Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Auburn / history / memories / Thursday — Comments Off
05
Jan 23

Filled with 1929 history

Feeling better today, thanks. Dinner, sleep, a light snack for breakfast and some lunch made it everything better. Still a bit fatigued, for some reason I can’t explain, but that’s made the decision for me. Taking it easy today, going to bed early.

The highlight, then, was … laundry. Wow. Can someone punch that up in re-write? (No. — ed.)

We haven’t looked at an old newspaper in a while. (OK, it has been almost a month.) Let’s go back to campus and read the alma mater’s classic rag.

This is from 94 years ago, January, 6, 1929. (I wrote for this same publication many decades later.) These guys have no ideas what’s coming for them the next fall, and I don’t mean the 1929 football season, which would prove dreadful in its own right.

The lead story is to the right, and it goes with this art, though you wouldn’t know it to look at the page, “Thousands greet opening new radio station WAPI.”

I worked at WAPI after college. I was proud to be on that air. It is the direct descendant of WMAV, which is the fourth oldest radio station in Alabama. (Alabama Power launched it, when they got out of the entertainment business, well, that time, they donated the gear to Auburn, which was Alabama Polytechnic Institute, hence WAPI. When it went back up to Birmingham in 1929 the station was co-owned by Auburn, the University of Alabama and the Alabama College for Women — now the University of Alabama. New owners bought it in the 1930s, and they launched the state’s first television station, the modern NBC affiliate in Birmingham, in 1949. Soon after, the company that owns the newspaper, another company I worked for, purchased the broadcast properties.) Today, WAPI is still the most powerful transmitter in that state, and it started right here.

Auburn’s new, powerful radio station WAPI went on the air New Year’s Eve from the studios in Birmingham with its formal opening program, which was heard by thousands of listeners throughout Alabama and the nation. Telegrams and telephone calls from 21 states began to pour in immediately after the new station took the air at eight o’clock, with a magnificent program lasting until four o’clock the next morning. The number of calls and messages amounted to over 900 before the station’s second program was presented.

Promptly at 7:55 KVOO at Tulsa, the station with which WAPI divides time on the same wave length, made an announcement that the air was being turned over to WAPI, and promptly at 8 p. m. the Boy’s Industrial Band of Birmingham opened the program with bugle calls and “The Star Spangled Banner.”

Addresses were made by Gov. Bibb Graves, J. M. Jones, president of the Birmingham city commission; President Bradford Knapp; Dr. L. N. Duncan, director of the extension service, Victor H. Hanson, publisher of the Birmingham News and Age-Herald; Sam F. Claxbaugh, president of the Protective Life Insurance Company; P. O. Davis, director Department of Public Information, and H. C. Smith of the Department of Agriculture at Montgomery.

Three guest radio announcers assisted Walter N. Campbell, manager, and W .A. “Bill” Young, assistant manager, in staging the huge opening program. The visiting announcers were George Dewey Hay, “the solemn old judge” from WSM, of Nashville; G. C. Arnoux, “the man with the musical voice,” of KTHS, Hot Springs, Ark.; Luke Lee Roberts, of WLAC, Nashville, and J. C. “Dud” Connelly of WBRC, Birmingham.

Through the new station, which is among the most powerful of any in the South, Auburn’s influence and instruction may be carried to thousands upon thousands of homes in every section of the State and the South. Reception reports from programs already broadcast indicate that WAPI may be heard clearly in every portion of Alabama. No college in the land has more desirable facilities.

With the abundance of talent available in the city of Birmingham, programs of the highest type will be given over WAPI.

The installation job complete is said to be one of the best and most modern. The power is 5,000 watts. With recent improvements in broadcasting apparatus the actual signal strength is said to be at least ten times as powerful as the old 1,000-watt station at Auburn which was discontinued and sold.

The new station occupies the entire 14th floor of the Protective Life Insurance Company building. Three studios, a control room, reception room, and office space are included. The outlay is ideal and up-to-date for radio purposes.

The transmitter—or broadcasting apparatus—is located seven miles from the downtown district of Birmingham. It is on a mountain overlooking the village of Sandusky, which is on the Bankhead highway between Birmingham and Jasper. A building 32 by 48 feet houses the transmitter and other apparatus. Only the input equipment is located at the studios in the Protective Life Building. At an early date regular broadcasting from Montgomery and Auburn will begin. It will be done by remote control. Modern studios and modern input equipment, are being installed at the state capital in Montgomery. It is in the building occupied by the department of agricultural industries. At Auburn the old studio in Comer Hall will be used.

Comer Hall, home of the College of Agriculture, was one of my main buildings in undergrad. I was on WAPI’s air for about a year, and later worked for the newspaper company that (from 1953 to 1981) owned the station. One of the hosts on the debut programming was from WBRC, which is where The Yankee worked when we met. I’ve been on the air in all of the other markets mentioned here, I think. Broadcasting is full of small world callbacks.

If you look at that photo again, the round microphones were an innovation just a year or so before. The shape and the innards did a lot to remove vocal disruption and clean up the transmitted signal. It looks old to us, of course, but this stuff was top-end.

Similarly, this little story puts the lie to the black-and-white images we sometimes get of history. Or maybe that’s just me.

Blakey was from Birmingham, he was senior, studying architecture. Marty was a junior, and he was also studying architecture. Renneker would become a named partner in an architectural firm, and there’s a scholarship in his name today.

Bill Streit lettered in three sports in college. Made sense that he’d work in athletics professionally, and he made a great career of it.

Streit also officiated track and field meets, managed the U.S. Olympic track team in Paris (1924), Amsterdam (1928), Los Angeles (1932) and Berlin (1936). In ’24 he was also the chairman U.S. Olympic wrestling committee — they won four golds. He also did a bunch of other big time things, maybe the Rose Bowl was just for fun. He became a member of the Executive Committee of the U.S. Olympics from 1948 to 1952. He’s a 1971 inductee into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame.

Here’s that Rose Bowl, which is famous for a guy returning a fumble the wrong direction. Streit is in here, somewhere.

And in the 1950s, Streit was the subject of a nice little speech in Congress.

Back on campus, there had been another flu endemic. The local government briefly shut things down as a precautionary measure.

After that small stretch, when the numbers seemed to be easing up, life got back to 1929 normal.

There was this column inside the paper, filled with some prosaic advice. But the remarkable thing is the tone. It is written so matter-of-factly: wash your hands; well, obviously masks work; oh, and stay away from others if you are sick. They knew this back then. Why is some of it contentious for their great-great-great grandchildren?

I know the answer, and you do, too.

Again, 1929. People seeing the first talkie had a better grasp of common understandings of medicine than some of our peers do today. Weird.

Back then, the college kids had to drive across the state line, to Columbus, to see this picture. You can watch it, right now, on your computer or phone.

So glad they resolved all of this in 1929, so it wouldn’t crop up every few years as a silly political debate. This saved us so much time and energy, when you think about it.

No idea what becomes of Benjamin Provost. I halfway suspect it is a nom de plume.

This cartoon is supposed to be funny. Maybe the joke gets lost down through the generations.

I get to the “dog with the plush ears” line and get distracted, thinking of Cassius Marcellus Coolidge’s dogs playing poker (1894) painting.

One more radio tidbit. If you look at that WAPI copy again, you see where the station was sharing 1140 on the AM dial with KVOO. (That persisted until 1942.) Both sets of call letters are on the FM dial today. WAPI is talk. KVOO, the Tulsa, Oklahoma station, is today a country heritage format. And their morning show is co-hosted by Tige Daniel. I did a morning show with him in college.

cycling / music / Re-Listening / site / Wednesday — Comments Off
04
Jan 23

That’s embarrassing

It is remarkable to me how light things get when it is time to go back to work. It seems having a normal schedule prevents me from finding and doing fun things to tell you about here. The nerve of the real world, no?

So this is my day, today, be it ever so humble.

I did 16 miles in about 45 minutes and then quit. Everything was wrong. It was just immediately fast and hard and not at all what I was hoping for, which was a ride that would have lasted about twice as long. Instead, I had a bit of mild-to-medium nausea, there was no more energy, and I was threatening to overheat.

I bonked. Bonked like a rookie who knows nothing about nutrition, and did it in under an hour. Very weird. But, I guess, lunch had been some time back and maybe there hadn’t been enough carbs. There certainly wasn’t enough glycogen.

I felt a bit better after dinner, at least. But by then I was just … tired. So the rest of this isn’t terribly substantial, sorry.

But, hey, I set five PRs on Strava segments. And I finished 8th out of 460 on one of the sprints. I did the math and I managed to hold 30 mph through that segment with no virtual draft, or even a real awareness that I was about to enter a sprint. (Also, I am in no way a sprinter. Or anything else, really.)

Here’s a quick update to the Re-Listening project. I know, I just put two pieces in this same space yesterday. But those were to get caught up from before the holidays. Since I drove to two places in town yesterday to run errands I spent more time in the car. It’s an odd thing about temporal mechanics around here, but it takes 27 minutes to drive nine miles. Between that and waiting in line at the car wash, I managed to listen all the way through another CD.

I actually skipped one CD yesterday, because life is too short to listen to awful music. A record promoter gave me this disc, and I couldn’t get out of it. I should have tried harder, I know. I knew it then, too, when he compared the lead singer to “an off-key Kurt Cobain.” This was, mind you, a silly one-off conversation 26 years ago and I remember that comment. How out of place. How weird. How wrong. But at least the guy got to drop a name, I guess.

Anyway, the guy singing on that CD wasn’t Kurt Cobain, but closer to Chris Cornell. He didn’t have all of the tricks, and he sounds simultaneously bored and impressed with himself. The guitarist is noodling around, seemingly aware of the limitations by his chord structure or what he had to play around, gamely looking for something new and different. But there’s not much variation, and life is too short for awful music.

I wanted, here, to do the thing where I look all of those guys up and say they all went on to be successful restauranteur, fire fighters or boat charter captains. All four guys have incredibly common names, though. So one of them could be a judge. Another might be an auctioneer. One is probably just really good at D&D. The guy that did the cover photos has had a good run as a photojournalist. Seems to be in Florida now.

Anyway, after that came my 1996 cassettee-to-CD upgrade for the Hootie and the Blowfish debut. Probably you’ve heard of it. It finished seventh on Billboard’s 1990s pop list. Only Alanis Morissette, Whitney Houston, Shania Twain, Garth Brooks, the Titanic soundtrack and Celine Dion, respectively, fared better. They won a Grammy and were certified platinum 21 times in the United States. So, yeah, I needed to get an updated copy, I guess. Because you never heard this stuff on the radio.

(Aside: Lilly Haydn was, is, and likely always will be, incredible.)

Anyway, I really dug the band (last August their second album, Fairweather Johnson appeared on the Re-Listening project)
and I still do. Something about the Carolina yelling appeals to me.

Oh, there was a 25th anniversary edition released in 2019? Guess I should pick up a copy of that.

But, first, I’m going to sleep off the bleh feeling.

books / errands / music / Re-Listening / site / Tuesday — Comments Off
03
Jan 23

Don’t move anything: all the regular site elements are caught up

Today? Oh, back to the regular. I actually went to work. Did a few work things, saw some people. Thought I should start a list: People I’ve Asked About The Holidays. Over the next seven or eight days I will, no doubt, ask someone that same question twice. Three times if they are really unlucky.

I’d also like to develop an app for the phone that listens to all of my jokes and notes the phones around at the time. Then, the next time I start wind up for that same joke, it buzzes most annoyingly if it notes the same people around. We’ll name it Asa. Avoiding Social Awkwardness.

I even whipped up the logo.

It symbolizes the circular nature of one’s jokes, you see.

Because we tell our best material over and over.

Now, to just program the thing, and get around all of the many and considerable privacy issues with anonymity decryption protocols.

See, I’ve thought of everything. Except that I know not how to build it.

After work I went to the auto parts store. It is a building where they have parts. They are, generally, parts for your car. The interior of the store is helpfully organized in zones. And I went to the zone of the auto parts store that holds the light bulbs. Turns out the oil change guy last month was partly right. He said my blinker was out. My blinker is fine. My marker light, a term I learned only this afternoon, was the one that was out. The market light is the one behind the yellow lens. I thought that was the fog light, but, no, that’s different.

There are two light bulbs that seem similar to the busted marker light bulb I pulled out in the parking lot. And a guy that works in the point of sale zone of the store helped me find the right one. Online indices are wonderful things.

While he was doing that, though, someone walked out with a battery. Just carried it right out of the store. He’d been talking about it with them. made eye contact at the door, got into his truck and drove off. We all watched him leave the parking lot. The three guys working just shrugged.

I purchased my two marker light bulbs, walked outside, installed one in the socket, successfully tested the replacement and drove to the car wash.

My car needed it, but you don’t need 400 words on three days of dry weather, the long line at “Wash World” and those wonderful sounds the drive through wash makes as the machinery works its way around. Well, anyway, my car is cleaner, but my windshield was, for some reason, blurry after that.

You just can’t get good robotic help these days.

Let’s get back to the Re-Listening project — the one where I’m playing all of my old CDs, in the order I acquired them, and write about them here. These aren’t reviews, as such. Just memories and a fun excuse to put up too many videos. It’s a whimsy, as most music should be.

These, by the way, were things that got played just before the holiday break. I am, as ever, in arrears.

And first up is a maxi-single. What’s a maxi-single? So glad you asked. A maxi-single is a release with more than the usual two tracks of an A-side song and a B-side song. This is a Rusted Root maxi-single, and it has five tracks. I am sure this was a college station radio giveaway. Also, it is still good.

The title track is up first, a Santana cover that does the original a bit of justic.

And before you wonder, Rusted Root produced seven studio albums and a live record between 1992 and 2012. Four of them landed on the Billboard 200, and two of those in the top half of the chart. One is certified gold, the other is platinum. They’re not hardly a flash in the pan.

Rusted Root is one of those bands that have a lot of musicians come through the band over the years. And, I must confess, I am not always clear on who is where. But let me just say this. There are some talented front porch pickers playing on this thing, and that’s about as high a compliment I will offer a musician not paid to play orchestral music in formal wear.

Three of the songs on the maxi-single are live, including the one that was the point, one of the ones you definitely remember, and the one that still shows up in commercials and TV shows from time-to-time.

The band itself seems to be done, or on hiatus, but many of the former members are stilly playing music. (A lot of them have been in Hot Tuna, turns out.) The lead singer is still making music, and others, including the most prominent female vocalist and the original drummer, are dividing their time between their own music and things like teaching and entrepreneurial projects.

I was hoping one of them might be a software developer, someone that could help me with the Asa project.

The next CD is from Big Mountain, another freebie I picked up because, if you were a kid of a certain era you were issued at least one post-Marley reggae album as a matter of procedure.

And, honestly, unless you line things up just right, a little reggae goes a long way for me. I appreciate some of the historical elements of the form, and my lay ear respects the musicianship, and they’re still at it, but it isn’t mine.

Which is maybe why I have no real fixed memories of this CD in particular.

This is one of the later tracks on the record, and it’s a TV studio performance. This 1995 song is still topical, of course.

The previous year they’d released their cover of “Baby I Love Your Way,” which peaked at number six on the Billboard Hot 100. That was their biggest pop moment. This record, “Resistance” didn’t follow up with commercial success, but they did release three singles from this one, and recorded seven albums since then. They finished last year playing in India. They’ll be touring locally in California early this spring, their 34th year of making music.

I finished Rick Atkinson’s The British Are Coming tonight. I was wrong, where he leaves us. The book ends after the Battle of Princeton, and the maneuvering immediately after. These were the circumstances that set up the Forage War in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. I wonder if that’ll appear in the next book of the trilogy. As I said yesterday, this is Tolstoy meets Burns, the two-time Pulitzer winner embracing completely the role as a popular historian.

And he’s got seven more years of the story to tell. The epilogue covered John the Painter, so, I assume, it’s going to get grim in a hurry, when the new installment is published.

The next line of his acknowledgements, which runs several pages after 564 pages of maps and another hundred-and-change of notes, thanks Queen Elizabeth II, but there’s nothing here telling me when the next book is coming out.

Maybe in 2024, just in time for my fake phone app, then.

books / cycling / history / Monday / photo — Comments Off
02
Jan 23

The non-holiday, holiday Monday

OK, OK. Let’s get this place back to normal. We have to settle down, I know. There was all of that travel, and then the extra weirdness of New Year’s, compounded by the weirdness of that being on a Sunday, meaning the hangover for the amateurs were observed today — by both the amateurs and their employers. And then I published something here on Saturday, very strange indeed. And I had today off. (And tomorrow!) But we stayed in, with good reason.

For the life of me, I don’t know why anyone over the age of 24 goes out for New Year’s Eve, no matter the night of the week. And it makes zero sense during a pandemic. (Yes, that’s still on.) Unless you figure you’ve done all the ritual and obligatory family events you need to do for the next several months, so you went out to get contaminated, and contaminate others, willy nilly.

Which is thoughtful of you, really.

Funnily enough, the etymology of willy nilly goes back to about 1600. To the Internet! (Where you already are!) Willy-nilly:

c. 1600, contraction of will I, nill I, or will he, nill he, or will ye, nill ye, literally “with or without the will of the person concerned.”

And just one or two generations later, there was the Great Plague of London.

City records indicate that some 68,596 people died during the epidemic, though the actual number of deaths is suspected to have exceeded 100,000 out of a total population estimated at 460,000.

Precisely why we stayed in. And, also, because we are over 24.

The cats had a party, though. Check out their glasses. You’d be profoundly disappointed in me if you knew how long we’ve waited for that moment to appear, just for these photos, and for nothing else.

And that’s as good a transition as any to move us smoothly into the most popular feature on the website. (I look at the analytics (and thanks for your visit) so I know these things.) Phoebe is having a ball.

Poseidon has been very cuddly and lovey today.

It’s when he’s charming that he’s most dangerous, because it is all a ploy. But, my, how he can charm the unsuspecting.

As ever, it is creepy when they do the same thing at the same time.

Just darned unsettling.

The thing you’ve been skimming or just scroll past, the last six weeks or so: On New Year’s Eve I set a personal best for mileage on the year. As ever, I did it at the last minute.

I had a difficult time trying to decide how much to do that night. If I’d stopped at that point, four miles into that ride, I would have set a best by only a mile. It was obvious I didn’t have another metric century in me, but it seemed like there should be some meaning or importance to this number no one else will ever know. Shouldn’t there be? What should it be? I failed utterly in that regard, but settled in to simply enjoy a midnight ride, which is the real meaning and importance.

I fell in with a fast group and stayed with them for six miles or so. I sprinted out of that group at the finish line for no reason. I beat them all to a vague finish line no one agreed to in a race they didn’t know they were having with me. Victory, he said grimly, was mine.

And after 18 miles that evening, that was that.

But the best part of the night, The Yankee decided to ride a few miles with me. We rang in the new year pedaling away in the bike room, holding hands and being cute and all. Here are our Zwift avatars, together.

It was her second bike ride of the day. She went to the pool today, and is back to doing her many other workouts, as well. So, if you’re wondering, she’s recovering nicely from her September crash and subsequent surgery.

Which means I have to find some way to get in more miles this year than she does. This will take a concerted effort on my part. (Not to worry, I already have a spreadsheet and two new goals to help me with this.)

I have about 75 pages to go in Rick Atkinson’s The British Are Coming. It’s one part Tolstoy, one part Burns, and all of it a story in a style befitting the journalist taking a turn as a historian. Last night I got to that point where I began to hate that the book is ending.

It’s a feeling all the more pointed because this is the first book in a trilogy, and because it is good, and so is everything else of Atkinson’s that I have read. Problem is, he hasn’t published the other two installments yet. These things, no doubt, take time. This one, for instance, has 564 pages of text, 135 pages of endnotes, a 42-page bibliography and 24 full-page maps.

But, come on, Atkinson, this was published in April of 2020. Make with the goods!

Isn’t that last passage something? (Read this book.)

I think he’ll finish this book just before Washington crosses the Delaware on his Christmas attack. It had been a grim year, 1776, and that December, the privation of the winter quarters and the desperation late in that December would be a good place to put in a cliffhanger and set up the next book in the trilogy.

Nary a word has been published online about when the next book will be out. How am I supposed to find out what happens next?

journalism / links / things to read / video / weekend — Comments Off
31
Dec 22

52 things I learned in 2022

We’re all moving on, done with 2022 and hopeful for 2023. But we’ll take some things with us. Much of it good, and much of the rest are things we’ve learned along the way. (Inspired by https://medium.com/magnetic/52-things-i-learned-in-2021-8481c4e0d409″>Tom Whitwell.)

In no particular order …

1. Toyota is now America’s top-selling automaker

2. We can put pig hearts in humans

3. A billion years of the planet’s history is missing, maybe

4. The digital cloud is impacting the planet

5. 20 things to learn about where you live

6. Life advice from NYC chess hustlers

7. Calculate the pizza exchange rate

8. Lack of advancement, development is why people quit

9. Staffing shortages may take years to resolve

10. We miscalculated the cost of the federal student loan program

11. Many states that restrict or ban abortion don’t teach kids about sex and pregnancy