Lift Up Your Hearts!

In 1992 my father and one of my brothers made a trip to London to visit another brother who was living and working there.  When he returned, he wrote a detailed, 15-page report of their adventures.  As I was proofreading ChatGPT's transcription of my scanned pages, I came upon this gem:

From there we walked down to the area of Big Ben and the Parliament Buildings and then across the Westminster Bridge and down along the River to the Lambeth Bridge. As we were crossing the Lambeth Bridge I recalled that back in my high school days there had been a popular song called “Doing the Lambeth Walk”.

Later that day...

Since it seems to be an unwritten rule that everyone who goes to London has to see a show, we next went to the Adelphi Theater and bought tickets to “Me and My Girl”. This was a revival of an old show written during the Great Depression so it was not as costly as some of the new shows like “The Phantom of the Opera” which is sold out until who knows when. Still, we paid 17 pounds for second row in the balcony seats.

And after dinner....

We then went to the show which we all enjoyed. One of the main songs was “Doing the Lambeth Walk”. 

Neither the song nor the musical is one that I'd ever heard of. But I doubt I'll ever forget it now. Here you go.

The Kindle version of The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran is currently on sale a for $1.99. If you care to understand more about what is going on in the Middle East at the moment, this is excellent background and too good to pass up. It's also a page-turning story.

I wrote the following back in 2017, after my first reading of the book. Nine years later, I stand by my first impressions.

• The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Jimmy Carter is undoubtedly an amazing, wonderful person; as my husband is fond of saying, the best ex-president we've ever had. But in the very moments he was winning his Nobel Peace Prize by brokering the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty at Camp David, he—or his administration—was consigning Iran to the hell that endures today. Thanks to a complete failure of American (and British) Intelligence and a massive disinformation campaign with just enough truth to keep it from being dismissed out of hand, President Carter was led to believe that the Shah of Iran was a monster; America's ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, likened the Shah to Adolf Eichmann, and called Ruhollah Khomeini a saint. Perhaps the Iranian Revolution and its concomitant bloodbath would have happened without American incompetence, disingenuousness, and backstabbing, but that there is much innocent blood on the hands of our kindly, Peace Prize-winning President, I have no doubt.
• There's a reason spycraft is called intelligence. Lack of good information leads to stupid decisions.
• Bad advisers will bring down a good leader, be he President or Shah, and good advisers can't save him if he won't listen.
• The Bible is 100% correct when it likens people to sheep. Whether by politicians, agitators, con men, charismatic religious leaders (note: small "c"), pop stars, advertisers, or our own peers, we are pathetically easy to manipulate.
• When the Shah imposed Western Culture on his people, it came with Western decadence and Hollywood immorality thrown in. Even salt-of-the-earth, ordinary people can only take so much of having their lives, their values, and their family integrity threatened. "It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations."
• The Shah's education programs sent students by droves to Europe and the United States for university educations. This was an unprecedented opportunity, but the timing could have been better. The 1960's and 70's were not sane years on college campuses, as I can personally testify. Instead of being grateful for their educations, the students came home radicalized against their government. In this case, "the Man," the enemy, was the Shah and all that he stood for. Anxious to identify with the masses and their deprivations, these sons and daughters of privilege exchanged one set of drag for another, donning austere Muslim garb as a way of distancing themselves from everything their parents held dear. Few had ever opened a Quran, and fewer still had an in-depth knowledge of Shia theology, but in their rebellious naïveté they rushed to embrace the latest opiate.
• "Suicide bomber" was not a household word 40 years ago, but the concept was there. "If you give the order we are prepared to attach bombs to ourselves and throw ourselves at the Shah's car to blow him up," one local merchant told the Ayatollah.
• People with greatly differing viewpoints can find much in The Fall of Heaven to support their own ideas and fears. Those who see sinister influences behind the senseless, deliberate destruction during natural disasters and protest demonstrations will find justification for their suspicions in the brutal, calculated provocations perpetrated by Iran's revolutionaries. Others will find striking parallels between the rise of Radical Islam in Iran and the rise of Donald Trump in the United States. Those who have no use for deeply-held religious beliefs will find confirmation of their own belief that the only acceptable religions are those that their followers don't take too seriously. Some will look at the Iranian Revolution and see a prime example of how conciliation and compromise with evil will only end in disaster.
• I've read the Qur'an and know more about Islam than many Americans (credit not my knowledge but general American ignorance), but in this book I discovered something that surprised me. Two practices that I assumed marked every serious Muslim are five-times-a-day prayer, and fasting during Ramadan. Yet the Shah, an obviously devout man who "ruled in the fear of God" and always carried a Qur'an with him, did neither. Is this a legitimate and common variation, or the Muslim equivalent of the Christian who displays a Bible prominently on his coffee table but rarely cracks it open and prefers to sleep in on Sundays? Clearly, I have more to learn.
• Many of Iran's problems in the years before the Revolution seem remarkably similar to those of someone who wins a million dollar lottery. Government largess fueled by massive oil revenues thrust people suddenly into a new and unfamiliar world of wealth, in the end leaving them, not grateful, but resentful when falling oil prices dried up the flow of money.
• I totally understand why one country would want to influence another country that it views as strategically important; that may even be considered its duty to its own citizens. But for goodness' sake, if you're going to interfere, wait until you have a good knowledge of the country, its history, its customs, and its people. Our ignorance of Iran in general and the political and social situation in particular was appalling. We bought the carefully-orchestrated public façade of Khomeini hook, line, and sinker; an English translation of his inflammatory writings and blueprint for the establishment of an Islamic republic in Iran came nine years too late, after it was all over. In our ignorance we conferred political legitimacy on the radical Khomeini while ignoring the true leaders of the majority of Iran's Shiite Muslims. The American ambassador and his counterpart from the United Kingdom, on whom the Shah relied heavily in the last days, confidently gave him ignorant and disastrous advice. Not to mention that it was our manipulation of the oil market (with the aid of Saudi Arabia) that brought on the fall in oil prices that precipitated Iran's economic crisis.
• The bumbling actions of the United States, however, look positively beatific compared with the works of men like Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, and Yasser Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organization, who funded, trained, and armed the revolutionaries.
• The Fall of Heaven was recommended to me by two Iranian friends who personally suffered through, and escaped from, those terrible times.

The following excerpt from the Introduction to The Fall of Heaven matters much to me because at the time of the Revolution I had heard and absorbed the accusations against the Shah, and believed Khomeini was acting out of a legitimate complaint with regard to the immorality of some aspects of American culture. See the above comment about sheep....

The controversy and confusion that surrounded the Shah's human rights record overshadowed his many real accomplishments in the fields of women's rights, literacy, health care, education, and modernization. Help in sifting through the accusations and allegations came from a most unexpected quarter, however, when the Islamic Republic announced plans to identify and memorialize each victim of Pahlavi "oppression." But lead researcher Emad al-Din Baghi, a former seminary student, was shocked to discover that he could not match the victims' names to the official numbers: instead of 100,000 deaths Baghi could confirm only 3,164. Even that number was inflated because it included all 2,781 fatalities from the 1978-1979 revolution. The actual death toll was lowered to 383, of whom 197 were guerrilla fighters and terrorists killed in skirmishes with the security forces. That meant 183 political prisoners and dissidents were executed, committed suicide in detention, or died under torture. [No, I can't make those numbers add up right either, but it's close enough.] The number of political prisoners was also sharply reduced, from 100,000 to about 3,200. Baghi's revised numbers were troublesome for another reason: they matched the estimates already provided by the Shah to the International Committee of the Red Cross before the revolution. "The problem here was not only the realization that the Pahlavi state might have been telling the truth but the fact that the Islamic Republic had justified many of its excesses on the popular sacrifices already made," observed historian Ali Ansari. ... Baghi's report exposed Khomeini's hypocrisy and threatened to undermine the vey moral basis of the revolution. Similarly, the corruption charges against the Pahlavis collapsed when the Shah's fortune was revealed to be well under $100 million at the time of his departure [instead of the rumored $25-$50 billion], hardly insignificant but modest by the standards of other royal families and remarkably low by the estimates that appeared in the Western press.

Baghi's research was suppressed inside Iran but opened up new vistas of study for scholars elsewhere. As a former researcher at Human Rights Watch, the U.S. organization that monitors human rights around the world, I was curious to learn how the higher numbers became common currency in the first place. I interviewed Iranian revolutionaries and foreign correspondents whose reporting had helped cement the popular image of the Shah as a blood-soaked tyrant. I visited the Center for Documentation on the Revolution in Tehran, the state organization that compiles information on human rights during the Pahlavi era, and was assured by current and former staff that Baghi's reduced numbers were indeed credible. If anything, my own research suggested that Baghi's estimates might still be too high. For example, during the revolution the Shah was blamed for a cinema fire that killed 430 people in the southern city of Abadan; we now know that this heinous crime was carried out by a pro-Khomeini terror cell. Dozens of government officials and soldiers had been killed during the revolution, but their deaths were also attributed to the Shah and not to Khomeini. The lower numbers do not excuse or diminish the suffering of political prisoners jailed or tortured in Iran in the 1970s. They do, however, show the extent to which the historical record was manipulated by Khomeini and his partisans to criminalize the Shah and justify their own excesses and abuses.

When my father, an avid Elderhosteler, discovered a course with lots of outdoor activities intended for grandparents and their grandchildren, he promptly invited his oldest grandchild to accompany him to Vancouver Island in British Columbia. The year was 1990.

On their way, they stopped briefly to visit my father's cousin Sylvia, who lived in the Seattle area. I'd known that Sylvia was a remarkable woman, a world traveller who at the time of their visit had justreturned from trekking in Nepal—at nearly seventy years of age. Re-reading Dad's Elderhostel report, I realized something else remarkable that I'd missed before:

Sylvia seems very happy. She is very interested in acting and when I last saw her she was quite dejected as she had just been rejected for a part in "Harvey" because she was too old. She is now doing more acting in films, is a member of the Screen Actor's Guild, and was going to Portland tomorrow for a second audition for a minor part in a film.

A quick look at imdb.com reveals that the actress Sylvia Langdon played a townsperson in Season 1 (1990), Episode 5 of the TV series, Northern Exposure ("Russian Flu"). Was that our Cousin Sylvia? I think the odds are pretty good. The probability that I will have the opportunity to watch that show is very low, but if I do, I'll be scanning the townspeople for a familiar face.

As I continue to organize my father's documentation of his many Elderhostel adventures, I occasionally run into photographs that need further identification. In the past I have found Google Lens to be a wonderful resource—and now with the increasing use of AI it has become exponentially more useful. As in, I'm finding success in heretofore hopeless situations. Not that I necessarily trust the LLM identifications, but they let me know where to look for confirmation; so far they have been amazingly accurate. And getting better by the minute: photos that defied identification a year ago were quickly identified when I tried again recently. (Which brings up the question that I've wrestled with in my genealogy research as well: When is it better to pour time into a particular research question now, and when would it be more productive to wait a bit and see how much more information becomes readily available later on? The older I get, the less willing I am to wait.)

Recently I was reminded of why it's important to check an LLM's answers.

The puzzle was a set of eight photographs included in a folder of information pertaining to an Elderhostel Dad attended at the Pingree Park Campus of the Colorado State University, back in 1989. The pictures of the mountainous area could easily have been from Pingree Park as well, but I was suspicous of them because they were labelled with the numbers 9-16, and there was already a set with those numbers in the stack, one that was more obviously of the Pingree Park area. Was one set right, or the other? Did Dad mistakenly duplicate the numbers as he arranged the photos? Did one set accidentally end up in the wrong folder? I scanned the first four of the questionable photos and turned to Copilot for identification.

Copilot's first response was very general, giving a few possibilities: Rocky Mountain National Park (Colorado), Glacier National Park (Montana), Yosemite or the Sierra Nevada (California), and The Cascades (Washington/Oregon).

I then asked if they could be in Pingree Park, Colorado. It agreed that that was likely, and with a deeper analysis (after I suggested 1989 as the year) Copilot announced that it was, indeed, "CSU’s Mountain Campus during its Pingree Park era, around 1989."

Great job, right? So I then set it another task: the final four pictures. These it quickly and unequivocally identified as of the area around Mount Saint Helens in the early late 1980's or early 90's. This I could instantly confirm, because I knew Dad had visited Mt. St. Helens after another Elderhostel in 1987. I went back to my work on that trip, and found the identical photos, identified by him. But here's the kicker: I also found there copies of the first four photos, the ones identified by Copilot as definitely from Pingree Park in Colorado. But Dad had identified them as from Paradise, one of the visitor areas of Mount Rainier National Park in Washington. I trust him: he was there, he took the pictures, and they were from the same roll of film as his Mt. St. Helens photos.

My next step was to ask Copilot if the first set of photos might instead be from near Mt. Rainier, and it stated firmly that Mt. Ranier was very unlikely, and Pingree Park the far more likely match, giving me clear reasons why (which are lengthy, so I'll skip therm here).

Here's where I poked the bear.

I checked with several other LLM's (ChatGPT, Google's Genesis, Brave's Leo) which all insisted the photos in question were from the Mt. Rainier area. In particular, they identified the lodge shown in one of them as the Paradise Inn (which Dad had labelled "Paradise Lodge"; possibly that was what it was called in 1989). When I pointed this out to Copilot, it got a bit huffy: "I strongly disagree. Photo 12 is not Paradise Inn at Mount Rainier. And I can show you exactly why — visually, architecturally, and geographically — without guessing." It then proceeded to give detailed reasons why it was so sure it was right, and dismissed other LLMs' conclusions with,

Most models:

• Key off the word “lodge”-
• See mountains + trees + a rustic building
• And jump to a famous national park lodge

But they often don’t check architectural details, which is where the truth lives.

Conclusion: Photo 12 is not Paradise Inn. It is almost certainly a building at the CSU Mountain Campus (Pingree Park) as it existed in the late 1980s.

After a few more attempts to get Copilot to admit it might be wrong, I let it have the last word. But I kept Dad's identification, and moved the questionable photos from Colorado to Washington.

Update: As I was showing this to my grandson, he suggested I ask Copilot to show me a picture of the Paradise Inn. I'd already looked it up (regular search engine) and found that it looked very much like the lodge in my photo. But when I asked Copilot to show me an image, I learned that it was seeing, not the main lodge building, but what I later discovered was called the Annex building. Hence our arguments over architecture.  However, it did no good to point that out. Copilot still insists that it is 100% right and I am wrong.

LLM's are beginning to act more and more like people every day.

In 1989, my father participated in an Elderhostel at the University of Wyoming. The course covered a number of topics, including the geology of the state. At the time, Wyoming was America's top coal-producing state—and a quick check shows me that is still true. The following excerpt from Dad's story of his trip illustrates one reason why our bicameral federal Legislative Branch represents the people both in proportion to population and as individual and equal states. Sometimes I think our Senators forget these days that they are not mini-presidents trying to rule the country as a whole, but are in power to represent the interests of their own states. This is why each state, of large or small population, has equal representation in the Senate.

It is also a stark example of how powerful special interest groups can rule and overrule reason and common sense when laws are made on the national level.

[University of Wyoming geology professor] Jim McClurg is a specialist on the subject of coal, and while I do not doubt that the interest is real, it is also politically expedient, I am sure. Wyoming is the leading state in the production of coal and this is very important to the state. From Professor McClurg's remarks, it would appear that most of the national coal legislation is written with the Eastern coal producers in mind. Western coal is low in heating value relative to the Eastern coal, but it contains about one tenth the sulfur. Clean air legislation requires that the sulfur content of coal be reduced by fifty percent before it is burned. This is easily accomplished for the Eastern coals but is very difficult for the Western coals which are much cleaner originally than the "cleaned-up" Eastern coals.

Even the laws specifying how the land is to be reclaimed are slanted toward Eastern mining. We saw some reclaimed land which had, in accordance with the laws, small piles of rocks over the area for the benefit of game. So here they were, even though the land originally had no rocks on it at all. In addition, the laws had originally specified that the reclaimed land had to be seeded with a specific type of grass that will not grow in Wyoming.

Today I think primarily of the stranglehold Big Agriculture has on our food regulations, and the devastation the laws impose on small farms. And of the way our covid-era regulations favored large chain stores while driving small businesses to bankruptcy. I'm happy that national attention is finally being directed to the problem, at least in agriculture—but the Behemoth is powerful. Will it be a case of too little, too late?

Sunday mornings, when I was a young child, often meant going to church. But even more religiously, it meant blueberry pancakes. The pancakes were from a box mix, quite likely Aunt Jemima, although I don't remember for sure. The blueberries, however, were local, hand-picked by our family from a small blueberry farm owned by one of my father's co-workers, Viv Merschon. Mr. Merschon lived in a delightful stone house that he built with his own hands, and always let us eat as many berries as we wished while we were picking.

Our syrup wasn't Aunt Jemima—we shunned commercial fake syrup like the plague—but it wasn't real maple syrup, either. Even living in Upstate New York, that was beyond our budget. We made our own syrup with white sugar, brown sugar, water, and Mapeleine (maple extract). My recollection of the process was to bring 1 cup water, 1 cup white sugar, and 2 cups brown sugar to a boil, and stir until the sugar was dissolved. Then add 1/4 teaspoon (or maybe 1/2) Mapeleine, stir well, and serve. To this day, although I almost always use pure maple syrup (preferring Grade B, which apparently doesn't exist anymore), this homemade syrup ranks higher than any store-bought substitute.

And of course there was bacon. We weren't much of a family for sausage; I've since come to like it a lot, but it will never take the place of bacon when it comes to eating pancakes. The same budget that closed the door to real maple syrup meant that bacon was rationed: three half-slices each. We never felt underprivileged, but happy to have bacon at all, and content to know what was our share.

I don't think it was thrift, per se, that made my mother save the grease that rendered out of the bacon. That was common practice in those days—why waste such a good source of fat and flavor? But that's a story for another post.

My father did have a way with words.  If you're feeling a bit cynical about the state of the world, you might appreciate his thoughts on politics, from a September 1988 letter:

So far the presidential campaign speeches don't seem to have done much to answer what I consider to be some very important questions. They each keep telling me that to vote for their opponent would be a disaster. Perhaps they are both right.

I'm not feeling cynical at the moment, though I've been known to visit that territory on occasion.  I am, however, tired.  Tired of rudeness.  Tired of ignorance.  Tired of bitterness, hatred and violence.  Most of all, I'm tired of people and institutions who stoke the fires that destroy rather than provide warmth and light.

But Dad can still make me laugh!

In a letter from my father, 6 April 1985

You mentioned some time back that so many of the AT&T fathers, and mothers too, seemed to have minimal interest in doing things with their children and seemed almost to regard their children as an unwanted product of their marriage. I can only comment that I can think of no activity that pays better dividends than the time spent with the children.. I can comment from experience that whatever time you spend can be returned many times over.

I can attest that his life was in perfect alignment with his words.

Here's some more from my father, writing in 1988 about an airplane flight to Denver.

There is much talk about the high level of illiteracy in this country and I suppose that is why all the "do and don't" instructions on the plane are all in the form of pictures with no words to be found anywhere. I have my own type of illiteracy—I often can't understand pictures. There was a picture that seemed to be a man and a woman with something that I could not make out between them, and the line through the picture indicating that whatever the picture represented was forbidden. It wasn't until my trip to Hawaii when I paid more attention to it that I concluded the picture had to do with whether or not the lavatory was occupied. It needs to be recognized that some of us never went to kindergarten and we therefore sometimes need a few words to help us along.

I did go to kindergarten, and still need words to help me along.  I never did like those "wordless books" that were popular when our kids were young.

That said, when confronted by a choice between those cryptic heiroglyphics and instructions in a foreign language, I usually have a better (though still minimal) chance of decyphering the pictures.

(I can't say I've been waiting all my life to use "cryptic," "heiroglyphics," and "decyphering" in the same sentence, but now that I've accidentally done it, I find it pretty cool.)

There's been a lot of talk about autism, and the autism spectrum, in recent years: what it is, what causes it, why the condition seems to have skyrocketed, what can or should be done to help those dealing with it. I'm not getting into the politics of it all; whether you blame heredity, vaccines, Tylenol, environmental pollution, ultraprocessed foods, random chance, or all of the above doesn't matter for this post. Personally, my own favored "cause" is the explanation I once heard of the high number of children considered "on the spectrum" in places like Silicon Valley and Seattle: Engineers are marrying engineers. I'm only half joking.

From my perspective, 1988 seems recent, but in the 38 years since then much has changed, including autism awareness. In that year, my father attended an Elderhostel program near Pikes Peak, Colorado. This comment from his journal of the occasion stood out:

Mrs. Drummond felt compelled to keep up a conversation as we traveled to her home. They have two children, a girl about 7 and a boy about 5 years old. The boy is Autistic and is in the public school for the first time this year. The disease is rare enough, at least in that area, that she has had to spend a good deal of time instructing the teacher on how to handle the problem.

Today, no one would call autism a disease, nor would they consider it rare. On the other hand, I'm certain there are many parents of autistic children who would say that they are still having to spend a good deal of time educating teachers (also family, friends, and random strangers).

In view of all the excitement over the weather these days, it seems appropriate to publish my father's story of one of my happiest childhood memories, which he called the Great Ice Storm of 1964.  If you find yourself struggling under bitter cold, sheets of ice, and loss of power this weekend, I hope you will be able to turn the event into an adventure that your children will still remember with delight sixty years later.

The Great Ice Storm of 1964

by Warren Langdon

In December 1964, while we were living on Haviland Drive in Scotia, NY, an ice storm wreaked havoc throughout the area and left us with an adventure that I recorded in letters to my father and other family members.  I recently found carbon copies of those letters and am rewriting them.  It is my intent to copy the letters exactly as written except for misspellings and for words that are crossed out.  Words that I have added I have put in italics, thus identifying the parts of the story that might suffer distortions caused by my faulty memory.

Part 1

December 9, 1964

Dear Dad,

What an adventure we have had this past weekend!  It all started on Friday, the day that Lynn and Linda were supposed to go to the Girl Scout camp on Hidden Lake for the weekend and I was to stay home and baby-sit with the other three children.  We all had great plans, but Friday morning brought freezing rain that had not let up by noon.  At that time Lynn backed out of the trip, feeling that the weather was not proper for taking the girls out.  Just before they were to leave at 3 o’clock the trip was canceled, and the freezing rain continued to fall.

I had been at work all day.  The part of the Laboratory that I worked in was housed in a large multistory building that belonged to an entirely different part of the Company.  Our offices were in a corner of an otherwise unoccupied first floor.  I had not been outside all day and the first inkling I had that things were not normal came when all the lights went out at what I suppose must have been about 5 o’clock.  The entrance to our office area was a fairly large room with desks for two secretaries and off this room was a moderately long hallway with offices on both sides.  When the lights went out I was the only one in the area and I had to grope my way down the hall, through the entrance area and out to the out-of-doors.  Of course it was dark at that time of day and since all electricity was off, there was essentially no light coming into the building.  To make matters more interesting, as I was groping my way up the hall a fire engine with siren blaring drove up.  (I found out later that some equipment that was running on the fourth floor was connected to sound an alarm in the fire station in the event that the power went off.)  I went home and do not remember any difficulty getting there.  The streets must have been well salted/sanded.

I arrived home about 6 o’clock to find a fire in each fireplace and candlelight removing the darkness from the house—the power had gone off at 1:50 in the afternoon and that is a time that is etched in my memory, for that is when the clock stopped, and that is what the clock read for better than three days—every time I looked at it.

When I got home Lynn had supper ready—baked beans cooked over the fire in the fireplace.  They were burned a little, but they tasted good.  All evening long we could hear trees snapping and branches falling as limbs bent and broke under the weight of the ice that was coating them.  And in Scotia, every time a limb fell it took down a live power line.  We could watch as the whole sky lit up brightly with the red, orange, and yellow light, and often the green that signified vaporized copper.  The light was so bright and the sky so completely lit up that I thought it must have been the northern lights, even though they were in the east, but I have been assured several times since that it was all caused by high voltage power lines coming down.  I never believed that it could be so bright from so great a distance, but I suspect that the low clouds did much to enhance the effect.  But the fire department and the police in Scotia were very busy setting up barricades and otherwise coping with the problems of downed power lines.  Our fire department got not one single call on Friday night—mostly, I think, because all the lines that went down in our district were dead when they went down.

Friday night Linda and Alan slept in sleeping bags in front of the fireplace while Nancy, David, Lynn, and I slept upstairs as usual.  It was a little chilly upstairs but not bad.  Linda watched the fire down stairs and put an occasional log on as she woke up during the night.  We awoke Saturday morning to behold an awful mess outside.  Almost every tree in our yard had been broken to some extent, although the two oaks in the back and the pines seemed unbroken.  But the locusts and the wild black cherry trees were badly hit and they are now rather drastically thinned.  The back yard is a mess, but our yard is not nearly as bad as some of the yards nearer Spring Road.  But Scotia was far harder hit.  Not only has the tree damage been worse, but almost every tree limb that fell took down a power or telephone line or blocked a street.

When the power went off Lynn was caught with a wash done but not dried, so one of the first chores on Saturday morning was to go into the village and see if there was a Laundromat open.  At that time I did not realize just how badly the village had been hit since they had power when I came home from work on Friday.  Linda and David went with me and we actually had very little trouble.  The streets we traveled on were mostly clear and there was very little traffic out.  There was enough power in the business district that a Laundromat was open and we dried the wash with no problems.  We also went to a drug store that had some power.  Their electricity came from two streets (they are located on a corner) and the part that came from Vley Road was on and the part that came from Fifth Street was off.  We came home still not realizing just how many live wires were still coming down and how much damage had been done in some parts of the Village.  The house of one of the men I worked with was without power for a full week.  Things were bad enough that the sheriff’s cars were making the rounds of the Village with sound systems warning people to stay home unless it was absolutely necessary to go out.  A state of emergency was declared, but I still do not know what that means.  In spite of all the live wires that were falling, the only fatality so far as I know was the Mayor’s dog.

When we got home we made an effort to prop up the little wild plum tree in the front which was sagging badly and had one main branch broken, but beyond that there didn’t seem to be much to do and it didn’t make much sense to start cleaning up yet.  We spent the day not accomplishing very much, but not having a hard time of it either.  We had plenty of wood—in fact, on Friday, Linda and I had taken a couple of wheel barrow loads to a neighbor whose husband is a traveling auditor and was out of town.

Saturday night we cooked hamburgers over the charcoal grill, doing the cooking in the garage where the car lights helped us see what we were doing.  Lynn used paper plates and paper cups as much as possible to cut down on the dish washing that was required since we were not in a position to heat much water.  But cooking over the grill gave us a chance to have a good supply for the dishes.  As far as I was concerned it was a privilege to wash the dishes as long as there was hot water to do it in.  The water in the hot water tank was still rather warm and that, together with what we heated on the grill made dish washing easy.

Saturday night we moved Nancy’s crib down into the living room and we all slept downstairs.  Nancy was in her crib; the other children were in sleeping bags in the living room; and Lynn was on a mattress in the living room while I was on the roll-a-way bed in the family room.

I suppose it was inevitable on such a weekend.  About 3 a.m. the telephone rang (Don’t ask me how it was that no one had electricity and everyone had working telephones.) and I was told to report to 72 Spring Road as there was a fire there.  (The fire station was without power too, so the siren did not blow.  Don’t ask me why the power lines were down and the telephone lines were not.)  I dressed and got there before the fire trucks did and actually had some trouble finding the place as no one was out to flag me down.  I overshot and by the time I got back the fire engines were there.  Then I could see considerable smoke coming out of the attic ventilator.  It was a case of a fireplace in an interior wall and a hole in the mortar of the chimney.  Either heat or sparks had set fire to the wall and it was a rather stubborn blaze.  I tended the truck and ran the pump and never got inside, so I don’t know just how bad the damage was.  I gather there was considerable damage to the wall but essentially none to the rest of the house.  I gather the owners are back living in it now that the power is on.

I see that I am at about the limit of the paper that I can send to Ethiopia for one stamp so I will close and continue later except to say that we got our power back at 8:00 p.m. on Monday and are absolutely none the worse for wear.  I’ll tell the rest of the story later. 

Part 2

December 15, 1964

Dear Dad,

I left off last week’s narrative telling about the fire we went to at 3 a.m. Sunday morning during our week end without power.  As I mentioned, I ran the pump and tended the truck, standing out in the wind and snow flurries and getting very, very cold.  I kept thinking how nice it would be to go home after this was all over and have a good hot bath;  then I would remember how impossible that was with no hot water, so I just shivered some more.  We put the fire truck away by candlelight and returned at 11 o’clock to finish the job properly by daylight.  I got home the first time about 6:30 a.m. which meant I no sooner gotten back into bed, after first building up the fires in the fireplaces, than the first of the children started waking up, and there was no more sleep for that night.

Sunday Lynn again went in to the village and did a laundry, primarily to make sure we had plenty of diapers.  Both the Dietzes and the Campbells called to offer us any help that we might need.  The Campbells were without power only about 28 hours and the Dietzes never did lose theirs.  The only thing we thought we might want was a hot bath, but Sunday was a pleasant day and it seemed easier to stay home than to go out, so that is what we did.  I did make a point of shaving in some rather lukewarm water but that is as far as we went toward cleaning up.  A neighbor lent us his two-burner gasoline stove for our supper, so we had some hot gravy and a hot vegetable to go with some left over roast beef.  We also cooked some baked potatoes in the fireplace and we dined like royalty.  Of course I didn’t time the potatoes very well and they weren’t done until everything else was gone, but then, what better dessert is there than hot baked potatoes with butter?  The gasoline stove got put to good use for heating water and it was a real pleasure to wash dishes under these circumstances.

Sunday night it got cold outdoors and was an official four degrees by Monday morning.  Inside it was 44 degrees in our hall where the thermostat is and it was less than 34 degrees in the upstairs bathroom.  (My recollection is that we had a Celsius thermometer hanging in the bathroom and it read barely one degree.)  But in the family and living rooms it was warm enough that no one suffered.  Monday there was no school and I decided not to go into work.  Lynn packed up and went in to the Campbell’s in Scotia and they all had hot baths and a hot lunch while I watched the fires at home and took advantage of the deserted house to proof-read a rather lengthy report we were having to write.  After lunch I abandoned the house for an hour or so and went also to the Campbell’s and had a hot bath.  That was a feeling of real luxury!  I think that the thing I missed most during the time the power was off was copious amounts of hot water.  Lynn also used the visit to the Campbell’s to do another wash and to put some of our freezer foods in Mrs. Campbell’s freezer.  Fortunately we had not had much perishable in our freezer when the power went off.  There was bread which didn’t matter, some frozen vegetables and frozen strawberries that we could eat before they spoiled.  But our really valuable frozen foods—the 12 quarts of blueberries—Lynn put in Mrs. Campbell’s freezer.  Things were pretty well frozen on Monday morning, but were beginning to soften.  The only thing we lost was about a gallon of ice cream.

As I returned from the Campbell’s I noticed the power company crew working on the broken line on Haviland Drive, and others were working on Spring Road, so it looked like we would have power by sometime Tuesday for sure.  I returned to the Campbell’s for supper and a very pleasant dinner it was.  Linda and Alan were invited to spend the night with the Campbell children, and they did—-not because of any hardship at home but because they enjoy playing with the children.  The rest of us returned home for another night without heat and light, but sure it would be the last such night.  And as we sat before the fire the lights suddenly went on.  It was almost exactly 8:00 o’clock—-the power had been off just over 78 hours.  So with the furnace running at last we knew that we could let the fireplace fires go out and we set about the business of finishing the defrosting of the freezer and the refrigerator, and giving both of them a good cleaning.  And when we finished that job we probably got colder than at any time during the weekend.  The fires had died considerably while we had been working, and the furnace had only barely begun to raise the temperature in the house.  In fact, when I left for work on Tuesday morning the furnace had been running for eleven hours and the temperature was only up to 63 degrees.  Monday night Nancy and David again slept before the living room fireplace, but Lynn and I slept upstairs where the electric blanket would nullify the effect of the cold bedroom.  And so ended the big adventure.  No one suffered and no one was unhappy.  But poor Nancy—-in the years to come she will complain that she can’t remember a bit of it.

Editor's commentary:

• If, like me, you cringed when you read about using our hibachi-sized charcoal grill in the garage, know that (1) our garage was drafty, and (2) my father was not only an engineer but a fireman, and well aware of the dangers of burning charcoal in close spaces.  I certainly don't recommend the practice these days, but he knew what he was doing and we were in no danger.
• In those days power lines and telephone lines were two different things, with the power wires being strung higher than the phone wires, and thus perhaps more vulnerable.  "Landline" phones (there was no other kind) carried their own power, independent of the electrical service.
• His apparently incongruous concern over the cost of postage to Ethiopia was because that is where my father's sister and her family, to whom he sent copies of his letters, were living at the time.
• I am still puzzled by his description of the frozen food situation.
  1. Why, if it was 4 degrees outside, did they worry about frozen food?  Why didn't they just put it outside?  If they were worried about animals getting to it, then if my memory of the temperature of our garage was correct, that would have done just as well as a convenient, walk-in freezer.
  2. How on earth did we let a gallon of ice cream go to waste?  Surely our family of six could have polished that off easily enough.
• Poor Nancy, indeed.  The ice storm is one of my most cherished memories.  What more could a child want?  The family was together, school was closed, and we “camped out” at home.  Toast never tasted so good as that which we grilled over the fire on our marshmallow sticks.  I liked being responsible for keeping the family room fire going.  Ordinary life was put on hold while we enjoyed working and playing together.  (You can tell I was not the one responsible for making sure there were enough clean diapers.)  The sun turned the ice-covered world into a crystal paradise, and the exploding transformers were as good a show as any fireworks display.  While it is true that we always enjoyed being with the Campbells, the way I remember the night spent at their house was that I felt I was supposed to be grateful for heat and hot water and the chance to have a “normal” night, but I really resented missing the last few hours of an enormously pleasurable adventure.  I suspect I didn’t communicate this to my parents at all at the time, but I’m surprised at how strong the memory of the disappointment is to this day.

Christmas 2025 has come and gone, but I'm not waiting 11 months to share this fun peek at things you might not know about "A Charlie Brown Christmas." I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

As you might guess, I'm one of the dinosaurs who remembers waiting eagerly for the one and only time slot of the year we could watch this show. Only in my case, it didn't matter whether Snoopy's doghouse was red or blue—not on our black and white television set.

As I've mentioned before, I've been enjoying going through (and digitizing, where possible) my father's old journals and letters. I particularly like coming upon examples of his sense of humor, which often relied on either exaggeration or understatement, or both. The following, from a mid-1988 letter, made me smile this morning.

Last Monday while I was carrying an ancient and defunct television set out to the trash, my back gave way. It was not a heavy load--certainly not more than 20 pounds--but even though I had no trouble getting it up the basement stairs and through the house, the problem came without warning as I was descending the front porch steps.

Over the next several days, interspersed with other news, Dad reported feeling fine enough to spade the garden, then feeling considerably worse, finally consulting a doctor and getting x-rays which revealed a compression fracture. He next visited an orthopedic specialist, who was not concerned about the x-ray results, since they showed only something minor that might have happened many years ago. Based on Dad's description, the doctor concluded that the problem was muscular, and prescribed "time and a heating pad." When Dad then asked what kind of activities he could could indulge in, the doctor replied, "Anything you want." For anyone reading this who knew my father, the alarm bells are now going off....

Dad did limit his activities to the extent that he did not go bungee jumping, nor bowling, the latter having landed him back in the hospital on a previous occasion when his surgeon had told him that he could "do anything you feel like doing." He did decide that that heavy gardening was still on the table, and paid for that the next day, but the orthopedic doctor was apparently right, and the references in his letters to his back petered out. In the end, he was left with the following conclusion:

I guess this confirms my feeling that television is bad for you. But on the other hand, if you have one, keep it.

I don't usually pay attention when Hollywood celebrities preach about issues unrelated to their own professions, and at my age, I've finally learned to take even the confident pronouncements of experts with a grain of salt. But as an old Star Trek fan, when I heard that Mr. Spock (aka Leonard Nimoy) was narrating a special on the climate crisis, I had to watch. It's 22 minutes long and worth seeing in its entirety.

If you're not frightened or angry, you may at least be amused.

The year was 1978. We had recently graduated from college, gotten married, and begun our careers. The year before, we had moved into our first house; the following year we would welcome our firstborn child. Life was good.

Little did we know that doom was on our doorstep.

'Way back in the 1980's, my family enjoyed spending time with good friends who owned a summer camp on a lake in Vermont. The following is a story from the year my father made the mistake of being part of camp-opening at the beginning of the season. Names have been abbreviated to protect the innocent and the guilty. I hope you find that this tale of minor summertime woe brings you a little bit of cheer this Christmas season, if only because it didn't happen to you. It's funny how we often find misfortune to be humorous as long as it's sufficiently distant in time and space. But don't feel bad about that. Dad would have laughed—that's why he wrote it the way he did.

Friday, 5 June 1987

I was the first to arrive. I expected D. around 9 or 9:30, A. and J. around 2-3 a.m., and E. even later. What I found in the cabin did not leave me overjoyed. When the camp had been "winterized" the refrigerator had been unplugged and the doors propped open as they should have been, but what they failed to do was remove what appeared to have been some popsicles and something that had been wrapped in aluminum foil and was about the size of a pan of brownies. Whatever it was, it had long ago spoiled and left a very unpleasant odor in the kitchen and a mess in the freezer compartment. At this point I went out and bought some sponges for cleanup and some bottled water as the water system had yet to be made operable. When I returned, I set about cleaning up. In addition to the mess in the freezer, the refrigerator was full of what I at first thought were mouse droppings, but which I later concluded were egg cases as they were too uniform and shiny to be droppings. They may also have been seeds that were stored there by some creature for future use. The refrigerator door contained a shelf with depressions for holding a dozen eggs and each depression held at least a half dozen of these seeds or whatever. Anyway, with sponges and ammonia I cleaned up everything but the smell. Out of all this I came to two conclusions: 1) Next time I won't be the first to arrive, and 2) when the guys go up this fall to close up the camp, J. should go to take care of the details that the guys tend to forget. As you will see later, this latter conclusion was reinforced during the weekend.

About 9 o'clock I got a call from E. saying that D. was leaving Middletown about 8 o'clock which meant he would not arrive until around midnight. I had held off having dinner until D. arrived, but I now decided that D. would have eaten by the time he arrived and it was time for me to find some dinner. I went to the Checkmate restaurant and found they were closed to the point that they would sell only ice cream. While I was wondering what I would find open at that hour of the night, I concluded that there was no reason I couldn't fix my own dinner. So I went into Fairhaven and to the Grand Union where I bought the ingredients for a fried egg sandwich and then returned to camp where I fixed just that.

D. arrived around midnight. He snacked a little and we went to bed about 1 a.m. J. and A. arrived around 2:30.

Saturday, 6 June 1987

E. arrived about 6:30 and with that we all got up. A., D., and E. got the water system working after a little problem getting the pump primed. But when they turned on the water to the house, a large spray emerged from an elbow in the cold water line to the bathtub in the main bathroom. Clearly they had not opened the faucets when they drained the system. So while the pump-installers went to play golf, J. and I tackled the elbow problem. Naturally the elbow was old and nothing like it has been made in years. The people at Gilmore's Hardware threw up their hands, but at Tru-Value they put together a combination that would do the job. Having finished this repair, we turned on the water, only to find a stream pouring out from under the house. A soldered joint in the copper tubing to the wash basin in the small bathroom had come apart and that is where the water was coming from. J. and I went back to Tru-Value and bought a torch, solder, and flux and made the repair. This would not have been difficult except that we were working with a clearance of only about six inches between the house and the ground, and not only was the working space cramped, but I also made a reasonable effort to avoid setting the house on fire. So now we turned on the water again and all was well until I ran water into the wash basin. Now water gushed out of the basin drain pipe which was broken near where the copper joint had come apart. Since there was no leak except when the basin was used, the solution this time was to pass a law that the basin would not be used until repairs had been made.

Now we could open the line to the water heater so we could wash dishes in hot water. I opened the valve, and was showered from the water pouring out of two big cracks in the copper line into the heater. So once again we went to Tru-Value where we bought some couplings and a length of tubing. I cut out the bad section and soldered a new piece in its place. Now we could turn on the water again, and this time water sprayed from an elbow on the bathtub in the small bathroom. By now it was nearly closing time for Tru-Value and besides, we didn't dare go in that store again today. So we went to a hardware store in Fairhaven, but they did not have exactly what we needed to put together a substitute elbow, so we returned to camp and resorted to heating our water on the stove.

In the meantime, E., A., and D. had not only gotten the water pump running, but had played 27 holes of golf, and put the dock into the cold Vermont lake on a chilly and windy day. So we had a light supper of hot dogs before everyone fell asleep, woke up, went to bed, and fell asleep again.

Sunday 7 June 1987

We were slower getting up this morning than yesterday. I got up about 8 o'clock and J. and D. followed at decent intervals. Even E. did not sleep as late as A.. The first trip out was to Tru-Value (where else?) for the needed elbow, which I installed, and we soon had hot water. I consider hot water one of the most luxurious necessities for the good life at a camp, or anywhere else.