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.