Staying put

The sun is out in a cloudless sky, but the temperature is only 22º, so the snow-dusted crust of sleet isn’t melting to any significant degree.

I say not to any significant degree because the sun causes a little bit of sublimation in which the snow and ice turn into water vapor, but it’s negligible.

Unfortunately, the roads are still mostly covered with the sleety glaze, making it necessary for me to activate the ECT feature on my Lexus RX330. I have no idea what ECT stands for and haven’t found an explanation in the voluminous owner’s manual.

As far as this Hoosier in exile is concerned, the most dangerous thing about the roads is the unskilled winter drivers who seem astonished when they get in over their heads and slide into oncoming traffic or a ditch or tree.

The Weather Channel web site forecasts a Friday high in the mid-30s and a very melty high of 50 on Saturday, accompanied by a 100 per cent chance of rain to flush this stuff away.

As miserable as cold rain is, I’ll take it rather than freezing rain.

In the meantime, I have no further travel plans for today.

No big deal

Dire predictions of several inches of sleet and snow from Winter Storm Octavia proved wildly inaccurate last night and this morning.

As expected, the sleet arrived about 9 p.m. yesterday, but it was intermittent and light. We ended up with an inch or two – not enough to cover all of the leaves on the ground, but enough to freak out the schools and businesses in the region.

I warmed up the Subaru for Maria, melting the light coat of ice from the windshield and windows, and she motored in to work in Jonesboro. Being a native Hoosier, she learned long ago how to drive on snow and ice, so the only real peril was from Arkansans who are clueless on slick pavement.

So Octavia wasn’t even a storm worthy of a name around here, although she may gather momentum as she churns eastward and up the Atlantic coast.

No need for our generator and the cable TV and internet stayed on.

My snow storm preparedness kit

Lassen Sie es schneien!

Lassen Sie es schneien!

Lassen Sie es schneien!

It’s sunny and 53º now, but this could be Monday’s weather

The weather is so pleasant at midday Saturday that I’m thinking of going for a motorcycle ride.

But the forecast calls for the first significant snow of the winter, starting sometime late tomorrow.

The Weather Channel web site says there is a 100% certainty of snow and forecasts accumulations of 5-8 inches.

Since it’s Presidents Day, I suppose most of the schools will be out anyway, but a snowfall of this magnitude is a real game-changer for northeast Arkansas where our county owns two snow plows. Two.

And it looks like the snow will be around for awhile. The forecast highs for the next 10 days are all below 40º.

I didn’t have anyplace special to go anyway.

The photo is from March 8, 2008 when we got a couple of inches of snow that was gone in a day. I don’t think we’ll be so lucky this time.

One of my favorite rides

I haven't posted anything interesting for awhile, which is not to say this will be either, but I was pleased with the way it turned out.
This is a piece about the Lost Coast of California that was published 13 years ago in Motorcycle Tour & Cruiser magazine, which later mutated into RoadBike magazine.

By JOHN FLORA

The golden eagle came at me head-on, the California morning sun glinting yellow in his right eye as he pierced me with his gaze.
Framed by ancient oak trees that overarched the empty two-lane blacktop, his brown wings extended a full seven feet as he held a motionless glide about 10 feet above the pavement.
A moment earlier I had glimpsed a large shadow flash across my path from the right as I leaned into a gentle right turn among brown grassy hills. Glancing up and left, I saw nothing but blue sky.
But now, there he was, squarely in front of me. Regarding me sternly with his golden eye, the eagle welcomed this wayfarer to his wild domain with a magnificent show of confidence and authority.
I cut the throttle and pulled in the clutch, then held my breath as our shared momentum drew us together. He flashed over my helmeted head and was gone.
I smiled as I re-engaged the engine of my ’91 BMW K100RS.
The Mattole and Silkyone Indians who once peopled this wildest stretch of California’s north coast regarded the eagle as a bearer of messages from spirit to man. They would have seen my encounter as a very good omen.
I considered myself officially welcomed to the Lost Coast.
This rugged place where 4,000-foot peaks meet the Pacific 160 miles north of San Francisco is the least-visited segment of the more than 800 miles of California coastline. Here the mountainous terrain so intimidated the road builders that they swung California Highway 1 and U.S. 101 inland just south of Eureka to penetrate the redwood forests rather than force a route through the King Range. Much of the Lost Coast lies within Humboldt County where, even with the communities of Eureka and Arcata, the population density is just 34 persons per square mile. By comparison, the state of California averages more than 212 people per square mile.
I live in Indiana but I visit Northern California almost every summer as a happy consequence of having a son on the West Coast. Over the years, I’d wondered what adventure I was missing by taking the redwood route south and skirting the mysteriously named Lost Coast.
A little research revealed at least one good streetbike road into the area. The route from Ferndale down to Shelter Cove is mainly two-lane chip-and-seal blacktop, although Marilyn Machi, who took my reservation for a room at the Beachcomber Inn at Shelter Cove warned “there’s one place that’s unpaved, but you ought to be able to make it.”
Fresh from a good night’s sleep at the Eureka KOA, I struck camp in the foggy darkness, wolfed down a quick McDonald’s breakfast and rode south to pick up the road to the Lost Coast in Ferndale.
A worthy destination in its own right, the Ferndale is five miles off the beaten path of U.S. 101 and a century behind most California architecture. Its elegant Victorian main street and residential facades are a legacy of a prosperous dairy industry that made Ferndale a melting pot of Scandinavian, Swiss-Italian and Portuguese cultures.
I marveled at these ornate “butterfat palaces” as I idled through town. The road to the Lost Coast awaited me at the south edge of Ferndale, snaking up a fog-shrouded hillside and marked by a sign pointing to Petrolia and Honeydew.
It’s a nondescript little road. Without the sign, it might be mistaken for someone’s driveway. Fog and rough pavement kept me in second gear as I steadily climbed through the misty forest, gaining about 2,000 feet of elevation in the four-mile ascent to Bear River Ridge. The fog that told of the nearby ocean was heavy with moisture, forcing me to wipe my visor with a gloved finger every few minutes.
Finally, near the crest, I broke into bright sunshine. A tongue of marine fog filled a valley to my left with billowy white, transformed into glorious white cloud tops by the morning sun.
I kept a wary eye out for deer and other wildlife. I’d read in that morning’s Eureka newspaper about a small commuter plane hitting a deer at the local airport. An airport official said deer have become so accustomed to aircraft, people and machinery that they remain on the runway while pilots try to land.
Descending toward the coast, I was in treeless grassy hills now and presently the sunlit sky yielded again to fog. A sharp right turn and I caught sight of a line of surf pounding a misty beach, marked by a massive rock, barely visible a few hundred yards offshore. A switchback down and left and I was riding south along the shoreline, looking for a place to pull over.
A bronze plaque informed me this was Cape Mendocino, once the site of a 422-foot-tall lighthouse that guided mariners from 1868 through 1951. Despite the navigational aid, the offshore rocks claimed nine ships over those years. The lighthouse has been dismantled and now sits in pieces down at Shelter Cove, awaiting restoration.

This six-mile stretch, devoid of human habitation, is the only part of the 80-mile ride from Ferndale to Shelter Cove with an ocean view. Pressing on south, I soon discovered I was not alone. A herd of cattle fanned out across the steep hillside to my left, some eyeing me, some gazing out to sea like cud-chewing sentinels. I overtook three of their number on my side of the fence, strolling along the road and looking perplexed with their newfound freedom.
All too soon, the road bent left, back up into the coastal hills and a few foggy miles on I found myself in Petrolia. This crossroads village is so named because California’s first oil wells were drilled about 3 miles east of here on the north fork of the Mattole River. A dog barked at a passing cable company truck as I read how the Union Mattole Oil Co. made its first shipment to a San Francisco refinery from here in 1865.
By now, the road surface had improved to the point where I was routinely managing fourth and fifth gear and 50 mph. I made quick work of the 24 miles to Honeydew, pausing once to accommodate a road resurfacing crew and again to chuckle at a homemade sign warning of “Road Cows.”
It was just north of Honeydew that I received the golden eagle’s benediction. Golden eagles are common here, favoring rugged terrain that creates abundant updrafts for soaring.
As the road wound past ranches and farms, I noticed a large number of “No Trespassing” signs. I thought, “These folks sure like their privacy.”
The route isn’t well marked and there were several junctions where I stayed on track only because one road choice looked slightly better traveled than the other. Even so, I made one false move. Taking what looked like the most promising route, I found myself dead-ended a few hundred yards later in a barnlot.
The village of Honeydew offered me the option of continuing southeast in search of Shelter Cove or taking the twisty Bull Creek Road to the north. This narrow paved road climbs about 2,000 feet over the ridge to Humboldt Redwoods State Park and continues for about 23 miles through old-growth redwood forests east to U.S. 101. I decided to save that ride for another day.
A few miles south of Honeydew, I found the unpaved section – a rough washboard stretch of perhaps a half-mile, full of steep 180-degree uphill switchbacks that called for first gear and lots of concentration. I was grateful it was an uphill run because I suspect I would have felt my ABS kick in had this been a downhill ride. The official Bureau of Land Management map warns, “This Section Not Recommended for Travel Trailers.”
I stopped about 11:30 a.m., three hours into my ride, to check my maps at a crossroads offering a choice between Ettersburg and Briceland. The road bearing to the left looked slightly better maintained and I chose it in the hope it would lead to the Shelter Cove Road before it turned to dirt or worse. I later learned I’d chosen well. Turning right would have taken me down the challenging and unpaved Kings Peak Road. As it was, I had good pavement the 11.5 miles to the road junction that pointed the way west to Shelter Cove.
By noon, I was poised at Paradise Ridge, the last mountainous rampart before the road slaloms down nearly 2,200 feet to Shelter Cove. The seven-mile descent to the coast is marked with dire warnings to RV drivers about fatal crashes over the last decade.
“We’ve had quite a few tragic accidents,” said Carol Sullivan, who lives in Shelter Cove and works for the Bureau of Land Management. “In fact, there’s even a t-shirt that says, `I survived the Shelter Cove Road,’ with a picture of an RV with its brakes on fire.”
Shelter Cove, built on a grassy marine terrace overlooking the Pacific and flanked by mountains on three sides, is a picturesque fishing village that is home to about 200 permanent residents. Much of the town’s economy is based on charter fishing and tourism, with eco-tourists representing the latest wave of visitors. Shelter Cove offers several headlands, bluffs and beaches that make the place an ideal vantage point to watch for the flukes and spray signaling the spring and fall migrations of the California Gray Whale. You can also pass countless hours watching the birds, seals and sea lions. Deer are a common sight throughout the town and Roosevelt elk occasionally wander in from a nearby meadow called Hidden Valley.
Many visitors to Shelter Cove arrive by light plane, using the 3,400-foot-long airstrip that forms a kind of centerpiece for the town. Some come to hike or fish and others fly in for a day of golf on the course that wraps around the asphalt runway.
I followed the convenient signs at the north edge of town and easily found the Beachcomber Inn where Marilyn Machi checked me in and advised me that, this being a Tuesday, the only restaurant open was the deli at the nearby campground and RV park. After unloading my bike, I cruised the short distance down to the deli. In no time, I was relaxing on the patio with a tasty lunch of clam strips and chips under the covetous gaze of a dozen or so noisy seagulls.
The patio affords a spectacular 220-degree panoramic view of the ocean and I could hear sea lions barking as I watched charter fishing boats bobbing on the gentle swells offshore. While I dined, four other motorcyclists rode into town and cruised past.
I caught up to them later over a mocha latte at Cheryl’s Coffee House. Riding a mix of touring bikes and cruisers, these four friends were up from the San Francisco Bay area for a couple of days and had ridden down from Ferndale about 90 minutes behind me.
One of them, who had been down this road before, observed that the “No Trespassing” signs we’d passed suggested some of the locals might be marijuana farmers. This, after all, is Humboldt County – one of the prime pot-growing counties in all of California and the United States and we were there at harvest time. They said they noticed folks smoking dope in their yards as they rode through Honeydew that morning.
“People here are very independent and private,” said Carol Sullivan later, but she wasn’t eager to brand all of her Lost Coast neighbors as dope-growers. “It’s very common for people who live close to public land to keep up signage. Mostly, it’s a liability issue and they’re concerned about people getting hurt while on their property.”
Sullivan, who grew up in southern California, fell in love with this remote area while studying natural resources at nearby Humboldt State University in Arcata and moved to Shelter Cove about three years ago.
“I like the fact that it remains pretty wild and untamed. The forces of nature haven’t been completely conquered by human beings here,” she said. “The King Range is one of the fastest rising mountain ranges in North America. A lot of mountain chains uplift maybe 10 feet in 1,000 years. Our uplift rate is considerably higher: the King Range rose three feet in a matter of seconds in the 1992 Petrolia earthquake.”
While some maps show Chemise Mountain Road and Usal Road winding south from Shelter Cove to link with the Pacific Coast Highway north of Fort Bragg, it’s no through-route for street bikes.
Usal Road is a narrow, winding remote dirt road that gets minimal maintenance, Carol said. “That means it is passable to high clearance vehicles in the summer when it is dry, but usually quite bumpy due to erosion caused by the wet season. There are usually some really deep ruts, lots of washboarding and many times downed trees block the road for a few days at a time… there are no services in the area.”
I spent the afternoon exploring Shelter Cove and walking on Black Sand Beach at the north edge of town. Dinner was a burger and fries at the deli.
Returning to the Beachcomber, I was drawn into conversation with a pleasant young couple from Marin County who were overnighting at the inn after a couple of days down at Mendocino. They shared conversation, cheese and champagne with me on the patio outside their room as night fell.
I awoke the next morning smelling eucalyptus from the grove outside my window. Loading my bike in the soft misty light of morning, I could hear the barking of sea lions as they greeted the day from the rocks offshore. Their voices, a strange delight to my midwestern ears, carried clearly through the moisture-laden air.
Even though I had a full day’s ride ahead of me, with plans to ride down through San Francisco to Big Sur, I was in no hurry to leave this remote pocket of serenity.
I rode my loaded bike down to the deli, bought a styrofoam cup of coffee and walked over to the launching ramp to watch the charter fishing captains ease their boats into the cove for another day on the water. Squadrons of gulls kept an expectant vigil from nearby rooftop perches.
On my way back to the bike, I exchanged morning greetings with Tom, a cell phone sales rep from San Francisco, and his friend Ray, a Shelter Cove resident. Noticing I was about to ride out of town, they regaled me with their favorite Shelter Cove Road story: A local couple, the story goes, were involved in a romantic interlude in a pickup truck, parked in a turnoff somewhere this side of Paradise Ridge. Somehow, the parking brake got released and the truck rolled forward, launching off of the cliff.
“They were topping trees on the way down,” Ray recalled. He added that the man was killed and the woman survived with serious injuries, draining most of the humor out of the situation.
So, mindful of runaway pickup trucks, I saddled up and took the only streetbike road out of town, climbing the ridge and savoring the 24 miles of redwoods and twisties to Garberville and the U.S. 101 freeway. I was sorry to see Shelter Cove and the Lost Coast recede in my mirrors, but something tells me I’ll be back.
Shelter Cove Resources
Here are some handy names and numbers if you visit the Lost Coast:
Bureau of Land Management King Range Project Office – 768 Shelter Cove Road, Whitethorn, CA 95589 707-986-5400
Shelter Cove Information Bureau – 707-986-7069
The Tides Inn – Spacious oceanfront rooms and suites just a short walk from the day use airstrip, golf links, restaurants and local services, 59 Surf Point, Shelter Cove, CA 95589 707-986-7900, thetidesinn@earthlink.net Beachcomber Inn – Six rooms and a hillside ocean view, 412 Machi Road, Shelter Cove, CA 95589 800-718-4789
Mario’s Marina Motel – Rooms and bungalows close to the beach, 533 Machi Road, Shelter Cove, CA 95589 707-986-7595
Oceanfront Inn – Suites on the beach, 26 Seal Court, Shelter Cove, CA 95589 707-986-7002
The Lighthouse – One luxury suite, 62 Seal Court, Shelter Cove, CA 95589 707-986-7002
Shelter Cove Motor Inn – Spectacular cliffside ocean view, 205 Wave Drive, Shelter Cove, CA 95589 888-570-9676
Shelter Cove Ocean Inn Bed & Breakfast – Four suites with excellent ocean views, 148 Dolphin, Shelter Cove, CA 95589 707-986-7161
Shelter Cove RV Park, Campground & Deli – Tourist information, cold deli foods, a grill and steam table, the market has a variety of drinks, 492 Machi Road, Shelter Cove, CA 95589 707-986-7474
The Cove Restaurant – Fresh seafood, steaks, pasta, vegetarian specials, 210 Wave Drive, Shelter Cove, CA 95589 707-986- 1197

Liese’s back with Jack and Dora

Liese’s dad is in the hospital in Little Rock, so she’s spending a few days with her old friends Jack and Dora.

We still had her kennel from the last visit, so we were able to make her comfortable with very little effort.

We hope she can rejoin her people soon, but she’s welcome here as long as she needs us.

Getting better

Maria’s back problem flared again last week, most likely triggered by her decision to lug a heavy antique sewing machine from her car to a repair shop counter.

That was around Wednesday. By Friday noon, she was in such pain that she had to come home from work and get horizontal.

She soldiered through the weekend on muscle relaxers and bed rest and I took her to the clinic Monday morning where she was seen by a nurse practitioner who prescribed steroids.

The prescription worked quickly and she got a good night’s sleep and feels significantly better. I dusted off our garage treadmill and she’s on it as I write.

Chronic back pain is a horrible thing and I thank God it’s not among my ailments.

Keeping them safe

An expensive set of headphones needs more protection than the cloth carrying bag that came with them.

So I invested about $60 in a GOcase hard case that is a perfect fit for my new Bang & Olufsen H8 wireless headphones.

Now I am an utter and complete geek.

I expected a check

Our Thorntown tenant used Western Union to pay his rent this month.

I drove down to the Jonesboro Kroger store, which has a Western Union connection, this afternoon to pick up the payment, which I supposed would be in the form of a cashier’s check.

Instead, the girl at the service desk opened the cash register and gave it to me in enough cash to make it uncomfortable to sit on my wallet.

We’ve become so reliant on plastic, that I rarely have any cash with me, not even change, so this is a particularly odd feeling.

And when did the U.S. Mint start making $100 bills with a blue tinge?

Still amazed by the Bang & Olufsen headphones

Here I am, at 2:20 a.m. today, exploring my iPhone music library with my new Bang & Olufsen H8 Bluetooth headphones while lying in the darkness in bed.

If someone had told me there could be headphones that would make every song in my more than 11,000-song library sound fresh and new, I wouldn’t have believed it. And if they told me I would own such a fabulous pair of headphones, well, I would have dismissed it out of hand. This time last year I was asking my musician sons to recommend a good set of ‘phones under $100.

So far, four other Amazon Vine program reviewers have evaluated the H8s and the verdict is a unanimous five stars.

My review is informed by a life of listening to all kinds of music with average to cheap consumer grade speakers and headphones, so it’s pretty subjective. It’s gratifying to see that reviewers with serious audiophile credentials are blown away with the H8s as well.

One guy who edits video and audio headlined his review with “Near perfect headphones!” and gushed, “Over the years I've product-tested close to a hundred headphones from $20 - $1000 and thanks to B&O I have a new favorite!”

So, educated ears or not, I guess I know a killer set of headphones when I hear them.

Face Time with Lisa

I just made my inaugural iPhone Face Time call with the Bang & Olufsen Bluetooth headphones and they functioned perfectly, thanks to a very well-engineered built-in microphone.

Steve is spending his days home schooling Lisa and five nights a week playing bass in the orchestra at Steve Wynn’s musical extravaganza in Las Vegas.

Lisa would have been a fifth-grader if she had stayed in school this year. Steve says she’s deep into seventh-grade math and excelling at everything far above her old grade level.

Chatting with her is like chatting with a young adult. She has a rich vocabulary and poise and confidence to burn. She’ll be 11 at the end of May.

At last! Headphones I can love!

Thanks to the Amazon Vine program, I have the opportunity to evaluate the newest, best headphones from Bang & Olufsen.

The BeoPlay H8 headphones are scheduled to be released on Feb. 26 with an MSRP of $499. Expect Amazon.com to offer them at a lower price eventually.

They’re wireless Bluetooth ‘phones with Active Noise Canceling and a built-in microphone making it possible to use them for iPhone voice and Face Time calls. In short, they do pretty much everything I can imagine headphones doing.

I’m listening to Beethoven’s Third Symphony, Fourth Movement at the moment and the sound is phenomenal in its range and subtlety. The sound reproduction is what I would call “neutral” without the amped up bass so common with ‘phones aimed at the younger hip-hop crowd. These are headphones for grownups.

And I am a grownup.

The controls on the right earpad are highly intuitive and it took me no time at all to navigate them with ease.

I’ve been a headphone junkie ever since my first encounter with a pair at a listening post in a Lafayette, Ind. music store around 1958. The ability to hear the music with proper dynamics and spatial imaging blew me away like no experience with speakers ever could.

And the Bang & Olufsen H8s are the best I’ve ever heard. They are showing me things in my music I never knew were there.

Bang & Olufsen is a Danish company known for high quality audio products with distinctive design features. So far as I know, this is their first Bluetooth headphone offering and it sounds like they got it very very right.

Impatience

Once in awhile, the Amazon Vine Program gives me an opportunity to review some really cool products.

This is one of those times, but I’m not going to say what it is other than to say I am extremely excited to get my hands on it.

The UPS Surepost tracking site says it arrived at the Jonesboro UPS facility about 3:30 a.m. today, but it wasn’t scheduled for delivery until tomorrow.

I called UPS in the hopes of driving down to their customer center on Industrial Drive and picking it up myself, but that was not to be.

Under the Smartpost scheme, packages are turned over to the U.S. Postal Service for final delivery. In this case, it means they gave it to the Jonesboro post office for delivery tomorrow to the Brookland post office.

So I have to wait until tomorrow.

I’m not good at waiting.

Deer Jack

I still haven’t decided where to hang the $10 eight-point buck head I bought over the weekend, so it sits in our black leather recliner, surveying the living room with its dusty glass eyes.

Jack and Dora ignored it for a couple of days, then last night Jack suddenly became fixated on it with what appeared to be a mixture of fascination and fear.

Aussies notice changes in their environment and are wary of new things, so this didn’t really surprise us.

59 years ago

Here I am with 30 other members of the Delphi High School Class of 1963 as sixth-graders.

Our teacher was Kenneth Bell, a U.S. Navy veteran of World War II who regaled us with a story of an anaconda wrapping itself around a mast on a vessel he was aboard traveling on a river in Brazil. He also taught us to count to ten in Portuguese.

I recognize most of the faces, but have no idea who the blonde on my right was. The guy on my left was Harold somethingorother. I think most of these folks are still alive, although the fourth girl in the second row – Marcia Hunt Matlock – died Dec. 26.

Workplace violence

Sometime in the late 1970s, when I was still working in The Indianapolis News City Room, I strolled over to the photo studio, which was down the hall and a half-flight of stairs down, and came face-to-face with a guy in a Darth Vader costume.

I have no idea who was under that helmet, but one of the staff photographers was quick to record the moment.

You never knew what was going to happen next at the newspaper in those days.

Deer John…

I’ve wanted a stuffed deer head for a long time. But not enough to go out and murder a deer.

I have no idea what the attraction is. Maybe it started when I provided a temporary home for an enormous moose head for a coworker who was moving into smaller quarters. He reclaimed it a couple of years later, but I really liked seeing it on my wall.

Fast forward to yesterday afternoon when we were driving home from visiting friends. Maria spotted a sheet of plywood sign announcing “Basement Sale” in front of the Pine Log Road house that had been the home of neighbor David Head’s mother.

We turned around and went back, finding David and his brother with a trailer full of trash. They were clearing out their mother’s house, some two years after her passing, and put the sign up about an hour earlier as an afterthought.

They took us on a tour of the house and offered us generous deals on a few items we (mostly Maria) fancied. I got the deer head for $10. She got an antique Japanese-made sewing machine for her collection for $25.

Now I have to figure out where to display my new trophy buck.

Is this why penicillin and tetracycline drugs give me hives?

University of Alberta researchers find cause of allergic reactions to medications

He got his mother’s eyes

Pete, our first Aussie who died shortly after his seventh birthday, had beautiful, expressive brown eyes that helped make his innate sweetness all the more endearing.

I was reviewing images stored on a solid state hard drive and found the photos we shot the day we visited the farm east of Crawfordsville where Pete and his littermates awaited adoption in November, 2005.

Pete’s dad was a miniature Aussie and his mom was a full-size Aussie. We had a few photos of his mother and it immediately became obvious where he got his soulful eyes.

Here’s Pete’s mom:

Me and Jeff

The caches of old photos keep turning up and continue to yield surprising images and memories.

Like this one of me and my pal Jeff Clayton around 1949 or 1950.

Jeff’s father, Bernard Clayton, grew up in Zionsville where his father owned The Zionsville Times. Bernard was a newspaper guy too and worked at The Indianapolis News and ran bureaus in Chicago and San Francisco Time and Life magazines. He was a military correspondent in World War II and was lucky enough to be on the USS Missouri when the Japanese signed the surrender documents in Tokyo Bay in August, 1945, and witnessed the proceedings. After the war, he settled in San Mateo, Calif. and handled public relations for Matson steamship lines, which did a booming post-war business carrying passengers to and from Hawaii.

I’m a little fuzzy on when he married Marjorie Roach, but it had to be before or during WWII. Marjorie was a daughter of Harry and Minnie Roach of Delphi, Ind., and Jeff spent a few weeks some summers at their house, which is how I came to know him. That’s the Roach house and yard in the photo. Their yard and ours were separated by a long line of peony bushes.

The last time I saw Jeff was sometime in the 1980s when he traveled from California to spend Christmas with his parents who, by that time, were living in Bloomington, Ind.

Dropping out of the corporate world in 1964, Bernard and Marjorie traveled the U.S. and Europe for a couple of years before he was recruited by Indiana University for a special project. In the course of their travels, Bernard took up cooking and wrote cookbooks, the most successful of which were “Bernard Clayton’s Complete Book of Small Breads” (1998) and “The Complete Book of Soups and Stews,” first published in 1984 and reissued in a revised edition in 2006. Bernard died in Bloomington in 2011 at the age of 94.

He is one of a handful of my acquaintances to rate an obituary in The New York Times.

I’ve lost track of Jeff. There are a lot of Jeffrey Claytons in the U.S., but I suspect he’s the one who lives in Twin Peaks, Calif.

I fell, but I got right up

I misjudged the curb at the post office where it tapers down to a wheelchair ramp Tuesday morning and found myself on the pavement.

It startled the hell out of a young guy just opening the door to the building.

I remember saying, “Shit!” as I landed on my right side, abrading two knuckles  and getting a couple of abrasions on my right leg and knee.

Fortunately, I was wearing my German Polizei leather jacket, which spared me more abrasions on my arm and shoulder.

“Thank God for leather,” I said, embarrassedly as I scrambled to my feet and regained my composure, quietly cursing my inattention.

Thinking about it later, it occurred to me that the CDC and other medical authorities have made a big deal about falls and senior citizens.

I still have trouble thinking of myself as a senior citizen, even though I’ll be 70 in July, so I figured those warnings didn’t apply to me.

Then I recalled it was a slip and fall on ice that put my dad in a downward spiral. As a consequence of the dreaded broken hip, he spent most of his remaining years in a nursing home.

Granted, he was in his 80s when he fell, but the point is worth noting.

I guess I have a couple of choices – either wear my motorcycle gear all the time or get my head out of my ass and pay attention to where I put my feet.

Tesla P85D Insane Mode Launch Reactions Compilation - Explicit Version

My son Steve and his wife Nicky bought a Tesla late last year.

The original Flora Music Man

I’ve been clearing out boxes from our garage that have been there since we move here from Indiana more than seven years ago and finding several old family photos that are worth preserving.

Yesterday’s scans included this wonderful image of my grandfather, Irvin Monroe Flora on a piano bench in the parlor of the farm house where he and his wife, Bertha LaDora Long Flora, raised nine children.

The Flora family farmed 80 acres in southern Carroll County, Indiana. Irvin Flora served as Trustee of Democrat Township and later as Carroll County Treasurer. During the 1920s, my Dad tells me, Irvin had the distinction of being the only farmer on his road who refused to join the Ku Klux Klan.

This photo dates from the late 1930s or early ‘40s and is a remarkable environmental portrait. Given the limitations of consumer-grade cameras and film of the era, it’s an real triumph of available light photography. The lighting is very nearly perfect, coming from two windows. If you couldn’t see the windows, you might think it was a studio shot, so perfect is the light on his face.

My grandfather died on June 21, 1945 at the age of 72. My Dad said he was sitting in an easy chair in the parlor when he suffered a fatal heart attack. I can’t help but wonder if it wasn’t the chair on the right of the photo.

It’s also significant that Grandpa Flora was sitting on a piano bench, because he was a natural self-taught musician who, my Dad said, could play the trumpet, cornet, baritone, violin, and flute.

The only recording I have of my father’s voice was made in the early 1980s when my son Steve had just finished playing a song on his trumpet for my parents.

“My dad was just nuts over music,” my father said. “He had stacks of music that high. He used to buy music for the Delphi Band. He was so good that a talent scout, when he was about 16 or 17 years old, wanted to take him east to some eastern band that played county fairs. My grandparents were Dunkards and wouldn't let him do it.”

Grandpa Flora would be proud of his musical descendants:

• I was in every vocal and instrumental group that existed at Delphi High School in the 1960s.
• My older son Sean is a musician, recording engineer and record producer with a studio on Sauvie Island near Portland, Ore.
• My younger son Steve is a cum laude graduate of the University of Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and is a successful bass player in Las Vegas.
• My cousin Eric was a high school music teacher.
• Eric’s son Jamie is an operatic tenor, having sung with the Metropolitan Opera Company in New York.

If there is such a thing as a musical gene, we all have this man to thank for it.

A belated birthday note

Yesterday was the 21st birthday of our 1994 BMW K75S. It was born on Jan. 27, 1994 in Berlin.

I bought it used from Revard BMW Motorcycles on Oct. 31, 2000 with 2,417 miles on the odometer and a ridiculous looking too-tall windscreen.

I bought it for Maria to ride but she never felt really comfortable on it and a car accident a few years later in which a woman with macular degeneration totaled the Buick Maria was driving undermined her confidence.

So it has fallen to me to ride it regularly and keep it in good condition, which has turned out to be a pleasure.

I’ve never toured on it, mainly because it lacks a luggage rack. The longest trip I’ve taken on it was Sept. 28, 2007, when I rode from our home in Thorntown to Jonesboro in preparation to buying a house and moving to Arkansas.

The Sargent seat isn't as nice as the BMW Comfort Seat on my K1200GT, but it wasn't awful,either.

Aside from the chilly start, the weather for the ride down was perfect. It was a warm, but not oppressive, 82 degrees when I rode down through southeastern Missouri and into Arkansas.

The bike performed flawlessly and delivered something like 44 or 45 miles/gallon. I stopped at Boomland for my final fill-up and savored the last 110 or so miles to Jonesboro.

I left the bike with Charlie and Deb Parsons, who were already storing my GT, and caught a ride home the next day with Indianapolis News compadre Skip Hess.

The bike has about 14,780 miles on the odometer as it sits in my garage this afternoon. It continues to be a joy to ride.

Here’s a video I made with it in May, 2011.

I started on a Kawasaki

My motorcycling career began in the summer of 1980 when I bought a used 1977 Kawasaki KE175 from Keystone Kawasaki in Indianapolis.

I survived somehow for a few months before Divine Providence steered me to the Motorcycle Safety Foundations beginning rider course. I can’t count the number of times the skills I learned in that class saved my life.

I put both of my sons through the course, but they weren’t really interested in riding and neither has ever owned a bike.

But shortly after Sean completed the course, probably around 1982, he and I would take the bike to some then-undeveloped land along the east bank of the White River where it flows under I-465 and ride the trails.

The trails are gone and the land, being close to the Castleton Shopping Mall, has been developed as apartments.

A dead language

I did a new scan of this image over the weekend. It’s me being a makeup editor at The Indianapolis News, standing next to the front page of the Blue Streak edition of Dec. 21, 1968 – the day the Apollo 8 mission was launched for the first orbits of the moon.

It occurred to me that much of the language of journeymen printers has been lost with the advent of electronic typography.

So here is a glossary of terms I learned working as a makeup editor at The News (that I can recall) before the paper transitioned to computers and offset printing.

Art – a picture, either a drawing of a photoengraving.

Artline – the caption for a piece of art.

Chase – a metal frame within which the type, headlines and photoengravings are assembled to create a newspaper page. The chase had bolts on two sides that made it possible to compress the type from the bottom and one side using a chase key.

Column rule – a type element typically extending from the top of a story to the bottom of the page of whatever other element is below the story that makes a vertical line separating the columns.

Dingbat – a design element such as the title of a continuing feature that was saved and used over and over from one edition to another.

Etaoin shrdlu – the sequence of letters in the first two columns of letters on a Linotype or Intertype machine keyboard. Typesetters would occasionally sweep a finger down the first and second columns to make a test line of type reading “etaoin shrdlu.”

Galley – a metal tray that typically held a newspaper story in lead type form.

Galley proof – a proof made from one individual galley to let proof readers check for typographical and other errors.

Hell box – a box into which no-longer-needed lead type is dumped before it is melted down into lead ingots for reuse in typesetting machines.

Intertype machine – a mechanical typesetting machine that created individual lines of type on lead slugs.

Line gauge – a metal ruler used by printers to measure a story or design element. Line gauges were typically 12 inches long and measured in inches, agate lines, picas and points.

Linotype machine – a mechanical typesetting machine that created individual lines of type on lead slugs.

Ludlow – a machine used to cast large type for headlines.

Mat – short for matrix, the individual brass mold for a letter or character that dropped into place to create a line of type on a Linotype or Intertype machine.

Pica – a unit of printer’s measure. There are six picas to an inch.

Point – a unit of printer’s measure, used to measure the height of a line of type or a headline. There are 72 points to an inch.

Proof press – a small printing press designed to print the contents of one galley at a time for proof readers to edit.

Squirt – a malfunction of the Ludlow machine in which a stream of molten lead is ejected.

Turtle – a metal-topped table with wheels on its four feet upon which a page is assembled. That’s what is holding the front page of The News in the photo above.

Type lice – the subject of a prank pulled on novice printers and editors. Experienced printers tell the victim that a special kind of louse lives in type and it can be flushed out by pouring water into a 1”-2”-inch gap in a column of type. When the victim leans over to peer closely into the gap, the printer thrusts the bottom of the column of type forward sharply, slamming the gap shut and squirting the water up and into the victim’s face. Hilarity ensures.

Deflated: the Statistically Impossible Patriots Fumble Record

Deflated: the Statistically Impossible Patriots Fumble Record

Happy Birthday, Nicky!

Today is my daughter-in-law Dr. Nicole Flora’s birthday.

Nicky is Chief Medical Officer at Nevada Health Co-op in Las Vegas and we are immeasurably proud of her and Steve and their daughter Lisa.

I shot this portrait when I visited them in 2013. We hope to see them soon.

Still puzzling

I’m still studying the images on Phil Kroon’s long lost roll of negatives from around 1952.

Here is a closer view of the church/cathedral that was featured in yesterday’s blogpost.

I can’t help but think it’s in France, rather than French Canada, largely because of the cars, particularly the two 1930s Citroens. I could be wrong, but I don’t think they were ever common in Canada.

I’m also intrigued to notice what appear to be two gargoyles projecting from the upper left side of the building. And the streetlight says “Europe” to me, too.

French spoken here, but where?

Rooting through a box of militaria and related stuff that once belonged to my first father-in-law this morning I found a roll of negatives that appear never to have been printed.

There are a few pictures of my ex, her parents and her two sisters, leading me to conclude the images are from around 1952. From what I can recall of her childhood, the family shots involve military housing, probably in California or Virginia.

But there are also some travel photos including this street scene where all of the business signs are in French. I was unaware that her dad traveled to France around this time, so maybe he went to Quebec. I posted this photo on Facebook, asking if anyone recognizes the street or the church/cathedral.

There are no shots of the family in the travel pictures, suggesting he went by himself.

Here are a couple of the family photos:

Clockwise from noon: Jean Kroon, Kathy, Janice and Diane.

Kathy, Phil Kroon, and Diane in front of their home on a yet-to-be-determined Army base.

True GRIT

My neighbor Tony knows I’m a World War II history buff and brought over a couple of 1939 issues of GRIT, a weekly family newspaper published in Williamsport, Pa. with a national circulation. (It’s still around, but now it’s a bi-monthly glossy magazine published in Topeka, Kans.)

The one I found most interesting was published Sept. 17, 1939 – 17 days after the Germans invaded Poland. I was mildly surprised to notice they were already calling it the Second World War.

The United States was trying to remain neutral while giving support to Great Britain and there’s a story about President Franklin Roosevelt asking Congress for modifications to the Neutrality Act.

Another headline suggests that Hitler is outclassed by French and British military commanders.

As you should know, American neutrality ended with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. The next day, Congress declared war on the Axis powers, which also included Germany and Italy.

This issue of GRIT is a fascinating snapshot of America watching the world slide into chaos, while hoping to avoid involvement.

One can’t help but wonder how things would have turned out if we had gone to war in September, 1939 instead of two years later.

When I was a kid in the 1950s, GRIT routinely ran colorful full page ads in comic books, trying to recruit kids to sell the newspaper in their neighborhoods. They had a circulation of more than 400,000 nationwide at the time, but I never saw a copy of GRIT until Tony showed up on my doorstep last night.

Awesome Beer Commercials of the World

Not watching the State of the Union speech

I can’t bear to listen to another litany of lies, distortions and straw man arguments.

Besides, my dogs get upset when I yell at the TV.

Guinness Commercial: Empty Chair

Proud to be their landlord

When we bought an office building in downtown Jonesboro a couple of years ago, it came with two tenants, one of which is the Pregnancy Resource Center.

Their mission statement says:

The Pregnancy Resource Center strives to offer hope, help, and healing to women facing an unplanned pregnancies. The Pregnancy Resource Center is not a surgical center and does not perform or refer for abortions. We also do not provide prenatal care.

Their services include:

• Pregnancy Tests
• Ultrasounds (Limited to women who have been assessed by our nurse and are not guaranteed to every client who receives a pregnancy test.
• Pregnancy and Fetal Development
• Abortion Education
• Adoption Information
• Referrals for Medical Care and Housing
• 24/7 Dad
• Earn While You Learn/Parenting Class

Maria and I are Pro Life and feel honored to provide a home for this important agency.

Not today!

This is how our road looked on Dec. 27, 2012.

It made for a pretty picture, but I like today’s weather better. The forecast high was 59° but it’s already 10° warmer than that and it’s not even 11 a.m. yet.

That makes for a perfect day to fire up the K75S and run some errands in town.

Revisiting an old story and older images

I wrote this story for The Indianapolis Star in the spring of 1997:

NOBLESVILLE, Ind. – The convergence of an old soldier's souvenirs and his granddaughter's high school photography course has opened a window in time.

Fifty-two springs ago, Ted Brost was a young sergeant in the U.S. Army's military police. He was among hundreds of thousands of Allied troops pouring into Germany to end World War II in Europe.

“I was with the 504th MP Battalion, attached to the Third Army,” recalled Brost, an 81-year-old retired farmer. “We had come up through southern France and up the Rhone Valley and into Germany

“We were right behind the infantry and the Germans were just laying their guns down and waiting for us to come through and move them back to the rear,” he said. “They were finished and ready to quit.”

Brost and his comrades relieved German prisoners of their weapons and anything else of possible military value. In the course of his duties, Brost picked up three 35mm film canisters from a German soldier.

“I don't remember exactly where I got them. I had a trunk with me and, if I picked up anything interesting, I just put it in the trunk,” said Brost, who lives in Benton County.

Brost brought his wartime souvenirs home in September, 1945. The trunk ended up in the closet of an upstairs bedroom of his farmhouse near Boswell. The three film canisters languished there, all but forgotten, nearly half a century.

Recently, Brost said, his wife found the canisters, suspected they might contain salvageable pictures and gave them to their granddaughter, Melodie Brost.

Melodie, 16, a sophomore at Noblesville High School, took the canisters to her photography teacher Craig Ryan and they examined the find.

Each canister held a roll of exposed, undeveloped film. Instead of being wound into the kind of 35mm film cassettes familiar to today's photographers, the film was tightly coiled inside the canisters, protected only by the screw-on caps.

Since color photography was in its infancy in the early 1940s, Ryan assumed they were dealing with black-and-white film. He and Brost went into the darkroom and tore off a short strip from one roll for testing purposes and processed it as if it were a medium-speed modern black-and-white film.

“We developed it just to see if the contrast would be okay and it turned out to be great,” Melodie said.

When they pulled the film from the fixer solution they found crisp, well-defined images. Encouraged, they developed the rest of the film with the same chemistry.

Examining the images with a magnifier on a light table, Melodie and Ryan marveled at how well the film held up over a half-century.

“In all their literature, Kodak says to process film within 24 hours, if you can, so it's really amazing to see images this good after so many years,” Ryan said.

Donald “Chip” Maury, director of photography at The Star and The News,was also impressed.

“This is very very unusual,” he said. “What often happens is that film is left there for years, exposed to extreme heat and humidity. In this condition, the film is literally being abused and it causes the latent image to sometimes become fogged or fade off into never-never land. It's kind of a guessing game as to what you're going to get when you process it.”

The film, it turned out, is a photographic record of a young recruit's training in the Waffen-SS.

The SS, short for Schutzstaffel, was created by Adolf Hitler in the 1920s as an elite unit formed around a nucleus of personal bodyguards. Under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler, the SS grew in numbers and influence, taking on police and security duties in the Nazi state and developing a military branch – the Waffen (armed) SS.

The young men in Melodie Brost's pictures were still in their teens, not much older than Melodie. Most, if not all, were the products of years of Nazi indoctrination, beginning as children in the Hitler Youth and continuing with duty in the Reich Labor Service.

Now they were eager, fresh-faced recruits in the SS, training in the summer sunshine. They wore the silver SS lightning bolt runes on their right collar tabs and the characteristic silver SS eagle on the left sleeves of their field-gray wool tunics.

The pictures show a variety of training exercises – stripping and cleaning a machine gun, crossing a river, building a log-and-earth pillbox, operating a field radio and standing sentry duty.

There are scenes of columns of troopers, Mauser rifles on their shoulders, marching across a railroad crossing and down a city street.

The unknown photographer also caught lighter moments. About 40 young enlisted men squint into the slanting rays of what is probably a late afternoon sun, mouths open in song and accompanied by comrades on accordion and washtub bass. Eight recruits pose at the door of a railroad boxcar and a tow-headed blond private beams at the camera, flashing a row of stained teeth.

There are pictures of off-duty SS troopers enjoying themselves in town, posing on the street or crowded happily into a horse-drawn carriage. A few frames show civilians – possibly parents or other relatives.

There are also unexpected images, like pictures of a woolly Bactrian camel, and two shots of a smiling Gypsy woman at the reins of a horse-drawn wagon – an incongruous image, considering that the Nazis targeted Europe's Gypies for extermination along with the Jews.

The pictures are of happy, confident young men, pleased to be in each other's company and oblivious to the horrors of war that lay ahead.

As Hitler's elite, the SS fought with fanatical bravery. But they also handled the most repugnant assignments and were charged with most of the atrocities committed in the name of the Third Reich.

The SS manned the extermination camps of Hitler's “Final Solution.” They methodically rounded up and murdered Jews as German forces pushed into the Soviet Union. It was an SS unit that massacred more than 70 American prisoners at Malmedy during the Battle of the Bulge.

“It's so interesting to think that here, he's having this happy time and then they had this huge war,” Melodie said of the unknown photographer. “They're practicing doing all these things that are kind of fun and they don't look like they realize the seriousness of it all. You wonder what happened right after these pictures were taken.”

The film also includes well-composed pictures of cathedrals, city vistas and pastoral scenes.

“He had a very good eye,” said Ryan. “He really knew how to frame and compose a picture.'”

The unknown photographer might be pleased to know his pictures are being appreciated by a new generation. Melodie mounted several prints made from the negatives and won a merit award with them in a recent art show at school.

Language arts students in Noblesville Intermediate School, studying the Nazi Holocaust, made a field trip to the high school to see the pictures and talk with Melodie and Ryan.

Melodie said she plans to create a photo album of pictures from the long-forgotten film to present to her grandfather.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

AND SOME DEDUCTIONS

The pictures Melodie Brost rescued raise several questions.

When and where were they made? Who was the photographer? Did he survive the war? Is he still living?

Some of these questions may never be answered, but a few answers have surfaced and much can be deduced from careful examination of the images.

One SS private turns up repeatedly in the photographs– a dark-haired young man of medium build. While most of the pictures on the three rolls of film are artfully framed and in sharp focus, several of the pictures including this young man lack those qualities. It's the kind of pictures you'd expect if you handed your camera to someone unfamiliar with it and asked them to take a picture of you.

One such example is a series of pictures of a family group – possibly the unknown photographer and his parents, grandmother and brother – taken in front of a house.

A group shot, including the man believed to own the camera, is out of focus and off-center. The next frame, however, is razor sharp and shows the same group, minus the man suspected to be the photographer.

In an effort to seek help, some pictures of the suspected photographer and seven urban scenes were posted on an Internet home page. Next, electronic mail messages were sent to about 250 German subscribers of America Online whose user profiles identified them as journalists.

A few hours later, a reply came back from Thomas Krohn, a journalist in Mainz-Kostheim, Germany. The urban scenes, he said, were from Krakow, Poland, and he went on to identify such surviving landmarks at the Cloth Hall in the center of town, the Town Hall Tower, St. Mary's Church and a tower in the medieval wall, where “today, there is a McDonald's next to it.”

The presence of Waffen-SS troops in Krakow would indicate the pictures were taken sometime after the Sept. 1, 1939, German invasion of Poland. The city in southeastern Poland also became the site of a Waffen-SS training camp.

The Germans made Krakow an administrative center and built the infamous Auschwitz death camp 37 miles west of Krakow.

You might conclude these young SS recruits were destined to participate in the murder of an estimated 1.6 million Jews, Gypsies, Russian prisoners of war and others at Auschwitz.

But the troops in Melodie Brost's pictures are training for combat – learning to build bunkers, communicate with field radios and cross rivers. It was another element of the SS – the SS Totenkopfverbande – who staffed the concentration camps.

This is not to say that none of these young men could have transferred to death camp duty or could have committed atrocities. Dr. Josef Mengele, who conducted sadistic and pointless pseudo-medical experiments on Auschwitz prisoners, was a member of the Waffen-SS before he was wounded and considered unfit for combat duty.

Likewise, some Waffen-SS troops were assigned to Special Action Groups, oreinsatzgruppen, that followed combat units across Russia, rounding up and executing Jews.

Georg Keppler, former commander of the Das Reich Division of the Waffen-SS, explained after the war that Waffen-SS troops were forced into these einsatzgruppen as a result of disciplinary action.

“They are late or fall asleep on duty. They are court-martialed but are told they can escape punishment by volunteering for the Special Commandos,” he told Allied investigators. “Well, these commandos, where they are first put through special training, are murder commandos. When the young men realize what they are being asked to do and refuse to take part in mass murder, they are told the orders are given as a form of punishment. Either they can obey and take that punishment or they can be shot. In any case their career is over and done with. By such methods decent young men are turned into criminals.”

The few photos showing instructors are of sergeants and corporals with decorations that identify them as wounded combat veterans. The instructors are too young to have earned their wound badges in World War I, leading to the conclusion that they won their decorations during or after the invasion of Poland.

A likely scenario is that the unknown photographer and his comrades were being trained in the summer of 1940 in preparation for the June, 1941, invasion of Russia.

If so, he or a friend carried the undeveloped film for five years before surrendering it to Ted Brost at war's end.

If you know who any of the people in the photos are and what became of them, please contact me here.

Frank Widner’s Indianapolis Times photos

The late Frank Widner was an assistant managing editor at The Indianapolis Times, one of the three great daily newspapers in Indianapolis's modern history.

He left a personal archive of photos that included shots of his coworkers in the newsroom and in the composing room. They date from the early 1960s, shortly before The Times folded in October, 1965, and just a few years before I started my career at The Indianapolis News in early 1967.

Several refugees from The Times - reporters and printers - were hired by The News and I worked with several of the guys in his photos. Widner was hired by The Indianapolis Star five days after The Times went under and became that paper’s news editor and night assistant managing editor.

The photo I'm posting here includes Carl Henn, who went on to a career in public relations. Always a dapper dresser, Carl is the guy in glasses and a vest. Carl's daughter, Merry Henn, is a Facebook friend and a good Broad Ripple High School friend of my son Sean Flora.

Frank Widner's son Jim Widner has posted much of his dad's archive on his Flickr account: https://www.flickr.com/phot…/mytownindy/…/72157634403304806/

It’s a wonderful look at how we used to do newspapers with typewriters, paste pots, Linotype machines and lots of brilliant, quirky people.

Sean Flora’s Rock & Roll Bed & Breakfast

The web site has gone live and it’s IMPRESSIVE!

If you know anyone who’s looking for a producer and a studio, check out: http://www.rocknrollbnb.com/

Tale a few minutes to explore the site, listen to the music, watch the videos. I’ve watched Sean work with musicians and he can take them to levels they never knew existed.

He is truly an audio genius.

Happy Birthday, GT

My 2003 BMW K1200GT was born/built in Berlin on this date 12 years ago.

The photo was shot at 11:03 a.m., Feb. 22, 2003 at Revard BMW Motorcycles in Indianapolis the first time I sat on the bike and wondered if it could be a worth successor to the 1991 K100RS that carried me more than 160,000 miles.

It was.

I took delivery of the GT with 15 miles on the odometer at 10:04 a.m. on March 8, 2003. There were several inches of snow on the ground, but the roads were clear and I don’t remember being particularly cold on the ride home to Thorntown.

Since then, I’ve ridden it to nine BMW MOA rallies:

• 2014 - Minneapolis, MN
• 2012 - Sedalia, MO
• 2010 - Redmond, OR
• 2009 - Johnson City, TN
• 2008 - Gillette, WY
• 2006 - Essex Junction, VT
• 2005 - Lima, OH
• 2004 - Spokane, WA
• 2003 - Charleston, WV

It carried me to Daytona Beach Bike Week in 2010 and 2013, down the Pacific Coast Highway a couple of times, to Las Vegas and Portland to visit my sons, a few times to visit friends in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, and back to Indianapolis three times for MotoGP.

All this riding and more add up to 72,588 miles on the odometer as it sits in my garage this afternoon.

The GT, for those who care about such things, was the K1200RS with color-matched saddlebags and amenities like an electric-powered windscreen, electronic cruise control, and heated seat and handgrips. The model was introduced in 2003 and I had the first one sold by Revard’s.

I added MotoLight caliper-mounted halogen driving lights after a year or so and upgraded them with LED bulbs in 2012. I also added a removable passenger backrest at Maria’s request in 2003, but haven’t used it in years because she’s not keen to ride these days. The Marsee tank bag purchased when I bought the bike finally started falling apart a couple of years ago and I replaced it with a Nelson-Rigg bag with a solar panel in October, 2012.

I also had a Gerbings power cord connected directly to the battery in 2013 after I discovered the accessory circuit didn’t want to run my heated gear and my Garmin Zumo 550 GPS at the same time. That discovery meant I rode to Daytona and back without electric heat, other than seat and grips.

I added a Pirates Lair sidestand footpad in 2003, but it fell/sheared off a few years ago at a Return to Shiloh Rally and I never got around to putting it back on.

Maria bought me an XM Roady satellite radio setup for my birthday in 2004. I used it and later a Roady II until March, 2010 when I bought a used Garmin Zumo 550 GPS with XM radio receiver from BMW friend Charlie Parsons. It was the elegant GPS/XM solution I’d wanted for a long time and satisfied my need to more gadgetry.

So, after a dozen years and a bunch of tweaks, I have the bike set up to suit me. (Oh, I forgot to mention I bought a pair of oversized saddlebags from Revard’s sometime around 2005, which come in handy for long-haul touring.)

I look over the new models whenever I visit a BMW dealership, but other than the high tech safety electronic features like traction control, I don’t see anything that makes me want a new bike.

Another thing to worry about

A guy I used to ride with a lot had what I thought a somewhat quirky practice of always paying with cash whenever he refueled his motorcycle.

I think we were on the western edge of Kansas City one afternoon when I finally asked why he didn’t just take advantage of the convenience of paying at the pump with a credit card.

“I don’t like the idea of anyone being able to tell where I am or where I’ve been,” he explained.

That exchange came flooding back to me about 3 a.m. the other day when I awoke with the realization that virtually everything we know, think, do, or say is knowable by an electronic trail that, in the wrong hands, could be used against us.

Think about it.

Our movements away from home are trackable by our cell phones, credit/debit card transactions, even increasingly by security cameras with facial recognition software.

Somewhere there is a charge/debit card record of everything I have bought going back decades.

People unwittingly cooperate with this accumulation of personal information when they make a smart phone – the most intimate portal – their constant companion. It has already been discovered that the art of hacking has reached such a sophisticated level that the microphone and camera on your cell phone and computers can be turned on remotely without you ever knowing it.

And don’t imagine that everything you post or forward on Facebook isn’t recorded somewhere, no matter what your “privacy” settings.

Knowing that our government has built a huge data center in Utah for the collection of whatever information it wants makes this even more disconcerting.

Consider that there is a record somewhere of:

• Every penny you earn and spend.
• Every car you buy or sell.
• Every email and text message and phone conversation you have.
• All of your medical and dental records.
• Everything you have ever looked at on the Internet and all of your searches.

So the question becomes, “Am I paranoid enough?”