1963 Boy Scout Pre-Camporee

It’s Scout Week, so it’s an appropriate time to dredge these up. Some of these photos are of are men and boys I recognize being in Trinity Lutheran School’s Boy Scout Troop 8. The negative sleeve said they were taken at the 1963 Pre-Camporee. I can’t quite place where the event was held. Maybe someone else can clue me in.

I recognize a few of the boys. Two who were my age were Joe Snell and Ronald Dost.

Stan Snell, Harry Ruesler , Ralph Haman

Three of the adult leaders were Stan Snell, Harry Ruesler and Ralph Haman.

Loading them up

Dad (L.V. Steinhoff),  left, loads up a batch of boys into his pickup. Clarence Schade is on the right.

A double exposure

Something was wrong with this photo. A closer look disclosed that it was a double exposure: two photos taken on the same frame of film. That’s pretty tough to do with most cameras because you cock the shutter for the next photo when you advance the film. About the only only way you can do it by accident is to load the film in the camera twice. (There’s another way, but you REALLY have to want to do it.)

It dawned on me, then, that in 1963 I was still using a Kodak Pony 135 camera. I had to go searching for a manual on line to refresh my memory. As soon as I saw it, it all came flooding back.

It was designed for folks who didn’t know much about photography, but it still required you to set your shutter speed, aperture and distance. On top of that, you had to remember to cock the shutter by pushing down on a lever on the front of the lens. After you had taken the photo, you had to turn a knob on the top of the camera to advance the film. If you forgot to do that and just cocked the shutter, you could take a double exposure like this one.

Scout Executive Paul Berkbigler

I wrote about Mr. Berkbigler earlier.

Photo Gallery

Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the image to move through the gallery.

 

Trinity Lutheran School Kindergarten circa 1952

This was taken in Trinity Hall of the Trinity Lutheran School kindergarten class at its Christmas party. If I was five when I was in kindergarten, that would mean this photo was taken in about 1952. Click on it to make it larger.

I can’t identify everyone in the photo, but I see, in no particular order, Mike Miller, David Hahs, Jerry O’Connell, Judy Schrader, Della Heise, John Hilpert, Jim Lorberg, Patty Haas, Ronald Dost and Kent Verhines. Apologies to everyone I left out or whose name I mangled.

Oh, yes, I’m in there, too.

Transformers, AM and FM

Looks like someone is getting a new transformer or other high-voltage piece of equipment. These photos were on the same roll as the Scott City fire truck, so they may have been taken somewhere around there, but I don’t know that for sure. Click on any photo to make it larger (but don’t look too closely. This film is scratched up pretty badly).

Telecommunications: squirting electrons

I spent the last dozen years of my newspaper career as the telecommunications manager. That sounds a little odd, but telecom is all about managing projects helping people communicate. It was pretty easy to understand: you squirt electrons in this end and they come out way over there. I had installed enough two-way radios to have that principle down pat.

Lucky for the paper, there were two guys already in the department who knew what they were doing. My Number Two guy, Mike, had two main responsibilities: keep the phones running and kick me under the table if I started to say something dumb in a meeting.

My most important lesson came one night when the building’s electrical crew had to kill all the power to make some repairs. We had a telephone switch that we called The Cash Register because it handled the classified and circulation department call centers. It was an ancient box that was so old we couldn’t get new parts for it. We had to go out on the secondary market for used and abused stuff that had a failure rate of about two out of three.

The Cash Register didn’t wake up

Old equipment runs fairly well as long as you don’t shut it down. Unfortunately, when it came time to wake up The Cash Register when the power came back on, it decided that it LIKED napping. I was there that night, not because I was of any help, but just as a sign of support to my troops. About four in the morning, two hours before the call centers were supposed to open, I asked Mike the question that all techs hate to hear: “Any idea what the problem is?” The obvious, unstated answer is, “No. If I knew how to fix it, we’d have all been in bed two hours ago.”

Mike was the calmest, best troubleshooter I’ve ever seen. The world could be blowing up around him and he’d keep working through the checklist until he found out which hamster needed kicking.

It boils down to AM and FM

He turned to me and said in quiet, measured tones and with great patience, “What we have here is AM and we need FM.”

We’re in my arena now. This is language I understand. “Amplitude Modulation instead of Frequency modulation? Those are radio terms. What does that have to do with a phone switch?”

“No,” he explained. “What we have is AM – Almost Magic. What we need is FM – Freaking Magic (except he didn’t say “freaking).”

That’s the night everything there was to know about telecommunications and most of life in general became crystal clear. It all boils down to AM and FM.

Can you keep it going another year?

The first year I was telecom manager, I went into a capital budget meeting with a request to replace The Cash Register. Management asked if I could milk one more year out of it. Mike, unfortunately, wasn’t there to kick me under the table, so I said we’d try.

The second year, I went into the hearing with the same request, only more urgently worded. When management asked the inevitable question if I could keep it running one more year if they increased my maintenance budget I was ready.

“No, in fact, you can cut the budget to 25 cents if we don’t replace The Cash Register. That’s about enough to buy one bullet. It’s gonna be a toss-up whether I use it on the switch or me if it hiccups one more time.” They gave me the quarter-million bucks I’d asked for instead of two bits, so life was good.

Staying away from sparky stuff

Our universe was divided into Low Voltage and Sparky Stuff. Management must have known about my limitations because they put me in charge of the low voltage data stuff. Oh, sure, you might get a little 90-volt buzz if you happened to be holding onto a telephone pair if someone happened to be calling it, but that’s minor compared to what the Sparky Guys worked with.

From time to time we’d have to venture into the building’s power vaults. Newspaper presses and elevators and the like take a lot of juice, so our switch gear was almost this big. When you’re dealing with stuff like this, you don’t just push a button to connect to the outside world. We’d watch the Sparky guys pull down down a big lever attached to springs like this, then they’d beat feet to get out of the vault. After a few seconds, the spring would fire the connectors into the grid  with an impressive CRACK!! and the smell of ozone. The spring-loading was to minimize the  time and distance that an arc would jump. A human couldn’t do it fast enough.

After that impressive display, we’d slink back to our safe telephone switch room to see if we could find someone who could be persuaded to hold the two ends of a phone cable while somebody in another room dialed the phone number. Hey, even low voltage guys have to have fun.

Okay, Who Did It?

I’ve already done a page on the Red Dagger’s My Sister Eileen and Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, so when I discovered these frames stuck in with a fire I shot in Ohio, I almost relabeled them and stuck them back in the file. Then I saw something that piqued my interest.

Whose car is this? Who did this nefarious deed? Their timing was good. I see one of the pages is from The Missourian’s Achievement Edition. That was usually the biggest paper of the year. Gaining entry to the car wouldn’t have been difficult. Most folks didn’t lock the doors and about half of them left the keys in the ignition.

Surely these guys didn’t do it

Principal Fred Wilferth and custodian James Criddle were on this roll of film, which means they were in the vicinity of the hooliganism, but they don’t have the guilty look of someone who has just stuffed someone’s car with a week’s worth of papers.

By the way, this film was in pretty bad shape, so I had a choice of spending hours spotting out all the flaws or pretending that the practice took place during a snow storm. I opted for the latter. In one frame there IS a cup flying through the air and water or some other liquid frozen by the strobe flash.

Gallery of the usual suspects

If I was a cop, I’d round up this gang of suspects from My Sister Eileen. I’m pretty sure that at least one of them would crack when you shined the bright light in their eyes. I bet you wouldn’t even have to bring out the rubber hoses. Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the photo until you find the guilty person or persons.

Anola Gill Stowick was kind enough to provide a cast list when I ran the other story. I’m having the names run right now for wants and warrants. We should have this wrapped up in a matter of hours.

Chuck Dockins, Sally Wright, Sherry Harris, Larry Loos, Pat Sommers, Tom Spitzmiller, Steve Crowe, David Reimann, John Reimann, Rick Meinz, Jane Randol, Mike Daniels, Pam Parks, Mike Seabaugh, Steve Folsom, Anola Gill, Lee Dahringer, Don Mowery, John Magill, Preston Foster, Kenny Fischer, Vicky Roth, Jim Stone
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Faculty Director – Kitty Hart, Jerrette Davis, Carl Meyer, Becky McGinty, Steve Strong, Marsha Seabaugh, Janice House, Hilda Hobbs, Martin Hente,  Bill Kuster, Tom Holt, Ralph Frye, Shari Stiver, Cheri Huckstep, Tana Austin, Diane Siemers, Betsy Ringland, Francie Hopkins, Ruth Ann Seabaugh, Beth Hayden, Judy Dunklin, Peggy Estes, Judy Brunton, Terry Hinkle, Robin Kratz, Marcia Maupin, Sally Nothdurft, Toni Starkweather, Bunny Blue, Mary Sudholt, Cheryl McClard, Emma Pensel, David Stubbs Ron Hill, Gwynn Sheppard Mary Rickard, Mary Jean Rodgers, Carol Klarsfeld, Dean Kimmich, Donna Eddleman, Marsha Harris, Martha Mahy, Paul Schwab, Amanda Ashby, Della Heise, Don Sander, Anne Buchanan, Ronnie Marshall, John Mueller, Pat Johnson.