This is the weekly opportunity to post a lot of pictures that haven’t yet landed elsewhere on the site. Here’s a handful, there are even more in the January photo gallery.
One day one of the gymnasts will leap into the air and forget to land:
Look at the expressions on her teammates’ faces in the background:
Nobody has more fun on the floor than Bri Guy:
In the Hunt Seat arena. Horses jump things there, and this is currently the extent of my ability to comment on the sport intelligently. I’ll have to fix that:
I’ve never seen Nosa Eguae anywhere around town where he didn’t have a handful of people come talk to him. He likes equestrian events, too, apparently:
Oklahoma State’s team is called the Cowgirls. The name is bejeweled on the back of their outfits. It was in juxtaposition of all of their serious, championship-caliber riders. You can just see her championship belt buckle in this shot:
Stop! This is part of the routine:
On today’s big bike ride, mile 20, middle of nowhere and feeling fine:
At 26.4 miles in I’ve already gotten lost, figured out where I missed a turn and thought to myself “You’ve always wanted to see what is happening in Crawford. Press on …”
Here’s Crawford in a nutshell, an unincorporated community of perhaps less than 1,000 people, it was settled in 1832, as Crocketsville. A few decades later the state legislature changed the name. It boasts one of the oldest Masonic lodges in the state. A prominent church was built in 1910 using bricks from the original county courthouse. You can apparently see some of the workers’ (slaves mostly) handprints in those old courthouse bricks now making up the church.
Didn’t see that church, I was going in the wrong direction. Not sure about the history of this building though:
Nothing happening at the local co-op, about 34 miles into the ride:
I don’t know if the church planners put this place up with an idea of how the sunsets would play, but it worked out for them:
This next picture is 41 miles into my ride. I’ve been here before — behind where I’m standing as the photographer there is a gas station full of nice people that sold me Gatorade one hot summer day last year — but I didn’t notice this advertisement:
It is safe to say this mural is pre-1980, when Texaco drilled on Louisiana’s Lake Pelgneur and accidentally pierced the roof of the Diamond Crystal salt dome beneath the lake:
Within seven hours the entire 1,100-acre lake was empty and two drilling rigs, a tugboat, eleven barges, a barge loading-dock, seventy acres of Jefferson Island and its botanical gardens, parts of greenhouses, a house trailer, trucks, tractors, a parking lot, tons of mud and trees and three dogs had disappeared into the sinkhole at the bottom of the lake. The whole scene was described by witnesses as resembling a draining bathtub with boats bobbing around like toys before being sucked under. About 30 shrimp boats that were in the canal were beached as the canal emptied into the sinkhole, and were refloated later when the lake and canal refilled with water. Nine of the eleven barges would eventually pop back to the surface. Amazingly, no human life was lost in this spectacular accident.
What does that say? I haven’t been able to afford exterior paint in 30 years? No one has come along and offered to make it say “See Rock City”? I really like salt and my sodium levels are unfortunately high?
I wanted to do 60 miles today. This is with about 14 miles to go, and it was the last I would see of the sun:
I managed to get 52 miles. It was dark and cold. When you can’t see the bumps in the road you call it an evening. And then you put on several layers to warm up.
An email conversation spent me on a late evening genealogy search. My known family tree only goes back so far, it seems. Some people aren’t interested in doing the research. We have common names. We are from a typically inconspicuous rural lifestyle, so there aren’t a lot of newspaper mentions.
I haven’t done any real genealogy research, the extent of my primary searches have come from old digitized newspaper copy, but I do enjoy digging through the hard, good work of others.
So in this conversation today I realized there were names I’d forgotten and names I couldn’t recall ever knowing. I started searching. I got back an extra generation and found two new surnames. I also found the obituary of my great-great grandfather. He was a World War I draftee, and died in his home. He was survived by his wife and four children, including my great-grandmother.
(Update, from several years later … In digging this up to search out one key point, I now think I was wrong about the people in the family tree. I can’t find the original thread anymore, and later clicking and surfing has given me other names. So I’ve put a strike through the parts below that now seem erroneous. Still, one side of my family was Dutch, though.)
These were the ads on the obituary page of The Alabama Courier (Athens, Ala.) on Thursday, February 28, 1946. (The Courier was established in 1892 and merged with the Limestone Democrat in 1969. They’ve been publishing as the News Courier since.)
Miss your loved ones? Bury yourself in work! The nuts and bolts of the Army Air Corps will see you through! The coveralls are free, but you’ll earn the stripes.
This is from the Ads You Don’t See Anymore department of the newspaper:
I couldn’t find any mention of the Clem Brothers Gin, but I’ll ask around. The closest thing I can find is a lumber concern over in Georgia.
Ahhh, a glamorous night out on the town. You’ve put on your best coat, your wife is wearing that beautiful dress. And the maitre’ de can set you up at the best table! “We’ll take the milk. Christopher’s.”
“Garçon! This is from a different dairy. Please take it back.”
I can’t figure out if this was the local logo or something that died out before the muscle car era, but here’s the Dodge ad:
A man named Robert Mills had worked at Draper Motor Company for about a year when this ad came out. After a decade on the lot he bought the dealership in 1955. It stayed open at least until he retired, in 1979. Can’t find anything about the place after that.
The Plaza Theater was on the square in neighboring Athens:
The movie, West of Pinto Basin, was released six years before, in 1940. My how the world changed in between. The IMDB blurb for the movie: “Three cowboys fight a saloon owner who is trying to grab up all the local land by engineering stagecoach robberies so an irrigation dam can’t be built.”
Can’t miss, right? It is a durable plot. Shows up in a lot of westerns.
Here’s the Zorro serial, in full:
Three people are killed and a stagecoach crashes off a cliff into a creek in the story’s first two minutes, before the first word is spoken. They do a great cliffhanger at the end of the episode, too. (You can watch the entire story at the Internet Archive.
And, yes, the title says Zorro, but the character is Black Whip. Released in 1944, the serial was meant to capitalize off of a 20th Century Fox remake of The Mark of Zorro. Republic couldn’t get Zorro, and so this was how they solved the problem. (See? Hollywood has been out of ideas before.) The serial is set in Idaho and the main theme is a fight to prevent and ensure statehood by the villains and heroes respectively. You wonder if other territories had other Zorro spinoff franchisees. A different color, a different weapon and some hero could pay a few royalties to the Big Z and save the day, and probably a few Hollywood production companies, too.
One last thing on the Zorro serial: James Lileks has a theory that projects from this period always have a Star Trek tie. So I ran the entire cast and crew through the Star Trek filter — it zooms along at warp speed don’t ya know … — and found exactly one match. Tom Steele was a stuntman on Black Whip. He started in 1932 and worked until the mid-1980s. He appeared in Bread and Circuses as Slave #2. He has the best stuntman bio ever:
Stuntmen are often selected because of their resemblance to the star they are doubling for. In contrast to this, many of Republic Pictures’ western stars in the 1940s and early 1950s, such as Allan Lane, Bill Elliot, Rex Allen and Monte Hale, were selected in part due to their resemblance to Steele, who would do their stunts.
The Added Joy? It was a cartoon short from 1937, back when Mel Blanc was uncredited.
But I digress. The Plaza opened in 1939 and sat 340 people. (The city itself had about 4,300 at the time.) In 1954 a newspaper ad said the theatre would be closed temporarily starting in June, but it never reopened.
Here’s where the theater stood:
Last year, the Courier reported that a non-profit community organization that prettifies the downtown area asked the current owner of the building, a pharmacist, to improve the façade of the old theater. The dilapidated stucco came down, the brick underneath was still in good condition.
BABY CHICKS – The KIND THAT LIVE. As opposed to the chicks that, you know, die.
It verily screams out at you on the obits page.
Anyway. In my paternal grandfather’s family I gained an extra generation — Smith’s are tough to trace at a casual glance — dating back to my great-great-grandfather.
Now, my paternal grandfather’s mother? She told me when I was very young about some uncles who fought in the Civil War. I was young enough to be enthralled by this, but not smart enough yet to ask if she knew any details. If she were still here I might be able to tell her a few things after this bit of reading.
It was her father’s obituary we started discussing here. I picked up a thread on rootsweb that allows me to go back 13 more generations. Assuming these various people’s hard work is correct (I see a few logic errors in chronology in some peripheral details, but let’s assume the big stuff is accurate) we can go back to a man named Eltekens, in 16th century Midwolda, Groningen, Netherlands.
The Hendricks family, again I didn’t even know this name until today, came over to the New World in 1662. (In my mother’s family a young man came over on the Mayflower, so my roots are fairly deep, it seems.) Albertus Hendrickssen became Albert Hendricks. He was a house carpenter, owned land in Pennsylvania and was a constable and a juror.
This would have been his land around the turn of the 18th century:
Albert’s particular son that matters to this story, Johannes (or John), was a shipbuilder. His second wife extends the chain a bit closer to my family. He had two children in Philadelphia before dying in 1709. It was John’s son, James, that moved the family south. He found himself in North Carolina in the early 1740s. He had nine sons and “several unknown daughters as he left no will.”
James Jr. changed Hendricks to Hendrix. He is believed to have fought in the Revolutionary War. James Jr.’s son, Larkin, moved the family to Alabama in 1830 or earlier.
Larkin’s son, William, and grandson, Joseph, lived through the Civil War — though I don’t know if they fought. Joseph also read about World War I and the Great Depression in the local paper. He was a farmer, and he died in 1933 at the age of 88. His son was James, the World War I draftee, my great-great-grandfather at the beginning of this post.
At least one branch of my family tree has been in that county for nine generations and 180 years. It’s only been a county for 196 years. (They should really own more property don’t you think?)
All of this is more than you wanted, of course. But when you do this sort of thing it is good to write it down and make good sense of it all. That way you can bore your friends endlessly at parties.
Sunday is usually the day where I throw a lot of extra pictures from the week on the blog, hoping to feel the space with images of things that didn’t otherwise get used.
Only I didn’t take a great many pictures this week. It won’t happen again.
We did receive a fine box of oranges from The Yankees grandparents:
Updated and edited my vita, which was a job that was past due.
Rode 25 miles on my bike, enjoying the beautiful January afternoon. The afternoon was the best part about it. It’s going to take three or five good long rides to start getting my form back. My only complaint about riding is that just when I hit my stride events overcome me. Something will come up to preoccupy me for too long and all that hard work is undone.
Around finals I had a nice 45 mile ride and just started to get back into a good pace and comfort level. Then I got sick for a week and change, and then there were 10 days of holiday travels.
So this week has been a return to square one. (I’m not a very good cyclist.)
Visited the library this evening. Thought I’d do a little historical research. This is an issue of the 1914 Orange and Blue, Auburn’s student paper that preceded The Plainsman:
Note the championship-wining football team’s headline. The story included this argument for facemasks:
Babe Taylor, Auburn warrior, and by the way, Birmingham-bred, displayed a vast amount of gameness yesterday afternoon. In the early part of the first quarter someone, unthoughtedly of course, kicked in the upper section of Babe’s face, in the neighborhood of the left eye. Babe’s face wore an expression of agony and the blood trickled down his features in doublequick time, but he stood by the fort and played a grand game of football.
Sixty percent of the front page is devoted to football, which happened pretty regularly, even in 1914. Note, also, that the band played Touchdown Auburn, which was a tune that pre-dated Jim Fyffe’s famous call by many decades. There’s a note that students from Alabama telegraphed their congratulations on the championship — you have to wonder what their angle was.
There’s a poem on the right hand side, a dream of a beautiful young woman, and “An Ode to some Pickles.”
Upon a night long ago
Three fellows sat at ease
And tried to soothe their inner man
With pickles and with cheese.
The cheese, by nature yellow,
Met quick and sure defeat;
But the unassuming pickles
Were very green and sweet.
The eats were good and everything
Seemed lovely for a while —
Till a feaster’s flesh, turned wan and pale
In the middle of a smile.
His face began to shudder,
A twitch and then a jerk;
We looked at him and realized
The pickles were at work!
A private, and not especially good, joke 97 years ago was published in a newspaper. And you’re reading it today. None of this would have been conceivable to the poet who wrote those lines.
Didn’t find what I was looking for — though I have a feeling I’m getting close — so I’ll have to go back. No problem there, the old microfilms are great fun.
We’ve been trying to have doughnuts for breakfast since Sunday. But that was New Year’s Day, and so our local doughnut shop was closed. Monday? Closed for New Year’s Hangover, I suppose. Yesterday we had a real breakfast. Today we made it happen.
After the sugar kicked in and moved on — and after having made it through the morning edition of email, text messages and RSS reading — we decided for a light ride. Would have ridden yesterday, but it was too cold. Today it was just right, a light chill in the shade and a good breeze to keep the temperature right when you started working a bit.
Not that there’s a lot of that when you haven’t been on the bike in weeks, another victim of the holidays.
On Monday, though, I installed the new computers on our bikes. Now we’ll now just how bad at this we are! (Hint: Bad.)
The Yankee had two flats. It was one of those days.
At one point I was tucked in behind her, but went around because the time was right. We were about to hit a stretch where I perform slightly better than she does. There was a car coming, which is not where I want to be putting brakes to wheels. So I kicked.
And for one glorious, brief, sprinting, downhill, mass-forward, aerodynamically-tucked moment, I hit 37.6 miles per hour. If I could keep up that pace for 4,231 I might have been competitive in the 1987 Tour de France. The race has gotten a bit faster since then.
But I only rode 17 miles today, clearly there’s some work to be done. But that’s what tomorrow is for.
We made dinner to the Beatles, ate over the bowl game.
Somewhere along the way we put away clothes that will be donated. We ordered four pictures for over the fireplace. I found a new water filter for the refrigerator. It was a perfectly low key evening.
Finally answered one of the many nagging questions of my faulty childhood memory. It was a Woolco. The town I grew up in had a Zayre’s and one of the W stores in what I think of as the place’s two original strip malls. I could never recall if it was a Woolworth or a Woolco, though. Woolworth, you might remember, was one of the original American five-and-dime stores. They slipped in the 1980s and disappeared entirely in 1997. (Now their existing properties are the struggling Foot Locker entities.
Woolco, on the other hand, was their discount store. Think about that: the discount of store of a five-and-dime shop. I don’t remember much about it, I couldn’t even remember which name the store had. Woolco died in 1982, so I guess that’s when that store went away. Soon after Wal-Mart moved into that spot.
Not too much longer after that the Zayre’s down the street shut their doors. K-Mart went in there.
After a few years Wal-Mart moved three miles down the road to the interstate and a new Supercenter. There’s a Big Lots where the Wal-Mart and Woolco once operated. A thrift store occupies the place that used to run as Zayre’s and then K-Mart. That entire part of that town has dried up. What was once upon a time the longest lit road east of the Rocky Mountains and, prior to the Great Depression, was intended as the nation’s first freeway is a husk of itself.
For years, though, I’ve wondered: was that a Woolworth or a Woolco?
These are the questions that occupy a preoccupied mind. This all came about because of an essay I read about Best Buy:
Electronics retailer Best Buy is headed for the exits. I can’t say when exactly, but my guess is that it’s only a matter of time, maybe a few more years.
Consider a few key metrics. Despite the disappearance of competitors including Circuit City, the company is losing market share. Its last earnings announcement disappointed investors. In 2011, the company’s stock has lost 40% of its value. Forward P/E is a mere 6.23 (industry average is 10.20). Its market cap down to less than $9 billion. Its average analyst rating, according to The Street.com, is a B-.
Those are just some of the numbers, and they don’t look good. They bear out a prediction in March from the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column, which forecast “the worst is yet to come” for Best Buy investors. With the flop of 3D televisions and the expansion of Apple’s own retail locations, there was no killer product on the horizon that would lift it from the doldrums. Though the company accounts for almost a third of all U.S. consumer electronics purchases, analysts noted, the company remains a ripe target for more nimble competitors.
But the numbers only scratch the surface. To discover the real reasons behind the company’s decline, just take this simple test. Walk into one of the company’s retail locations or shop online. And try, really try, not to lose your temper.
The store goes on, sounding much like Circuit City and Service Merchandise and many others before it. The piece also included a Wikipedia list of defunct American stores that started between the 1920s and 1950s and now out of business, either consolidated, liquidated or folded. It is a great list for nostalgia.
The only thing I remember buying at that store is maybe some superhero-themed clothing. I wanted a digital watch, I remember distinctly, but my parents wouldn’t buy it for me. I needed to learn the analog watch first, they said. It was a good lesson.
I almost never misread my watch today.
The clock display on my bike’s new computer? Digital in every way.
