Henry Meiggs

If there was one thing Henry Meiggs could do, it was construction.  Everywhere Meiggs went, he was responsible for incredible commercial construction projects, many of which are still standing.  Unfortunately, after the construction was completed, Meiggs never proved capable of successfully running any of those enterprises he had created.

 

Born in 1811, Meiggs’ first company was a lumber business in New York City, where he found that his lack of political connections meant he would be unsuccessful in securing government contracts.   Eager to move his business to an area not quite so settled, Meiggs loaded his inventory of lumber onto a ship and sailed into San Francisco Harbor just at the peak of the Gold Rush. 

 

Gold fever and the stampede of would-be miners had skyrocketed the price of everything, and though California had a seemingly endless supply of timber, there was a critical shortage of men willing to work in the forest for wages while others were getting rich in the gold fields.  Meiggs was able to sell his lumber for twenty times what he had paid for it, providing more than enough funds to start several businesses.

 

Meiggs opened a lumber mill, invested in real estate and began promoting the building of piers on the north side of the harbor instead of the usual location on the south shore.  Due to the currents along the north shore, construction was difficult, but eventually, Meiggs Wharf extended 2000 feet out from shore, making it the longest pier in California.  Meiggs was correct about the location of the pier—which remained in operation until the 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed it and most of the rest of the city.   Today, the location is known as Fisherman’s Wharf and Meiggs is credited with being the ‘Father of the North Shore’.   There is even a small historical marker on the site with his name on it.

Unfortunately, the new pier was slow to return the cost of construction and Meiggs, facing bankruptcy, sold fraudulent city warrants (think of them as bonds) that he obtained from his brother, the newly elected city comptroller, raising somewhere between $8,000 and $500,000—the amount varies depending on whether you believe the city or Meiggs.  By the time the fraud was discovered, Meiggs and his family—including his brother—had hastily boarded a south-bound ship and had escaped to Chile.

 

After arriving in Chile, Meiggs tried to start a business and was unsuccessful, losing all of the money he had brought from San Francisco.  Impoverished to the point that he had to pawn his pocket watch to eat, Meiggs once again started a new business.  Despite having no experience whatsoever in the field, Henry Meiggs started building railroads across Chile and Peru, where the mountainous terrain makes such construction all but impossible.

 

Depending on the terrain, Meiggs used four different railroad gauges, dug long tunnels, bridged enormous ravines, and built railroads connecting mining districts to Pacific ports, after British engineers had said the job was impossible.  In Peru, he laid tracks from Lima to Altiplano, 14,000 feet above sea level, to build what is still the highest railroad line in the Americas.  Still operating today, the train carries oxygen tanks for its passengers, who frequently suffer from hypoxia.

 

Once again, Meiggs built a personal fortune, using part of his new wealth to completely refund the victims of his San Francisco fraud.  After extensive lobbying, the California State Legislature passed a peculiar law—one making it illegal to prosecute Meiggs for his swindle.  Though the legislature approved the measure—one can only imagine what that cost in bribes—the governor vetoed the bill.

 

For years, Henry Meiggs was the unofficial dictator of Chile, using the railroads to control what the country exported, but while the railroads were profitable for Meiggs, the cost of maintaining them impoverished the nations where he had built them.  Since Meiggs was generous with the right government officials, neither Peru nor Chile tried very hard to correct the situation.

 

Note.  In 1857, President Buchanan appointed John Bigler as the U.S. Minister to Chile.  Bigler did not execute the job very well, as he was all but ignored by the Chilean government.  This is strange since Bigler had previously enjoyed a distinguished political career, having served as the Governor of California.

 

Meiggs expanded his railroad empire and had signed a contract to build a new railroad line in Costa Rica, when he died in 1877.  The railroad business and the new contract for the railroad in Costa Rica passed to Meiggs’ nephew, Minor C. Keith, who not only finished the line, but used the profits to invest in agriculture.  Because banana plants soak up an amazing amount of ground water and can help stabilize low-lying areas, Keith experimented with growing bananas on land bordering the railroad tracks, using his trains to quickly ship the fruit to the docks where steamboats could race the ripening bananas back to New Orleans for sale.  Slowly, this sideline agricultural business began to make a profit.

Over the years, that small company slowly grew into the infamous United Fruit Company that controlled large areas of Central America for decades.  Today, the company is known as Chiquita Bananas.  (Well, actually, the company is called Chiquita Brands, but the company changes its name so frequently in hopes of outrunning its past, that it has probably changed again in the last hour or two.)

 

I guess I should tie up the rest of the loose ends here.  Although railroads all over Central and South America are being abandoned and shut down due to government neglect and siphoning off of profits instead of maintenance of the lines, the railroads created by Meiggs and Keith are still largely functioning. 

Henry Meiggs can no longer be called an embezzler.  In 1977, one hundred years after Meiggs’ death, Judge Harry Low of the California Superior Court quashed the 123-year-old indictment on the grounds that the railroad mogul had not only rehabilitated himself, but had taken the case to a higher court.  (Seriously, that’s what he put in the court records.)

 

So…. The next time you are eating a banana, you can reflect on the fact that you have that fruit because a San Francisco embezzler couldn‘t sell lumber in New York, which led to his nephew becoming worried about flooding in Costa Rica. 

 

The Conservator Did It

Fall is unfortunately here and the longest summer in history (at least the pandemic induced self-quarantine made it seem that way) is over.  This means that I have returned to class.

 

The Doc and I married at an early age, and at the time my mother professed that her only regret was that marriage meant I would probably never finish college.  In retrospect, she was right, since although I have long since graduated, I have never stopped going to school.

 

Now, in retirement from Enema U, this has meant that I have the freedom to pick and choose among the courses that I study.  Some of this is the university’s fault.  When I went to work for Enema U, among the retirement benefits promised was a ‘special parking pass’, free golf, and unlimited free tuition.  The special parking permit turned out to be an opportunity to purchase a permit at full price.  They reneged on the golf, too.  But, the free tuition for taking courses remains in effect.  So far.

 

This semester I am taking a course on the restoration of paintings.  Last semester I took the restoration of pottery class in which the instructor had each students paint a terra-cotta flower pot that she promptly smashed to pieces and threw away a few of those.  This semester, this same vandal will have us painting a canvas while she sits in a corner, calmly sharpening her knife.  I think I see a pattern developing.

 

Though I have only just started studying the conservation of paintings, I have already discovered that after a painting is restored—even if this only involved cleaning away the grime of centuries—critics always claim the restoration was done wrong, the painting is ruined, and the conservator is to blame.  Just as in bad Hollywood mysteries the murderer is always the butler—in the world of art—the conservator did it.

 

Take for example, the case of the Norman Rockwell painting, Breaking Home Ties.  Produced in 1954 as cover art for the Saturday Evening Post magazine, Rockwell sold the painting in 1960 for $900 to his friend and neighbor Don Trachte.  Rockwell was obviously selling the painting for far less than the market value, as the painting was already famous, having been part of a traveling exhibit of Rockwell’s work that had been shown from Cairo to Moscow.  Trachte, an artist himself, was the illustrator for Henry, a comic strip that appeared daily in some newspapers from 1938 until 2018. 

 

Needless to say, Rockwell’s painting was a prized possession of the Trachte family.  Voted the second favorite cover from the 321 Rockwell paintings the magazine had showcased over the years, the painting depicted a young man seated beside his father on the running board of a pickup along with the boy’s suitcase and the family dog.  The boy, dressed in his best clothes, is obviously about to leave home for the first time.

 

From time to time, the Trachte family received inquiries from collectors eager to purchase the painting (including one from H. Ross Perot, the billionaire and one-time presidential candidate).  Trachte politely refused all offers and the Rockwell painting, along with seven other valuable, though less famous paintings, remained in the Trachte home.

 

Unfortunately, the Trachte marriage splintered into a protracted and messy divorce case in 1973.  Though it took some time, eventually it was worked out that, while all the paintings would be held in trust for the children, Don would keep the Rockwell painting and two others in his home while his wife, Elizabeth, would receive the other five paintings to display in her home.   Even after the split, the paintings stayed relatively close together, since Elizabeth moved to a new home across the road, but still on the Trachte farm.  Although she lived directly across from her former husband, the two apparently never spoke to each other in the next 32 years.

 

For decades, the Rockwell painting remained in the Trachte home in Sandgate, Vermont, leaving only once for a curator to clean the accumulated dirt and smoke residue of a wood burning fireplace.  In 2002, Don moved to an assisted-living home, turning the farm home over to his children.  In 2003, the family loaned the painting to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts for safekeeping. 

 

While at the museum, experts noticed that the painting had changed over time.  The colors were not as bright as before, so that the overall effect was somewhat diminished—a change the experts attributed to excessive cleaning by the curator.  Nevertheless, the painting was included in several shows of Rockwell’s work.

 

Once again, a sloppy curator had inadvertently damaged a valuable painting.  Typical.

 

In 2005, Don Trachte passed away and his son began cleaning out some of the accumulated paperwork in his father’s house.  Among the papers, he found correspondence from Rockwell praising Don’s loyalty in refusing to sell the painting despite an offer of $35,000.  He also found two photographs of the painting, both showing the framed painting hanging on the living room wall.  As he compared them, the son was puzzled by some minor discrepancies between the two pictures.

 

Obtaining original photos of the painting from the Saturday Evening Post, the son traveled to the museum to compare them to the painting.  After careful study, it became obvious that the painting that had been hanging in the museum from 2002 to 2005 was not the original.  Experts at the museum tested the painting and declared that it had never been cleaned and the painting was an original—there was no other painting hiding underneath.

 

After a careful search of his father’s home, the son noticed a crack in the living room wall of his father’s house.  After moving two shelves from a bookcase, and sliding back the panel, he discovered eight original paintings—including  the real Rockwell painting—hidden behind a fake wall. 

 

There was only one inescapable conclusion:  Trachte didn’t want to part with any of his beloved paintings, so he had forged eight copies to substitute for them:  Copies that had fooled experts—and his wife and family—for decades.

 

When Elizabeth Trachte was told of the deception, her only comment was, “Not surprising.”

 

All of the paintings, real and forged, were the focus of an exhibit at the National Museum of American Illustration in 2016.  Eventually, the family decided to sell the Rockwell painting, bringing in $15.4 million.

 

And just like the butler isn’t always the murderer, in this case, the curator didn’t do it!

More Really Random Thoughts, Part 2

If you missed last week (and if you did, click here), I’m listing all the truly random thoughts over the last year that I wrote down in various little notebooks, fully intending at some later date to turn them into pure blogging gold.  For whatever reason, weeks later I decided these ideas were, at best, fool’s gold.

 

Here are the remainder of ideas that didn’t make the cut:

 

·      It might very well prove that historians are not really competent in any field.  History is just the area where they exhibit the least incompetence.

 

·      Heron of Alexander, a Greek mathematician, invented a water clock during the time of Alexander the Great.  Its sole purpose was to limit the time a lawyer could speak in court.

 

·      If President Obama were to suddenly blow a hole in the space time continuum and produce that mythical Nigerian birth certificate long sought by the brainless…. He could move to Nigeria and run for President.  If successful, he would be (by their criteria, anyway) their first white president.

 

·      Did the Roman Empire really use flaming pigs in battle?  I know lots of books say they did, but…. Really? 

 

·      Just what is the point of non-alcoholic beer?  Or soft porn?  Did anybody ever say, “I want to see someone naked!  But only a little naked!”  Why is there decaffeinated coffee?  Or the College of Education? 

 

·      Presidential Debate—a process where a political party is guaranteed to pick the worst possible candidate.

 

·      Karen’s Law of Diminishing Returns—No matter how bad your old driver’s license photo looks, it is still better looking than your next one.

 

·      'Listen is an anagram for ‘silent’.

 

·      At age 13, Warren Buffet filed his first income tax return.  Instead of using the standard short form, Buffet itemized deductions against his income for a newspaper route.  He claimed a $55 deduction for his bicycle.

 

·      I finally watched The Lion King, only to discover that it is nothing more than Hamlet with meat eaters.

 

·      If the British Navy has actually declined to the point where it cannot handle the threats of the Iranian Navy, then the biggest problem facing Great Britain is not Brexit.

 

·      Question:  How many Grammar Nazis does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Answer:  Too.

 

·      We need a new federal law—Any television news anchor that says “Déjà vu all over again” needs to be fined a year’s pay and demoted to weather man.

 

·      Pope Stephen VI was a stickler for law and order.  In 897, he had his predecessor, Pope Formosus, exhumed to stand trial.  After a spirited yet unsuccessful defense, he was found guilty and had the three fingers of his right hand—the ones used in blessings—broken off.  He was then clothed in the rags of a commoner and reburied.  Later, Pope Stephen changed his mind and had Formosus exhumed a second time and tossed into a river.

 

·      For reasons I will never investigate, wombat feces are cube shaped.

 

·      I always wanted the history department to teach a course on current events, tying in the events of today with the past.  History is what is happening now!  We breathe in the present and exhale the past.

 

·      Frank Capra once wrote that there were no rules in filmmaking, only sins.  He went on to say that the cardinal sin was dullness.  The same applies to church services, political rallies, faculty meetings and any other place where the particularly evil congregate.

 

·      Ah, tequila.  You miss 100% of the shots you don’t drink.

 

·      Only during a hurricane can you go to a hardware store and purchase a shovel, rope, duct tape, and a large tarp without someone questioning your motives.

 

·      Perhaps the most obscure government job in history was created by Queen Elizabeth I of England in 1698.  The Uncorker of Ocean Bottles was responsible for opening message-bearing bottles that washed up on the shore of England.  For a commoner to open such a bottle was punishable by death.

 

·      Sarcasm is a poor but necessary alternative since beating the living crap out of people inexplicably remains illegal.

 

·      Jim Heselden, 62, the owner of the Segway Company died shortly after purchasing the company, when he drove his two-wheeled device off a cliff into a river thirty feet below.  In a separate, but karmically similar accident, Douglas Tomkins, 72, the co-founder of North Face (the outdoor clothing company), died of hypothermia after he flipped his kayak in Patagonia.  The chief business rival of North Face is a clothing company named Patagonia.

 

·      When Raymond Burr was recovering from surgery and unable to act as Perry Mason on his weekly television series, Bette Davis stepped in and took over his role on a lark.

 

·      Someone should do a research project based on the childhoods of university administrators.  I will bet serious money they were the overly sincere twerps who thought student spirit was real, not just an artificial construct cheaper than putting barbed wire around the building.

 

·      Studying abstract expressionism is like trying to collect clouds.  There is something there, and you can see it, but it is impossible to get a handle on anything. 

 

·      Blog Idea.  The English professor who earned tenure after publishing her novel—a retelling of To Kill a Mockingbird from Boo Radley’s point of view.

 

·      That Congressman—I won’t name him, but he’s a bald-headed coot from North Texas—is such an imbecile that the only possible explanation is that his parents mistakenly raised the afterbirth.

 

·      Once a week as I race to meet my self-imposed ‘deadline’ of Friday’s midnight, I remember that the term comes from Civil War prisons.  A line was drawn on the ground that prisoners crossed at peril of being shot by their guards.

 

Unfortunately, that is where this post must stop as that deadline is approaching all too soon.  For the better part of this evening, instead of spending the time writing, I was sitting in the dark watching the local electrical company replace a transformer atop a telephone pole.  For the next crop of topics that never made the crop, you’ll have to wait a year. 

 

I already have a new notebook.

More Really Random Thoughts Part 1

Frequently, I am asked where I get the ideas that I turn into weekly blog posts.  The answer is fairly simple—I have a mind like a ping-pong ball, bouncing around from one topic to the next.  For me, the biggest problem is that my memory is horrible, forcing me to write everything down in notebooks, so I have filled dozens of little notebooks with incredibly random nonsense.

 

I suspect that someday, these notebooks will be entered into evidence at my commitment hearing. 

 

In any case, come Friday night, I grab the latest notebook and select a topic that I wrote down during a meal, the middle of the night, or at some other time when I was supposed to be doing something useful.  Occasionally, either the note is too brief or my writing so bad that I can’t decipher what I meant (trying to write in the dark in the middle of the night doesn’t help, but you never know when inspiration will hit you). 

 

Some of the ideas written down are just too short—or too stupid—to use as topics.  When I have enough of these “reject ideas”, I just list them all at once for readers to peruse.  Here, then, are some ideas that never quite made it into blogs:

 

·      Can a robot be compelled to testify against its owner?  If an electronic personal assistant is an extension of a person, wouldn’t this be a form of forcing someone to testify against themselves?  The Supreme Court has ruled that a person cannot be forced to unlock a cell phone, but what about a robot?  If someone has ordered a robot not to testify, can a court force someone to order a robot to testify.

 

·      I just checked.  Every city in Texas large enough to have a freeway system has at least one large portion of it under construction.   The Gulf Freeway in Houston has been under continual construction since its inception.  Some city should finish a freeway just to let it become a tourist attraction. 

 

·      After watching my son trying to corral my three-year-old granddaughter, it occurs to me that Fatherhood is the only time in a man’s life where he tells a girl to put her panties on.

 

·      Playing Cards Against Humanity with friends teaches you that even little old ladies have dirty minds.

 

·      Is it against the law to counterfeit Confederate paper money?  If so, what country's laws are you breaking?

 

·      According to Lord Hewart, the Lord Chief Justice of the England, the detective story can only flourish in a settled community where the reader’s sympathies are on the side of law and order.  Does this mean the mystery is an endangered form of literature?

 

·      Yes, I have a Texas accent.  Once, after the first day of class, after I briefly explained the syllabus (honestly, if a student can’t figure out the syllabus on his own, why is he in college?), an exchange student from Japan raised her hand and asked very politely, “Will you ever be teaching the class in English?”

 

·      In Sri Lanka, a sixteenth century philosopher wrote that all religion was the result of malnutrition.  He was, of course, promptly executed for his heresy—probably by hungry people.

 

·      Despite any evidence that it provides a lasting benefit, politicians in this state keep clamoring for more Pre-K education.  If they really want that funding, they will probably have to start a football program in nurseries.

 

·      In any correspondence at the university, the phrase “Per my previous email” should be translated as “Bitch, can you read?”

 

·      Never make “snow angels” in a dog park.

 

·      An attempt to assassinate Arthur Conan Doyle with a letter bomb failed in 1911.  The assassins?  Suffragettes. 

 

·      The history of the communication technology is a great story of constantly improving tools for the transmitting of knowledge and eradicating ignorance and superstition.  Invariably, however, these tools are used to validate our prejudices.  Today, when everyone in the country has in their pocket a device that can instantaneously display all of mankind’s art, literature, and the details of man’s greatest achievements—we use it to watch videos of cats and to argue politics with strangers.

 

·      During the filming of The Wizard of Oz, the Munchkins were paid $35 a day.  Toto was paid $100 a day.

 

·      It is impossible to imagine a Norman Rockwell painting of a slack-jawed youth, his pants significantly below his rear end, obliviously staring into his cell phone.

 

·      When someone says they have a “butt load” of something, they are giving you a specific measurement.  There are 126 gallons in a butt of wine.

 

·      Thomas Paine had a remarkable career.  Besides his role in the American Revolution, he was an elected representative in the French National Assembly.  But, of all the remarkable achievements listed on his resume, I am jealous of the fact that he was briefly a pirate serving on a ship named “Terrible” under the command of Captain Death. According to one of the crew, after Captain William Death surrendered his ship to a French frigate, he was shot by one of his own men and his body was tossed overboard.

 

·      If you were free to pick a religion instead of being born into one, I suspect that among the more popular would be Penn Jillette’s Church of Bacon.  Anyone can relate to a breakfast that died for your sins.

 

·      Adjunct faculty work harder than an ugly stripper.

 

·      Enema U needs a sign:  In Case of Fire, Exit Building Before Posting to Social Media.

 

·      It is not true that the nature of race relations is unchanged.  Now, when you watch a horror movie, the white people die first.

 

·      People who don’t believe that Texans are in love with the death penalty should remember that in 1928, the citizens of Cisco, Texas battered down the jailhouse door and lynched Santa Claus.  To this day, no one has been charged with the murder.

 

·      Eventually, Schrödinger must have realized that the quantum state of the world outside of the box was just as unknown from the cat’s point of view.  At this point, the world should have imploded into a Lovecraftian black hole from the 7^th Dimension.

 

·      The first group of people to value the contributions of the disabled were pirates.  “Arrgh!  Got a peg leg?  Man the helm, matey!  Missing a hand?  You’re officer material—Here’s your hook.”   So, it was pirates that got the whole ADA ball rolling.

 

·      Since at least the time when Andrew Carnegie was building free libraries in towns across America, it was generally believed that the chief cause of mass stupidity was the common man’s lack of access to information.  Well, the internet certainly proved that theory to be concentrated bullshit.

 

·      Only on Facebook can people become experts in fields they cannot spell.

 

·      On average, cat toys are played with longer by humans than by cats. 

 

·      The hymn, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, was written by Wallace Willis.  A slave in Oklahoma at the time, he was the property of a Choctaw Native, Britt Willis. 

 

·      Politicians can safely ignore what their constituents think, secure in the knowledge that they don’t do it very often.

 

·      In March, 1865, General Grant was impatiently waiting for the rain to lift long enough for his army to take to the muddy roads and finish off the remains of General Lee’s army.  As he sat in his tent waiting for better weather, he wrote in his notebook, “Matthew 5:45”.  If you are unfamiliar with the scripture, it says, “for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.”  General Grant had an appreciation of weather that only an old soldier could possess.

 

·      The State Department once asked me to describe a former student who was seeking employment.  I didn’t dare tell the truth (as in, “In any attempt to cull the herd, put your rope on this specimen first.”).  So I did what they asked and described him:  “This individual is a bipedal carbon-based life-form, axially symmetrical.”

 

Well, that’s enough of that…for now.  Writing in and keeping a notebook allows you to be periodically astounded at your own stupidity.

 

 

In Tents Education

Note:  No one should take a blog too seriously, though naturally, everything I write is the Gospel truth, give or take a lie or two.  Truth, being so rare a commodity, should not be wasted, but used intelligently.  My goal is to use honesty a little more than the average preacher or member of Congress—neither of which has ever heard of the concept—and a little less than the local weatherman, who—realizing that NM only has about a dozen days annually of anything that could be considered “weather”—is correct more than half the time.

 

None of these events could have possibly happened to me, since I remember I wasn’t there at the time.  Besides, I can produce numerous witnesses to prove I was somewhere else.

 

Classes are about to start at Enema U, and the administrative squirrels over in Abattoir Hall are frantically trying to figure out how to keep students safe from Covid-19 while still collecting the maximum amount of tuition.  Since, with every passing day it becomes harder to maintain the fiction that online education works, something has to be done.  Predictably, they have appointed a large committee so secretive that even the Committee Chair doesn’t know who the other members are. 

 

So far, about all that has been done is that the university has expressed  concern with where students will be able to study, since the library will remain closed.   Exactly why the library will remain closed is another deep mystery.  You would think that if it is safe for students to attend class, the few students who actually still search through the library for books the football team has not yet colored in would be equally safe.  Trust me:  you don’t need to enforce social distancing in a university library until the week before final exams.

 

In any case, a solution has been discovered:  the university is erecting “study tents” around campus.  Yes, it is August in Southern New Mexico and those tents will be as hot as pawn shop pistols.  And yes, the wind in Southern New Mexico is strong enough to blow the nuts off a prairie dog and may send the tents to Arkansas.  And though I would be far more impressed if the Administrative squirrels turned their offices over to the students and moved themselves into the Internment Study Camps, I suppose these canvas sweat shops marginally meet the definition of places to study. 

 

Naturally, all of the new tents remind me of an old story that happened to a friend.  

 

During the Vietnam War, Bob was a college student with such an extraordinarily low draft number that had he not enrolled in College R.O.T.C., before his freshman year was over he probably would have been called up to visit Southeast Asia.  But, as an ROTC student (always pronounced rot-see) he could delay being drafted until after he graduated.  The downside was mandatory training at the summer camps, where Bob would spend several weeks annually at a remote military base being edjumacated in the proper Army way.

 

R.O.T.C. programs today are wonderful and students definitely learn and benefit from summer camps.  Fifty years ago….well, not so much.  Most of the time, Bob found himself watching obsolete training films, endlessly drilling in the sun (a little of that goes a long way), or sitting in a large tent listening to someone read a prepared lesson.    Frankly, the Army didn’t really have an established program set up to effectively handle the sudden influx of college students—which was understandable, since the Army was busy fighting a war.

 

In Bob’s case, he spent a lot of time uncrating old rifles, removing ancient hardened cosmoline, reapplying new cosmoline, and re-crating the rifles.  If you are not familiar with cosmoline, it is a brown waxy petroleum substance straight from Hell that is used to prevent rust.  It can only be easily removed with liberal applications of flammable substances that the Army will not let you use.  It takes a vast quantity of it to cover a rifle, but only about a spoonful to completely cover the human body.  I swear to God, just typing the above made me, er….Bob....remember what it smelled like.  Bob still probably has traces of the stuff under his fingernails.

Eventually, the Army decided that handling the sudden influx of somewhat suspicious-looking (their hair was at least a quarter inch too long) college students required the construction of an additional dining hall, so they decided to put up a large tent.  From some vast military storeroom, they located an ancient crate containing a bail ring tent, probably situated on top of the crate containing the Ark of the Covenant.  Last used during the Korean War, the tent came with everything needed, packed in a massive wooden crate roughly the size of a small bedroom.

 

Unless you have worked at the circus, you are probably not familiar with a bail ring tent, as they are being replaced with tents with lightweight aluminum scaffolding, plastic miracle fabrics, and inflatable frames, but in the old days, large tents were made from heavy treated canvas that was supported by massive poles longer than the average telephone pole.  The center pole (not included in the crate) was fitted with a set of pulleys at the top and put up first.  Then the bail ring was snapped around the pole, with the canvas laid out on the ground and fastened to the bail.  Using the ropes and pulleys, the bail would be lifted to the top of the pole, dragging the heavy canvas behind it.  Lifting this massive load was one of the reasons that circuses had elephants.  Bob said it was a little disconcerting to realize that it took about a hundred college students to equal one elephant.

 

Bob, as unskilled labor, found himself as one of a long line of men assigned to one of the ropes, waiting impatiently in the sun for the various sections of canvas to be joined together and then fastened to the bail ring.  With nothing much to do, Bob was not paying much attention, as he was wondering if the rations he had been given for lunch were older than he was.  The meal had come in olive drab cans and boxes that suspiciously had no dates and that Bob suspected they had been found in the same warehouse as the tent.

 

Suddenly, Bob’s daydreaming was interrupted by a sergeant with a bullhorn, who was reading instructions from an ancient manual.

 

“Ready Left!”, boomed the sergeant with the bullhorn.  “Ready Right!”  Bob, and the other students came more-or-less to attention, grasping the ropes with both hands.  No one knew precisely if they were the “Left” or the “Right” as the two groups were standing on opposite sides of the pole, but everyone knew they were in one of the groups and they were ready.

 

The bullhorn crackled and the sergeant roared the order to the waiting students, “PREPARE FOR ERECTION!”

 

Bob let go of the rope and he says what happened next ended his days in R.O.T.C.