This was my yesterday evening. Made it back home by around 9 p.m. thinking “There’s no place like home from the holidays.”
Though I wish I could have stayed longer, there is work to be done. And, also, the vain hope that moving 170 miles to the south will improve the temperature. It is cold in north Alabama, where the snow still looks abnormal, but the bitter chill is setting into the bones.
So that’s looking west. I headed east, and then south, and then east again. And in all of that driving I began to tinker with an hypothesis about what you can learn about a reason by the tall things you see during your travels. Here’s a partial list of last night’s sites:
Neon catfish. They like their fried fish around here.
And on the last leg of the trip the dog track’s giant triple sevens.
You could write books from just those starting blocks.
Anyway, back to the above picture. If you look east, you’d see this:
I took that particular picture four years ago after it closed. Yesterday, when I drove by it was still covered in snow.
The bridge was built in 1924 and opened in 1925. My grandmother, at Thanksgiving, showed me a newspaper clipping of the first car that went over the bridge. There was an addition made in 1959, making it one of the last truss bridges built in the state.
When they closed the narrow little bridge it was supporting something like 15,000 cars a day. Now there’s a nice, wide six-lane expanse sitting nearby.
And we’re going to call that History Monday, because the rest of the day was indoors, trying to stay warm and reading. I did make it to the mailbox. We got a card from family in New England. The theme was “Let it snow.” I bet they’d like to take that back just now.
Very cold here in Auburn still. There was a wintry mix late on Christmas day. Snowmen were made. I saw photographs.
Just the sporadic Monday history feature today. Everything else was spent up in uninteresting things like studying and laundry.
Dean Hallmark, in the center, approximately 21 years old in the 1936 Glomerata.
Dean E. Hallmark was an avid athlete, adventure seeker and U.S. Army Air Corps pilot. He was born in 1914 in the small west Texas town of Robert Lee. He was a standout football player, ultimately making his way to Auburn University on a football scholarship. He played there only one year, quitting school in 1936 to take flying lessons before becoming a civilian pilot.
In November of 1940, Dean was recruited by the Army and he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps. After training he reported for duty with the 95th Bomb Squadron, 17th Bombardment Group stationed at Pendleton Field, Oregon. One of the first men to fly the North American B-25B Mitchell medium bomber, he caught Col. Jimmy Doolittle’s eye and ultimately flew with him on his raid of Japan in April of 1942.
This was the first offensive strike at the Japanese mainland, meant to shake the Japanese faith in their leadership and a morale boost back home after the surprise of Pearl Harbor and bad outcomes elsewhere in the Pacific.
Doolittle and his raiders had to launch from their aircraft carrier early after being detected by a Japanese ship. (The launch was actually the first time a B-25 had ever used a carrier deck. All of the practice runs had been on land.) Hallmark was the command pilot of the sixth B-25 off the aircraft carrier. He was 28-years-old.
He flew to Tokyo with the rest of the raiders, dropped his bombs and made his way to China. Dean’s bomber ran out of fuel and he ditched his plane about three miles from the coast. The two enlisted crew members on board drown. Dean and his two fellow officers were hurt, but survived the crash. Dean was catapulted through the windshield, the pilot’s seat still strapped to his body.
The officers made their way to shore, linked up the next morning and evaded the Japanese for eight days. Finally they were captured, and along with five captured crew members from another bomber, were tried by the Japanese on what are now considered phony charges of killing innocent civilians.
They were tortured and malnourished. Dean came down with beriberi and dysentery. All eight were sentenced to death. Five of those sentences were commuted. Hallmark and two officers from the other bomber — 1st Lt. William Farrow and Sgt. Harold Spatz were not so lucky. On October 15, 1942 Hallmark, Farrow and Spatz were executed by firing squad.
The bodies were cremated and located by American officials after the war. Today, Hallmark’s remains are at Arlington National Cemetery where he was interred in 1949.
USAAF Aviator wings
Distinguished Flying Cross (awarded posthumously)
Purple Heart Medal (awarded posthumously)
Prisoner of War Medal (awarded posthumously)
American Defense Medal
American Campaign Medal w/ bronze star
Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal w/ bronze star (awarded posthumously)
WWII Victory Medal (awarded posthumously)
Breast Order of Pao Ting (awarded posthumously by Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China)
China War Memorial Medal (awarded posthumously by Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China)
Other memorial honors include:
Greenville, Texas celebrated Dean Hallmark Day on April 28, 1943 in conjunction with the Second War Bond Drive
The Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 4011 in Greenville, Texas, named their lodge after Hallmark
Auburn University dedicated a plaque to Dean’s memory in the Letterman’s Lounge in Jordan-Hare Stadium
Study carrel 4431P inside the Auburn University library was named in Dean’s honor.
This year’s family ornaments have been made. Took longer than it should, but life is full of little tasks that you think you can complete in 45 minutes that take upwards of three hours of your evening.
First there was going through 11 months of photographs for the ones worth of putting on our tree. And then that list must be cut in half. Agonizing is then done to get it down to the requisite number. I do three a year.
The tree has grown nicely at that rate, there are ornaments from Belize, San Francisco and Louisville. Our graduations from the master’s program we shared together are there, football is there and our engagement and wedding. But there are also regular pictures, days in the park or picnics by a pond.
Anyway. I get these through Cafepress, where I have made money in the past. Remember “Don’t get stuck on stupid?” Made several bucks off that slogan on a bumper sticker a few years back. Occasionally something else sells, but I don’t spend a lot of time there. Except for today.
I had to open the shop, blow out the cobwebs, sweep, put the chairs down and upload the chosen pictures to the slowest servers not involving Julian Assange. Fortunately I didn’t have to re-edit any pictures, making the banal turn boring and flirting with tedious. The assembly process — choosing the product I wish to make, putting the image on the product, ordering and repeating — is somewhat more pleasant than sausage making, gives way to a very nice product, however. I love those ornaments.
And for maybe the first year I’ve smartly ordered the ornaments early enough that they might actually make it on the tree this year. Usually it works like this “Merry Christmas. You can put these on the tree next year!”
Next year we might have to get a small tree for this. I think we’re outgrowing the plastic apartment tree The Yankee bought some years back. One day, I hope, they’ll take over the main tree. Of course we have all of the other ornaments. At some point we’re going to have a tree in every room, I’m afraid.
Links: Just two today, because putting these two together amuses me.
Journalists, says Alan Mutter aren’t objective. Never have been, he says. And we should do away with the pretense.
NASA has discovered a new life form, a bacteria called GFAJ-1 that is unlike anything currently living in planet Earth. It’s capable of using arsenic to build its DNA, RNA, proteins, and cell membranes. This changes everything.
NASA is saying that this is “life as we do not know it”. The reason is that all life on Earth is made of six components: Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.
[…]
The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding organisms in other planets that don’t have to be like planet Earth.
Once again, that’s (alien-ish) life imitating art:
Back to Mutter on approaching news with a nod to appreciating our objectivity:
For journalists to be able to report effectively on the news and its significance, we have to replace the intellectually indefensible pretense of objectivity with a more authentic standard that journalists actually can live up to.
The way to do that is to treat the public like adults by providing the clearest possible understanding of who is delivering news and commentary – and where they are coming from. Hence, the following proposal:
Let’s take advantage of the openness and inexhaustible space of the Internet to have every journalist publish a detailed statement of political, personal and financial interests at her home website and perhaps even in a well publicized national registry. Full disclosure would enable consumers to make their own informed judgments about the potential biases and believability of any journalist.
No one would read the individual disclosures, but they could be consulted when Spidey-senses started tingling. Blogs and their endless archives, searchable and permanent, would be a good place for this. But who reports on the disclosures? And would my biases inform my disclosure? Or would they stifle it? Perhaps I leave something out, is it a sin of omission, or just a harmless mistake? Or what if a particular detail of my life and my beat didn’t previously intersect, but now do.
Suddenly it sounds like a wiki.
In domestic news, I was instructed to put a lasagna in the oven this evening. Our friends Shane and Brian were here for dinner and they stayed late telling stories. The bigger picture is that I’ll get to have lasagna leftovers for the next three days. This is an excellent development.
As I tried to put the dining room table back in order Allie was jumping on every chair as I tried to move it. In a previous life, she might have been a snow skiing cat. She’s longing for the lifts.
Woke up not feeling well and it took several minutes to shake the full body of numbness. It took longer still to shake the aches and several hours to defeat the headache.
And then we went shopping for a Christmas tree. It is now installed, the floor littered in needles. Already we’ve vacuumed once. I’ll probably make another pass before turning in this evening. The lights adorning the tree are all a-twinkle in the library. The many pounds of seasonal decoration are being installed throughout the house.
The two miniature trees are on display. They are out because we have them and we can. One is traditional, a small plastic tree that The Yankee bought years ago when she was in an apartment. She was very sad because she likes real trees. Now that tree holds all of the ornaments that make up our time together. I make a few new ones every year. We’re about to outgrow that little tree.
The other miniature has been decorated as a kitschy joke. The tree was made by my grandmother a few years ago. She crafted it from half-a-dozen wire coat hangars, a big roll of garland and some hot glue. Easy to make, perfectly shaped and now covered in stuff that should never be on a football tree, it is the perfect tertiary tree.
One year we’ll probably have a tree in every room. Just not a real one, we have needles a-plenty already.
The house smells deliciously of wintergreen and potatoes. We had steak tonight. Also, it smells of winter here. A chill is in the air — 34.5-degrees of as of this writing. You love seeing decimals in your temperatures. Someone at the local National Weather Service office is in serious denial about what is happening. “It isn’t 35, it is 34-and-a-half. That’s almost 36!”
It dipped into the 30s last night, but we’d returned home from the Iron Bowl celebration when it was still 40 degrees which, as the NWS man would point out, is better than 39.
Here are the last of my videos from last night. I recorded a bit of Toomer’s Corner just for the ambiance of those who couldn’t be here. Enjoy.
I think those are a nice postscript to the description I wrote last night.
This last one is of the 12-0 Tigers returning home after defeating Alabama across the state. You can tell in some of their reactions that they were a bit surprised to see such a reception. This will probably be the start of a new tradition that, while chaotic last night, will be down to a smooth operation before next year is over.
