history « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

history

history / Indiana / IU / music / Thursday / video — Comments Off
2
Feb 17

Take me to the river (or the old canal)

Working at IU, I have a free subscription to the New York Times and other publications. I could read all of the time and not read it all. And that’s just in today’s world. I also have access to the Times Machine which is more than a century and a half of old news, and a reasonably decent search engine.

So I searched. And one of the first things I found was the supposed origin of the word hoosier.

This is one of the stories that gets around. Truth is, no one really knows where the word comes from. There are some scholars still working on trying to figure it out.

Everyone is trying to figure something out, though, I suppose.

We were figuring out a sports show tonight:

And I watched this documentary on the history of music in Memphis. And if you like music, the history of music, or the South, or just watching joyous people do things they enjoy …

That is a film worth your time.

books / Friday / history / memories — Comments Off
20
Jan 17

James and Willie and me

You go through your young life in Illinois and enlist the Army right out of high school at 17. By the time you are 20 you have fought in Guadalcanal, been wounded and learned both your parents died while you were away. You go AWOL three times before, finally, your bouts of drinking and fighting become too much to overcome, you get discharged. And then you write classics like “From Here to Eternity” and “The Thin Red Line.” That was Jim Jones. Later still, he was also a journalist covering Vietnam. And I bring him up to you because he was a friend of Willie Morris, that Mississippi scoundrel who was editing Harper’s Magazine by the time he was 33. They become such good friends that Jones asked Morris to finish his last book for him after he died. And he did, “Whistle” became the last of Jones’ war trilogy, and Morris wrote the last three chapters in 1977-78.

Two decades later Willie died. He’d been teaching at Ole Miss after he moved back from New York and had compiled and released a book of his essays that I’d find in a bookstore. I wish I could remember which one. It doesn’t matter, but it probably does. Either way, Terrains of the Heart he wrote at Oxford and I bought it in Alabama, quite literally because of the cover.

And this was a great choice. Willie, like all gregarious storytellers, was pleased to hold court in the warm embrace of a room of people that loved his stories. Willie, like the best storytellers, could make a place come alive and — no, that’s not quite accurate. Willie Morris, who was concerned about entropy and stillness and mortality and life could make the South hum. He could bring the sweet smell of the South to your mind, through your nose, and the dew in the fields to your heart through your toes. And Willie taught me the second thing I learned about writing. The first was that if you can figure out how to bring a smell into the story you’ve done some serious writing. And the second was I wanted to teach myself how to write like Willie Morris.

I tell you this because on this day, every four years, I think of a conversation Willie Morris recounts of his friendship with James Jones:

Who knows what all we’ll think four years from now, or at any time in between, but that’s an important observation to keep in mind.

books / friends / history / photo / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
18
Jan 17

Stuff in the air, and in my office

I found this book last weekend:

It was published in 1958 and seems to be aimed at giving a reasonable historical re-telling and description to teens. The chapters have great line art:

That’s a paratrooper, which was pretty much the moment I decided to take pictures to send to our friend Adam, who is a modern paratrooper, because I thought he’d appreciate the biplane:

But it was this one he really liked, and how could you not? Look at his left hand:

Just another day at the office, oh, and do remember your briefcase. Here’s an almost contemporaneous accounting of Captain Sergei Mienov:

He spent almost a year in the United States. On his way back to Russia he passed a few days in Paris. He was full of enthusiasm for what he had seen in the development of air technique. Although Russia was not yet officially recognized, Mienov had been courteously received. He had visited airplane factories, airdromes and training schools. He praised highly the quality of American parachutes and the instruction American pilots received in their use. He had made his first parachute jump here.

[…]

When Mienov submitted the report of his US observations to Air Chief Alksnis, he mentioned the wide interest which parachute jumping could arouse. He suggested that the interest of the Soviet population, and particularly the young, could be turned toward the development of air power by this type of propaganda. Alksnis passed the comment on to the Politburo. Stalin agreed that it was a good idea.

And so parachuting became wildly popular in the Soviet Union.

Until the purges. And then the Germans did it better and then the Americans did it more. And that’s the story of how one of the more crazy ideas a person could do as a spectator sport became one of the craziest things people would do in military service. How the book wound up where I found it remains a mystery.

Here’s Adam now, this is his jump into Ste. Mere-Eglise, Normandy, France, commemorating the 70th anniversary of D-Day:

He took a miniature American flag on the jump with him and sent it to me as a keepsake, which super cool. That’s in my office now.

So is this stuff:

We are about to surplus a bunch of old equipment. The university has a surplus process for its eight campuses and some things of a certain value must be processed in a certain way and that’s where I am. More specifically, that picture is opposite of where I am, in my office, which is now filled.

Because it made more sense to bring this stuff out of storage, start (and hopefully complete) the paperwork process and then wait on the nice fellows from the Surplus store to come over and pick it up. So I have huge bundles of television cabling, a half dozen old cameras, a switcher, various accesorries and a chest-high stack of old engineering components in my office. If anyone wants to come push buttons, now is the time.

As a bonus, many of the buttons sound different.

history / IU / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
17
Jan 17

The ranch we visited last weekend

So we stopped by to see some family. Which, to some of us, meant family and, to others, like me, meant new people. And very kind and interesting and happy people, too. This was after the funeral, and this was some of the local family who invited the whole large group over for a visit. This was the first sign you see:

Now think of that. Inside the house there was a framed certificate that says they ranch started in 1856. Texas was annexed in 1845, so the ranch itself is almost as old as the state. We learned that the man who originally owned the land had it longer than that before he built on it. In all that time it has stayed in that one family. Think of that.

So it turns out Texas’ Historic Farm project has been going on for some time. They recognize farms that have stayed active within one family at 100, 150 and 200 years. One press release I found said there were about 4,800 in the state that can make the century claim. In an entire state, in all of Texas, there are just a handful of farms older than this place:

Let’s think of this another way. While at the place, which still raises cattle and has at least a few horses and one very loud donkey, I met this delightful lady, a retired art teacher. I won’t guess her age, but she had one. These, she said, were her grandparents:

And they weren’t even the first people on the ranch. And the way she said it, they were’t the first ones by a good ways.

Back at work today. The semester started last week and we started shooting today. Here’s a view of the control room during the shoot:

And here I am in the studio with the What’s Up Weekly crew:

They proclaimed me the king of candid shots with that one. I’ve had worse titles.

adventures / history / I do not know what is happening. / photo / running / weekend — Comments Off
24
Dec 16

A Christmas Eve jog

We ran 12.64 miles today. We did that on Christmas Eve, and I do not know what is happening. But it was in the low 60s, because we’re back in Alabama for a few days. We ran to the dam, and then we ran over it. I remember being nervous about riding over it as a kid, and then driving over it when I was young, so narrow is the road. But there’s now a nearby bridge that took much of the traffic off the dam and so it seems like no big deal to jog along on the sidewalk, which is about as wide one of the two very narrow lanes.

I ran over that. I do not know what is happening.

There are five turbines inside the dam, taking the flood waters upstream and generating hydroelectric power, 663 megawatts a day. Those turbines can produce what is equivalent to 35,000 horsepower. That’s the most powerful set of turbines in the TVA system, and an impressive degree of efficiency for something developed in 1848.

There are 49 spillways in the dam, and the signs say that if you collected the water from just one gate for an hour you could fill the Astrodome. The lock on the side is the highest one in the country to the east of the Rockies. More than 3,000 commercial and private boats go through each year.