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memories

Back in Polaroid time

My grandmother dug through the furniture and who knows where else she keeps it all, but she produced three albums and four boxes of photos tonight. I started her down this path by asking about a CD someone brought over several years ago that traced my grandfather’s family back to his grandfather through photographs.

It was essentially half an hour of people I didn’t know, mysterious black-and-white shots of people my grandmother knew as adults and then the later, questionable, hair and clothing styles of those later adults.

So we watched the disc and she named people and guessed at others. And then, somehow, we found ourselves in the back of the house. I was staring at pictures of my grandparents looking into a camera two decades younger than I am now. My wife was taking pictures of me from three decades ago. Suddenly we all felt so young, and so old. And it was all interesting and weird, except to see those that are gone, now, and to count them all up in your head.

I want to hear these stories and one day I want to ask a lot of questions about them, for posterity’s sake. Some of that information should continue on, somewhere, but I’m not sure if there’s much of an appetite for it. So it should be me that does it, then. And then my grandmother says “They’re all gone now, except for those two girls,” it breaks your heart a little to ask her to think about it.

On the other hand, the two times that I’ve started to dig into this a little bit, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more real smile than when my grandmother is talking about her grandmother. It is worth it for that alone.

Anyway, some pictures.

That guy could straight up sing:

Stringbean, my grandmother said, always wore his pants like this. So he was fashion forward.

David Akeman and his wife were killed by burglars in their home in 1973. (One of their killers died in prison in 1973. The other was paroled just last month.)

But he could play that banjo, she insisted. No kidding. I picked this one because Porter Wagoner was my grandfather’s favorite, and Roger Miller shows up, he was one of my favorites:

If you hear the term clawhammer in a musical sense, this is the meaning. It is, now, considered the “old style” of banjo playing. (Earl Scruggs, who replaced Akeman in the great Bill Monroe band, is the pioneer of the “new” three-finger style.)

I don’t remember Akeman on Hee Haw reruns, but he was there. I’m sure we all laughed at his jokes, my grandparents and me, when the scarecrow was on camera. And now that entire show suddenly seems like a portal into a different time, my grandparents watching stars they’d grown up and were growing old with. Bright colors and bad puns beamed to their antennae, guest hosts and bad skits, all of the stuff in between hearing the songs they knew.

I’m even less certain why people collect head shots and autographs of politicians, but it makes the politicians happy. Once upon a time, at least, one of these was in a lot of homes in Alabama.

I wonder where my grandparents picked all of those up.

Here she is now. She figures she was about 18 or 19 in this picture.

“Let’s talk about this wallpaper,” I said.

“Let’s not,” she said.

She’s such a sweetheart.

family / maps / memories — Comments Off
22
Dec 14

70th anniv – My great-grandfather’s war

This is the 70th anniversary of my great-grandfather’s service in Europe, and we’re following along what he did through this map I made some time back. Tonice was a combat medic in the 137th Infantry Regiment, which fought in the 35th Division. We don’t know which company, or even which battalion. This is only a regimental overview with some movements down to the company level.

So, then, for Dec. 22:

The 2nd Battalion arrived at Remering from Neunkirch. The 1st Battalion cleared into the town of Grundweiler. During the day an ordnance check was made and all ordnance items and several 50 calibers were tested for anti-aircraft defense.

The Regiment received more replacements, which helped raise the strength of the units. Eight officers and 220 enlisted men were received.

The 35th Infantry Division was ordered to move by combat team to Metz sometime during the day.

The 137th Infantry Combat Team, less the 219th FA Battalion, moved northwest toward Metz and its new assembly area, and, going through St. Avold, Boulet, and Metz, arrived at its destination, Moulins.

There isn’t an update in the unit history for December 23 — they were moving off the line and resting, primarily — so we’ll return to this on the 24th. You can follow along at your own pace on the map, however.

This information is derived from the unit history, found here and here and from this unit overview. These markers are rough estimates of locales and are meant only to be illustrative. Any errors are mine alone.

Auburn / football / memories / video / Vine / weekend — 1 Comment
20
Dec 14

Things I produced today

I posted my first videos to Vine today. Yes, I am behind.

I try to experiment with about every third MUST HAVE web craze. Skipping a few here and there tends to keep the pressure off. Some of those things will be gone before we know it anyway.

But Vine is proving it has staying power, and people are now talking about “How we can do more with it than just six second jokes.” That suggests an audience maturation, too. When it has more than one accepted use, I figure, might have think of some useful way to use it.

My first idea, was to use Vine as teasers for the video I shot yesterday. If you saw that, you already met the $120 Russian tortoise.

And you also saw the ~~rabbit~~ guinea pigs:

They’ll all catch up eventually, I’m sure.

We purchased neither. We did, however, get cat litter, in such amounts as to be valued at the equivalent of the per capita gross domestic product of Burundi. By the time you pick up pounds 85-126 your hands can sting in the cold winter air. But then that dog walked by and I thought “Establishing shot!”

And the puppy had no camera sense. Don’t look at the camera, dog.

Anyway, that was yesterday. Vines today. I have contributed, then, 12 seconds to the insatiable appetite of the Internet.

OK, fine, I contributed this too, on Twitter. As you know I collect Gloms, the Auburn yearbook. I was scanning a few more for the continuation of the covers project and was putting them away. I opened the back cover of the 2011 book to this picture.

A student took this photo, as did a lot of other nearby photographers, I’m sure. The versions you usually see make you wonder what he’s looking at as he turns. Maybe it was her. Here’s the play:

The line they put with that photo now has, I think, several extra meanings.

So I have put all of that on the web today. Also, family events and holiday events began today. Steak, chocolate cake, listening to people talk about cars and so on.

That turtle is rather captivating, right?

adventures / football / history / links / memories / photo / things to read / video / weekend — Comments Off
13
Dec 14

A standard rambling Saturday of fun and memories

Every so often we have to make Allie, The Black Cat, famous on the Internet. This morning she was posing so patiently in the sun. She doesn’t mind the actual camera, but today I had the phone and she does not care for the phone in her face. Who can explain cats? She didn’t mind so much today, though, I guess because of the warm sun, but who can explain cats?

We watched the Army-Navy game. We attended one a few years ago, it was a great, chilly day and it is a game that everyone should go to at least once. (We want to go back.) You get a fair amount out of the experience watching the game on TV, CBS has done a nice job with it over the years.

To see the track athletes run the game ball onto the field and to watch the flyovers in person is a different thing. You’ve probably never seen the “prisoner exchange” of returning cadets and middies to their own sides after a student exchange program at home. Television doesn’t often show you the young men and women sworn into the service at the game and it doesn’t allow you to talk to graduates of both academies. For all the care that CBS gives that game, you just can’t absorb it all from the screen.

To watch the cadets march on, or to watch the teams sing their schools’ alma maters — my favorite college tradition of all — that’s an in-person experience you need. Here’s my video from 2011, shot on my first iPhone. It looks fuzzy after a few downloads and uploads from service to service, but it offers a nice little stadium view:

Here are some of the photos I took from our 2011 trip.

Of course, the hype videos always play better at home. You can hear them better. These were my favorites today:

More were collected for you here.

I’ve always cheered for Navy — the Department of the Navy was important in my childhood world — but two years ago, watching that late Army turnover, I softened up. The Black Knights were about to score late and break what was then a 10-game losing streak to the Middies. But they fumbled inside the 20 and I decided, about 40 seconds into the video here, that no rivalry should ever have more than a three-game losing streak. Everyone should know what it feels like to beat the other guys once in their career.

But it was not to be then, or today, of course. Navy has won 13 in a row, but Army is getting better.

I do enjoy the Army-Navy game.

Things to read … because there are other sports to enjoy.

The headline ruins this great high school basketball story:

Your team has not suffered like the Climax-Fisher Knights.

No matter how Raider-y or 76ers-esque your program is, it has not endured their unique brand of pain. Even Prairie View, the Division I-AA football team that lost 80 straight games during the 1990s, has technically suffered a shorter string of defeats than the Climax-Fisher girls basketball team, which finally broke its four-year losing streak Tuesday despite incredibly unfavorable odds.

That’s a happy finish.

I remember covering the accident that started this story years ago. It was probably one of the last stories I did before I moved to KARN in Little Rock. It was a terrible accident, to be sure. Dangling power lines killed a 7-year-old and changed a 4-year-old boy’s life forever. But this story is thrilling to read today. Good for him. Ward Webb lost his feet at age 4, but the Mountain Brook linebacker never says ‘I can’t’:

Mountain Brook football coach Chris Yeager remembers the early days of watching Ward Webb train with other players.

As teens sprinted up and down stadium steps for conditioning, Yeager remembers, they told Webb to go to the side and use the handrails.

Webb, who lost his feet at age 4 and uses prosthetic legs, refused.

“He wants to be like everybody else,” the coach said. “He’s falling down those steps and that’s just typical Ward. He absolutely believes he can do anything anybody else can do. I’ve been coaching him for 3½ years, and I have never heard Ward Webb say, ‘I can’t.’”

This is a neat concept. Not sure if I’d want to work there, but I’d read the product: A newspaper and a hotel, all in one. If you’re interested, here it is now.

St. Patrick’s is beautiful. Immediately below are a few of the pictures I’ve taken on visits to Manhattan over the years. The cleaning, though, has done wonders. St. Patrick’s unveils its immaculate facelift

This is an interesting visual mashup, and it leads to some spooky results. Battle of Nashville Then & Now is worth seeing, and the bigger your screen, the better.

In elementary school, during the third grade, let’s say, we buried a time capsule. It seemed a very big deal at the time, of course. I think it was a garbage bag-lined ice chest or something like that. And possibly they dug it up sometime later that night after we all left school. But we took it seriously, because it was very serious. It would be important when they dug it up in 50 years. All of this has come to mind a few times since, and now I wonder if anyone knows about it, if anyone remembers where it is or even cares. Were there 10 or 15 such time capsules buried on that playground? And did they dig it all up when that school built the big gym next to it? All of that is boring. This is amazing: Time capsule found at Massachusetts Statehouse:

Crews removed a time capsule dating back to 1795 on Thursday from the granite cornerstone of the Massachusetts Statehouse, where historians believe it was originally placed by Revolutionary War luminaries Samuel Adams and Paul Revere among others.

The time capsule is believed to contain items such as old coins and newspapers, but the condition of the contents is not known and Secretary of State William Galvin speculated that some could have deteriorated over time.

Officials won’t open the capsule until after it is X-rayed at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts to determine its contents. The X-ray is scheduled for Sunday.

Time capsules are fascinating things. Who came up with this idea? And why can’t I open them for people?

We went for ice cream last night. One of those places where you drive over, park, walk up to the window and order under the humming neon lights. There’s a list of the ice cream flavors of the day, and the flavors are always changing. This is a challenge for me. Occasionally I find something I really like, but it is never there twice.

Tonight we pulled up about a half hour before the place closed and the guy at the window, Matt, knew it. He was older than the usual high schooler working there and he knew that too. The Yankee ordered her usual. I hemmed and hawed and agonized.

What is the Oreo cheesecake like? I asked.

“It tastes like cheesecake … with Oreos,” Matt said.

He gave me a sample. He was correct. I ordered it.

It was good. I’ll probably never see it offered there again.

history / memories / Monday / music / Samford / video — Comments Off
1
Dec 14

The Rushton Carillon

Today’s installment from college newspapers past has to do with one of the iconic images — and sounds — on the Samford campus.

The carillon was donated by Col. William Rushton, Jr. in honor of his family, or his father, Franklin Rushton, depending on which version you read. The Rushtons came south with William Rushton, Sr., in 1881, just after the end of Reconstruction, when Birmingham was only 10 years old. Senior became an ice magnate, a city alderman and put the first cement paving on the ground. His son, Franklin, ran the family ice company, was a chamber president and was a big part of getting World War II vets jobs in the community. Birmingham Ice & Cold Storage Co., meanwhile, was in operation for 92 years before closing up in 1973. Anyway, Franklin’s son Col. William Rushton, Jr., fought in World War I as a young man and rose through the ranks as a reservist after the war. He, like many of the prominent Samford men, was an insurance executive. If it was a regionally prominent organization in the 20th century, Rushton had a role in it. He died in 1987, but he had several years of listening to the beautiful carillon he helped place on campus.

The author of the above article is today a pediatric disease physician in Kentucky.

The campus official he references, Evan Zeiger, Sr., was an Auburn man. He came to Samford in 1956 and retired in 1984. He died just a few years ago. His son, a local neurosurgeon, died in a plane crash in the Gulf the next year.

I actually have a copy of the original notes for this next piece. The editor submitted a list of questions to the university president and he answered from on high, via an assistant’s typewriter. (This being a few years after he shut the journalism program down, a long and interesting tale for another day, which led to pieces like this proto-listicle.)

Bells about to be installed …

This was a standalone photo and, just to the right, you get a sense of the varying sizes of the bells, which allows for the different notes. The first 49 were cast in Holland and, together, weighed five tons. They were originally above one of the chapels. When Rushton came along they added 11 more bells and it all moved to the library, which is what is going on here:

Breaking news! Here are the library steeples, old and new! (Being located in the center of campus, no one ever had an opportunity to see them … )

Finally, the bells were put in above the library, the weather cooperated and the steeple work was completed, the clavier arrived and was put into place and Mr. Knight was ready to play.

Steve Knight, who has been doing this here for almost 40 years, has long been one of the most interesting people on campus:

I recorded a snippet in April of 2012. Here’s what it sounds like when you stand just under the bells:

Curiously, if you are in the library, you hardly here them at all. That’s by design.

I’ve never been up the ship’s ladder, as Knight called it, so I’ve never seen him perform. Seeing Knight actually play is a marvel, check out this feature piece one of our students produced:

The carillon is a wonderful feature on this beautiful campus. We’ll call it a day right there. Plenty to go around for tomorrow, be sure to stop back by when you can.