The Old Year's gone away
To nothingness and night:
We cannot find him all the day
Nor hear him in the night:
He left no footstep, mark or place
In either shade or sun:
The last year he'd a neighbor's face,
In this he's known by none.
All nothing everywhere:
Mists we on mornings see
Have more of substance when they're here
And more of form than he.
He was a friend by every fire,
In every cot and hall --
A guest to every heart's desire,
And now he's nought at all.
Old papers thrown away,
Old garments cast aside,
The talk of yesterday,
All things identified;
But times once torn away
No voices can recall:
The eve of New Year's Day
Left the Old Year lost to all.
~ John Clare
(Video fixed and playable. Be sure to click on HD quality!)
I just realized that this year is the 400th anniversary of my European ancestors
coming to America, the very first -- that I know of -- a French
Huguenot, born in Lorraine, arrived on these shores in 1624. I've written about him
before, but I didn't connect this year with his escape to the promised
land four centuries ago. Others came in ensuing years, Quakers,
Dunkards, a British army deserter, a Dutchman, Swiss, Normans, Norwegians...all fleeing intolerable situations
that made them cast their fate with America as it was then, a wild,
unknown land full of danger and terror.
They did not steal the land,
they fought for it, even if they did not want to fight. The Quakers and
Dunkards were pacifists. Were it not for the wars of the French and
British for control of the continent, they would have gotten along well
with the Indians they encountered. The Dunkards bought land from the
Indians, converted them to Christianity and tried to stay out of the way
of the marching armies. They didn't fight even when the British
authorities showed up at their farms and told them they were trespassing
on Crown land and had to get off, pay the king for "his" land or else.
The
"or else" being attack by Indian mercenaries in the pay of the
British, Senecas in New York, Shawnees in Pennsylvania. The British
paid the Indians $8 a scalp, man, woman or child, of those who resisted
paying. So they paid. When the Revolution began, the British sent their
Indian allies down on them anyway. Rape, looting and slaughter ensued.
They called it the Year of the Bloody Sevens, 1777.
In ensuing years, my direct ancestors made it west, to the Rocky Mountains, where one married into the Northern Cheyenne tribe and lived as a trapper and Indian trader working out of Fort Bent in Colorado. Others followed the Appalachians down to the south and west, ending up in Texas. Still others Montana and California. But most, I've learned, stayed in the East, Pennsylvania, northern West Virginia and western Maryland, Ohio.
And what did they do? The were farmers, printers, blacksmiths, gunsmiths and wainwrights in the East, traders, Indian fighters, scouts, ranchers and cavalrymen in the West, engineers, gold miners, loggers, railroad and land speculators, surveyors and orchardmen in California. In the 20th century they have been oilmen, real estate developers, university professors, airline pilots, policemen, naval and air force officers, engineers and ranchers.
What will my children be? My grandchildren and great grandchildren? I don't know. Will my line have another 400 years in these United States? I don't know. I do wonder. But I expect that some of my line will be somewhere in North America for many centuries to come. And some, perhaps many, will, just as our long ago European ancestors left their homelands of centuries, leave to cast their fate with a new land somewhere beyond the horizon.
But I hope some will always be here. This land is their land, this country exists because they created it. It wasn't here until they made it. The first truly new country in the world. They all can't just abandon it. They can't.
Home-made gingerbread cookies, candy canes, fruitcake, pumpkin
and mincemeat pies, candied apples and popcorn, egg nog and fruit punch, chocolate and
peanut butter fudge.
Sitting on the floor in front of the
fireplace, feeding the fire a log now and again, roasting chestnuts in a
wire holder, marshmallows on a stick.
Christmas tree lights
flashing on and off, casting shadows and reflecting a jumble of colors,
familiar carols that everyone knows the lyrics to. Piles of presents
all gold and green and red, covered in Santas and reindeer, ribbons and
bows.
Looking out the window to see snow swirling around the
porch lights, firs swaying in the wind that croons around the eaves,
little curls of cold air puffing in around the windows.
Merry Christmas everyone! It's the best time of the year!
One of the things that has always puzzled me is why some historical incidents generate massive, sustained popular interest, while others, often greater, generate scarcely any interest at all.
Take the bombing campaigns of World War Two and its antecedents. During the Spanish Civil war the bombing of Guernica is still remembered as a seminal moment in history, although it caused few casualties and other, more severe bombings during that war are utterly forgotten. And perhaps even more puzzling, the Japanese terror bombing of Chinese cities in the 1930s garners no interest at all.
I say "terror" with purpose: the Japanese intended to maximize civilian deaths. Their spies in Chinese cities reported that the bomb shelters were poorly ventilated and people rushed to get out of them as soon as the all-clear was sounded. So the Japanese bombers would only release half their bomb load and then depart, the all-clear would sound, people would scramble out of the shelters gasping for air -- and the Japanese bombers would swing around and race back, dropping the rest of their bombs on the frightened, exhausted civilians, slaughtering them en masse.
Then we have the bombing of Dresden remembered forever, but not that of Hamburg -- Operation Gomorrah as the RAF called it, clearly defining what the British intended to do to the civilian population. And Hiroshima but not Tokyo, the bombing of which killed maybe more than any other bombing raid in history.
I could go on listing such large events, but even some small, even insignificant events, live on and on, never forgotten though the generations pass. Take the loss of Amelia Earhart in July of 1937, almost 90 years ago. Why is it still getting headlines today? What was so important about her death? A few years earlier, in a race between California and Hawaii, six airplanes and 10 airmen were lost, yet nobody remembers that episode.
Well, of course, you may say, the difference was that Earhart was a woman, a woman back in the day doing something only men were expected to do. But that's not really true. There were many women involved in those early days of aviation -- Louise Thaden, Elinor "The Flying Flapper" Smith, Florence Klingensmith, Ruth Elder, Frances Grayson, Ruth Nichols, Blanche Noyes, Laura Ingles, Jackie Cochran, and Noel Gourselle among many others, making distance, endurance and altitude records, winning air races. Some were even killed. But no one remembers them today. You could wonder why, but that seems to be the way of the world. Not
everybody who excels gets recognized, whatever the field of endeavor.
Earhart at the controls of her Lockheed.
It was Earhart who caught the public's imagination, perhaps because she was so friendly and outgoing, just the opposite of self-contained, publicity-shunning Charles Lindbergh, who typified the ideal of the manly hero of few words. Earhart was also an ordinary Midwestern girl all Americans could identify with. She had a then-typical country tomboy childhood, riding horses and motorbikes, going down to the town dump with her sister to shoot rats with a .22. She became a nurse during the Great War, tending to war wounded. On one of her days off she went to a fair and on a dare took a ride in one of those newfangled things called an aeroplane and got hooked on flying. She took lessons and bought her own airplane, a little 60 horsepower job in which in 1922 she set the woman's altitude record -- 14,000 feet -- and suddenly found herself famous. And found being famous allowed her to do lots of things she liked doing, especially flying airplanes, expensive ones she could never afford but that others would willingly pay for if she did newsworthy things in them. So she kept flying, which she loved doing, but now on other people's dime. She flew the Atlantic. She flew the Pacific between California and Hawaii. She flew nonstop across the United States. And she attempted to fly around the world. Wiley Post had done it, but then died in a crash in Alaska, along with Will Rogers. Who remembers that, or who Wiley Post was, or even Will Rogers?
Last photo of Earhart & Noonan at Lae, New Guinea.
In any case, by 1937, when she attempted her around-the-world flight, Earhart had been a newsmaker for 15 years, a well-known figure in the rotogravures. So her loss was naturally big news. But it was not something unforeseen. Part of the interest in Earhart's flying exploits, I imagine, was due to the expectation that one day she would be killed, and what a thrill it would be to read all the gruesome details. I think of that because last year when I was flying the Atlantic and across the country with my father, a father-daughter duo were killed in the crash of their Beechcraft and my mother got plenty of concerned inquiries wondering if it was me and dad or saying that they thought it had been us when they first heard the news, and I got a sense that some of those people were hoping it was, not out of malice but prurient interest -- someone they knew got killed in an out of the ordinary way. And celebrities such as Earhart then and now are, in a way, people we know.
Of course, there were legitimate mysteries and curiosities, if I can call them that, about Earhart's final flight, especially the route she took, and her disappearance. But they dissolve away when you examine them. Wiley Post on his around-the-world flights had avoided long over-water legs across the Pacific by traveling through Russia, even taking the shortest way across the Atlantic by following a northern route via Newfoundland. But Earhart chose to fly around the world as close to the equator as possible, meaning long distances over water making a 29,000-mile flight, the longest ever attempted. Post's circumnavigation took only 15,000 miles.
Earhart's original plan was to fly east to west, completing the trans-Pacific legs first, getting the hardest part over with while all her plane's equipment was in tip-top shape, but Earhart ground-looped on take-off from Luke Field in Hawaii, wrecking her plane, and so the first attempt was cancelled.
One of the stories about Earhart's last flight was that she bungled the take-off because she was a poor pilot, or even deliberately crashed her plane because she really didn't want to make the flight. Eye-witnesses said a tire blew, but I'm not convinced that was the reason for the crash. I tend to doubt that because I fly a plane with very similar ground-handing characteristics to the Lockheed 10E, a Beechcraft BE18. Both are tail-wheel planes from the same era, and taxiing them is an acquired skill and always challenging. They also both have similar flight characteristics so it is not hard for me to imagine what Earhart had to deal with handling her airplane.
Earhart's Lockheed was heavily loaded, probably at maximum gross weight with specially installed long-range tanks loaded with 5,400 pounds of fuel and herself plus three crew members, including two navigators -- Fred Noonan, who had established Pan American's seaplane routes across the Pacific and trained the airline's trans-Pacific navigators, and Harry Manning, captain of the USS President Roosevelt and a pilot himself -- and Paul Mantz, Hollywood stunt pilot and Earhart's business partner. Mantz was killed many years later while performing a stunt flight for the movie Flight of the Phoenix. Manning would crash his own plane the next year and be so severely injured that he quit flying.
It is not at all hard for me to believe that Earhart had difficulty keeping the Lockheed under control during take-off, especially if she was having trouble with the plane's variable-pitch propellers. They had begun malfunctioning during the flight from the mainland and Mantz ferried the plane from Wheeler where they had landed to Luke where the props were repaired at the Navy facility there, but perhaps one failed on take-off, suddenly changing pitch. That's important because you control taxiing and take-off in a multi-engine tail-wheel plane by
Wiley Post's bent Lockheed Vega.
applying differential throttle, more so than braking, which, especially in those old planes, was not very good. My BE18 has had much more powerful modern disc brakes installed, replacing the originals, but I still rely on differential throttle to keep the plane center-lined on the runway during take-off. If one of her props slipped out of pitch or otherwise malfunctioned, it might have been impossible for Earhart to control the plane.
On his around-the-world solo flight Wiley Post ground-looped his Lockheed Vega 5C while landing at Flat, Alaska, the crash almost putting an end to his attempt. Tail-wheel planes are unforgiving on the ground. And the bigger they are the more challenging they are to manage. Post had left Khabarovsk, Russia heading for Nome. He had a radio direction finder, but it didn't help him. He missed Nome and wandered around interior Alaska, completely lost, for seven hours before sighting the airfield at Flat after 22 hours in the air. Completely exhausted, he lost control on the roll-out.
Earhart's Lockheed in Karachi after its record flight.
Anyway, once Earhart's 10E was shipped back to the States and repaired, weather and wind conditions had changed so much that an east-west flight was no longer possible so the plan was changed to west to east with the 7,000-mile over-water legs the last ones. And navigator Harry Manning had to bow out of the trip because of other obligations.
As planned, her flight would take her through Omani airspace, which the British, who then controlled Oman, had closed to all non-British air traffic. The American ambassador to Britain requested foreign secretary Anthony Eden grant an exception for Earhart but he refused, so Earhart was forced to skirt the British protectorate, flying nonstop from Assab in Eritrea to Karachi in India (as it was
then). She followed the line of the south Arabian coast, but stayed over
the sea in the record-breaking 13 hour and 10 minute flight.
Earhart after landing at Lae.
Thence she flew across the subcontinent and southeast Asia to Australia and then New Guinea, landing at Lae. Five years later, Lae would be the hub of serious fighting in the war between Japan and America and there are many tales that can be told about all that happened. The USS Yorktown attacked Japanese shipping in the Huon Gulf off Lae in March, 1942, while the USS Lexington attacked the Japanese naval base at nearby Salamaua. The Lex's
dive bombers and torpedo planes virtually annihilated Japan's Fourth Fleet, some 15 ships, which had spear-headed the invasions of Guam and Wake, sinking five cargo vessels and four warships plus
setting afire and stopping dead in the water four more warships.
Two other warships were damaged.
TBDs about to attack Japanese shipping at Lae on 3-10-42..
Vice Admiral Shigeyoshi Inoue, commander of the fleet, had to order the postponement (later abandonment)
of the planned invasion of Port Moresby as a result of these losses. He
also called for Japanese carrier back-up to counter the US Navy carrier
force, thus setting the stage for the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway. Just three months after Pearl Harbor, the US Navy was kicking the snot out of the Tojos. I'm proud to say my grandfather flew on this mission, flying air cover in his F4F-3.
The next leg of Earhart's flight was the long stretch over open water to Howland Island. That flight skirted the Japanese-controlled Marshall Islands, which the Japanese, contrary to treaty, had secretly fortified. Japan based long-range bombers on the islands, which were planned to be launching points for attacks on Australia and British and American possessions. In 1939 and 1940, the Japanese navy built airfields on Kwajalein, Maloelap and Wotie and a seaplane base on Jaluit. When Japan attacked in 1941, the planes that bombed Wake Island flew from these bases.
Howland Island, where Earhart was to land, was uninhabited until 1935, when the United States took possession. And it wasn't until 1936 that facilities began being built there by the Air Commerce and Interior Departments, the airfield completed only weeks before Earhart's flight in 1937. Because personnel, supplies and equipment were transported by the Navy to Howland, some have speculated that Earhart's was a spy mission sponsored by the Navy, the plan to have Earhart accidentally-on-purpose fly over the Marshalls and photograph Japanese installations. But Earhart's plane carried no recon cameras and most of the countries and colonies she flew over did not permit foreign planes to carry cameras, even hand-held tourist types, and there is no evidence the Lockheed was so equipped. The plane was sponsored by Purdue University and was called a flying laboratory because it carried instruments to measure atmospheric conditions and that sort of thing. But no spy gear.
So why was an airstrip built on Howland just before Earhart was to need it? It seems the Air Commerce Department had planned to build one from the beginning but had no funds to do so. However, when Earhart announced her trip itinerary, mentioning Howland as a refueling point (based on old news items, she thought there already was an airfield there), the Interior Department borrowed a bulldozer and grader and the Navy agreed to transport them to the island on their next quarterly resupply run to the island, which would be in January,1937. And so a rough-and-ready landing strip was scratched out. But there were no facilities for servicing her plane or repairing it, as had been necessary at several stops along the way, including at Darwin, Australia, where her radio was repaired. Her direction finder was also not working. A blown fuse was replaced but no examination was made into why the fuse had blown.
Gasoline at Howland was delivered by the Navy in 55-gallon drums that had to be hand pumped into the plane's fuel tanks, 350 turns of the pump crank to empty the drum. There were only four people stationed on the island, Hawaiian university students, replaced at three-months intervals. They studied the flora and fauna of the island, the weather, etc., as part of their school curriculum.
The Coast Guard agreed to station a plane guard ship, the Itasca, at Howland and another plane guard ship, the Ontario, halfway between Lae and Howland, at approximately 3° South Latitude, 165° East Longitude, to assist with the flight. That was all the military involvement in Earhart's flight.
The loop worked by manually turning the crank on the controller until a “null” or point of low-signal strength was found.
A high-frequency loop radio direction finder borrowed from a Navy patrol plane at Pearl Harbor, in which it was being tested, was set up in a jury rig on Howland Island. It was the same as the experimental battery-powered Bendix, one of three ever made (see additional explanation farther down), in Earhart's plane. It was capable of receiving on 3105 kilohertz, or kilocycles as the term then was, the frequency Earhart would transmit on, but it could not obtain bearings on an airplane transmitting on that frequency unless it was nearby. It could only fix on long-range transmissions being broadcast below 1800 kilocycles due to the nature of radio waves. On higher frequencies, the signal can be heard but the receiver can't pick up the steady hum, or null, that indicates direction. It seems that was not understood by Noonan or Earhart, or those who obtained and installed the Bendix. But it was intended only as a back up anyway, in case the direction finder on the Itasca, receiving on 500 kilocycles, which the ship expected Earhart to transmit on, failed, something it often did, and, hopefully, by then Earhart would be near enough that the Bendix could obtain her direction.
WW2-era drift meter similar to Earhart's. Center is eyepiece.
So what happened to Earhart? From studying her flight path and reading her radio transmission transcripts, it seems Earhart deviated north of her flight plan. The clearest evidence of this is a radio message Earhart sent at 2030 Sydney, Australia, time (1930 Lae time), that she had sighted a ship that she thought was the Ontario. This message was heard by the radio operator at Nauru Island (2130 Nauru time), who heard transmissions from Earhart over a five-hour period. The ship she sighted was actually the British steamer Myrtlebank, which reported hearing a plane fly over at that time. The Myrtlebank's approximate position at the time the plane was heard was 1° 40' South Latitude, 166° 45' East Longitude, 1° 20' north of the Ontario. (Nauru lies at 0° 31′ 41″ South Latitude, 166° 56′ 13″ East Longitude. Howland Island lies at 0° 48′ 25.84″ North Latitude, 176° 36′ 59″ West Longitude.)
If Earhart thought she had sighted the Ontario when in fact she had sighted the Myrtlebank, then she didn't know that she was already about 90-100 miles off course to the north and some 50 miles farther east. If she didn't correct her course, she would be well north of Howland at her planned arrival time, and, if her ground speed held, well past it. But if she thought she was right on course, and flying over what she thought was the Ontario seemed to prove that, she would not have changed course. Incidentally, the Ontario never heard any messages from Earhart although the Itasca did. It seems that for some reason the Ontario was not listening on any of the frequencies Earhart transmitted on.
Those blaming Earhart never consider the weather she dealt with.
At 1700 Lae time, the radio station at Lae received a message from Earhart saying that they were at 10,000 feet but were going to reduce altitude because of thick banks of cumulus clouds. The next and last message Lae received, at 1720, was that they were at 7,000 feet and making 150 knots.The message also said that they were having trouble receiving transmissions so were changing frequencies. Lae had been hearing them loud and clear but after the frequency change heard nothing more.
My guess is that the clouds were so thick they couldn't use sunsights or celestial navigation and were by that point relying solely on dead reckoning and were being blown off course by strong south-southwesterly winds pushing them north-northeast. Being in the tropics, there probably were thunderstorms in the area, their lightning discharges interfering with their radio direction finder, if it was working, and may have been the cause of its failure. From what I understand, the most likely reason for the direction finder antenna
system to fail would be malfunctioning of the send-receive relay, located inside the transmitter unit, which would leave the receiver effectively without an
antenna. The relay probably malfunctioned because of damage by
lightning or heavy static discharge. Flying into the growing night as they were and traveling over trackless ocean, their drift meter would have been of no use. And it seems their radio was also going on the fritz: they could transmit, at least on one frequency, but couldn't receive.
So there they were, far out over the ocean with no way to determine where they were or what direction they needed to fly to reach safety, unaware they were off course. And you can bet, with all that cloud cover and strong winds, thunderstorms building, lightning flashes flaring through the clouds and blasting static into their earphones, a gale brewing, that they were encountering some pretty rough turbulence. I can imagine exactly what it was like in that cockpit, believe me, and would definitely not have wanted to be aboard that plane.
That big loop antenna is the Bendix MN-20.
Why didn't they use radio navigation aids? When the Lockheed was being repaired after the Hawaii crash, the radio Earhart had trained on, the Western Electric Model 20B, was replaced with a Bendix aircraft radio receiver with an experimental (only three ever built) Bendix Type MN-20 rotatable shielded loop antenna. A 250-foot flexible-wire trailing antenna on an electrically operated, remote-controlled reel at the rear of the plane was also added. Neither Earhart nor Noonan were trained to operate these, just given a brief rundown. The trailing antenna would have allowed them to receive and send radio transmissions for over a thousand miles but neither navigator Noonan nor Earhart saw the necessity for this capability.
Earhart Light after the Jap attack.
While flying the plane from Burbank to Miami, Earhart noticed that the plane's flight characteristics had degraded. When she tried extending the trailing antenna it became even worse. The Lockheed was also burning more fuel and flying slower than it should given the throttle and prop settings. She attributed these problems to the drag caused by the trailing antenna when extended and, located at the very rear of the plane as it was, its weight and that of its associated equipment pushing the center of gravity aft, requiring her to trim strongly nose down, so she had it removed. Had she kept it, she and Noonan should have had no communication problems, assuming the radio kept working; 1930s-era electronics needed constant maintenance and repair. But, burning more fuel than normal, range would have been reduced, and flying a plane with squirrelly flight characteristics is exhausting.
In any case, the Earhart mission, extremely risky had everything been perfect, was, it seems to me, doomed at the start. Maybe Earhart should have taken the crash at Hawaii as a word to the wise from the Fates and called the whole thing off.
As a postscript, no airplane ever used the landing strip at Howland. The Japanese, flying from the Marshalls, bombed the island the day after Pearl Harbor and a Japanese submarine shelled it, destroying the only two buildings, killing two of the university students studying there and severely damaging the "Earhart Light," originally built as a beacon to help Earhart spot the island, but converted to a memorial tower to the vanished pilot after her loss by the university students studying on the island. After the attack, the students were evacuated and the island was left to the seabirds.
Now, why did I title this post missing "planes" in the plural as well as missing things? Lemme tell ya. And answer the question I asked. But in another post. This one is already pretty long.
Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace, The soul that knows it not, knows no release From little things: Knows not the livid loneliness of fear, Nor mountain heights where bitter joy can hear The sound of wings. How can Life grant us boon of living, compensate For dull grey ugliness and pregnant hate Unless we dare The soul’s dominion? Each time we make a choice, we pay With courage to behold resistless day, And count it fair. ~ Amelia Earhart
Photo by Allison Meier.
A lock of Amelia's hair, preserved at the Museum of Women Pilots in Oklahoma City. The museum also has Amelia's lucky bracelet that she always wore when flying, but left behind, along with her lucky scarf, on her last flight. Her scarf was taken aboard the space shuttle Atlantis for one last flight.
A portion of the radio transmissions to and from Earhart's plane on the Howland leg of the flight. Note these were in Morse Code, although there were some voice broadcasts. Noonan, not Earhart, who was busy flying the plane, made the transmissions. He was not all that familiar with Morse code, keyed slowly and made several mistakes, including, I believe, the infamous "We are on the line 157 337," which people have interpreted it to mean all sorts of things. Note also all the "Unanswd"s and frequency changes. Something certainly seems to have been wrong with their radio.
Morse code numbers. Did Noonan mix up his dits and dahs?
Howland Island runway distances between markers: N/S 4200’ NE/SW 2600’ E/W 2250’ Soft coral recently graded. Prevailing easterlies 20mph. Days average 100°F, 85% humidity.
At Lae, the runway was 3,000 feet of packed dirt with a 25-foot drop-off to the sea at the end. Earhart's plane got airborne at 2,900 feet, began dropping and disappeared off the end of the runway descending, skimmed over the water, the props leaving spray trails, before gradually beginning to climb. Could Earhart, if she had landed at Howland, been able to take off safely? She might have crashed due to mechanical problems, unable to gain flying speed, or perhaps a bird strike; the island is home to thousands of sea birds. I think a crosswind of 20mph would make the North/South runway inadvisable and both of the others are probably too short. (The yellow word on the photo is "Itascatown," the name of the buildings pictured farther up post.)
El jefe likes to sing. I especially enjoy it when he sings to me, as he often does, but he sings whenever and wherever he feel like. Of course, he sings in the shower, but he may sing while he's helping me with kitchen work, or working out of doors, chopping firewood or that sort of thing. He sings while we're hiking or backpacking. Even when we go horseback riding. Anytime is time for a song.
He is a natural baritone and has a voice very much like that of Robert Goulet, but with a touch of Nelson Eddy, and he can very definitely belt it out to the balcony, as well as croon as if he were caressing the woman he loves -- which better be me or out comes the frying pan and the Benny Hill theme song! Well, okay, I gotta admit his dearest love is my mini me. He sings to her most sweetly.
Sometimes I play the piano while he sings. And sometimes I join in the singing, but I am no Julie Andrews or Jeanette MacDonald. I prefer the quieter songs, while he prefers to make the welkin ring.
You know, it's a funny thing, but whenever he sings to me, I get kind of excited, if you know what I mean. I don't know why that should be so. But maybe if it's not the reason, it's one of the main reasons humans began to sing -- to get the female's motor running. Birds do it to attract mates, why not us? After all, look at all the love songs there are. Why do people, almost always men, keep writing new ones? Well, it's been said that a woman attracts a man by how she looks, while a man attracts a woman by what he does. The easiest and quickest thing a man could do is sing a song, preferably one complimenting the looks of the woman he likes. In like Flynn!
This Bill Mauldin cartoon reminds me of how el jefe was after the birth of our latest. Of course all newborns are not looking their best. Right? Right...?
****************
My favorite era, as I've written, is the decade between, roughly, 1935 and 1945, with the best years being 1940 and 1941 up to Pearl Harbor. I'm talking about in America. I don't care about the rest of the stupid world. I'm very parochial, provincial and insular in my world view --et j'en suis fier! You betcha.
Anyways, I was reading a general-interest magazine from 1937 and ran across a major multi-page story about a national amateur photo contest. There was not one picture of a cat, if you can believe it. Truly, the past is another country.
There were photos of factories in long-shadowed afternoon light and skyscraper construction workers eating lunch on girders suspended from cranes 50 stories above the ground and farmers plowing fields with teams of horses and skinny rural southern families in clothing made from flour sacks sitting on shack porches and so forth.
But the national award winner was a photo of a naked two-year old. In fact, there were two pages devoted to the little kid. To the left is the first page. I've censored the photos, you will notice. Now you may say that in those by-gone days, naked children symbolized innocence and I would like to agree with you and I do believe that to a large extent that was true, and also would say that pre-pubescent children's nudity was taken for granted. Kids routinely swam naked, for example -- skinny-dipping.
But then why, in this story, is the little girl described as a baby blonde? Recall that this was the era when the trope of the blonde bombshell sexpot was created, thanks to Irving Thalberg and Jean Harlow. In earlier times brunettes were the femme fatales and seductresses and blonde hair represented the innocence of youth, but those views were ancient history in the later 1930s.
What struck me even more, though, was the copy explaining how the photos were taken. A middle-aged man walking through a park comes upon mother and daughter and asks mom if he can take pictures of her little girl and she says, oh, sure, snap away. Then he asks her to have the kid take her clothes off and wade in a pond so he can take pictures of her naked. The little girl doesn't want to do that, but her mother makes her. What did mom say to her daughter when the kid says, "But mommy I don't want to!" Did she say, "Shut up you little brat and get naked for the nice man so he can take pictures of you?" I don't know. I don't get it at all. If the guy just wanted to take photos of her wading in the pond, she didn't have to take her clothes off. And why would her mother agree to that? I mean, really. If some guy came up to me and my little girl in a park and asked to take naked pictures of her, he had better have his life insurance paid up and his will made out.
And if you insist that I am over-reacting and this was all innocent -- and, okay, maybe it was -- I would point you to a news item (left) in the same issue reporting that a man had murdered three little girls. The item doesn't directly mention anything sex-related about the killings, but my 21st century cynical and suspicious mind immediately thought that the piece left out one important word: rape. The man was arrested for raping and murdering three little girls. You can take that to the bank. And the text does talk about sex crimes, so the reader could infer what the man did.
Note in the copy under the photo (enlarged below) it says that those convicted of sex crimes are only fined or sometimes receive a short jail sentence. Then we have, also from a 1937 magazine, this teenager on trial for stabbing an "elderly man" who attempted to sodomize him. The teen described the man as a "sex maniac." Now there's a phrase that should be brought back into style.
I was about to say that there are probably more of those around today than there were back in the good old days, but I hold my tongue. Twelve years on, we have this truly disgusting incident (right and below left). Note the first news item, from the Herald-Express, is very circumspect, telling the reader only that there was an arrest on a morals charge involving a young girl who implicated her father -- ! -- and 19 -- ! -- others.
The second new item covering the same incident, however, from the Daily News, gives more details. The girl was 14. Her father had sex with her. She was gang-raped by six men. She became pregnant and her father arranged for her to have an abortion. The man who performed the abortion had sex with her after he carried out the abortion.
I can't....
The depths of depravity human beings are capable of is beyond my comprehension. Should you be able to travel to the past in hopes of escaping that, you would be disappointed. In those bygone years we had brutal heterosexual and homosexual sex crimes, as well as pedophilia, just as today. And, apparently, most of those arrested for such crimes were only mildly punished and released back on the street to continue in their ways, to the outrage of normal people who wanted these creeps tossed in the slammer and kept there.
Sounds familiar to today, doesn't it?
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. ~ Ecclesiastes 1:9
Oh, man. Now I've gone and ruined my fantasy of fleeing to the innocent past to escape this horrid present. The past was just as bad, but without antibiotics.
Why do I mention antibiotics?
Um....from 1936:
"Floy-floy" was a slang term for syphilis. "Flat foot" refers to the way a person with advanced syphilis walks. The original word in the title of the song was not floogie but floozie, a slang term for a promiscuous woman. It was bowdlerized for the record, which was a top hit in 1938.
Iwas skipping through an on-line yak yak forum when I ran across some brilliant mind asserting that in the 1870-1890 era cowboying was "a low status job." I paused over that, thinking how people, especially urban/suburban types, project their own attitudes and lifeways onto not only the present but also the past. I don't know any cowboys from 1880, though I am descended from some, but I do know cowboys in the here and now and you can bet your saddle cinch that the last thing they considered when becoming cowboys, indeed the last thing they ever think about, is social status in the sense that that forum person considered it. In fact, they don't give the proverbial pest's posterior about any kind of status except maybe that among their peers, but some don't even care about that. They want nothing to do with a world of social rank, status or prestige.
You know what they want? Do you really want to know? Well, I'll tell you. Or I will tell you what one cowhand told me: "I want the world to leave me the God-damned hell alone. A day that passes without me seeing another human being is a damned good day, a week a damned good week." This a man who may spend weeks alone far out on the range, tending cattle, mending fences, fending off predators, caring for his mounts, eating pan biscuits, pinto beans and side meat, drinking eggshell coffee and smoking a pipe of pouch tobacco when the day is done.
If that is the way a cowpoke is today, can you imagine that 150 years ago cowboys would have been concerned with the social status of their job? I wonder if they even considered cowboying a job as we think of it. It was just life.
A lot of the men who drifted west after the civil war wanted to get away from society, from people. Of course there were many who went west looking for their fortune, but there were also a lot of disaffected veterans of the war who couldn't ever go back to their old life, so they lit out for the western horizon just to get away, put everything behind them, forget all that was. They took up the life of the cowpoke because it suited them and because that's about all there was to do to get three squares and a flop.
I've written more about cowboys as I've come to know them, about all I have to say, here if you care to read it.
Besides cowboys, there are a lot of people who have no interest in society, certainly not social status, and prefer to go their own way. They prefer nature to the world of man.
“One could starve to death on an enviable job — for mountain wind, for stars among pine trees, or the call of a wood-thrush to his mate.” ― Barbara Newhall Follett
I think most people can't even understand what motivates such mavericks, if I may call them that. But I feet very much kin to them. My brother the forest ranger does even more so. For him the happiest life lies out of doors, far into the wilderness. He's told me that he feels as if he were born centuries after his true time, that his real life, the life he was born to live, was of a mountain man in the early 1800s, traveling alone through the far high country, living by hunting and trapping, encumbered by nothing more than a Hawken rifle, axe, Bowie knife and possibles bag filled with powder, shot, flint and steel, mending needles, and some salt.
I wonder how many others feel that way, perhaps not pining for the life of a mountain man or cowboy, but maybe that of an early 19th century sailor as depicted in the stories of Richard Henry Dana and Herman Melville. Or maybe they dream of a life as a yeoman farmer on a quarter section, growing and raising all they need for life, visiting a market town on fair days to sell their surplus but otherwise living on their own. Others may wish to have lived in a time when they just could have been a rover and rambler, a Johnny Appleseed, with no fixed abode, no fixed profession, no fixed anything, just letting their feet take them hither and yon as they listeth.
The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the
sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it
goeth." . ~ John 3:8
Give to me the life I love,
Let the rest go by me,
Give the jolly heaven above
And the byway night me.
Bed in the bush with stars to see,
Bread I dip in the river --
There's the life for a one like me,
There's the life for ever.
Let the blow fall soon or late,
Let what will be o'er me;
Give the face of earth around
And the path before me.
Wealth I seek not, hope nor love,
Nor a friend to know me;
All I seek, the heaven above
And the earth below me.
Or let autumn fall on me
Where afield I linger,
Silencing the bird on tree,
Biting the blue finger;
White as meal the frosty field --
Warm the fireside haven --
Not to autumn will I yield,
Not to winter even!
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