Girardot Poster Party

Girardot Poster ProjectNancy Jenkins (left), Ron Marshall and Marcia Maupin work on posters to help sell the 1965 Girardot in this much-scratched negative.

Nancy was Editor in Chief, Ron was Art and Literary Editor, and Marcia was on the Art Staff. The Marshall coat of arms on the wall leads me to believe the art extravaganza was taking place in Ron’s basement.

Teem bottle

There’s a Teem soda bottle on the table. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw one of those, so I turned to our old friend Google: Teem is a lemon-lime-flavored soft drink produced by The Pepsi-Cola Company. It was introduced in 1964 as Pepsi’s answer to 7 Up and Coca-Cola’s Sprite.

 Teem was sold in the United States and Canada until 1984, when Lemon-Lime Slice was introduced, though it was still available at some soda fountains into the 1990s. Sierra Mist has since taken over the Teem role in the US.

 Teem remains on sale today in Brazil, Uruguay, Honduras, South Africa and Pakistan; it survived into the 1990s in other markets too, before Pepsi authorized vendors to replace it with 7 Up.

 Teem’s TV ad campaign in the early 1980s challenged viewers to “go ahead… build up that thirst until you can’t stand it any more…” (showing, for example, a disheveled old guy eating “two plain dry tacos” bought from a street vendor in the Southwest) “…then BLOW IT AWAY with TEEM.”

Water Column Barometer

When Jim Stone and I visited our old earth science teacher Ernie Chiles on one of our trips back to Cape, Ernie mentioned a class project both of us had forgotten.

To back up a bit, I’ve written about the odd relationship Ernie, Jim, George Cauble and I had in class. Ernie was a teacher so new the ink was still smeary on his diploma. Jim was on his way to become a science whiz and George was destined to go to Rolla as an engineer. Me, I was just a guy who liked to challenge authority and hang out with George and Jim.

Jim is on the left in the photo above. Ken Trowbridge is in the middle. The fellow on the right looks familiar, but I can’t put a name on the face right now. Wife Lila says it might be Terry Hopkins. Click on the photos to make them larger.

The pressure (atmospheric) was on

As Ernie tells the story, we were on a chapter dealing with atmospheric pressure, which is typically measured in inches of mercury. Normal atmospheric air pressure – roughly 14.7 psi at sea level – will support a column of mercury about 30 inches tall. The same 14.7 psi will support a column of water about 34 feet high.

Jim, George and I said we wanted to prove it. This is where Ernie got worried, he said. “It would be an interesting experiment that would make the concept clear, but I was worried. What kind of prank had these these scallywags cooked up that was going to get me fired?” Maybe Ernie was contemplating what having a student fall to his death out of his classroom window would do to his teaching career.

Our motives, despite Ernie’s misgivings were pure. We had a chance to kill a class period doing something that would allow us to drop a hose out of the third-floor classroom, attracting the attention of the classes of Floors One and Two and we could watch Ernie squirm. Oh, yeah, and we could learn something that we already knew about atmospheric pressure. What’s better than that?

The experiment was simple

The experiment was low-tech. We had to fill a waste can with water, drop a hose in it to fill it with water, then hoist it with a rope to measure how high the water column was. A three-story building should give us the 30 feet we needed. Jim was in charge of the classroom side. I was supposed to get the hose filled with water.

I don’t recall Bill Wilson being in our class, so I may have Tom Sawyered him into filling the bucket and carrying it under Jim’s classroom window. I probably said something like, “Hey, Bill, how about doing this while I take your picture?”

George Cauble was even smarter

George Cauble didn’t even work that hard. While Jim was hauling hose and Bill was toting water and I was taking pictures, George was hanging out with Nancy Jenkins. Like I said, he was the smart one.

The experiment worked (sort of)

Jim didn’t fall out of the window, Bill managed to fill the hose with water, the water column came close to 30 feet (there was some kind of last-minute glitch of some kind, but it was close enough for CHS work), I managed to take some pictures that I held onto for almost half a century and we didn’t put an end to Ernie’s teaching career. Not a bad day’s work.