Gen. Joe Foss

Capt. Joe Foss was a Marine fighter pilot at the battle of Guadalcanal. He shot down 26 Japanese planes. Congress awarded him the Medal of Honor. Not a bad start, but he went on to many other accomplishments.

He was twice Governor of South Dakota.

He was the Commissioner of the American Football League.

He was President of the National Rifle Association.

He and his wife founded a non-profit organization to teach patriotism to children. That's one is his legacy, and it is ongoing.

It's the kind of thing that was possible for an American farm boy.

The story of Joe Foss's life is a story of human endeavor so great and so accomplished that it defies exaggeration. His has been a life of courage, independence, honesty, determination, and patriotism.
--Senator John McCain

Milkweed

Back in the United States of America, Boy Scouting was an honorable activity. Scouting was held up as something to be proud of. Scouts were called upon by the government at that time to do what were called "National Good Turns".

In 1944, one of those Good Turns was to collect milkweed fluff. Before the use of synthetic materials, life preservers were filled with a material called kapok. During the war it was impossible to get kapok in sufficient quantities for the demand, and milkweed fluff had been chose as an alternative filler material for the life jackets.

The Scouts collected enough fluff to make 2 million life jackets. They were young, but their country was at war and they wanted to do their duty. They were members of the Boy Scouts of America and they had taken an Oath.

On my honor I will do my best
To do my duty to God and my country...
--The opening phrase of the Scout Oath

Remember Who We Are

The singer's name is Krista Branch. Hat tip to Jimmy T. over at Voice From the Noise.

Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.
-- Mother Teresa

Parks & Rec Ball

Not Little League. That had tryouts and only kids who could actually play got on those teams. I didn't even know those kids. Parks & Rec Ball. They took all comers, formed teams, had a town league. There were 4 fields scattered around town, and a roster of games through the season. Dads coached, and we all played like we cared, because we did. Even those of us who were lousy at such things as hitting and fielding cared.

The teams had uniforms, names, and sponsors. Games were in the evening, after supper a couple of times a week during the summer. I would put on my uniform, sling my glove over the handlebars, and ride out to whichever field we were scheduled to play at. The games were seven innings long. I would play the outfield not unlike the kid in the Peter, Paul, and Mary song.
It didn't matter what position I played. I loved baseball. I can look back and remember those games, the way the grass looked as the day faded, the big clouds in the midwestern sky. The feeling of turning on a pitch and hitting it over the second baseman's head.

When the game was over, we all rode to the Dairy Queen. The coach bought a Mr. Misty for everyone on the team if we won. If not, you were on your own. He only paid for winning, and he was happy to tell you so, if you were brave enough to ask. I'd bicycle home, usually as it was getting dark. It wasn't unusual, we rode bikes everywhere and we played baseball. It's what boys did in America.

If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base.
--Dave Barry

Zac Brown

When I hear this song, I think of me and her, traveling along the coast, camping as we go.
Zac Brown made it a tribute video. That works, too.

Zac Brown Band    

He who is brave is free.
--Seneca

Willow Run After the War

When the need for B-24s was over, the Willow Run Plant was run by Kaiser until 1953. It was then sold to General Motors. The facility lent itself to large scale production and additional capacity was added over time, resulting in a five million square foot plant. The Chevrolet Corvair was made there, as was the Chevy II and the Caprice.

The largest use of the facility was for producing transmissions. At the height of operations in the 1970s, 14,000 people worked at Willow Run. Even as America was shutting down, as late as 2005 there were 4,000 workers making four different models of transmissions.

It was the governmental takeover of General Motors that finished off Willow Run. In the restructuring that occurred after the nationalization of GM, the government redirected the resources to Mexican factories. The Willow Run facility will turn out the lights in December of 2010, adding over a thousand workers to the unemployment rolls of Ypsilanti, Michigan. We won't have to think about the Willow Run facility standing empty though, the government's plan is to tear it down.

The government automobile manufacturer that is using the old GM logo? A lot of the production is out of the Silao General Motors truck and SUV assembly plant in Mexico. The facility is doing well. They make Chevrolet and GMC Pickups, the Cadillac Escalade EXT and the Chevrolet Avalanche. Here's one of the Silao production lines making pickups. It only made sense to the government, the average wage in Silao is $2.80 (US) per hour. No one asked why we would want to keep manufacturing jobs in the country, that was the old kind of thinking, the way they used to think in America.

We need not stride resolutely towards catastrophe, merely because those are the marching orders.
—-Noam Chomsky

Charlie Sorensen and Willow Run

Charlie Sorensen had worked for Ford Motor Company for 35 years. He'd been there when they were making Model N Fords in a piecemeal way. He had been part of the engineering effort to streamline operations that lead to mass production. In January of 1940 he was Vice-President of Production for Ford. That was when he was sent to the Consolidated Aircraft plant in California to see how B-24 Liberators were being built. Consolidated was making a bomber a day.

He left the facility discouraged that the production seemed so slow, with a great deal of hand fitting of major components. He said so, and was challenged, "Well, what would you do?" Charlie worked on it overnight. The next day he returned and this was his answer.

In one night he had broken down the production steps into sub-assembly jobs, arranged those jobs so that the components flowed into a production process, decided how large the building would be, and concluded that it would be possible to build a bomber an hour. When he presented his plan to the leadership at Ford, they agreed, and built Willow Run. A $200,000,000 facility that was decided on because of Charlie Sorensen's pencil sketches.

At the time it was built, it was the largest single room in the world. They made 18 bombers a day in 2 nine hour shifts. A bomber an hour. It dwarfed the other B-24 production efforts, Willow Run made half of all the B-24s built for WWII. It was part of the effort that allowed America to achieve victory, manufacturing military aircraft on a such a scale was beyond the capability of other countries.

One man, in the right place, with the right training, made the difference.

To compare a Ford V-8 with a four-engine Liberator bomber was like matching a garage with a skyscraper, but despite their great differences I knew the same fundamentals applied to high-volume production of both, the same as they would to an electric egg beater or to a wrist watch... I was going on the principle I had enunciated many times at Ford: "The only thing we can't make is something we can't think about."
--Charlie Sorensen

Shorpy's Photos

Looking for more images of America, I found Shorpy. Hundreds of pages of old pictures from the Library of Congress, mixed in with old pictures of family and slides bought on e-Bay. Each one with some explanation, but always a window into a bygone place.

Here's an image from page 260.
"1917. U.S. Navy Yard, Washington. Sight shop, big gun section."

What you have caught on film is captured forever. It remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.
--Aaron Siskind

It was Made in America II

From Summer Patriot comes a story about a college lecture he heard 40 some odd years ago. The main idea being that at some point the Romans stopped being Romans and became Italians. It's the why I found interesting.

If you asked an early Italian, he would have very likely called himself a Roman. He had been born into a culture that called themselves Romans and would have self identified as Roman. It is only looking back that historians can say that Rome was gone and Italy had begun.

There are clues in the process, if you know where to look. As I mentioned in my previous post, America made steel. America made all sorts of things, textiles, toys, cars, mattresses, if it had been invented and could be manufactured, America made it. It was a point of pride to stamp Made in U.S.A. on products. Here's just two examples. A simple open end wrench, stamped to show it's size, the manufacturer, and where it was made. Americans bought things made in America, it was considered a mark of quality. A spool of fishing line, showing the vendor's name, the product type, and where it was made. There were no labeling requirements, it was just something the manufacturer did, expecting that he might sell more American product to Americans.

I have just one more product to show you. It will have to stand in for all the others, your computer, TV, tools, gas grill, toys, cell phone, etc. It's evidence that even though we still call ourselves Americans, a new name is coming. Just like those early Italians, we're still too close to our former glory to see it.

A great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges.
--Benjamin Franklin

It was Made in America

From Historic Sites of the West comes the story of a steel mill built in Utah during World War II.
Built in far from the coasts, with access to water, coal, and railroad distribution, it was the only large steel making operation west of the Mississippi. If you want to read about how steel was made in America, here's a link to an article in The Ohio State Engineer about the Geneva Steel Mill in 1944. It tells the story proudly, boasting of capacities and volumes, the 1.3 million tons of steel produced in a year, the largest electric motor in the world, the millions of gallons of water used to make steam every day.

It was shut down permanently in 2002. The railroads that supported it are gone as well. Everything has been demolished and carted off. A photographer named Chris Dunker photographed the end. Click the link and then menu/gallery/industrial/geneva steel. He uses Flash, and I couldn't link directly to the pictures.

America made steel. They needed it, they were building a country.

If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
--Abraham Lincoln

Central High School, Washington, D.C.

In November of 1922, the Girls Rifle Team from Central High in Washington, D.C. won a competition. Here they are, a group of American girls posed on the football field with their rifles and the trophy.

The very atmosphere of firearms everywhere restrains evil interference.
--George Washington

Viewpoint

During WWII, Americans saw victory as the only acceptable outcome. Without regard to the religion, politics, or race of the enemies of America, the Armed Forces of the United States brought them death and destruction until they surrendered. Even the military recruiting efforts of the United States reflected that resolve. Here's a few so you can see how a free people committed to victory think.


The National Archives has some of the posters from America, but in the introduction it is clear they are ambivalent about them. Now they call the posters propaganda.

You have forgotten the face of your father.
--Steven King, writing as Roland of Gilead

Yellowstone 1921

In 1921, a Scout Leader in Clinton Iowa, O.O. Pierce, organized and lead a Scout trip to Yellowstone National Park. There were no paved roads, no bridges, and no electronic communication. He had written towns along his planned route, mapped carefully, set his river crossings where there were ferries.

It turned into the epic adventure of a lifetime. 191 Scouts and 86 adults in a caravan of Ford Model T's and various trucks made the trek. Iowa Public Television has some surviving video footage, highlights of parades, a group of Scouts riding a log behind a Model T that was using the log as brakes on a long downhill, interviews with 5 elderly men who had made the trip as Scouts.

I couldn't embed it, but here is the link: Video from a forgotten America.

Adventures are for the adventurous.
--Benjamin Disraeli

U.S.S Olympia

The oldest steel warship afloat anywhere in the world. The U.S.S. Olympia was the flagship of Commodore George Dewey at the Battle of Manila Bay. She served through WWI and was decommissioned in 1922. She is essentially grounded in the mud at the Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She looks good above the waterline, but the Navy has said that there is ten million dollars of work needed just on the hull. The decks are wood, and rotting under a protective layer of concrete. The ship was last drydocked in 1945. This link outlines the work that has been done to try to save her, but it will not be enough.

There are beautiful internal spaces, wooden wardrooms, engines that display a sense of pride and empire. If you want to see her in person, you need to hurry. It's to the point that a hull failure is anticipated, and public tours will end in November of 2010. The Navy has authorized the the company that holds the ship to have her sunk at sea. The flagship of the U.S. fleet at the dawn of America's prominence as a world power is going to be scrapped.

Action expresses priorities.
--Mohandas Gandhi

It's Not Just in the Past

From Bob, over at The Drawn Cutlass, comes a modern story of a Scout, prepared for what the day put before him. This was in the Charlotte Observer yesterday.

19 year Alan Riggs was jogging on the beach at Edisto Island, S.C. He came up to an agitated knot of people on the beach. Laura Bell, a 6 year old girl on a boogie board had been caught in a rip current, slammed around by the surf, and was being pulled out to sea. The beach patrol was there, but they were just keeping everyone else out of the water, trying to prevent a multiple drowning.

Alan ignored them and ran into the surf, swam out to the girl, calmed her, and turned to see how far away the beach was. They were a long way out, in rough water. The girl was tired, scared and injured with a broken leg. It was a tough swim back, maybe one of the toughest of his life, but he made it. They made the shore together, and Alan was able to hand her off to her father.

Alan Riggs was a competitive swimmer in high school. He is an Eagle Scout out of Troop 100 in Shelby, NC. Here's the interview he did with a local TV station this week.

I’ve got a little sister. I’d want someone to go out and help my little sister. I just couldn’t leave the little girl out there by herself. It was dark, the tide was going out and the water was rough.
--Alan Riggs

A Life's Contribution

Philip Zinman had a career in real estate in Camden, New Jersey. He was successful, partnering in a firm in the 1920s and still active into the 1970s. In addition, he served the community. First as secretary on the Camden County Real Estate Board, and later was president of the Mortgage Bankers Association of New Jersey.

He respected his religious faith as well. He and his wife created and endowed Philip and Betty Zinman Endowment for Jewish Cultural Arts at the University of Pennsylvania and established the funds for the Philip Zinman Foundation International Studies Honors Scholarship at the University of Florida.

He had a life of business, contribution, and meaning. It almost didn't happen. On January 7th, 1928, Phillip Zinman fell through the ice while skating in a local park.

James Wilcox heard his cries and saw Phillip struggling, cold and exhausted, in the pond. James crawled out on the ice to bring a branch for Phillip to grab, then went back and got a larger branch when the first one broke. Nearly pulled in by the weight and effort of the larger man, he got another person to hold his legs so Phillip Zinman could escape from what soon would have been a fatal case of hypothermia.

James Wilcox was 14. He was the Patrol Leader of the Silver Fox Patrol, Troop 11, Boy Scouts of America, East Camden, New Jersey. Just an American Boy Scout doing what he had been prepared to do.

Why, for any old thing.
--Robert Baden-Powell, the Founder of the Boy Scouts, when asked what Scouts should "Be Prepared" for

Greater Love

Henry "Red" Erwin was a radio operator on B-29s during WWII. One of his tasks on April 12th, 1945 was to arm and drop phosphorus flares through a tube in the aircraft floor as the planes arrived in an assembly area. A fuse malfunctioned. The flare lit in the tube, blew back up into the plane, hit Red Erwin in the face, blowing off his nose and blinding him. The flare then fell to the deck of the plane, burning at 1300 degrees, filling the plane with toxic smoke and threatening to burn through into the bomb bay.

Completely blind, Red Erwin found the flare by the heat, picked it up in his hands and headed forward toward a window. His progress was stopped by the navigator's table. He switched the burning flare to one arm, cradling it against his ribs and raised the table. The flare burned his arm and ribs to open bone.

His body and clothes on fire, he made it to the cockpit and dumped the flare out the open window, then collapsed to the deck where other crewmen put him out with fire extinguishers. The pilot had been unable to see for the smoke, but as it cleared, he regained control at 300 feet and made an emergency divert to Iwo Jima.

Bits of phosphorus continued to burn as they tried to tend to Red and it seemed clear he was a dying man. Still alive and conscious, he asked, "Is everyone else alright?" He was still alive when they landed and then the crew told the story.

Major General Curtis LeMay, then commander of the XXI Bomber Command demanded an immediate approval for the Medal of Honor so it could be presented before Red Erwin died. There was no Medal of Honor available in the Pacific and the crew of the plane sent back to Pearl Harbor to get one was ordered not to return without one. They got it by breaking a display case at Army Headquarters and taking it. Red Erwin was awarded the Medal of Honor by General LeMay on April 19, 1945 on the Island of Guam, the only time the Medal of Honor was ever awarded in so short a time.

Red Erwin then surprised everyone by not dying. He shrunk down to 87 pounds, his eyes stayed sewn shut for over a year, he underwent the first of many surgeries, and was finally sent home, still wrapped in bandages to cover the open wounds of his burns. When he got back to America, Betty Erwin, the girl he had married a few months before while home on furlough, the girl that had been his sweetheart in Sunday School, turned out to be tough enough to be a hero in her own right. She walked in, looked him over, kissed him and said, "Welcome home." In the end, he endured 41 surgeries and in 1947 he was medically discharged. He had regained some of his sight and the use of one arm. He worked 37 years as a counselor for the Veteran's Hospital in Birmingham, Alabama. He and Betty had four children and lived a full life. Red passed away in 2002. There was a full crew on that bomber, and every one of those men came home, too. Here's Red's Medal of Honor citation. Here's an article from Air Force Magazine in 2007 that has a lot of pictures and details. He would always say, when asked about it, that he felt he wore the Medal for everyone who had served.

Your effort to save the lives of your fellow airmen is the most extraordinary kind of heroism I know.
--Gen Curtis LeMay, speaking to Red Erwin, April 19th, 1945

It Happened Slowly

Parts of America persisted long after the Federal government had been overwhelmed by the massive debt and the move into socialism. The southern states and some of the west, primarily rural areas, held to the old values the longest. Country music reflected the split between the direction the global socialists took the country and the way America was remembered. Here's Buddy Jewell's "Sweet Southern Comfort" to take us back to that time and place and reminds us of how it was in America.

All I can say is that there's a sweetness here, a Southern sweetness, that makes sweet music. If I had to tell somebody who had never been to the South, who had never heard of soul music, what it was, I'd just have to tell him that it's music from the heart, from the pulse, from the innermost feeling. That's my soul; that's how I sing. And that's the South.
-- Al Green

The Last Victory

The last time America declared and fought a war, it ended in a victory. Look back back at the spontaneous victory celebration in Honolulu, Hawaii as filmed by Richard Sullivan, August 14th, 1945. In 16 mm Kodachrome, if it pleases ya', and a tip of the hat to Iowahawk.

It is an amazing sight to witness a free people unreservedly celebrating a combat victory. But it was what you could expect from Americans.

Any time the Western way of war can be unleashed on an enemy stupid enough to enter its arena, victory is assured.
--Victor Davis Hanson

Another Voice

Abigail and Dolley commented on my latest post and when I visited her site, I found these two recent offerings:

Brand Loyalty and the Real Hope for America

I Still Cry About 9/11

Go see what you think and leave her a comment if you like what you find.

Wisdom and penetration are the fruit of experience, not the lessons of retirement and leisure. Great necessities call out great virtues.
--Abigail Adams

Paukenschlag

In the early months of World War II, the German Navy sent U-Boats to attack merchant shipping along the U.S. coast. They called it Paukenschlag. In English, it would be called Operation Drumbeat. The United States was at a loss to combat the operation. A lot of the older ships that might have been useful had already been shipped to Britain under the Lend-Lease agreements. Most of the rest of the Navy was engaged in the Pacific, and that really wasn't going all that well.

With an immediate need was to find a way to fight the Germans and protect the shipping along the Atlantic coast, the Navy turned to the Coast Guard, and then to civilians in yachts, pleasure boats and fishing vessels, to watch for and report enemy submarine activity. It was officially called the Coastal Picket Patrol, but it became known as the Hooligan Navy. The civilian boats didn't have any meaningful offensive weapons, and often the reports they made didn't lead to anything because the subs either had moved on or weren't there in the first place. But America needed them and they responded. Here's the story of one of them.

The Java Arrow was a tanker. Early in the morning, shortly before dawn, on May 6th, 1942, it was torpedoed twice by U-333 eight miles off the coast of Vero Beach. The survivors abandoned ship and shot up a flare.

The Kitsis was a 30 foot fishing boat, named for the owners, Kit and Sis Johnson. Since January of 1942, the Kitsis had been "fishing" every night. Kit had done four months of nighttime patrols off the Florida coast in a small boat. On the morning of May 6th, Kit Johnson saw a flare in the distance and turned the Kitsis toward it. When he arrived, he found 22 burned, injured, seasick crewmen from the Java Arrow in a life raft. The Kitsis was too small to tow the raft, so Kit Johnson and his partner, Ottie Roach transferred the men to their boat. Badly overloaded, they bailed by hand and made their way to port.

When Kit got home, he told his wife of the events of the night, ate and went to sleep. Sis Johnson collected rags, a mop and a can of powdered bathroom cleanser and went down to the pier to the Kitsis. She scrubbed the blood and vomit, washed the decks, and got the Kitsis ready to go back to sea. It took most of the day, but the Kitsis was ready when Kit took her back out on patrol that night.

They were just one couple with a small boat in a country they called America.

The reason that the American Navy does so well in wartime, is that war is chaos, and the Americans practice chaos on a daily basis.
--Karl Doenitz, Admiral of the German Navy during WWII

Going to Texas

A friend showed me this link to the diary that one of her relatives kept in 1846. It is a record of his journey from New Jersey to Texas on a trip he took to see if he wanted to move his family there. He then returned home, and four years later, moved his family to Kaufman County, Texas.

This wasn't renting a U-Haul and driving for 3 or 4 days. He left New Jersey on October 17, 1846 and returned January 21st, 1847. This was boats, both oceangoing and riverboats, and overland by foot and horseback. His descriptions of people and places captures a piece of America when it was young. If you want to listen to a story this evening, the words of James LaRoe will tell it fine.

I walked ahead of the wagon. I saw 3 deer and a great many wild geese and I shot 3 shots at them and did not kill any. We are now in Harrison County in Texas.
--James S. LaRoe, November 16th, 1846

Words Had Meaning

When the country was formed, documents were written and signed by the states that formed what came to be called the United States of America. These documents were not terribly long and were written in the common language of the day, so as to be understandable to anyone who wanted to read them.

They were considered the basis of the law that governed the country. So important that a process was included to modify or amend the documents. This process was used several times during the first two centuries of the United United States.

The usual acceptable method was that both houses of the American Congress passed the wording of the amendment by a 2/3s majority, then sent the document to the various states. 3/4s of the States had to then approve the document for it to become part of the Constitution of the country. There are other means outlined, but this method is the only one the United States ever used.

For example, in the late 1800s, women were protesting for their rights to be full participants in the society. Specifically, they wanted the right to vote. Since this was not clearly stated in the Constitution, an amendment was put through the process and was successfully ratified in 1920. It was not enough that giving women the right to vote seemed like a popular idea, the rule of law prevailed, and since the change was seen as being needed, then the process of amending had to be followed.

As archaic and cumbersome as that process appears to us today, that's the way they did it in America, believing as they did that words had meaning, and that documents could be binding agreements.

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
--The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

Surrender 1945

In December of 1941, America was attacked by the Imperial Empire of Japan. Without doubt or hesitation, the United States responded. Putting the country on a war footing, they converted steel, auto, textile, and appliance manufacturing to make weapons, bullets, aircraft, uniforms, and ships. For example, it is still possible today to buy a firearm that was made by Singer Sewing Machines, IBM, Underwood Typewriters, or Rock-Ola, a manufacturer of jukeboxes.

In August of 1945, having already fought the war in Europe to a conclusion, America was poised for a land invasion of the Japanese home islands. There was a navy, army, and air forces the likes of which the world had never seen. Supply lines, bases, air fields, fleets of ships, all built and directed with the purpose of achieving unconditional victory.

The United States didn't have any trouble determining who their enemy was. Finding ever more efficient ways to kill that enemy and eliminate that enemy's ability to wage war was the goal, and America was goal oriented. Protecting American lives and property while destroying the enemy was a plus.

In the midst of this war, America developed a new weapon, and in an effort to spare the Army, Navy, and Marines the human cost of the invasion, America used it. Twice. This new weapon did not kill vastly more people than the firebombings that proceeded it, it just did it more efficiently, with one aircraft instead of four hundred.

The Japanese High Command finally decided to capitulate, but it is clear that if they had not, America would have just kept coming, killing, bombing, destroying, for as long as it took to reduce the Japanese to surrender. The Japanese signed documents agreeing to surrender unconditionally on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2nd, 1945, and as they did, there was a flyover of fighter planes. It looked like this: It took less than 4 years. That's the kind of country the United States of America was.

There is no substitute for victory.
--General Douglas MacArthur

Kodachrome

I used Kodachrome. Starting in 1980, I used as much as I could afford to buy and have developed. It made you slow down. Kodachrome 64 required a lot of light and a fast lens, or it required you to have a tripod and a good idea of the light available.

Now it is gone, a victim of the digital age. The process to make and develop it is complex, and the demand has fallen off to the point that it only makes business sense to let it go.

There's no more being made, and there's only one lab left that can do the developing, Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kansas. They will be shutting the developing tanks down at the end of the year. There still is slide film available, Kodak Extachrome for example, but I remember, and it is not the same. Kodachrome is vibrant, reds especially stand out, the color returned made every roll a treat to view.

This picture is one of the finest, most complex shots I ever took with Kodachrome. This is the arch at Ground Zero in Hiroshima, looking out from the museum toward the iconic remains of the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. It was taken after dark, relying on street lights, ambient light, and a hand held flash that I used by running up and manually flashing the inside of the arch while the shutter was open. It was a 40 second exposure at F8, using an Olympus OM-1 and a Zuiko 200mm lens. As good as digital cameras have become, for everything gained there is something lost.

Kodachrome
You give us those nice bright colors
You give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day...
--Paul Simon

The Empire State Building

John Raskob was a businessman. After business college, he started out as a bookkeeper at DuPont in 1900. By 1918, he was vice-president for finance in the DuPont Corporation, a role held until his retirement in the 1940s. He was also an early investor in General Motors, and for ten years, from 1918 to 1928, he was Chairman of Finances at GM.

William Fre­de­rick Lamb attended Columbia University's School of Ar­chi­tec­ture and in 1911 he joined the architectural firm of Carrere & Hastings, which later became Shreve, Lamb, & Harmon. He was the lead designer when John Raskob approached the firm in 1929 about building the tallest building in the world. They returned a set of preliminary drawings in two weeks. Contracts were signed and excavation on the site began in late January of 1930. The building officially opened on May 1st, 1931. They built it in sixteen months. It was the tallest building in the world until 1973. It's the kind of thing that was possible in America.

Bill, how high can you make it so that it won't fall down?
--John J. Raskob, asking William Lamb about the limits of possibility in 1929

Decisions and Outcomes

Borepatch weighs in on the theme of America. I link to him today because he is right, you can't look at outcomes and pretend that the decisions that lead to that outcome didn't have any effect. He uses Detroit as the canary in the mine, but the problem he identifies is far reaching.

It was decided to let all our manufacturing go overseas. It was decided that the capitalist system was evil and making a profit made you suspect. It was decided that many rules to control the actions of industry were necessary. It was decided that the economic engine that ran America was unnecessary.

Men built America, built from raw materials, work, and the creative genius of individuals, it once stood as an example to the rest of the world what free men could achieve. This image is from a railyard in Chicago in 1940. It's one from a set of images of American cities from the Denver Post. If you wondered what we did with all that splendor, here's a link to one answer.

...when you live in a rational society, where men are free to trade, you receive an incalculable bonus:the material value of your work is determined not only by your effort, but by the effort of the best productive minds who exist in the world around you.
--Ayn Rand, speaking as John Galt in "Atlas Shrugged"

Inventors I

As you might have learned, the government of the United States did not develop it's heavy handed regulatory functions until the mid 20th Century (CE), so individuals with ideas were free to develop those ideas into new inventions and use those inventions to make a personal profit.

To start out, we are going to consider John Moses Browning. Born in 1855, he is responsible for some of the most famous designs in modern firearms, including some that are still in production and in the inventory of armies around the world. He didn't have to ask anyone. He didn't need permission, or a government permit. He set to work, solved the problems, and sold his inventions to individuals, armies, and other businesses. Browning Hi-Power, Colt Woodsman, M2 (Ma Duece), 1911, Browning Auto-5, Winchester 1897, the list goes on and on. He accomplished a great deal in his life, but he had a big head start, he lived in America.

I decided to take the gun apart, piece by piece, down to the last small screw, even though [the] parts that were mashed and twisted together. And when I did, finally finishing long after supper that night, the pieces all spread out before me on the bench, I examined each piece and discovered that there wasn’t one that I couldn’t make myself, if I had too. If I had been in school that day, I would have missed a valuable lesson.
--John Moses Browning

The Fortress of Solitude

Even Superman needs a place to retreat to, to recharge and regain perspective. A friend of mine sent me pictures of his fortress today. He talks about it from time to time, but this is the first time I've seen pictures.

This is the view looking out from the porch. Up in the mountains, away from the worries and stresses of working two jobs, I don't think he gets to go there near as much as he would like. I don't know how he feels exactly when he's up there sitting on that porch, but I know how I would feel. I would feel free.

Freedom is the oxygen of the soul.
--Moshe Dayan

The News Beckons

But I will continue to resist. Anytime I am tempted, I just open the debt clock over in the sidebar and watch it for about 30 seconds.

Here's the last sunrise of the trip, taken the campsite. On the way back, we stopped in a town that had a monument in the town park. Here's a pic of the inscription. I liked it, it was hopeful. Click the picture to biggify. So we are home, and some of the history posts will be forthcoming. I am going to branch out from my family, there are some historical figures that deserve to be remembered.

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclination, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
--John Adams

Sunny Day

The ocean temps keep things nice. They say the water is 74 degrees, air temp in the low 90s. We spent all day on the beach.

Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt.
--John Kenneth Galbraith

The Clouds Parted

It had been cloudy, threatening along the horizon and spitting rain. We had cooked supper early, wanting to get things cleaned up and stowed before the coming storm hit. As I was washing dishes, I heard her say, "Look at this light!" The sun had broken out from the clouds near the western horizon, painting the undersides of the clouds and the ground with a golden, almost orange light I have only seen a few times in my life.

I left the dishes and we took the bikes out the boardwalk to try to get a few pictures.
The colors changed every few minutes, as the sun set and the clouds moved. It was raining to the northwest, a band of dark that extended out to sea. The light shifted, and then there was this. A broad section of rainbow, not complete, but bright, standing out across the marshgrass. You use the camera you have, which in this case is a small pocket digital, and you take what you can. This does not begin to capture the drama of that sky. It lasted about 15 minutes, then the sun set behind the clouds in the west and the rainbow disappeared from the ground up, like a curtain being brought up from the beach, extinguishing the show.
We biked back to the campsite, and I finished cleaning up. The storm passed just to the north of us and out to sea. This morning the sky is clear and it promises to be hot. Today will be a day for the beach.

God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform. He plants his footsteps in the sea, and rides upon the storm.
--William Cowper

Beach Camping

Another night under canvas. We got in late afternoon, set up camp and had homemade crab cakes and corn on the cob for dinner. By the time we were done, it was dark and I washed dishes by lantern light.

I woke up early and we went for a walk to see the beach. Water temps in the low 80s, a light breeze. The sky is clearing. It looks like this.

Don't grow up too quickly, lest you forget how much you love the beach.
-- Michelle Held