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Auburn / Friday / Glomerata / history / photo — Comments Off
23
Feb 24

The 1946 Glomerata, part one

I recently purchased a new desktop document camera. It arrived and, today, I began playing around with it. There is a lot to learn, namely consistency of production values and efficiency. But, even in this learning curve part of this new toy’s workflow is already better. When I take a photo, it is already on my computer. Struggling with this camera, then, is already better than struggling with the phone.

Anyway, the first project is taking pictures of some of the photos in this beautiful book.

That’s the 1946 edition of The Glomerata, the year book of my alma mater. I collect the yearbooks. For one, they look great. For another, it’s a unique and contained hobby. I like that it was a finite thing. The first Glom was published in 1897. (I don’t have that one, so if you run across it … ) and the last, latest one I’ll collect was the 2016 book. There are 120 in between. (One year they published two books.) I now have 112 of them.

I’m sharing these images here as I digitize them, but just in case anyone else is interested, you can find them all here.

In the 1990s I ate at The Grille, the same restaurant where the English staff, are eating. I may have eaten in this same booth.

We ate there weekly. Spaghetti, with a free second plate. Every week. It wasn’t enough. The restaurant closed while I was in school, and it is one of those things you can’t not be sad about.

But that’s not what we’re about. We’re going to see how students lived in the 1940s.

Kirtley Brown was the director of student affairs. He’d been in PR. Sometime soon after this he and his wife, the now-famed author Mary Ward Brown moved back to the family farm. He died in 1970, and she passed away in 2013. Their son became a criminal justice instructor at the nearby Marion Military Institute. Kirtley Brown, the son, retired in 2023.

And we’ll probably share every photograph of people on bikes.

Mildred Woodham was the editor of The Glomerata. From Geneva, Alabama, she studied art, graduated in 1946 and moved to New York to become a fabulously successful sculptor.

Known professionally as Jean Woodham, she had prominent shows and won prestigious awards for almost 70 years.

Her last show was at the art museum at her alma mater, in 2013. She passed away in 2021.

I don’t plan on including a lot of the posed posed shots in this collection, but she was the editor of The Glom and all of this was worth mentioning.

This is a scene from the campus newspaper, The Auburn Plainsman. I worked there in school, of course.

I’ve no idea where this room is or was. The paper was in a different building when I was in school, a building that wasn’t even on blueprints when this photo was taken. It is housed in still another building today.

Here’s another surely staged scene from The Plainsman. The careful viewer will note it is the same room, with a slightly wider angle, panned to the right, with all new people.

It was a twice-a-week publication until the late 1940s. It was a weekly, the largest weekly in the state, when I was in school. They went primarily online in 2011.

In between, they’ve won 25 National Pacemaker Awards — basically the collegiate Pulitzer — including two when I was on the staff.

Yes, I have plaques.

Mimi Simms was the editor of The Plainsman. She was the second woman to sit in the big chair. She comes from Auburn royalty.

One of her brothers played football for the university, and was recorded as the best tennis player on campus. That many became a veterinarian, much like their father did. Their young brother is Jack Simms, the legendary founding faculty member of the journalism department.

Mimi did her graduate work at the University of Alabama, but we don’t hold that sort of thing against people. It seems she never married. She died in 2000, and is buried in Tennessee with her parents.

This handsome fellow is Greg Allen, president of the veterans’ organization, and yes, there are a lot of coat and tie photos in this yearbook.

Maria Duchac’s nickname was Skippy and that’s the best possible name. Also, this was apparently a family nickname, she’s heard it her whole life. She studied chemical engineering.

I love everything about this. Her major, her nickname and that door.

And as of this writing she is apparently still with us. War Eagle, Skippy.

The cutline simply says “Folk dancing class.”

I’m assuming there’s some rule that there’s a reason they were all women. But look how some of them were so intently having fun!

But there was plenty of dancing, elsewhere, of course.

The caption here reads “Winners of Jitterbug Contest.”

White leather shoes are about due a comeback, right?

And that’s 10 photos, and 800 words on the subject. That seems like a good stopping point for now.

More from the 1946 Glom next Friday. You can see all of the book covers I’ve collected, here. And if you just like old photographs, I’ve digitized selections from a few of the other old books here.

And just so where we remember where they are, all of the 1946 photos are landing right here.

Cozumel / cycling / history / markers / New Jersey / SCUBA / We Learn Wednesdays / Wednesday — Comments Off
21
Feb 24

Too much of what we like

You start off with the best of intentions. You’re going to settle in and get all the grading done. Finished, finito and kaput. From there, you can take a deep breath, rub your eyes and do other things until it is time to get geared up for the next lecture and class notes.

That’s what you want to do, with the 51 things you have to grade, but when it comes down to it, you’ve come into 51 things to read and think about and give some useful feedback and, ultimately, grade.

It’s the grading part, you see. These are good assignments, but ultimately subjective. So, each time, with each assignment, you have to make sure you’re comfortable with the rubric and that you can deliver it equitably. All of this takes a little time and then there’s just the regular daily stuff and should that really be an 80? Or was it a 70? Should I call it 75? Was that a typo in the feedback?

It goes on and on. The mind goes round and round. And when I grade in bulk I am mindful of two things. First, I have to stay consistent throughout the process. Rubrics help with that, but you keep it at the forefront. The other thing is that I have to stop before I get blurry eyed. The grading must come in stages.

So much for the plan of knocking all of this out in one sitting. And that’s a big part of how Tuesday turns into Wednesday and Wednesday will turn into Thursday.

Time, once again, for We Learn Wednesdays. This is the 26th installment, so you are familiar with the idea. These are the local historical markers, as found by bike rides across the county. This is the 47th marker in the effort, which presently consists of photos I grabbed last fall.

Last week, we saw this building, and several of the colonial-era names we’ve learned in the last several months start to fit together. The courthouse is going on 400 years old, and sits near the center of downtown, even today.

Around the left side of the building, you find this small plaque.

John Fenwick fought, as a cavalry officer, for Oliver Cromwell in the Second English Civil War. (This one was about the Scots, King Charles and a parliament, including Cromwell, that didn’t like him killing his subjects, among other things.) Sometime around that same year he got married. In 1665 he left the Church of England and became a Quaker.

When he came to the new world in 1675 he created the first Quaker colony in North America, seven years before Philadelphia, even. The Salem Tenth was 1/10th of this region of the state. Basically the resolution of a convoluted and contentious series of business dealings, it was a 350-square mile county, making up most of two modern counties. Native Americans lived here, as did the children of earlier Swedish, English and Finnish settlers, people of modest means, merchants, farmers and craftsmen among the forests, meadows, bogs and waterways. The farms ranged from 50 to 300 acres.

It was Fenwick that recorded a land deed with the local Lenape Indian tribe. It was a deed and treaty with indigenous residents that was actually honored. You might remember reading about this in a history class somewhere along the way. The deal was made, the story goes, under the Salem Oak, which died in 2019, at almost 600 years old. Saplings were shipped to every town in the state.

Just a few of the modern allusions I’ve found to Fenwick refer to him as hapless, troublesome and eccentric.

The bottom of the plaque says “That my said colony and all the planters within the same may be settled in the Love of God – and in that peace which becomes all our great professions of being Christians.” Presumably that’s Fenwick, which doesn’t sound so bad a dream.

The Quaker still had some fight in him. It seems the colonial governor of New York, a man named Edmund Andros, wanted Fenwick to stop running his little area. These guys were political rivals. The governor obviously had power. Fenwick felt the same way.

Fenwick regarded himself the political equal of Governor Andros that he was the head of a small, but rapidly increasing colony that he was Patroon by purchase; was Governor by choice of the people. He had pledged his allegiance to the King and taken an oath to discharge the duties of his office faithfully, and to the interests of the people without fear or affection, and hence could not recognize any power greater that his own, save when the prerogative of the King should be exercised.

Andros, obviously, didn’t see it that way. Couldn’t see it that way. He had Fenwick tossed in jail a few times. Once, the governor’s men came down and Fenwick …

bolted himself in his house and refused to go “without he was carried away either dead or alive, and if anyone dare to come to take him it was at their peril, and he would do their business” (New Jersey Archives, I, 190).

He had two homes in the area, was looked upon as a possessor of valuable belongings by his peers. Having been a cavalry officer, he maintained good horses. He was a successful enough farmer for his time. He made furniture, and then became a barber and a phlebotomist. When he was about 65, his health failing, he moved in with his daughter, and died that same year.

He’s buried in an old family cemetery, but we don’t know precisely where his grave is. In the 1920s a marker was put nearby, but there’s not a specific marker for his grave. I’ll have to go by there sometime.

Next week, we’ll visit a 19th century fire house. If you’ve missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.

Here I am on the descent of Box Hill, in the Surrey Hills, in the Zwift cycling video game, exercise program and winter base mileage accumulator. Yesterday I did the PRL Half, which features Box Hill, a 1.9 mile climb with an average gradient of 4.4 percent, though in places it sneaks quite a bit higher. Right after the primary climb, each time, is a maddening extra climb, a short leg breaker that isn’t happy until you’re going uphill at 9 and 11 percent. But all of that is behind me right here, on my last descent of the day.

Box Hill is said to be a GPS-accurate climb of the real Box Hill that figures into the actual Prudential RideLondon-Surrey route and was featured prominently in the 2012 Olympics. It isn’t the hardest hill, in the real world or on Zwift, but there enough to it to make for an interesting mental obstacle. In yesterday’s route, I had to go over it four times.

This route is the PRL Half which copies the distanced of the Prudential RideLondon-Surrey. I don’t know if I’ll do the PRL Full. I tried the half a few days ago, completed two circuits and decided I’d rather go eat. I’ve never decided anything that quickly, in one heartbeat I was going under the banner, ready to start lap three and in the next I said, “Nah,” and pressed the exit button.

That was the right decision, but sometimes even the right decisions can ring in your ears. So, yesterday, it was back to the half. Four laps, each anchored with that Box Hill climb. I had a plan. Go out slow the first time, slow-ish for the second lap, do whatever felt right on lap three and drag myself over the climb on the final loop. It seemed a wise plan.

This is what happened. On Zwift there are ghost riders, representations of your effort the last time you were on that particular route. Sometimes they fall behind you because you’re stronger, today, than you were the last time. Sometimes they dance just ahead of you for reasons unknown to man and science. Some days they disappear ahead of you because you’re tired. On my first lap I kept pace with the ghost rider, even as I was telling myself to go slow. This particular route gives you two ghost riders. One for the whole lap, and the segment for the Box Hill climb. So, at one point on that first lap, I had two ghost riders ahead of me. And then I was ahead of them, and so on. At the top of the 1.9-mile climb, I was in between them. I had to chase the first ghost down the hill.

When we got back to the starting banner I was able to follow my go slow-ish strategy for lap two. First the initial ghost rider and then the second would dangle just ahead of me, until nearing the top of the hill. The full lap ghost rider finished just ahead of me, and that was fine, because I was in this for the duration, not the time. At these speeds, duration was a thing.

Now I had to get over the climb on the third lap and let my legs rest on the descent. The ghost riders, again, only riding at my previous pace, but they easily dispatched me. That’s good for the morale on lap four.

On lap four, I found a nice little burst. I dropped the first ghost rider right away and when I linked up with the second ghost rider on the climb, he too fell behind. I hit the peak of Box Hill some 42 seconds ahead of both of them, and had about three minutes on the full-lap ghost by the time I finished the loop.

Which meant I had to continue on for nine more miles. And then sprint! Anyway, that’s 42 miles in the basement. The effort helped turn this February into the fourth most prolific month I’ve ever had on the bike. Before the week is out this should become my most productive month. There will be several spreadsheets to update.

I cut 100 words from the Box Hill story so I could include the most salient details of tonight’s late night ride. It was a flat course, but it featured five sprints. The Zwift timer shows two data points. One is your performances over the last 90 days in that particular sprint segment. The other is your time, relative to everyone else in that Zwift world at the moment. So you can see your times historically, but also your results compared to the 2,500 peers currently pedaling away around the world.

In those five sprints, I finished 2nd, 2nd, 1st, 5th and 1st.

My avatar wearing the coveted green sprinter’s jersey means simply this: all of the real fast people were already fast asleep.

Something you’ll like even more: a few more photos from last month’s SCUBA diving trip. The most important element, of course, being my dive buddy, and the best fish in all of the world’s seas.

Here’s another decent photo of a giant tortuga. She was big, and very patient with us.

And here’s a random photo I managed to take at the end of the dive. It seems I was juuuuust about to break the surface.

But who wants to do that?

Auburn / Cozumel / Friday / Glomerata / history / photo / SCUBA / site — Comments Off
16
Feb 24

A nice package arrived today

On the front porch, and a day earlier than anticipated, was a box with two books inside. I found these online, on e-Bay, actually, in one of the more fruitful examples of late night insomnia. The prices were low and right and the end of the auctions were listed during the Super Bowl.

No one was paying attention to e-Bay. But I have a particular set of skills, and so I was paying attention to e-Bay and watching the game and silently wondering, for about the sixth year in a row, why we still get worked up about the commercials which were — not exactly pedestrian — but standard fare for the most part. Many commercials are well done these days, so you have to really stand out with celebrities, but they’re in spots all the time. Many commercials are good. And so even the good commercials debuted during the Super Bowl didn’t stand out too much, except for the ones that were obviously going to be controversial in some corner of the web. And that wretched Temu ad.

But I digress. I won both auctions. The nice lady who sold me the books offered to combine shipping and, today, they have arrived.

I opened the box, and inside were two large Ziploc bags. Inside each bag was a book. That book was wrapped in guerilla-resistance strength cling wrap. And, beneath, that a two layer roll of bubble wrap.

The woman who sold me these books really understands me.

Inside the first bubble wrapped, shrink wrapped, Ziploc bag was this.

That’s the 1912 Glomerata, the yearbook from my alma mater. This book is 102 years old, and the cover is showing that age. Even if it does need rebinding, the pages inside are basically perfect. The cover, particularly of the older books, is where the fun is.

Longtime readers know I collect the Glomeratas. It seemed like a good thing to get. They make a handsome bookcase. And it’s a unique thing to acquire. I know of two other people who dabbled in this. And, importantly, it is a finite thing. The first Glom was published in 1897. (I don’t have that one, so if you get a lead … ) and the last, latest one I’ll collect was the 2016 book. There are 120 in between. (One year they published two books.) I have 112 of them.

As I said, it’s a handsome bookcase.

The other book was the 1907 Glomerata. It has been rebound. It’s a generic black cover. No need to show you that, but what’s inside is also where the fun is.

I just spent a few minutes flipping through the 1907 book. The highest quality photos are the studio head shots and the posed group photos. There are a few candid action shots, but they are all small. It was a limitation of cameras 117 years ago. There are some cool drawings inside the older books. This one was on the page introducing the students who put the yearbook together.

That was done by a guy named F. Roy Duncan, a senior. His blurb in the yearbook says he learned to draw in an English class there, and I’m not sold on his proficiency as an artist, or as an English student. But he becomes a talented engineer and architect. Born in Columbus, Georgia, educated at Auburn. He worked in Pittsburgh, and then on the Panama Canal. It seems he stayed down there for about three years, contributing to electrical, mechanical and structural engineering projects. And then he returned to Columbus.

Some six years after that photo was taken at school, he became an architect. Among his achievements are more than a half-dozen homes still standing in various historical districts (here’s one), the Taylor County (Georgia) courthouse and parts of this Columbus church. They all survive him, as did his wife, and this art. He had a heart attack while fishing and died, at 61, in 1947.

And so we’re going to have to look at these books. And all of the rest of the collection, over time. Because I also recently picked up a nice desktop document camera. These were the first three photos I took with it, and I’m pleased. It’s a little slow and awkward as I figure out the workflow, but it seems much better than trying to take a photo on my phone, emailing it to myself and then editing thing. At the very least I’ve got out two steps in the process. And so, next week, I’ll open a book and point it at the camera.

I think I’ll probably start in the 1940s.

But first, I have to add these two covers to the Glomerata collection on the site.

(Four minutes elapse.)

There, now the 1907 and 1912 volumes have been added to my Gloms cover collection. I’ve just noticed four or five other covers which haven’t been digitized, but I’ll get to them soon. And, as of this writing, these are the only ones I need to add to the collection: 1899, 1900, 1902, 1905, 1906, 1909, 1911, 1913, 1915, 1916.

Beyond a certain point, as you can imagine, they are difficult to find.

I just wrote 800-plus words about things that are only of interest to me! Let’s show you some diving photos, which I know you’ve been waiting for, patiently, and get you in to your weekend.

There is absolutely positively nothing like just … hanging there in the water. It’s so captivating that I spend time on most dives just watching other people do it. Like my dive buddy!

This is a shot-from-the-hip of a woman that was on one of our dive boats with us. She just happened to float over, or I swam under, or whatever it was, and I looked up. I love these shots, and I include it here as a reminder to myself to take more of them, which can only be done by more diving.

Dive boat dynamics are interesting. Unless you go as a big unruly group you’re surrounded by strangers. These are two-tank dives, which means you go out, take the first dive, and then enjoy another, all without having to return to land. For safety reasons that have to do with the chemistry of your blood under the mild pressures involved with reef diving, you take a surface interval. So you wind up talking to people. And they’re often just fascinating. This dive had a bishop from Miami, a high powered business man from Denver, this woman, who is in pediatric medicine and, of course, us. Plus there’s the captain and the divemaster, who is an underwater welder doing this in his free time. That’s an awesome amount of brain power on one little vessel, and also me.

So you wind up having some interesting chats. Usually it’s about equipment, things you just saw, how your diving has been, something innocuous from back home. It’s small talk. And you’re all the best of friends.

Except now I can’t remember anyone’s names.

I don’t know if she got to see this turtle. Not everyone on that dive did. But that’s the breaks. Sometimes you see the high profile sea life, and other times you hear about it and appreciate what you were able to find. But we found this giant turtle.

That’s easily a three-foot shell. Easily.

OK, that’s enough for now. Enjoy your weekend! (We’re getting snow.)

Cozumel / history / markers / New Jersey / photo / SCUBA / We Learn Wednesdays / Wednesday — Comments Off
14
Feb 24

Some of these marker features are starting to come together

I only showed you a few of the flowers from the fresh cut collection currently adorning the house. In addition to the pretty purples, we have these delicate pink and white petals ready to spread their grandeur.

I’m choosing to see this as a sign, and a welcome one, that the pastels are on their way.

Meanwhile, in the basement arboretum, there are now three pink roses in bloom. Another plant also has two flowers on display. They seem to be sticking around for a good long while. It could be my imagination, or it could be the long grow light and light watering.

I’m going to have to carry those plants back up and outside eventually. There’s only eight of them, so it’ll be little trouble. But I’ll also have to clean up that part of the basement, too. That might be the one thing about the eventual run up to spring I’m dreading. It’ll take probably 10 minutes. But that’s still some ways off. Snow is in the forecast for the weekend.

It is time for another installment of We Learn Wednesdays. This is the 25th installment, so you know the premise by now. I ride my bike across the county to find the local historical markers. Right now, we’re working our way through a handful I stockpiled in late fall. These are the 45th and 46th markers we’ve seen in the series.

And this building has some proper history to it.

This side was altered in the last expansion, including the brick work, the Palladian windows and the porch. The cupola, hip roof and box cornice are original.

In 1774, the courthouse was the site of a county petition to King George III. In it, the locals discussed their colonial grievances. From here, they also sent county relief to Boston.

Judge William Hancock presided in the King’s Court of Common Pleas. As we learned last October, Hancock’s property, about five miles away, was at the center of a skirmish during the harsh winter of 1778. The British were foraging on this side of a creek, and the colonials on the other side. The redcoats crossed the water and fixed bayonets. When they came upon Hancock’s house, the British entered through the front and the back, and killed the small detachment of militia men there that night, 20 or so, according to the British commander. But also killed was Judge Hancock.

That same year, the courthouse held the treason trials. Four locals were tried and convicted and sentenced to death for helping the British soldiers in that raid. They were pardoned by the governor and exiled. The governor would eventually sign the U.S. Constitution.

The oldest courthouse, by the way, is in Virginia, and it is only a decade older. But the first courthouse here was even older. A building that they believe was made of logs, was the local legal center dating back to 1692. And they paper records from hearings that are dated 1706. But if it’s the still-standing buildings, the Virginia courthouse has the honors, but that pile of bricks in Virginia doesn’t have this bit of trivia.

The Salem courthouse is the site of the legend of Robert Gibbon Johnson. Here he stood before an amazed crowd eating tomatoes, proving they are edible.

Col. Johnson announced that he would eat a tomato, also called the wolf peach, Jerusalem apple or love apple, on the steps of the county courthouse at noon. … That morning, in 1820, about 2000 people were jammed into the town square. … The spectators began to hoot and jeer. Then, 15 minutes later, Col. Johnson emerged from his mansion and headed up Market Street towards the Courthouse. The crowd cheered. The fireman’s band struck up a lively tune. He was a very impressive-looking man as he walked along the street. He was dressed in his usual black suit with white ruffles, black shoes and gloves, tricorn hat, and cane. At the Court House steps he spoke to the crowd about the history of the tomato. … He picked a choice one from a basket on the steps and held it up so that it glistened in the sun. … “To help dispel the tall tales, the fantastic fables that you have been hearing … And to prove to you that it is not poisonous I am going to eat one right now”… There was not a sound as the Col. dramatically brought the tomato to his lips and took a bite. A woman in the crowd screamed and fainted but no one paid her any attention; they were all watching Col. Johnson as he took one bite after another. … He raised both his arms, and again bit into one and then the other. The crowd cheered and the firemen’s band blared a song. … “He’s done it”, they shouted. “He’s still alive!”

Great story. Pure fiction. It was written in the 1940s, punched up twice more in that decade for books and radio. And so on. In the 1980s, the locals did a reenactment. In 1988, Good Morning America took it to heart and reported this apocryphal first.

Everybody knew about tomatoes.

Where that crowd would have supposedly stood there are some pavers on the ground. And here is another marker, and an absent piece of history. This marker says “Il Sannito. Forged in Naples, Italy in 1763.” There’s a list of the groups who’s donations made a restoration possible. And notes that it was re-dedicated on October 30, 2013, to commemorate the cannon’s “250th birthday.”

And that cannon could really blow out some candles, let me tell you. Il Sannito isn’t in place, but one of its sister cannons is, and we met it in September. There were three cannons, originally. The Italians made them, but Napoleon collected them in one of his battles. The French fought with them, until they lost them to the British and then the British lost them to the Americans in the War of 1812. The state militia got them sometime after that. These two have been on display in local towns, the third one is just … gone.

And where is Il Sannito? There are not, and this will come as a surprise to you as it did to me, not a lot of mentions of 18th century Italian metalworks in the middle of a 21st century town not too far removed from being a news desert. From a photo on the Historical Marker Database and Google Maps’ street view, I can tell you it was removed again between July of 2020 and April of 2023. But that’s all I know as of this writing. This is what it looks like, so if you see any cannons behaving suspiciously … drop me a line.

Next week, we’ll walk around the side of the old courthouse. I bet we’ll find a marker there. If you’ve missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.

Let’s wrap up this day with a trip back under the water. Look! A mermaid!

Seriously, she does not breathe. I don’t know how she manages that. I started looking for gills on this dive trip.

I started looking, but then I got distracted by this tortuga.

That’s a photo taken through the video recording on my underwater camera. Distressingly, the secondary function of my video camera which shoots underwater is not of a terribly high quality.

Here’s an actual photo. Same tortuga.

A version of that photo is going on the site’s front page eventually. The first updates on that are coming tomorrow. Be sure to swing back by and check that out. And if you come back to the blog tomorrow, you’ll see more of that turtle, and a few other neat things as well.

Cozumel / cycling / history / markers / photo / SCUBA / We Learn Wednesdays / Wednesday — Comments Off
17
Jan 24

A long bike ride, shallow fish and old history

I’m trying, now, to slip back into the ol’ routine. We got back into town around midnight on Sunday, and at about 3 a.m. I was able to get to bed. I have no idea why everything took so long that night, but that meant Monday was a day spent moving through syrup. Plus the snow. And then Tuesday was a bit more of that. The last part of my sinus allergies, something I brought home from Cozumel, started to … de-allergize themselves yesterday. Breathing is fundamental.

Also, there’s the usual series of small things that need to be done. House things. Work things. Prep things. And so on. It’s amazing how quickly the little things will fill a substantial chunk of a day.

Also, I got in my first bike ride in 10 days. I did 50 miles, which gives you a lot of cool sites. Some of them are views I am sure that are new to me. I feel like I’d remember Mr. Crank’s Crab Shack.

But nearby, a lighthouse that I’m sure is familiar.

New on Zwift, or new to me, at least, are these climbing portals. I tried one, and entered into a quantum realm. I’m not sure the point, except for “up.” I think I climbed about 3,000 feet. Trainer feet. That’s not a real climb. You just keep turning over the pedals, no matter how slowly, and grind your way up. It’s never as much of a grind as a real climb. And I can’t fall over.

Not in the quantum realm.

Here’s today’s quick return to the underwater realm. And here’s Aquawoman. Still no bubbles; still not breathing.

I’m pretty sure I’d intended to just take a photo of this brown sponge bowl. I noticed the purple sponge cluster in the foreground, but I didn’t notice the one in the background until just now. And I’ll never know what was inside of that one.

The scrawled filefish, (Aluterus scriptus). It can be found all over the world, the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, and in that Caribbean-Gulf of Mexico region too, of course. Typically, this is a shy fish, so we’re lucky here.

It also has a toxic chemical inside, the scrawled filefish, that is significantly more potent than the puffer fish. The likelihood of it causing you problems is more from intravenous introduction, rather than digestive, so don’t let that fish give you an IV.

Here’s another beautiful reef dweller, the queen triggerfish, (Balistes vetula). Carl Linneaus described it in 1758. It can be found all over the Atlantic and, in the western hemisphere, from Canada to Brazil and beyond.

That fish might also be in the quantum realm. It may have come to that reef directly from that other plane. It did seem to suddenly appear, and never let me get close. I have three shots, of the queen triggerfish, and that’s the best of the bunch.

But I was more interested in what was hiding among the coral and sponges anyway. Behold, the giant sea anemone, (Condylactis gigantea). This is an animal, not a plant.

Anemone are often not mobile, but these can move around. And they look delightful, but they can sting predators and prey. The anemone is, itself, a predator. But it’s also a cleaning site for other fish. Smaller creatures will hang around here to clean bigger ones. The smaller fish eat the irritants of the bigger fish. And, also, they provide a bit of protection for the anemone itself. It is a great big set of circles in the underwater ecosystem.

This is the 21st installment of We Learn Wednesdays. I’ve been riding my bike across the county to find the local historical markers. Including today’s installment, we’ll have seen 40 of the markers in the Historical Marker Database. This one marks a home that dates, in part, back to the 17th century.

This is the Alexander Grant House, which dates to 1721, and the Rumsey Wing goes back a few years before. Some of the walls were put up for an earlier structure, so you could say it dates to 1690. This is the home of the county’s historical society. There’s a colonial artifact museum inside, along with the home’s original woodwork. (The historical society is also in three other adjoining buildings.) The Rumsey Wing has some restored features, comprised of some of the original work from other nearby old homes, in the 1950s. All told the historical society maintains thousands of artifacts, displaying a wildly broad array of history, some of it believed to be thousands of years old.

It was originally a one-room home. The first room became a kitchen when Alexander Grant bought it. Finding out about this man is a bit tricky. I did discover his will, dated 1726, where he’s listed as a yeoman. Seems he had 118 acres in a few different locations. I believe he died in 1734 or so.

But let me tell you about John Rock, who was mentioned in that first sign. This is an impressive man. Born a free man in 1825 to parents of few means, they put him through school, which was rare for any child in those days. A teacher at 19, he worked with students eight hours a day and then spent his evenings studying medicine under two doctors and apprenticed for them. He studied dentistry and apprenticed in that field and then opened his own practice. After that, he got into medical school, and became, in 1852, one of the first black men to get a medical degree in this country. By the time he was 27 he’d earned himself a reputation as a teacher, dentist, physician and abolitionist. By 1860, his health failing, he gave up medicine and the mouth and started reading the law.

On January 31, 1865, Congress approved the Thirteenth Amendment. The next day, Charles Sumner, a Massachusetts senator, introduced a motion that made Rock the first black attorney to be admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States. Writing for The Supreme Court Historical Society, Howard University professor Clarence G. Contee had a fine historical summary.

“By Jupiter, the sight was grand. ‘Twas dramatic, too. At three minutes before eleven o’clock in the morning, Charles Sumner entered the Courtroom, followed by the negro [sic] applicant for admission, and sat down within the bar. At eleven, the procession of gowned judges entered the room, with Chief Justice Chase at their head. The spectators and their lawyers in attendance rose respectfully on their coming. The Associate Justices seated themselves nearly at once, as is their courteous custom of waiting upon each other’s movements. The Chief Justice, standing to the last, bowed with affable dignity to the Bar, and took his central seat with a great presence. Immediately the Senator from Massachusetts arose, and in composed manner and quiet tone said: `May it please the Court, I move that John S. Rock, a member of the Supreme Court of the State of Massachusetts, be admitted to practice as a member of this Court.’ The grave to bury the Dred Scott decision was in that one sentence dug; and it yawned there, wide open, under the very eyes of some of the Judges who had participated in the judicial crime against Democracy and humanity. The assenting nod of the great head of the Chief Justice tumbled in course and filled up the pit, and the black counsellor of the Supreme Court got on to it and stamped it down and smoothed the earth to his walk to the rolls of the Court.”

Benjamine Quarles in Lincoln and the Negro concluded the ceremony; “A clerk came forward and administered the oath to Rock, thus making him the first Negro ever empowered to plead a case before the Supreme Court.”

The Boston Journal, the home town newspaper of Rock, was also able to feature the admission of Rock. The correspondent of the paper wrote that: “The slave power which received its constitutional death-blow yesterday in Congress writhes this morning on account of the admission of a colored lawyer, John S. Rock of Boston, as a member of the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States.” The paper noted that the faces of some of the older persons present at the ceremony were knotted in rage. Even papers in England mentioned the admission of Rock into the bar of the Supreme Court. Most of the observers who reported on the act saw it as a giant step in the repudiation of the Dred Scott decision of former Chief Justice Taney. It was evident that John S. Rock had set a great legal precedent. Before the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, Rock had obtained one highly prestigious symbol of the citizenship status of the Negro in 1865.

While in Washington, Rock had attended a session of Congress; he was the first Negro lawyer to be received on the floor of the House. Congressman John D. Baldwin of Massachusetts, former editor of The Commonwealth and of The Worcester Spy, had escorted Rock to a seat. Baldwin was a close friend of Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson, also a Massachusetts politician of some influence. Rock was warmly received by some of the leaders about to shape Reconstruction policies. Unfortunately, as Rock was returning to Boston, he was brought back to reality when he was arrested at the Washington railroad station for not having his pass. James A. Garfield, a Congressman from Ohio and later a President, thereafter introduced a bill that abolished required passes for blacks.

It appears as if the direct illness that brought Rock’s remarkable career to an end began the day before Rock was admitted to the bar of the United States Supreme Court. He had attended the Presbyterian church of the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, a famous black leader and abolitionist, the day before, on January 31, 1865. He caught cold. He was already in a weakened state of health, and to catch cold in the winter in those days was serious. When he returned to Boston, he had to appear at gatherings honoring him and in the interest of his race. His health continued to deteriorate rapidly.

He never argued before the court, however. In ill health anyway, he died in December 1866 of tuberculosis.

He’d done all of that by the age of 41.

Contee wrote much more about Rock in the Journal of the National Medical Association. Still can’t find more on the mysterious, colonial, Alexander Grant, though.

In the next installment of We Learn Wednesday, we’ll take a glance at a 19th century hotel. If you’ve missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.