Our home is haunted. And we’ve terribly angered some spirit that also lives here. This is the only logical conclusion.
First it was just bad work. Then a failure to follow instructions. Then bad luck. And now, I’m convinced we’re on some holy ground that never should have seen a house built in this place.
The first item, previously discussed here was a bad replacement effort on our part when it came to light air conditioner work. Then I broke the shower head, which yielded a much larger, funnier and more frustrating repair job that I never wrote about here.
Suffice it to say that you don’t want a plumber to come to your house on a Sunday night. That can get expensive. Fortunately the home insurance covered it.
After that it was the refrigerator. And here we were beginning to get suspicious.
Now the problem is the dishwasher, the previously steady, unremarkable but reliable dishwasher. It just decided not to do its job last night.
So I spent the late evening hours taking it apart. And my investigation yielded one truth: I can’t fix it myself.
Sealed it up last night and spent a little time investigating the possibilities today. The motor turns. The drain is clear. The float switch is free. What do you think the problem might be? I explained it all and asked this question of two appliance places. Neither had any real idea. One was very helpful, printing off schematics that showed what might be the problem, but upon further inspection doesn’t seem to be the case. Another was an old man who’s just hanging on. He has an appliance shop, the kind of place that 85 percent of the people probably pass on their way to Sears to buy a new deep freezer. The shop hasn’t been the recipient of any work since the 1970s. The man himself was straight out of the late 1960s. All of his prices were contemporary, however. He tried, but he came up grasping for straws, too.
The person that fixes it will probably not be those people. My guess is that the problem is the timer, which I understand can fail, or suddenly a power supply issue, for which I can’t test because of the configuration.
Or we’re living on a burial ground.
Spent the afternoon reading conference papers and checking in on one of my grandmothers, who had a little surgery done today. She’s doing great this evening, but could still use a prayer and a positive thought, if you don’t mind.
In that process I’ve learned there is a segment of my family, old and young, that hasn’t found the need to set up their cell phone’s voicemail. I’d just assumed everyone did that, and created a custom wallpaper on the first day with their new phone.
That’s what you’d do, right?
So there’s the Monday history. I’m still working my way through the Pine Hill Cemetery. There’s just mountains of local history under the stones there and I still have about a third of the place to walk. I’ll give you three of the finds today and a few more next week.
The first thing you need to know about Bennett Battle Ross, here, is that he was actually a Bennett, junior. His father, Bennett, was a methodist minister. The dad attended nearby Lagrange College and became a professor of English literature at Alabama Polytechnic Institute (Auburn) in 1872 when Junior was six.
Junior, then, was educated at API, the University of Chicago and abroad. He became API’s assistant chemist, and then a professor of chemistry at LSU. He’d return to Auburn as professor of chemistry in 1893, served as the dean of agricultural sciences, the state chemist and university president for a brief time. He was in every chemistry society in the world, it seems, and, because he was popular, served as a director of the local bank and cotton mill.
That’s Ross, a dashing looking guy, from my 1925 Glomerata.
Auburn’s Ross Hall, built in the year of his death, is named in his honor. It was for years the chemistry building, but after a recent renovation now houses engineering and administrative offices. Check out some through-the-years pictures of Ross Hall.
The interesting ones there are from the building’s construction in 1930 compared to a 1957 photograph. If you’re familiar with the campus the difference between 1930 to 1957 is much greater than the one between that 1957 picture and the supporting 1979 photograph. That’s the case for a lot of the world, though.
This one is both prominent local history and slim, indirect personal history. Isaac Sadler McAdory’s father, Isaac Wellington McAdory, is the namesake of the high school I attended near Birmingham. After the Civil War — during which he served in the Jonesboro Guard, Company H of the 28th Alabama Infantry Regiment and saw action in Mississippi, Kentucky and, most prominently, in Tennessee at Chickamauga and Nashville and Georgia in various battles surrounding Atlanta — he founded his own school, Pleasant Hill Academy. It crops up as a fairly prominent regional 19th century school in post-bellum history.
His son, Dr. Isaac Sadler McAdory, was Auburn’s second dean of veterinary medicine, working at the university for more than 48 years.
That’s McAdory in the 1936 Glomerata, his first appearance there. The university’s large animal clinic is named after him.
Edmund Camp’s marker says he was the first textile engineering graduate in the western hemisphere (at Georgia Tech). It’s an odd sounding thing, but true. He managed mills in Georgia and would go on to found the textile engineering program at Texas Tech and then started the program at Auburn in 1929. These days it is called polymer and fiber engineering where they’re doing cool things like improving the strength of vehicle armor to help keep soldiers safer.
Camp was also an Auburn graduate, earning his master’s degree from A.P.I. in chemical engineering in 1935. That picture is from the 1931 Glomerata. Unfortunately there isn’t much more to tell. Even though he was a chemist and an engineer, I have the feeling his story might be a good one, but the Internet doesn’t know it.
I bet he could fix my dishwasher.
