October 2015

October 10, 2015

Quitting Cold Turkey

Buried back in a corner of the attic was a pipe stand and a bunch of Dad’s pipes. They hadn’t been used since one New Year’s Eve when he pitched all his cigarettes in the fireplace and quit smoking cold turkey.

I was a little late coming home from my date with Shari Stiver that night, and the next morning he gave me an uncharacteristic chewing-out. I mean, I wasn’t THAT late, so I was surprised.

A lack of smoke in the air

Over the next couple of weeks, we noticed he was sucking on a lot of hard candies and was crankier than usual, but we didn’t notice the lack of smoke in the air.

Finally, he told us what he had done. “I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure I could do it,” he said.

Most of the pictures we have of him showed him with a cigarette in hand. It wasn’t unusual for him to be puffing on one, have one smouldering in the ashtray and be reaching for a fresh one to light.

He said it was fairly easy for him to quit because “I had become disgusted with myself: the way my clothes smelled, the way I had burned holes in everything… I no longer LIKED to smoke.”

It sure made shopping for him a lot harder when Christmas and his birthday rolled around. We bought him a lot of smoking paraphernalia like those pipes and stand over the years.

October 10, 2015

Nobody But Daddy Touches It

When we bought our first Zenith TV set, the dealer offered to throw in a black ceramic panther with eyes that lit up for the top of the set. That must have been a standard promotion because I saw a score of them over the years.

Mother thought they looked tacky, so Dad traded it in for credit on an Alliance Antenna Rotor and antenna.

We kids were given strict instructions that “NOBODY but daddy touches it.”

It made satisfying noises

Turning the dial caused a motor at the top of the antenna mast to turn the big antenna to bring in the least worst signal of a distant station. It couldn’t turn all the way around or it would twist off the antenna wire, so you would run it all the way in one direction, then reverse it.

There was some kind of big relay or something hiding in the innards that caused a very satisfying CLUNK-CLUNK-CLUNK! as the rotor was turning. That’s one of the reasons we didn’t mess with it. Dad could have heard the thing all over the house.

That’s it on the left

If you look closely, you can see the antenna sticking above the roof on the left side of the house. If you click on the 1970ish photo to make it larger, you can see Brother Mark’s Sears Spyder bicycle with its fake leopard-skin banana seat in front of the porch.

I figured Laurie Evertt would tell us to toss the gizmo in the dumpster, but she put it in the Keep Pile. Turns out that ones in good condition are going for about 25 bucks on the Internet. (It’s even got the motor and a stub of antenna mast, although it hasn’t been turned on it years. Check it out at Annie Laurie’s Antiques on Broadway if your life has been empty without an Alliance Antenna Rotor.

Dad died in 1977, so I guess it’s OK for you to touch it. If you get hit by lightning, though, I guess the curse is still attached.

October 8, 2015October 8, 2015

There’s One in Every Class

When I ran across this photo I shot of a kid who was supposed to be using newspaper photos in an art project, I immediately thought of Mike Bruce Miller. There’s a Mike in every class in the world.

Mike and I went to Trinity Lutheran School K through 8, then made it through Central High School in one piece. We were in the same Cub Scout pack; I might have even been his patrol leader at Troop 8.

Round up the usual suspects

Mike’s claim to fame was that he was always getting into some minor scrape or another.

If there was trouble, he either instigated it, was in the middle of it or was caught in the dragnet when the teacher rounded up the usual suspects. The picture above was taken on the Trinity Lutheran School playground in June 1961.

Not a bad kid

Mike really wasn’t a bad kid. We didn’t run around all that much, but when he came over to the house, he was always respectful to Mother. She agreed with me that he was just a harmless trouble magnet, but warned me that I should make sure I wasn’t around him if and when lightning struck.

He’s the second from the right in the bottom row. I’m not going to tell you which one I am.

Taken too soon

I was sorry to run across his obituary:

Mike Bruce Miller, 54, of Scott City died Thursday, Oct. 31, 2002, at his home. He was born Nov. 8, 1947, in Cape Girardeau, son of Lowery B. and and Flora Pensel Miller.

Miller attended Trinity Lutheran School, Central High School, and Southeast Missouri State University. Survivors include his mother; a sister and brother-in-law, Diana and Stuart Rosenstein; and nephew, Mark Andrew Rosenstein, all of Boulder, Colo. He was preceded in death by his father.

He is buried in Cape County Memorial Park.

I’m sure that if the angels find itching powder in their robes or “Go Devil!” is printed on a cloud, St. Peter will go looking for Mike, but he’ll do it with a shake of his head and trying not to grin ’cause you just couldn’t stay mad at that guy.

October 7, 2015

The Confluence

There was some discussion on a Facebook group about the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers at the south end of Illinois at Ft. Defiance. That’s been one of my usual stops every time I’ve passed through, going to or from Cape.

Pilot Ernie Chiles and I picked a bad day back in August 2014 for this particular project: we couldn’t shake the clouds that kept covering the mingling of the waters. In this photo, the Mississippi is the brown mass snaking from the left side of the frame and crossing across the bottom. What’s left of Cairo is in the top middle. The bridge carries traffic from Illinois to Kentucky.

The Muddy Mississippi is higher than the Ohio and it’s “holding back” the greenish waters of the river on the right. Click on the photos to make them larger.

Pushing the Ohio

The view looking down the Mississippi shows the muddy water pushing the Ohio way over onto the east side of the river. This bridge links Illinois to Missouri.

Southernmost point of Illinois

That tiny point of land is as far south as you can go in Illinois. The Mississippi is at the bottom, and the green Ohio, looking almost like a field of grass, is meeting it at the top.

War of the waters

The intersection of the two rivers is a bit roiled because a tug steaming northbound up the Mississippi stirred things up.

That’s why it’s called The Big Muddy

The Mississippi is divided into three regions. This marks the beginning of the Lower Mississippi. Surprisingly, at the confluence, the Ohio is the bigger river at this point, based on flow, with it’s long-term mean discharge at Cairo being 281,500 cubic feet per second. The Mississippi, measured just upriver at Thebes, is 208,200 cubic feet per second.

On this day, though, the Mississippi was higher and dominant.

You can see two of my favorite Ft. Defiance photos here. One was taken in 1968, the other in 2010.