the early summer, they departed in early fall. The French were sailing for Boston. The war would continue.

And so does this book. It’s terrific!

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3
Aug 26

This covered more ground than anticipated

It was oppressively muggy — central Arkansas muggy — last night. Also it rained. Rained all night. Rained into the morning. Thunder was my alarm clock. The storm front blew away mid-morning. We’ve been in triple digits with the heat index into the early evening. I’ve sat here to sweat.

I spent several hours doing work stuff today. Don’t you want to know about it? I had to find the notebook that held the fall 2025 notes for a class I’m teaching again. I figured it was in one of three places, and I found it in the third place: a bookcase. Also, there were two notes books. So many notes I made for myself! I’d forgotten that.

When last this class met it was a twice-a-week class. This fall it will meet once a week. So the bulk of my day was in starting the reorganization process. Moving things around, renaming modules. Oh, and I updated this document I maintain with pages and pages of university resources. And I updated the syllabus for the course. It’s funny: some parts of working through all of those details can be easy, and some parts seem like a huge effort.

Apply that nonsensical observation for most of my days for the next five or six weeks.

Tomorrow I’m going to restructure the outline of that class. Hopefully that will be done by Wednesday. The rest of the week will be spent in making sure the work works right for both the style, and schedule, of this new version of the class. And I need to figure out how I’ll update the old slides in an efficient way.

That, I think, will be solved by some inspired bit of epiphany. Or I’ll just do it the long way 15 times in the next few months. Copying and pasting is such a bother, innit?

Also, I have to work on two other classes. I suspect I’ll begin one of those next week. The good news is that they aren’t starting from scratch. I’ll just agonize over them as if they are.

There’s a new look to the site, and if you go to the front page you can see it now. It starts like this, the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa.

Go ahead and look. That link will go to a new tab. Give it 60 seconds of zen. This page will be here when you’re ready.

The new idea for the front page is to update those images each month. If I don’t mess that up I have front page updates prepped to take us into next June. If I don’t mess it up.

I also updated the mobile version of the site. Just some easy text corrections and changing a few buttons that needed changing. Still not sure why it looks as intended on a phone, but broken in a computer browser. That’s an issue for another day. I wonder how many times I’ve said that about this issue.

And, of course, because the first of the month was this weekend I also did all of my regular monthly computer updates, changing various files, updating spreadsheets, cleaning up files, and so on. It’s not the most fun thing to write about, but this is is an old machine now, and it’s necessary. Fortunately these are easy chores.

Do you know that feeling when you learn something new and you just have to tell someone about it? I learned this yesterday and I have to tell people about it. Admittedly, I like this tale more than anyone else will, but I have that feeling, and so now you get to learn about this too. And for that we must return to Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy.

When the Augusta’s ammunition and gunpowder burned off the explosion was heard more than 50 miles away. The vessel’s remains sat in the water for about 90 years, a sometimes navigational hazard. I found a great 2015 lecture that talks about the ship, recovering the vessel’s remains, a tourist attraction, scavengers, and then …

That appeals to me in more ways than one. I’d just like to make things and then point to them later and say “That came from …” and the rest of that sentence not be “the lumber yard.” You can see some better photos of the HMS Augusta furniture and paneling from the DAR themselves.

Here’s one other, unrelated, Revolutionary War note for the day. Just 250 years and one day ago, John Adams wrote to Richard Cranch, the colonial watchmaker, clockmaker, and repairman of Boston. He talks about the inoculations against smallpox and a few other events of the day. But also this.

You mention the Exultation at a Declaration of Independence. Is not the Change We have seen astonishing? Would any Man, two Years ago have believed it possible, to accomplish such an Alteration in the Prejudices, Passions, Sentiments, and Principles of these thirteen little States as to make every one of them completely republican, and to make them own it? Idolatry to Monarchs, and servility to Aristocratical Pride, was never so totally eradicated, from so many Minds in so short a Time.

I’ve rambled on a bit, as it turns out, a few times recently about the public moods of those heady, dangerous, uncertain days. It’s not as if they had a bunch of surveys in the field to gauge things on the home front, or beyond their own social circles. They just knew what they knew, heard, read, and felt as they did. But there’s the great John Adams, certain of a sea change all the same.

It’s a remarkable kind of public politics, really. A revolution of its own, perhaps. Gauging the public interest like that wouldn’t have mattered quite the same way to a monarch. And it matters, of course, more and more now. Also, we still find the pros guessing at it often as not.

Cranch and Adams had been friends for decades. It was the watchmaker that introduced Adams to his future wife, Abigail.

I guess you could say, at both points, Adams knew what time it was.

Cranch married Abigail’s sister, so they were all related. And while the couples remained close, John kept his friend at arm’s length over money-making schemes. Cranch was not lucky in business. But, he served in the Massachusetts legislature, and was a trial court judge for almost 30 years. He and his wife died within a day of one another. He was apparently a forgotten man until modern historians wrote about him in just the last few years. His son became a federal judge in D.C. Two of his grandchildren became a painter and a minister. One of Cranch’s great-grandchildren was a man named Henry Ware Eliot, who became president of a brick making operation in St. Louis. And this is how history never ceases to astonish me. This man, the great-grandson of a Revolutionary War era man, died in 1919. Henry Ware Eliot, by the way, was also the father of T.S. Eliot.

I didn’t see that coming, either.

I had a nice ride Saturday evening. My lovely bride was off having a girls’ day and by the time I set out I had most of the roads all to myself. It’s quite lovely to be out when most everyone is already where they need to be. I did the river ride, which is the second route we designed for ourselves when we moved here in 2023. We haven’t done it in a good long while because a bridge has been closed since July of last year and there’s a sad and spooky part after that, but the road is opened once again.

Just behind me in that photo is where that new asphalt begins. If they’d just paved down another 100 feet or so (and, again, this road was closed for a year, they had time) they could have repaired the biggest mess of potholes you can find in the county.

When you get to the bridge it has that new overpass smell.

New overpasses have smells. Turns out it is not a pleasant smell, but surely it will descend upon the highway below it.

On the other side of the overpass we regained a pleasant little downhill, and a stretch of land that gives you three or four houses on one side, and a cornfield on the other. There is an intersection soon after that, so it was only ever a closure effecting about 1.5 miles, but still, it’s nice to have that road back. This corn is a definite change of pace.

From there you go up a little hill, through more fields, past the famous local artist, respectfully cruise by a memorial, and sprint through a tree canopy so you can get to an access road that’s a half-mile, tree covered stretch of brand new asphalt. A car followed me down that road, but the driver stayed respectfully behind me while I tapped out something in the 20 mph range. After that, back off the access road, another overpass, more trees, watch out for deer, go as fast as you can by the house where the people always yell, and then into the wind.

If I go the way of our designed route I would eventually get to a four-way stop and go straight, but last year the county made a shambles of that stretch of road. If I turn to the right I can stretch this ride. The weather was nice, I was not pressed for time, and so I went that longer way, making my road selection as it suited my whim and wind direction.I stunk it up on the one real hill on the route, as usual. Twice, though, I broke 34 mph on a flat stretch. Haven’t done that recently.

Maybe I’ll do it again!