Tuesday, August 22, 2023

Restarting the BLOG - August 2023

 

This post marks a re-start of the BLOG; the intent being to enhance the content already existing in this space.  We are about 17-years older than we were when the BLOG was first laid down mostly as a learning tool for me to explore the then new technologies just beginning to come online.

The scrapbook pictured above is the source of the artifacts, photos, certificates, and ideas for much of the BLOG's content.  Contributions by other Highlanders makes up significant portions of content also.  To this point in time, Aug 2023, over 396,000 visits to the BLOG have been registered.  Depending on what I post elsewhere online linking to an article herein, the monthly visits to the BLOG range from 1000 to 3000 each month.  

A lot has changed over the past 17-years and a lot of '63 Highlanders have both discovered the BLOG and departed the Earth for the next life.  Be that as it may, many of us remain to continue the mighty EHHS Highlanders' march into the future.  So, here goes . . . there's a lot yet to be discovered.  


Cheers 

Monday, January 23, 2023

SCAN TO IMAGE FOR VINTAGE HIGHLANDERS - GUS'S HOW TO SERIES (#1)

This is for Taddie and any other Vintage Highlander having an interest in this topic.

If you've followed Gus for any amount of time over the past 17-years of dinking around with THE BLOG, you may have gotten the idea that I'm content with being somewhat of a grouch and have little patience with incoming snark.  Outgoing snark is not an impossible event nor is it particularly intended to be mean or gently kind in any particular way.  Blunt is O.K. with me . . . either incoming or outgoing so, stretch yourself a bit and be prepared for this bit of tech crap.  No, I'm not a giddy fan of tech for tech's sake.  Where it's useful, I'm O.K. with embracing it; where it's not, it's worse than useless - it tends to waste time and raise stress.  And in so doing, it strikes me as a silly proposition.  Who am I thinking of as I'm writing these words?  



Try these generics ---


 


However, this particular skill is useful even if tedious.  Shame this skill took so many screen shots (14) to construct a simplified explanation. 

STEPS 1 & 2 - open Windows dialog box - click Windows icon at lower left of screen.  Open "Devices & Printers"

STEPS 3 & 4 - click to open your printer icon.  Choose to "scan your document or photo". 

STEPS 5 & 6 - open scanner set-up box . . click "scan a document or picture".  In the box, be sure to select ".jpg" format for your result AND "200 dpi" for your result resolution.  (Any higher resolution isn't necessary and does result in a too huge result; too huge to conveniently work with.  200 dpi is sharp enough for most future uses).  

STEPS 7 & 8 - (you did connect your computer and printer before his, didn't you?) Here's a little time to relax and let the magic happen as the printer/scanner leaps to life.  Be patient - it's probably as creaky as we are these days.  Green "loading indicator" shows progress of the scan.  When the box appears, it's a good idea to name the doc/pic something brief that you can remember - I never have any clue where the computer is going to decide to store it !  So, you may have to search for it.  

STEPS 9 & 10 - now you have an image stored on your computer.  You also have two ways to find it but, clicking "open file location" is easiest and pretty quick.

STEPS 11 & 12 - my scanned image is only a fraction of the whole space scanned because my original is a small card that was sent to me many years ago.  My post-Vietnam IV-A draft classification which in this case probably ranked sometime after the feeble and partly-handicapped - I had completed the active duty requirement of the times.  

STEPS 13 & 14 - shows how the imported files look in my example and the final image result after cropping.  Yours will probably look differently.  


DISCLAIMER - all these examples are results from my particular combination of printer/scanner/windows software, and computer.  Yours will likely be something different and will display images somewhat different than these; so, please consider them a guide only and work through any dissimilarities.  Generally, most of the hardware/software iterations tend to be similar even if not identical.  


Adios & Good Luck




 

Saturday, June 11, 2022

Mickey, Yogi, and the Duke - a story about a set of 1957 Topps Baseball Cards

     As I have entered my early retirement years, I have enjoyed writing about a number of subjects that reside in my memory. In a sense, it’s a modest effort to leave some record of small things that occupied a boy’s life a half-century ago. 

    Living memories of the 1950s reside in an increasingly smaller number of people these days. Most will not write anything down about their memories, yet some of those memories should be of interest to new generations as time passes. 

    For a couple of summers, collecting baseball cards was a particularly sweet summertime activity. Where the notion came from, I cannot say, but as with most things that become a serious focus for 10-12 year old boys, the idea seemed to sprout spontaneously throughout my group of friends. Suddenly, on some specific day during the summer, baseball cards were available in the local stores. Once again, the news of their availability spread as if through osmosis within my group of friends.

    This particular set of cards was collected while I was living at 3219 Mimosa Park Drive in Richland Hills, Texas. In those days, Richland Hills was the northeast frontier of Ft. Worth, beyond which lay open country until you reached Dallas. Oh, there was a little country settlement somewhere down Highway 183 called Hurst and Bedford, but aside from a Bell Helicopter plant and the Greater Southwest Airport, there wasn’t anything else “out there.”

 

   
The house on Mimosa Park Drive was Dad’s first and it was new. He was 30 when we moved there in 1953—I was 8. Dad was just 5-years out of college and had recently been released from the United States Air Force after having been recalled to the service during the Korean War. Recalled? Yes, before the Korean War, he had flown as an Eighth Army Air Force B-17 navigator from his base in England against the Nazi Third Reich—50 times, or about twice the requirement for WWII aircrews and he had a chest full of medals to show for it. 

    Most of the other fathers on Mimosa Park Drive and throughout all those '50s Richland Hills neighborhoods were also WWII veterans. As kids, we spent a small amount of time comparing our fathers’ war service, often as a means of establishing who’s Dad was the greater war hero, but we quickly dropped that exercise since not many of us really knew much about our fathers’ service or of the war either. With few exceptions, we had all been born in the years just after WWII and all we knew of it was from the Victory at Sea series on TV and a few 1940s black and white movies.   


    Mimosa Park Drive was loaded with kids, perhaps 20-30 along that one short block. Of course, we were not all friends—some were cool, others were not, and then some were girls, thereby being something different altogether! Those WWII veterans obviously felt they had lost a lot of time during their young years and were working hard to make up for it. The new Richland Elementary School was just down the hill about one block and that would be the gathering point for all the kids in that area for a few years after 1953. It had a nice large playground that we used for football and yes, baseball games. Our sports activities were mostly pickup games where we played whatever game was being played by the professionals at the time, with whoever we could round up to play. In the summer, that meant baseball. The heat didn’t bother us at all—it was all we knew. 

    We started our summers at the end of the school year by bringing our old comic books to school on the last day and trading with one another. The school set that activity up and it was a
much anticipated day even beyond it being the last school day, usually just before Memorial Day in late May. Trading comic books was great entertainment because that way we went home with a tall stack of “new” comics to keep us busy for the first days of summer. Then Little League baseball kicked off sometime later, and we had the tryouts, then practices, and the games. 

Mixed in with all that activity came the news that baseball cards were in the stores. For me the store was a drug store about a mile from our house on Mimosa. My mother worked, so I was on my own until my parents got home each afternoon. Think of that in this day and time, an 8-12 year old kid on his own all the summer—at least until mom and dad got home after work. To get to the drug store I had to ride my bike, a Schwinn Phantom, up Mimosa to Highway 183, maneuver along the soft gravel shoulder on the south side of the highway past the big church with the red roof , then cross the highway to the drug store in the shopping strip on the northwest corner. Those buildings are all still there in 2007. 

    Topps baseball gum packs were 5¢ each, probably contained about 8-10 cards and a very sweet, big flat piece of pink bubble gum. The gum had been sprinkled with powdered sugar before the pack was sealed, which altogether gave the cards a great smell. 

    Mickey Mantle was NEVER inside those packs! And the other stars of the day were not often found either—Ted Williams, Hank Aaron, Willie Mays—none of them were common. We didn’t understand anything about Topps releasing their cards by series, so whatever we found in the store packs came from whatever series was being sold at the time. If we were slow in hearing about the cards being available, then we could have easily missed an early series of cards. That left us having to get together to trade for the cards we needed. And if we couldn’t agree on a trade, cash would do—I think I had to pay $1 for the Mickey Mantle card in this set. 

    Now, if you think about it, a set of 407 cards if assembled with no duplicates, would require the purchase of 40-50 packs of cards. At 5¢ each pack, that would imply a minimum investment of $2 to $2.50 to get a complete set of cards. Of course it didn’t work that way and a good many more packs than 40-50 were required to fill out a set, together with finding those other kids who had spares of the ones you needed. As children of the WWII generation, we were coached to be competitive, both by parents and by our teachers. One facet of that competitive spirit was to stick to it until you had a complete set of cards. 

    In my home at least, I was also coached to be a collector—my Dad collected stamps for nearly 60-years. The numbers on the Topps cards provided a goal—collect one of each number! If we were thinking we should have focused on Mickey and saved the energy spent on the rest. But that wasn’t how we saw it then. Now and then I would see a few cards from earlier sets. Some Bowmans and some earlier Topps, mostly 1956, but also a few 1953 and 1952. I’m sure these earlier cards came from the older brothers of some of my friends. I don’t recall ever seeing very many of these older cards and I don’t recall ever seeing any Bowman cards for sale at the store. 

    As to finances, my allowance was $2/month then, I think. Whatever it was, it was not enough, so I had to augment my income. Most summers I did that by cutting lawns at a few houses on Mimosa. The going rate was $2.50 per lawn per week. And since I was about the oldest kid on the street I was able to organize, define, and lead most collective efforts of the neighborhood children. New houses were still being built along Mimosa in 1957 and the debris piles provided a good source of building materials. 

    One summer I was able to get a good sized sheet of plywood, cannibalize the wheels off an old wagon, and probably with Dad’s help put a low, wide wheeled cart together that could carry about 3 kids. It was steered with a rope tied to either side of a swing arm axle on the front, permitting the driver to steer the cart wherever he or she wished and it wouldn’t turn over. Our driveway had a pretty good downward slope to get the cart rolling. Once in the street, the cart turned right and continued down a gentle hill, then a sweeping left turn down the block toward the school grounds. The whole ride was probably 600’ to 800’ long. Of course at the end of the ride the cart had to be pulled back up the hill. We never worried about traffic—there wasn’t much and we could see up and down the street easily enough. Rides were 5¢ for each kid, or 15¢ if I were able to get 3 of them aboard. They put their nickels in a round tobacco can I had nailed to the front of the cart and cut a coin slot into. Pulling the cart back up the hill was part of the ride as I sold it. If I needed some help with the smaller kids, then I would hire 1 or 2 younger boys to pull the cart back up in exchange for a free ride—and they still pulled the cart back up the hill as part of the deal. I stayed at the top of the hill by my garage, just counting the money and waiting to launch the next ride. The little kids loved that cart ride and when I got it out in the afternoons, there would be a literal stream of kids streaking back and forth to their houses for more nickels. It was a good little business and it paid for a lot of these baseball cards. 

    Life on Mimosa during the 1950s was idyllic in many respects. The skies were filled with sonic booms as jets streaked overhead breaking the sound barrier. It was only a few years after Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier the first time and there seemed to be glee amongst military aviators to break the sound barrier often. It could scare you sometimes if you were focused on something else. Out at Carswell, unknown to most people, the Air Force was flying a B-36 around the area with a nuclear reactor aboard. There was active talk about building a nuclear powered airplane. The early days of the nuclear age were blissfully ignorant of the long term dangers if not carefully controlled. Coming out of WWII we had nothing to fear. 

    We did not trade baseball cards at school because by the time school started we were playing football and had pretty well satisfied whatever we wanted to do with the baseball cards. However, in those days there were only 8-teams in each major league so the World Series was a big deal. There was no league championship series or anything like that—only the World Series. In those years that meant either the Yankees vs. the Dodgers or the Yankees vs. Milwaukee—Mickey, Yogi, Duke (and later Hank) and the boys. The school would tune in its one TV set to the series in October and the kids (and teachers) could check in on it at lunch time. It was a big treat for those of us who were intensely interested in baseball. A year or two later that same TV set would be tuned in to the first launches of our satellites into space. General Dwight Eisenhower, a bona-fide hero of WWII, was President furthering our sense of stability and having nothing to fear. 


    The westernmost professional baseball team that 1957 summer was the St. Louis Cardinals, but the only good player they had was Stan Musial. I was a Yankee fan, so for me it was Mickey, Yogi, Whitey, Moose, Elston and the others. The guys to beat were the Dodgers with Duke and the Braves with Hank. We watched baseball on Saturday afternoon TV with Dizzy Dean doing the commentary, singing the Wabash Cannonball and saying over and over again, “he slud into third base.” Dizzy was a terrific personality who called the games with the verve and good humor that someone like John Madden does it today. However, I don’t recall Mickey ever doing anything remarkable when I watched him on TV. A couple of years later, on a summer driving vacation to New England, we visited the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown and attended a Yankees game in New York. Mickey didn’t do anything remarkable that night either. 

    When the weather was bad or it was just too hot outside, we would sometimes get together at my house or at another’s and play baseball games with these cards. We would choose our teams without regard to their actual teams. That way you could have Mickey and Ted Williams on the same team. I think the only restriction was that we had to have players at the positions they actually played rather than just packing the team with big hitters. A single dice would drive the game, with 5’s and 6’s being outs. As I recall, it made for a pretty good afternoon’s entertainment. To the extent you find any wear on these cards, it is from that afternoon activity. Some kids would fix their cards to their bicycles in order to make a chattering noise with the spokes but I always thought too much of my cards to do that. Some of these cards are of rookie stars who went on to have big careers such as Brooks Robinson, Don Drysdale, and Bobby Richardson. 

    I put a 1958 set together the following summer but something had changed. We kids didn’t get together the same way we did the previous summer. There were other things to occupy time so that 1958 set never was pressed into play. It survived as an essentially new set all these years and sold earlier this year. I bought a few 1959 cards but never got into it like I had in 1957 and 1958. 

    We moved to the Eastern Hills section of Ft. Worth in 1958 and I started to get involved with another set of activities and friends as I grew up there. These baseball cards went into a box and were only rarely brought out to view in the decades after that. They survived my mother’s clean out of my room after I went away to college at UTAustin—she got rid of my baseball glove, my Schwinn Phantom, and a bunch of other stuff during that clean out, but thankfully, the baseball cards survived. They also survived a family move to California and have been with me ever since during moves to New York, Colorado, back to Texas, Louisiana, and back to New York again. I was separated from them only once when I went to Vietnam in 1968. 

    I hope you enjoy the cards and the story—it was fun to write and it brought back some great memories. They come from a very special time.

Wednesday, January 13, 2021

Six Flags over Texas

 cj64

The summer after the 11th grade (1963) I got a job at a truly magical place, Six Flags over Texas. In those days it had only been opened about 2 years. It was a theme park, not an amusement park with scary rides. The “six flags” referred to the flags that had flown over Texas during its long history – French, Spanish, Mexican, Texas, the Confederacy, and the US. So, parts of the park were devoted to each of those eras, some more than others. The French section, for example, featured the LaSalle boat ride and Lafitte’s pirate ship, while the Texas section was large and extensive and featured an old West town and railroad depot. The Confederate section looked like plantation houses and was centered on a huge fried chicken restaurant. It also had Skull Island, which was an island with a giant skull. You could slide from the top of the skull out through the skull’s mouth. It had dark pathways around the island and was a great place to take your date. It also had Indian canoe rides. The Mexican section was limited to an El Chico restaurant and the Sombrero ride. Spain had the Log Ride, a fun house where things rolled uphill, and curio shops. The US section, called the Modern section by the park, featured Humble Oil’s Happy Motoring ride and a train depot, plus refreshment stands. There was one more section just past Modern called Boom Town. It had mining town buildings housing souvenir and refreshment stands, plus the Mine Train ride. Tying the park together were the train, that ran the perimeter of the park; and the Astrolift, where you road a suspended bucket from Modern to Texas to see the whole park.


The park was extremely well-managed. Their training was excellent and lasted about 2 days just for the indoctrination. Their overall message – “We have no customers or employees. They are guests, and you are hosts. If you don’t treat them as your guest, we will fire you.” What we learned is that good attitude and good manners can be taught and can become habitual, and pays off with pleased “guests”.

Six Flags had 3 job organizations – Food & Beverage (eating and drink establishments), Operations (the rides), and Maintenance (cleaning and repair). They also had vendor operations, which were outside companies who operated at the park under lease arrangements, such as El Chico or the souvenir hat stands (more about them later).

I was hired into Food & Beverage and spent the summer of 1963 in the popcorn stands at a pay of $1.20 per hour. We had 3 locations you could work at – the big stand with multiple workers serving popcorn and cokes in the Modern section, and one-worker stands in a mining shack in Boom Town, and a vintage popcorn wagon in the Texas section. The latter two were popcorn only, no cokes. Modern was more fun as you could chat with your fellow workers, but the standalones were good for doing some serious thinking if so inclined.

We all wore uniforms. The standard for boys were white shoes, white pants, a blue-and-white or red-and-white striped shirt and white straw hat with a shirt-matching band. Fry cooks and table bussers wore a chef’s smock and hat with the striped design. Operations wore uniforms appropriate for their ride. Maintenance wore yellow shirts with orange pants and hats. The girls wore shirt-waist dresses with pink or blue stripes. I have to add that the girls must have been hired for their good looks. Gosh, they were pretty. Six Flags hired from all over the DFW area, and they were a pleasant bunch to work with.

Six Flags was open on the weekends in the spring and fall, and every day in the summer. In the spring of 1964, my senior year, I worked weekends and that summer bussing tables or as a fry cook in the Depot Café of the Texas section. You worked in shifts – the day from 8-4, or the night from 3-11. The night shift had its benefits as the park was beautiful at night and a little quieter. Sometimes we would organize a party after work and head for Lake Arlington, and some romancing might occur. That summer the Park had arranged for the famed Kilgore Rangerettes (the original drill team) to work at the park. They would perform their routines occasionally in return for park jobs and park-paid accommodations. They were all lookers with loads of personality and fun to work with.

In the summer of 1965 I worked for Howell Instruments. I got the job through Don Pipes’ dad, who was a VP there. It was actually a construction job, as the Howells had bought a beautiful mansion in Rivercrest (built in 1912) and they used Howell workers to do a lot of the tear down. My main job was knocking down a 3-foot thick rock and mortar outer wall. The tool was a 110-pound jackhammer. At the time I weighed about 160 pounds. I would lift that hammer up and stick it against the wall and pull the trigger, then repeat, all day. At the end of the summer the wall was gone and I weighed 180, mostly in my chest and shoulders.

It was back to Six Flags in 1966. This time at the souvenir hat stands. Ken Huddleston got me the job as he had worked there the year before. We sold all kinds of novelty hats and had stands in every section. The fun part was learning how to sew names on the hats. We had a sewing machine that had a rotating handle underneath the counter. You would hold the hat with your left hand and twist and turn it as needed while you were rotating that handle to guide the needle. It required considerable practice to learn and the progress was usually in these stages – 1) you couldn’t do it 2) you could do it but the result was unreadable, and 3) you could do it and the result was OK.

The big test was on a busy day where one guy would man the machine and the other guys would toss the hat to you for name-sewing. They would toss a sailor hat (called “gobs) to you and yell out the name. You would sew it on and toss it back, yelling out the name again. After an hour of this you got good at it, but the first hour was a mess with lots of re-sewing.

We had a lot of fun with this operation, I guess just to keep it light-hearted, such as – the host would ask the name, and the guest would say “Jim”. The host would toss the hat to the guy at the machine and yell out “Jim, G-Y-M”, misspelling it on purpose. The sewer would yell back “G-Y-M” then start sewing J-I-M on the hat and toss it back. All the while the guest is protesting like crazy, until the host handed him the hat and they would grin big time. Sometimes they would keep re-reading the hat to make sure it really was “Jim”.

Also, people were always asking directions, and we noticed they rarely listened to us but would pay a great deal of attention to where we were pointing. So they would ask, “Which way to the Astrolift?”, and we would point in that direction and say “Just past the chyser on the timex!”, or some other nonsense and they would take off happily. It sounds silly now, but it kept our spirits up.

We learned a great deal about people, as individuals and in crowds. For example, most people expected July 4 and Labor Day to be extremely crowded, so they wouldn’t come that day. As a result, July 4 and Labor Day were practically empty. I even went home early one July 4. But, the Sunday before Labor Day was the biggest day of the year and we would extend the park’s hours to a midnight closing to accommodate that crowd.

And, we learned that people were always pleasant if you were pleasant to them. The exceptions were extremely rare.

We had a function at the park that proved to be very much appreciated. It was called Lost Parents. That is where we placed the lost kiddos. The procedure to be followed when a crying child came up to you was to comfort them, pick them up if small, find the nearest security guard (dressed in white pants, blue tunic, and white pith helmet), and turn the child over to them. He would take the child to Lost Parents, located in the headquarters area, where nurses and nannies were waiting to take care of them. The inquiring parents, wherever they showed up, were directed to Lost Parents for the reunion.

Every section of the park had theme music playing in the background over hidden speakers, and it varied by section. In Modern, they played a lot of music from Camelot, for example. In Texas, it might be “The Green Leaves of Summer”, from The Alamo. Wherever and whatever it was, it gave you an opportunity to stop and reflect on the music and recall the memories music always generates in people. It might be quiet where you were, and it was night with a moon and a breeze, a family would stroll by, and one of the pretty girls would walk by in her striped dress, and the music would make you wonder if she was in your future. Magic is like that, and the park could produce it in abundance, but you had to watch for it.  

Wednesday, December 25, 2019

A Poem - Bob Dillard, a tribute by Kendall McCook

A tribute to an old friend of over 60-years ...




... in text:

28 July 2019
Bob’s Pass Over

More than a week since old friend Bob Dillard’s goodbye
Saying a sad “so long” to that Blue Mountain man
Who worked and strolled days and nights
Of his own free successful choosing
Meeting friend and foe as equal

In the days before he left us Bob drove
Sleepless over to El Paso to catch a plane
With his old and constant compadre Larry Guthrie
Bound for La Paz where they walked the tropical
Roads and drank cerveza with lifelong buddy Paul Tate
Who now enjoys dual citizenship and permanent residence
In Mexico where he still plays trumpet in a local jazz band

Bob remembered the trip fondly but said it was
A hard road
Then came the busy traditional July 4th Fort Davis
Celebrations and barbecue brisket smoking and sale
Bob’s last photo shows him in his barbecue apron
Black dusty cowboy hat pulled back happy smiling
Smoking those briskets, more than 50 sold
Then came the wedding party and forty
More briskets for the hungry folk crowd

And there was the sudden death of
His trusted and constant canine companion, Gabby
And the front page story and obituary of
Hundred year old civic leader Vera Bloys Grubb June 8th
And then the school board seminars in San Antonio
And the breakdown after these sorrows

And on the front gate of his friend John’s Olympia Hat Shop the banner
“ Trump 2020 – Keep America Great” in red, white, and blue

Too much to handle at seventy-four. His strong body said,
“Whoa!” And the unexpected end came soon
After a Careflight from Alpine to a hospital in Lubbock
And several days in a coma, he finally
Passed Over

He died at the top of his game
Still sittin’ tall in the saddle
Still ropin’ still writin’
Still befriendin’ the people
Still makin’ the next edition.

Sunday, July 28, 2019

Robert Allan "Bob" Dillard II




Gus recalls:  Before leaving EHHS for the rest of his life, Bob left a short expression of his hopes and aspirations for the future.  






Wednesday, June 05, 2019

2019 - D-Day June 6, 1944 - 75th Anniversary

Everyone embarking in the morning will get a copy of this letter to carry with them.