Sep 06
In another of the “Who Knew” Holidays…
National Read A Book Day is observed annually on September 6th.
Don’t keep it to yourself. Share the experience! Read aloud to anyone who will listen.
Reading improves memory and concentration as well as reduces stress. Older adults who spend time reading show a slower cognitive decline and tend to participate in more mentally stimulating activities over their lifetime. Books are an inexpensive entertainment, education and time machine, too!
Sep 02
Labor Day was celebrated for the first time in New York City in 1882. It was originally celebrated on September 5th, but was moved to the first Monday in September in 1884.
Labor Day started out as a state holiday, getting voted in by individual states. As the day gained popularity, Congress declared Labor Day 1894.
Sep 02
The first Monday of every September is dedicated to the men and women who have labored to build this country. Through a time-honored tradition that has its roots in the coordinated efforts of the labor movement of the 1800s, we salute the American worker force.
Labor Day was celebrated for the first time in New York City in 1882. It was originally celebrated on September 5th, but was moved to the first Monday in September in 1884.
Labor Day started out as a state holiday, getting voted in by individual states. As the day gained popularity, Congress declared Labor Day 1894.
With an added day to the weekend and the school year starting, Labor Day also signals the official end of summer. Families take one last summer trip and cities hold one last festival for the season.
Aug 31
All this talk about Hurricanes reminds me of Hurricane Carol which hit where we lived when I was a kid.
At the time we lived in Pawcatuck, Connecticut, right on the line with Westerly, Rhode Island. Luckily, we also lived on a small hill.
My Mom said “let’s go down and see the waves” so we drove to Misquamicut Beach, about 15 minutes away.
Our car got stuck in the rising tides and we probably would have washed out to sea had we not been blocking the path of a truck who wanted to get out of the area fast. That truck pushed us to safety.
We lived on a small embankment and when we got home, we could see that the road directly below us was flooded and people were going by in rowboats.
Carol, the first named Hurricane to impact the northeast arrived Tuesday, August 31, 1954. 10 days later another hurricane struck on September 11th. Edna caused more localized damage including the Cape Cod area. This promotional feature is from the photo album Hurricane! – published in 1954 by The Standard-Times.
From http://www.thewesterlysun.com/news/latestnews/5294584-129/remembering-hurricane-carol.html
WESTERLY — Carol Nash and Joe Potter were cheerfully preparing for their wedding during the summer of 1954 when they were hit with a double whammy.
Days before the wedding, on the morning of Aug. 31, Hurricane Carol, the most destructive hurricane to strike Southern New England since the Great New England Hurricane of 1938, came crashing ashore in coastal Rhode Island and Connecticut, causing significant flooding, knocking out power for weeks in some areas, and leaving 65 people dead. The hurricane would forever change the face of Misquamicut.
On the Potters’ wedding day, 10 days later, Hurricane Edna, which followed a track slightly east of Carol’s, barreled into southern New England with hurricane-force winds of 75 to 95 mph, buffeting all of eastern Massachusetts and coastal Rhode Island and claiming 21 lives.
Their stormy beginnings may have brought the Potters good fortune. On Sept. 11 they will celebrate 60 years of marriage. The parents of two daughters, and grandparents of two grandsons and a granddaughter, the Potters have traveled widely and now divide their time between Weekapaug and southern Arizona. Earlier this month they sat on their back deck overlooking the Weekapaug Breachway, recalling the two hurricanes of 1954.
Hurricane Carol destroyed much of Atlantic Avenue, they said, noting that the section now called Misquamicut State Beach was once dotted with summer homes. Joe Potter, who was living with his sister in Ashaway, was working for a man who owned the old Sunoco Station on Granite Street.
“He had some houses and a boat in Matunuck,” Potter recalled, and one of his houses was washed into a field.
Carol, who worked in data processing at the Pawcatuck-based Cottrell’s Printing Company in 1954, remembers how she had to travel to New Haven by train for work since there was no power on Mechanic Street where the company was located, and all the machines were shut down.
The traveling time cut into her last-minute wedding tasks, so she had to enlist her mom, Lillabeth Nash, who took the bus to Providence to pick up one very important item.
“I bought my wedding dress at Shepard’s Department Store,” recalled Carol as she described the rigors of travel to Providence in the pre- I-95 days. “And thank goodness they kept the dress upstairs because the entire basement of Shepard’s was flooded.”
The Shepard Company Department Store was once the largest department store in New England. Hurricane Carol was not kind to Providence, its surge submerging much of the downtown in 12 feet of water.
But Carol Nash’s wedding dress survived, and her mother was able to retrieve it and lug it back to Westerly on Sept. 11, the same day that Edna came roaring into town.
There was a good supply of raincoats and umbrellas on hand that morning for the bridal party and guests, and when Carol and Joe made it halfway down the aisle of Our Lady of Victory Church in Ashaway, the power went out.
The Potters were not only married by candlelight, but their wedding reception was also a candlelight affair.
****
Susan Sullivan Brocato, a longtime library assistant and guidance office secretary for the Westerly School Department, was a child when Hurricane Carol hit the coast. She remembers the day before the hurricane, driving to Watch Hill where her family had a cabana at the Watch Hill Yacht Club, taking her WoodPussy sailboat, Skip-It, out of the water and cleaning out the cabana.
“There seemed to be a lot of concern about the storm,” she said. “It was scary, but there was also excitement.”
Brocato said that back in 1954, the cabanas were sitting right on the sand, level with the beach.
“We waited out the storm at our home in Bradford only to find, when we returned the following day, that the cabanas were destroyed,” Brocato recalled. The Sullivans spent the next summer at Seaside Beach Club while the Watch Hill cabanas were rebuilt.
When they were completed, the cabanas were raised on stilts.
****
Although Stonington native Joe Rendeiro wasn’t in the states when Hurricane Carol slammed coastal New England, he remembers well the stories his father told about the storm and the damage it caused. Rendeiro, like his father before him, is a retired commercial fisherman. On Aug. 31, 1954, he was in the Mediterranean serving in the U.S. Navy aboard the USS Salem. As a member of the shore patrol, his job was to keep an eye on the sailors. He remembers walking into a shore-front hotel on Sept. 1, 1954, and noticing a woman reading The New York Times. When he glanced at the paper, the headline caught his attention.
“The headline said ‘Hurricane Carol hits New England,’” recounted Rendeiro. “For two days I tried to call home and finally I got through.”
When he reached his home in Stonington, his mother, Rosa Rendeiro, gave him another kind of headline: Stonington had been hit hard. There had been an incoming tide, and boats had been lifted up and thrown upon the grassy area of town owned by Tony Longo.
“They told me that boats were spread all over town and that there were sailboats up against the railroad tracks,” Rendeiro said. “It caused a lot of damage to the fishing fleet.”
Rendeiro said his father’s boat, America, pretty much survived, but needed a lift from Chet Perkins, the owner of the local crane operation. His dad’s car did not fare as well.
“My father had a 1952 Pontiac from Joe Brustolon’s,” Rendeiro recalled. “He and Joe played poker together so he got all his cars from Joe.”
Rendeiro said his father thought he had parked the Pontiac far enough away from the rising tides, but he was mistaken.
“It was totally destroyed,” Rendeiro recalled. “When I came home that November he had a brand new Pontiac.”
****
Misquamicut resident Don Gentile, a self-described weather junkie and author of several local history books, including the Arcadia Publishing Company’s “Misquamicut,” was a young boy in late August 1954.
“I remember riding down Atlantic Avenue after the hurricane and seeing all the cottages that ended up in the pond, cottages that had been lifted off their foundations,” said Gentile. “They were there for a long time, too.”
When the Great Hurricane of 1938 destroyed most of Westerly’s waterfront, demolishing structures from Weekapaug to Napatree Point, people were reluctant to rebuild, Gentile wrote in “Misquamicut.” But by the early 1950s, people were less apprehensive, he said, and cottages and smaller buildings like hot dog and ice cream stands began to reappear by the beach. Lenny Malagrino, a local entrepreneur, brought in so-called “Groton Cottages,” small houses that had been used to house military personnel during World War II, and sold them for $500 apiece. People could buy a house and a lot for as little as $1,000, Gentile said.
By 1954, more than 50 cottages dotted the beach in Misquamicut, Gentile said.
“Little did people realize as the rebuilding continued,” he wrote, “a tropical entity in the South Atlantic would again have a say in Misquamicut’s future. Hurricane Carol would soon be visiting Misquamicut and it would not be pretty.”
One of the property owners, the late Henry Morris, Gentile reported, owned a cottage on lower Crandall Avenue (“Hurricane Alley”) that was moved off its foundation and up the street by the hurricanes of 1938, 1944 and 1954.
In total, more than 4,000 homes, 3,500 cars and 3,000 boats were destroyed and 65 lives were lost as a result of Hurricane Carol, according to the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography. With damages totaling over $460 million, Carol was the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history until Hurricane Diane surpassed it the following year.
In 1955, Rhode Island Gov. Dennis Roberts introduced legislation to condemn the one-mile stretch of beach and secure it for the state by right of eminent domain. The legislation passed, and in 1959, Misquamicut State Beach was opened to the public.
****
Patty McKinney, whose family has owned property in Weekapaug for generations, was a little girl at the time of Hurricane Carol but vividly remembers the hubbub surrounding the event. On the day after the hurricane, Patty was in the family car with her mother, aunt and sisters, driving down Weekapaug Road to check on the cottage, when suddenly her mother let out such a sound that Patty was startled and scared until she saw what her mother’s exclamation was all about.
“There was a house in the middle of Weekapaug Road,” McKinney recalled. “We later heard that the house had floated across the pond and landed there, right in the middle of Weekapaug Road.”
McKinney said she also heard that the house was moved to Chapman Road, where it sits to this day.
“It’s the second house on the right,” she said. “It’s still there.”
nbfusaro@thewesterlysun.com
A few years ago we had some run-ins with a couple hurricanes while on a cruise. This is adapted from a post on my Travel Blog MaryOut and About:
September 18, 2017
The ship is really rolling tonight – I’m having trouble sleeping due to the closet doors opening and shutting themselves. The chairs on the balcony have rearranged themselves to be right up next to the door.
From Cruise Critic:
Jose is projected to be directly between NYC and Bermuda on Sunday when we are scheduled to sail.
As of the latest run of the GFS Jose would be due west of Bermuda half way to SC coast on Sunday the 17th. [I will attach the map of this.] After that Jose is projected to slide north then recurve out to sea heading NE. Late on Wed. the 19th Jose is forecast to be 350-400 miles SE of Nantucket.
IMNHO, the Breakaway will sail to Bermuda heading a bit more out to the east than its normal straight line course. Going to the North or to the South would take the Breakaway into Jose direct influences. There may be a bit of a swell, but by going [fast] to Bermuda will avoid most of the winds of the storm.
All this said we are talking about events 6+days out. A lot can change in that time
~~~
I had trouble flushing the toilet about 4 am – at 6:59 it flushed itself!
Wave height 14.5. normal is 8
~~~
After lunch people out on deck were huddled under towels in rain.
I shared this on Cruise Critic:
They’re reporting that the waves are 14.8 and have been most of the day. The TV calls them “rough mounting” but I’m not sure what that is.
The upper decks are closed but there are hopeful folks in deck chairs wrapped in towels – and it’s raining.
We used my backpack to stop the doors from crashing so much.
Internet is working fine – it’s all good for me as long as I can get online. LOL
Our path keeps changing and we’re going further north and west, then heading back to Bermuda. I’ve been taking screenshots of the TV and I’ll post them in a bit.
Here’s an image I edited this morning as an overview for the folks back home.
6:21 Waves 21.3
Sea state Rough
September 19, 2017
The wind is blowing quite loudly
We’re heading home on Thursday at 5:00 PM instead of Friday due to the hurricane 😦
Posted on Facebook
Update, for those interested… We’ve had to go further and further around the storm (Jose) and the waves have been buffeting us around a bit.
We’re doing ok and I have lots of books on my Kindle so I’m good for a long time. The people who wanted to lie out by the pool are out of luck. The pools are closed and drained, often the decks are closed so everyone is eating and shopping – and in the casino, I guess.
The captain just announced that we’re going to have to cut our time in Bermuda short by a day because we’re going to have to skirt a hurricane (the same one?) on the way back.
I had a snorkel trip planned for that day so I’m a bit unhappy about that but it’s better to be safe…
Posted on Cruise Critic
We’re still trucking along, due to be in Bermuda tomorrow morning at 5:30 am as planned.
The pools have never been opened, as far as I know, and the decks are usually closed due to high winds.
Earlier today, the captain said we might have sun by Thursday.
Tonight he announced that we would be leaving Bermuda early, on Thursday afternoon at 5 instead of Friday at 4 to continue sailing around whatever hurricane is out there now.
I was able to reschedule the shore excursion I had lined up with an outside tour company, so that’s good. We did an excursion, but not through NCL, although the same one was offered through them. We were supposed to go out on Friday, on the Rising Son but, when we learned that our ship was leaving port on Thursday afternoon, I contacted them to cancel. They offered us a Thursday morning snorkel trip, which I accepted. Had we been on the same excursion as offered by NCL, it would have cost us more money at the outset but it would have been automatically canceled, so we would have missed out.
~~~
Response to above post on CC:
Wow, thanks for the live update – been looking at ship webcam off-and-on, looked like ship is still sailing in large swells w. bits of small whites, guessing it’s 10′ to 12′ seas & windy. we ran into that for a day last year coming back from Dockyard … a bumper.
Must be one packed atrium lobby with all the displaced outdoor chair hogs unable to sunbath …
Hurricane Maria doing major damages down in the Caribbean, expected to hit Puerto Rico directly & hard starting tonight, then continue its path as a Cat-5, possibly missing some of the Bahamas islands … and maybe weakened somewhat – turning north/northeast in the direction of Bermuda. This latest forecast model is probably what prompted NCL is modify your time on the islands, sorry – it’s mother nature – 2 full “fun” day at sea to sail around & outrun Maria next.
From BDA’s local forecast office: Bermuda will maintain showery and thundery conditions into Wednesday. Moderate to strong winds gradually ease light to moderate by Wednesday evening. Thursday is a mix of sun & clouds, high of 82 degree. (Seas outside the reef for arrival, 6 to 10 ft.)
September 20, 2017
Made it to Bermuda! If the hurricane does turn around, it makes this sound like the book – The Ship and the Storm: Hurricane Mitch and the Loss of the Fantome:
Sadly, the Windjammers have gone out of business. In October 1998, Hurricane Mitch was responsible for the loss of the s/v Fantome, a four-masted schooner operated by Windjammer. All 31 crew members aboard perished; passengers and other crew members had earlier been offloaded in Belize.
The ship, which was sailing in the center of the hurricane, experienced up to 50-foot (15 m) waves and over 100 mph (160 km/h) winds, causing the Fantome to founder off the coast of Honduras.
If so, I sure hope there’s a better ending here. The Fantome was important to me because we’d sailed her many years ago.
When I told the snorkeling company about us leaving early, they were able to change us to tomorrow so we don’t lose out on that trip at all. Hooray!
Message from NCL
Weather Updates 2017
September 20th at 11:30 AM (4:30 PM UTC)
At Norwegian Cruise Line, the safety and security of our guests and crew is of the utmost importance. The company is closely watching Hurricanes Maria and Jose in the Atlantic, and will be slightly modifying the itinerary for Norwegian Breakaway, to ensure that our guests have the best vacation experience possible.
To avoid the storm’s path, Norwegian Breakaway will sail a longer route back to New York for her cruise that departed on Sunday, September 17. Norwegian Breakaway will now spend two days in port in Bermuda and depart a day early at 6 p.m. on Thursday, September 21 and will arrive back in New York on Sunday, September 24, as scheduled. Norwegian Dawn will sail as scheduled and return to Boston on Friday, September 22.
We are saddened by the devastating impact Hurricane Irma has had on several islands in the Eastern Caribbean, ports that we have called on since the start of our 50 years in business. We are working with our partners on the ground to provide assistance to ensure these spectacular destinations are up and running and ready to welcome guests again very soon. In the interim, due to the destruction caused by the storm, we have altered the itineraries for Norwegian Escape’s Eastern Caribbean cruises for the remainder of 2017. Travel Partners and guests booked on these sailings will be receiving updated itinerary information shortly.
Should there be any further updates, guests will be advised and updated information will be posted on www.ncl.com.
Hopefully, I’m done with hurricane encounters for a while.
Aug 19
Today is another of those “Who Knew” holidays.
I was recently talking to someone about our last trip to Scotland and she reminded me to take lots of pictures. Then, she said to be sure to print them out so she could see them.
Um, no way! I haven’t printed out pictures since probably the 1980s – or earlier.
All the work that went into that. Taking the film somewhere, getting back to the store to pick up the prints, buying scrapbooks, and those little corner holders, sorting, writing the people’s names on the back, the place. Then, finding the right scrapbook to show people…
No, NO NO!
These days. I keep most of my photos online. There are 63,373 photos right now in my Flickr account and it’s so much easier to share online.
It’s interesting about photos. A couple of my first real jobs were working in photo processing.
When I was first out of college, I worked for Technicolor, processing negatives into photos.
Back then, the film had to be processed entirely in the dark.
When the door of the machine was open, the light-proof curtain of the cubicle was shut tight.
I learned how to thread huge, heavy rolls of photo paper into a machine – in total darkness. Over, under, around, over…
Neither the undeveloped paper nor the negatives could be exposed to any light – ever.
Someone else had cut the end of the roll of negatives square and stuck it to a “leader” using special tape which wouldn’t peel off during the developing process.
The leader featured small rectangle holes like old movie filmstrips. The holes catch onto sprockets which guide the leader card and film through the processing machine.
After being sure we had enough paper in the machine, we would feed the leader end of the negatives into the side and that automatically moved the leader card forward.
We’d be sure that the machine was set for the type (size) of film it was (mine were usually 110 or 35 millimeter) and feed the roll of negatives through the machine, making minor corrections using a special keyboard. Different amounts of cyan, magenta and yellow were added or subtracted to each photo to ensure the color was correct.
Adjustments are also made for exposure to each individual photo, and sometimes we’d recenter the subject (or what we guessed was the subject). Sometimes, we had to choose between 2 or more photos to find the one that was “best”.
Then we’d (finally!) get the prints, package them up and start again.
The whole thing was on piecework so the faster, the better. The faster we worked, the more money we made.
The young women who had worked here longer than I had got really good/fast at this and they were able to work with newer machines that let them work in a large room out in the light and have others to talk with. As I recall, those machines only processed the 110 film, which was becoming more popular with amateur photographers.
It was a boring job, but it was a job. I worked there from late afternoon until midnight, so it gave me lots of time to hang out at Lake Metacomet where I was living with a roommate.
Somehow, my roommate had managed to get us an apartment right on the shore of the lake and it was much easier to hang out there in the sunshine than to drive to work and be in the dark all evening.
Sometimes, I’d call in “sick” LOL
Tom and I moved to Milwaukee so he could go to grad school. While I was there, I did substitute teaching for public school music classes around the Milwaukee area.
And, after school, in the evenings, I did photo processing for a small photo processing company.
They hired me on the spot because I knew how to thread that machine. I didn’t have to do that for long, though. Somehow, I got promoted to wedding photos, those that took a lot of care, color corrections, perfect centering…and I was mostly in the light. No more piece work because I had to spend so much time on each photo, striving for perfection.
Fond memories, all of them. To this day, I am very good at telling if things are centered properly, level, and if the color matches perfectly.
In the greater scheme of things, World Photo Day is an international photography event on August 19th that celebrates the passion for photography in our communities.
Go out and get some pictures. Print them, if you want – or not 🙂
Jul 21
National Ice Cream Day is observed each year on the 3rd Sunday in July and is a part of National Ice Cream Month. This day is a fun celebration enjoyed with a bowl, cup or cone filled with your favorite flavor of ice cream.
Thousands of years ago, people in the Persian Empire would put snow in a bowl, pour grape-juice concentrate over it and eat it as a treat. They did this when the weather was hot and used the snow saved in the cool-keeping underground chambers known as “yakhchal”, or taken from the snowfall that remained at the stop of mountains by the summer capital.
It is believed that ice cream was first introduced into the United States by Quaker colonists who brought their ice cream recipes with them. Their ice cream was sold at shops in New York and other cities during the colonial era.
HOW TO OBSERVE
Enjoy National Ice Cream Day by sharing some with your family and friends! Post on social media using #NationalIceCreamDay.
HISTORY
National Ice Cream Day is a holiday declared by President Ronald Reagan back in 1984 to promote the economic well-being of the U.S. dairy industry. It was a nod to the fact that the frozen treat is produced using nearly ten percent of U.S. dairy farmers’ milk supply.
Reagan’s proclamation also called on the people of the United States to do their duty and pay tribute to ice-cream with “appropriate ceremonies and activities.” So who are we to argue?
Jul 18
This is from one of those silly Facebook posts where they want you to copy and paste to share with your friends. I decided to take it a bit further and expand just a *bit*.
Tell us about your SENIOR year of high school! The longer ago it was, the more fun the answers will be!!
The year was: 1966.
1. Did you know your spouse? No. I didn’t meet him until college
2. Did you carpool to school? No, everyone had to take the city bus – and pay our own way.
In those days, most everyone smoked on the bus so I often got a headache. I had to get off quite a ways from home and walk the rest of the way. This was a city school and, as far as I knew, nobody, except maybe teachers, drove.
The school was in an interesting location. Across the street was Classical High School (Tech and Classical were replaced by Central High School in 1986.)
Next door to Classical was Commerce High School for kids who wanted to go into business right out of high school or be secretaries and such. Classical was for kids who thought they wanted to major in the classics in college. The Tech kids were going into the sciences in college.
Those 3 schools plus the public library took up a huge chunk of real estate downtown. This is probably why they closed these schools – so they could put in expensive condos. (There was also a 4th high school for people who wanted to go into trades, Vocational High. That was up the hill, next to the Springfield Armory)
It made it really easy for all of us downtown kids to take the public bus, though. No matter what school we went to, we all rode together… and it was easy for any of us to go to the library after school.
The library is still there and has the Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden which honors Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known to the world as Dr. Seuss.
The library and the local museums now make up the Quadrangle.
The Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden, in the center of the Quadrangle, is surrounded by a park, a library, four active museums, a fifth museum due to open in 2016, and a cathedral. A second cathedral is just on the Quadrangle’s periphery.
I loved that library – we could check out anything.
Where I’d lived before, we had to get permission to get a book from “the stacks” – and we couldn’t go get it ourselves. A librarian had to get it and deliver it.
A stack (or bookstack) is a book storage area, as opposed to a reading area. More specifically, this term refers to a narrow-aisled, multilevel system of iron or steel shelving that evolved in the nineteenth century to meet increasing demands for storage space. An “open-stack” library allows its patrons to enter the stacks to browse for themselves; “closed stacks” means library staff retrieve books for patrons on request.
Not my car, but the general idea
3. What kind of car did you have? None. I didn’t get a car until I graduated from college. No point. We couldn’t drive to school and couldn’t have a car at my college until the senior year.
My grandfather gave me the money ($1000!) as a college graduation gift to help buy the car. It was a green Chevy Nova 🙂
That Nova served me well, though. When I blew out the engine, my dad tried stuffing the hole with an old rag. Uh, no! It was in my parents driveway for the longest time, in a Massachusetts winter, while my future husband and I replaced that engine. Later, it hauled a U-Haul with all my worldly goods to Wisconsin.
When it finally died, I salvaged it for enough money to buy a book of Beethoven Sonatas, which I still have to this day 🙂
4. What kind of car do you have now? A PT Cruiser
5. It’s Friday night where would you be? At home
6. What kind of job did you have in high school? I worked at Kelly Springfield Tires
7. What kind of job do you have now? Piano Teacher / CFO / webmaster / Founder and Chief-Bottle-Washer at Cushing’s Help and Support (4 part time jobs)
8. Were you a party animal? No. I’m still not.
9. Were you a cheerleader? Not for school but for my church basketball team in middle school.
10. Were you considered a jock? No
11. Were you in band, orchestra, or choir? Yes, Chorus. I first heard one of my favorite pieces in High School. I remember learning this for a concert. I doubt that we sang it quite as well as The Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
“How Lovely Is Thy Dwelling Place” is the sacred, stirring centerpiece movement of Requiem by Johannes Brahms. I doubt that this could be sung at a public school anymore 🙁
In 6th grade, they started having band and asked what instrument(s) we wanted to play. I wanted to play saxophone, but my parents wouldn’t let me. They said I already played piano and that was enough. Even though the school would lend the instrument and give lessons. Still makes me unhappy that I missed out on this experience.
12. Were you a nerd? Probably, if that word existed yet
13. Did you get suspended or expelled? No. My parents would have disowned me. I did get suspended from a VBS at another church while in elementary school, but that’s another post 🙂
14. Can you sing the fight song? Not any more
16. Where did you sit for lunch? In the cafeteria, I suppose but I really don’t remember having lunch.
17. What was your full school name? Springfield Technical High School
18. What was your school mascot? Tigers
19. If you could go back and do it again, would you? No. I was very excited to go as a Freshman, though. We were moving from Pawcatuck, CT to the “big city” and I got to choose my high school. This one required a Math Test before admittance and I was very proud to pass and get in. I thought I’d meet lots of boys there. Uh, no.
My math skills did win me a slide rule in a “Geometry Bee” my Junior year.
20. Did you have fun at Prom? It was okay. I was very excited when the cute guy I sat next to in Chemistry asked if I had a date and, when I said no, he fixed me up with his friend. His friend who could drive. <sigh>
21. Do you still talk to the person you went to Prom with? No. I barely spoke to him then. I pretended to have a hurt knee so we didn’t have to dance much, either.
22. Are you planning on going to your next reunion? No, haven’t been to one yet. In October it will be the 50th. I never really had any friends there, except for one. If I didn’t talk to anyone then, why now?
23. Are you still in contact with people from school? No
Other memories:
We had to take a class in Biology. One of the girls wore blue eyeliner, which I had never seen before.
The teacher of that class was famous for saying “Any cough can be controlled” when anyone did.
Somehow, I was the star student in both Geometry and Algebra classes. I have no idea how that happened.
Driving class took me two semesters to pass. I think I just liked being out of the classroom driving around with a fun teacher so I made it last 🙂
I also took Latin (the only memory I have of that is the teacher drilling the difference between calvary and cavalry). Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.
English, I wrote some kind of paper on Devil’s Hopyard that my teacher really liked. My parents and I had been there hiking on a trail and as one, we felt an eerie presence and turned back. Apparently, we weren’t the only ones. According to http://www.damnedct.com/devils-hopyard-east-haddam: “Over the decades, dark shadows and phantoms have been purportedly seen moving around the woodland. In more recent times, people have allegedly experienced spirit orbs and mists, as well as strong feelings of foreboding.”
Typing was required and it’s serving me well, even today 🙂
Chemistry, where I sat next to the cute boy I double-dated with for the prom. I don’t remember anything else outstanding, which is a good thing!
Gym class. AARRGGH! We had to buy seafoam green gym suits…and wear them. Our school didn’t have an outside field or anything (being downtown) so we had to change into those suits, grab field hockey equipment and hike up the hill to the Springfield Armory (The site is preserved as the Springfield Armory National Historic Site, Western Massachusetts’ only unit of the national park system.) Then, we had to actually play field hockey, a sport I was horrible at. Of course, I was picked last for any team.
Then, we had to haul all the stuff down the hill. The other 2 nearby schools had to do the same thing so any school day there were lots of kids wearing stupid uniforms climbing up and down that hill. I would guess that was a nightmare for the schools to coordinate, though.
When field hockey was done, we’d have gymnastics. Vaulting over horses, climbing ropes, tumbling. I wasn’t fond of any of that, either.
But the worst, of course, was taking showers afterwards. The only way you could get out of that was once a month – and the teachers kept track.
Still worse, however, was November 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy was shot. We were in gym when we got the news. We all sat on the floor and watched on a TV that had appeared from somewhere.
Stunned, we got out of school early.
Not in school but In my church youth group we played this game, which happened to be in the dark. A boy (I still remember his name but won’t share it here!) with buck teeth hit the top of my head with his teeth. I went to the emergency room for stitches and the ER tech couldn’t believe it when I said how this happened. He was from another country and thought that this was something that all American kids did, maybe.
I got quite a bit of mileage out of telling the story and showing where my head was shaved.
Later, when I went to the doctor to have the stitches out, I got another headache and the doctor didn’t even have any aspirin to give me. Imagine! These days, it would probably be against the law to dispense aspirin in the doctor’s office.
Like everything else I did, I took the bus to the doctor’s office, by myself. It was definitely a different time.
I don’t think we ever played that game again.
Springfield Technical High School was built in 1905 and closed in 1986.
My school was converted into the Springfield Data Center at a cost of $110 million. While most of the original Tech building came down, a substantial portion of the school, including the facade and “The Technical High School” inscribed above the front doors, was preserved.
The data center was built on the 2.2 acre site of the former Technical High School. The project site is in an historic area of Springfield and the façade of the remaining portion of the high school is in an historic district.
The project preserved the Elliot St. façade of Tech High School and demolished the remaining portion of the building, replacing it with a modern facility.
Jul 17
Another of those Who Knew holidays.
World Emoji Day is an unofficial holiday celebrated on July 17. The day is deemed a “global celebration of emoji” and is primarily celebrated online. Celebrated annually since 2014,[NBC reported that the day was Twitter’s top trending item on July 17 in 2015.
Now before the emoji, there were emoticons. Emoticons (emotion + icon) were actually developed as an expression of emotions in the cold hard texts that were devoid of it.
Emoji, a Japanese expression, roughly means “picture word” and was developed in 1990 by Shigetaka Kurita. While working for NTT Docomo, a Japanese telecom company, Kurita design these picture words as a feature on their pagers to make them more appealing to teens.
When Apple released the first iPhone in 2007, an emoji keyboard was embedded to nab the Japanese market. While not intended for U.S. users to find, they did and quickly figured out how to use it.
Every year new emojis (both emoji and emojis are acceptable plural forms of the word) are developed. The emojipedia.org keeps track of all the emoji updates across all platforms and operating systems. There are over 1800 emojis covering much more than just emotions. From transportation, food, an assortment of wild and domesticated animals to social platforms, weather and bodily functions emojis virtually speak for themselves.
More about emojis
Jul 04
Independence Day, commonly known as the Fourth of July, is a federal holiday in the United States commemorating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, declaring independence from Great Britain.
Independence Day fireworks are often accompanied by patriotic songs such as the national anthem “The Star-Spangled Banner”, “God Bless America”, “America the Beautiful”, “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee”, “This Land Is Your Land”, “Stars and Stripes Forever”, and, regionally, “Yankee Doodle” in northeastern states and “Dixie” in southern states. Some of the lyrics recall images of the Revolutionary War or the War of 1812.
A bit of audio for your listening pleasure, as played by Vladimir Horowitz…
And, just for fun:
Music Little Free Library