Words from a friend, now long gone

I was cleaning out my email this week and found this - the last email I received from Mouseketeer Doreen Tracey on June 16, 2005, responding to my happy birthday message a couple of months earlier:

Dear John,

Thank you for remembering. I kind of skip over the birthdays the past few years. As well as not going into my in-box to check emails. Too much work. Anyway, things are fine here in my world. Hope all is going well with your family. Will bring you up to speed, once I open my all my emails which is now over a thousand +. Always doreen

Doreen died of pneumonia as a consequence of cancer two years ago this month.

Happy birthday K1200GT, still running like new

My 2003 BMW K1200GT was born/built in Berlin on this date 17 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 10 BMW MOA rallies:

2015 - Billings, MT
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 79,790 miles on the odometer as it sits in my shed today.

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.

Remembering a friend

My friend Doreen Tracey died two years ago today of pneumonia, ending a two-year battle with cancer.

We hadn't spoken for a couple of years and I was about to email her when I did a Google search today and learned of her passing.

For those of us lucky enough to have memories of the 1950s, the name “Doreen” has a special significance. Doreen Isabell Tracey was an original cast member of the Mickey Mouse Club.

Doreen spent her entire life in the entertainment industry.

She was born April 13, 1943 to Sid and Bessie Tracey. The Traceys were vaudevillians entertaining the troops in England and Doreen was born in London.

The family returned to the States when she was four and moved to Hollywood, where Sid and vaudeville friend Ben Blue opened a place called Slappy Maxie on Wilshire Boulevard.

In a move that would shape his young daughter's life, Sid also opened the Rainbow Dance Studio.

Growing up as a normal American little girl, Doreen had the advantage of an extended show business “family.” Her “Uncle Ben” Blue was a prominent fixture in her life and she lived with him for a time when her mother was hospitalized with tuberculosis and her father struggled to keep his business afloat. Jimmy Durante seized upon her childhood name of “Do-Do” and delighted in embarrassing her by announcing, “Look who's here – it's Sid's little DoDo bird!”

She was an only child, and her best buddy was her cat, Sylvester.

Doreen was answering the phone at the Rainbow Studios that fateful day when the call came from Lee Travers at Walt Disney Studios in early 1955 announcing the search for talented kids for the pilot of the Mickey Mouse Club.
She sang “Cross Over the Bridge” in a Little Bo-Peep costume for the initial audition in March.

As one of the original Mouseketeers, Doreen remained with the show through its entire run.

After the Mickey Mouse Club ended, Doreen went to John Burroughs High School in Burbank where she fell in love with Robert Washburn. The two eloped to Tijuana and, a short time later, Doreen found herself pregnant with a son, Bradley Allen Washburn. The marriage was short-lived and Doreen soon became a single mother.

During the 1960s, she performed with the Andressi Brothers in Las Vegas and elsewhere and appeared on episodes of My Three Sons, Donna Reed and Day in Court.

She also toured Alaska and Vietnam with the USO. Her recollections of Vietnam landed her a job as a consultant on the film "Apocalypse Now!" where she contributed elements of the surfing-under-fire sequence.

Doreen fell out of grace with Walt Disney Studios in the mid-1970s when she did two nude photo layouts for Gallery magazine.

That's when I first made her acquaintance. About the same time as the first Gallery layout, writer Jerry Bowles published a where-are-they-now book about the Mouseketeers called Forever Hold Your Banner High. A press kit turned up on my desk at The Indianapolis News one day with a mail-back postcard to request phone interviews with Doreen and/or Jerry Bowles. I checked both boxes and, about a week later, found myself chatting with Doreen. We hit it off and have kept in touch ever since.

Since the Gallery flap, Doreen and the studios have been reconciled.

Doreen lived in Simi Valley with her son.

In an email exchange in April, 2013, she related that this has been a particularly stressful period with the passing of fellow Mouseketeer Annette Funicello, friend Jonathan Winters and ballerina Maria Tallchief.

“She practiced with the Ballet Russ de Monte Carlo company, as Mr. Balanchine gave instructions to his troupe. He never spoken above a whisper to his beautiful swans. The rehearsals were at Sid's dance studio. I watched in wonder at her dedication. Although, I never achieved the perfection of Ms. Tallchief, she did inspire this lonely little girl to become a good enough dancer to get by.”

Working hard for egg nog

I had a hankering for some Dean's Egg Nog, the brand I've loved since childhood, and I knew they stocked it at the local Dollar General store.

But when I headed for the car, I thrust my hand into my left front pants pocked and discovered my keys weren't there. A quick review told me they were almost certainly locked in the shed, where I had stashed some items that were taking up space in the kitchen.

But the only key to the padlock on the shed doors is on my keyring and almost all of the tools I need to break into the shed were, likewise, locked inside the shed.

I finally decided the only solution was to take the hinges off of one of the doors, but of course, my impact driver reamed out the grooves on a couple of the 14-year-old hinge screws. I finally was able to back it out with channel locks and, voila, there were my keys on the Craftsman multi-drawer tool chest.

With Maria's help, I screwed the hinges back into place and, hoping that Dollar General still had some Dean's Egg Nog, I headed downtown.

My luck was in and I scored the last two quarts in the cooler.

Makes me happy

It makes me happy to have my collection of cowboy china on display again. We packed it away in the summer of 2017 when we prepared to move home to Indiana after a decade in Arkansas.

It remained in boxes and the china cabinet stayed in our storage unit until this week.

Maria repainted the interior of the cabinet and I installed three puck lights to illuminate the top shelf. I'm missing a bunch of saucers, but I'm confident they're in a box somewhere in the house.

I first encountered Wallace china with the cattle brands around the rim in restaurants in Wyoming when my parents took me to Yellowstone National Park in the summer of 1956 and got serious about collecting the genre when I found some on Ebay.

Maria was on vacation this week and we spent the last seven days on projects to bring our house back to full functionality after renters abused it for nine years. The upstairs was a mess - they let their dogs use the carpet for a toilet and the carpet was full of fleas.

We set up our king size bed in the dining room and put the dining room table in the living room while we struggled to set things right. With Austin's help, we moved the bed upstairs to a properly appointed bedroom last Sunday. Maria undertook the Herculean task of pulling the carpet staples out of two stairways on Monday and we moved the dining room table to the dining room and unfurled a new rug in the living room. Later in the week, I hitched up the trailer and we brought the china cabinet and a dresser home from storage and retrieved the buffet as well, along with the table linens I inherited from my mother.

Pete - seven years gone

We said goodbye to our beloved Pete, our first Aussie, seven years ago today.

Pete was the victim of faulty DNA, specifically a hereditary liver problem. His liver failed and his abdomen filled with fluid, putting pressure on all of his internal organs.

He died just a few days after his seventh birthday - much too young. He was a sweet sensitive boy and we loved him dearly.

Come on, winter

I've kinda gone nuts over Duluth Trading Co. clothing, especially after my stepson Austin Dunbar (whose birthday is today) showed up in a pair of fire hose pants his employer gave him.

In the past couple of weeks, I've bought two pairs of fire hose pants. And yesterday I bought a pair of fleece-lined fire hose pants and this ultra-cool infantry-style sweater.

Bring it on, winter. I'm ready.

Happy 49th, Steve

It's hard to believe my son Steve is 49 years old today.

As far as I'm concerned, this is not Halloween, it's Steve Flora Day.

Fire Hose Pants

My son Austin, who has a job as a garage door installer, was here over the weekend sporting a pair of Duluth Trading Co. Fire Hose Pants.

His employer outfitted all of his crew with a pair and I was very very impressed.

So I drove over to the Duluth Trading Co. store on the far eastside of Noblesville this morning and found a pair to my liking that are a perfect fit. This is made even more exciting by the fact that, instead of my usual 40x28 size that I've worn for more than 20 years, I can fit into 38x28.

Thank you very much Trulicity - a once-weekly injectable drug that my doctor prescribed for diabetes that also suppresses appetite.

The pants fit perfectly, feel great and look pretty good.

Remembering Mom

My mother, Eileen I. Flora, left us on this date in 2000. Here she is in my Honda del Sol, out for a jaunt with the top off. I think she kinda liked it.

Somebody got some firewood today

We awoke Monday morning to find this 15-foot-long, 9-inch-wide limb had fallen off of the maple tree at the end of our driveway.

I offered it for free on the local garage sale Facebook page to anyone who wants it and it disappeared this morning.

Winners, winners, chicken dinners!

The Floras did pretty well at the Hoosier State Press Association's Better Newspaper Contest last Saturday.

Maria, The Lebanon Reporter’s assistant editor, earned first place for best news coverage under deadline pressure in both divisions, with “Warmoth removed” in Lebanon and “Family sues man charged in son’s death” in Zionsville.

Working as a freelance correspondent, I won a first place for best portrait with “Double Portrait” and a third for best multiple picture group for “Dog day at the Christmas tree farm,” both for the Lebanon paper.

Here's the portrait:

40 years ago today

Forty years ago today, I got my first taste of real disaster reporting.

At 3:29 p.m. Sept. 9, 1969, a student pilot from Indianapolis named Bob Carey, flying a Piper Cherokee, collided with Allegheny Airlines flight 853 southwest of Indianapolis. Carey and the 82 passengers and crew aboard the DC-9 jet airliner died in the resulting crash.

The jetliner came down in a soybean field about 100 yards north of the Shady Acres mobile home park near London, in Shelby County just as a school bus was unloading children. Even though debris peppered the mobile homes and some aircraft parts punched holes in trailer sides, no one on the ground was hurt.

I was a couple of years into my career at The Indianapolis News at the time. I got a call at home almost immediately and was at the crash site within an hour of the impact.

The authorities were slow to control the crash scene, making it possible for me and several other reporters and photographers to roam at will, including through the soybean field which was drenched with kerosene jet fuel.
The sight was grisly beyond imagining. The plane disintegrated upon impact and the force of those thousands of pieces of metal shredded everything it their path. I walked that field for at least a couple of hours. The sun set at 7:04 p.m. and I finally left the field when it became too dark to see where I was stepping.

In all that time, I didn’t see a single intact body – just scores of arms, legs, feet still in shoes, hands, the back of a man’s head, the contents of luggage and hundreds of dollars in cash. I touched nothing. Neither did any of my colleagues.

As I drove to the scene, I’d wondered how I would react to the carnage I was sure to encounter. Would I be overwhelmed? Would it get queasy, or worse?

As it turned out, I felt a cautious kind of detachment. Looking at those body parts, I couldn’t conceive of them ever having been part of living, breathing human beings. It was as if someone had strewn a truckload of plastic body parts through the bean field.

It was estimated that 12 seconds elapsed between the collision and the jetliner’s impact with the ground. The passengers had a full 12 seconds to notice the jolt of the collision, the rolling of their plane to the left into an inverted attitude and the plunge to earth. That’s the horror that creeps me out the most.

Their deaths must have been virtually painless.

I think about the crash and that soybean field every September and every time I fly.

I’ll think about it in a couple of weeks when I fly to Portland for my son’s wedding and realize that I’ve seen something none of my fellow passengers will never see – what happens when an aluminum tube full of people falls out of the sky.

Dan McGlaun, a private pilot, has an online analysis of the crash and its circumstances, including several of my photos. It’s at http://www.mcglaun.com/1969.htm
Going strictly by the statistics, flying is still safer than driving and nowhere nearly as risky as motorcycling. But I much prefer the measure of control I have on my bike to the helpless feeling of being a passenger on a jetliner.

Mystery solved

I've had this certificate for several years and always supposed my grandfather Irvin M. Flora was appointed Carroll County Treasurer to fill a vacancy through death or resignation.

Turns out he was elected in November, 1928 and this is a document signed by Gov. Ed Jackson certifying the results of the election. Thanks to Carroll County Historian Mark Alan Smith for tracking down the details for me.

Grandpa Flora died in June, 1945 at the age of 72. He died about a month before I was born, so I never knew him.

Never again. Maybe.

Maria and I spent last Saturday photographing the wedding of one of her brother's older daughters up in north central Indiana.

We started about 9 a.m. and shot about 1,800 images by the time we quit at 4 p.m. We were in action almost constantly except for about a 15-minute lunch break. We did it for free as a wedding gift to the couple. Maria is also finishing up a quilt for them.

The church and reception hall were very dark. We refuse to use flash during the ceremony, so it was a bit of a challenge getting sharp, properly exposed images. I ended up having to correct the color balance in most of the ceremony photos.

We've both out of practice and a bit out of shape, so we were pretty worn out by the time we finished the reception. (See photo)

And we both agree that this is the last wedding we're going to shoot. I thought I was done after we shot the wedding of a neighbor's son in Arkansas about 5 years ago, but I was wrong.

I have a sneaking feeling Maria will commit us to photographing the wedding of the girl's twin sister.

My memory card reader malfunctioned a day after I successfully downloaded my Compact Flash card's 850 wedding images. I lost some photos I shot for a newspaper story, but was able to re-shoot a couple of days later. It would have been a major disaster to lose those wedding photos.

Not worried

I planted morning glories all along the fence in late May expecting them to form a privacy screen.About 1 seed in 5 sprouted and I saw the first two blooms yesterday morning. I posted a picture and explanation on Facebook and got a flurry of comments from horrified friends who warned that morning glories grow and spread like crazy and are very hard to get rid of.

We had morning glories on our fence in Arkansas and they seemed pretty well behaved, so I'm not worried.

Remembering L.T. Browm

Larry "L.T.” Brown was a copy editor at The Indianapolis News who created and wrote The Bar Beat column in the late 1970s.

L.T. was a world class eccentric and, like most good copy editors, was a storehouse of obscure and arcane knowledge and talents.

Always friendly and helpful, he made every reporter look a little better through his careful editing.

His hobby was raising exotic chickens and he was a regular competitor in Indiana State Fair poultry shows.

Back when Roselyn Bakeries was having problems meeting health department standards, he kept a rubber rat in a Roselyn bag on his desk.

Since Brown is a common name, he distinguished himself in the Indianapolis telephone directory by having his home phone listed as "Xanavana Brown."

I seem to recall that he was a Vietnam veteran. He died of a heart attack at a convenience store on a Memorial Day holiday weekend in the late 1990s.

One more reminder of the renters gone. Good riddance!

When we moved back into our Thorntown house in August, 2017, I was annoyed to see that the renters had left this satellite TV dish attached to the south side of the house.

It was particularly annoying because we tried a year of satellite TV back in the early 2000s and dropped it when the introductory rate expired, mainly because the signal always crapped out in heavy weather. I used my dad's old wooden extension ladder to unbolt that dish from the house and put the dish out for the trash guys.

I would have done the same when we found the new dish attached, but my dad's ladder - which we left in the utility shed - was nowhere to be found. Thanks again, renters.

But thanks to my son Steve's generosity, I now find myself with a cool collapsible aluminum ladder that is plenty tall enough to reach the dish mounting. So I undid the three 13 mm bolts yesterday afternoon and, voila, the dish tumbled to the ground. Here it is, ready to be hauled away tomorrow morning when the trash guys come.

Thank you Steve and Austin!

The green mossy crud on the north side of our house has been a constant source of embarrassment for me ever since we moved back to Indiana two years ago.

I rented a pressure washer and cleaned it off a few weeks before we moved to Arkansas in 2007, but it came back with a vengeance over the next 12 years.

I acquired a pressure washer in Arkansas, but found the renters somehow made my dad's big wooden extension ladder disappear during their ruinous time in our house.

So when Steve gave me a $150 Amazon.com gift certificate for my birthday, I ordered this nifty ladder. (Turns out Steve has one just like it.)

My stepson Austin consented to pressure wash the side of the house for a reasonable fee and accomplished a cosmetic miracle in 90-degree heat this afternoon.

Now I don't have to cringe when I come home and see the side of the house.

There is still much to be done, but it's a good start.

Steve and friends

Here's my son Steve (on the right with his bass) and friends at Microsoft's 2019 "Inspire" conference at the Four Seasons Hotel Las Vegas on July 19.

Two observations: Steve is looking very fit and trim and it looks like thin neckties are back. I haven't had occasion to wear a tie for years, so I've been out of the loop for that part of men's fashions. They were thin when I was in high school and college, then widened substantially over the next couple of decades. I wish shawl collar sweaters would make a comeback.