Gasoline For Everybody, An Old Film...

 ...still relevant today!

Susan's Homemade Vanilla Extract! An Easy, Fun Project!

Remember to shake your bottle every day for the first month, and occasionally after that. Buy good ingredients.

A Couch Is Not A Holster!

 Your firearms need to be under your control at all times. When you have company come, do not leave guns loose in the house where an unauthorized person may come in contact with them. These little safes are inexpensive and can be staged conveniently in your home. If a gun is out of your primary safe, it should be on your body or in a staging safe for safety's sake. 

What Really Happened At The Suez Canal?

 Susan and I found this video quite interesting. Bank Effect and Finger Traps!

Height Measurement Made Easy; Biltmore Stick Hack

Seldom Seen Insect Treat

I think I have seen exactly three of these in my life.  It's a mole cricket. Not a bug you want to see in your greenhouse, but neat to look at.  I saw my first one fifty years ago.  I collected one for Entomology a couple years after that, but don't remember where I found it.  (I may still have it in a cigar box!)  This one was in the garage tonight.  Kinda like running into an old friend. Internet sources say that it is a serious pest of turf, especially golf courses.  Our yards do not come close to golf course standards, even for the Rough, so No Problem!

You Can't Educate The Public...

You have to educate individuals!  Yes, that works!  I do not think you can educate mainstream media news hacks, though.  They are thoroughly indoctrinated by college and their own culture.  Here goes, anyway.  The song that is offending the news hacks and sport teams is a lament, and a protest against racism.  If any one of them had bothered to read the lyrics or listen to the song they would (Should) have come to understand that.  But, they have their agenda, and singers of patriotic songs don't fit in with them.  Here is the song, performed by Paul Robeson in 1931, the same year that Kate Smith recorded it.  Let's see if they call Paul Robeson a racist.


Back To The Educational Old Grind!

Covington Kids And An "Old Time Stage Driver In Taos"

It's a darn shame the way the students were treated by the drum-beater, the media, and entertainers who think they are important.  The kids did learn a lesson that many never do figure out.  Some people just are not worth fooling with.  Ernie Pyle could spot them, and he would be on thin ice for posting this today, but here it is!  Ernie and his traveling companion visited the Taos Pueblo during the 1930's and paid for a tour.  He wrote a couple pages about the very unsatisfactory visit.  You can see how it went in the last couple paragraphs.  From Home Country, by Ernie Pyle.

'And so we finished the one pueblo, and came to midway in our tour.  We had seen five curio shops and not one other thing.  We hadn't entered the pueblo proper; we hadn't see a room where anybody actually lived; we hadn't got an honest answer to a single question.

We started then to do the other pueblo.  I said to the guide, "What will we see in this pueblo?"

"Fine curio shops," he said.  "I show them you."

"No, you won't," I said.  And with that the entire party abandoned the guide, got in their cars, and drove away.  He stood there looking after us, in his pigtails and bed sheet, cut to the quick.  Or maybe not.  Of course the joke was on us.  We had paid to see something, and with a straight face we had been shown nothing.

"I guess it's all right," said my traveling partner at last.  "They're just getting even for what the white man did to the Indians in the first place."  And I guess that's right.

Some people out there get hepped, as they say, on Indian life and culture and philosophy.  But I am more inclined to throw my eggs in the basket of an old-time stage driver in Taos.  He had lived around there forty years, and knew the country like a book.

"Indians?" he said.  "Hell, no, I don't know any more about an Indian than you do.  And neither does any other white man.  Talking to an Indian is just like writing a note and putting it in a prairie-dog hole.  I don't pay any attention to them." ' That's a good one, Ernie.  I include just about all the so-called journalists of today with the old boy's assessment.

Olney FFA Did Well At Indy!

Jamie VanDyke, Olney, Illinois FFA Forestry Team, Representative from John Deere

                                                                    Click To Enlarge.

Jamie VanDyke, Ag Instructor at Olney, is a dedicated teacher.  I think this is the third time he has taken a forestry team to the FFA Convention, and they did very well.  The Team placed 8th in the nation, and they had two individuals in the top ten.  It is an impressive accomplishment for both the students and their teacher.  Congratulations!

Olney FFA Forestry Team Takes First At State!

The Olney FFA Forestry Team did well at Carbondale.  They took first place by a very comfortable margin, and three of the five team members were in the top ten out of 72 individuals who competed on 16 forestry teams.  The top scoring individual is one of the Olney students!  They can go on to the national contest at the annual FFA Convention in October, in Indianapolis. Congratulations!

Photo Credit: Jamie Vandyke

Repurposing; Recycling

I wish I could watch this without imagining the smell of sour, leftover milk!



Back To The Old Grind!

Before New Math, Before Common Core,

...kids learned the multiplication and division tables, and were able to work out problems in their head when they went out into the world.  Ernie Pyle was with engineers on Sicily during WW II, and saw them work out complex problems firsthand.  The general waiting on the finished product was the first one across.

Sicily, 1943, with Ernie Pyle:  "When the Forty-fifth Division went into reserve along the north coast of Sicily after several weeks of hard fighting, I moved on with the Third Division, which took up the ax and drove the enemy on to Messina.

It was on my very first day with the Third that we hit the most difficult and spectacular engineering job of the Sicilian campaign.  You may remember Point Calava from the newspaper maps.  It is a great stub of rock that sticks out into the sea, forming a high ridge running back into the interior.  The coast highway is tunneled through this big rock, and on either side of the tunnel the road sticks out like a shelf on the sheer rock wall.  Our engineers figured the Germans would blow the tunnel entrance to seal it up.  But they didn't.  They had an even better idea.  They picked out a spot about fifty feet beyond the tunnel mouth and blew a hole 150 feet long in the road shelf.  They blew it so deeply and thoroughly that a stone dropped into it would never have stopped rolling until it bounced into the sea a couple of hundred feet below.

We were beautifully bottlenecked.  We couldn't bypass around the rock, for it dropped sheer into the sea.  We couldn't bypass over the mountain; that would have taken weeks.  We couldn't fill the hole, for the fill would keep sliding off into the water.

All the engineers could do was bridge it, and that was a hell of a job.  But bridge it they did, and in only twenty-four hours.

When the first engineer officers went up to inspect the tunnel, I went with them.  We had to leave the jeep at a blown bridge and walk the last four miles uphill.  We went with an infantry battalion that was following the retreating Germans.

When we got there we found the tunnel floor mined.  But each spot where they'd dug into the hard rock floor left its telltale mark, so it was no job for the engineers to uncover and unscrew the detonators of scores of mines.  Then we went on through to the vast hole beyond, and the engineering officers began making their calculations.

As they did so, the regiment of infantry crawled across the chasm, one man at a time.  A man could just barely make it on foot by holding on to the rock juttings and practically crawling.  Then another regiment, with only what weapons and provisions they could carry on their backs, went up over the ridge and took out after the evacuating enemy.  Before another twenty-four hours, the two regiments would be twenty miles ahead of us and in contact with the enemy, so getting that hole bridged and supplies and supporting guns to them was indeed a matter of life and death.

It was around 1 P.M. when we got there and in two hours the little platform of highway at the crater mouth resembled a littered street in front of a burning building.  Air hoses covered the ground, serpentined over each other.  Three big air compressors were parked side by side, their engines cutting off and on in that erratically deliberate manner of air compressors, and jackhammers clattered their nerve-shattering din.

Bulldozers came to clear off the stone-blocked highway at the crater edge.  Trucks, with long trailers bearing railroad irons and huge timbers, came and unloaded.  Steel cable was brought up, and kegs of spikes, and all kinds of crowbars and sledges.

The thousands of vehicles of the division were halted some ten miles back in order to keep the highway clear for the engineers.  One platoon of men at a time worked in the hole.  There was no use throwing in the whole company, for there was room for only so many.

At suppertime, hot rations were brought up by truck.  The Third Division engineers went on K ration at noon but morning and evening hot food was got up to them. regardless of the difficulty.  For men working the way those boys were, the hot food was a military necessity.  By dusk the work was in full swing and half the men were stripped to the waist.

The night air of the Mediterranean was tropical.  The moon came out at twilight and extended our light for a little while.  The moon was still new and pale, and transient, high-flying clouds brushed it and scattered shadows down on us.  Then its frail light went out, and the blinding nightlong darkness settled over the grim abyss. But the work never slowed nor halted throughout the night.

The other men of the Third Division didn't just sit and twiddle their thumbs while all this was going on.  The infantry continued to get across on foot and follow after the Germans.  Some supplies and guns were sent around the road block by boat, and even some of the engineers themselves continued on ahead by boat.  They had discovered other craters blown in the road several miles ahead.  These were smaller ones that could be filled in by a bulldozer except that they couldn't get a bulldozer across that vast hole they were trying to bridge.  So the engineers commandeered two little Sicilian fishing boats about twice the size of rowboats.  They lashed them together, nailed planking across them, and ran the bulldozer onto this improvised barge.  They tied an amphibious jeep in front and went chugging around Point Calava at about one mile an hour.

As we looked down at them laboring along so slowly, Lieutenant Colonel Leonard Bingham, Commanding officer of the Third Division's 10th Engineers, grinned and said, "There goes the engineers' homemade Navy."

During the night the real Navy had carried forward supplies and guns in armed landing craft.  These were the cause of a funny incident around midnight.  Our engineers had drilled and laid blasting charges to blow off part of the rock wall that overhung the Point Calava crater.

When all was ready, everybody went back in the tunnel to get out of the way.  When the blast went off, the whole mountain shook and we quivered too-with positive belief that the tunnel was coming down.  The noise there in the silent night was shocking.

Now just as this happened, a small fleet of naval craft was passing in the darkness, just offshore.  The sudden blast alarmed them.  They apparently thought they were being fired upon from the shore.  For just as our men were returning to their work at the crater edge, there came ringing up from the dark water below, so clear it sounded like an execution order, the resounding naval command, "Prepare to return fire."

Boy, you should have seen our men scatter!  They hit the ground and scampered back into the tunnel as though Stukas were diving on them.  We don't know to this day exactly what happened out there, but we do know the Navy never did fire.

Around 10:30 Major General Lucian Truscott, commanding the Third Division, came up to see how the work was coming along.  Bridging that hole was his main interest in life right then.  He couldn't help any, of course, but somehow he couldn't bear to leave.  He stood around and talked to officers, and after a while he went off a few feet to one side and sat down on the ground and lit a cigarette.

A moment later, a passing soldier saw the glow and leaned over and said, "Hey, gimme a light, will you?"  The general did and the soldier never knew he had been ordering the general around.

General Truscott, like many men of great action, had the ability to refresh himself by tiny catnaps of five or ten minutes.  So instead of going back to his command post and going to bed, he stretched out there against some rocks and dozed off.  One of the working engineers came past, dragging some air hose.  It got tangled up in the general's feet.  The tired soldier was annoyed, and he said crossly to the dark, anonymous figure on the ground, "If you're not working, get the hell out of the way."

The general got up and moved farther back without saying a word.

The men worked on and on, and every one of the company officers stayed throughout the night just to be there to make decisions when difficulties arose.  But I got so sleepy I couldn't stand it, and I caught a commuting truck back to the company camp and turned in.  An hour before daylight I heard them rout out a platoon that had been resting.  They ate breakfast noisily, and loaded into trucks, and were off just at dawn.  A little later three truckloads of tired men pulled into camp, gobbled some breakfast, and fell into their blankets on the ground.  The feverish attack on that vital highway obstruction had not lagged a moment during the whole night.

It wasn't long after dawn when I returned to the crater.  At first glance it didn't look as though much had been accomplished, but an engineer's eye would have seen that the groundwork was all laid.  They had drilled and blasted two holes far down the jagged slope.  These were to hold the heavy uprights so they wouldn't slide downhill when weight was applied.  The far side of the crater had been blasted out and leveled off so it formed a road across about one-third of the hole. Small ledges had been jackhammered at each end of the crater and timbers bolted into them, forming abutments of the bridge that was to come.  Steel hooks had been embedded deep in the rock to hold wire cables.  At the tunnel mouth lay great timbers, two feet square, and other big lengths of timber bolted together to make them long enough to span the hole.

At about 10 A.M. the huge uprights were slid down the bank, caught by a group of men clinging to the steep slope below, and their ends worked into the blasted holes.  Then the uprights were brought into place by men on the banks, pulling on ropes tied to the timbers.  Similar heavy beams were slowly and cautiously worked out from the bank until their tops rested on the uprights.

A half-naked soldier, doing practically a wire-walking act, edged out over the timber and with and air-driven bit bored a long hole down through two timbers.  Then he hammered a steel rod into it, tying them together.  Others added more bracing, nailing the parts together with huge spikes driven in by sledge hammers.  Then the engineers slung steel cable from one end of the crater to the other, wrapped it around the upright stanchions and drew it tight with a winch mounted on a truck.

Now came a Chinese coolie scene as shirtless, sweating soldiers--twenty men to each of the long, spliced timbers--carried and slid their burdens out across the chasm, resting them on the two wooden spans just erected.  They sagged in the middle, but still the cable beneath took most of the strain.  They laid ten of the big timbers across and the bridge began to take shape.  Big stringers were bolted down, heavy flooring was carried on and nailed to the stringers.  Men built up the approaches with stones.  The bridge was almost ready.

Around 11 A.M., jeeps had begun to line up at the far end of the tunnel.  They carried reconnaissance platoons,  machine gunners and boxes of ammunition.  They'd been given No. 1 priority to cross the bridge.  Major General Truscott arrived again and sat on a log talking with the engineering officers, waiting patiently.  Around dusk of the day before, the engineers had told me they'd have jeeps across the crater by noon of the next day.  It didn't seem possible at the time, but they knew whereof they spoke.  But even they would have had to admit it was pure coincidence that the first jeep rolled cautiously across the bridge at high noon, to the very second.

In that first jeep were General Truscott and his driver, facing a 200-foot tumble into the sea if the bridge gave way.  The engineers had insisted they send a test jeep across first.  But when he saw it was ready, the general just got in and went.  It wasn't done dramatically but it was a dramatic thing.  It showed that the Old Man had complete faith in his engineers.  I heard soldiers speak of it appreciatively for an hour....The tired men began to pack their tools into trucks.  Engineer officers who hadn't slept for thirty-six hours went back to their olive orchard to clean up.  They had built a jerry bridge, a comical bridge, but above all the kind of bridge that wins wars.  And they had built it in one night and half a day.  The general was mighty pleased."

Ernie then talks about a few of the men he got to know during this wartime engineering feat, and ends Chapter 6 with this:  "During the last half hour of work on the Point Calava  Bridge, I saw as fine a drama as ever I paid $8.80 a seat for in New York: The bridge was almost finished.  The climax of twenty-four hours of frenzied work had come.  The job was done.  Only one man could do the final touches of bracing and balancing.  That man was sitting on the end of a beam far out over the chasm. a hammer in his hand, his legs wrapped around the beam as though he were riding a bronco.

The squirrel out there on the beam was, of course, Sergeant Levesque.  He wore his steel helmet and his pack harness.  He never took it off, no matter what the weather or what he was doing.  His face was dirty and grave and sweating.  He was in complete charge of all he surveyed.  On the opposite bank of the crater, two huge soldier audiences stood watching that noisily profane craftsman play out his role.

Their preoccupation was a tribute to his skill.  I've never seen a more intent audience.  It included all ranks, from privates to generals.

"Gimme some slack, Gimme some slack goddammit," the sergeant yelled to the winch man on the bank.  "That's enough--hold it.  Throw me a sledge.  Where the hell's a spike, goddammit?  Hasn't anybody got a spike?

"How does that look from the bank now, colonel?  She about level?  Okay, slack away.  Watch that air hose.  Let her clear down.  Hey, you under there, watch yourself, goddammit."

Sergeant Levesque drove the final spike deeply with his sledge.  He looked around at his work and found it finished.

With an air of completion, he clambered to his feet and walked the narrow beam back to safety.  You could almost sense the curtain going down, and I know everybody in the crowd had to stifle an impulse to cheer.

If somebody writes another What Price Glory? after this war I know who should play the leading role,  Who?  Why, Sergeant Levesque, goddammit, who do you suppose?"


Excerpts from Chapter 6, The Engineers' War, Brave Men by Ernie Pyle, Henry Holt and Company, 1944

PS:  Go HERE to read about some of the men who made this bridge happen, and to see some photos.  The first photo has a soldier who is obviously Sergeant Levesque in the center, wearing his pack harness and helmet.

Weekend Steam: Old Steam Powered Machine Shop, Bushing A Flywheel

This is a great project to watch! A real education for machinist wannabes!

Olney FFA Does It Again!

Jamie VanDyke's FFA team will be making their third trip to the FFA National Convention in October after winning the state FFA Forestry Contest at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.

Jamie's team took top honors at the sectional contest that was held at Sam Dale Lake State Park on September 11.  Jamie and his team stayed after the contest for a tutoring/review session and they have been working hard so they might go to the national contest again.  In 2016 the Olney team placed third in the nation; a remarkable achievement for kids from corn and bean country.

Tree ID

This year the contest consists of a written general knowledge test, tree identification, timber measurement, equipment identification, map interpretation, tree disorders, and chainsaw troubleshooting and knowledge.  Contestants at the national contest are also individually interviewed by judges.

Sycamore; An Easy One!

Team Photo Credit, Jamie VanDyke, Richland County Schools

Hit The Deer, Possum, Coon, Whatever...

And teach your kids to do the same.  We all hate hitting an animal on the road, but the alternative is bad.

Gary and Debbie Stratton, Illinois Tree Farmers Of The Year, 2017!

Gary and Debbie Stratton of Dahlgren are the recipients of the 2017 Illinois Outstanding Tree Farmer of the year.  This award presented by the Illinois Tree Farm Committee is sponsored by the American Forest Foundation and recognizes private landowners for their achievements in managing and modeling sustainable forest management.  Their goals, like many Tree Farmers, are to enhance wildlife by maintaining a healthy forest and utilize forest products to supplement their income.  Tree Farms across the nation are annually recognized for their efforts promoting sustainable forestry.

The Stratton's tree farm consists of 197 acres and has been in a forest management program for over 35 years.  Timber has been professionally marked for harvest on 3 separate occasions, thinning and crop tree release practices have occurred throughout.  A cabin was built using harvested lumber.  This property is a mix of forest and non-forest habitats with 3 wildlife watering ponds, six 1/2 acre wildlife openings planted with annual/perennial food plots and nesting/brood rearing habitat.  In addition, over 2 miles of hiking/access trails and several miles of temporary firebreaks necessary for controlled burning of invasive plant species are being utilized.  This multiple use concept makes it possible to manage and maintain a sustainable forest with the added benefits of hunting, fishing, hiking, wildlife/bird watching and mushroom hunting.

Photo and text courtesy of the Illinois Tree Farm Committee; used with permission.

Eclipse 2017, Far From The Madding Crowd

Location is darned important. This is where we would have liked to go:

There's a little cemetery south of Carbondale, near Makanda where we have ancestors. This is Mary A Pollet Morgan, who passed in 1870,  a month after giving birth to Francis Lee Morgan, one of my great-grandfathers. The problem is, Carbondale was the focus of he Eclipse Crowd.  I-57 was going to be jammed on this day, also Hwy 13 that goes to Carbondale from the Interstate, and Makanda was being mobbed.  If we got there, we would also have to get home, and it's a two hour drive when the traffic is easy.

 Click on the photos to enlarge.

We studied the eclipse maps, and we didn't have to go far to get into totality.  We settled on Thompsonville. Good highways there, and we could take off into the country on township roads to get a bit farther south.

We stumbled on the Liberty Methodist Church and graveyard just as the eclipse was beginning. The only other person here was a man mowing the lawn, and he was just ready to leave.

We have witnessed partial eclipses before, so this was quite familiar.  My welding helmets have #10 filters, so I doubled the filters on a helmet to be safe, thus the ghost image.

Susan had some genuine Eclipse Glasses, and they were effective, too.

Susan also made a pinhole camera, and we all had a good time with that.

It's getting closer!

We thought is was supposed to cool down!  Here Susan is fanning her mother.

Pattie could not lean back or raise her head far enough to look directly at the sun, so Susan held her up as totality came on. Everybody tore off their protection and we were amazed to see the corona show. We could see wisps reaching out and coming back to the sun, plus the roughness of the moon, and the diamond ring effect at the beginning and end.

The next one in seven years comes right over little old Belle Prairie, so we won't have to move an inch to watch it!  We got really lucky today.  We could see vertical development in clouds all around us, but it was clear overhead.  The crowd in Carbondale had overcast, and one report we heard said that they got to see 3 seconds of the eclipse.  We got a full 1 minute, 20 seconds at our private showing just out of Thompsonville, IL.

Weekend Steam: Working Out Problems In The Steam Powered Machine Shop

Olney FFA Forestry Team Takes Third Place!

The Olney FFA Forestry Team took first place out our local meet in September, held at Sam Dale Lake State Park.  They went to the State Contest at SIU in Carbondale and took first place there, too.

That win sent them to the National Contest at Indianapolis where 39 top teams from all over the country competed.  Olney won third place there, which is pretty darn impressive.  They also won first place in a team activity event.  It looks like each contestant won a neat little hatchet as a reward for their hard work.  I bet they will treasure those the rest of their lives.  Congratulations to these excellent students, and to their FFA teacher, Jamie VanDyke.

FFA Forestry Fun

We had our annual FFA Forestry Contest this week, and it was  a good one, with perfect weather and enthusiastic students.  Here we see a couple of students measuring azimuths on the compass and pacing course.  One student scored 91 out of 100 possible points, which is downright remarkable.

I tell them all that they should get 100% on the equipment ID, since they have the list in advance and can look up pictures of every item.  The kid who scored 91% on the Compass and Pacing got 100% on the equipment, and on Tree ID, and the management exercise. 

Many of the kids have trouble measuring timber, and we work with them afterwards so they can do better next time.  Both of these students are showing good form. 

This is the Fairfield, IL team, plus two trainees who will probably be team members next year.  The Olney team took top honors, with their five members taking the top five individual scores.