Artifacts — The Bookcase

The 8th grade wood shop project was larger than the 7th grade project, probably because we were a year larger and were supposed to have learned something about woodworking during the previous year. The project was a small bookcase, not fancy, just three shelves, two sides, and a back, about three feet tall.

Bookshelf, front view

We started by drawing our plans, learning in the process a bit about mechanical drawing — drawing boards, straight edges, mechanical pencils, and the proper way to indicate dimensions. We then converted our plans to blueprint. Our blueprints were made simply to guide our work and to teach us how to work from clear plans, but for me the blueprint was a wonder unto itself. Blueprint is a rather old means of duplication, predating xerography by something like 100 years. It’s reasonably easy to create a blueprint if you have the right equipment and supplies; but the result is a transformation of the original, not a copy. The black pencil lines we had drawn on white paper became white lines on blue paper, transformed into something much less ordinary, almost but not quite the reverse of the plans we had started with.

In the novel A Canticle for Leibowitz Walter Miller described a far future time, a time when all technology and learning have been lost except a set of mysterious blue documents in the library of a community of monks. The monks believe the color of the paper and the whiteness of the lines have some mystical significance, that the drawing is filled with religious meaning, and they carefully preserve these characteristics each time they copy them by hand, preserving them over many generations without knowing what they are, what they mean. I’ve always liked that image, the mystical nature of the blueprint. Rough, technical, and pragmatic, but seeming somehow mystical and magically capable of guiding a person to create a thing, if the person understands the hidden meanings.

I guess we all managed to find the hidden meanings in our blueprints, at least well enough to finish our projects.

But being able to read the blueprint doesn’t replace actual woodworking skills. Once again I battled clumsily with saw, plane, and square, shaving away much more wood than should have been necessary because the edges would not become square and smooth. Decorative curves added to the challenge. How do you plane a curve? But all of that struggle is over now, and all that remains is a small bookcase.

Bookshelf, side view

Somehow these two artifacts, the book shelf and the bookcase, have survived for some 50 years. Other objects, including my blueprints, vanished long ago, but these two remain, possibly because they are useful. I wonder if it’s significant that both have to do with books.

Is Dinner Soon?

Nothing to Say

Once upon a time, when I was a high school sophomore, all the students in my English class were required to recite a poem from memory. Each of us was to select a poem, commit it to memory, and on a designated day recite it before the entire class.

Somewhere among my parents’ books I found a clever poem by O. Henry called “Nothing to Say”, and chose it. Having chosen it one might think that I then would have committed it to memory, but perhaps I didn’t manage that quite as well as I should have because, well, it didn’t get committed. At least not completely.

The recitations took place during regular class periods over several days. I managed to delay for a time, but at last the day came when I was called upon to recite. I remember walking to the front of the classroom, turning to face the class, and saying the title: “Nothing to Say”. Then I stopped and stared. There was no fragment of the first line in my head, no hint of how to start, and without the first line no following line could be spoken either. I don’t know how long I stood there, my mind a complete blank, before Mrs. Stotmeister said I could return to my desk and prepare to recite the poem for her after a future class.

As I slouched back to my desk a classmate commented “That would really have been funny if you had said the title like that, paused as if you weren’t going to say anything, then recited the poem.” Yes, I thought, that would really have been funny. Too bad it didn’t work out that way.

Nothing To Say

“You can tell your paper,” the great man said,
“I refused an interview.
I have nothing to say on the question, sir;
Nothing to say to you.”

And then he talked till the sun went down
And the chickens went to roost;
And he seized the collar of the poor young man,
And never his hold he loosed.

And the sun went down and the moon came up,
And he talked till the dawn of day;
Though he said, “On this subject mentioned by you,
I have nothing whatever to say.”

And down the reporter dropped to sleep
And flat on the floor he lay;
And the last he heard was the great man’s words,
“I have nothing at all to say.”

– O. Henry

Steve & Gene

Self Portrait with Gene

Self portrait with Gene Helfer, by Steven Helfer, circa 1930?

The Remarkable Music Machine

A few weeks ago I received a much-forwarded email:

Subject:: Fw: An Unusual Musical Instrument

University of Iowa Farm Machine Music

Turn your sound on for this. Read this first, then watch.

This is almost unbelievable. See how all of the balls wind up in catcher cones.

This incredible machine was built as a collaborative effort between the Robert M. Trammell Music Conservatory and the Sharon Wick School of Engineering at the University of Iowa. Amazingly, 97% of the machines components came from John Deere Industries and Irrigation Equipment of Bancroft Iowa. Yes farm equipment!

It took the team a combined 13,029 hours of set-up, alignment, Calibration and tuning before filming this video but as you can see it was WELL worth the effort.

It is now on display in the Matthew Gerhard Alumni Hall at the University and is already slated to be donated to the Smithsonian.

An amazing story to say the least. And attached to the email was a most wondrous video. What appeared to be ball bearings of some sort flew out of pipes, bounced off cymbals, drums, odd objects that looked a bit like marimba or xylophone keys causing ringing music, then dropped noiselessly into hollow cones and disappeared. The video was fascinating. It reminded me of both Rube Goldberg and old music cartoons I vaguely remember from my childhood. But it also didn’t look like what the email said it was; the images seemed not quite “real”, a bit too perfect, perhaps simulated.

I played the video a couple of times, then, curious, looked for more information. It didn’t take much effort for me to find this note on Snopes and similar notes on Hoax-Slayer and other web sites dedicated to debunking rumors and chain emails. So, the story isn’t true — the Matthew Gerhard Alumni Hall, the Sharon Wick School of Engineering, the Robert M. Trammell Music Conservatory, and the “machine” itself are all fictions, and the Smithsonian Institution doesn’t accept donations of things that don’t exist. But the video is still entertaining, and the creators (Animusic, of Austin, Texas) clearly deserve credit. And I should probably thank the perpetrators of the hoax email for introducing me to this video, even if the story they told is fiction.

The copy of the video that came with my email had no description and no credits, no evidence of who might have been responsible for this work. If anyone is interested in the real video, here it is on YouTube, with full credits and copyright statement intact:

If you were entertained by this video, check out Animusic’s web site for more of their work.

A Source of the Wild West

A touch of civic pride, history, and myth in Troy Grove, La Salle County, Illinois, birthplace of James Butler (“Wild Bill”) Hickcok

Hickok plaque, Troy Grove, Illinois

accompanied by a heroic image, which, like Hickok’s heroic reputation, has seen better days.

Hickok Statue, Troy Grove IL

Troy Grove, once known as Homer, is a tiny village in north central Illinois, about 2 1/2 miles east of the old route of US 51 (this part is now known as Illinois route 251, because the name US 51 has been moved to Interstate 39 a few miles east). We paused there briefly on 25 June 2008, in a light rain during our tour of old US Route 51.

The Syringa

The vegetable garden in my parents’ yard in Rochelle filled the space between our driveway and the low wire fence that separated our yard from the Lamars’ yard to the east. The garden expanded and changed over the years as my father turned the soil each spring with his pick-mattock, shovel, and pitchfork in preparation for his planting. In fact, my earliest memory of the garden is of the day Dad showed us a nest of garter snakes he had uncovered in an area that had not previously been dug at the “back” of the garden behind the garage. There, at the “back” of the garden, behind the garage and along our property line on the north, Dad planted a row of shrubs, perhaps intending them to form a hedge. They never actually formed a hedge — the spaces between the plants were too large, and the plants themselves grew upward rather than hedge-like so that they didn’t form a barrier, or at least not a barrier that prevented small animals and children from passing through. And I remember passing through frequently, even after Dad filled the area immediately in front of the shrubs with raspberry plants, whose wicked thorns could make a hot afternoon very unpleasant (but we managed to pick the berries anyway).

There were at least two kinds of bushes along this row, but I remember only one clearly, the plant Dad called “the syringa”. For me, as a child, the syringa was a wonderful, fascinating bush. In the spring it put forth a display of white flowers that attracted bees and butterflies, making an appealing backdrop for the garden. But much more interestingly, its bark was perpetually peeling in long, thin strips, and I, of course, couldn’t help encouraging it to continue this activity.

The back of the garden provided me, and probably other children as well, a more adventurous path between our yard and the neighboring yard. To the west of the garage no fence or hedge of any kind marked the boundary between the yards, besides a single lilac bush and a row of young pines, so nothing at all prevented our movement from yard to yard. But if one went through the garden one could pretend to be forcing one’s way through a jungle, albeit a jungle only one bush deep. And in the course of traversing that jungle one was confronted by delicate strips of bark hanging from the branches, and attached to the bark was a thin layer of cork-like pith that one could peel and press between one’s fingers, forming a small ball of doubtful utility. I remember speculating on possible commercial uses for this pith, but my imagination was too limited. The pith was fun to play with, though — I hope I didn’t hurt the shrub too much.

A few months ago while pondering what plants we would like in our new yard here in Clarksburg the syringa came to mind. Not that I necessarily wanted one, but I remembered it fondly and wondered if it would work in this yard. So I started searching for information about it, and immediately encountered a problem. I couldn’t find any information about Dad’s “syringa”. “Syringa” is actually what I grew up calling “lilac”. I found this discovery a bit confusing, since two other plants in our yard were definitely lilacs, and we always called them lilacs, and now I didn’t know what Dad’s “syringa” was.

Eventually I discovered another plant that is commonly, but mistakenly, called “syringa”, but more properly called “Mock-orange” or “Philadelphus”. After reading the descriptions I found I believe that this is the “syringa” we had. The descriptions I have seen don’t talk about anything like cork or pith under the bark, and perhaps my memory is mistaken on that point, but the rest of the descriptions sound like the shrub I knew.

We have a lilac already here in Clarksburg, an inheritance from a previous owner; perhaps a mock-orange wouldn’t be out of place in this yard as well. We’ll have to think about it.

The Free Show

The Hub Theater in Rochelle was the first place I watched movies. During summers in my childhood the local merchants sponsored a free show for kids each Wednesday afternoon. To get into the theater a child had to have a ticket, and to have a ticket the child, or the child’s parent, had to request one from one of the local stores. It was a simple process. One simply walked up to the cash register and asked; no purchase was necessary, one could even ask for more than one so a friend or two could also get in. But you had to get a new ticket every week. I’m not sure if the merchants were trying to attract children, or at least their parents, into the stores, since someone had to go into the store to get a ticket, or if they were hoping that the free show would provide them with at least one afternoon each week with no worries about small hands touching everything in the store.

In any case, each Wednesday afternoon during the summer what seemed like thousands of kids converged on the Hub to stream through the doors, buy popcorn, candy, and pop (this was the rural Midwest in the ’50s — it was pop) at a small counter in the front hall, then noisily claim seats. The Hub was built to serve as a variety theater as well as a movie theater. It had a stage at the front, and a heavy red curtain could hide the movie screen. There was also a balcony, a favored place as I recall, that usually filled rapidly. The least desired seats were those directly below the front edge of the balcony, where one might be subjected to popcorn or pop spills or the occasional maliciously thrown candy package or wad of gum.

Invariably the movie didn’t start quickly enough for the throng that filled the seats, and the room was soon vibrating with a rhythmic chant, “We want the show!! We want the show!!”, accompanied by stomping feet. I have always believed that the manager or the projectionist purposefully delayed in order to encourage this display of eagerness, but perhaps the audience would have chanted whether there was a delay or not.

Suddenly the theater lights dimmed and a white funnel appeared in the air, connecting a tiny window behind the balcony with the screen in the front of the room. The first images were always advertisements for the theater’s concessions and for local businesses. I remember ads for Barker and Sullivan’s Rexall Drugs, and possibly for Hornsby’s Five and Dime, but there must have been more; the ads seemed to last much too long. The ads were followed by a cartoon, Tom and Jerry, or Looney Toons, or Woody Woodpecker. And finally the opening credits for the first movie appeared — Captain Blood, or Robin Hood, or a Three Stooges comedy, or any number of movies that were cheap for the theater to rent but exciting or funny enough to satisfy a rowdy crowd of pre-teens.

The free show was a double feature. More ads and cartoons heralded a second feature, a second hour or so lost in someone’s adventure or slapstick comedy.

No movie was watched in silence, no actions went without comment. I was reminded of this some years later in Chicago when a friend and I ventured into a neighborhood theater to watch a re-release of a 1940s Batman serial. The two of us, two white college guys amid of a sea of black kids, were immersed in the sounds of hilarity and utter disrespect for the film-maker’s art. Hey, it was kids watching a movie, and it was loud, and it was fun, and we had been just like that at the Hub.

It always surprised me that the sun was shining when the second feature ended and we left the theater. The sudden flash of daylight when the exit doors burst open hurt the eyes, and the first few steps back into the real world seemed less real than the movies we were leaving. Sometimes we carried the stories away with us, sometimes we simply returned to our normal lives having been entertained in community for an afternoon.

I don’t know if the free show continued after I outgrew it. I hope that it did.

Ice Curtain

Ice Curtain

More About Trees

Today I happened to be looking out the window when a truck loaded with the drying bodies of small pines, spruces, and firs stopped by our house. A man stepped out of the cab, casually reached into a nondescript mound of snow, plucked out our Christmas tree, and tossed it into his truck. Thus one of the last remainders of this Christmas season has been removed.

Removing the tree from the house at the end of the Jule month has always been a sad event to me. In December we had walked through rows of possible trees looking for just the right one. The supply was limited. Apparently my habit of acquiring the tree as close to Christmas Eve as possible endangered our getting a tree at all this year. But we did find one that suited us, a much taller tree than we had ever had. We spread the work of setting the tree up and decorating it over several days. The final decorations were added during an evening when the whole family could participate.

The reverse of decorating takes less time, and I usually do it alone. It requires a certain amount of fussiness. One doesn’t want to lose an ornament by not noticing that it’s still attached to the tree. Usually the tree’s needles have become dry and brittle, and the tree itself has become much lighter than it was when I put it up. It can be a bit easier to carry the tree out of the house than it was to carry it in, as long as it hasn’t dried out so much that the branches won’t bend to let it through the door. In any case there will be a shower of dry needles as I force it out.

Cleaning up afterwards, or course, requires a great effort to remove every single fallen needle. It’s important to get them all, even though that’s not actually possible. When we took down the bookcases in Austin before our move a year ago we found remnant tree needles that must have fallen from our Christmas trees over several years, in a place where we had stopped standing our tree some years before. But even though we will not get all the needles, it’s important for us to get as many as we can, so that the ones that are missed, that appear as if from nowhere in the course of cleaning over the next few years, are that much more valuable for their holiday memories.

On the 7th of January, the day after Epiphany, I carried our Christmas tree out to the side of our yard next to Hartland Avenue to await the city compost collectors. It has snowed almost continuously since then, so by today the tree was thoroughly covered with snow. It had become a lump of snow in a field of all white, and I wondered if the workers would realize that it was there and thought that it might not be picked up this week. But it seems that enough green showed through to make its presence known, or perhaps the workers have come to recognize the kind of snowy lump that hides a fallen Christmas tree.

I haven’t often looked out at the tree in the yard. A Christmas tree lying in the yard after the holidays seems so sad, so stark, robbed of the bit of magic it held during the weeks it stood in the house. For a time, when we were in Austin, the city sponsored tree collection sites in some of the parks. Instead of simply leaving our tree in the yard for waste workers to remove we loaded it on top of the van, loaded the family into the van, and drove to a collection site. This was a community event, almost a festival of sorts, where lines of cars and trucks arrived decorated with trees and volunteers piled the trees into a huge stack. Broken branches and dropped needles covered the parking lot as the stack grew tree by tree. Some years we sat in line for several minutes while other people’s trees were lifted onto the stack. But other years, when there was no collection site available, we left our tree by the street and let it be picked up as part of the normal yard waste program.

Children’s perspectives of the world can often surprise, and sometimes an observation from a small mouth will stick in one’s memory, affecting later attitudes for years to come. When our children were small they always mourned the tree when we took it down, marking as it did, the end of the holiday. The year Arend was 3 he was particularly saddened when I carried that year’s tree to the street. It was the first Christmas tree that he had really been aware of, and it was obvious that the tree was significant to him. He watched it as it lay by the side of the street every day until the city workers carried it away. But I didn’t realize how attached he had become to having the tree, and attached to the tree itself, until the next December when it came time to get that year’s tree. As we walked to the car to begin our tree quest Arend asked if we were going to get our tree back.

I think this is how I want to see it. We haven’t had a succession of trees; we have just had our tree, the same one we have had every Christmas since 1979. And in December we will go out again and get our tree back for Christmas 2010.