October 2012

October 6, 2012October 6, 2012

Zippo Lighters

Dad was a smoker until he quit cold turkey one New Year’s Eve without telling any of us. We noticed that he was crankier than usual, but he didn’t tell us what he had done for a couple of weeks, “in case I couldn’t do it,” he said later.

One day he came home with a handful of these Zippos with his company logo on them. As a non-smoker and as an appreciator of something special, I never put lighter fluid in mine nor did I ever spin the flint. I don’t recall him carrying one of these special editions.

Zippo lighters worked

I remember well the Zippo lighter he DID carry. There was something simple and satisfying about this simple, but foolproof device. There was the “click” it made when you opened it, and the “clunk” it made when it was closed. Because of the nearly windproof chimney, it was almost impossible to blow the flame out; the proper way to put it out was to close the top, starving the flame of oxygen.

You filled it by putting lighter fluid on cotton batting inside the base. Dad always carried a couple of spare flints back there.

Zip!…It’s Lit!

One spin of the flint stiking was all it generally took to light. I’ll never forget the slight smell of ozone that came from the flint and the smell of the lighter fluid. Looking at the instruction sheet brought back the memory of those zebra-striped Zippo fluid cans. I’m going to have to look under the basement stairs to see if any of the old cans are still there. The fluid, I’m sure, has long since evaporated, but it would be neat to see a can again.

They weren’t kidding about the life-time warranty, either. Something happened to Dad’s lighter – maybe it was the cam on the left that kept the lid securely open or closed that broke – anyway, he sent it in and they replaced the guts of the lighter and returned it with the original case. (You might have to click on the pictures to get the instruction sheets big enough to read.)

Personalize your Zippo

I’m pretty sure Dad’s everyday Zippo was plain, but you COULD personalize it for as little as a buck. I don’t have any idea what the Steinhoff, Kirkwood & Joiner cases cost, or if they might have been a Zippo promotion to encourage him to buy more.

Dad tried some other lighters. I think Ronson made one that had a rounded case. It didn’t work like a Zippo, though, so it didn’t get carried long.

Guys got really attached to their Zippos. That’s hard to believe in this day of throwaway butane jobs (that don’t work as reliably as a Zippo).

Zippo Rule

At the same time he got the SK&J lighter, he got a Zippo Rule with the same logo on it. It looks like a lighter, but the case contains a tape measure.

October 5, 2012February 20, 2024

Taming Swampeast Missouri

Keith Lewis had a story in The Missourian October 4 noting that work on the Little River Drainage District started 100 years ago. There was a good reason why old-timers refer to this area as Swampeast Missouri: a large portion of Southeast Missouri was nothing but nearly impenetrable swamps with names like the Dark Cypress, Old Field and Big Field.

This aerial photo was taken south and west of Delta and shows the old Whitewater River meandering through what once would have been swamp. Dad had a job to divert the river, essentially cutting off this channel years and years ago.

Miles and miles of farmland

Once the timber was logged off and the land cleared, it turned out to be incredibly rich for farming.

Cut trees when swamp froze over

I interviewed Wife Lila’s Uncle Ray Seyer a couple of years ago when he was 89. Ray remembers growing up in the Tillman community area and hearing stories from his dad about the old days. “Pop would ride a horse – no cars in those days – from Kelso down through Delta and most of the time the water was up to the horse’s belly.”

“When they started clearing that ground there – it was all wooded area – they couldn’t cut when that water was in there.. they’d wait until it froze over, then cut it above the ice and let it float out later.”

Soft ground could swallow a tractor

Ray told some stories I had heard from old-timers back when I was a kid. I’m hoping I can run across a tape recording I made of one of Mother’s friends describing putting 12″ x 12″ “mudshoes” on horses to keep them from sinking into the “sinky” muck.

Ray and Dad both said you’d better not stop once you started across the old swamp. Ray talked about a couple of guys who used to haul limestone out of there. Their Caterpillar-type tractor stalled out at the end of the workday and wouldn’t start. They decided to leave it until the morning. The next day, only two smokestacks were visible above the muck, he said.

Diversion Channel

The Big Ditch is one of the main ways to move water out of the basin into the Mississippi River. Here are some of the stories I’ve done about the Diversion Channel.

October 3, 2012October 3, 2012

KFVS-TV Turns 58

I saw a posting on the KFVS-TV fan page that the television station went on the air Oct. 3, 1954. Actually, according to a letters received by the station, people were watching the test pattern days before the station went live with programming.

Brother Mark wasn’t there for the very first broadcast, but he worked a number of jobs there, including cameraman, in the mid-to-late 1960s.

KFVS-TV video about 58th birthday

Here’s is a video KFVS produced to mark the October 3 celebration.
KFVS12 News

Paper Boys

This Missourian paperboy is in our driveway on Kingsway Drive, but I’m not sure who he is. He doesn’t look big enough to be my neighbor, Eddie Ailor. (Click on the photos to make them larger.)

They were ALL paperboys back in those days. In fact, I remember seeing a condescending story in the newspaper trade magazine, Editor & Publisher,” about a GIRL who actually carried papers in some town or another. “With her interest in newspapers,” the story said,”she could grow up to be secretary to the publisher some day.” Even in the 1960s, I knew that was the wrong thing to say.

The sad thing is that there are very few “independent contractors” of a young age throwing papers these days. The switch to morning papers means that deliveries are made early, early in the morning, instead of in the afternoon when kids are out of school for the day. Paranoid parents wouldn’t want their kids out on the street after dark and knocking on the doors of strangers.

And, let’s face it, my first paper route paid me $2.50 a week as a sub working for another kid. That was for delivering six days a week and collecting for the paper on Saturday morning. Things got better when I got my own route – I made about 24 bucks a week – about half as much a week as a paperboy as I did as a Missourian reporter, but I had to have a couple of kids working for me and I still had to be out in all kinds of weather. That’s a lot of work for not much money.

Better than flipping burgers

These guys are at the gas station where we picked up our paper. I think it was a Gulf station on Kingshighway south of the Food Giant. Names come to mind, but I’ll let you tell me who they are.

I remember those canvas bags well: when I got my route at age 12, I had to carry my bag crossed across my chest like the boy on the left to keep it from dragging the ground. The piece dangling down by his leg was designed to fold over the papers on the inside of the bag to keep them dry when it was raining. On good days, you’d put one or two unfolded papers in the back of the bag, then put the rain cover over the top of them. That would give some shape to the bag and made it easier to carry.

I can’t think of any job today that a 12-year-old kid could do that would teach him (or her) that much about business. Dad made me keep a complete set of books tracking all of revenue and expenses, customer by customer. I would have been happy to count the number of receipts in my ticket book when I started collecting, count the number left when I finished and multiply the difference by 30, 35 or 40 cents to figure out how much of the money in my pocket was collection money and how much was tips. That wasn’t good enough for him.

You learned the responsibility of being on the job six days a week (or finding a kid to sub for you); when I got my own route, I learned how to sell the paper (growing my route from 90 customers to 300), and I learned how to recruit, hire and fire the kids working for me. Labor relations became very personal and important: you couldn’t mistreat your workers or they’d start thinking about how little they were being paid and quit.

The hills got steeper

You can say what you want to about erosion, but I found that the hills had gotten steeper over the 50 years between when I was riding up them on my single-speed Schwinn and when I tried it on my modern touring bike with low, low gears. It’s hard to believe that I rode up those gravel roads carrying a bag of papers that weighed about half as much as I did.

Month: October 2012