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cycling / history / journalism / Monday — Comments Off on Happy Valentine’s Day
14
Feb 22

Happy Valentine’s Day

I finally got to try my new bike shoes this weekend. To recap, I bought these on Monday …

And I decided on Monday evening, to my great frustration, that I needed to get new cleats. The gray ones you see here are the old ones. The new ones are black and yellow. They arrived on Thursday, I think, and I installed them and, most importantly, they clipped in properly to my pedals. I do not understand the old problem. The problem has been corrected, I have moved on.

So, yesterday, I got to do this.

And I went faster than I’ve ever gone on that particular course. Two loops, felt easy. It must be the shoes. (Probably it was a lot of rest in my legs.)

These are the earlier model and, thus, less expensive version of the Torch line. The 2.0 cost about $50 more and boast a stiffer carbon sole — meaning a more efficient power transfer. Surely that doesn’t apply to a duffer like me.

But it felt yesterday like it might apply. I’ll try to keep that in mind in 10,000 miles or so.

Anyway, the fictional place I rode was not over the ocean. The islet Zwift uses is in the Solomons. There is one village there, the internet tells me, but no roads.

I wonder if I can talk my lovely bride into a Valentine’s Day ride.

Let’s go back 50 years and down to Selma. It’s the Times Journal, which traces its origins back to 1827. Started life as the Courier, had its press burned during the Civil War, later through a series of mergers it became the Times Messenger, then the Times-Argus, the Selma Times and the Morning Times. Then, in 1920, the paper merged with the Selma Journal to become the Selma Times-Journal, a historically great local paper. Let’s see what was happening in 1972.

Coal strike in Britain was shutting down about eight million jobs. Bombings in Belfast, Nixon prepping for his historic trip to China, and a few bussing stories make the front page next to that rather anonymous standalone Valentine.

Oh, isn’t this a sweet photo on page three.

They did not last. John died in Illinois, in 2008, and was survived by another wife, who he’d only recently married. Carolyn died in south Alabama in 2006 and was also survived by another husband. That man, who doesn’t figure into this newspaper at all, helped design the plaque placed on the moon in 1969. (Her widower died just last year.) But the two above did, perhaps, get married. The names of surviving children in their obituaries match.

The first woman to graduate from AU in building construction.

She passed away last month. In her working life she contributed to projects at Florida Southern College; the University of Florida; the Cathedral of St. Luke in Orlando and Disney World. It’s no small thing to have your work create something people will value long after you’re gone.

An inside editorial.

Good. I’m glad we fixed that.

Oh, this is just lovely. Mom had never been able to cheer him on in a college game, and she surprised him here. He posted 22 points and 15 boards that night.

Nate earned two masters degrees, was a chaplain in the Air Force, worked his way up to becoming Col. Nate Crawford, retiring to Florida in 2006. He’s still down there, as far as I can tell. One of his sons went to the same military academy a generation later.

A half-page double truck ad that starts on page six.

This is 1972, but forced air wasn’t a mystery. How should you use your heater? Turn the heat up until you’re comfortable. Note the temperature on the thermostat. Repeat as needed.

Oh, on the next page:

I grew up with Louie the Lightning Bug (he was developed in 1983, and I had a sweeeeeet glow-in-the-dark Louie shirt.) And though I know of Reddy Kilowatt historically, I was a bit startled to see him here, in 1972. Turns out he declined in usage in the 70s and after. Fuel shortages hurt the mascots first, it seems.

Finally, on the back page.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

history / IU / memories / photo / television / Twitter / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Just before the weather arrived
2
Feb 22

Just before the weather arrived

The weather will start coming down in a bit. The forecast has solidified. We stand to get anywhere from three to nine inches of snow and a few quarts of ice. All of the local hardware stores are out of zambonis. Supply line problems, you understand.

All the hula hoops and bathing suits you want. Not a blowtorch can be found. Also, no crackers.

I could go for a good blowtorch just now. Probably be useful for the driveway tomorrow.

This was the view this morning. Grey, foreboding, and not just because we’d grimly stared at this forecast for the last four days.

For whatever reason, just before I ducked into the studio for the evening, the sky was this curious lapis blue.

We’ll all be asleep when it turns. It’s rained all day. As of this writing, temperatures have now dipped to just below freezing and will continue to fall for a few days.

The local school district announced yesterday that they would go virtual for the rest of the week. (And I heard some stories today about how that’s going over with parents, who of course now must make make all sorts of adjustments.) The county closed all of their offices around midday today. Just before 9 p.m. tonight the university announced that campus would stay open, but classes and work would be done virtually tomorrow. One assumes people in the particular office that makes the weather adjustment announcements were also out stocking up on salt and shovels, hence the late decision. Winter weather is a fickle thing and can be notoriously difficult to forecast (at least back home), but again, the National Weather Service sent up signal flares on Saturday and Sunday. I’d already staked out my WFH status. But late word was … reassuring? Is that the word there?

At that point I’m not sure if it mattered. People had made up their minds. Dear friends, we live in the county. They don’t plow out here — well, the roads anyway — and I simply will not tempt fate when ice is in the conversation. From 2021:

Also, the city doesn’t do an especially good job of winter road maintenance in the part of the city that we have to cross to get to campus. From 2018:

I’m sure plowing an entire city is a challenging task — ots of roads, traffic, changing conditions — but I’ve been assured it is a thing some places achieve.

Maybe it comes down to limited resources. Decisions have to be made, and none of them are about you. Or me! That road in the old tweet above? That’s a four lane highway through the heart of local commerce and the city’s growth pattern.

Tonight the sports crew was in to produce shows about … sudoku puzzles. Fire extinguishers? Ice dispersal? No, sports. I think it was the later, actually.

They’re doing a weekly feature this month they’re calling Historic Hoosiers to coincide with Black History Month.

And they are starting with one of the true greats.

I tell anyone within earshot about George Taliaferro. And I was talking about him in breaks tonight. They’re all too young to remember him, of course. And, indeed, some of the younger members of IUSTV weren’t even on campus when he passed away in 2018. But they all need to know him. I’m grateful for having had the opportunity to hear his story. I never met him, unfortunately, but there are a lot of really great videos online about him, and I hope they seek him out. His football was impressive, but truly the least important thing about him. We should probably remind ourselves about that of every athlete. I’ll say it about Taliaferro until everyone around here knows his story. Which means I’ll say that about him for as long as I’m here.

And if you’re getting weather, watch these videos on George Taliaferro yourself.

Here, he is telling his story to school children, which he did over and over. And you’ll see why that’s important in just a moment.

The sports shows they produced tonight will be up tomorrow. I’ll put them here. Until then, you can watch the news shows the news folks did last night.

This just needs to be longer, and have more stories and packages in it, really.

And here’s the pop culture show. Did you know all of these things? I did not. Pop culture might be leaving me behind. Maybe this is the year.

“The year” was actually several years ago. But I’m faking my way through it.

Anyway, they wrapped just as the temperatures hovered at 31 and 32. I walked out of the building and toward the car in a fine sleet.

I drove slowly to the house. And arrived safely with a nice peaceful feeling. Everyone is where they should be, and we don’t have to worry about tomorrow. Full day tomorrow, but at least it will be from home.

Good thing I bought a new office chair last month! And thanks to my mother for that.

The daily duds: The last one of these. And this is a good one to retire it on. It was new tie Wednesday. And new pocket square Wednesday. The latter was a Christmas gift from my in-laws.

Looks even better in person.

adventures / history / journalism / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on Let’s read century-old newsprint
12
Jan 22

Let’s read century-old newsprint

I woke up, because a bit of daylight was peering through the blackout curtains, 73 minutes later than I’d intended. My phone battery died overnight. No phone, no alarm. And despite making it out of the house — showered and shaved, in 15 minutes, and on time for my first appointment of the day — I could not shake that unsettled feeling. Despite that, it was a lovely day.

It got into the mid-40s here today. Positively chamber of commerce stuff.

I gave a tour this morning, reasserting once again that I would have never enjoyed being a tour guide. And yet. Then I did a little text work, then a little video work. That was the day, flying by as they do, except for the slow parts.

He said, after rethinking the parts of the day not worth writing about here.

Let’s look at some newspapers. This is what was was going on 100 years ago in the town where all of my family lives. Not my hometown, mind you. I’m not sure, anymore, if I have one of those. People talk about a hometown as the place where you were born, or where you grew up or where you live. I’m not in the one I’d prefer, and the rest hardly apply. And though I never lived in this part of north Alabama, all of my family is from around this area. And most of our ancestors were there when this paper was published a century ago.

Ain’t that something?

Read this over breakfast.

You wonder what led up to that over the previous year.

Earl Dean was convicted in April, and sentenced to life. He was paroled a decade later. Dean died in 1951. His sister, the wife of the well-known William McCarley, died at 81, in 1966. She never remarried. The McCarleys had five kids, the last born just after the murder. He passed away, aged 75, in 1996.

There’s still a Wofford Oil Company, but I believe it is a different concern. As for that gas station?

Long gone.

Also, why is the paper telling me about yesterday’s weather? Sure, it was cold and wet yesterday. We lived it.

Will build new church.

The First Methodist Church opened in a log house in 1822. Their third church got them to their current site, in 1827. Two versions later they had a brick building, which burned in 1920, so just before this newspaper. The new church went up on the same spot in 1924 and was renovated a few decades later. No one calls it the new church anymore.

I just wrote about the dam in this space recently. I told you the river and the dam and the TVA figured into everything. In the 1921 paper the writers were discussing its future. ‘Would the government keep the dam project up? And just look at how this dam thing has insulated us from the doldrums some other parts of the country are experiencing. We sure would like it if this continued.’ It’s easy to get the sense that they knew this was their path to prosperity and maybe a touch of that modernization that people talked about, the better parts of it, anyway. Also, there were sad tales like this.

He was one of 56 people who died during the dam’s construction. I know many of the family names on that plaque.

Finally, my grandfather smoked Camels, right up until the day the doctors told him another cigarette would kill him. So my grandmother made him quit. I can still picture, though, the coloring of the package, and the crinkling of the cellophane. No matter what this ad copy says, I can still imagine that god awful “cigaretty odor.”

After my grandfather stopped, my grandmother would go outside and sneak a Raleigh every now and then. That was her brand, and I never understood the distinction. They both smelled terrible to me. And there was a lot of that in their house.

My grandmother was a lovely hostess, though, the archetype grandmother. She always made sure to send me home with food or a plant or a toy, and a suitcase full of clean clothes.

The first thing we did when I got home was put all of those clean clothes go in the washer again. The smoke smells were baked in. It’s hard to imagine these days how ubiquitous that was, and not so long ago. How we were just … used to it. Sorta like cigarette ads in a newspaper.

We had lunch today at Chick-fil-A, which is to say we ordered it via the app and got the parking lot delivery and drove to a neighboring parking lot to enjoy our sandwiches. We parked in the lot of the now defunct K-Mart. It closed in 2016 and is presently being demolished to make way for apartments. The view from that parking lot is the Target parking lot just across the street. There were perhaps fewer cars there today than at any time during the pandemic. (Both locally, and across this state, we’re setting all sorts of pandemic records right now.)

This is our usual lunch date, once a week. While we’re there, I like to imagine we’re sitting over a broad, lazy creek. Today the mental image was enough to make me overlook this little message on the back of the cup.

And that’s true enough. So keep it up, won’t you please?

adventures / Covid-19 / history / Monday / photo / running — 1 Comment
3
Jan 22

Remember, it is twenty … twenty-two now

I took last week off from writing here, and now I have to rebuild my audience. Four people must be convinced to return. It will take weeks to establish that sort of trust. But it was worth having a few days away from this particular never-closed tab in my browser.

I hope you took some time away from the routine, as well, even if it meant time away from this site. And I hope you never close this tab on your browser. Just click refresh once a day. You’ll usually be pleasantly surprised.

Anyway, let’s get caught up. How have you been since we were here together last? I hope you had a good Christmas, if you celebrate, and a lot of time with people you care about and doing things you wanted to do, no matter how you mark the 25th.

We woke up on the 24th in Connecticut, to a white Christmas Eve.

The in-laws drove us to the airport, where we said our goodbyes, and headed inside from the cold to a warmer airport. I left my belt at the TSA checkpoint. For a week I’ve been trying to understand how I just … left my belt in that gray tub.

Sorry belt. We had a good run. And, despite my abandoning you, I liked you a great deal. You were starting to show wear, though, and I would have only gotten four or five more years out of you anyway. And now I’ll have to buy another black belt. (Or use one of the other three I found in my bedroom since then.)

We flew into Nashville, which is good, because that was the immediate destination of the plane we boarded, and also the destination for which we’d purchased tickets, and furthermore, where my car was. Our friend Sally Ann picked us up at the airport. She was just as excited to see us as when we stayed with her a few days prior, or when we saw her earlier in the month. It makes me wonder when people feel like they’ve caught up with those they’ve had to carefully avoid for most of the last two years.

He said, just as it was becoming apparent we’re going back to avoiding our friends and loved ones.

But not before Christmas, because we avoided everyone last year and that stunk and this is measurably better. We have soaring Covid rates, but also vaccines! Thank you science, and Merry Christmas. And so there we were, on Christmas Eve, in Sally Ann and Spencer’s home, planning for the next leg of our holiday travels. We’d removed our masks and took our first at-home Covid tests.

We took those tests because, once the 15 minutes of suspense was over and we were negative, which is a positive, we turned the car to …

We spent the better part of the next week with my mother, taking new tests every day, enjoying her walls instead of our own.

We had Christmas, of course, which is a thing we haven’t had a lot of in the last few years for a lot of reasons. But my mom picked up a bunch of silly little gifts for everyone and people unwrapped them and we laughed and it was different and fun. All of which, we came to find out, was just a setup for my being the recipient of a gag gift, which was clever and sweet and they’ll laugh about it for years because it’s now a part of the family lore.

We spent the weekend played dominoes with my grandfather, who you can see here performing trigonometry in his head.

He’s probably also there considering which dessert he should try, wondering about someone from his church, recalling a passing memory from his work life and thinking up the next sneakily hilarious thing he’ll say. He’s a smart fella, and dominoes aren’t the challenge for him that they are for me, is what I’m saying.

He won’t admit it, but he enjoys whipping me at dominoes. He’s not the sort that you’d think of us competitive, he’d much rather laugh at the moment than put up a big fuss about a game he’s playing. In the whole of my life the extent of his good-natured ribbing is “Goody goody!” But just as much as he likes to sit and visit and, as much as he was proud to teach me how to play dominoes, he also enjoys putting 45 points on the table while I’m drawing extra tiles.

But we play a lot of dominoes when we visit, now. It’s always my mother and grandfather versus me and The Yankee. And we’re getting better at it, at least a little. Occasionally we win a round or two. I am also experimenting with domino strategy, and counting dots on my fingers.

I will forever count dots on my fingers, even though my gag gift was a little calculator to go with my own set of dominos.

We had unseasonably warm weather, and we went for a few runs under some dramatic skies.

The whole time we were there the forecasts pointed at some bad weather coming later in the week, and we all tried to talk ourselves out of that eerie feeling you get this time of year when the barometer and the temperature are out of whack.

I seldom get to use that banner, but we ran over Wilson Dam again, so I’m going to use it here.

Water, as I have noted in this space before, is the predominant geographical feature of the area where all of my family live. The Tennessee River forms near Knoxville, Tennessee and flows to the southwest, into Alabama, before looping back up, helping form the Alabama-Mississippi-Tennessee borders and then heading on up to Kentucky. It created a topography that has defined all of the people that have ever lived there. (When we drove in on Christmas Eve we passed the “Entering the Tennessee River watershed” sign just as Christmas in Dixie came on the radio, like it was scripted to happen, and I was grateful for the darkness because it was a bit emotional in a nonsensical way.)

The Yuchi tribe, the Alibamu and the Coushatta, of the Muscogee Creek Confederacy, lived on this imposing body of water. They called it the Singing River. Alabama became a territory in 1817, white people moved in and it became a state in 1819. Some of my ancestors were among the first white people in the area, some even before the Native Americans were forcibly displaced by the federal government. From what I can glean, they were hardscrabble dirt farmers. Agriculture and water transit defined the era, but shipping was difficult. The shallow, turbulent water at Muscle Shoals was the problem, unlike this little man-made canal at Patton Island.

Then the Great War came.

There was a worry that the Imperial German Navy would cut off shipments of nitrates from South America, so the federal government decided to build their own nitrate plants, driven by hydroelectric power. Muscle Shoals was understood to have the greatest hydroelectric potential east of the Rockies.

So in 1918 they started building a dam, which became it’s own city, employing thousands. They had a school, barbershops, a hospital and more than a hundred miles of sewage lines. But the war ended before the construction did.

This is a view of Wilson Dam, completed in 1924 and named after President Woodrow Wilson.

It is a narrow, two-lane dam, always a bit intimidating when I was a kid. Back then, it was one of the last little bits of road on our two-hour trip to my grandparents’ home. My mom would tell me about how she learned how to drive on that dam, in the snow.

Well, I haven’t done that, but I have driven over it, jogged over it, biked over it in 2017, fished beneath it as a kid, marveled at the power of the spillways and the respect they commanded from people on the water, watched the ships pass through the locks, and dined above it. I didn’t grow up here, but the dam is omnipresent in my story because of the river it sits on and my family which lives in its orbit.

Wilson Dam has considerably less road traffic now, because of the almost-20-year-old Singing River Bridge, my vantage point for the above picture, which is a bit over a mile downstream. You can see the pylons of that bridge, here. I used to do news stories on the air about that bridge because, in the time around it opening, it was the most important thing happening in the area.

In 1933 the dam was handed over to the newly formed Tennessee Valley Authority, which also touches everyone and everything in the region. The dam was put on the historic registry in 1966, and boasts the highest single lift lock east of the Rocky Mountains.

I’m told they used to give tours. Sure, you could walk on that little sidewalk on the narrow dam, but why do that when you can walk through the dam?

As I said, they started building the dam in 1918. In 2016 we ran across the dam and saw a rainbow that was almost a century in the making.

Since they completed the thing in 1924, I now have two years to think up a good line and camp out on the dam until I see another century-old rainbow.

A word about those banners. The Spillway was a newspaper clipping from The Florence Times, the pre-merger ancestor of the modern Times Daily. The Spillway was one of those little social happenings sections of the daily paper The Northwest Alabamian is an old masthead from the still publishing paper of the same name. It’s been a twice-weekly community paper since 1965, tracing it’s own heritage back to 1911. The current publisher has been there since 1983. (He’s also now the county sheriff, and has worn a badge for 30 years, and was the agency’s public relations officer for some time. Small town papers, man.)

We stayed in north Alabama for most of the week, and have since returned to this.

Four days in a row so far, and three months until the reprieve that April will bring.

Hopefully the cats will forgive us for leaving them by then. They were demanding and cuddly over the long weekend.

And, now, for the first time in 2022, back to work.

adventures / family / history / photo / running / Wednesday — Comments Off on Enjoying our time at the Christmas cottage
23
Dec 21

Enjoying our time at the Christmas cottage

It’s always such a treat to be able to open our winter home on the Gold Coast. Though we learned that one of the neighbors is considering moving away. That would really be a shame.

Even on a cloudy day like yesterday, the Saugatuck and the Sound never fail to inspire.

We went out for a four-mile run, but I pulled the rip cord just a bit early when I slammed my heel into the road. Remember, it wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t my shoe’s fault, it was the asphalt.

I didn’t move quickly enough to catch the Canada geese, but I did get the heron from a distant, if only with my iPhone.

And of course, we ran by the old cemetery. You’ll love this marker.

1681- 1771

Families represented: Burns, Church, Gray, Hendricks, Shaw, in whose memory this tablet is dedicated by Compo Hill Chapter DAR and the Morris Park Association 1933.

In the American context of history the cemetery is getting up there in years — in the American context that plaque is aging nicely, too — one across the state is just a few decades older, and it is considered one of the oldest in New England. And if you start googling those names you begin to find the earliest English settlers in the region.

I believe there are just a handful of known graves in this cemetery, but I could be wrong. It sits beside a modern road, and in between is a walking path, and throughout you can enjoy some lovely birding and, just beyond, some decent fishing. Beyond that, you’re in a large city park that’s pretty quiet this time of year.

This evening, after she hanged her stockings by the chimney with care, I put the star on my in-laws’ Christmas tree.

It’s the little big things like that that make you understand you’re really a part of the family.

And how are your holiday festivities coming along? We’re opening a few presents this evening. And tomorrow I have to take on an entirely new role. It could be a hit! Or a miss!

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