The wedge guy

I don’t remember his name, but his daughter Jackie worked at The Indianapolis News and was married to Mike Davis, also a Newsie.

He ran a business in Centerville, Ind., just west of Richmond, that made wood wedges – the kind that get pounded into the business end of hammer, hatchet and axe handles to keep the metal parts from falling off.

I did a story about him and his business for The News sometime in the 1970s and shot these photos. I should have had the worker take off his hat so we could see his face in the photo.

The company had been in business for several years because I found a classified ad for it in a 1954 issue of Popular Mechanics online.

I figured it was time to blog these photos after I noticed I have a recurring visitor from Centerville. So far as I know, this guy and his daughter are the only people I’ve ever met from Centerville.

(BTW, it’s hard to beat daylight through a window for shooting environmental portraits.)

Happy 13th Anniversary to us!

Maria and I were wed 13 years ago this afternoon by Boone County Clerk Lisa Garoffolo in the rotunda of the Boone County Courthouse in Lebanon, Ind.

It was only fitting, since Maria has a passion (and I used that word rarely and only when I think it’s appropriate) for quilting, that we were married beneath the Boone County Bicentennial Quilt that hangs above the rotunda.

She is the loveliest, wittiest, smartest, most intuitive, strongest woman I have ever known and the only woman who really gets me. She can ride motorcycles, shoot guns, yank rattlesnakes (baby ones, that is) by the tail, write prizewinning stories and editorials, shoot prizewinning photos, manage a newsroom full of eccentric journalists or a classroom full of ADHD sixth-graders, survive years of misogynistic abuse from men not fit to run a newspaper, and still charm me with my mother’s recipes for ham loaf and pumpkin pie.

She impresses me anew every. Single. Day. And I think she kinda likes me too.

Better late than never

Here’s the Mother’s Day photo I couldn’t find on Sunday.

Easter Sunday, 1947.

Tempus fugit

This is one of three photos I posted this morning on a Lafayette, Ind. nostalgia page on Facebook recording tornado damage to a couple of gas stations on North River Road on April 27, 1994.

Although it seems like last month, I was mildly shocked to realize that was 20 years ago.

That realization of the passage of time has been my constant companion the last few weeks as I root through my photo archives, looking for negatives and slides that might be of interest to one or more of the Facebook groups where I post my finds.

Twenty years! And many of the images I’ve scanned recently go back nearly 50 years. How the hell did I get to be so old and why don’t I feel old?

Having nearly 69 years of experiences in my database goes a long way toward explaining why I have a little trouble relating to the problems and concerns of 20-somethings. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt, wore out the t-shirt and threw it away.

Accidental brilliance

This shot of women on a downtown Indianapolis street after a summer rain shower has an accidental brilliance to it that eluded me when I shot it back in 1967.

It might be a stretch to compare it to something by Henri Cartier-Bresson, but that’s the kind of feeling it evokes for me.

I was relatively new to 35mm photography in the mid- and late-‘60s and frequently felt compelled to just point my camera at something – anything – and press the shutter button. When I looked at the negatives later, I never bothered to print these pictures because they were spur of the moment things that had no meaning for me.

Now they do.

There are scores of them, scattered among rolls of film of my wife, my kids, my dog, things that meant something to me at the time.

Now, nearly 50 years later, these are the gems I’m mining my archives to find and my heart does a little dance every time I peer through my Mamiya loupe on the light box and find one.

Maybe I made so many of those seemingly random photos because I was a small town boy living in a big city with interesting things to see and record all around me.

They seem to be clustered around the period from 1967 to 1975 when I was shooting a lot of black-and-white film and processing most of it myself, but there are plenty of these images in the myriad boxes of color slides and envelopes of color negatives that continue up to the early 2000s before I transitioned to digital photography.

Sadly, since then, they’re not to be found.

Is it because I delete these “throwaway” shots on the spot or is it because I’m more disciplined about what I shoot? It’s ironic that I’m so much more careful about what it shoot now that I can put hundreds and hundreds of images on a single memory card, compared with my willingness to snap off a random shot here and there when my camera could only shoot 36 frames before I had to reload.

Whatever the reason, I’m glad to have them and share them with an amazingly appreciative online audience here and on Facebook. I only wish I had shot more of them.

Poser

This is about as hippie as I ever got. It was the spring of 1967. The Summer of Love was about to burst forth and those of us with our ear to the cultural ground knew it.

Two of my friends were making plans to leave Indiana for San Francisco and invited me to come along. I begged off because I had a good job with the largest evening daily newspaper in the state and was engaged to be married in a few weeks.

But that didn’t stop me from trying to dress the part. Here I am with my 1965 VW beetle in my blue denim shirt, USMC fatigue jacket and borrowed Mexican vest, standing in front of a house on Terre Haute’s northside where a couple of my fraternity brothers rented rooms.

I remember driving around Terre Haute, ripped on Romilar, when I first heard “A Day in the Life,” the last track on the just-released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. I don’t remember who was with me – probably Steve Power or Jim White – but we were stunned speechless.

It was probably the same day this photo was taken.

I’m still glad I didn’t chuck it all and go with them. Their lives were full of promise that, so far as I know, was never fulfilled. I’m pretty sure that things would have ended badly for me if I had gone.

Special significance

This is Treva Iddings, putting some of the finishing touches on the Boone County Bicentennial Quilt in June, 1976.

The quilt was the work of scores, maybe hundreds, of Boone County quilters and features a county map on one side with the outlines of each of the townships and significant township and county features.

The reverse, which is what Treva was working on here, is a patchwork of business and organization advertisements along with commemorative family patches.

Since 1976, the quilt has hung high in the rotunda of the Boone County Courthouse in Lebanon.

Treva, the widow of Lebanon attorney Wendell Iddings, died on July 31, 2007, in Rossville, Ind., at the age of 73.

Can you guess the significance of the Boone County Bicentennial Quilt to Maria and me? Check back on Thursday for the answer.

A curious twist of fate

Early in my career at The Indianapolis News, in the latter months of 1968, colleague Skip Hess and I got the idea that we could make money by photographing high school cheerleaders and selling the prints to their parents.

After all, we were serious newspaper reporter/photographers and we could give them photos of their kids they could never take. What could go wrong?

Well, among other things, it was damned dark in most high school gyms, especially the one at Zionsville where we made our first and only attempt. It was the Carmel-Zionsville game and the results were not encouraging. Almost all of my shots were crap and I don’t think Skip did much better. Consequently, we abandoned the enterprise.

Fast forward to this morning when I gathered up my negatives from that evening and started doing 6-frame batch scans with my Nikon Coolscan IV. I noticed one of the Carmel cheerleaders looked familiar. She looked a lot like my friend, former Carmel Clerk-Treasurer Susan Jones. I did the math and realized Susan, who once told me about trying out to be a Carmel High School cheerleader, would have been a senior in the winter of 1968-69. Her name at the time was Susan Wampler and damned if I didn’t have several shots with young Susan Wampler in them.

I also had several shots with Skip in them and I couldn’t help wondering if anyone thought we were more than a little bit creepy, ignoring the game and shooting photos of the cheerleaders.

Boy of Steel

You never know what you’re going to see at Sam’s Club.

Mother’s Day thoughts

This is my mother with her younger brother John Dietz, probably in 1938 or 1939 on their farm in Carroll County, Indiana.

Mom was a nursing student at Indiana University in Indianapolis. Her brother died in the autumn of 1939 of head injuries suffered in a horseback riding accident. Her mother died about the same time.

So this photo was shot a few weeks or months before a big part of her world collapsed.

But she was game and became the first person in her family to get a college education. She stayed home with me for much of my childhood while dad’s insurance agency and real estate business paid the bills.

She worked for a year or so in a hospital, then spent the rest of her working life as a nurse in a local doctor’s office.

She was a wonderful mother and I miss her every day, especially on Mother’s Day.

Saturday stuff

Morgan’s big sweet tempered bulldog Samantha has come to stay with us for a week.

Jack and Dora love Sam and wear her out with their energetic play, so she likes to find a quilt to doze on whenever she can escape the Aussies.

One of our neighbors is clearing out the home of her late mother and called Maria yesterday evening to ask if Maria would be interested in her mom’s quilting fabric stash.

Of course she is.

The neighbor came by and picked Maria up this afternoon and they returned about 90 minutes later with several boxes and bins of fabric, notions, patterns and other stuff. Maria, as you might suppose, is enormously grateful and promised to make a quilt from the materials to donate to their church’s fund raiser later this year.

Ten years in the Blogosphere

My blog will be 10 years old tomorrow and this is my 5,297th blogpost.

That works out to an average of 530 posts a year, so I can’t be accused of neglecting it.

I put a counter on it in May, 2006 and since then there have been more than 325,500 page views. I don’t know if that’s impressive or not, but there it is.

I enjoy blogging from the road, especially on long motorcycle trips.

So, in August, 2004, I bought a used Treo 300 cell phone on Ebay. You couldn’t call it a smartphone, not at least by today’s standards. It was just a tricked-out PDA (personal digital assistant) that could access the internet.

I upgraded a year later to a Treo 600 which had a rudimentary camera.

Soon after, I bought a fold-out keyboard to use with the 600, so I wouldn’t have to type with my thumbs, which can be tedious for long passages of text.

It worked OK, but it was just another thing to carry around and was a bit of a hassle to set up.

Then, in October, 2006, I moved up again, this time to the Treo 700. It had a better camera, but I was back to typing with my thumbs.

What I had always really wanted was a small laptop computer that could fit easily into my motorcycle saddlebags and withstand the bumps and jolts of motorcycle travel.

The breakthrough came in March, 2009, when I bought a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 netbook.

It came with a solid-state hard drive – no moving parts to get beaten up. Free Wifi was still a little scarce in those days, so I added a Sprint AirCard and bit the bullet on the $60 monthly connection fee.

Within a couple of years, however, free Wifi had become more prolific – McDonald’s, Panera, Barnes & Noble, Starbucks, etc. – so I sold the AirCard on Ebay and since then have relied on my ability to find Wifi when I want it.

The Mini 9 is soldiering along in its sixth year. I’ve replaced the SSD hard drive three or four times, but I’ve been smart enough to protect my data by putting everything I create onto an SD card that serves as a D drive for the netbook.

I don’t think anyone makes netbooks anymore. They were a very big deal in 2009, but the market has shifted to tablets. I like a real keyboard, so I’ll stick to my netbook as long as I can.

It will be interesting to see what technology I’m using in another 10 years.

Wishing I knew more

I rediscovered this image of my father last night when I was going through old color slides, looking for something interesting to digitize.

The date on the slide was December, 1969. Dad was born in 1910, so he was 59 on the Sunday afternoon that I shot this photo of him sitting at his kitchen table, illuminated by the soft light from the north-facing window.

I know it was a Sunday because the Sunday comics section from The Indianapolis Star is on the table in front of him. And I would have driven up from my home in Indianapolis, which almost certainly makes it an afternoon photo. I can’t identify the cased object on top of the newspaper, but it was probably some of my camera gear.

The kitchen was a new addition to the house at the time, an expansion of what had been the dining room. My parents were very proud of it with its Zinn cherry cabinets and Jenn-Air range. The house was built in the late 1940s and the original kitchen was a cramped space, which made the new addition seem doubly luxurious. The old kitchen became the new dining room.

But I digress.

Like most people, I feel like I never knew my dad well enough. Sure, I knew his habits and his preferences. He liked being warm in the winter, which explains the Pendleton wool shirt buttoned at the collar. I suspect he was also wearing long underwear under his slacks.

But dad was like most men of his generation when it came to expressing his feelings and that was reinforced by his inbred Indiana farmer stoicism.

I know I made him cry when I flunked out of college twice. But I also know that I made him proud when I succeeded at a career in journalism at the state’s largest evening newspaper, with almost daily bylines – some of them on the front page. He told me that, if he’d had his druthers, he would have been a newspaperman, so I ended up fulfilling his dream.

(Interestingly, I had wanted to be a musician, but lacked the talent. Both of my sons have succeeded beyond my wildest expectations in that field.)

Dad was almost 10 years younger in December, 1969 than I am today, but I still think he looks older than I do. Maria thinks so too, so I don’t feel so delusional about it.

There are so many things I’d like to ask him. He loved dogs and I think he would heartily approve of our two Aussies and the two dogs who preceded them. And he would be bursting with pride over his two grandsons and his great-granddaughter.

He was a modest man from a large farm family. He believed in community service, was an officer in his church, helped found the local Chamber of Commerce, and was president of the school board during the construction of the current high school.

I know a lot about him, but looking at this photo of him gazing pensively into space, I wish I understood him more deeply.

Maybe I will someday.

Capt. Kroon’s V-E Day letter

Sixty-nine years ago today, 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.
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.

No big loss

It was the spring of 1984 and my son Sean was driving our old beater of a 1971 Cadillac Sedan de Ville home from an evening musical practice at Broad Ripple High School when the car started to smoke.

He pulled in to the Standard gas station at the southeast corner of Kessler Blvd. and College Ave. The station was closed at that hour, but the gas station across the street was not and he ran there to call the fire department.

The firemen opened the hood with axes as flames destroyed the interior of the car and menaced the nearby gas pumps.

This is how it looked the morning after.

It was no great loss. I paid $800 for it at the dealer auction two years earlier and the insurance company reimbursed me $2,500, based on comparable prices in the area.

Last time I noticed, the Standard station had morphed into an animal hospital.

My morning in Memphis

I’ve visited lots of BMW motorcycle dealerships for a variety of issues and noticed there is a considerable variation in the level of amenities offered customers who are waiting for their bikes to be fixed.

The best I’ve found so far has to be BMW Motorcycles of Western Oregon in Tigard where they offer Wifi, cushy chairs, a big screen TV and even a pool table.

Grass Roots BMW Motorcycles in Cape Girardeau, Mo., is pretty good too. There are several reasonably comfortable chairs, Wifi, and a TV with lots of motorcycle DVDs and magazines.

The worst that I can recall is Sportland Motorsports, a multi-brand dealership in Champaign, Ill. where I bought a set of tires a few years ago. There was no customer waiting area and about the only place to sit was on bikes in the rambling showroom.

So by that standard, Performance Plus, another multi-brand BMW shop in Memphis, isn’t too bad. Their customer lounge is a desk at the back of the showroom. No Wifi that I could detect and no entertainment other than my iPhone. But they did offer me a free Coke or cold water. I opted for the water.

But it’s not all about amenities, is it? I didn’t want to start the riding and rally season with a dead low beam headlight bulb, so I rode down to Memphis this morning to replace it. It’s been almost four years since I replaced both bulbs at BMW Motorcycles of Western Oregon, so I figured the high beam was probably going to fail in the next year or so too and I had it replaced too.

I’d do it myself, except that I learned the hard way that headlight bulb replacement on the first generation K1200GT is a freaking nightmare because the windscreen motor takes up too much space under the front fairing.

I left home about 8:40 a.m., arrived at Performance Plus around 9:45 and rode away with two new bulbs installed before 11 a.m. The GT was back in the garage by 12:20 p.m.

That’s way better than I expected and the price was right, too. Performance Plus charged me $88 and change, compared with $116 and change at Tigard in July, 2010.

So who cares if I all they could offer me was water and a desk chair? I’m impressed with their speed and labor costs and I’ll probably be back.

The Snake Pit

This is about as racy (double-entendre intended) as this blog is ever going to get.

We took Steve and his girlfriend at the time to the Indianapolis 500 Mile Race several years ago – probably the late 1980s – and Steve and I took a stroll through the infield during a lull in the racing action.

We found ourselves in an area generally referred to as the Snake Pit where a lot of rowdy people congregated. I haven’t been to the big race since the mid-1990s, so I don’t know if the Snake Pit phenomenon still happens.

There were some guys and girls atop a van, surrounded by hundreds of gawking guys and a couple of the girls obliged them by showing off some assets.

Ahh, May is a magical month in Indianapolis.

Almost here

Carlos Santana’s new album, “Corazon,” is scheduled to be released on Tuesday.

His 1999 “Supernatural” album is one of my all-time faves and I’ve been looking forward to the new album since I discovered it was in the works last summer.

I hung out at Odds On Records in Las Vegas one night while Steve was laying down some tracks with saxophonist Rick Margitza and noticed these notebooks on the control room counter, left there the previous night when work was being done on the Santana album.

I’ve heard a couple of tracks from the new album and love them. I’ll be downloading it from Amazon.com as soon as it’s available there.

But I can’t help wondering why he didn’t schedule the release for a day earlier – on Cinco de Mayo.

Terraplane!

I was listening to a version of “The Terraplane Blues” the other day and found myself wondering what a Terraplane looked like.

The Terraplane was an economy priced car made in the mid to late 1930s by Hudson and the examples I found on Google Images blew my mind.

Remember when Chrysler introduce the retro-looking PT Cruiser in 2000? They couldn’t build them fast enough to keep up with initial demand and buyers were so eager to get one that they were paying sticker price. Over the next 10 years, Chrysler sold 1.3 million PT Cruisers.

I firmly believe that if an automaker had the vision to build a Terraplane clone with today’s electronics and advanced mechanical and safety features, the demand would be truly astonishing.

I can guarantee that I’d want one.

A splendid day and it’s not even noon yet

Dora, being excruciatingly cute, seems to get most of the photographic attention, so I decided Jack should have his portrait made this morning and, being a damn good dog, he obliged me.

This promises to be the perfect spring Saturday. It was the season opener for the ASU Farmers Market and the place was jammed with more vendors than we’ve ever seen. We went dogless because Dora has become a rowdy little girl who needs more leash training before we can take her out in public.

Nevertheless, there were plenty of dogs at the market, including a very shy rescue border collie named Sarah Palin who didn’t seem to be enjoying herself and was pretty focused on getting back to the car and going home. She did, however, let me pet her and gaze into her lovely brown eyes.

We had hoped to score some early tomatoes, but the best we could do was four tomato plants and a delicious sourbread cinnamon roll.

I determined that I don’t need an appointment to get the low beam headlight bulb changed on my K1200GT at the Memphis BMW dealership, so I plan to ride there Tuesday morning. I replaced both bulbs – high and low beam – at BMW Motorcycles of Western Oregon in Tigard, Ore. in July, 2010, so I guess it would be prudent to change out the high beam bulb while we’re at it. Then I can forget about it for another four years or so.

As you may recall, I spent several hours changing a low beam bulb on that bike in June 2006. The problem is that there is very little room for human hands inside the fairing where the bulbs go because of the space lost to the motor that raises and lowers the windscreen. Were it not for Peggy Garrison’s tiny hands, we never would have gotten it done.

I have since learned that BMW technicians ignore the standard procedure and just remove fairing sections to access the headlight components, something I don’t care to do either.