UNDERCUTTING THE SELF-INDULGENT COMPETITOR
by Bryce Martin
Members of the St. Louis Cardinals football team put together a touring basketball squad after the 1962 season ended. It was a way to rake in a little off-season money and keep in shape. I got a chance to watch them in a game at Joplin against a pickup team. One of the Joplin players was a local hero, �Bones� Turner, who had just concluded a college career at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.
The Joplin Globe newspaper had wasted no opportunity during Turner�s stay at Baylor to inform readers of his latest heroics.
The draw for me, however, was seeing the Cardinals halfback, and a favorite of mine, John David Crow. Crow was well over six feet tall, wore a flattop and looked mean as hell. That was partly because he had a crooked mouth. I didn�t know if it was from birth or from an injury. Another player who stood out was defensive end Joe Robb -- for the wrong reasons. Robb was a big lineman all right, but, surprisingly to me, he had a big gut. I thought pro football players, no matter their size, would be solid as a rock.
Turner was a hotshot ball handler. Cocky and a show-off, he carried it too far, unless he saw it as a vehicle to hone an audition for the Harlem Globetrotters. Even that wouldn't have been fair to his teammates, whom he gave casual notice. I could see that Turner�s demeanor was raising the hackles of Crow, a bruiser and Heisman Trophy winner as the best college player in 1957 while at Texas A&M. Crow, who played college ball under coach Paul Bryant, seemed to be the floor leader for the Cards. As such, he apparently did not like seeing Turner trying to show him up or his teammates on the hardwood with his self-indulgent dribbling and ball-handling antics.
You could see the extent of Crow�s irritation by his glares and stares directed at Turner, who seemed oblivious to any detail of attention aimed his way.
I was not prepared for what Crow had in store for the upstart Turner.
Robb may have been an accomplice. The huge lineman sent up a shot from underneath the basket that caromed softly to the other side of the backboard. Crow went into a squat where he was stationed to the right of the basket. Turner was underneath and when he went up for the rebound, Crow sprang up, undercutting Turner. Turner hit the floor hard and in a heap. A referee blew his whistle for an injury timeout and Turner had to be helped off the court. I did not much care for Turner�s style of play myself but I had to admit his punishment was rather ugly under the circumstances.
Intentionally undercutting a shooter or rebounder is not only against the rules it is dangerous. It is an act designed to harm another and can easily end in serious injury. I had seen it performed once in a physical education class but never in an actual game. Because of all the action in a basketball game, it can be a difficult and unexpected call to spot for an official. The two officials missed this one, or maybe they ignored it.
The moral I gathered from John David Crow was: Beat us if you can, but don�t show us up in trying. While �Bones� Turner may have been a star at Baylor, he was just now going up against the big boys.
Tell them how the weather was... -- Ernest Hemingway bryce_martin_1@Lycos.com
Saturday, November 29, 2003
Tuesday, November 11, 2003
THE DINES SOUTHERN AND OTHER MINING DISASTERS
by Bryce Martin
Lead and zinc mining was a big business in my part of the country. It was a dangerous profession.
My part of the country is Galena, Kansas, in the extreme lower southeast portion of the state and in the heart and center of the historic Tri-State Mining District of Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma � a kidney-shaped lead belt of a region on a geologic map.
My grandfather, Noah Wesley Martin, was born in 1879 in Tipton Ford, Mo. Old maps show that a wagon trail led from there directly to Joplin, Mo., the largest town in the vicinity back then and the gateway to the lead fields extending westward and southward. He settled near Joplin in Kansas just over the state line in Galena. Galena was then a just-recent booming place, its population greatly swelled by the lead and zinc mining flurry along the Ozark Plateau.
Noah Martin worked some at other jobs, but he was primarily a life-long lead miner. He worked as a hoisterman (he pronounced it �hoisti�man�) right up to 72 years of age. He had to. Miners were often paid in silver dollars. Companies came and went and record keeping was not much of a priority. When he reached normal retirement age, he could not draw his pension because either he did not have proof of employment or he was not always supplied with such information. He had to continue working to gain eligibility.
The derricks on graveyard shifts were lonely, my grandfather said. They were rickety, too, and seemed ready to topple when the winds blew.
They came from all over to work the diggings and the tailings and created boomtowns, short-lived mostly, alongside the creeks and shoals of the small hamlets. Those who did not mind hard, dirty and hazardous working conditions, survived to raise families and some even flourished.
Times were rough and there was a price to pay. Some times the price was your life.
Explosions from dynamiting rock were common sources for accidents. Sparks, too, sometimes ignited gases in the hollows of the mines and took lives. The biggest safety concern, though, for the miners was from falling boulders or timbers down deep in the mines. Men worked in the mines at depths of 500 feet and deeper. No matter how closely the mines were inspected by independent engineers, cave-ins were far too common.
One of the most deadly mining disasters happened in January of 1939 at the Dines Southern Mine northwest of Treece, Kan., in which five men perished when the roof collapsed. Three of the dead were from my hometown of Galena: James Campbell, 34; John McCumber, 24, from the Blackjack region west of Galena; and Harry Burtrum, 32. Burtrum�s father was J.W. Burtrum of Seneca, Mo. Rescue workers toiled for nearly 70 consecutive hours to retrieve the bodies. Of two injured workers, Louis Hensbregh, 35, was also from Galena.
Another wholesale tragedy occurred at the Swalley Mine, owned by Beck Mining and Royalty Co. of Miami (Okla.), a mile and a half west of Baxter Springs, Kan., with the deaths of four miners in the summer of 1945.
At the Swalley, engineers blamed the cave-in, estimated at consisting of 10 to 15 tons of rock and dirt, to the brittle nature of the �sheet ground� layers. A �sheet ground� consists of flat seams extending horizontally in layers measuring from a few inches to a foot. Lead miners say it is a formation similar to those witnessed in coal mining.
It was not necessarily a safe place on the ground, either. Miners often died of suffocation after being buried alive due to slides from enormous chat piles. Such mishaps could not only cover a human body in a moment but could involve thousands of tons of chat.
A relative killed in the mines was Clarence A. Thomason, who, at just age 19, died November 20, 1925, struck by a falling boulder at the Velie Lion mine near Baxter Springs. From an old news clipping of his death, it states that a �boulder� struck him. The headline reads differently:
Miner Killed by Slab
Will Be Buried Today
While there is a difference between a �boulder� (round) and a �slab� (flat), I would imagine that the two were used interchangeably when referring to �sheet ground.� Also, it was sometimes never known for sure whether a miner actually died from being struck by timber or by rock. The cause of death for the lead miners, though vague in nature at times, was usually sudden in execution.
At the time of his death, Thomason was working as a tub hooker � the person who hooks or unhooks the hoisting rope from the ore buckets. (A hoisterman, situated at the top of the derrick, raises the load from the shaft by rope or cable.) Tub hookers were especially vulnerable to falling rock.
Men were lowered in a barrel by the hoisterman down into the shaft to start a day�s work. Even that was dangerous. In January of 1945, dragline foreman James Cowan, 53, who was raised just north of Galena, died from injuries received when the can he was riding plunged out of control to the pit of the shaft at the Muncie Mine outside Treece. No one could judge how far he fell. The hoisterman blamed the accident on a faulty hoist friction band. A cable broke late in the year in 1917 at the Vinegar Hill Wilson Mine, located two miles north of Commerce, Okla., where a young Otis Davis, 17, was being lowered into the hole. He fell an estimated 200 feet to his death. The cause of the cable�s failure was unknown but attributed to �constant strain.� Another such fall happened in an accident when a man fell from the can after it swung violently and struck the side of the shaft.
Hoistermen were not safe, either. Many were injured or killed when derricks collapsed. The man who lowered and raised the buckets was stationed high atop the derrick. The usual height of a derrick was around 70-feet.
Death came in many forms at the mines. A truck driver, Harry Farrar, 38, from Joplin, delivered a hoister to a site near Picher, Okla., early in 1945 and died while trying to help install the machinery. He fell from the top of the derrick.
One morning when no action was coming from the derrick room, a group of miners waiting to be transported to the bottom of the shaft went to see if there was a problem. There was. The hoisterman, apparently attempting to do some quick repair work, was found crushed to death. He was entangled in the hoist, lodged between the belt and the drum of the hoist.
Some derricks were fashioned from steel and others from wood. Steel derricks were not necessarily a safe haven. A hoisterman and another worker were killed in a steel derrick mishap on July 27, 1944, at a site just south of Cardin, Okla. A double-girder steel leg from a 400-ton square-type steel hopper buckled and gave way, toppling the derrick nearby.
Lawsuits were not uncommon. Widowers and other family members often collected in court from companies regarding the deaths of their kin.
Stephen Henry Velie Jr. owned the Velie mine, where young Thomason, my relative, was killed. Velie was the grandson of John Deere. In addition to the Lion Mine, he owned the Leopard and Tiger mines in the region. He was also, at the time, the vice president of the Velie Motor Company in Moline, Ill., a company that built automobiles. Postcards from the era show Velie cars parked in front of his mining offices and facilities in Baxter Springs. In 1911, a song of the day was �Take Me Out in a Velie Car.�
In 1962, on a Friday morning, October 19, the Velie Lion Mine claimed its last victim during �chugging� activities to relieve the ancient hole of its last vestiges of raw ore. Bill Wilson, 31, a World War II Army veteran from Picher was the second of two miners to die from the results of a cave-in that took place two days earlier. He was victim No. 41 taken by the mine since it opened in 1916.
Much too late for Clarence A. Thomason and others before and after him.
by Bryce Martin
Lead and zinc mining was a big business in my part of the country. It was a dangerous profession.
My part of the country is Galena, Kansas, in the extreme lower southeast portion of the state and in the heart and center of the historic Tri-State Mining District of Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma � a kidney-shaped lead belt of a region on a geologic map.
My grandfather, Noah Wesley Martin, was born in 1879 in Tipton Ford, Mo. Old maps show that a wagon trail led from there directly to Joplin, Mo., the largest town in the vicinity back then and the gateway to the lead fields extending westward and southward. He settled near Joplin in Kansas just over the state line in Galena. Galena was then a just-recent booming place, its population greatly swelled by the lead and zinc mining flurry along the Ozark Plateau.
Noah Martin worked some at other jobs, but he was primarily a life-long lead miner. He worked as a hoisterman (he pronounced it �hoisti�man�) right up to 72 years of age. He had to. Miners were often paid in silver dollars. Companies came and went and record keeping was not much of a priority. When he reached normal retirement age, he could not draw his pension because either he did not have proof of employment or he was not always supplied with such information. He had to continue working to gain eligibility.
The derricks on graveyard shifts were lonely, my grandfather said. They were rickety, too, and seemed ready to topple when the winds blew.
They came from all over to work the diggings and the tailings and created boomtowns, short-lived mostly, alongside the creeks and shoals of the small hamlets. Those who did not mind hard, dirty and hazardous working conditions, survived to raise families and some even flourished.
Times were rough and there was a price to pay. Some times the price was your life.
Explosions from dynamiting rock were common sources for accidents. Sparks, too, sometimes ignited gases in the hollows of the mines and took lives. The biggest safety concern, though, for the miners was from falling boulders or timbers down deep in the mines. Men worked in the mines at depths of 500 feet and deeper. No matter how closely the mines were inspected by independent engineers, cave-ins were far too common.
One of the most deadly mining disasters happened in January of 1939 at the Dines Southern Mine northwest of Treece, Kan., in which five men perished when the roof collapsed. Three of the dead were from my hometown of Galena: James Campbell, 34; John McCumber, 24, from the Blackjack region west of Galena; and Harry Burtrum, 32. Burtrum�s father was J.W. Burtrum of Seneca, Mo. Rescue workers toiled for nearly 70 consecutive hours to retrieve the bodies. Of two injured workers, Louis Hensbregh, 35, was also from Galena.
Another wholesale tragedy occurred at the Swalley Mine, owned by Beck Mining and Royalty Co. of Miami (Okla.), a mile and a half west of Baxter Springs, Kan., with the deaths of four miners in the summer of 1945.
At the Swalley, engineers blamed the cave-in, estimated at consisting of 10 to 15 tons of rock and dirt, to the brittle nature of the �sheet ground� layers. A �sheet ground� consists of flat seams extending horizontally in layers measuring from a few inches to a foot. Lead miners say it is a formation similar to those witnessed in coal mining.
It was not necessarily a safe place on the ground, either. Miners often died of suffocation after being buried alive due to slides from enormous chat piles. Such mishaps could not only cover a human body in a moment but could involve thousands of tons of chat.
A relative killed in the mines was Clarence A. Thomason, who, at just age 19, died November 20, 1925, struck by a falling boulder at the Velie Lion mine near Baxter Springs. From an old news clipping of his death, it states that a �boulder� struck him. The headline reads differently:
Miner Killed by Slab
Will Be Buried Today
While there is a difference between a �boulder� (round) and a �slab� (flat), I would imagine that the two were used interchangeably when referring to �sheet ground.� Also, it was sometimes never known for sure whether a miner actually died from being struck by timber or by rock. The cause of death for the lead miners, though vague in nature at times, was usually sudden in execution.
At the time of his death, Thomason was working as a tub hooker � the person who hooks or unhooks the hoisting rope from the ore buckets. (A hoisterman, situated at the top of the derrick, raises the load from the shaft by rope or cable.) Tub hookers were especially vulnerable to falling rock.
Men were lowered in a barrel by the hoisterman down into the shaft to start a day�s work. Even that was dangerous. In January of 1945, dragline foreman James Cowan, 53, who was raised just north of Galena, died from injuries received when the can he was riding plunged out of control to the pit of the shaft at the Muncie Mine outside Treece. No one could judge how far he fell. The hoisterman blamed the accident on a faulty hoist friction band. A cable broke late in the year in 1917 at the Vinegar Hill Wilson Mine, located two miles north of Commerce, Okla., where a young Otis Davis, 17, was being lowered into the hole. He fell an estimated 200 feet to his death. The cause of the cable�s failure was unknown but attributed to �constant strain.� Another such fall happened in an accident when a man fell from the can after it swung violently and struck the side of the shaft.
Hoistermen were not safe, either. Many were injured or killed when derricks collapsed. The man who lowered and raised the buckets was stationed high atop the derrick. The usual height of a derrick was around 70-feet.
Death came in many forms at the mines. A truck driver, Harry Farrar, 38, from Joplin, delivered a hoister to a site near Picher, Okla., early in 1945 and died while trying to help install the machinery. He fell from the top of the derrick.
One morning when no action was coming from the derrick room, a group of miners waiting to be transported to the bottom of the shaft went to see if there was a problem. There was. The hoisterman, apparently attempting to do some quick repair work, was found crushed to death. He was entangled in the hoist, lodged between the belt and the drum of the hoist.
Some derricks were fashioned from steel and others from wood. Steel derricks were not necessarily a safe haven. A hoisterman and another worker were killed in a steel derrick mishap on July 27, 1944, at a site just south of Cardin, Okla. A double-girder steel leg from a 400-ton square-type steel hopper buckled and gave way, toppling the derrick nearby.
Lawsuits were not uncommon. Widowers and other family members often collected in court from companies regarding the deaths of their kin.
Stephen Henry Velie Jr. owned the Velie mine, where young Thomason, my relative, was killed. Velie was the grandson of John Deere. In addition to the Lion Mine, he owned the Leopard and Tiger mines in the region. He was also, at the time, the vice president of the Velie Motor Company in Moline, Ill., a company that built automobiles. Postcards from the era show Velie cars parked in front of his mining offices and facilities in Baxter Springs. In 1911, a song of the day was �Take Me Out in a Velie Car.�
In 1962, on a Friday morning, October 19, the Velie Lion Mine claimed its last victim during �chugging� activities to relieve the ancient hole of its last vestiges of raw ore. Bill Wilson, 31, a World War II Army veteran from Picher was the second of two miners to die from the results of a cave-in that took place two days earlier. He was victim No. 41 taken by the mine since it opened in 1916.
Much too late for Clarence A. Thomason and others before and after him.
Wednesday, November 05, 2003
FALLING DOWN ON MY STUDIES
by Bryce Martin
Another study. This one released in late 2003, informs us that scientists have concluded that video games are addictive. We needed them to tell us that? How much were they paid to conduct that study? Is it only official if scientists study the obvious and give us lay people the obvious results? I can add to that study. Before video games, pinball machines were addictive. I know because I was one of the addicts. We can probably take it back as far as the abacus.
As a matter of fact (and why not?) I will take it back as far as the abacus. I now offer that as a study. Headline: Study Reveals Ancient Greeks Were Hooked on Abacus.
If I were one of these scientists, I would take all the money given to me to conduct the study and spend none of it on the actual study itself and buy me a new Olds Aurora with the money left over (It would all be left over.). Why even bother? All I would need to do is to fill in some easy blanks to come up with some true results.
Tell us something we do not know -- or cannot figure out for ourselves -- then go conduct a real study and amaze us with your findings.
The one that first got my attention in a big way was the boondoggle done decades ago. As I recall, it was a $36,000 foray into reasons why kids fall off tricycles. More appalling was that it was a federal government study, which meant we had to cough up the money for it. I took it as a parody, but it was not, of course. They all read like parodies, don�t they?
It seems like there are two or three such �news stories� every year. I used to clip them out and collect them, but it got old. What I do not understand is how the media treats them so objectively, as if they really have something.
Imagine Joe Citizen looking up in the phonebook the number for the regional office of the Associated Press. �Hello, I have a news story for you, a little study I have done. Running downhill in bad shoes can cause your feet to swell. Hello�Hello!�
However, let Mr. Wizard call it in and, �By, Jove, I think we�ve got something. Your name, professor, and the details��
Here are just a few of several thousands such studies just waiting to be made official:
Fat people weigh more than people who are not as fat do.
Survey finds most people describe dill pickles as having a tart or sour taste and sugar as tasting sweet.
Live cows give more milk than dead cows.
Why do kids fall off tricycles? I can only guess. That is all it would take, too.
When do I start? I'll work for a stipend.
by Bryce Martin
Another study. This one released in late 2003, informs us that scientists have concluded that video games are addictive. We needed them to tell us that? How much were they paid to conduct that study? Is it only official if scientists study the obvious and give us lay people the obvious results? I can add to that study. Before video games, pinball machines were addictive. I know because I was one of the addicts. We can probably take it back as far as the abacus.
As a matter of fact (and why not?) I will take it back as far as the abacus. I now offer that as a study. Headline: Study Reveals Ancient Greeks Were Hooked on Abacus.
If I were one of these scientists, I would take all the money given to me to conduct the study and spend none of it on the actual study itself and buy me a new Olds Aurora with the money left over (It would all be left over.). Why even bother? All I would need to do is to fill in some easy blanks to come up with some true results.
Tell us something we do not know -- or cannot figure out for ourselves -- then go conduct a real study and amaze us with your findings.
The one that first got my attention in a big way was the boondoggle done decades ago. As I recall, it was a $36,000 foray into reasons why kids fall off tricycles. More appalling was that it was a federal government study, which meant we had to cough up the money for it. I took it as a parody, but it was not, of course. They all read like parodies, don�t they?
It seems like there are two or three such �news stories� every year. I used to clip them out and collect them, but it got old. What I do not understand is how the media treats them so objectively, as if they really have something.
Imagine Joe Citizen looking up in the phonebook the number for the regional office of the Associated Press. �Hello, I have a news story for you, a little study I have done. Running downhill in bad shoes can cause your feet to swell. Hello�Hello!�
However, let Mr. Wizard call it in and, �By, Jove, I think we�ve got something. Your name, professor, and the details��
Here are just a few of several thousands such studies just waiting to be made official:
Fat people weigh more than people who are not as fat do.
Survey finds most people describe dill pickles as having a tart or sour taste and sugar as tasting sweet.
Live cows give more milk than dead cows.
Why do kids fall off tricycles? I can only guess. That is all it would take, too.
When do I start? I'll work for a stipend.
Thursday, October 23, 2003
THE GODS MUST BE HAPPY AND SMILING
by Bryce Martin
First N!xau and now Jack Elam.
They may not be big names to all out there, but two of my favorite people on the big screen have passed on this year. It is sad, but inevitable. If anything is inevitable, it seems to be death. Taxes you do not have to pay, contrary to adage. You can go to prison instead.
N!xau. What a name. You have all these pretentious ______s out there trying to come up with a cool reading of an odd name to fit on a marquee, record label, or American Express card, and up comes some Kalahari bushmen as pure as the driven snow with a real name of his own to top any you could possibly dream up. Reading more about his death, I discover that his real name was G!kau. Still a singular marvel, because it maintains the apostrophe, but not quite up to N!xau on the cool quotient. In addition, it was not N!xau, a South African, who made the change from G!xau. It was a simple typing error during the formation of the first The Gods Must Be Crazy movie in 1982 in which N!xau-really-G!kau played the role of Xixo. The film was released in the United States in 1984. Sequels followed.
The original, in case you missed it (I know you would not forget) involves the ramifications of a bushman (Xixo) finding a Coke bottle tossed from an airplane and thinking it coming from the gods.
Too bad Francis X. Bushman from the silent era was not available for a cameo.
For those who missed the details, N!xau died July 1 from tuberculosis while hunting guinea fowl.
For anyone over 50 years of age, all I have to say for them to pinpoint in their craniums just who the hell Jack Elam is are these words: �You know, the guy with the bad eye that rolled around.�
�Oh, yeah. Him.�
I know they know at that point.
There was the leer, too, the smiling one to go with the wandering eye. That face was a stage of its own under a Western hat. Not all of Elam�s movies were cowboy ones but the ones you most remember sure were.
My earliest moment of movie terror involved Elam. The bad guys had the good guys pinned down in an outpost on the prairie in the movie Rawhide. The wind was blowing the thin topsoil of the plain to the point where visibility was at a minimum and eyes were pitted and useless from the dust. Suddenly, a young boy no older than two or three drifts from the house onto the flat area outside, between the bullets of the outlaws and the god fearin� sodbusters inside. The shooting stops once the boy is noticed and all is silent. Then, we see Elam, his grinning, menacing face, roving eye with its crazy gleam. With the camera back on the boy now, bullets fly near his feet, stirring up small explosions. The boy cries. The camera now rotates back to Elam. He is grinning, leering some more, pulling the trigger and is a picture of mad rapture.
Nobody could play that type of baddie like Elam.
Jack Elam passed on October 20.
Remember him, don�t you? The guy with the�
by Bryce Martin
First N!xau and now Jack Elam.
They may not be big names to all out there, but two of my favorite people on the big screen have passed on this year. It is sad, but inevitable. If anything is inevitable, it seems to be death. Taxes you do not have to pay, contrary to adage. You can go to prison instead.
N!xau. What a name. You have all these pretentious ______s out there trying to come up with a cool reading of an odd name to fit on a marquee, record label, or American Express card, and up comes some Kalahari bushmen as pure as the driven snow with a real name of his own to top any you could possibly dream up. Reading more about his death, I discover that his real name was G!kau. Still a singular marvel, because it maintains the apostrophe, but not quite up to N!xau on the cool quotient. In addition, it was not N!xau, a South African, who made the change from G!xau. It was a simple typing error during the formation of the first The Gods Must Be Crazy movie in 1982 in which N!xau-really-G!kau played the role of Xixo. The film was released in the United States in 1984. Sequels followed.
The original, in case you missed it (I know you would not forget) involves the ramifications of a bushman (Xixo) finding a Coke bottle tossed from an airplane and thinking it coming from the gods.
Too bad Francis X. Bushman from the silent era was not available for a cameo.
For those who missed the details, N!xau died July 1 from tuberculosis while hunting guinea fowl.
For anyone over 50 years of age, all I have to say for them to pinpoint in their craniums just who the hell Jack Elam is are these words: �You know, the guy with the bad eye that rolled around.�
�Oh, yeah. Him.�
I know they know at that point.
There was the leer, too, the smiling one to go with the wandering eye. That face was a stage of its own under a Western hat. Not all of Elam�s movies were cowboy ones but the ones you most remember sure were.
My earliest moment of movie terror involved Elam. The bad guys had the good guys pinned down in an outpost on the prairie in the movie Rawhide. The wind was blowing the thin topsoil of the plain to the point where visibility was at a minimum and eyes were pitted and useless from the dust. Suddenly, a young boy no older than two or three drifts from the house onto the flat area outside, between the bullets of the outlaws and the god fearin� sodbusters inside. The shooting stops once the boy is noticed and all is silent. Then, we see Elam, his grinning, menacing face, roving eye with its crazy gleam. With the camera back on the boy now, bullets fly near his feet, stirring up small explosions. The boy cries. The camera now rotates back to Elam. He is grinning, leering some more, pulling the trigger and is a picture of mad rapture.
Nobody could play that type of baddie like Elam.
Jack Elam passed on October 20.
Remember him, don�t you? The guy with the�
Thursday, October 02, 2003
IT'S ALL ONE THING
by Bryce Martin
To all things there is an order. Your order is not necessarily my order. When I tape whatever it is I tape on television, I don�t try to edit out the commercials or promos. I do it that way for one reason; I want to capture it just the way it was. It is all one thing, it is a totality. That�s because I�m pre-remote. I am before the hand-held channel changers. If you wanted to change the channel, you got up and turned the knob. That usually meant you didn�t get up, not to get away from the commercials anyway. So, I'm accustomed to seeing all of it, the commercials, the announcements, all the filler in-between. I bring this up to get to my subject of the moment: an old favorite of mine, a patty melt. A patty melt is what it is for a reason. Take out any part of it, rearrange how it is put together, and it is not a patty melt. It is something else. A patty melt is a totality; a sum of all its parts. First off, the bread is rye, not plain, not sourdough, not wheat, not something else, but your basic rye bread. You toast the bread on a griddle or in a skillet. The meat is better if it is ground round, but it can be just hamburger, just ground beef. That part is a matter of preference and does not hurt anything. Here now is an important ingredient. Onion, red or white is fine. I like white. Here, though, is the key: sliced in rings; not diced. If you do everything else right, but you dice the onion, then you�ve ruined it. Grill the rings until they are caramelized. That�s big. The cheese you use is swiss, nothing else, swiss. It is relevant to remember to melt the cheese slices on the burger, and not on the bread. Now, put it together and you have one delicious sandwich. I left out the salt and pepper part. As the phrase goes, season to taste.
by Bryce Martin
To all things there is an order. Your order is not necessarily my order. When I tape whatever it is I tape on television, I don�t try to edit out the commercials or promos. I do it that way for one reason; I want to capture it just the way it was. It is all one thing, it is a totality. That�s because I�m pre-remote. I am before the hand-held channel changers. If you wanted to change the channel, you got up and turned the knob. That usually meant you didn�t get up, not to get away from the commercials anyway. So, I'm accustomed to seeing all of it, the commercials, the announcements, all the filler in-between. I bring this up to get to my subject of the moment: an old favorite of mine, a patty melt. A patty melt is what it is for a reason. Take out any part of it, rearrange how it is put together, and it is not a patty melt. It is something else. A patty melt is a totality; a sum of all its parts. First off, the bread is rye, not plain, not sourdough, not wheat, not something else, but your basic rye bread. You toast the bread on a griddle or in a skillet. The meat is better if it is ground round, but it can be just hamburger, just ground beef. That part is a matter of preference and does not hurt anything. Here now is an important ingredient. Onion, red or white is fine. I like white. Here, though, is the key: sliced in rings; not diced. If you do everything else right, but you dice the onion, then you�ve ruined it. Grill the rings until they are caramelized. That�s big. The cheese you use is swiss, nothing else, swiss. It is relevant to remember to melt the cheese slices on the burger, and not on the bread. Now, put it together and you have one delicious sandwich. I left out the salt and pepper part. As the phrase goes, season to taste.
Thursday, September 04, 2003
LIVING AND DOING IN 1962
by Bryce Martin
Here I was with my first traffic ticket and scheduled court appearance, after five years of driving and countless miles traveled. It was just a few weeks ago when the odds caught up with me. An oscillating red light (dimmed some by the light of day) and the sound of a siren coming from a California Highway Patrol car near Red Rock Canyon clamored for my attention. I was driving just a few miles over the speed limit, according to the officer, but enough for a speeding violation citation. As noted on my copy, I was to appear before the judge in Johannesburg on such and such a date. That part rather threw me� Johannesburg. I mean it was not even a place you encountered along the highway. It was off the highway, kind of out of the way. However, since that was the closest settlement to the violation, I guessed that it made sense to attend court there.
At age 19, I considered myself to be an experienced driver, and my 1958 Chevrolet Biscayne was my fifth car; all of them stick shifts and two-doors except for this one, and all of them Chevies.
My first car was a dark green 1951 Chevrolet Deluxe two-door. The total cost for it in late 1957 was $312.50. It was equipped with a standard, column shift (�three on the tree�), fender skirts, and a sun visor. Next came a hand-me-down �54 Bel-Air, a light blue and white two-tone and clean as a pin; a �55 standard post 210 series, light green, two-door; and a custom-painted dark blue �53 hardtop with a converted floor shift.
The neglected undercarriage of the Biscayne creaked and groaned, especially when I slowed to corner one of Trona�s small streets. At one certain corner where an old man was usually sitting outside on his porch, I heard, �Hey, Flintstone,� when I cornered past. I did not know if he was commenting on how I resembled Fred Flintstone or how my creaking car sounded like some stone-wheeled vehicle from the television series.
I was 14 years-old and a freshman in high school when I was presented with the �51 Chevy for my very own. I enlisted an older cousin, Bill Cagle, to help me smooth out my shifting and to analyze my overall handling of the vehicle. We used a gravel road, one between two paved roads running in the same direction, near the Old Crow distillery site. He seemed to think I was taking it all too seriously and advised me to just relax more and I would be okay. It dawned on me that was the type of advice I would likely get from anyone older, and that I was on my own with the machine and Galena would have to suffer the consequences along with myself.
As it turned out, I did not do too badly, a couple of dings and nothing major or catastrophic over the delicate next few weeks. I was issued a restricted license, of course, one that you can receive in Kansas at age 14. I was only supposed to drive the car on agriculture errands, and certain other occasions, and not at all after six p.m. I drove it to school and back each day and on all occasions and at any time. I figured the more practice, the better. I have yet to run my first agricultural errand. If I had to wait on that, I would have never gotten behind a wheel.
I was so excited about the car; I just had to give my grandmother a ride. �No, no, no, Bryce, boy, you go on with it. I�m too old for that, � she said, good-naturedly. I politely insisted and finally talked her into it. �Just around the block or two, � I said. Returning in front of the house, she said, �Goody.� I was glad I took her for that ride, short though it was. It was the only time. She died not long after.
Just a few short months later in the summer of 1958, I drove, with my grandfather in his 1957 medium green Chevy, all the way to Trona from Galena for a two-week vacation. It was not that we would drive nothing but a Chevy. I remembered a roomy-as-a-house 1939 Packard. We stopped in Albuquerque where my grandfather called Virgil Duley from a roadside pay phone. Virgil was a young man who had lived across the street from us in the Spring Grove region of Galena. He had worked at the local Feezell�s Market, and the experience had somehow landed him a job as a grocery store manager off Route 66 in Albuquerque. We gave Virgil directions as to where we were located and waited while he arrived.
Albuquerque was about eight hundred miles from Galena and the unofficial midpoint to Trona.
Once in Trona, it was oven hot. Searles Valley, where most of the inhabitants work in one of two chemical plants, is just a short distance removed from Death Valley proper. My grandfather would sleep outside at night in either his car or his son�s, Walter. The cold air from the cooler in the house gave him respiratory problems. It did for me, too. The only type of air conditioning we were acclimated to was an open window. I was not about to sleep outside, so I suffered through some minor sore throat irritation and upper throat discomfort.
I attended the Foursquare Church in the evenings with Walter�s wife, Annabelle, and the boys. (Annabelle and Walter are both from Galena). Uncle Walter, like the other men in our Martin family, did not go to church. The Trona house of worship reminded me of my Assembly of God Church in Galena on Main Street. At the Trona church, I met a local girl, Bonnie Alter, who captured my attention. We were later to keep in touch with letters.
Near the end of the vacation, I drove us across more desert and down the El Cajon Pass among trees and grass to the city of Rialto, near San Bernardino, where my grandfather had a visit planned with a nephew, George M. Shaw. The two sat around George�s kitchen table and talked all afternoon. I drove us back to Trona the next morning.
When it was time to leave Searles Valley and reroute back to Galena, I drove to Barstow where we stopped to eat. I left the restaurant first, while my grandfather stayed to pay the tab. Outside, I was twirling the car keys when a pair of Marine M.P.�s wearing white armbands and wanting to see my identification approached me. I showed them my driver�s license, but they were not interested in that. Finally, my grandfather arrived. He listened and seemed to understand what they were asking. �He does not have a service card, he�s just fourteen,� he told them. That satisfied them and they drove away. �They wanted to see your military identification. They thought you were at least eighteen.�
I remembered all that while getting dressed and getting ready to drive to my first ever court appearance. I had fifty-five dollars in cash. I had no real idea what the fine might be, or if I was to receive a fine at all, but I did not think it would be any amount near fifty-five dollars. Oh, well, I had better place it all in my wallet, in case I have car trouble or some type of emergency.
I had already talked to some of my co-workers at Stauffer about the ticket. I was told that the judge would have a copy of my driving record, all previous citations and so forth. When I reminded that it was my first time in court, and that I had no previous citations, they all said the same thing: Then, he will go easy on you.
In court, the judge read the charges and asked how I pled.
�Guilty, your honor,� I said. I was not so sure, though, that he actually had a copy of my driving record or was aware that I had no prior violations. I felt it in my best interests to let him know.
I was quick to add, �This is my first time in court, my first ticket, your honor.�
�So, this is your first ticket,� he repeated, looking down at some papers and then focusing back on me. �That will be fifty-three dollars or three days in jail.�
I was a little stunned. I was angry at how he seemed to relish his words, and the severity of the punishment. If he was trying to prove a point of some kind, it was only that he came across as a jerk. The point being that life offers jerks galore and this is just one of many I will confront. I would have told him that, too, if he would have asked.
I left happy in the fact I had started the trip from my relatives� house with a full tank of gas. What had I learned from all of it? Something that I already knew: If you do not put yourself in such circumstances, you will not be subject to the particular whims of that fate -- something along those lines.
You do not necessarily live and learn; you live and do. I made that up for the moment and decided that would be my motto, at least until I thought of another one.
by Bryce Martin
Here I was with my first traffic ticket and scheduled court appearance, after five years of driving and countless miles traveled. It was just a few weeks ago when the odds caught up with me. An oscillating red light (dimmed some by the light of day) and the sound of a siren coming from a California Highway Patrol car near Red Rock Canyon clamored for my attention. I was driving just a few miles over the speed limit, according to the officer, but enough for a speeding violation citation. As noted on my copy, I was to appear before the judge in Johannesburg on such and such a date. That part rather threw me� Johannesburg. I mean it was not even a place you encountered along the highway. It was off the highway, kind of out of the way. However, since that was the closest settlement to the violation, I guessed that it made sense to attend court there.
At age 19, I considered myself to be an experienced driver, and my 1958 Chevrolet Biscayne was my fifth car; all of them stick shifts and two-doors except for this one, and all of them Chevies.
My first car was a dark green 1951 Chevrolet Deluxe two-door. The total cost for it in late 1957 was $312.50. It was equipped with a standard, column shift (�three on the tree�), fender skirts, and a sun visor. Next came a hand-me-down �54 Bel-Air, a light blue and white two-tone and clean as a pin; a �55 standard post 210 series, light green, two-door; and a custom-painted dark blue �53 hardtop with a converted floor shift.
The neglected undercarriage of the Biscayne creaked and groaned, especially when I slowed to corner one of Trona�s small streets. At one certain corner where an old man was usually sitting outside on his porch, I heard, �Hey, Flintstone,� when I cornered past. I did not know if he was commenting on how I resembled Fred Flintstone or how my creaking car sounded like some stone-wheeled vehicle from the television series.
I was 14 years-old and a freshman in high school when I was presented with the �51 Chevy for my very own. I enlisted an older cousin, Bill Cagle, to help me smooth out my shifting and to analyze my overall handling of the vehicle. We used a gravel road, one between two paved roads running in the same direction, near the Old Crow distillery site. He seemed to think I was taking it all too seriously and advised me to just relax more and I would be okay. It dawned on me that was the type of advice I would likely get from anyone older, and that I was on my own with the machine and Galena would have to suffer the consequences along with myself.
As it turned out, I did not do too badly, a couple of dings and nothing major or catastrophic over the delicate next few weeks. I was issued a restricted license, of course, one that you can receive in Kansas at age 14. I was only supposed to drive the car on agriculture errands, and certain other occasions, and not at all after six p.m. I drove it to school and back each day and on all occasions and at any time. I figured the more practice, the better. I have yet to run my first agricultural errand. If I had to wait on that, I would have never gotten behind a wheel.
I was so excited about the car; I just had to give my grandmother a ride. �No, no, no, Bryce, boy, you go on with it. I�m too old for that, � she said, good-naturedly. I politely insisted and finally talked her into it. �Just around the block or two, � I said. Returning in front of the house, she said, �Goody.� I was glad I took her for that ride, short though it was. It was the only time. She died not long after.
Just a few short months later in the summer of 1958, I drove, with my grandfather in his 1957 medium green Chevy, all the way to Trona from Galena for a two-week vacation. It was not that we would drive nothing but a Chevy. I remembered a roomy-as-a-house 1939 Packard. We stopped in Albuquerque where my grandfather called Virgil Duley from a roadside pay phone. Virgil was a young man who had lived across the street from us in the Spring Grove region of Galena. He had worked at the local Feezell�s Market, and the experience had somehow landed him a job as a grocery store manager off Route 66 in Albuquerque. We gave Virgil directions as to where we were located and waited while he arrived.
Albuquerque was about eight hundred miles from Galena and the unofficial midpoint to Trona.
Once in Trona, it was oven hot. Searles Valley, where most of the inhabitants work in one of two chemical plants, is just a short distance removed from Death Valley proper. My grandfather would sleep outside at night in either his car or his son�s, Walter. The cold air from the cooler in the house gave him respiratory problems. It did for me, too. The only type of air conditioning we were acclimated to was an open window. I was not about to sleep outside, so I suffered through some minor sore throat irritation and upper throat discomfort.
I attended the Foursquare Church in the evenings with Walter�s wife, Annabelle, and the boys. (Annabelle and Walter are both from Galena). Uncle Walter, like the other men in our Martin family, did not go to church. The Trona house of worship reminded me of my Assembly of God Church in Galena on Main Street. At the Trona church, I met a local girl, Bonnie Alter, who captured my attention. We were later to keep in touch with letters.
Near the end of the vacation, I drove us across more desert and down the El Cajon Pass among trees and grass to the city of Rialto, near San Bernardino, where my grandfather had a visit planned with a nephew, George M. Shaw. The two sat around George�s kitchen table and talked all afternoon. I drove us back to Trona the next morning.
When it was time to leave Searles Valley and reroute back to Galena, I drove to Barstow where we stopped to eat. I left the restaurant first, while my grandfather stayed to pay the tab. Outside, I was twirling the car keys when a pair of Marine M.P.�s wearing white armbands and wanting to see my identification approached me. I showed them my driver�s license, but they were not interested in that. Finally, my grandfather arrived. He listened and seemed to understand what they were asking. �He does not have a service card, he�s just fourteen,� he told them. That satisfied them and they drove away. �They wanted to see your military identification. They thought you were at least eighteen.�
I remembered all that while getting dressed and getting ready to drive to my first ever court appearance. I had fifty-five dollars in cash. I had no real idea what the fine might be, or if I was to receive a fine at all, but I did not think it would be any amount near fifty-five dollars. Oh, well, I had better place it all in my wallet, in case I have car trouble or some type of emergency.
I had already talked to some of my co-workers at Stauffer about the ticket. I was told that the judge would have a copy of my driving record, all previous citations and so forth. When I reminded that it was my first time in court, and that I had no previous citations, they all said the same thing: Then, he will go easy on you.
In court, the judge read the charges and asked how I pled.
�Guilty, your honor,� I said. I was not so sure, though, that he actually had a copy of my driving record or was aware that I had no prior violations. I felt it in my best interests to let him know.
I was quick to add, �This is my first time in court, my first ticket, your honor.�
�So, this is your first ticket,� he repeated, looking down at some papers and then focusing back on me. �That will be fifty-three dollars or three days in jail.�
I was a little stunned. I was angry at how he seemed to relish his words, and the severity of the punishment. If he was trying to prove a point of some kind, it was only that he came across as a jerk. The point being that life offers jerks galore and this is just one of many I will confront. I would have told him that, too, if he would have asked.
I left happy in the fact I had started the trip from my relatives� house with a full tank of gas. What had I learned from all of it? Something that I already knew: If you do not put yourself in such circumstances, you will not be subject to the particular whims of that fate -- something along those lines.
You do not necessarily live and learn; you live and do. I made that up for the moment and decided that would be my motto, at least until I thought of another one.
Friday, August 29, 2003
TO BE JUST SO POPULARLY GREAT
by Bryce Martin
Three things I just do not get: Garth Brooks, NASCAR, and pay per-view wrestling.
Now I can add another: awards shows. To be more specific, I should say televised awards shows.
Take music awards shows, please, any of them. You have people who, during the course of the year, had recordings that gained fame for those doing the recordings, adulation from fans, money, and all the big ticket add-ons. Are they not giving us all the pleasure we can stand? It seems not. After all that, they want to get together in some huge auditorium setting and pat each other on the back all evening for our viewing pleasure.
Not mine, thank you.
They are playing Big Shot.
It is not enough that these prima donnas get all the glory. They have to rub it in our faces, too.
Not mine, thank you.
I cannot imagine why anyone would watch such blatant pandering. Even worse, the same people who are labeled �artists,� are proving just the opposite by even taking part.
I have no problems with any of the entertainment groups having a private get-together to honor their own. I would encourage it. When it becomes a made-for-the-public event, it becomes forced and strained. The television awards shows are reduced to a party of self-centered swells back slapping each other into the night. At home in our living rooms we are reduced to fawning servility.
The whole shebang gives diarrhea a new egress.
How thrilling it is to watch them high-arm the trophies and thank the lesserlights for aiding their rise to fame and glory.
There amounts to a glut of these shows. The networks choose the participants for the shows, not the industry being honored. They are told what to wear, where to stand, what to sing, how long to sing it, when to clear out and go home.
The country music genre is toned down to where it is just a shadow of its true being. To appeal to the largest number of viewers, the networks take as much country as possible out of the country.
So much for honoring your own your own way.
by Bryce Martin
Three things I just do not get: Garth Brooks, NASCAR, and pay per-view wrestling.
Now I can add another: awards shows. To be more specific, I should say televised awards shows.
Take music awards shows, please, any of them. You have people who, during the course of the year, had recordings that gained fame for those doing the recordings, adulation from fans, money, and all the big ticket add-ons. Are they not giving us all the pleasure we can stand? It seems not. After all that, they want to get together in some huge auditorium setting and pat each other on the back all evening for our viewing pleasure.
Not mine, thank you.
They are playing Big Shot.
It is not enough that these prima donnas get all the glory. They have to rub it in our faces, too.
Not mine, thank you.
I cannot imagine why anyone would watch such blatant pandering. Even worse, the same people who are labeled �artists,� are proving just the opposite by even taking part.
I have no problems with any of the entertainment groups having a private get-together to honor their own. I would encourage it. When it becomes a made-for-the-public event, it becomes forced and strained. The television awards shows are reduced to a party of self-centered swells back slapping each other into the night. At home in our living rooms we are reduced to fawning servility.
The whole shebang gives diarrhea a new egress.
How thrilling it is to watch them high-arm the trophies and thank the lesserlights for aiding their rise to fame and glory.
There amounts to a glut of these shows. The networks choose the participants for the shows, not the industry being honored. They are told what to wear, where to stand, what to sing, how long to sing it, when to clear out and go home.
The country music genre is toned down to where it is just a shadow of its true being. To appeal to the largest number of viewers, the networks take as much country as possible out of the country.
So much for honoring your own your own way.