I subscribe to SpotTheStation, which tells you when you may be able to spot the International Space Station (ISS). Most of the time it’s at too low an angle (behind buildings or trees) or too late/early (or also too cloudy). Today, however:
Time: Sat Sep 17 7:44 PM, Visible: 7 min, Max Height: 89°, Appears: 10° above SW, Disappears: 10° above NE
Almost straight overhead and before my bedtime!
I walked to the park across 55th and got a great look at it until it disappeared 10º above NE. Even in all the light pollution. It took about six minutes from the time I spotted it until it disappeared. Here it is toward the end.
My dad would have loved this. We watched for the burn-up of Skylab together but conditions weren’t right. Still a great moment. And on the way home from family’s house in Eden, we saw a meteorite, which we were both thrilled over. Two of my fondest dad memories.
Beginning with my paternal grandparents, we move on to my parents, my dad’s family, and my brother — characters, each and every one. Arranged roughly in chronological order.
Cast of characters:
Nicholas Peter Schirf and wife Anna Marie Shank, married c. 1910
Children Mildred, Ralph (my dad), Marietta, and Thelma, plus a possible appearance by Harold
Thelma’s husband John Conner and granddaughter Erin
Daisy (my mother), Virgil (my brother), and yours truly
Possibly a few unidentified family members and/or third parties
Marietta Schirf was my dad’s youngest sister. He said he didn’t know how she snuck into the Armed Forces because he was sure she didn’t meet the minimum height requirement.
At a 1980s July 4th concert on Capitol Hill, E. G. Marshall officiating, veterans by branch were asked to stand up. When the turn came for the Air Force, she stood and whooped, to the surprise of our neighbors on the grass. I asked why Air Force, and she answered she’d been in the Army Air Corps. That’s the first I’d heard that.
Aunt Marietta died in the mid-90s. How she would have appreciated the resources of the internet. She once took me to the Library of Congress to look up articles on sugalite.
I will have to look up Front and Center. On the internet.
I can date only a couple of my brother Virgil’s school photos, but tried to arrange them by apparent (to me) age. I wasn’t born until Virgil was almost eight years old, and I don’t remember much before kindergarten (except, I think, climbing out of and dangling from my crib, giving my mother heart palpitations when she found me). My first day of kindergarten was his first day of eighth grade.
I was on a train in Indiana that had left a campground I was staying at (I remembered being at a camp but didn’t remember it). The train started to pass snow-covered fields, although it was only August. I thought, “Something is terribly wrong.”
Next I was in the bright atrium of an office building or a large department store. Slowly I became aware that someone was firing or about to fire a bazooka or something like it. I ran away and encountered a second person about to fire. I got away from that one too.
I found myself in a narrow street or an alley that should have been crowded with people but was quiet and lonely. I walked faster and faster, trying to elude whatever was lurking for me between me and the end.
I heard something, then saw my dad in his van, beckoning me to hurry. “How could Dad be here?” I wondered, but still I hurried to him . . . and safety.
We visited my parents’ graves at Logan Valley Cemetery, located across from the high school. A cousin I haven’t seen in decades had left flowers at my dad’s grave. His flag holder for veterans still has a metal medallion. The newer medallions are plastic thanks to theft. Once upon a time I was young enough to find it shocking someone would steal the flag holder from a veteran’s grave.
In Sinking Valley, this little mare and her young’un attract customers to Hilltop Farm. There’s also a wee donkey.
On to Whipple Dam State Park, which was new to me. It’s yet another part of our legacy from the Civilian Conservation Corps. As it was Labor Day and central Pennsylvania isn’t rich with beaches, a college-age crowd had gathered at Whipple Dam’s postage stamp of sand to play volleyball and stand in the relatively shallow water. Despite the crowd, the surrounding woods gave the lake and beach an isolated feeling that reminded me of Pewit’s Nest in Wisconsin.
We’d passed the road to Shaver Creek Environmental Center and stopped on the way back. The buildings were closed for the holiday, so we relaxed on the deck’s Adirondack chairs. I kept hoping to hear a creek.
On the way to the park, V. spotted a plant she thought might be teaberry (ICE CREAM!). According to the folks of iNaturalist, it’s partridgeberry. Pretty, but perhaps not as weirdly tasty as teaberry. If you can’t get teaberry ice cream, try Clark’s teaberry gum. You won’t thank me, I think. It’s an acquired taste, associated with childhood 50 years ago.
Dad in October 1982, age 69, with his reduced garden, about six years before offering to throw a lifetime’s worth of family photos away
I’ve seen vintage photos and postcards for sale, and even bought a few myself, such as postcards of Starved Rock State Park.
I understand wanting postcards, souvenirs of places that have disappeared, changed, or survived — time capsules of a not-too-distant, recognizable past.
It’s harder for me to understand buying mundane photos of regular people the buyer never knew. Do they hope the photos will turn out to be valuable? Do they want to make up stories about the unknown, deceased-these-many-years people? Do they pretend strangers are their own family members, giving them names and histories? Or do they simply want to add old photos to their decor for a vintage look?
I was thinking about this when going through two shoeboxes of family photos. I’d finally found the perfect scanner for small photos (e.g., 4” x 6”). Many of my oldest photos are smaller. Some have typewritten captions on the back. I suspect these were added by Aunt Marietta, who after World War II became an executive assistant with the Atomic Energy Commission, later the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I don’t think anyone else would have had access to a typewriter.
Some have handwritten captions. Many aren’t labeled — no subject, location, or date. Dad labeled most of his photos, at least later. I think these random, unlabeled photos frustrated him — even though he knew most of the subjects. I wonder what a photo buyer would make of them?
I don’t know what to make of some of them myself. There’s a little blonde girl who is not the daughter of my mother’s best friend. (She agreed it’s not her.) There are a boy and a girl. The boy could be my brother, but he doesn’t recognize the girl. two of my aunts are posed with a taller man. I can only guess he may have been Harold, a brother had had epilepsy and died before he reached 21.
I have two shoe boxes and a suitcase of my dad’s photos and a lot of scanning to do of the people photos. When he moved to Pennsylvania to be closer to family, he threatened to throw out every photo. Panicked, I hastily communicated he was not to toss a single photo, and I would take them. I was shocked, but he was in a purging mood. Who knows? A buyer may have wanted them.
All this is a long way of saying to expect to see small vintage photos posted here once in a while, along with anything I know and think about them.
I can’t say we took any great American road trips when I was a child — mostly 200-mile jaunts to visit family in the Altoona area of Pennsylvania or rare shorter ones to local attractions like Niagara Falls or Letchworth State Park. The first car I remember was a powder blue Ford Falcon. With Virgil and me in the back seat picking on each other and wondering “Are we there yet?” after 25 or 50 miles, time and money may not have been the only reason we didn’t travel far or often.
Later, my dad bought a used van with two back seats. This was such a novelty that kids stopped by to pile in. All that room! Of course it was bare bones, a working man’s van, with none of the comforts of today’s SUVs and minivans, like DVD players or even — gasp! — cup holders. We “roughed it” back in those days with tap water or water from a roadside spring in Pennsylvania kept in a jug. We’d have to pull over to drink it. And we didn’t know about “hydration,” only thirst.
We had only an over-the-air radio — no Sirius, no subscription services tailored to our tastes. You might find yourself in a part of the country with only bland pop and country & western. Our series of bare-bones vehicles didn’t have 8-track tape decks or CB radios for chatting with passing truckers. I don’t think the radio played much of a role in our trips, except to get traffic and weather.
We had games like “punch bug,” in which being the first to see a Volkswagen Beetle on the highway entitled you to punch your annoying brother, sister, or friend. We also kept an eye peeled for “beavers,” station wagons with wood-paneled sides. We’d make a pulling motion to truck drivers to try to get them to pull their air horns. We liked the ones who accommodated us. I understand the tradition continues today, although with safety first (no startling of unaware drivers) and the hope it doesn’t provoke a modern road rage incident.
Of course there were no USB ports, but there were cigarette lighters — in 1965, a whopping 45 percent of Americans smoked. I’ve never bought a car, but it sounds like what Wikipedia describes as a “de facto DC connector,” or cigarette lighter receptacle, is more likely to be used to power portable accessories (“lights, fans, beverage heating devices, and air compressors for inflating tires”). I wonder if it can be used for e-cigarettes? J’s is used for an iPhone charger. With only about 15 percent of Americans smoking today, I suspect the car cigarette lighter as such has achieved “relic” status for many of us.
Neither the Ford Falcon nor the vans that followed had air conditioning save that offered by an open window and a speed-generated breeze. I don’t know how we held conversations on the open highway. Maybe we didn’t, other than, “He’s picking on me!” and “Are we there yet?” punctuated by “Ralph, STOP!” (My mother had imaginary brakes on her side and possibly a worn-out floorboard.)
Most cars sold in the U.S. now come with air conditioning as a standard; it’s a given, not a luxury — not so north of the border. Today we “wind” the windows down mostly to take photos, ask passers-by questions, pay entrance fees or talk to booth operators, and on occasion encourage a fly or mosquito to vamoose. I say “wind” even though the push of a button opens the windows (as long as they’re powered, that is).
In the old Ford Falcon and vans, you did wind the windows up and down, just like we used window winders to open and close the trailer’s jalousie windows. I had to look that term up — jalousie windows in campers/trailers/mobile homes were common in the 1950s and ‘60s, but aren’t anymore.
Jalousie window opened with a window winder in Riverside, Illinois
Although cars.com talks about “old-school manual crank windows that seem, especially now, from a bygone automotive era,” they’re also not quite a relic. People don’t want them for themselves, but they do want the lower car price. They’re also found in many trucks. The 2015 cars.com article concludes, “For now, at least, it’s clear there are enough price-conscious new-car shoppers to keep manual windows around.”
I’ve never been a smoker, and I don’t feel nostalgic about car cigarette lighters. As with push lawn mowers and clotheslines, however, I do miss manual windows and window winders. Power windows have their advantages when you spot something and want to take a photo or video quickly (although they make enough noise to scare off animals). On the other hand, when I wait in the car I don’t always remember to open the window when the power is on, so I resort to the alternative, awkward in a parking lot, of opening the door. It doesn’t sound like much, but sometimes I want to crank open the window.
At least it’s not because someone used the cigarette lighter.
(The title is from The Thief of Bagdad. Grand Vizier Jaffar, played by Conrad Veidt, dramatically summons the sea wind to do his evil bidding.)
I was living with my parents in a trailer in a sweet location, probably with trees and gardens. The word seemed to be “idyllic.”
It became windy and windier, and the wind finally tore the trailer away. It felt like we were traveling smoothly down the highway, but I knew the stop would destroy the trailer and possibly kill us.
It didn’t.
We found ourselves in a city or town, in a narrow, darkened alley or street, the opposite of everything I had wanted or known. I was devastated. One of us found a window with a view of a field and trees, but the trees were weedy bird of paradise.
The wind took us away again on the same smooth ride. We saw we were headed toward water. I know everything we had would be ruined. I searched frantically for Pudge to try to save her but even after we stopped (and yet somehow ended up back on land) I couldn’t find her. I panicked and cried over the loss of my helpless innocent cat.
We were blown away again, and during this journey I found Pudge not only unharmed but dry and clean as though she had never been wet.
Next we were blown toward a sunny hillside. “Great,” my mother said. “Figures we’d be blown into and down the only hill in Illinois.” I started to tell her there are hills in southern Illinois in Shawnee National Forest, but it occurred to me a moment of fear and anger is not the time to educate someone.
As we bumped down the hill, I noticed how steep it was — steeper than any hill I’d seen.
I wondered how the trailer and we had survived these journeys and crashes. I kept hoping we’d land gently in a sheltered spot where the wind couldn’t grasp us.
We sailed toward a passing freight train in town, but curved off and didn’t hit it. That was a relief, but there was another track with a train in the next direction, and another in a third direction. It’s like we were in a triangle of trains, but I couldn’t work out how that could be possible in such a tight area without them hitting one another.
I knew at some point the trailer must disintegrate and we must die.
