White House Games

Without a doubt, being President is the hardest job in the world.  (With the possible exception of being the dean's secretary.)  With such a hard job, it is no wonder that our Presidents have tried to relax as hard as they work.  Sometimes, their hobbies and pets have bordered on the bizarre.

For relaxation, Calvin Coolidge enjoyed playing with his pet pygmy hippopotamus, John Quincy Adams liked to scare guests with his pet alligator, and Theodore Roosevelt kept a whole damn zoo:  packs of dogs, a clowder of cats, a dozen horses, a macaw, a rat, two kangaroos, an owl, several roosters, five snakes, a hyena, a coyote, a raccoon, a lion, a

zebra, a flying squirrel, five bears, and enough snakes to frighten Indiana Jones several times over.  Oh, yeah!...And a badger.  (When T.R. left office, incoming President Taft said, "Badgers?  Badgers!  We don't need no stinkin' badgers!")

Pets have not been the only presidential diversions.  Thomas Jefferson kept a skeleton of a mammoth in the White House and amused himself by trying to piece it back together.  Zachary Taylor was proud of being able to spit tobacco with deadly accuracy and Chester Arthur had a monster rummage sale of furniture and knickknacks left by his predecessors that netted him an impressive $8,000.  None of the stuff he sold was "his", but everybody has to have a hobby, right?.

Many of our presidents played sports when they were young, and continued to do so once in the Oval Office .  Nixon played baseball in college, and followed the game closely the rest of his life.  After he lost the California gubernatorial election in 1962, he was offered the job of Major League Baseball Commissioner.  I wonder how history would have been different if he had accepted the job.

Dwight Eisenhower was a star player in both baseball and football.  His sports career was cut short when West Point played the Carlisle Indians in 1913 and Ike unwisely cut in the way of their star player on his way to a touchdown.  Future Olympian superstar Jim Thorpe broke Ike's leg so badly that the future president had to switch to golf as a sport.

This is just a blog, so we don't have the space to list all the sports that Teddy Roosevelt enjoyed while president.  The White House had a shooting range, a tennis court, and a boxing ring, but the sport that might surprise you is "stilting".  You know—walking on tall wooden stilts.  Evidently, it was something the whole family enjoyed. 

Today, there are a lot of sport facilities at the White House, including a jogging track, a pool, a tennis court that doubles as a basketball court, a pool table, a putting green, and an exercise room.  Less well known is that the White House also has a bowling alley...or two...or several.

Harry Truman was a part-time bowler, and in 1947, added a two-lane bowling alley on the ground floor of the West Wing.  It there stayed until Eisenhower had the alley moved to the Old Executive Office Building across the street, so space in the West Wing could be used to move in one of those new-fangled mimeograph machines.  Today, that space is used for the Situation Room, where the long lanes have been replaced with long conference tables and the walls are covered with monitors.  This is the room where President Obama watched the strike on the bin Laden compound.

The newer alley is still across the street, and while not exactly open to the public, it has been used by thousands of bowlers over the years.  Named the Harry Truman Bowling Alley, it was used frequently by President Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson.  President Nixon, definitely the most avid presidential bowler in history, used it frequently until he built the other White House Bowling Alley. 

Yes, another bowling alley:  This one is a single lane built in the White House basement under the North Portico, where President Nixon could practice his game without leaving the White House.  How good was Nixon?  Supposedly, he once bowled back-to-back 300 games and (depending on who you believe) had an average of either 165 or 232.  But, like many other things about Nixon, it bears a little fact checking.  If you look at the photo to the right, you can clearly see that Nixon has fouled by crossing the line, though I'll bet money that the Secret Service didn't call him on it.

This lane is still there, but reportedly in rather sad shape.  No president wants to spend public money on such a self-serving project, though a few years ago, several bowling organizations volunteered to remodel the lane.  The picture below is an artist's attempt to show what it could look like.

 

Actually, there is also a third presidential bowling alley.  This is a double set of lanes that President Eisenhower had installed in the Hickory Lodge at Camp David.  Supposedly, this is the set of lanes most used by every president since Nixon.  When Premier Khrushchev came to America in 1959, he asked to see the lanes and seemed fascinated to see the automatic pin setting machines.  Evidently, he was expecting serfs.

This is where President Clinton taught Secretary of State Madelaine Albright how to bowl, where Chelsea Clinton had her Sweet Sixteen birthday party, and  where President Obama celebrated his 48th birthday.  According to the White House press release, he scored a 144.  If true, he had obviously been practicing, since he was observed in April, 2008, bowling a game in Pennsylvania while campaigning for reelection:  That day, he had bowled a 37.

Perhaps this is why he once promised, that if reelected, he would rip out the Presidential bowling alley and replace it with a full-sized indoor basketball court.  So far, this is just another unfulfilled campaign promise.  In politics, as in bowling, split happens.

Wanted: Experienced Cattle Guard

The old cowboy looked down at the cattle guard and swore under his breath. 

"Kent?" he asked.  "Got any other ideas?" 

Mike slowly unhooked the chain from the one of the pipes that made up the cattle guard.  The other end was attached to the bucket of the front-end loader Kent was running.

"I was sure that we could just lift up one side of the cattle guard and dig the dirt out from under it," Kent said.  "But, it looked like the pipe was bending."

"Yep," Mike said.  "And if we can't lift it up, there is only one way we can get all of that dirt out from under it."

Mike looked down at the cattle guard again.  The heavy pipes were set about five inches apart, close enough that a vehicle could cross, but cattle would not even attempt to cross the pipes.  This meant that a cattle guard was a gate that never had to be opened or closed—a real time-saver on a ranch. 

This cattle guard, however, now had dirt filling the usual open space under the pipes.  The recent rains from a a tropical storm that had not come within a thousand miles of the Brazos River ranch had flooded the road and washed in so much dirt and debris that the cattle no longer viewed the cattle guard as an obstacle—something that was made apparent by the cattle the two men had found grazing along the county road that bordered the ranch.  Now safely returned to their pasture, the cattle would be safe as soon as a little maintenance on the cattle guard was finished.

An hour later, the two men were still on their hands and knees, scooping the dirt out from the between the heavy pipes.   It was slow work, but they were making steady progress.

"You know, they've done experiments and all you have to do is paint the pipes on the ground and the cattle won't cross it," said Kent as he lifted another small scoop of dirt out of the space.

Mike stopped for a second and looked at the other man.  "That's nonsense," he said.  "Why wouldn't they just walk across them?"

Before his friend could answer, a county road truck slowly drove around the bend in the county road and the two men could see two workmen laboring behind the truck as it slowly made its way toward the gate.

Staring at the truck, Kent answered, "Cows can't see that well, so they think the stripes painted on the ground are the real thing."

By now, the two ranchers could see that the truck was stopping every 20 feet or so, and one of the two workers was using a posthole digger to make a hole in the ground about two feet deep.

"Those cows could see well enough to realize this hole was full of dirt—and these pipes are real, not just painted on the ground."  As Mike was talking, he stood up so that he could get a better look at the approaching work crew.  As he watched, the man had finished digging the hole, and as the truck slowly moved forward, the man with the posthole digger followed the truck as it drove  another 25 feet up the shoulder of the county road.

Mike leaned back and stretched his back, one hand on his kidney.  "I feel as beat as a rented mule.  Besides, the eyes on a cow are so far apart they have about twice the field of vision as you and I.  What they lack is depth perception:  that's why you see them walk around shadows—they're afraid it might be a hole in the ground."

"But, you see, the cows think...." Kent began, but stopped as he watched the second workman following the truck walk up to the freshly dug hole and begin refilling the hole with dirt.  When it was finished, he followed the workman with the posthole digger as the county truck moved farther up the road.

"Just what in the world are those two fools doing?" asked Mike.  "Why are they digging holes and filling them back up?"

For a long minute, the two men just stood there watching the county workers as they dug another hole and refilled it.  As they watched, the truck finally pulled up roughly in front of where the two old cowboys were working.  Together, they crossed the road and spoke through the open window of the truck to the driver.

"What's going on?" Mike asked.

The driver nodded to the two men and answered, "The county wants to plant trees along the side of the road; they think it will help stop the erosion after heavy rains."

Kent walked over to the back of the truck and looked in.  "Where's the trees?"

"Didn't bother to bring them," the driver answered.  "The guy who plants them, Bob, is on vacation for two weeks."

"Then why are you digging the holes and filling them back in?" asked Mike.

"Well," answered the driver.  "Just because Bob's on vacation doesn't mean the rest of us shouldn't get paid."

This Too Shall Pass

Curiously, I started my career in the hotel business at the top.  My first job was manager of a weird little hotel/bar/restaurant on the Texas/Mexico border.  The certifiably insane owner of the hotel decided—in the midst of a drunken stupor—that I might be able to shake up the place and return it to profitability.

I was superbly unqualified to be the manager of anything.  I knew nothing about hotels, I couldn’t prepare a baloney sandwich, and at eighteen, I wasn’t old enough to set foot in the bar that I was supposed to be running.  I was the kind of incompetent manager that normally one can only find within the ranks university administrators or almost anywhere at the State Department. 

No other business, in my opinion, will provide a young man the kind of diverse education the hospitality industry will provide. 

Note.  Why in the world do they call it the ‘hospitality’ industry?  Cecil B. De Mille claimed that young actresses were called ‘starlets’ because ‘piglets’ was already taken.  If this rule applied to the hotel business, the true name should be the Mental Health Industry.

My reign as manager of the complex did not start well:  As I drove up and was parking my car at the hotel—a place that I had never before laid eyes on—a young man came barreling out the back door with a case of beer hoisted over one shoulder.  Watching him disappear down the alley, I wondered, “Who the hell was that?”

The next 24 hours were extremely educational.  I learned the head cook thought he should have been promoted to manager, and when he found out that I couldn’t even make coffee, he promptly resigned.  I also learned that in front of the hotel was a neon sign promising, "Fresh Apple Pie Made Daily".  Evidently, a good share of the restaurant's business came from local ranchers and oil field workers who came in before dawn each morning for coffee and pie.  While the morning cook could handle breakfast, the pies had to be prepared the night before.

This taught another great lesson:  When you are the boss, you are either responsible or you are irresponsible—there is no middle ground.  There is simply no substitute for getting the job done, and if all else fails, you have to do it yourself.  Management is exactly like fatherhood:  Everything is your job.

The local drug store (which coincidentally, rented part of the ground floor of the old hotel—making me its landlord) sold me a paperback copy of The Betty Crocker Cookbook.  I stayed up all that night--and many more later—learning how to bake an apple pie.  Along the way, I wasted a lot of flour and murdered quite a few harmless apples.  I think my first couple of attempts can still be found behind that hotel; the last time I saw them, they were being used as stepping stones across a wet spot in the alley.  Eventually, I could turn out a pretty fair apple pie. 

Note.  I don’t mind sharing my secrets to making a good apple pie.  Don’t overwork the pastry dough.  The pie looks better if you peel the apples, but tastes better if you leave the skins on.  Slice green apples paper thin.  You can’t use too much cinnamon or sugar.  Add butter.  Add more sugar and butter—no dish was ever sent back to the kitchen because it contained too much butter and sugar.  And the top crust needs three slashes.  One to let out the hot steam and two more because that’s the way your momma did it.

I learned a lot about coffee, so I can tell you there are five grades of coffee; Coffee, Java, Joe, Jamoke, and Carbon Remover. On any given day, I’m happy to have anything in the first three categories.  The last two can only be made by true coffee illiterates (these being tea drinkers, the US Army, and Mormons).  No one will complain if you serve them grade two (Java), but everyone will complain if the coffee isn’t hot enough to injure the drinker.

Another lesson:  People hide crap in hotels rooms and then forget to take it with them.  And usually, it is the same kind of crap:  Tennis rackets, cameras, and drugs are most common.  (Well, except for the expensive bottles of designer shampoo that damn near everyone leaves in the shower.  I worked at one hotel where the head housekeeper collected all those bottles and added it to the detergent used to wash the hotel towels and sheets.  I have no clue whether this actually worked, but the hotel laundry room smelled nicer.)

I have no idea what the street value would be of all the drugs I have thrown out after all those years in the hotel business.  Pills, powders and bales of weed were all tossed because guests couldn’t remember where they had stashed their stashes during bouts of drug-induced paranoia.  While no scientist has yet done research on the matter, every hotel maid can tell you that short term memory leads to marijuana loss.

In short, the hotel taught me that hard work and creativity pay off.  So against all odds, I made that small, little, tiny border hotel profitable and before long, I had made a deal with a seismograph crew working for a major oil company.  These guys went out into the middle of nowhere, set up sensitive instruments, and set off buried dynamite in an effort to map the underground reservoirs of undiscovered oil and gas.  This was dangerous and hard work, and the men who made up the crew were well-paid and overworked.

I rented almost every room in the hotel to the oil company, and signed a contract to provide three meals a day for the entire crew.  (By now, I was buying apples by the pickup load.  Not that those guys were gourmands--they would have eaten cinder blocks with ketchup--but no one could match them for the quantity of pie they put away.) 

We had over fifty of these guys in the hotel, and they were just a little on the rough side.  Five nights out of the week, by the time they got back to the hotel, they were too exhausted to do much more than eat dinner and go to bed.  Saturdays were different:  They worked a half-day, then came back to the hotel to eat dinner, and get cleaned up, after which they promptly went wild every Saturday night.  They drank the bar damn near dry, then went out to party as much as anyone could in a border town that boasted one traffic light, and NO night life.  A lot of the activity involved fist fights, shooting craps, and chasing every woman in town.

By Sunday morning, most of the guys were dead broke and dead drunk, and at least half were in jail.  Sunday night would be as quiet as the grave, and then the whole process would begin again on Monday morning.

Not only were the weekends a little…trying, but by Monday, most of restaurant and bar employees had quit.   Harassing the waitresses was the reason about half the roughnecks got arrested each weekend.  So every Monday, I had to start looking for a new crew to train—which is how I hired the Rios sisters.

Guadalupe and Sylvia Rios were two of the hardest-working employees I have ever had.  (Yes, the Guadalupe River is one of the larger rivers in Texas, but don’t blame me--I didn’t name the girls.)  Deeply religious, smart as a whip, and stunningly beautiful, they were two of the best employees ever.  Guadalupe cleaned that kitchen until even I would eat there, and even more important, she took over the pie making responsibilities.  Sylvia waited tables and was so outgoing and charming to the customers that, for the first time, the restaurant was making more money than the bar. 

And that was my biggest problem:  while both of the sisters refused to set foot in the bar, I knew for certain that as soon as the weekend came, those girls would quit after the way they saw the roughnecks run wild.  I couldn’t just give them the weekend off:  we didn’t have enough other employees to cover, but SOMETHING had to be done!  In hindsight, I can only plead youthful exuberance and galloping stupidity for the plan I hatched to keep my two best employees.  The chief of the seismograph crew had already announced that the next week, they would be relocating to the next county, so my plan only had to work one time…

You will remember that we fed those four dozen guys at the hotel Saturday night before they went out to party.  Every Saturday night, we set up the restaurant tables in long rows, then put out platters of food, banquet-style.  That night, each table had a large pots of kidney beans in barbecue sauce thick with chopped onions and peppers—a favorite of the crew.

The beans were especially popular that night:  the guys liked the new, slightly sweeter taste.  (Remember?  No one ever complains about too much sugar.)  The un-named, but key ingredient was a surprisingly large amount of chocolate-flavored Ex-lax—in the kind of quantity one could only obtain if he was the landlord to a pharmacy for which he had a set of keys.)

This was not a terribly clever plan—Effective, but not clever.  When the meal was over, there wasn’t a single bean left in any of the pots.  The men ate, galloped off to get cleaned up….and vanished.  We hardly saw them for the rest of the weekend.  Several phoned the front desk for more toilet paper, but otherwise, it was a peaceful weekend.

A few rugged individuals showed up the next morning for breakfast.  The buffet featured a mercy dish:  grits with cheese.  The rationale was that this was light...but binding. 

Since I was not murdered (with my corpse shoved down a dynamite-packed drill pipe), the crew obviously never caught on to the deliberate nature of my plan.  Within days, they were gone.  When I left the hotel in the fall to start my days at the University of Houston, the Rios sisters were still working there. 

Last I heard, beans were still on the menu.

Reformatting Formats

This has been one of those weeks at Enema U, I have spent more time working with people with computer problems than with my students.  I should complain, but Enema U actually pays me more to solve piddling little computer problems than to teach history.  Go figure!

By coincidence, most of the problems this week concerned trying to recover old files from long-dead computers.  Even after the dead had been resurrected, it turned out most of the files were in word processing programs only slightly more advanced than using pointed sticks in clay tablets. 

No one ever calls the lab and says, "Hey, I have this old file, so worthless that I haven't read it since disco, and God knows I never bothered to back it up or even print out a copy, but if you have time, it might be fun to look at it.  Can you help me?"

Nope.

It's always, "Oh my God!  It's an emergency.  My only copy of my manuscript is gonna be lost unless you can help me!  I don't remember what the file was called, and I'm not sure where I saved it on this ancient hard drive, but YOU HAVE TO HELP ME!"

I personally have saved the Great American Novel at least a dozen times.  Not that any of them ever got into print.

Safe copies of one’s work have always been a problem: it is not something new to the digital age.  Even with printed records, how many copies were enough?  Libraries burn, copies can get lost, and paper is fragile.  If paper is your only storage medium, then nothing is permanent.  Most of the books printed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were printed on paper with such a high acid content, that nowadays, libraries routinely find that precious volumes have turned into faded confetti.  Even today, some publishers print their hardbacks on such poor quality paper that the expected lifetime of the volumes is less than 20 years.

For a guy who is still angry at the Romans' burning of the library at Alexandria, this situation is entirely unacceptable.  Some of the greatest mystery stories ever were those of The Thinking Machine by Jacques Futrelle.  But none of us will ever be able to read all of them, since several unpublished manuscripts went down with the author when the Titanic sank.

You would think that computers would provide some form of remedy, but they actually have made the problem far worse.  For years, every word processing program went out of its way to make sure that every document saved would be compatible with every other word processing format.  Eventually, public pressure created a need for some forms of open format:  ASCII, RTF, and PDF files being the most popular.

NOTE.  When I just happened to mention in passing to my wife, The Doc, the universal knowledge of ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) she gave me a blank look.  In the twenty-first century, how can anyone NOT understand ASCII?  Incredulous, I asked her, "C'mon!  What is ASCII 65?" 

She didn't know!  Wives are weird.

The fact that some documents could be saved in an almost universal format did not solve the problems, since every computer used a different storage system to save the file.   Simply put, a disk from one computer was unreadable to a computer from a rival manufacturer (sometimes, it could not even be transferred between two models of computer from the same manufacturer--how's THAT for planned obsolescence?).  And it has always been this way.

In 1976, manufacturers and programmers met in Kansas City to agree on a standard format for storing data on cassette tapes.  (Yes, before the floppy disk drive became affordable, early computers stored data on cassette tapes...Badly.)  Everyone at the meeting quickly agreed on a standard--the Kansas City Standard.  And then almost all of them went home and developed their own proprietary standards incompatible with the new standard, in the desire to lock in their own customer bases.

At the same time, the hardware itself was changing constantly.  Computer cards were replaced by paper tape, which was replaced by cassette tape, which was in turn replaced by floppy disks that came in a bewildering assortment of both sizes and capacities.  Which holds more data, a single-sided, single formatted 10" diskette or a double-sided, hard-sectored 5.25" inch disk?   Unfortunately, none of them can be relied on to be readable after resting in a file cabinet for a decade.

I once had a lawyer promise to pay me any sum of money I wished if I could resurrect data stored on Mag Cards from a IBM typewriter system from the 1970's.  And for the amount of work it took me, I was still underpaid.  Even IBM didn't have one of those antique systems in its museum.

Zip drives, CD drives, DVD (single and dual layer), Thumb drives, and Blue-ray disks...while the storage capacity of the new drives keeps increasing dramatically, there is almost no backward compatibility.  (And almost no one remembers to copy data from old devices to the new devices).  There is no such thing as permanent storage.  Whether we like it or not, every day the world loses the last copy of something.

The temporary nature of our collected knowledge reminds me of the old Roman practice of the the triumphal parade of a victorious general.  As he guided his chariot through the crowds of cheering citizens, a slave stood on the rear of the chariot, holding a laurel wreath over the general's head while gently whisperer a reminder.

"All glory is fleeting."

I Hanker to Hunker

It has rained enough this week that locals are checking their driver’s licenses to see if they still live in New Mexico.  Normally, around here, it is so dry and dusty the children adopt tumbleweeds as pets and the Spanish Doves build their nests out of barbed wire.  Dry is one of the things we do well in New Mexico. 

 

All this rain is creating a couple of problems with the rock walls surrounding my house:  some of the formerly bone-dry mortar is leaching out of the walls and one or two of them are starting to look a little lazy.  (Rock walls are something else New Mexico does well.  This is a great place to build with rock and adobe because it never rains—at least, until this week.)

 

Suddenly, I have to patch my own rock walls and masonry is not in my skill set.  I can fly a hot air balloon, I know which end of a hammer fits the hand, and I can even bake you a fair loaf of cheese bread—but working with concrete is a pain in the ass.  (Come to think of it, most of the men I know are pretty good cooks.  Restaurants, unfortunately, are not one of the things Southern New Mexico does well.  The local notion of a seven course meal is a six-pack of Corona beer and a burrito.)

 

I miss my rock wall guy.  He would know how to patch the mortar, replace a few missing stones, and while he was doing it, I could get him to build a few new walls.   José built all the sturdy rock walls around my house, and he did it fast and incredibly cheaply.  He was by far the best rock guy I have ever met, and at the bargain prices he charged, I could always find a new wall project. 

Not that there weren’t a few problems working with José.  First off….well, let’s just say he was of questionable citizenship.  Donald Trump would either deport him or have him rebuild Trump Tower in stone. 

It was not even remotely possible that José was from New Mexico.  Quite a few people born locally either learn English as a second language, or not infrequently, never learn it.  In José’s case, he could speak neither English nor Spanish.  José spoke only a dialect of Nahuatl. 

For those of you who have not studied Pre-Columbian Mexican History in my class (and you are welcome—Tuesdays and Thursdays at 10:20), Nahuatl is the language of the Aztecs, and roughly 1.5 million people still use it—almost all of whom live in Central and Southern Mexico.  New Mexico has 19 pueblos and 3 reservations, but none of them are for the Aztecs.  While a lot of Spanish words have made their way into the Nahuatl vocabulary (and a lot of the really good Spanish profanity has its roots in Nahuatl) it is not the same language.

Luckily, whenever José came to my house to build a new wall, he brought his grandson with him.  His grandson, about 7, had a fair working vocabulary in Spanish, Nahuatl, and English.  His skill in English was about even—poor—with my skill in Spanish (minus the interesting profanity).  So, every time I needed a new rock wall, the three of us would gather in my front yard and enact our own little private version of the UN.  There was a lot of waving of hands and hunkering and drawing in the dirt. 

Since my prodigious hate mail indicates that my readership includes a large number of Yankees, I should explain about hunkering and drawing in the dirt.  In Texas, this is an art form as respected as fiddle playing, bass fishing, or playing dominoes. 

The hunker and draw is a skill honed over eons of time that got its start with primitive man who hunkered down around his fire and drew crude figures in the dirt as he lied about that day’s hunt.  Even today, a good hunker damn near requires a stick in the hand to draw in the dirt.  If two Texans spend more than thirty seconds discussing a deer hunt, they’ll both get down on their haunches and start to draw in the dirt.

After thousands of years of technological improvement, the only real improvement in education is that we have exchanged ‘the hunker and draw’ for PowerPoint.  Socrates described a classroom as a log with a teacher on one end and a student on the other.  If Socrates had been a Texan, he’d have held school without the log.

One of the built-in advantages of hunker and draw is that there is an automatic time limit.  After about half an hour, the newcomer will need a crane to stand up, and as his legs develop a Charley Horse that could run the Kentucky Derby, he may find himself readily consenting to proposals that he might find objectionable standing upright.  If the United Nations building had been erected in Fort Worth, by now we would have achieved world peace.

I would try to get my department head to hold the next faculty meeting outside so we could all gather under a tree for a good hunker, but the damn Yankee, bless his heart, probably can’t tell the difference between a good hunker and a squat.

Even with the best of dirt drawings, communication was difficult.  There is only so much information that you can pass through the vocabulary of a 7 year old.  I learned that the word rock—piedra in Spanish—is teti in Nahuatl.  And flat stone—piedra plana in Spanish—is tepatiachtli in Nahuatl.  Don’t try to pronounce that, it will make your throat hurt worse than speaking German.  (That will probably piss off Professor Grumbles, the German professor.  But, maybe he won’t read this.  He recently retired and opened a Bavarian bistro he calls the Wurst Bar.)

Occasionally, mistakes were discovered in our design.  If you drive by my house, you will notice that the front wall has a definite slant as it runs east.  I have no idea why, but maybe the “blueprints” needed a sharper stick.  I blame it on the 7 year old—it’s hard to teach construction to children.

That front wall was the last job José did for me, since he seems to have vanished.  I haven’t been able to find him for years, and I have really tried.  When he did that last job for me, he laboriously asked—through our translator—if he could deliver the necessary rocks in the cool of the evening, and then start the job the next day.  Naturally, I agreed to the plan.

That night, when I went to bed, the rocks had not been delivered.  I wasn’t particularly worried as doing jobs on schedule is another thing that New Mexico doesn’t do particularly well.  I was certain that in a day or two, José would finish the job. 

The next morning, I was surprised to see a mountain of stone in front of my house.  (So were my neighbors, for José had stacked them in the street, not in my yard!)  How he had managed to put so many large rocks in front of my house without waking me is still a mystery.  By the time I left for work, José had arrived and happily begun assembly of my new wall.

When I arrived at Enema U, there was something of a traffic jam in front of the new Sports Chalet, still under construction, at the end of the football field.  It looked like every policeman on campus was gathered around where they were building a new….rock….wall….around….the parking lot.

Suddenly, I understood how José could build the cheapest rock walls in town.  I have no idea if this had anything to do with his sudden disappearance. 

I think of José every time I drive by the Enema U stadium.  I hope he comes back to town before they finish building the new art building.

The Door

Previously, I have written about the old Jack Tar Hotel in Galveston, which unfortunately isn't there anymore. As far as I know, the largest remaining piece of that hotel is a single weathered brick sitting on a shelf in a bookcase in my office.  Several hurricanes ate the rest of the old hotel, taking a bite or two from me in the process.

This is just about the end of the hurricane season, so I have been thinking about the old hotel lately.  Every hurricane gnawed at the hotel (in some cases the damage was spectacular), but even the smallest tropical depression brought wind damage and flooding--this is the inevitable fate of anything built directly on a beach.  An oceanographer once told me that the ocean eventually either buries or washes away everything it touches, and a little of both eventually destroyed the hotel.

Not all the hotel's destruction was caused by nature, however:  It suffered through a few man-made storms, too.  Some of the "storm damage" was caused by the exuberant application of the law by the off-duty police officers I employed as hotel security.  Someday, I really should record a few stories about "Too Cold" Taylor and "Colonel Klink”.  (I'll have to check on the statute of limitations first).

The worst man-made storm damage, however, was caused by conventioneers.  The only safe way to attend a convention of the Telephone Workers of America is from inside an Abrams battle tank--And keep the hatch firmly dogged!  It still mystifies me how such a group of harmless-looking people could hold such a wild drunken convention and it was simply amazing how many of them ended up in either the county hospital or the county jail! 

One convention that stands out in my memory is a convention that started out fairly mildly, anyway.  The Mattress Tax Tag Collectors of Texas (the name has been changed to protect the guilty) was the kind of mild-mannered group that could be counted on to arrive with a dirty t-shirt and a five dollar bill...and by the time the convention was over and they had left the island, they wouldn't have changed either one.

So it was something of a surprise when the front desk got a call about 3:00 AM, from a guest in one of the of the lanai rooms, complaining about the noise from a room occupied by one of the Mattress Tax Tag Collectors.. 

It was standard policy at the hotel that in the advent of anything really weird, the front desk was to call a manager instead of security, who would then make the decision about whether to call security.

The lanai rooms were strange, two-story bungalows, scattered around the pool; each one was comprised of only two rooms, with the upper room accessed by a flight of stairs.  This shows the age of the hotel:  not only would this kind of room fail to meet current ADA compliance, but cleaning these rooms would be far too labor-intensive for today's wages.

When I got to the room in question, sure enough, there were loud sounds of a man's moaning and sighing.  I couldn't make out all the words, but I could occasionally hear what sounded like someone saying, "Help!  Help me!"

When no one answered my knock on the door, I used my passkey let myself into the room.  The television was on, the room was obviously occupied, no one was in sight, but there was loud moaning coming from the bathroom.

As I moved into the bathroom, I found the source:  A very large--and very naked--man was lying on the floor, covered in splintered pieces of wood, lying half across what had once been a sliding pocket door separating the shower from the rest of the bathroom.  His badly scraped and slightly bleeding body was half in one room, and half in the other, and the remains of the door had a large man-shaped hole right through it.

Note.  When Rene Magritte painted the picture to the right, I doubt that he had this use in mind, but it did sort of look like this.

The man was all but unconscious and incoherent, and it took almost an hour to get the poor man to calm down, to stop crying, to remove most of the tiny splinters of wood, to get him covered with a towel, and to be relaxed enough to tell me what had happened.  For the record, there is an awful lot of naked on a large panicky, semi-conscious, naked, (Did I already mention that he was NAKED?) man!

The story unfolded like this:  Despite being somewhat claustrophobic, and alone, the guest had locked the door while taking a shower, but when he tried to unlock the door, it had become jammed.  Before long, according to him, he had "run out of air", had begun choking, and had passed out.  The next thing he knew, I was helping him up and he had absolutely no memory of crashing through the door.

Now, this had been a standard pocket door that slid in and out of the wall.  There was no way it could actually jam:  the latch could be flipped open with a hard stare, so it was rather obvious that the man had just freaked out and in a blind panic had simply crashed through the door.

Eventually, I got the man reoriented and calmed down, and with the help of a bellboy, moved him to another lanai room.  I wasn't too worried about the destroyed door since maintenance could replace it the next day, then housekeeping could vacuum up the remaining wood splinters, and the room would be ready for occupancy the next night.   I wasn’t even going to try and get the guest to pay for the damages, I figured the poor guy had suffered enough embarrassment.

The next morning, as I was making the rounds of the hotel, I passed the room with the destroyed door and saw a note taped on the front door.  Curious, I walked over and read it:

"Jerry, I've moved to 233.  I had a little trouble with the bathroom door in this room.  I had to get tough and use karate on it.  Steve."

 

You Can Hang Your Hat on It

It seems that Enema U is not the only university run by lemmings who regularly manufacture mountains of fear from molehills of facts.  The President of the University of Delaware has declared a campus emergency—someone left rope nooses hanging from trees. 

(What is the proper plural collective noun for a noose?  Nooses sounds absurd.  Say it out loud and you'll see what I mean.  It is absolutely impossible to say 'nooses' ten times as fast as you can.)

"We will not tolerate this hate crime!" thundered President Taggert.  "We must all stand together against intolerance."

This statement was probably the very first clue that something was wrong.  First, when someone says, "We should all stand together," you should immediately sit down firmly on your wallet.  A contrarian by nature, I firmly believe the wisdom of the masses is a pernicious falsehood on a scale that would intimidate organized religion.  If the collective opinions of the great unwashed were valid, then the finest newspaper in the world would be National Enquirer, the finest beer would be Bud Light, and Congress would deserve to be reelected.

Always run in the opposite direction of the crowd:  If nothing else, you will avoid traffic jams.

Second, can we all just back off a little on the "hate speech"/"hate crime" labels?  There is no right to be protected from being offended—even deeply offended.  Inoffensive speech does not need protection.  You can go to the most regulated and controlled areas of the world—even San Francisco—and praise the local governmental leaders and no one will bother you.  If you do not protect offensive speech—even hateful speech—you are not protecting any speech at all.

The campus hate crime was discovered just hours after a university sponsored protest by the Black Lives Matter group had ended on campus.  This led several students to speculate on the school's website that the nooses (nuces?) were an obvious reference to Southern Jim Crow laws and KKK lynchings.

Sure enough, shortly after President Taggert went on television denouncing the hate crime,  and shortly after the campus police announced they were launching an investigation (this probably meant questioning every student from Mississippi), it was determined that the nooses (Neesi?  Noosi?) were actually the remains of paper lanterns that had gotten a little wet in the rain.  To be fair, it was a hate-filled rain that came up from the south.  And the paper lanterns were made in Southern China.

Why had so many people looked at the remains of wet paper lanterns and leaped to the wild conclusion about racial hate crimes?

This kind of reminds me of the Great Satanic Site in New Mexico.  This is not something tourists will find on the map, even though it is still there. 

It was 1990, and a utility worker stumbled across a large geometric pattern of old tires, laid out in the desert scrub.  The design, almost 500 feet on each side, included three hexagrams, each with a seven tire dot in the center.  The three hexagrams were connected by five lines of tires—altogether, the design used over 450 tires!

A local police officer, who lectured to area high schools about the seductive dangers of Satanism, warned that the area was obviously in use by local practitioners of witchcraft.  "I'd stay away from the area if any people are around," he said to reporters.  "They'll hurt you."

The Associated Press interviewed several experts.  An expert on symbolism agreed that the symbol was connected to witchcraft, and added that it was obviously connected to a moon cult.  A promoter of psychic affairs testified that the steel-belted desert pattern was "a powerful and spiritual symbol."

By this point, TireHenge had been on the front pages of the local papers for almost a week and featured such details as aerial photographs—and the rather grisly discovery of mounds of chicken bones:  the obvious result of ritualistic sacrifices!

Just as the site was becoming the subject of sermons by local pastors, a large number of rather sheepish men—most of them very prominent in civic and social affairs—stepped forward and admitted responsibility for the design.  The design was the layout for a three-way soccer match.  (This is in NO WAY connected to what I wrote about two weeks ago!)

The first game was—I swear!  I'm not making this up!—the Albuquerque Police Department, the Fire Department, and the Parks Department.  The mayor was one of the players.

When asked why it took them so long to come forward, one of the players said, "From what was being printed, we didn't recognize ourselves."

This is exactly the point:  Any act, speech, or behavior can be labeled as evil, deviant, or hate-filled by someone else—someone who is looking for evil in it.  If we allow those in power to label our actions, then it won't take long for the politically incorrect speech—the uncomfortable speech—to equal a "hate crime".  Label something as hate, racism, or prejudice and even those involved won't recognize themselves.

Oh, yes!—and those chicken bones?  They came from that well-known practitioner of the Dark Arts—Colonel Sanders.

One in a Thousand

The American Civil War occurred at an unfortunate point in technological development: quite simply, we had just gotten very good at killing each other. 

In the first few battles, generals were shocked by the large number of casualties—and those who were wounded had devastating wounds.  This new lethality was the result of recent improvements in rifled barrels, consistently performing gunpowder, and bullet designs.  Suddenly, the average rifleman could reliably kill at 400 yards, reload quickly and do it again.

This was the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and improved technology would make this the deadliest war in American history.  Railroads, steamships, improved metallurgy, better metal casting—all of these contributed to making the war a bloodbath.

Even so, it could have been worse:  the war stimulated innovation and rewarded creativity, particularly in the field of weapons, which improved dramatically. 

 

Note:  It is a sad commentary on the human race that we show our best creativity while trying to murder each other.  Look, for example, at the Second World War:  at the start, we were flying fabric-covered biplanes, but by the end of the war, sleek metallic darts were creeping close to the speed of sound, powered by jet and rocket motors.  If you were to chart the progress of wartime technology (and had the war lasted another ten years), the Big Red One would have established a beachhead on the moon.

 

The casualties of the Civil War could have climbed dramatically if overly conservative generals had adopted repeating rifles when they had the chance.  Two rifles in particular—the Spencer and the Henry—could have dramatically changed the course of the war if they had been widely adopted.  (I have already written about the Spencer, Lincoln's favorite rifle.)

The Henry is a 16-shot, lever-action rifle that utilizes the (then) new metallic cartridges that were so popular with the soldiers.  Operating the lever ejects the spent cartridge casing, loads a new round, and cocks the weapon's hammer so quickly and smoothly that in the hands of an experienced marksman, the rifle sounds like a slow-firing machine gun.  Impervious to weather, easy to load, and rapid-firing, the rifles, while more expensive than the commonly used Springfield muskets, were a dramatic improvement in technology and lethality when introduced.

Despite the proven effectiveness of the rifle, the Federal Ordnance Department purchased only 1,731 Henry rifles, but thousands more were sold directly to the men.  Over 200 men in the Illinois 7th, dissatisfied with the single-shot rifles they had been issued, purchased their own Henry rifles, despite the astronomical cost of $50 per rifle. 

It wasn't long before the rifle was known in the south as "that tarnation Yankee rifle they load on Sunday and shoot all week."

Ironically, the very companies that had profited from the war, went bankrupt because of the peace that followed it.  The federal government no longer had a need for so many weapons, and sold off the surplus arms—including the Spencer and Henry lever action rifles—for as little as $2 each.  Effectively, the arms companies were priced out of the market by their former best customer, who was selling their own products below cost.

Oliver Winchester was a businessman who had become rich manufacturing and selling shirts, and had used some of his earnings to invest in industries manufacturing war goods for the government.  When the firearms companies began failing, Winchester bought up the company manufacturing the Henry and renamed it the Winchester Repeating Arms Company.  Within a short time, he also bought the rights to the Spencer rifle. 

By 1866, a new improved version of the rifle had been produced, the Winchester 1866, commonly called the "Yellow Boy" because of the brass receiver.  This rifle had two important improvements;  a wooden forearm was added (the previous rifles were painfully hot to hold after a few rounds were fired) and the tubular magazine under the barrel was sealed and a loading gate was added to the receiver, facilitating reloading.

In the years following the Civil War, two events changed the Winchester:  the first was the rise of the metallic cartridge—the day of the paper cartridge was over.  The second, was the advent of the efficient revolver using those metal cartridges.  The Colt Firearm Company introduced the Colt Single Action Army, a six-shot, reliable revolver—the famous Colt Peacemaker—in 1873.  That same year, The Winchester Repeating Arms Company released the Model 1873, changing the world of firearms forever.

The new Winchester rifle was much stronger, manufactured from steel rather than brass, and was chambered in a new more powerful cartridge, the .44 WCF (Winchester Centerfire).  The new rifle/cartridge combination was reliable and powerful, and quickly became the most popular firearm in America—so popular that Colt was forced to offer its revolver using the same cartridge.

This combination made both guns far more popular than the addition of either would have by itself.  Cowboys liked the convenience of having a rifle and a pistol that both used the same powerful cartridge.  The general store in almost any settlement in the West might not have a lot of inventory, but it certainly had a box of .44 ammo on the shelf.

This rifle was, and still is, used by almost everyone.  Outlaws and peace officers, Indians and settlers—everyone used it except the military, that is until Colonel Custer and and his men were wiped out by Lakota armed with rapid-firing Winchesters, causing the military to finally change its mind about using the Winchester.  It did not take long for the rifle to be used all over the world.  Even today, the .44 Winchester has killed more game—and people—than any other rifle.  Within a few years, the Winchester became the rifle known as the "Gun That Won the West."

By 1875, Winchester began making a limited edition of the 1873 Winchester, the "One of One Thousand."  Hand-crafted and fitted, the rifle had special stocks and case-hardened blueing.  The highly sought after rifles originally cost roughly $100, and if you have one of the 136 that were manufactured, it will bring over $500,000 at auction. 

In 1950, James Stewart starred in Winchester '73, a movie about one of the rare One in One Thousand rifles.  If you watch it, you can actually see one of the rare rifles.  The movie, set in the year 1876, also inexplicably features a Winchester Model 1892. 

The 1879 Winchester made Oliver Winchester incredibly rich.  When he died, the company passed to his son, William Wirt Winchester, who died less than a year later.  The wealth and almost half of the company stock passed to his wife, Sarah Winchester.  Sarah, unfortunately, believed that the ghosts of the people killed with the various Winchester rifles were haunting her.

Fleeing the spirits of fallen soldiers from around the world, Indians, outlaws and rustlers, Sarah moved from New Haven, Connecticut to San Jose, California.  Somehow, the ghosts of the slain still found her, so Sarah began construction of a home that could trap and confuse the spirits that chased her.  Beginning in 1884 and continuing until her death in 1922, the Winchester Mystery House (pictured at right) was under continuous construction.  Almost 5 acres in size, the house had over 160 rooms, three elevators, and two ballrooms.  The house featured stairs to nowhere, false doors, and a labyrinthine floor plan that changed so often that even the number of floors in the house changed over time.

Did Sarah really believe that she would perish if the house was completed?  Was she really trying to trap the lost souls killed by Winchester rifles?  The answer is one in a thousand.