Autographed photo of the day

Here’s another Ebay find – a photo of Astronaut Nancy Currie autographed “to John.”

Currie, 53, is a veteran of four Space Shuttle missions, most recently in March, 2002.

Nice fox, Jack

Jack desperately wants someone to play tug-of-war with him and the Friendly Fox.

Pete absolutely will not condescend to play that game with him, probably because he outweighs Pete by a considerable margin.

Autographed photo of the day

Here’s another Ebay find – an autographed photo of the comedic genius Tim Conway.

Autographed photo of the day

It’s not inscribed “to John” but I couldn’t pass up a chance for an autographed photo of Jerry Mathers as The Beaver from the late-‘50s, early-‘60s sitcom “Leave it to Beaver.”

I keep running into people who had horrific childhoods, scarred by alcohol, abuse and divorce. Mine was almost as idyllic as The Beaver’s childhood.

That’s my son

I Google my sons’ names from time to time to see how famous they are. I found this entry at the McKenzie Worldwide site, with a charming shout-out, the odd typo notwithstanding:

 

Sean Flora

Audio Specialist
Years of experience: 17
Sean Flora, who has more than 17 years experience as an audio professional, grew up in a family where music was highly valued. While his father didn’t play himself, he was one of the greatest appreciators of music Iíve meant,î Sean says. It was from this world that he dedicated himself to a career producing excellent quality sound for just about any place recorded sound is needed. Sean oversees the audio production and editing for client podcasts and e-media projects for McKenzie Worldwide.
Sean started out his career at White Horse and has created audio productions for Nike, Freightliner (now Daimler Trucks North America) and Weiden+Kennedy, among other clients. He has produced, engineered and hosted live radio programs and produced sound design for full-length films. He has also worked in the music industry in a wide variety of musical genres. In other areas of sound work, he directed voice talents, edited and recorded literature textbooks in English and Spanish for public school students in grades six through 12.
Sean has a bachelorís degree in audio engineering from Indiana University. He also plays guitar, bass and some organ and piano when heís not perfecting the audio of clientsí sound productions.
Sean can be contacted atseanf@mckenzieworldwide.com.

Dog gone

From the public bulletin board in the Brookland, Ark., post office. The area code for the phone number is 870.
I have no idea what “used for medical purposes” means, but the pup looks a little worried in the photo.
Dunno about the color, either. Maybe he's a Blue Dog Democrat.

Autographed photo of the day

I found this autographed photo of Steve Allen on Ebay.

He was the first host of the Tonight Show when it debuted on Sept. 27, 1954. He died in October, 2000 of injuries suffered in a traffic accident.

Shows

• Songs for Sale (1950–1952)
• What's My Line? (regular panelist, 1953–1954; frequent guest panelist 1954-1967)
• Jukebox Jury (1953)
• Talent Patrol (1953–1955)
• The Steve Allen Show (1956–61)
• The Tonight Show (1954–1957, NBC)
• The Steve Allen Westinghouse Show (1962–1968)
• I've Got a Secret (1964–1967, 1972–1973)
• The Steve Allen Show (Filmways production, 1968–1969)
• Match Game (panelist, 1974)
• Meeting of Minds (1977–1981, PBS)
• Steve Allen Comedy Hour (1980–1981)
• The Start of Something Big (1985–1986)
• Space Ghost Coast to Coast (1997, one episode, Guest)
• Homicide: Life On The Street (1998): Steve and wife Jayne Meadows appeared as guests (January 16, 1998).

Songs

More than 14,000, including:

• "Theme from Picnic"
• "This Could Be the Start of Something Big"
• "Pretend You Don't See Her, My Heart"
• "The Gravy Waltz"
• "The Saturday Evening Post"
• "Impossible"
• "Cool Yule"

Comedic Discography

• "Man in the Street" (1963) (Signature 1004)
• "Funny Fone Calls" (1963) (Dot 3472, re-issued as Casablanca 811-366-1-ML)
• "More Funny Fone Calls" (1963) (Dot 3517, re-issued as Casablanca 811-367-1-ML)

Andy Adams, cowboy author and fellow Hoosier

I was looking for a reference book on cattle brands this morning when Amazon.com directed me to a book called “Cattle Brands” by Andy Adams.
Rather than an encyclopedia of brands, the book is a collection of short stories that I can barely put down to write a blogpost.
Adams, is turns out, was born in Whitley County, Indiana near Columbia City, in 1859. He left home as a teenager and worked briefly at a lumber camp just down the road from us at Newport, Ark. before striking out for the West and life as a cowboy.
He took up writing at the age of 43 and his best-known work is “Log of a Cowboy,” which chronicles a five-month drive of more than 3,000 head of cattle from Brownsville, Texas to Montana in 1882 and has been called the most authentic account of an old West cattle drive ever written.
Adams died in 1935 and is buried in Colorado Springs, Colo.
I was struck by the rich imagery and directness of his prose and was delighted to see his stuff is now in the public domain and is a free Kindle download from Amazon.com. Here’s an excerpt from “Log of a Cowboy.”

The old trail crossed the river about a mile above the present town of Dodge City, Kansas, so when we changed horses at noon, the first and second guards caught up their top horses, ransacked their war bags, and donned their best toggery. We crossed the river about one o'clock in order to give the boys a good holiday, the stage of water making the river easily fordable. McCann, after dinner was over, drove down on the south side for the benefit of a bridge which spanned the river opposite the town. It was the first bridge he had been able to take advantage of in over a thousand miles of travel, and to-day he spurned the cattle ford as though he had never crossed at one. Once safely over the river, and with the understanding that the herd would camp for the night about six miles north on Duck Creek, six of our men quit us and rode for the town in a long gallop. Before the rig left us in the morning, McNulta, who was thoroughly familiar with Dodge, and an older man than Lovell, in a friendly and fatherly spirit, seeing that many of us were youngsters, had given us an earnest talk and plenty of good advice.
"I've been in Dodge every summer since '77," said the old cowman, "and I can give you boys some points. Dodge is one town where the average bad man of the West not only finds his equal, but finds himself badly handicapped. The buffalo hunters and range men have protested against the iron rule of Dodge's peace officers, and nearly every protest has cost human life. Don't ever get the impression that you can ride your horses into a saloon, or shoot out the lights in Dodge; it may go somewhere else, but it don't go there. So I want to warn you to behave yourselves. You can wear your six-shooters into town, but you'd better leave them at the first place you stop, hotel, livery, or business house. And when you leave town, call for your pistols, but don't ride out shooting; omit that. Most cowboys think it's an infringement on their rights to give up shooting in town, and if it is, it stands, for your six-shooters are no match for Winchesters and buckshot; and Dodge's officers are as game a set of men as ever faced danger."
Nearly a generation has passed since McNulta, the Texan cattle drover, gave our outfit this advice one June morning on the Mulberry, and in setting down this record, I have only to scan the roster of the peace officials of Dodge City to admit its correctness. Among the names that graced the official roster, during the brief span of the trail days, were the brothers Ed, Jim, and "Bat" Masterson, Wyatt Earp, Jack Bridges, "Doc" Holliday, Charles Bassett, William Tillman, "Shotgun" Collins, Joshua Webb, Mayor A.B. Webster, and "Mysterious" Dave Mather. The puppets of no romance ever written can compare with these officers in fearlessness. And let it be understood, there were plenty to protest against their rule; almost daily during the range season some equally fearless individual defied them.
"Throw up your hands and surrender," said an officer to a Texas cowboy, who had spurred an excitable horse until it was rearing and plunging in the street, leveling meanwhile a double-barreled shotgun at the horseman.
"Not to you, you white-livered s---- of a b----," was the instant reply, accompanied by a shot.
The officer staggered back mortally wounded, but recovered himself, and the next instant the cowboy reeled from his saddle, a load of buckshot through his breast.
After the boys left us for town, the remainder of us, belonging to the third and fourth guard, grazed the cattle forward leisurely during the afternoon. Through cattle herds were in sight both up and down the river on either side, and on crossing the Mulberry the day before, we learned that several herds were holding out as far south as that stream, while McNulta had reported over forty herds as having already passed northward on the trail. Dodge was the meeting point for buyers from every quarter. Often herds would sell at Dodge whose destination for delivery was beyond the Yellowstone in Montana. Herds frequently changed owners when the buyer never saw the cattle. A yearling was a yearling and a two year old was a two year old, and the seller's word, that they were "as good or better than the string I sold you last year," was sufficient. Cattle were classified as northern, central, and southern animals, and, except in case of severe drouth in the preceding years, were pretty nearly uniform in size throughout each section. The prairie section of the State left its indelible imprint on the cattle bred in the open country, while the coast, as well as the piney woods and black-jack sections, did the same, thus making classification easy.
McCann overtook us early in the evening, and, being an obliging fellow, was induced by Forrest to stand the first guard with Honeyman so as to make up the proper number of watches, though with only two men on guard at a time, for it was hardly possible that any of the others would return before daybreak. There was much to be seen in Dodge, and as losing a night's sleep on duty was considered nothing, in hilarious recreation sleep would be entirely forgotten. McCann had not forgotten us, but had smuggled out a quart bottle to cut the alkali in our drinking water. But a quart amongst eight of us was not dangerous, so the night passed without incident, though we felt a growing impatience to get into town. As we expected, about sunrise the next morning our men off on holiday rode into camp, having never closed an eye during the entire night. They brought word from Flood that the herd would only graze over to Saw Log Creek that day, so as to let the remainder of us have a day and night in town. Lovell would only advance half a month's wages--twenty-five dollars--to the man. It was ample for any personal needs, though we had nearly three months' wages due, and no one protested, for the old man was generally right in his decisions. According to their report the boys had had a hog-killing time, old man Don having been out with them all night.

Autographed photo of the day

This autographed photo of Clayton Moore as the Lone Ranger, aboard Silver, is yet another Ebay find. Moore died in 1999 at the age of 85. His given name was Jack Carlton Moore and he was born in Chicago.

Wikipedia says:

Moore became a circus acrobat by age 8 and appeared at the Century of Progress exposition in Chicago in 1934 with a trapeze act.

As a young man, Moore worked successfully as a John Robert Powers model. Moving to Hollywood in the late 1930s, he worked as a stunt man and bit player between modeling jobs. According to his autobiography, around 1940 Hollywood producer Edward Small persuaded him to adopt the stage name "Clayton" Moore. He was an occasional player in B westerns and the lead in four Republic Studio cliffhangers, and two for Columbia. Moore served in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II and made training films (Target--Invisible, etc.) with the First Motion Picture Unit.

Autographed photo of the day

This photo of a much younger Martha Stewart is another Ebay find.

Changing to the new Facebook format

I finally surrendered today to Facebook’s pressure to change my page to the new format, which features a thematic cover photo.

I chose this shot from June 1, 2007, when I was invited to ride along with Gov. Mitch Daniels and Department of Correction Commissioner J. David Donahue on a leg of their roundabout journey from Indianapolis to Terre Haute.

We rendezvoused at the Wabash College Fieldhouse and Maria recorded the event photographically. Pictured are (from left) the two Indiana State Police escorts, Gov. Daniels, Donahue and me.

You can read the whole story here.

Autographed photo of the day

Here’s another Ebay find – Alan Young and Mr. Ed, the talking horse.

Gone too soon

Lauri is on her way home to Indiana.

We stopped in Walnut Ridge yesterday afternoon on the way home from Marshall’s Dry Goods in Batesville to show her the metal sculpture commemorating the Beatles’ whirlwind visit to Walnut Ridge.

Here’s the explanation from the Encyclopedia of Arkansas:

On September 18, 1964, the group finished a concert at Memorial Coliseum in Dallas, Texas, and immediately boarded a plane owned and operated by Reed Pigman. (Pigman owned American Flyers Airlines out of Dallas. The Beatles chartered one of Pigman’s planes during the 1964 tour.) Pigman owned a ranch in Alton, Missouri, that would serve as a getaway before the group’s final U.S. concert of the year, which would be in New York. Before traveling to Alton, the Beatles made a brief stop in Walnut Ridge. The Walnut Ridge airport provided the ideal spot for the group to change planes before heading to Missouri. The runway was built as a training facility during World War II and could handle large aircraft. Also, the Beatles could avoid the crush of screaming fans by landing at a secluded airport at the edge of a small town.

Autographed photo of the day

Another Ebay find – a younger Mary Tyler Moore.

Road trip!

BATESVILLE, Ark. – We’re in Batesville this afternoon. Maria is introducing Lauri to the fabulous fabric selection at Marshall’s Dry Goods while I relax with a Coke Zero and Wifi at Hardees.

We checked in at the ASU Farmers Market before hitting the road for Batesville about 10 a.m. We were in rain most of the way and made Josie’s Steakhouse on the east bank of the scenic White River our first stop for a quick lunch before the ladies moved on to Marshall’s. Maria’s been trying to get Lauri to Marshall’s ever since we discovered it. I’m curious to see how much fabric we’ll end up with in the back of the Lexus.

Jack Flash strikes again

Jack is eight months old and still growing like a weed. He’s significantly bigger than Pete, but he’s still just a big puppy.

Unless he is closely supervised (i.e. controlled) he dashes around the house looking for something to steal, then he romps joyously inviting us to chase him.

He made a foray into the bedroom this morning where he grabbed one of Maria’s shirts and yoga pants. Then he fled onto the back porch and then through the dog door into the back yard where he dashed around for several minutes before he decided to surrender his prizes.

Designer at work

Lauri and Maria explored some web site design possibilities last night.

Then we introduced her to the first two episodes of Grimm.

Autographed photo of the day

This is my oldest autographed photo, obtained 57 years ago when I was in the fifth grade and a devoted member of Captain Midnight’s Secret Squadron.

And, no, I don’t think Captain Midnight (played by Richard Webb on the Saturday morning TV series) really signed it.

Lauri’s here!

Our friend Lauri rolled in about 4 p.m. from Indiana for a long weekend visit. What fun!

And the dogs love her too.

Not a ghost town

I was reading my new issue of the BMW RA magazine last evening, specifically a piece about all of the great mountain passes we can ride when we go to the RA rally next month, when I got stopped dead in my tracks.
The passage about Hoosier Pass informs us that you can ride south over Hoosier Pass to visit “the ghost town of Alma.”
The author obviously hasn't been to Alma, which had an estimated population of 1,314 in 2010, along with a couple of bars, lots of shops, a liquor store, and at least one marijuana dispensary. Some ghost town.

In this morning’s mail

I threw out an opening bid of 99 cents last week on this half-liter stein celebrating six major breweries of Munich. Nobody else wanted it, so I got it for $8 and change with shipping.

Now to fill it…

A little family history

The oldest plat map  have from my dad’s collection is from 1941 at a time when my grandfather, Irvin Flora, still owned his 80-acre farm south of Cutler, Ind., west of Ind. 75 and on the north side of what is Carroll County Road 700S today.

This is where my dad was born in 1910 and grew up with eight brothers and sisters.

 

This is how it looks today on the Google Maps satellite view. The house and barn look pretty much the same. I don’t think the round grain bin or white pole barn would have been there before the 1970s.

As I said the other day, my dad’s older brother Joe bought the 80 acres across the road and farmed it for several years.

And here are the Flora kids in the barnyard during the summer of 1915. Herbert, the youngest, died the following February at the age of 17 months. That’s my dad in the center, looking away from the camera. Uncle Joe is in the upper right.

Autographed photo of the day

Today’s submission is an Ebay find – a signed photo of German actress/director/cinema pioneer Leni Riefenstahl.

Somebody else probably would have figured it out if she hadn't, but Leni Riefenstahl pretty much invented sports cinematography.

Much of what we've seen in TV coverage of the Olympics involves camera techniques that Riefenstahl developed for shooting Olympia, her epic film of the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

And yes, this is the same Leni Riefenstahl who created Triumph of the Will, the premiere Nazi propaganda film working under a direct commission from Adolf Hitler.

She was unquestionably the most talented woman director of the 20th century, but her deal with the devil wrecked her chances for a post-war career.

Even so, she took up still photography, lied about her age to take up scuba diving in her 80s, did amazing photographic work with African tribes and lived to be 101.

Riefenstahl pioneered in the area of the moving camera and innovative shooting angles.

If you were impressed with the shots of the track events in the Bird's Nest from the camera pod that followed the runners down the  track, know that it's a refinement of what Riefenstahl was doing  in '36.

Ditto high angle elevator shots. And lowlevel track and field shots - she had camera pits dug in strategic places in the Berlin Olympic Stadium for her cameras.

See if you can track down a copy of Olympia. It's conspicuously absent from the Netflix lineup, but you can get it on DVD from Amazon.com for as little as $14.83.

Autographed photo of the day

Here’s my friend, Doreen Tracey, one of the original Mickey Mouse Club Mouseketeers. (This is obviously not an Ebay purchase. Doreen sent it to me in 1998.)

Doreen and I have been friends since I interviewed her for The Indianapolis News back in the late-1970s, about the time when she did a couple of nude layouts for Gallery magazine. This series of photos, which didn’t sit well with Disney officials, is part of the second Gallery appearance. I dropped in to spend a Saturday with her on my first motorcycle trip to the West Coast back in 1986 and she gave me the grand tour of Burbank and Hollywood.

Doreen turned 69 on April 13. We exchanged emails and she gave me a call last week to catch up on our lives. She gave up her little bungalow on Glenwood Place in Burbank a year or two ago and moved to a pleasant-looking little yellow house in Simi Valley where she lives with her divorced son and his kids.

She’s recovering from a surgery last year and working on getting back to the level of fitness she enjoyed before the surgery.

Doreen hopes Disney officials, who have finally gotten over the Gallery episode, will go for her proposal for former Mouseketeers to perform on the four ships of the Disney Cruise Line.

In today’s mail

This morning’s mail brought this 9” Pioneer Trails plate from the Wallace China Co.’s Westward Ho series.

Woo-hoo!

Capt. Kroon’s V-E Day letter

Sixty-seven years ago today, 26-year-old Capt. Philip C. Kroon, an artillery officer with the U.S. Army's 144th Field Artillery Group, took pen in hand in the garden outside an Austrian hotel and wrote a letter to his young bride in Redlands, Calif.
It was V-E Day - Victory in Europe Day - and the young captain from Grand Rapids, Mich., had been in combat since his unit came ashore in Normandy a few weeks after the June 6, 1944, invasion. He was looking forward to coming home, but mindful that the war against Japan seemed far from finished and that he might be needed in the Pacific Theatre.
Here is what he wrote on a sheet of Adolf Hitler's personal letterhead, liberated a day or two earlier from the Führer's Berghof retreat at nearby Berchtesgaden:

My adored wife,
Finally the work of the past year for me and over three years for the nation is completed. The war here is over completely. Of course, we are glad it is over, but to us it is sort of an anti-climax. For nearly two months now, we have completely routed the Germans. During the past few days we have seen steady streams of German soldiers marching to the rear. At some places, even the super-highway is jammed. It was a sight never to forget and one that only happens once in a lifetime. I wanted to get some pictures of it, but my camera was stolen some time ago. I didn't tell you because I didn't want you to worry. I now have another very good German camera that I took from a German soldier, so am better equipped than before.
Now that we are no longer at war here, I should have more time to write you and expect to get off better than one letter every five or six days. In fact, it's now been seven days this time. I'm sorry, darling. I'll try to make it up to you.
About a week ago I went through the Dachau concentration camp. Any pictures you see or stories you hear are only a small part of the picture. The stench was indescribable as well as the actual scenes. I saw some of the toughest soldiers nauseated. I won't tell you any details for they shouldn't be put on paper. It was the most terrible thing I have ever seen.
In contrast, a couple of days ago I went through one of Hitler's palaces -not the one at Berchtesgaden, but an old Hapsburg palace  that he took over. It was a paragon of beauty and symmetry. In the two main floors was not a sign of Nazi Occupation except that most of the furnishings had been looted, mainly from France.
The walls were covered with priceless tapestries, the floors with thick pile rugs. We were nearly the first soldiers in the place and looked through it by ourselves. We went snooping in the cellar and came across two storage rooms. One was nearly filled with medals, of which I have a few choice ones. I also found one silver knife (not table) in the house - the only one there, so I suppose it belonged to Hitler. In another room, we found some stationery, of which this is the choicest. His personal. I have quite a bit of it and will send it home. You can give a sheet to various people, but save some of each kind, especially this with just "Der Führer" on it. I also came across some other excellent souvenirs - One pair of field glasses - the best I have ever seen - fifteen power - this may not mean much to you, but they are two and ½ times as powerful as the ones I and Pop used to have The must be worth three or four hundred dollars. I also have a pair of Luftwaffe swords that are not in the best of shape but will look good fixed up and crossed in my den if I ever have one.
Guess what, Sweets. I shaved off my mustache today - because the war is over. No one noticed it so I guess it couldn't have been so good. I'm not making any plans for a quick return home, beloved, nor am I getting any fancy ideas about it. I would give anything just to spend a few weeks with you, but there is much to be done, both here and in the Orient and I'm sure I'll be one place or the other.
Some will get to go home on their way to the Pacific and rumors are already afloat, but I'm not counting on anything - then we won't have the disappointment.
These Bavarian Alps are really beautiful, dearest mine. They are all snow covered yet, although we are not very high and last week we had snow in Munich. Today was marvelous. The view of the mountains is similar to that from our front yard, though the mountains are much closer and not as high.
During the last mad rush we have been getting practically no mail and I'm way behind, although today I got the letter you wrote on the eve of our anniversary. Sweet - just as they all are - but why not, with the sweetest wife in the world writing them. I wish my letters would get there more regularly. You probably have had a batch since that time, but it is nicer when they come spread over a long time.
Darling, I adore you completely. I don't dream of you often, but that isn't my fault. When I'm awake I can control my thoughts and they always include you. Always I wish you could share the beautiful scenery and the old German cities - Worms, Nurnberg, Augsberg, Munich, Saltzburg and the rest with me. Maybe, in future years, after they are rebuilt we will see them together. Anything we could do together would be wonderful. One thing in particular - I miss you so, Jeanie. I'll always adore you.
Your only Phil
P.S.
A little picture of you know who.

The cease fire order for XV Corps.

Capt. Kroon came home six months later. He made a career of the Army, taking a reduction in rank to sergeant in order to remain in a downsized postwar military. His last duty post was as an instructor in the Reserve Officer Training Corps program at Purdue University. Following his retirement, he worked for the U.S. Postal Service. He died of cancer in 1988. Diane, the first of his three daughters, was born Oct. 30, 1946, and grew up to be my first wife.

Autographed photo of the day

This autographed photo of Nicholas Cage is one of my Ebay acquisitions. He had a bit more hair back in the 1990s.

“I can fly!”

This is, without question, the best bear tranquilizer photo I’ve ever seen. My guess is that Andy Duann, the photographer for the University of Colorado-Boulder student newspaper, set his camera for rapid fire continuous shooting when it looked like the bear was about to fall and this is the best frame in a series.

The picture was shot on April 26 after the 280-pound black bear wandered onto the campus near a dormitory complex. The bear climbed a tree, was shot with a tranquilizer dart and landed on an airbag. He was released in a mountain wilderness area about 50 miles west of Boulder.

But there’s a sad coda to the story. The hapless bear was fatally injured last Thursday when he was struck by a car on U.S. 36. Wildlife officials said an ear tag confirmed it was the same bear that Duann photographed for the CU Independent. His photo went viral and resulted in the bear having its own Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Uncle Joe and plat books

Hey, there’s my Uncle Joe’s 80 acres in Democrat Township of Carroll County in the 1950 Carroll County Official Farm and Business Directory, published by Keyes Publishing Co., Peru, Ind.

Uncle Joe lived across the road from the farm where he and my dad and seven other Flora kids were raised. It belonged to Charles Pope in 1950.

In his day, my dad was the best farm appraiser in the county and he had a large library of plat books for Carroll and the surrounding counties. I gave several of them to Delphi attorney friend Tom Ives a few years ago, but discovered a cache of about 20 plat books in a box in our garage a week ago.

For the uninformed, plat books show each parcel of land in a county, noting the name of the owner and the acreage. Uncle Joe sold the farm and he and his wife Cassie retired to a mobile home court in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Here he is with my mother when we visited him in the summer of 1970.

That was the year I learned it’s a bad idea to go to Florida in July. I also learned about sand fleas.

Among Joe and Cassie’s neighbors in their trailer, oops, mobile home park was Johnny Roventini, who was the bellhop who did the “Call for Phillip Morris” cigarette commercials on radio and TV for more than 40 years. I never got to meet him though.

Uncle Joe died in 1980 at the age of 80.

But I digress.

I just listed 17 of the plat books, which include Carroll, Cass, Clinton, Benton, Newton, White, Tippecanoe, and Howard counties, on Ebay. They’re a great source of information for genealogists.

Autographed photo of the day

I shot this photo of Willie G. Davidson when I interviewed him for my weekly motorcycle column in The Indianapolis News back in February, 1986.

Willie G., who just retired as senior vice president and chief styling officer of the Harley-Davidson Motor Co., was leading a ride of Harley folks from Milwaukee to Daytona Beach Bike Week and they stopped for the night at the Holiday Inn in Lebanon, Ind.

As luck would have it, one of the cable channels was running “Easy Rider,” so we chatted about bikes and life in general in his room while watching the movie.

As far as I know, my motorcycling column was the only weekly column on the subject in the U.S. at the time. It ran in The News for about four years in the mid-‘80s.

Willie G. is the son of former Harley-Davidson president William H. Davidson and the grandson of Harley-Davidson co-founder William A. Davidson. Willie G. is a very young 78.

Autographed photo of the day

Sometime back in the 1990s I noticed a lot of autographed photos up for auction on Ebay were named to specific people. I started searching for photos that were named “to John” and started collecting them.

I ended up framing them and creating a gallery in the downstairs half-bath of my condo on the northside of Indianapolis. I never displayed them at our house in Thorntown and they’ve been in a box in the garage since we moved here in the autumn of 2007.

If I can’t hang them (Maria doesn’t like the cheap frames that don’t match each other), I’ll blog them instead.

Here’s 1950s movie star Kim Novak. She walked away from Hollywood, married a veterinarian and lives on a ranch in southwest Oregon. She was reportedly diagnosed with breast cancer in 2010 but her manager said she was undergoing treatment was expected to make a full recovery. She turned 79 in February.

Good morning, neighbor

Here’s our neighbor David Head counting out change for a customer at the Nine Oaks Beef stand this morning at opening day of the 2012 season of the Arkansas State University Farmers Market.

David and wife Cheryl own the ranch on the other side of our woods and raise quality natural beef cattle – no h0rmones and no antibiotics.

You can read about their operation at their web site: www.nineoaksbeef.com

David is a good neighbor and has a kind of Sam Elliott vibe about him.

It’s too early for most vegetables, so the market was full of other stuff like plants and geegaws.

McClaine Meats of Advance, Ind.

Meet Mr. and Mrs. McClaine, owners of McClaine Meats, a country grocery store I visited in the spring of 1973.

The store was at 104 S. Main Street, which is also Ind. 75. Advance is in Boone County a few miles north of I-74. The store isn’t there anymore and I can’t remember the McClaines’ first names, but it was the heart of the tiny Advance community (population estimated at 563 in 2003).

If you wanted bologna, Mr. McClaine would slice it for you on a big wooden chopping block that is almost certainly against today’s health codes. Never mind that nobody ever got sick because of it. We have to have regulations, you know.

Notice the gorgeous tin ceiling and the wood floor. The place was a 21st century health inspector’s nightmare, but it didn’t matter back then. It shouldn’t matter today, either.

They also didn’t make a big deal about customers wearing shoes, as this photo illustrates. (That’s my Gossen Super Pilot light meter and reporter’s notebook on the counter in the lower left corner of the photo. Just for the record, the photos were shot with a Pentax with a 28mm lens on Tri-X film. Available light, of course.)

I drove past the building last Sunday on my way home from Thorntown, Ind. and looked in vain for any trace of the former grocery store.

The McClaines were good Hoosier people and their store was a joy to visit. I’m still charmed by the photos and glad they weren’t lost in my hard drive crash.

You can see the photos larger if you click on them.

Sniped!

I just sniped this gorgeous 9” Pioneer Trails plate on Ebay. It’s from the Wallace China Westward Ho series which features, IMHO, some of artist Till Goodan’s best work.

At the risk of tipping my hand to potential Ebay competitors, here’s my strategy: I check the new listings daily for stuff that interests me and when I find something I might want to buy, I click the “Add to watch list” button.

I never bid until the last 10 seconds of an auction – sometimes the last 5 seconds. Bidding early only invites a counter-bid and drives the price up needlessly. By throwing in a crushingly high bid in the last seconds, I make it impossible for a competitor to respond before the auction ends and the final price ends up just being incrementally higher than the previous high bid.

Yes, it’s a little risky if someone else has also put an insanely high bid on the item that is only slightly less than your insanely high bid, but that’s a rare case.

Recovering, one program and peripheral at a time

Here’s the first image shot by my freshly re-installed Logitech 250 webcam this morning.

I’m clawing my way back from a hard drive crash that necessitated the purchase of a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black hard drive and reinstalling all of my software.

I lost a bunch of photos in the crash and some other data, but it looks like I’ll be able to rescue almost all of my iTunes library, which would have otherwise amounted to the largest monetary loss.

It’s also an opportunity to update drivers and be rid of stuff that was slowing down my computer or otherwise impairing its performance. I’m not happy about it, but I’m not despondent either.

I had never opened the box on my Dell Studio XPS computer before yesterday because Dell said that would void the warranty. It’s out of warranty now, so no worries. I had some initial difficulty getting the computer to see the new hard drive and called the WD tech support line. The techie suggested I shift the drive to the other hard drive bay and call back.

Imagine my surprise when I realized the case has only one hard drive bay, despite the fact that I was assured it had two when I bought it. WTF?

Fortunately, I have external hard drive mounts to accommodate four more drives, plus USB ports to run several others.

In today’s mail

I haven’t smoked cigarettes for more than 30 years (I was smoking four packs of Viceroys a day when I quit for the second and final time in the late 1970s, if you must know.), but I couldn’t resist this Wallace-esque Texas Longhorn Steer ashtray.

It looks like it could have been made by Wallace China, but there’s no maker’s mark on the bottom.

Hard drive hard luck

My desktop hard drive is dead, bricked, hosed, fucked.

I got a DOS message to back up my files when I tried to start the computer just before my departure for  Indiana last Friday morning, so I had the whole weekend to let it weigh upon my mind.

I came home with the plan to buy a new 1 or 2 TB drive and use Acronis software to clone the old drive. When I got to Best Buy yesterday morning to scope out the hard drives, I called my computer mentor Tim Balough to get his thoughts on drives and strategies. Tim advised against cloning, warning that a cloned drive would likely have the same corrupt data that created this crisis.

So I went home without buying a drive, wiped a 500GB drive I had a bunch of junk on, and put it and the ailing drive into a dual-drive stand-alone mount, connected to Maria’s desktop computer. I was able to see the sick drive and its contents and figured the first thing I would rescue was my iTunes library.

But when I clicked on it, I got a Windows message saying I didn’t have permission to access that folder and would I like permission? Yes. I clicked OK and waited several minutes for the progress indicator to crawl to completion. But when it did, my old drive crashed completely and went invisible to Maria’s computer.

As a last-ditch effort, I put it back into its original case and tried to run SpinRite on it. But SpinRite reported it as an empty drive. Crap.

Now I’m back to buying a new hard drive and reloading my Windows 7 64-bit OS and all of my programs. I still have the hard drive from my previous computer, so my older documents are still there. I’ve only lost what I created in the two years I had this computer. Happily, I archived our tax returns and a lot of other crucial stuff on Google Docs and an external hard drive, so it’s not quite as bad as it could be.

In the meantime, I’m relying on my netbook to stay connected.