Mr. President

One line in the oath any new soldier accepts as a condition of his or her enlistment pledges their allegiance to the President of the United States and states that he or she will obey the orders of all officers appointed over them. It didn’t take me too long to question the practical application of that contract term and I took it up with an officer appointed over me.

The problem, I related, was with the word, “all.” I went on to explain that in my short time in the service I had seen a few officers of higher rank that were clearly idiots, or to be more charitable, inept.

What would you suggest I do, I asked, should one of these inept officers order me to charge a machine gun nest and I deem both he and his order insane? The man I chose to ask the question was fairly high up in that particular military organization and I had established a reasonably good relationship with him...he seemed to have a good practical head.

He replied, you have to first take care of yourself. Your duty is to respect the rank and uniform, not the man wearing it. Respect for the man was something he had to earn.

It was sage advice and meant that one was doing no good for anyone, including himself, by sacrificing for no good reason. That kind of judgment was for each individual to make. His advice implied that it would be best to ignore idiots, regardless of their rank.

Military service was a short, yet influential part of my life. For years after I had left the service I could readily tell who had served and who had not…it was something in the way a person carried himself, a sense of humor, and a kind of character they wore easily.

Until Vietnam, essentially all young men having high political ambitions were counseled by their fathers and mentors to volunteer for military service and if possible, seek assignment to a war zone. Some medals for heroism could translate into thousands of votes later. The older advisors also knew that a young person had only a few years within a long life to be a part of a military service and the opportunity, once gone, could not be repeated.

I think there is something more to military service than simply medals and the future show value. For a young person, it provides a very real opportunity to test and prove his mettle. Once done, it can never be taken away. Once missed, it can never again be accomplished. It’s a difficult proposition for a young person to comprehend.

Since Vietnam, we have seen a couple of examples of Presidents who did not serve in the military. It became fashionable during the Vietnam period for young men, especially the smart and well-connected ones, to seek ways to avoid serving. It was certainly a safer route to take and joining the political opposition to the Vietnam War provided a kind of assumed moral superiority cover for those who chose it.

However, as the Commander in Chief of the most powerful military force in the world, I think it’s a plus for that commander to have some practical knowledge of that which he commands. It’s probably also a plus in the forming of his or her character.

The accompanying pictures show our post-WWII presidents both in office and in their youth. Draw your own conclusions about them.

Adios

SPAM

I use several email addresses, each for different online communities, and very rarely post them anywhere online; the theory being, by protecting the addresses, I won’t be pestered by spam. However, I do order some things online which do require leaving an address.

Where possible, I use one of the disposable address services that allow me to retrieve mail and verify links. Where the disposable addresses are filtered, I use an address I consider a throw-away should the spam volume become intolerable. I’ve been doing this for about 15-years or so, and have never found the volume of spam to be much of an irritant, nor have I had to abandon an address due to spam overload.

All that said, I do get some spam in one of my more active Yahoo addresses. It seems that there are spammers who work something like the old robo-dialers on the telephone…they just go down the list and spam them all. Of course, Yahoo tends to set some filters and I set others, such that most of that stuff is automatically shunted off into a spam folder.

Now and then it’s interesting to take a look at some of the spam mail. It’s a wonder that anyone sending that kind of stuff out would expect to get responses, but maybe they do.

Mujahideen wants me to call him urgently; my old pal Ibrahim Bhaki writes me—Dear Friend; several folks, including Mr. Karim Ahmed, are wanting to send me money from various funds I don’t know about but they will help, I’m sure; julian justin yak’s subject is “Dearest one” – wonder what jjy wants; Microsoft Office is writing about something…sometimes it comes in as Microsofts Office…they’re in a hurry, I suppose. And so on, and so on.

I used to stand by the waste basket and throw away everything marked “bulk rate” without bothering to open it. Many days, that took care of 90% of a day’s mail in just a few seconds. Then the junk mailers got into cahoots with the post office and started marking junk mail “presorted first class” and printing my name and address all over everything inside. Then I had to start shredding.

Some of the Asian subcontinent societies may have it right…just take people that irritate you out behind the barn and flog them with a stick. For now, spam filters and that delete button works pretty well.

Adios

NINE WORDS WOMEN USE

(1) Fine: This is the word women use to end an argument when they are right and you need to shut up.

(2) Five Minutes: If she is getting dressed, this means a half an hour. Five minutes is only five minutes if you have just been given five more minutes to watch the game before helping around the house.

(3) Nothing: This is the calm before the storm. This means something, and you should be on your toes. Arguments that begin with nothing, usually end in fine.

(4) Go Ahead: This is a dare, not permission. Don't Do It!

(5) Loud Sigh: This is actually a word, but is a non-verbal statement often misunderstood by men A loud sigh means she thinks you are an idiot and wonders why she is wasting her time standing here and arguing with you about nothing. (Refer back to # 3 for the meaning of nothing.)

(6) That's Okay: This is one of the most dangerous statements a women can make to a man. That's okay means she wants to think long and hard before deciding how and when you will pay for your mistake.

(7) Thanks: A woman is thanking you, do not question, or faint. Just say you're welcome. (I want to add in a clause here - This is true, unless she says 'Thanks a lot' - that is PURE sarcasm and she is not thanking you at all. DO NOT say 'you're welcome'. That will bring on a 'whatever').

(8) Whatever: Is a woman's way of saying...Go to blue blazes.

(9) Don't worry about it, I got it: Another dangerous statement, meaning this is something that a woman has told a man to do several times, but is now doing it herself. This will later result in a man asking 'What's wrong?' For the woman's response refer to # 3.

1963 EHHS Highlander Track Team

Members of the 1963 EHHS track team shown in the accompanying picture are: Bill Wilson, Randy Blake, Chuck Wellington, Roby Morris, David Bane, Jimmy Anderson, James Gilmartin, Robert McGown, Mike Penny, Bill Winkler, Ed McDonald, Jimmy Brown, Guy Perkins, Jimmy Smart, Lloyd Grimm, Roy Vandiver, Jim Young, Steve Morris, Mike Flowers, Sam Bartholomew, Charles Jones, Buzz Gardner, LeRoy Gast, Mike Moore, Wayne Hardy, Jim Aitken, and Steve Helmricks.  Bold names were 1963 seniors.

The article appeared in a Spring 1963 sports summary section of the school newspaper, The Tartan.


Adios

1962 1963 1964 EHHS Highlander Basketball

Our 1963 basketball team consisted of about half seniors and half juniors. I think this was Coach Howerton’s first year at EH, replacing Ronnie McBee who had been the team coach for a number of years.

The team members in this picture and article were: Dwayne Williams, Jim Newell, David Williams, Guy Perkins, Ted Harris, Steve Rose, Roby Morris, Kendall McCook, Melvin Starks, Wayne Templeton, Bobby Dillard, J.W. Southard, David Tracy, David Richardson, Bob Larmer, Roy Burklow, and Coach Johnny Howerton.

The article was cut from a year-end sports summary section of the school newspaper, The Tartan.


CJ64--For the EHHS classes of 1962, 1963, and 1964, basketball was an other sport – not nearly as important as football and somewhat under-appreciated, but not an unexpected situation in football-crazy Texas. It’s probably still the same way today.
Coaches


Ronnie McBee was the coach in 1961-62. He had been a star at North Side High and TCU. He was fun-loving, irreverent, and sort of a playboy type, but he was a good coach, and the players liked to play for him. He gave out nicknames to most, but not all the players. Gary Granger, a guard, was “Baby Ears” because of, well, his small ears. Fred Culberson, another guard, had dark, bushy eyebrows, and eyelashes all the girls envied, so he was tagged as “Hairy Eyes” .


Johnny Howerton came in the fall of 1962 to replace McBee. They could not have been more opposite. McBee was tall, easy-going, and fun; Howerton was short, intense, and scary. Howerton had played on the 1952-53 state champion Poly High team, and at Abilene Christian. Howerton was outstanding at teaching, particularly winning fundamentals. His teams were always well-conditioned and poised, because they had been taught what to do. They were also overachievers, like the coach.


Memorable Moments


1961-1962. We had gone down to Waco to play the now-defunct Richfield Rams. Late in the 1st half, Fred Culberson sprained his ankle, but not too badly. At the half in the locker room, Coach McBee taped up the ankle, and Fred played the 2nd half, and we won. Now, Fred not only had hairy eyes, he also had hairy legs. 


Normally you would have shaved his ankle prior to taping, but there had been no time. So, 3 days later, when it was time to remove the tape, Fred was not looking forward to it. Ray Coleman, our manager, took the scissors and cut along the bottom of the foot, then through one side. The only thing left to do was rip it off. Fred said he was ready, and Ray yanked. The result: Fred’s ankle was beautifully shaved, and the inside of the tape was solid leg hair. Ray kept it around for a couple of weeks for show, then tossed it.


Tuf-Skin was an all-purpose product we used mainly on our feet. It came in a can, and you spread it on blisters with a brush, and it would toughen the skin almost immediately. It also burned like hell. We discovered it made an excellent cure for jock itch. Jock itch was caused by perspiration-soaked jock straps, and resulted in a reddened, inflamed, and itchy area around the genitalia. You could treat it with lotion, or powder, but that took time. Bruce Schnitzer had it really bad, so after consultation, he agreed to the Tuf-Skin cure. He lay down on the bench, shorts down, and Ray swabbed him down with the brush. Bruce broke out in a sweat, and clenched his teeth, but he was cured.


1962-63. Bobby Larmer led the district in scoring through the first half of district play. It was a surprise, and got him some press in the papers. It was a surprise, but no accident. He played the way his coach taught – aggressive, smart, and with discipline. He faded to second or third by season’s end, but made the all-district team. The team was developing the style that led to our district championship in in 1963-64; we played an opportunistic, over achieving game, waited for the other team to make mistakes, and took advantage of them.


We played against the Pampa Harvesters in a tournament. Today, Pampa is a town that has fallen on hard times, but not in 1963. Their key player was Randy Matson, later a Texas A&M and Olympic gold medal shot-putter. He was a full-grown 6’7”, stayed at the foul line, and directed traffic. They waxed us.


Ted Harris was an all-around good athlete who was good at every sport, but particularly football. He played more on heart than on skill. If every person on the team could work as hard, and play as hard, as Ted Harris, there is no way you could be beaten. We had a wind-sprint drill to end every practice. We would line up at the end line, run to the foul line, then run backwards back to the end line, then forward to the half-court line, then backwards to the end line, and repeat to the far foul line and far end line. Ted and Roby Morris were racing back from the far foul line, running backwards, when Ted stumbled at the finish. His head struck the concrete wall. He went down to the floor on his back, unconscious, his legs and arms jerking. Bobby Dillard ran over to check to see if he had swallowed his tongue. He suggested to Coach Howerton that we call Ted’s father, Marvin Harris (there was no 911), and Coach did. Mr. Harris got him to the hospital. Ted had fractured his skull, but he recovered with no after effects. It was memorable only in that it was so scary.


1963-1964. We played in an open tournament in Graham early in the season, meaning that different classifications were invited from class B to class 4A. When we arrived at our motel, Coach was told there had been a mix-up, and our rooms were taken. So, he called the Graham coach. No problem. The Graham coach arranged for our players to be parceled out the Graham players’ homes, 2 to 3 at a time. That’s how David Tracy and I ended up in the home of John Matzinger, a starting guard. Mr. and Mrs. Matzinger couldn’t have been more gracious, and Mrs. Matzinger stuffed us with a huge platter of chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes, gravy, and peas.


The next morning we went to the gym. We were slated to play Megargel, town population 408, a class B school. We were 4A, at that time the top classification. Megargel had a team of about 7. Their tallest player was about 6’, but he had a letter jacket which practically disappeared underneath the awards and letters. Their guards were twin brothers who were laughably short, at about 5’6”. We thought it was so funny that it took us 2 overtimes to beat them by 1 point. Let that be a lesson to you.


That afternoon we played Graham. They were a 3A school, but they were loaded. In addition to Matzinger, Graham had 6’6” Tiny Lochner (they both played at Texas), and P. D. Shabay and E. A. Gresham (who both played football at TCU, and led the team in initials). They beat us and won their own tournament, but that was offset by the goodwill they had shown us in putting us up at their homes.


We won district. Poly won the first half, we won the second half, and we beat them in the championship. The key players were Roby Morris, Wayne Templeton, David Richardson, Roy Burklow, Ward Ericson, and Duane Williams. Roby and Wayne made all-district. We went over to Dallas to play Adamson in bi-district. They were taller, and could shoot. They featured a tall center who had a club foot, but he could still move and played well. They beat us and the season was over, but it was a great season. We owed it to some gutsy, intelligent players, and to Coach Howerton, who earned our complete respect.

1961-1962

Adios

Things Change

This article caught my eye yesterday. It's a good read if you want to look it up. I recall Gallagher, one of my favorite comedians from the early 1980s, doing a take-off from Chevy Chase's old news update bit on the first SNL. Almost 30-years ago his joke news item was to announce that the president of Mexico had decided to move his offices to Los Angeles so that he could be closer to his people.

A few years later I stopped over in Los Angeles, spending an extra couple of days to walk-through a visa application in order to visit Australia while on a project assignment. My hotel was just off Hollywood Blvd, around the corner from Grauman's Chinese Theatre. The area was still clean and safe enough, but I could not find a single place to eat where the wait staff could understand English! Not one, in 2-days! Every single waitress was Mexican and not a single one spoke even a smattering of English, or if they did, they wouldn't speak it for me.

More recently, I spent some time in Dallas. It has gotten to be much the same there. Things change, don't they?

Adios

Stones, Peas, and a Kiss

I was thinking about the Super Bowl half-time show and had heard the criticism it got from today’s crop of critics. To tell you the truth, I haven’t paid much attention to pop music at any time in my life and stopped listening to the radio music stations sometime in the 1970s.

Now and then a really good song would make its way through my personal fog and register in my mind as one to remember…but I’ve generally forgotten those, too. Until the Super Bowl performance I had never heard of the Black-eyed Peas, or of Will-i-am, although I had heard of Fergie…that’s randy Andy’s ex-princess isn’t it?

The Peas’ appearance struck me as rather bizarre and their music struck me as unremarkable. However, Fergie wasn’t hard to look at. Their bizarre appearance is really what got me thinking. Bizarre music acts aren’t anything new.

A generation ago there was Kiss, another bizarre looking group whose music I don’t recall.

In our youth about the most bizarre looking group I can recall would be the Stones, which doesn’t look too bizarre to me now. However, a lot of their songs are a part of me. How many guys of our generation don’t remember most of the lyrics of Under my Thumb and how many times did you wish your own situation with a girl would resolve itself in accordance with the lyrics? But they never did.

Under my thumb
The girl who once had me down
Under my thumb
The girl who once pushed me around
It's down to me
The difference in the clothes she wears
Down to me, the change has come,
She's under my thumb

Yeah, right

Yankee Station

As we’ve aged, retired, and started reflecting on some of the things we’ve experienced over the past, nearly 50-years since EH, the net has come along at a propitious time. As no other generation has ever had available to them, we have the tools to ask long, unanswered questions and have a reasonable expectation of finding answers. It amazes me nearly every day.

Someone mentioned the F4 Phantom recently and that started my mind going. This was the plane most young pilots wanted to fly, but few got the opportunity. It had a reputation for being powerful, somewhat unwieldy, and dirty with respect to throwing out a lot of black smoke. We used to joke that a Phantom didn’t land as much as it arrived as it came aboard a carrier. They hit hard and emitted a lot of smoke from burning rubber as their heavy frames arrived on deck.

As so many others are going through their old picture files, a lot of old Vietnam material is beginning to appear in online venues such as Flikr and other sites. If you have a specific memory of something you saw, but never photographed, there is now an opportunity to find some of those pictures you never took.

This story is illustrated with a couple of shots I frequently saw but never photographed. Unlike the WWII veterans, we have a marvelous communication tool available to us in the net. For those with an interest in the subject, all you need to know is how to ask the question. I recalled the boiling smoke from the Phantoms coming aboard (arriving) and the close calls they often had with a pitching deck as they made their final approach.

If you were Navy, this is the kind of stuff you saw on Yankee Station, if you were Army or Marines, you saw something different, and if you were Air Force, you saw something different still. I think Navy had the most exciting jobs but since they were done in locations remote to news media, there wasn’t much of a record created of their duties. Only pictures like these, taken by some of the sailors themselves can do a good job of telling their story.

The last picture is an aeronautical chart marked by a carrier pilot for his use in flying a mission into North Vietnam. This is the kind of thing that is essentially unique and rarely seen by others. However, as we clean out some of the old boxes and trunks, this is the kind of thing we are finding.

Garbage Collection

My father left a number of impressions with me. One of them being a strong recollection of his running dissatisfaction with garbage collection services of the 1950s and 1960s; the years I lived in his house. As a kid, I had a lot of house chores to do, but taking the garbage out was one Dad kept for himself and consistently complained about the service. I think it became a matter of wills over who was going to call the shots. Trouble was that garbage collectors tend to occupy a similar spot as does the anus in the old joke about who is the boss of the human body. Perhaps you’ve heard the joke.

Dad was a 20-year old Lt. in the WWII Air Force and at an early age had grown accustomed to having people jump when he barked a command. Of course, civilian life was different in that respect, and the garbage collectors tended to be different still. They generally set the rules of garbage collection, not the customers. I think Dad hated that. After a running battle with one garbage collection service, he even started wrapping his garbage in red ribbon, complete with bows just like a gift. True story.

Of course, we are all accustomed to having our garbage collected on a certain day of the week, maybe even twice a week. I’ve found that during my run at life, garbage collection has tended to be rather inconspicuous and of only minor irritation. But now and then, a new driver can change things and introduce irritation for a few collection cycles.

Our local rules are to place garbage in bags and then bags into cans. I tried doing it that way years ago, but with women in the house, we have always been significant bottom-line contributors to all the major paper companies and have produced far more garbage than can be conveniently fit into a can or even two of them; so, I prefer to use just the bags without the cans. My rationale is that one trip out with the bags is less work than two trips required by using the cans—one to leave it out and another to retrieve the cans.

Our local lady garbage Nazi clucks at me at times about my bags…but she’s been doing that for 20-years without result. We understand each other. One thing about garbage Nazis is that they are good at clucking, but weak at conflict.

Yes, yes, I know the animal problem argument and have suffered some irritation with aggressive squirrels, crows, a fox now and then, and a herd of raccoons at one house; however, overall I’ve experienced very little animal problems over the span of about 40-years of fussing with the garbage.

Most irritating is when a regular driver establishes a predictable schedule, then suddenly changes it, as happened again this week. The week before last, after months of picking up about mid-morning, he shows up in the late afternoon. Last week, he skipped a day and showed up the next. This week, as I’m enjoying my morning coffee, expecting him to come about mid-morning, he shows up at the crack of dawn. I’ve got to get it out before I planned…now my schedule is being jerked around by this joker who has suddenly gone erratic. Maybe I should use some of Dad’s red ribbon?

Adios

Super Bowl Flyover

There’s a snit in the air today as information about the Super Bowl flyover of 4 Navy F-18 fighters become public knowledge.  There are a few troublesome facts emerging.  Apparently the Navy acknowledges a fuel cost of about $110,000 for flying the jets from Virginia to Texas and back.  The other costs being tacked on would be for maintenance and other operating expenses.

One wonders why jets from Pensacola or Corpus or even locally from nearby Naval Air Stations in the DFW area couldn’t have been used.  Maybe they didn’t have any available state of the art planes or maybe not enough available pilots, who knows.

Of course, one obvious question would be to ask why do it at all when the stadium roof was closed due to snow and icy weather.  Some defenders are already responding to that one with statements that the flyover wasn’t done for the folks in the stadium, it was done for the 100+ million TV audience.

Well, be that as it may, there are some legitimate questions that need to be answered about this decision.

Adios

Truppenführung

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While chatting with a colleague many years ago, I remarked I was frustrated that so many people were not driven to do their work promptly and competently.  Some even seemed content to let things drop altogether, even though they were capable people.  Management tolerated it.

For those like me, those driven to get something done, life in a working environment that included many others with differing motivations was annoying.  Thankfully, I spent most of my working years in small, entrepreneurial endeavors.  There, we associated only with motivated people having useful skills.

My colleague, an ex-pat Brit who was content for many years to be Dilbert-like within a large corporation, got out a pad of paper and drew a quadrant diagram, numbering the quadrants 1-4.  He then marked 4 personality types, one in each quadrant and showed that each group was useful, except one…that one should be taken out and shot (his words).


His drawing and explanation amused me and I found later that the theory is well known in some areas of organization philosophy. 

1.     smart & sluggish

2.     smart & hard-working

3.     stupid & sluggish

4.     stupid & hard-working

Apparently the first known proponent to publish his version of the theory was a German Army general who rose to prominence during the period between WWI and WWII.  As Chief of the Army High Command, Kurt Hammerstein-Equord oversaw the composition of the German manual on military unit command (Truppenführung), dated 17 October 1933.  He originated a special classification scheme for his men:

I divide my officers into four classes;

1.     the clever,

2.     the lazy,

3.     the industrious,

4.     stupid.

Most often two of these qualities come together.  

•       The officers who are clever and industrious are fitted for the highest staff appointments.  

•       Those who are stupid and lazy make up around 90% of every army in the world, and they can be used for routine work.  

•       The man who is clever and lazy however is for the very highest command; he has the temperament and nerves to deal with all situations.  

•       But whoever is stupid and industrious is a menace and must be removed immediately!

Super Bowl – Take the Ball, Dummy!

I suppose one indication that you’ve gotten old is that things, that for a lifetime you’ve taken as fact, are rejected by that huge group of younger people that have been building behind you while you were distracted with raising your family.

For instance, once again this evening at the opening flip of the coin, I’ve seen a team win the toss and give the ball to the other club!!! Good God, man…what in the hell are you doing? My offspring patiently explain to me that that is how these things are done now. The winner of the coin flip gives the ball to the other team in order “to see what they have” they say.

Who gives a shit, I retort. My offspring return those patient with the old man glances, and I know that further discussion is useless…that is the way it is done today, Dad.

Look kid, I say. In my day I learned that having the ball was a distinct advantage over not having the ball. Most importantly, YOU CANNOT SCORE IF YOU DON"T HAVE THE BALL. Explain to me kid, how is it different to win the coin flip and give the ball away than it is to fumble or throw an interception? No answer, just that patient look.

Further, in the old days our thinking went like this…take the ball any time you have the opportunity. You will find out what they have soon enough.

The only time we might have considered choosing which end of the field to start instead of taking the ball, might be an instance of there being a strong wind. In that case, we might choose the end of the field to start the game that would give us the wind behind our backs in the 4th quarter. Of course, we didn’t have indoor stadiums when we played, so today wind is usually not a factor. Take the f***ing ball.

If you play chess, do you ever take black when you have the first choice? No, of course not, you take white...white always has the first move. Having that first move advantage all the way through a game between evenly matched players is very important.

….blank stares….

President Ronald Regan would have been 100 today. There was an extraordinary service held in California this afternoon to mark the milestone. Be sure to watch a rebroadcast if you get the chance. Rather than post a video of yet another young singer trying too hard to stylize our National Anthem and muffing the words, I thought it would more substantive to post a couple of other visuals. Mr. Reagan’s picture speaks for itself. The video is only 1 minute long…stay with it to see the last few seconds of the young marine holding his/her salute. Tell me what you think.

Adios

DFW Power Shortages - Winter Storm

I don't understand several things about the power shortages reported in Texas yesterday and today.  Maybe I'm wrong, but isn't summer air conditioning load much larger than winter heating load?  Is 20-deg. really that cold?

Why did ERCOT lose 50 generators totaling about 7,000MW?  I heard one radio report that the west Texas wind mills failed to provide power during this storm, but have been unable to find anything written about it.

Next day...Oncor, the transmission company admitted making a mistake by cutting off critical care hospitals while implementing ERCOT's "rolling blackout" order.  Oops, my bad!  Going forward, the Oncor spokesperson said they need to work on their "processes".   This new wave management gibberish drives me nuts.  It seems to me that the current approach to ducking responsibility is to fog the issue with meaningless lingo.

When our utility was TXU or even the TESCO, DP&L, TP&L companies before that, I don't recall them having the same problems doing what they were charged to do; generate and deliver electricity.  Sure, there were upsets due to tornado or hurricane damage, but losing 7,000 MW to a cold snap, come on now.

About 3-years ago TXU was purchased by 3 large investment fund managers and broken in to several subsidiaries--a generating co. and a transmission co. among them.  I'm not a fan of bankers, accountants, and lawyers trying to "run" technical enterprises.  Invariably, they focus on the short-term balance sheets and resist making long-term reliability investments.

If the technical group were out ranked and out classed by the financial gurus, then I would expect expensive things like preventative maintenance work to be a hard sell within the organization.  Ultimately, as the old adage goes, you can pay now or you can pay later...but with regard to keeping equipment running, you are going to pay sometime.

A technical guy will recommend doing the routine maintenance so you can better control the reliability, but a financial guy will want to wait until it breaks and he is forced to spend the money.  Unfortunately, waiting leads to unscheduled outages at the least convenient times.  But luckily for the geniuses making the "wait" decisions, retribution is rarely forthcoming because few outsiders understand the real problem they induce.

I think this is a sort of replay of the foolishness in the BP blowout this past summer. 

Adios

LeRoy Thompson & Dick Goddard – EHHS Photographers

We owe these guys a debt of gratitude for their perseverance in roaming the hallways so many years ago, taking the pictures for our yearbooks and whatever copies of the school newspaper still survive. Now I know that any excuse for getting out of class to do something more interesting was an enjoyable perk and taking pictures isn’t too strenuous. Yet, for the most part, whatever visual record we have left from those years at EH is to the credit of LeRoy and Dick. LeRoy was a school yearbook photographer all three years he was there, 1960-63, and was one of the top class scholars. I think he worked with Steve Franks (’62) for a year or two.

During the years my offspring were growing up I noticed that the photographic quality of their yearbooks was not as good as ours of the early 1960s. One likely reason for that is that LeRoy and Dick used a medium format camera which can be seen in the accompanying picture of the two of them. By the time our offspring went through those years, everyone was using smaller format 35mm cameras…the pictures just weren’t as sharp, largely due to the smaller negatives.

Both Dick and LeRoy are still living in the DFW area as far as I know. It would be a good project for someone in the area to look them up to see if, per chance, they still have those old negatives packed away in a closet. If so, we could pull some sharp scans from them that would knock your socks off.

Any volunteers?

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram negatives from the 1960s are in the Special Collections section of the University of Texas at Arlington Library. Electronic copies of specific pictures in a .tiff or .jpg format can be purchased for a nominal fee. You would need to be able to estimate the date of the picture with some accuracy in order to narrow the librarian’s search for the right picture. The closer, the better.


Adios

Bette Perot

Bette Perot taught a class called "Health & Safety" to 8th grade students at Meadowbrook Jr. High during the 1950s. She moved and spoke just like her brother, H. Ross, who at that time had not yet made his mark. In my memory, she came across as a feisty sort. I made all "As" in her class, about which I remember essentially nothing. I think it was 1950s version of sex education, but I could be wrong about that.

Come to think of it, that NHS chapter formed at Meadowbrook was so exclusive that a straight "A" card was not enough! Kiddies, that's how tough some our old days were...sad to see that recently Meadowbrook Middle was on the State's watch list for poor academic performance.

Adios

State of the Union - WTF?

There was a State of the Union speech last night.  I didn't watch it.  Figured that if anything worthwhile occurred, today's news would spew it out, ad nauseum.

Neat little slogan seemed to be launched...WIN THE FUTURE.  It took me about 2-3 seconds to notice the obvious acronym.  Difficult to believe that some snarky little speech writer thought himself clever beyond all reasonable expectation when he dreamed this one up.  Will be interesting to see if it has any legs today.

Honest Abe

For much of our lives we’ve all heard about “honest Abe” and honesty is the best policy. Long-time House Speaker, Sam Rayburn (D-TX), was known to counsel his younger colleagues, “Son, always tell the truth, that way you don’t have to remember anything.”

Abraham Lincoln (R-IL), was known for his forthright honesty and was also responsible for the South becoming a solid Democrat voting block for over a century.

Guys, if you’ve been paying attention to the ladies in your life, then you’ve probably noticed their amazing propensity for phrasing questions that are either unanswerable or incredibly risky to sustained harmony, should you offer an answer…any answer at all.

As men, we utterly hate to admit that we don’t know something—we feel it diminishes our stature to say, “I don’t know.” It's in the DNA. And also as men, we recognize that there are some questions our ladies ask that cannot be answered in any manner that would avoid us being emotionally pummeled. Do we tell the truth, or do we lie, or do we try to find a quick way out of the room?

This great commercial wonderfully illustrates ours, and Honest Abe’s predicament:

Adios

Sis Boom Bah

What is wrong with this picture?

CARNAC:              Sis boom bah.

ED:                          Sis boom bah.

CARNAC:               Describe the sound made when a sheep explodes.


Adios

Email Uses & Risks

I first recall hearing of email in the late 1980s with the arrival of CompuServe and Prodigy for the masses. However, since the use of those services required that you have someone else online to receive your messages, the early years were slow going with respect to common usage--together both services had slightly more than 1,000,000 subscribers and there weren't any other significant ISPs in the business then. By the mid-1990s AOL came on with strong marketing push and simple software. Millions of new users started going online and email began to flourish as a new communication mode.

We belatedly went on line about 1999 in our office, together with a clumsy email client program and began emailing with utter abandon. Unfortunately many of the people flocking to email communication had little or no training in the downside of written communications. Those of us who had been communicating in professional capacities for decades immediately recognized the inherent risks with this new form of communication.

Boston political boss Martin Lomansey was an individual that understood the value of discretion. He is attributed with the famous quote: “Never write if you can speak, never speak if you can nod, never nod if you can wink.” Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer is attributed to putting a modern twist on the famous quote, “and never put anything in an email.”

Early on, I noticed that people were writing email messages I would never dream of writing—although I might consider voicing those sentiments now and then.

As a fledgling professional years ago, I was ready and able to engage in corporate battle over a number of issues until I circulated one especially caustic report castigating a headquarters dolt. Although I had the dolt over a barrel on that particular issue, a senior manager took me aside and explained the fine points of written communications within a large company, which more or less followed the advice of Boston's Mr. Lomansey. He specifically pointed out that whatever you write down can come back to haunt you even years later.  The lesson: be very careful what you write.

In today’s email world, those older wisdoms are being learned by yet another generation of young tigers. Unfortunately for them, the ease with which email can be prematurely released, copied, stored, forwarded, and reused makes it easy for would-be opponents to stuff an ill-advised message up your nose over and over again as well as scatter it to unauthorized recipients.

I don’t think many companies have been formally training their employees in the prudent use of written communications; perhaps like me, those lessons are still taught one-on-one.  However, if you are interested, one of the online magazines today published an 18-point list of things to consider when writing emails that can be found HERE.

Adios

Bob Larmer

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Bob was one of those kids with an infectious grin that I never recall being angry or upset about much of anything.  He was a good friend and sometime neighborhood prankster, as were many of us.  Bob had perhaps the best car of anyone in our class, a black ’57 Chevy.  Those cars were classics when they rolled off the assembly lines and have remained so ever since.

I recall him as a wiry kid, a varsity basketball player, and co-captain of the team.  He and Dillard, and Williams, and Roby, and the others were usually outgunned in 4A, but they gave ‘er heck anyway and seemed to have a great time playing the game. 

Sometime after getting that great Chevy, Bob started dating his future first bride and fairly quickly, the stories of his hi-jinks stopped.  But before then, he provided a couple of funny stories that I’ve remembered all these years.

Apparently, during his antagonize the neighborhoods phase, he drew the ire of a local man whose garbage can Bob or some of his running mates for some reason had repeatedly targeted for turning over.  Having grown weary of the mess, the man sat up one night to snare the miscreants.  He was armed with a .22 rifle loaded with birdshot.  Bob came in one warm Monday morning wearing a long-sleeved shirt and an uncharacteristic peeved expression.  The long sleeves were necessary to cover the birdshot wounds to his elbow.

And on another occasion I recall him loosing a brief bout with the local constable.  As kids, we never thought about how really small our area was nor how really few of us were out on the streets any given year.  So a kid driving a black ’57 Chevy would have probably been the only one of his kind in the entire area, and if the constable was the same cop most nights, well he wasn’t a dummy.  I don’t think Bob’s car got a spot in the garage, so it’s likely that the cop knew exactly where that black ’57 Chevy driver lived based on it being parked out on the street in front of his house most nights.

If I recall correctly, Bob had cut-out plugs in his exhaust system which permitted making a lot of noise…enough to be really annoying in the neighborhoods and enough to be heard for several blocks in any direction.  A smart kid, which Bob was, can be a pretty elusive little bugger to catch in the act, but one night our constable came up with a clever solution to administer justice. 

Bob came in one morning, mad as a hornet.  He had gotten a ticket for parking on the wrong side of the street…his car was pointing the wrong way.  And since the parked car had violated that parking law, the constable reasoned that he had to have driven on the wrong side of the street also, and left a ticket for that infraction, as well!

I still laugh when I think of that little story.  Sometimes you just have to just suck it up, pay the tab, and thank goodness you weren’t caught doing all the things you did as a kid!  Bob was still in good form at our May 2010 celebration—one of the really good guys.

Adios

Heritage

I’ve dabbled with some of the heritage clubs, mostly in an effort to build up an offspring’s grad school applications.  Growing up when we did, such clubs as DAR and others were known only by the awards they presented to a few of us at the end of each year. 

In my house those clubs were mostly thought of as society ladies or climbers and given little thought.  However, I discovered that although they are those things, many of them are also serious genealogists and depend on others developing the interest in their own heritage to ensure the survival of the clubs and the history.  Most of them are very nice people with a sincere interest in preserving American history.

The lineage proofs can be difficult and must meet a legal standard.  Many of the early proofs developed in the 1900s tended to be fanciful and are no longer accepted as legitimate references…suggesting that our impressions of the early DAR ladies as social climbers might have been partially correct.

A few years ago I challenged a Manhattan heritage group to recognize the service of my Arkansas grandpappy.  After about 2-years of gentle, nudging they agreed to do so.  It wasn’t so much that they didn’t want to do it, it was more that they hadn’t done very often before and had apparently lost the knowledge of how to go about it.  Be that as it may, they got it done at a lovely venue in mid-town, across from 30-Rock.

The society was clearly a social club where the original mission had given way to more of an old-style pecking order exercise.  Seeing actual veterans like me and my grandpappy was atypical for them.  Nevertheless, they did a magnificent job and never once made me feel unwelcome.

When the club president discovered that we were also Jamestowne Society members, she was openly and unabashedly impressed.  She had been trying for years to make her own connections to that group.  It’s kind of like the Mayflower Society, only for southerners. 

Most of the heritage clubs I’ve encountered are based on some form of military service of an early ancestor…a great grandpappy way back up the line somewhere.  A veteran would understand better than most that serving in a war is mostly a matter of being born within a fairly narrow range of years and being drug into it as a result of arguments between some old guys.

Bill Mauldin understood the facts of these matters and illustrated them as succinctly as anyone I’ve seen.  I forwarded Mauldin’s cartoons to the society president a few months after the ceremony…she got a kick out of it.

Meadowbrook Junior High - 1960

For better or worse, here some of us were as 9th Grade Meadowbrook Buffaloes in May 1960.  The next fall we would be EHHS Sophomores, starting out at the bottom of the pile once more.

These sheets are probably quite rare as there was no yearbook published during our junior high years; just these composite pages printed in the school newspaper.  You've got to be quite a pack rat to have saved this kind of stuff all these years, and that I am.

Then you have to fumble around with the scanner to get the oversize sheets digitized in pieces and stuck together.  Enjoy the memories.

I think I counted about 230 pics here which would be more than 2/3 of the 1963 EH senior class.  However, a fair number of these kids went to Poly after this and we picked up a contingent from Handley at EH. 

Any idea how many 6th grade classes fed this school and from which elementary schools?

Feeders:
    Meadowbrook Elementary
    Tandy Elementary
    Sagamore Hill Elementary

Others??





Adios

Car Development 1900 - 1965

This post is somewhat related to my earlier US highway posting HERE.

Shorpy, an online database of HD scans from very large, very old photograph negatives, is a terrific collection of originals from which to crop out small portions for a closer look at detail. 

Most of their pictures were taken in large cities where such hi-tech inventions as automobiles existed in numbers much greater than out in the hinterlands.  In them, especially NYC, you can actually see the transition from horse-drawn coaches to horseless carriages taking place.

The pictures are roughly spaced about 8-10 years apart in order to better illustrate the change in cars on the road.  The Goofy cartoon is one that I clearly recall from 1950s broadcasts of the Sunday night Walt Disney TV programs.  It depicts what was going on in California during the 1950s, but what Texas would not start seeing until about the 1970s as the highway system was built-out there. 

Adios

The Pointy Haired Boss - More

Reminds me of some of the newcomers I worked with last.  No kidding...

The Pointy-Haired Boss

Scott Adams, Dilbert's originator, has an amazing talent for capturing the essence of today's business management and working atmosphere.  I'm thankful to not be dealing with this kind of crap any longer, but can attest to its accuracy...it's uncanny.

I like to group a few similar strips together and post them here as a means of storing them for later reference.  Hope you enjoy them, too.  But if you don't, no matter...they're in storage for now.


Adios

Substance

Sometimes substance is easy to see; and so is the lack thereof.

If you ever have wanted to call someone on their veracity, call them a liar...saying that they do disservice to the truth is an eloquent way to do it.

Adios

Goatheads

Although I am mostly a product of medium-size city suburbs, much of my boyhood recollections are of a new, post WWII neighborhood living on a street loaded with kids from one end to the other.  Like my Dad, all or certainly most of the fathers living on that street were WWII veterans.  Our street was just a simple, straight thoroughfare with none of the curves and cul-de-sacs characteristic of upscale residential neighborhoods.  No, our neighborhood was a semi-shotgun collection of 3 bedroom, 1 bathroom, 1-car garage brick homes, perhaps 1200-1400 square feet in size.

Living those 5-years in that house had some magic to them.  By a year or two the neighborhood had built out and I was the oldest kid on the block.  That enabled me to choose and lead whatever games the neighborhood kids decided to play.  There were hide-and-seek games that ranged up and down the street for several houses in all directions; trick-riding bicycle rodeos in the street; football games on the front lawn; and baseball games in the back yard.  We could get a baseball game going with only a batter and a pitcher. 

We always played barefoot outside nearly all summer and our young feet would toughen with calluses wherever they came into contact with the ground, which for a kid was pretty much the entire bottom of the feet, except the instep.  Mom would insist that those feet be washed at night, but from what I can remember, it didn’t seem to improve their condition.  However, that toughening of the feet had its upside.  One of the benefits of toughened feet was that not too much bothered you when you stepped on or in something.  The in something part was usually the leavings of a neighborhood dog, which was not of much consequence unless the dog had diarrhea.  Of course if it did, then play was immediately stopped for a quick trip to the garden hose to wash-off, especially between the toes!

A Texas summer is hot and dry requiring that lush lawns be frequently watered—these were the days before sprinkler systems were even a thought in most neighborhoods.  The climate also produced some unique species of vegetation specially acclimated to the hot, dry environment.  As I recall, there were at least 2 distinct varieties of stickers.  One of them could hurt if your feet were not toughened up, or if they found their way to your instep.  But their barbs were fairly soft such that they would bend somewhat and usually fall away as your foot left the scene.  The other sticker was a goathead, so named because of its resemblance to a goat’s skull complete with 2 horns.  They are nasty little buggers that can flatten a bicycle tire and deliver a sharp pain even to calloused young feet.  When they stuck, they stayed stuck, and required the victim to immediately cease his forward motion to remove it.

This obscure subject recently came to mind when I was thinking about how people develop into whatever kind of adults they become, accompanied by a body of experience which for most, is largely different one from another.  My friend, Bob, described his childhood as one that was much different than the childhood I had experienced.  And in trading stories with Bob, I began to understand that such disparate childhood and perhaps young adult memories tend to color our views of what, in a larger societal sense, is a relatively common history.  It’s another version of the North—South societal differences that led to a Civil War, differences that to this day are still evident between the two regions.  Whatever it is, it is a powerful influence.

I thought of all this in the context of goatheads as an adjunct to my thoughts about our disparate Vietnam service experience and our differing political views—each, I think, having their roots in our childhoods and young adult years.  Bob had described his childhood as having been spent in significant part, living in Israel and later, in Los Angeles.  The experience of growing up in either of those places would have been very much different than my own suburban childhood experience.

While I was tumbling down the gentle incline of our front lawn during a football game, Bob told of being chased down a Los Angeles street by a gang of young toughs shouting anti-Semitic taunts.  And while I was being criticized by my 3^rd grade teacher, Mrs. Walsh, for sailing paper airplanes, Bob was being taught by Jewish teachers who displayed the serial numbers that had been tattooed on their arms in Nazi concentration camps.  Bob’s teachers taught him that like the Germans, Americans would come someday to take everything they had.  Thoughts like that are so at odds with my own maturing experience that they defy belief. 

Anyway, as I dug out some old pictures to illustrate this little piece, thoughts of childhood games of baseball, football, fishing, sailing paper airplanes, large post-war classes brought a lot of memories flooding back to mind.  Not a single thought was one of taking something from someone else, or even hearing that notion expressed in my classes or amongst my friends.  We had other things to do, and goatheads to deal with.

Tucson

I'll probably pull this post back after a few days...didn't really want to deal with it.  However, the cartoon someone sent me today was too pointed not to share.  The outrage is, as most of us know, just another incident in a long line of similar senseless violent incidents stretching back at least to JFK and Dallas.  I'm sure there are some actuarial calculations that would accurately predict losses like this over any given period of time.


That's not to diminish the profound loss to the families.  However, the vulgar media and political circus that quickly sprung up immediately after the crime was truly repugnant.  Leftists of all stripes took their wild shots at anything they could, to see if anything stuck.  I think they have been successful in further exposing their own decay.  I don't know what good can come of something like this...but maybe something can.  We can hope.


Adios