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Auburn / history / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
23
Jul 14

A return to 1898

Last year I published this photograph:

It was the second in a series of posts about photos I found in my 1898 Glomerata, which is Auburn’s yearbook, of which I have a humble collection. The first post was here. (I have three more from that book that I scanned to share here, but I’d forgotten about them until just now.)

I say all of this to mention an email I received today. A nice lady from Wisconsin is doing genealogical research on some of her in-laws and one of the guys in this picture is her man, Franklin Waters Van Ness, and did I know which one he might be.

He’s the guy who is sitting. He was the captain of the API track team. At an inter-mural field day against six other schools he won the half mile, running it in two minutes and five seconds. But, I said, that was all the yearbook had on him. This was both a surprise and not surprising. They never really seem perfectly complete, but, also, the school was so small back then, and so many names pop up more than once, that you imagine he’d been in there somewhere, but I can’t find him.

So I asked what she knew about F.W. Van Ness. My previous post had some information that I’d read from research that she’d posted on findagrave.com. She wrote back right away:

He and his brother moved to Chicago where they were engineers. Franklin was also an efficiency expert. Franklin met Jennie Sullivan there. She was a teacher. They married in Chicago and the three children were born there. The family then moved to Milwaukee where Jennie was instrumental in developing playgrounds at the schools. They then moved to East Orange, New Jersey. Franklin is on the 1920 census twice. I think he was also in Cincinnati, as well as East Orange, but he traveled for his work.

Being a southerner, he loved the south, and bought that cotton mill (in North Carolina), which went bust during the Depression. They had lived very wealthy lives until that point.

[…]

(H)e ended up in Richmond, Virginia, and I don’t know why or what he did until his death.

[…]

He was certainly a smart guy and very motivated until the Depression took the steam out of him.

One of his daughters became a success in the hospitality industry, writing a book and giving college lectures on hotel work. Another daughter married an admiral and an ambassador. Franklin’s wife, Jenny, a suffragist and prohibitionist, was one of the first two female legislators in New Jersey. This is an interesting family.

Where Franklin Waters Van Ness is buried is a mystery, so I started Googling the man once more. Where I once again came up empty.

But I did find out something about Franklin’s brother, Graham Van Ness, that she didn’t know. She knew he’d served in the 2nd Missouri during the Spanish American War, but her trail went cold. Here’s the actual muster roster with his name on it. His unit only made it as far as Georgia, where another guy in the 2nd Missouri was famous for being Jesse James’ son. The story goes that people would often visit his unit to take pictures of him. This gives us a small world moment. I’m apparently related to Jesse James, so my relative would have known my new email friend’s relative. Except not. Apparently, the essay notes, this was a trick played by one of the jokers in that unit. But small world!

I found all that because I found a mention of Franklin as F.W. Van Ness in the story covering the suicide or murder of Graham. They were brothers and, the Burlington Daily News explains, Graham had witnessed the murder of Jack Lingle. This was a huge story in Chicago and Graham was apparently on the run from hitmen. Lingle was a well-to-do reporter … and a friend of Al Capone.

She said another of Franklin’s brothers was murdered in Texas. And another part of the family features a man who made his money in oil and natural gas before branching out into shipping, real estate and S&Ls and buying the Dallas Cowboys. Some family tree.

All of that, and more, I learned today because of a 115 year-old-photo I published last year.

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14
Jul 14

Going home, and home again

Woke up this morning, pleased with how I felt considering the race the day before. Packed up the car, loaded the bike and said my goodbyes to grandparents and mother. I drove two towns over to visit my other grandmother.

She lives in between a town that has 1,250 residents and a village that has 281, a place where the arrival of the first 24-hour convenience store heralded the closure of a Piggly Wiggle and the local supermarket.

There’s a McDonalds and a Hardee’s and a Foodland, now, so they’re in high cotton. The barbecue place where I picked up lunch uses the walk up model most often seen at ice cream stands. The menu is littered with delightful typos. The town library, which looks like a bank, is closed on Sundays and Mondays. But they’ve expanded their Wednesday hours, where you can now get a book until 5 p.m. All of this isn’t bad for a literal one stoplight town.

Fishing and being between here-and-there are the two main calling cards of the community, which is growing. A few more storefronts popped up last year, and there are 51 more people in the town than at the turn of the century.

At the second largest intersection in town — a block from the largest, which is really just the U.S. highway that runs through the area — there is an old Coke sign on the side of a building. When it had faded beyond recognition they re-painted it. They displayed the same old Christmas decorations for at least 25 years, and they were old when I first saw them as a child. Hanging on to history is important here. I suppose that is why most of the local websites haven’t changed in years.

Just down the street from that second intersection is a four-gravestone cemetery with this marker:

I found that in 2010. Andrews volunteered in 1862, at the age of 69. He was a pensioner from the War of 1812 when he signed on to ride for the CSA. There are some arguments, apparently, that he would have been the oldest soldier in the Confederacy. His captain, John H. Lester, would remember him in 1921 in a publication called Confederate Veteran:

He was discharged in 1863, in his seventy-first year, on account of old age, against his very earnest protest; in fact, he was very angry when informed that I had an order to discharge him. I appointed him fifth sergeant of my company and favored him while in the army in every way consistent with my duty. He was a neighbor and friend of my great-grandfather, Henry Lester, in Virginia.

The local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy is named in his honor. One day I’ll meet one of those ladies and find out what they know about Andrews. The only other thing I know about him is that he was a grocer.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if he was behind that old, local supermarket?

Anyway, down the side road, beyond the place where we once ran out of gas and all the familiar old houses and the new sports fields and through a miniature subdivision that sprouted from a fallow field. We’re back on roads that just have county numbers now, in a place that, until recently, still used “rural route” on their mail until they thought being a bit more precise might be a useful thing in case of emergency.

Finally to the road that my grandmother lives on, next to the house that her parents built, where her son lives. She’s surrounded by pastureland and woods and a babbling little creek, idyllic places where I spent so much time as a child.

We had lunch and chatted and watched a bit of television. She caught me up on family health and pictures of people’s kids. There’s always a medical update or a studio portrait to see.

Drove home, in time for the neighborhood potluck. Tonight’s theme was country cooking, guaranteeing I would overeat, know it at the time, and not regret it at all. All of those things came true.

Oh, yes, these. There’s a new interchange coming that will serve as a southern bypass around Montgomery, a city that already has a bypass. I have to go under them every so often and am interested in the progress. You look up through the thing when it is just framework and imagine, “One day, there’ll be cars and trucks there.”

This phase, which started in 2011, was originally slated to be completed this year. That seems unlikely at this point. The entire project is estimated at a cost of $500 million and a completion goal of 2022. If you’ve ever seen a highway project, you’re guessing over and after.

And if you think that is plywood, let’s just all assume it is a trick of the light. We’ll also let someone else be the first people to drive over it.

Lastly, Weird Al Yankovic is releasing a video a day for the next week in what is surely the most brilliant marketing move we’ll see from the music industry this year. Here’s his first:

cycling / family / Friday / history / I do not know what is happening. / iPhone / journalism / links / memories / photo / running / things to read / Tumblr / Twitter — Comments Off
11
Jul 14

Scene chewing

Today I changed a doorknob. Four screws out, the new hardware in place and four more screws to install it.

I was listening to Pandora at the time. It took less than two songs, and that was because one of the screws was stripped.

But that wasn’t even the height of my industriousness today. I also built one of those shoe racks that you hang over a closet door and immediately regret having purchased! There’s just no end to my usefulness, it seems.

The door knob was on one of the houses that my great-grandfather built, let’s say, 60 years ago.

Here he is, the older gentleman:

He built three on some of his property for rental income. They’ve all stayed in the family over the years. A few years ago I sanded down door frames in one of the houses and went through all those decades of paint. It was a smooth glimpse of archeology.

At the time I wrote:

And suddenly I’ve found myself kneeling in the dust of the place, sanding smooth at least six layers of paint, peeling away the canvas of perhaps a dozen lives or more, letting that old lumber breathe again for the first time since the Eisenhower administration.

Sometimes I overwrite.

I walked around the side of that little rental and saw this, and wondered much the same thing as I did about the paint: Did he hang this?

That’s a small question that’ll never be answered. Who would remember? Who is left to know? Who would pay attention to the details of when a screen door went in? And is that the original, or something put up during the Reagan years?

I noodled up and down the road for five miles and then jogged one, the last effort before the Sunday race. We’ll see how much I come to regret that.

Usually, by this time, I am very much aware of how unprepared I am for the thing. This time I am choosing to not consciously acknowledge how unprepared I am.

Because, you know, I am.

Played with my grandparents’ dog:

She’s a smart one.

Things to read … so you can be smart, too.

There’s a super moon tomorrow night. Pretty large tonight, too.

US GIVEN HEADS UP ABOUT NEWSPAPER DATA DESTRUCTION:

In a statement to the AP, the Guardian said it was disappointed to learn that “cross-Atlantic conversations were taking place at the very highest levels of government ahead of the bizarre destruction of journalistic material that took place in the Guardian’s basement last July.”

“What’s perhaps most concerning is that the disclosure of these emails appears to contradict the White House’s comments about these events last year, when they questioned the appropriateness of the U.K. government’s intervention,” the newspaper said.

The White House said Thursday that the British government had acted on its own in destroying the Guardian drives.

Digital advertising will pass 25% of total ad spending this year:

Global spending on advertising will hit $545.4 billion this year, according to a report from eMarketer, and digital ads will make up more than a quarter of that spending.
Digital ad spending is likely to hit $140.15 billion this year, with $32.71 billion spent on ads for smartphones and tablets.
Growth in total media ad spending should be 5.7 percent this year, eMarketer said, more than twice the growth rate a year ago, which was 2.6 percent.

A properly sanitized report, from ESPN. Pete Carroll headed to Trojans HOF

And when ESPN disappoints you like that, they redeem themselves like this. Marcus Lattimore doesn’t walk alone

The Widespread Effects of Facebook’s Latest Outage:

The lesson, therefore, is a poignant one: When utilizing any third-party tags, particularly ones that have such a big effect on your end users interaction with your site, it’s imperative that you make sure the code is asynchronous with your own to prevent it from affecting your entire site’s performance.

Whoops. Anthrax investigation turns up ‘distressing’ issues at CDC

Stuff on my Tumblr: The mysteries of modern shipping, an examination of modern currency, an old Scout and an older swing.

On Twitter:

Maybe I should just start using this as a sarcasm face … pic.twitter.com/TuOzfR6NO4

— kenny smith (@kennysmith) July 12, 2014

Leonard Nimoy had just stolen all of William Shatner’s scene chewing.

I made fun of the Horta episode, with plenty of photos. Check it out.

cycling / history / iPhone / journalism / links / memories / photo / things to read / Thursday / Tumblr — Comments Off
10
Jul 14

There’s a can’t-miss offer at the end of this post

I had a V8 for breakfast this morning. “Start the gut,” they say. And I thought to myself, “I’ve forgotten how much I like V8.”

And then I read the nutrition label, remembering what I would find there, and realizing why I liked V8.

It is the potassium.

Oh, the old days in radio, when I would get to the studio at 4 a.m. and do three hours of air work and then rush down the mountain to the gas station for a V8 and a juice and some snack or other to get me through lunch. There’s nothing like faking energy on the air before 5 a.m., but, then, getting off before 2 p.m. had perks, as well.

Finally, about the time I convinced all of my friends that, no, really, I have to go to bed at 8 or 9 p.m., I was out of broadcasting. Sleeping in again never felt so good, and I probably haven’t had a V8 since.

I had lunch at a barbecue place, today, a little chicken, a little potato salad, it was delicious. And then later I went for a ride on my bicycle. I checked out 22 miles of the route for this weekend’s race. Here’s the beginning, and the end:

I didn’t do the very beginning, because it involves a small climb up from the river bank. I joined the circuit three miles in, where the country roads begin. This area will offer some long, gentle, slow climbs, rather than the rollers we normally ride. Always it felt like I was going uphill, or that I had dead legs, or both.

Then I’d look down at the computer and see my speed and be pleasantly surprised, except for the two hills of note. It will be a fast course through neighborhoods and beautiful corn and soybean fields and beyond pastureland stuffed with cattle. I think the layout only calls for six places where you have to slow down for turns, and so it is technically easy, and very pleasant. The roads are good. They are quiet.

Though I did have a car round a curve from the other direction so fast he was entirely in my lane. Not “I’m in the country and I can hover over the centerline a bit because I clearly see no one is coming,” but instead “For a moment there, I thought I was in England and driving on the left.”

And there was also, at the very end, the minivan full of children that wanted to pull up a little too close. People are people.

Anyway, the race planner has done a nice job, at least in the bike leg. I suspect several triathletes will come away very pleased with their times. (I will finish behind them all somewhere.) I hope I am. I didn’t even work very hard and had a high pace and absolutely bombed my way through the last turn and downhill.

Now the never-answered question: How much harder should I work during the race, knowing I have to bluff my way through a 10K after that?

Things to read … because if you read all of these you won’t have to run later.

Look out Hawaii, Samoa and Spain! We’re coming after your stuff! Or: Finally, Y2K arrives. 14,000 DRAFT NOTICES SENT TO MEN BORN IN 1800S:

The Selective Service didn’t initially catch it because the state used a two-digit code to indicate year of birth, spokesman Pat Schuback said. The federal agency identified 27,218 records of men born in the 1800s, began mailing notices to them on June 30, and began receiving calls from family members on July 3. By that time, it had sent 14,250 notices in error.

All the voter fraud people are surely wondering how many of them are still voting.

One commenter notes that perhaps they can find the IRS’s missing emails. Chinese hackers broke into computer network containing personal data on thousands of federal employees

I did this about 10 years ago. Man angry over child deaths videos self in hot car to prove a point:

“I’m sitting in the car with the windows rolled up cause I want to know how it feels to be left in the car, strapped in a car seat with the windows up, and the doors probably locked,” Williams says on the video. “I would never leave my kids in the car like this, man.”

The thing the story doesn’t mention is that babies can’t regulate their temperature as well as adults do. So when he locks himself in or, as I did, road 25 minutes from work to home at 3 p.m. at the apex of a summer in the South, there is an advantage we have. And, yes, it gets incredibly hot.

I think we’re down about a third in this category, based on the last numbers I recall seeing. I also recall working the statehouse beat, sometimes all alone, and seeing cobwebs in the old rooms that used to be the news bureaus’ — and all of that was a few years before the big cuts. It is sometimes worse on the local level. This means a lot when the politicians start to notice. Pew study: New media outlets attempt to fill void in statehouse coverage across the U.S.. The report says less than a third of the nation’s daily newspapers staff their respective statehouses. That is an embarrassment. Here are the state-by-state numbers.

First 5 Fulbright-National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellows Named:

The Fellowship provides a unique platform for U.S. Fulbright awardees to build awareness of transnational challenges, comparing and contrasting cross-border issues. Fellows will share their stories on nationalgeographic.com.

Finally, I made my triumphant return to Tumblr today, the place where I publish the random pictures I take so that they can one day be published on Tumblr. Today, you can enjoy amazing things like This 18-wheeler! A truly incredible chair! Or how about this postcard with a classic note? And, finally, the most amazing peanut cans ever!

There will be more tomorrow. See you then!

cycling / history / I do not know what is happening. / journalism / links / things to read / video / weekend — Comments Off
5
Jul 14

This car makes jumps

The world around you is one of the things a bicycle teaches you about. Things look different. Terrain is different. You come to understand that those aren’t two hills, but really one hill you approach from multiple directions.

The most important thing I have learned, so far, is that it has taught me not to judge. You never know what someone is going through, which is the personification of the “Walk a mile in my shoes” concept, which is writ large in my head every time I’m struggling to top a hill. Those people driving those cars don’t know, I tell myself.

Some of them probably do, but the point is that it can be hard.

Another important thing the bike teaches you is about more roads. Eventually you start looking for new routes, new challenges, new approaches to that same hill. I found some of those today, in part because I saw a neat road name on a map. The road is about four miles from our house and I’ve passed it dozens of times on my bike alone. But playing with cycling routes on a map led me to answering the question “What’s down there?” The answer was a private driveway.

And this:

Had a difficult with the new shoes. They, surprise, didn’t feel right for most of the ride today, but I figured it out as soon as I got home and took them off. And it was an easy fix. Hopefully that will be taken care of today.

I went through three new neighborhoods today, though, and two of them I’ll return to again. The third featured a bad stretch of road that overruled the two extra rides up that same hill mentioned above. In just over half of the distance I climbed more than I will in next weekend’s triathlon. And, with that and the time trialing I did yesterday, I will begin to taper off the workouts.

Tapering, like I have a training plan. Like I’m an athlete.

Aside from the pretending, I do not know what is happening.

Things to read … so you’ll know what is happening.

The best thing you’ll read today: A Janitor’s Ten Lessons in Leadership

Rare, Remarkable Maps Trace America’s Path to Independence

Roger Simon: America’s glorious failures

‘Flying Farmer’ recalls WWII service

Total US Ad Spending to See Largest Increase Since 2004

Guardian Australia: lessons in online-only publications

Have I mentioned I need a drone? I need a drone.