'SMOKE IN THE HOUSE'

In three of the years after my wife and I split I lived in one unit of a 4 unit row house downtown that a friend of mine owned.  I was working on the side for him anyway gutting the other 3 units so I didn’t have to go very far for that.  The building was built in 1829 so it had seen many residents and much change in the town.

Often I would hear strange noises coming from the other units, but since some of them didn’t have windows that were too tight, I always figured wind and other stray breezes were the sources of the noises.

One night, though, I had an experience that made me question what had gone on in the house in the years before I lived there.

I awoke at some point on the night in question to see the room filled with ‘smoke’.   Rubbing my eyes to be sure I had not awoken with gunk on my eyes, I could still see the ‘smoke’.  But then my clearer science trained mind took over and I thought that if the room were as smoky as it appeared, I should be able to smell it, which I could not.  At that instant the smoke disappeared.

I was told at some point after that that what I saw was called The Devil’s Smoke. 

There is  a sequel of sorts to this experience.  Some years later I was living up the street and my friend was in the process of working on the unit I had lived in and had the windows out of the room that had been my bedroom.  My friend Virginia and I were walking past it one night when she looked up and said there was a funny light coming from the room.  I remarked that it was probably a reflection form the bright street lights in that area of the street.  Her answer was that it was something else.

For a number of years before I had come to town, there was a family living in that house who had three sons, all of whom were involved in various crimes including one being implicated in a  double murder in the early 70s. 

Was there evil in that house waiting to spring out at whoever chose to live there? I think I came close to finding out on a personal basis.

THE BERWICK THEATER

I’m sure my readers who lived in South Easton Pennsylvania in the 50s and early 60s fondly remember the Berwick Theater.  Situated on the south side of the 500 block of Berwick Street, it was a typical neighborhood theater of the times.  By that I mean it didn’t get any first run movies and usually showed a fare of second run films, B horror films (some of which were really tacky and some were quite good, like the Hammer Films from England), occasionally a 1930s movie serial, and always cartoons. I doubt if anyone from any neighborhood in the city other than South Easton ever attended a show there. South Siders in those years were as thick as thieves. By that I mean if you didn’t actually know a person, more often than not you would at least recognize them or their names, and rarely did I see anyone there who I truly did not know
It was sandwiched in between a small corner store (though it really wasn’t on the corner) and an appliance store. The exterior of the front of the building, from the marquee to the poster cabinets and the walls themselves looked as if passing the theater in a painter’s truck was as close as a bucket of paint had been to the place in many years. This seediness wasn’t just outside either. The lobby, small and dark, had a threadbare carpet that I am sure was seeing the grandchildren of some of its first patrons. It also contained a forlorn popcorn machine and a few mechanical candy machines. A water fountain with perpetually tepid water was on one wall, and two bathrooms with barely functioning facilities were on opposite sides of the lobby, which ran across the theater from side to side after you entered the double doors.
Except for one row of good seats, the auditorium of the theater was just as seedy as the rest of it.  That row of good seats was fought over every week by whatever children happened to be at the head of the line.  Early entry when the doors opened guaranteed that you would not have a seat that was little more than a cushion on the floor, or which contained broken springs that would poke you in the ass if you moved around. The screen was in such bad shape that it actually fell over one Saturday afternoon during a show and they had to give us our money back.
An older couple, Russell and Anna Shafer (unsure of spelling), ran the Berwick Theater. He was a retired carpenter and they ran the theater on weekends. What made them think that having a theater full of sometimes squabbling children would be a good way to spend their retirement, I’ll never know. Russell Shafer sold the tickets and recycled them.  By that I mean the same tickets had been reused so many times that the only way you could tell if it was an adult or child’s ticket was by the color. Mrs. Shafer took the tickets and was also the usher of sorts, walking up and down the aisles like a storm trooper. That is actually a happy memory for me, because as an adult I have come to appreciate what the Shafers provided for those of us on South Side, and what they had to put up with from all of us. She didn’t tolerate moving around or noise of any kind. If we misbehaved, the close nature of South Siders at that time worked against us because usually she knew our parents and they would get a phone call before we got home.  I think they had a projectionist too, but I really don't remember that.
A typical show at the Berwick usually consisted of coming attractions (sometimes given the misnomer of trailers), usually at least one cartoon, sometimes a newsreel, and either 2 B grade movies or a second run A list movie. It was a very pleasant way to spend a Saturday or Sunday afternoon when I was growing up. The lowest price I remember paying as a child was 20 cents and I think the most was 75 cents, though I don’t recall exactly.
As I had said the theater was open on weekends mostly, Friday nights, and then Saturday and Sunday afternoons. But that was just for the movies. The Shafers had it open on Wednesdays during the winter for the KYM (Know Your Master) Club, a sort of winter version of the Vacation Bible Schools that a lot of churches used to run in the summers. I know very little about it other than seeing the signs for it in one of the poster cabinets on the front of the theater and the large letters KYM on the marquee. My cousins Craig and Gail, who lived almost directly across from the theater used to attend sometimes. To my knowledge the Shafers took care of all the expenses of the KYM club themselves, in addition to using the theater for the meetings.
At some point after the Shafers had closed the theater, Mrs. Shafer was walking their German Shepherd on a real rainy day and was unfortunately hit and killed by a driver who did not see her. To this day it saddens me that she died in such a tragic way. I miss her and can still see her face in my mind. The theater fell into disrepair after both the Shafers had passed away, with the roof caving in the final straw. The city tore the remainder down and there is a house on the property now. The Berwick Theater was home to generations of South Siders on the weekends. I can still close my eyes and remember a lot of it like it was almost 55 years ago, when I first attended a show there.

MEMORIES OF LAFAYETTE COLLEGE

It is difficult to distill my feelings on this year being 40 years since I graduated from Lafayette College.  It is not that the experiences I had while a student did not consciously and conspicuously stay with me these last 40 years.  I am ever grateful I have a good degree and had the chance to obtain it from a first rate institution of higher education.  It is just that the necessities of life in the real world have left me with little time to reflect on the experience.

On one level it has been difficult to feel as connected to Lafayette as much as some of us have, and I take full responsibility for that.  Living at home in South Eaton for the entire 9 semesters it took me to get my degree and participating in almost nothing on campus outside my classes I had little connection to the campus when I wasn’t in class.  Greek life didn’t appeal to me either, so I did not have that to add to any feeling of brotherhood while a student.

Further distancing me from involvement were my generally conservative political and social beliefs, which seemed to run counter to what most students in our day wee believing.  I am not saying that most social and political goals were not laudable, I just didn’t’ care for the confrontational style evidenced by most students in their efforts to attaining them. I tended then to have a loner personality and that I am sure contributed to me not joining many activities I could have in those days. 

With all of that I can honestly say I miss our days in college.  I miss the professors we had, many of whom I am sure are no longer with us.  I especially miss Ed Brown, whose course of Russian Literature in English, though and elective, I consider the highlight of my college years, because if you did the voluminous reading for each class,  the student could sit back and really enjoy the process of being taught by a master teacher. 

It may have taken me 9 semesters and a few night school courses to get back on the road to my Lafayette degree, but it was a road I am proud and privileged to have traveled.

THE CAVE

When you are a child growing up there are some activities you just have to do, not because you are supposed to do them, not because you are asked or told to do them, but just because you want to do them.

I have previously written about the Belmont Jungles, the name we boys had for the wooded area behind our houses on Belmont St. in South Easton Pennsylvania.  In the back of the Jungles, near where the truck farm fields started, there was  a slight bank where the terrain of the woods dropped off toward Glendale St., or more properly the right of way of Glendale St. , And a few of us decided this would be a good spot to dig a cave.  What we intended to do with the cave once we had it dug is lost in the mists of time.  Why we were going to do it probably wouldn’t make much sense either.  Let’s just say it was there, we had our folding camp shovels, and we just wanted to dig the cave.

The Belmont Jungle Excavating Company consisted of Roy, Mike, Bill, sometimes Jim, and I.  We took turns digging the dirt and throwing it out of the hole as it got bigger. We must have picked  a good place, because even though we were into the side of a bank in the woods, we didn’t run into any tree roots and no big rocks.

We eventually got the cave big enough that two of us at a time could be in it digging.  Digging went quick because the ground proved to be somewhat damp.  I don’t remember why we stopped, but I know why I wasn’t allowed to dig any more.  Mom and Dad had bought me a new winter coat, and I had been wearing it while I dug, ruining a coat they could ill afford to replace at that time.

THE LAND SPEED RECORD AND I

I have been a fan of land speed record racing ever since learning as a young child that my Aunt Mary Glinsky had babysat Art Arfons, a great competitor in the land speed record wars in the 1960s, when he was a child. I have maintained that interest over the years. There were lean years of course. Land speed record racing seems to go in spurts. But the news in the early 90s, that Richard Noble intended to build a car capable of breaking the sound barrier on land got me going again. When his car was on the Black Rock Desert in 1997 I used to come home from work and go right to my computer, which was in a room on the unused side of my house, and go online to see if Andy Green had done the deed. Before supper and anything else I wanted to know if the crack of a sonic boom had been heard on the Playa outside of Gerlach Nevada.
Land speed racing is mostly a solitary sport, but once, in 1960 on the Bonneville Salt Flats, there was a group of five land speed racers together at the same time, the legendary Great Confrontation. They were:

1. Nathan Ostich, a California surgeon whose Flying Caduceus, was the first jet powered land speed racer
2. Mickey Thompson, whose Challenger I, powered by 4 blown Pontiac V-8s would come so close to the wheel-driven record
3. Athol Graham, whose City of Salt Lake was powered by a huge Allison V-12 aircraft engine but was hampered by 2 wheel drive.
4. Art Arfons, whose Anteater, so named for its long snout, was also Allison powered but had 4 wheel drive. He would go on to set numerous records with a car powered by a huge GE J-79 jet engine.
5. Donald Campbell son of the great Malcolm Campbell, with his gas-turbine powered Bluebird, which, when rebuilt after a disastrous crash, would actually hold the world wheel-driven record set in Australia.
6. While he wasn't yet setting land speed records, I am sure Craig Breedlove was there too. His day would come very soon.

Never since has such a Great Confrontation of land speed racers occurred.

But even they could not have imagined what Andy Green hopes to do, probably in 2012.   On the Hakskeen Pan, ad dry lake bed in South Africa, he will strap himself into Richard Noble's Bloodhound SSC, accelerate to 350 MPH with a conventional jet engine and then fire a rocket engine that should have him up to 1043 MPH.  That's right. Over 1000 MPH on land. 

If that isn't enough, Waldo Stakes is designing a car around an Atlas missile motor that he expects to do Mach 2, almost 1500 MPH.  Theoretically it should do Mach 3 on land.

McADOO ASSOCIATES

We were living in McAdoo around the time McAdoo Associates became active in he mid 70s. I was working at the Purolator Oil Filter plant outside Ringtown.  I had been hired to be trained as second shift quality supervisor but as it turned out only had to spend occasional time on a second shift, when we were building aircraft oil filters, which as you might suspect, were made to much tighter standards than the equivalent auto filter.

My boss, the quality manager, had decided to resign and move back to Iowa, where he had come from when that plant had been shuttered.  I essentially did his job and mine for over a year, and never had gotten any complaints.  But in that time we had acquired a new division quality director, and when he was ready to fill the quality manager position, I was told I would not be considered.  I saw that as the same as telling me that I could not advance where I was at. 

Prior to the above phone call by several months, I had acquired a portable water testing kit, and had been doing some ad hoc testing for McAdoo Associates.  Since I had been given the message that I would help train the quality manager replacement and that he would be over me, I convinced the owner of McAdoo Associates he needed me full time.  As you will see in subsequent entries, most of the time want I did was only related to testing by the slimmest of threads, but it paid a little better than Purolator and it was only about 3 miles from home so that helped.

What they were attempting to do there was to come up with a way to dispose of the myriad kinds of industrial waste discharge by many different companies both local and out of the area.  We tried to burn a lot of the stuff we got in, because there were a lot of organics in them that burned easily, but unfortunately we were told to dump a lot out on the ground or take it to another property the owner owned in town and put it into a tank that formerly held fuel oil and had been partially dug up and had holes punch in the bottom.  I remember the owner being ticked that the slop we put into the tank wasn’t running out fast enough. 

There is  a lot more I could add, but I would have to write  a book to fully explain what went on there and its part in helping me formulate my attitude about industrial waste disposal.  Anyone who cares to hear more can write me at drjekyll@hazleton.net or call me.  I am in the book in Weatherly, Pa. 

HOW THEY LEFT US KNOW

We had only been aware for 2 months of Mom’s breast cancer, which had metastasized throughout her body by the time she let on that she thought she had a problem.  On the weekend when she left us, she had asked Dad to call the ambulance, as she couldn’t’ get out of bed to get to the bathroom. 

By Monday she was fading fast.  I had decided to go to work, reasoning I can wait for a phone call anywhere.  My wife called early in the afternoon and told me Dad had called and told us that Mom had died.  I called him from work, and he told me he had been to the hospital just before noon and found her disconnected from much of the equipment.  The staff told him nothing, having been told be their doctor that he was a heart patient and to tell him nothing. 

He went back home and was sitting in his recliner, not really thinking of anything in particular, and he heard her voice call his name.  Five minutes later the hospital called to tell him she was gone.  I told him that when she was passing through the doorway that separates this world from the next she turned around to say goodbye to him.

I didn’t know, but 2 years later when Dad died he would let me know that he made it to the other side as well.  Dad had been going downhill from congestive heart failure from October to July, when he died.  My wife was pregnant the entire time with our youngest son.  Dad got to see Scott when he was 2 weeks old.  Two weeks later we had him baptized, and the day after Dad was put on the critical list and the day after that he died. I firmly believe Dad lived to see his third grandchild baptized to God’s care and love.  I also believe that when he baptism was complete, he felt a gentle tap on the shoulder  and was told that he didn’t’ have to hold on any longer, that his race on earth could now be completed.

But I digress form my story.  The day he died I had to go in early to work to get our pilot machine started.  As I sat in the kitchen getting my lunch organized, I saw the shadows in the kitchen move very distinctly.  No vehicle had passed outside.  I got to work at 6 and  a half hour later my brother called and told me Dad had died. 

When we got to the funeral home later that day, I asked the F.D. what time was on Dad’s death certificate.  He told me 6AM.  I told him I thought it was a little before that.

HOW I CAME TO McADOO ASSOCIATES

We were living in McAdoo around the time McAdoo Associates became active in he mid 70s. I was working at the Purolator Oil Filter plant outside Ringtown.  I had been hired to be trained as second shift quality supervisor but as it turned out only had to spend occasional time on a second shift, when we were building aircraft oil filters, which as you might suspect, were made to much tighter standards than the equivalent auto filter.

My boss, the quality manager, had decided to resign and move back to Iowa, where he had come from when that plant had been shuttered.  I essentially did his job and mine for over a year, and never had gotten any complaints.  But in that time we had acquired a new division quality director, and when he was ready to fill the quality manager position, I was told I would not be considered.  I saw that as the same as telling me that I could not advance where I was at. 

Prior to the above phone call by several months, I had acquired a portable water testing kit, and had been doing some ad hoc testing for McAdoo Associates.  Since I had been given the message that I would help train the quality manager replacement and that he would be over me, I convinced the owner of McAdoo Associates he needed me full time.  As you will see in subsequent entries, most of the time want I did was only related to testing by the slimmest of threads, but it paid a little better than Purolator and it was only about 3 miles from home so that helped.

AGMET

The next future Super Fund site I had contact with I actually worked at.

Agmet had been started to reprocess the silver nitrate from obsolete x-rays back into silver. The basic process was to use an acid bath to strip the silver nitrate from the x-rays and process it back into silver electrolyticly. 

I answered an ad right after New Years Day 1973 for a chemist.  I had been laid off from the research lab at General Foam at the end of the year and my wife was pregnant with who proved to be our oldest son, Kyle.  They had bought an atomic absorption spectrophotometer(AAS) and all the necessary accessories, with the idea they would be able to tell when an electrolytic bat, of which they had several, was loaded up on silver and should be changed.

They wanted someone temporary who could set it up and get it running and then train their main lab technician, who didn’t know anything about AASs, to operate it.  At that pointing my life I had not been out of work so many times or so long that I was desperate enough to take something that was not intended to be permanent, but I thought why not.  I had run one at Allentown Testing Labs right out of college, and as it turned out, Manny, the man who ran the plant, knew nothing about them, which turned into an advantage for me I suppose.

Anyway I wasn’t hired off the interview and went back home.  I think they didn’t want to have to pay someone with a degree.  Anyhow after about 3 weeks, I hadn’t found anything else, and told my wife that they were not going to get too many people in off the street that knew anything about AASs, a sit was  a comparatively new technology at the time, so I called them back and yes, they hadn’t gotten anyone and I should come back in for  a talk.  I got the job.

I found out years later that their location, between Lofty and Delano (named after the family of FDR’s mother, who had coal lands in the area years ago) southwest of McAdoo, Pa., had been put on the Super Fund list.  I think it may have been abandoned at some point by the owners with a lot of acids and plastic x-ray substrate sheets left lying around.

A foot note to this story.  Many years later I came into possession of the AAS I had been asked to set up at Agmet, how is not germane to the present discussion. It was long since rendered not usable by years of abandonment, but I still have it.

ECHO CHEMICAL/DeREWAL CHEMICAL SUPERFUND SITE

As and addendum to the last post, the DeRewals brothers were wanted in several states for the practice of midnight dumping.  They would take a tanker of waste chemicals, stop along the road and open the drain a crack and drive off dripping whatever was in the tank out into the environment, where you or I would get it on ourselves or wonder why we had these spots on the finish of our cars.

ECHO CHEMICAL/DeREWAL CHEMICAL SUPERFUND SITE

The next Super Fund site I was associated with was the Echo Chemical/DeRewal Chemical location in Revere, Pa.  on the south side of 611 between the bend at the road to Upper Black Eddy and the 412 turn off to the right.

Norbert and Manfred DeRewal operated several companies and locations, the facility in revere being one of them.  There were others in New Jersey and North Carolina, where I understand they were from.

Typically their companies took in spent industrial amounts of acids, such as those used in pickling baths, and either disposed of them or as in the case of the Revere location, used acid baths to strip the copper off rejected and obsolete printed circuit boards.

At Revere they had a large number of outdoor, unlined lagoons holding thousands of gallons of these waste acids, some of which were leaking into local surface water streams.

Dr. Crockett, my faculty adviser at Lafayette, asked me to go along with he and an undergraduate whose name I have forgotten, to Revere for an initial look-see at the location, which was not secure at that time.  I don’t’ know if he asked me just because he wanted another student involved, or if it was because I was familiar with the area, had my own car, and could provide transportation to the fellow who was actually investigating Echo for a project. Dr. Crockett drove us down the first time, which was going to be just to see what it was we would be dealing with.

The site had been abandoned by the DeRewals at some point before we went there the first time.  The office had been thoroughly vandalized and what office papers that hadn’t been removed by the owners were strewn around the floor, and what laboratory equipment had been left was smashed on the floor of the lab. A building next to the lab which had a leaky roof had several uncovered drums containing some sort of powder.  The other student and I mapped the lagoons so we would have enough sample containers when we came back to do sampling.

I don’t’ know much about the subsequent history of the site, or the efforts it took to clean it up, but if you drive past it now it is covered with brush and small trees and fenced in.  There are old newspaper reports online that provide more details about the cleanup.

PENNSALT CHEMICAL SUPERFUND SITE

Over the course of my childhood I have had the ‘pleasure’ of having connections to 4 industrial locations that subsequently were put on the Super Fund list – one that I grew up near, one I assisted one of my friends investigate during the years I attended Lafayette College, majoring in Chemistry, and 2 I actually worked for.  I gather working for Super Fund sites was and is an occupational hazard of chemists.

I grew up near a small industrial site that housed a former PennSalt Chemical facility.  In the years after the site was abandoned by PennSalt, parts of it were occupied by a shooting range for a local gun club, Deal Products, which manufactured industrial scaffolding, Wyatt Automotive, and buildings used for storage by Brownie the Junkman and by an unlined landfill.

I grew up on the last street south in South Easton, Pennsylvania and we could see the industrial area that included the abandoned PennSalt plant from our house about a half mile away.  The PennSalt plant had been abandoned when PennSalt moved whatever it was that was produced there to a plant in Bristol.  My neighbor Roy Schirner, who worked there in a capacity unknown to me, moved there with his wife, and her sister, who lived with them up the street.

There were a number of buildings abandoned when PennSalt made their move, but the material they left in large heaps on their property most likely contributed to the site’s designation on the Super Fund list.  I remember it as being gray to white and not all that heavy.  One area where some had obviously removed was where the gun club has their shooting range. As children we would actually play around on these heaps of material with no apparent harm. 

In later years, Chrin’s started a local landfill there, unlined in the late 50s, and that contributed to the Super Fund designation probably more than the chemical plant.  I remember driving past that landfill on a windy day and seeing the fence rows festooned with trash that sometimes blew out of the landfill faster than they could cover it with earth. 

This is not the same identical location as the lined landfill Chrin operates on another part of the site presently.  The current landfill is operated by current landfill regulations and does not exhibit the smells or other problems of the first landfill.  They can only take so much in a day and has to be covered to the specified depth by the end of the day.  There are monitoring wells for water quality and methane gas, a byproduct of all landfills, at various locations in the immediate area. 

The size this landfill has grown to, serving a small area as it does, indicates to me that we have to come up with a better way of handling municipal waste, whether it be recycling any waste there is a use for, or finding ways to produce less household and industrial waste.  I think incineration with scrubbers on the flue gas is the way to go.  Resulting would be an inert ash that if land filled would take up far less space than what is currently placed into landfills. Of course this ash would need to be continuously tested, so chemists like me would be needed.  Many of the tests can be automated or done with instruments.

AN ENCOUNTER ON AN ICY, SNOWY ROAD

One of my earlier blogs concerned a pocket watch my father got for Christmas one year from the owner of a greenhouse he worked for as  a teenager.  This next one occurred several years later, when he wa sin his early 20s.

One of his jobs was to drive the owner's Pierce Arrow truck to Philly to Third and Arch Sts. to pick up flowers and supplies.  This was a round trip of about 3 hours on a good day and that included getting the truck loaded.  I have driven to Philly on the roads before the Doylestown bypass was completed and I cna't imagine how fast he had to be driving.

It was  a snowy day, and while the truck had a heater of sorts to protect the flowers, it didn't' have a defroster, which meant he had to stop every few miles and scrape the windows so he could see to drive.  Somewhere below Doylestown he stopped to pick up a hitchhiking salesman, who proved to want to get to Easton also.  he was one of these salesmen I remember from my youth.  They come around door to door and have just about anything in a huge trunk they carry with them.

After seeing Dad stop every few miles to scrape the windows, he said that he had something in his case that would help.  Dad started thinking he could have a gun in the case for all he knew.  The man opened his case and pulled out a stick of something lie mustache wax or butch wax, got out and smeared it on the windshield and side windows. Dad had no more icy buildup to deal with for the rest of the trip.

How Not To Deliver A Refrigerator

I have known my friend Clark since we were both students at Easton High School 40 years ago. How I got to know him is a subject for another story, but he told me this years ago and I still laugh at the visual image it presents.
Clark, like many young people, had had quite a few part time jobs in those days. One of them, taken after he was married to his first wife, was delivery man for Val Lanshe, who owned a large appliance store on South 3^rd St in downtown Easton. This anecdote concerns a particular delivery he had to make, with a partner.
I have to set this up a bit. In those days you could still get refrigerators for the home which ran on gas. Don't ask me how that worked, but it was very common. These gas refrigerators were also very heavy. Nowadays the only gas refrigerators are commercial units, and the 3 way refrigerators found in motor homes and travel trailers. The apartment building from where they had to remove this refrigerator was of a design where the steps were straight up from the first to the third floor from just inside the front door, with a landing at the second floor. These two details are important to the subsequent events.
Clark and his delivery partner had to deliver a side by side refrigerator, not known for being light and/or svelte either and remove the old gas refrigerator from a third floor apartment, in a building laid out like I have just described. After struggling to successfully get the side by side into the apartment, they began the trek down with the old and heavy gas refrigerator, with Clark on the bottom and his buddy holding the dolly to which refrigerator was strapped.
Half way down the flight of steps from the third to second floors, Clark's buddy lost this grip on the dolly's handles. Clark, not being desirous of being run over by the runaway refrigerator, jumped over the railing to the second floor hallway, fortunately not hurting himself in the process. The dolly and refrigerator, with no human hand to retard it, went end over end down the remaining flight and a half of steps and through the front door, which unhappily was closed at the time. The refrigerator wound up dented and bent in the middle of the street.
The repairs to the apartment house cost in the neighborhood of $1500, because the stairs were all Philippine mahogany, and the front door had an antique stained glass window in it. The amazing thing is that after all that, the refrigeration unit still worked when they got it back to the shop!

AIRLINE SAFETY

I read a column on the USA Today written by a retired airline pilot on the subject of airline safety and I woudl like to add a few comments from my own limited experience flying the friendly skies.

I have only flown twice, once to Freeport in the Bahamas on my honeymoon and then 36 years later when my youngest son gifted me with a  trip to visit him in Hawaii.I wasn't worried for the first trip, and unlike some friends of mine who asked me if I was worried about flying so far and out over the Pacific for a good deal of the trip, I was not in the least worried about any safety issues at all.  It is in everyone's best interest for the flight to be uneventful.  The crew can fly the plane and I cannot so I tend to trust in the experience of the crew.  Sure problems can happen, but they train for that.

Taking off from Philly was a little disconcerting because it was before dawn and into a cloud bank, but I figured the crews and air traffic controllers do this all the time. Flying over the Pacific was uneventful due I am sure to the great skill of the pilots.  When we hit bumpy air you could tell by the sounds of the engines the pilot was climbing to get over the bumpy air.  Only once did it so bumpy that he told the cabin crew to go to their seats and buckle in.  Again I didnt' feel danger in any way because I am sure the crew has encountered bumpy air many tiems and knew what to do.

It is a bit concerning coming into Honolulu because they come in at so steep an angle, but again I figured they had done this before.

For all of you male chauvinists out there, the pilots on the return leg from Houston to Philadelphia were two very capable female pilots.  They obviously had similar skills and experience to the male pilots on the other legs of the out and back flight.

For what it is worth, the roads into and out of the Philadelphia Airport are designed to get you in and out quickly.  Everything is well marked and getting there from where I live in Northeast Pa., aside from the obviously longer trip involved, is no harder than getting to the airport at Avoca, which is only about 40 minutes from my home.

THINK BEFORE YOU SPEAK

The following was told by George Jessel, the "toastmaster general", when asked to give  a short opening speech at an affair many years ago, using the idea of thinking before you speak.

 An Arab, the last survivor of a caravan attacked by thieves, was crawling toward what he thought was a distant oasis when he came upon a lamp half buried in the sand.  Thinking that perhaps it was like the Alladin's lamp of his childhood desert fairy tales, he rubbed it and instantly a genie appeared.

The genie said to the Arab "I am the genie of the lamp and because you have freed me, you get three wishes.  Do you have a first wish, master?"

The Arab thought a moment and replied "Yes".  I woudl like a caravan to replace the caravan I lost to thieves."

The genie said "Turn around and gaze on the largest caravan that ever existed in Arabia."  The Arab could not believe that many camels existed in all of Arabia. 

The genie then asked "Do you have a second wish, oh master?" and the Arab replied "Yes.  I would like to have a palace larger than any that has ever been seen in these parts."

The genie replied "If you just walk over this sand dune master, I think you will like what you see."  The Arab was greeted by the sight of a palace stretching from right to left as far as he could see.  None this large had ever existed before.

The genie then said "You ahve one more wish master.  Do you want to use it now?"

The Arab thought for a moment and said " I wish that all Jews in the world had never existed." 

Instantly the Arab was back in the desert, miserable as ever.

There is  amoral to the is story an it is that he should have thought before he spoke  You never know when you will meet  a Jewish genie.

TEAM TEACHING

I want to tell you dear reader of a teaching experiment about 100 of my fellow class of 1964 classmates and I were a part of the three years we were in Easton High School.  It was called Team Teaching and the basic function was simple enough – the first three periods of the day we would have History, Algebra II, and English (these were a sophomores. juniors and seniors had different courses but the idea was the same) and the 4^th period was a common class, usually a study hall but sometimes used for programs we were all to see or take part in. 

The first hurdle was getting selected for the group of about 100 students the program could take from each graduating class.  Considering that our class eventually had over 600 graduate, that meant roughly 2 in 13 would get selected.  At my junior high there were 5 individual homerooms with probably about 160 students.  Which meant there were between  20 and 25 of us chosen from that school.

Here is the problem.  Since this program was conceived as an academic program, or at least that is how it operated, a student whose aptitude lay in areas other than strict academic pursuits, such as in business or in vo-tech (we called it shop then), had no chance to be selected for this program no matter how good they were.  I would draw attention to 3 people who were not academic (read that in college prep) but who proved to be quite capable in their fields.

Jim took printing and specialized in the Linotype.  The print shop teacher told my father, who worked at the school, that people a scapable as Jim, come along once in a  generation.  Ed and Alice were 2 of the 7 of our fellow graduates who graduated with perfect 4.0grade point averages and they majored in business. 

ARE THEY URBAN LEGENDS?

The two incidents I will recount on this page could easily be discounted as urban legends and consigned to those stories which have a ring of truth and sound neat, but in the first case I actually heard the exchanges on a radio station sell it yourself type of program, and in the second case I was personally acquainted with the couple who made the incredible buy.

1953 Chevy

I heard both days of this tale on a tiny radio station in Shenandoah, Pa. some time in mid 1977. I had been working in the Purolator Oil Filter plant in Ringtown ,actually between Krebs Station and Pattersonville, which is in a pleasant farming valley just north of Shenandoah. The radio station aforementioned is one of the few whose signal is strong enough to be received in this area.
On the first day in reference, a lady called up and said she had her late husband's 1953 Chevy she wanted to sell on the Dutch Trader program. This was a program where private individuals could advertise items for sale, up to a certain dollar amount, for free, and they would be doing it live on the radio (well maybe with a 7 second delay, but close enough). He had died a few months previously and she could see no reason to keep it. She offered to sell it for $500. This was at a time when a 1953 Chevy was nearly a legal antique automobile in Pennsylvania, and $500 would have been an excellent price regardless of the vehicle's condition.
The next day a gentleman called the show and asked the host if he remembered the ad for the 1953 Chevy. The host replied that he indeed did and still had it on the list he kept in front of him on the air. The caller then said that the program really worked. He had called the lady and was given directions to her small farm somewhere near there in the country area. The lady told him that the Chevy was in the barn and would most likely be dirty and covered up with straw and who knows what else. Her husband had stored the vehicle at some point before he died and it hadn't been run in quite a while. When the caller got to the barn he could not believe his eyes. What the lady was selling for $500 and what he bought was a original, but not pristine after its stay in the barn, 1953 Chevy CORVETTE!
This was surely the find of the century. There had only been a few hundred 1953 Corvettes built and any one available at all would command a premium price.

Cheap El Camino

Our friend JoAnne had married Bruce in the late 1960s. Bruce was a car enthusiast who wanted nothing more than to restore a Chevy El Camino. An El Camino was a pickup truck built on a car platform, so that it had the general lines of the car on whose platform it was built, but had a pickup bed in the back. The Ford Ranchero was a Ford clone of the El Camino.
On a drive through the Poconos at some point in the late 1960s, Bruce and JoAnne came across an El Camino against a barn on a small farm, nearly hidden by a huge snow pile. Stopping, they asked the farmer if the El Camino was for sale. They were told that it belonged to the farmer's son, and he was serving in Viet Nam at the time. The farmer offered to write and ask if the vehicle were for sale and took their name and phone number down.
A month or so later, they got a phone message that the farmer's son had written home and told his father to sell the El Camino and everything that went with it for $75. As the El Camino was little more than a shell, this seemed a fair price. When they went to pay and arrange to have it brought to their home, Bruce and JoAnne got the shock of their life. Everything that went with it included a new 350HP 327 Small Block Chevy engine that had never been uncrated. The engine was worth around $500 at that time.

IN MEMORY OF TIGER 1992-2000

I'm a housecat
Born in and of the wild
Orphaned with my littermates
By the only predator my mother couldn't outrun - a car.
Rescued by The Tall One
Warmed in his jacket
I traveled to a new life
Far from the scene of my sorrow.

I'm a housecat
Taken to my new home
So small a little dish was my litter pan
I grew fast as I learned my new home
Curious as a cat could be
Anything and everything I tried
Stuck in a ceiling
Or locked in a closet
Were all in a day for me.

I'm a housecat
I ask very little of my masters
(I let them think that!)
Fresh water, clean food
Clean litter and love
I have plenty of all of them.

I'm a housecat
Please don't be angry if I pounce on you
I'm only being as my wild cousins
Have been for centuries
Don't reward my instincts with a beating or a kick
But I promise you
That I'll reward
A dangled string
Or a scratch on the ear
With the contented purr
Of a contented cat.

(Tiger came to me as an orphaned kitten of a road kill mother in July 1992.
He died peacefully on July 5, 2000 at home, with his family and fellow cats
Socks and Daphanie, and best buddy Baby, the shepherd/huskie mix with
whom he shared our home.  Tiger is passing eternity in my garden, where Baby
joined him in January 2003.  They will be missed.)

Incident on A Quiet Saturday Afternoon

INTRODUCTION

The following is based on a real experience my wife and I had years ago. The meat of the story is a figment of my imagination, but the feeling was very real then, as it still is more than 30 years later. I have not used the lady's real name.

---

Jean and I had been looking for a house to rent closer to my work. I had recently taken a position as assistant chief chemist at a cement plant which was an hour away from where we were living. This was in the middle of the so called energy crisis of the mid 1970s, and that, coupled with the long hills I had to drive, made it imperative to find a place closer to my work.
This meant I spent a lot of my lunch hours and breaks either scanning the want ads or checking houses out, if they were close to my workplace. On this particular Friday, I had found an ad for a half double house, 3 bedrooms, off street parking, and near to where I had grown up. So I decided to call, as anywhere in that area was about 1/2 hour from my work and on almost level roads.
I dialed the number and was immediately struck by the odd sound of the ring. It had a very old sound to it. Phones at the time of the call generally had a very subdued ring. This was like the clanging of a Philadelphia trolley bell, loud and strong. Presently it was answered.
"Yes." a female voice answered. The voice was not strong, but not weak either. It sounded like someone in her early 20s who was accustomed to speaking at a very low volume. "May I help you?"
"I am interested in the house you have advertised for rent." I continued. "What can you tell me that wasn't in the ad?"
"There isn't a whole lot more. It is three bedrooms, kitchen, bath, and a small half bath on the first floor." She added, "There is a full basement, but only part of it is cemented. The cemented part stays dry, and my tenants usually use it for storage. The attic isn't much more than a crawl space."
"What utilities are included? "
" The rent includes heat and sewer. You pay your own water, electric, and garbage."
"Is there a yard? Our son is 6 months old and we want to be sure we have a yard for him."
'Yes there is a big yard. He will have a lot of fun in this yard as he grows. You can put in whatever gardens you care to. "
Then I asked the big question. "How much is the rent?"
"There is a lot of expense in maintaining a home. I hope the rental doesn't put you off. I have to get at least $40 a month to make it worthwhile."
I nearly dropped the phone in amazement. Forty dollars was a quarter to a half of other rents I had been quoted, and none of them included heat.
"Would you like to see the house?" the same frail voice asked.
"Yes" I said, barely able to conceal my glee at finding the rent steal of the century.
"Will Saturday at 1 PM be agreeable?"
"Yes, we will be there." For that rent, 1 AM would have been agreeable.
"Very well.  The house is across from the big electronics on Butler St. in the township. My name is Mrs. Brandt."
After I hung up, I mused "No one could approach breaking even today with that rent. She is either very naive or very clever. There must be something about that house she hasn't told me." Tomorrow we would find out exactly what she hadn't told us, but it would involve something we could never anticipate.
Driving home in the afternoon, I figured out what was so strange about Mrs. Brandt's telephone. Its clanging ring reminded me of the telephones I remembered as a young child, almost as if Mrs. Brandt had the original phone installed in the house.
Upon arriving home I related the phone call to Jean along with the strange feelings I had. "It must be a dump for that price." she said, as incredulous as I had been. "Let's forget this one."
"Maybe she does have an old phone." Jean added, seemingly as an afterthought. "What have we got to lose? We were going to visit your mother and father anyway. Checking this house out will be just a pleasant little side trip. It maybe the only bargain we find."
Next Day
Saturday at 1 PM found Jean and I parking in the driveway of a house I remembered seeing many times as a child, visiting an uncle and my grandparents, both of whom lived in that area. The driveway was in a stand of tall hemlocks, which nearly blotted all traces of sunlight from Mrs. Brandt's side of the house.
The front door bell was an old twist bell, non-electric and very loud.
"Please go to the side door." A female voice said from behind heavy curtains. From the voice on the phone, and now the voice behind the curtains, I imagined Mrs. Brandt to be relatively young like we were, in our late 20s.
"This place is creepy." Jean said. "Let's leave."
She had picked up on the same strange feeling the house and grove of trees were giving me, as I began to remember more from having passed that way as a child.
"The house doesn't look like it has changed one bit since I was a kid. Same color, Same driveway." I said, stifling the feeling that these were the trees I remembered them, exactly as I remembered them, no larger than they had been 20 years ago.
Despite the common urge to leave, we walked to the side door. Mrs. Brandt opened it promptly and invited us in.
"Sit down while I put a kettle on for tea." she said pleasantly, ushering us into her middle downstairs room. "I must apologize for not letting you in the front door. I haven't used it in years."
She went to the kitchen as I whispered to my wife , "This place sure is dark isn't it ?"
"It gives me the creeps and so does she ." my wife whispered back as we both surveyed the room . The darkness was suffocating , despite several lights, which seemed only to carve little pockets of light in the otherwise gloomy darkness of the house interior.
The woodwork was varnished and the wallpaper was darker shades of blue and gray. The curtains, so tightly drawn that only little whispers of light, penetrated the darkness, prevented us from seeing anything outside the house.
"This place doesn't look like it has been redecorated since the war either." I whispered to my wife as Mrs. Brandt return with a steaming teapot and plate of homemade cookies. My wife nodded agreement as Mrs. Brandt put the tray down on the coffee table and settled into a well-worn arm chair.
"Let's chat for a while and have our tea." she said as she turned on another light. It really didn't help the darkness, but enable us to have our first good look at her.
Mrs. Brandt was a short lady of rather pale complexion (not surprising for someone living in such darkness), someone passed middle age. She wore a a dark blue skirted the suit which look as pre-war is everything else in the room. I had a gut feeling my wife and I had stepped into Mrs. Brandt's past. Her voice , while sounding similar to the voice on the phone and at the front door, sounded oddly more mature in person.
"I'll show you the house in a minute. But I must tell you there's no way I can change the rent from $40.00." She said as if to apologize for allowing us the opportunity to rip her off.
"I would have expected rents to be much higher here." I replied.
Her cryptic reply was "I think my asking rent is too high."
"When can we see the house?" I asked, wondering what kind of house rents for 1/4 the going price in the area.
"Right away. Please follow me out the back door." she said as she arose and led us through the kitchen toward the back door.
The kitchen, by contrast to the rest of the downstairs, was light and airy with the curtains drawn back and bright colors on the walls and woodwork. Mrs. Brandt had gone on ahead of us to unlock the back door of the rental side of the house. "Something bothers me about this entire situation." I said to my wife quietly.
"Sh. She is coming." my wife replied.
"Would you please give me a hand? The door is stuck." Mrs. Brandt asked.
The three of us got the door opened quickly, and my wife and I found the rental half to be a mirror image of Mrs. Brandt's side. It was painted in bright colors, and with no curtains at the windows, the afternoon sun streamed in. We toured the house in 10 minutes and retraced out steps through Mrs. Brandt's kitchen to her dark and gloomy parlor.
"We'd like to think about it a bit. "I said .
"I have wash to put away upstairs. "she said . "When I'm done you can tell me what you have decided." With that she disappeared up the steps.
"Something bothers me here." I said to my wife as I ambled to the front door. "Like there is something she hasn't or won't tell us, and now I think I know what it is. When we were on the front porch, did you think it was a younger or and older lady who spoke to us from behind the curtain?"
"It sounded like a younger woman." she replied, giving me a look that said she felt very uneasy. "Maybe she has a daughter we just haven't seen yet."
"Possibly. But how many chairs did you see at the kitchen table when we were in the kitchen?"
"One."
"If there were two people living here, wouldn't there be two chairs at the table?"
"I'm sure there is an explanation for that, but let's not wait around to hear it." my wife replied, still uneasy.
I suddenly had a suspicion of something else in this matter. Peering out from the curtains thickly covering the front door, I wasn't totally shocked to see cars predating WWII on the street and at the curbs. Motioning my wife over I showed her.
"Maybe a parade is passing?" she suggested.
"And left a vintage car in everyone's parking spot?"
"What other answer is there?"
"As impossible as it sounds, these two rooms must be in a time warp, stuck in Mrs.. Brandt's past." I said, groping for the right words.
"What about he kitchen and sideyard?" my wife continued. "They seem firmly rooted in the present."
"The kitchen archway must be a portal to what we know as our present, a sort of doorway between the time these rooms were the present, and what we see as our present. Remember, our present is only the present for an instant, then it becomes our past. Something stopped that process here. These rooms never became anyone's past. We See them as the past because, where we came from, they have been the past for many years. But here they are always the present."
"What about the front door?"
"Since these rooms are the past, that is where the doorbell rang, in the past. Mrs. Brandt, as a much younger lady, talked to us through the door."
"Why do we see her as older?"
"Perhaps we see her as older because we expect to see an older woman. Beyond that I haven't been able to work it out yet."
"Why don't we see our present outside from the window?"
"Apparently, if we are dealing with a time warp, it can only pass time in one direction. What we know as our present can't pass through this crazy time warp backwards so that we can see it. Mrs. Brandt is asking such a low rent because even she believes it is actually 1943 a little bit."
"Then who or what did she see when we were on the front porch, and who was seeing us? The Mrs. Brandt that we would expect to see in our present, or the Mrs. Brandt who is stuck in a 1943 time warp?"
"I don't know for sure, but I don't want to stay here any longer. Let's find her and leave."
With that we turned around and were both startled to see Mrs. Brandt standing there with a benign, pleasant smile on her face.
"I see you have discovered my little secret, so I guess I should tell you the whole story. I will understand if you don't wish to rent the house, but please hear me out before you go."
Neither of us really wanted to stay, but Mrs. Brandt seemed both frightened and relieved, so we sat down in the parlor again.
"My husband and I were a young married couple like yourselves when we bought this house at Christmas 1942. We had such grand plans. But he received his draft notice 3 months later. I promised him I would wait here for the war's end and for him to return to me through the front door. As he stood in the doorway, he said "Keep these two rooms exactly as they are now so I will recognize them when I come home."
"Fifteen months later I received the telegram stating he had been killed on Omaha Beach. I didn't want to believe it and rashly wished time would stand still until my husband returned home. In these two rooms and what can be seen out the front door and windows, it has. That is why I keep the curtains tightly drawn too. Any visitors I have won't be able to see that the outside seen from in here isn't what they see when they are outside."
"I wonder why time hasn't stood still all around the house. The driveway looks just as we left it, when I looked out the side door."
"I wish I knew." she replied now sounding tired and strangely distant.
"Why not open the front door?"
"I promised my husband I would open it only for him, no one else."
"It seems that you have accepted that your husband has been dead these many years. Why not open the door now?"
Mrs. Brandt replied, "Since a silly wish made time stand still, I have been afraid of what might happen."
My wife and I turned to head out the side door when Mrs. Brandt called out, "Will you help me open the front door? Perhaps my husband hasn't come home because the door has never been open for him."
We were scared to say the least, but we walked with Mrs. Brandt to the front door, unlocked it, and helped her pull it open. We still saw the old cars passing. We both said goodbye to her and stepped through he doorway.
At the instant we passed through the doorway, there was a blinding pulse of light, and the sound and feel of rushing wind passing us into the house. When the light dimmed and the rushing ceased, we found ourselves on the front porch in what we knew as our present.
"What was that?" my wife asked dazedly.
"Only a soldier coming home from Omaha Beach." I replied, dazed myself.
When we got to the car my wife asked, "Could we? Did we?"
"How?" I replied with a question. "We must have had the wrong house. That one doesn't look like it has been lived in for many years."

THE SHOWER ROOM AT BREAKER #7, HARLEIGH, PA.

The baskets hang there forlorn and forgotten

Waiting for those who will never again come

Forgotten shavers and dried cakes of soap

Never again to do that which they had done

So many years ago when voices rang

And stinging water flowed

Washing away the dark grit

Of countless days in the mines

The men are gone and no longer

Is there the cacophony of voices

In all the languages of the world

Swirling above the benches and lockers

Only the silent baskets remained

To remind us of the men

Who once used them

Now even the shower house is gone

Nothing remains to tell us

Of what was once there

Of the countless hours

Spent underground by countless men

Damaging their health to keep the fires burning.