Was it ten years ago FOX sent interns onto the streets of NooYawk with iPhones?
I laughed.
Now I am crying.
Railroads, and airplanes, and backpacks…
Long ago, my family and I travelled with a tent, and later on we carried the tent on our backs. I even got involved with a 4-H group and led some hikes. The Allegheny Plateau was one of my favorite destinations.
A railroad once built a viaduct over a deep valley there… a marvel of engineering at the time.
On one camping trip we visited the Kinzua Viaduct, and walked across it. Carol was terrified, both boys got a kick out of it. We even clambered down the steep hill to look at a couple of the foundation structures.
You could ride excursion trains across it.
When I was a student pilot, on one of the mandatory solo cross country flights I went to the airport near there. I asked the guy in the tower where it was. He told me it was near the outer marker. That would be right under me ;-(
It was impressive how it looked like a tinkertoy from a few thousand feet.
Years later a tornado knocked half of it down.
I will forever regret not taking one of those excursions.
Now it is just a fantastic lookout site. Allegheny-National-Forest-Visitors-Bureau
The inside info: at the turn of the (twentieth) century, they ran excursions over it too. They gave away salted peanuts for free. They sold lemonade for a price.
American ingenuity!
Cleaning out the attic….
A career of news photography is a lot like being a hobo hopping trains and picking up stogies when you can. It can be very rewarding, it has its forgettable days, and it has unforgettably bad days.
Sometimes you look back and have no memory of what you were thinking when you shot something, but it is kind of cool you kept the negs.
I have no idea who these people are, or why they are doing this, but it sure was cute. The fact I still have the negs is proof the pix did not make the paper.
Forty-some years later, they get published. Cute pix ALWAYS get published.
I bet a lot of my past colleagues can relate.
Hello world!
The Battle of Maxton Field
In 1958, in North Carolina, it was the Klan against the Native Americans (the Lumbee tribe, to be exact) and the Klan came out second best by a huge margin. They made Life Magazine, in fact. One of the pics in Life was a pair of Lumbee wrapped in the KKK banner. One wore a VFW cap. He was a flight engineer on a bomber in WWII. Clearly, the Klan was outmatched and outmaneuvered.
It inspired a folk song, and my girlfriend in 1965 recorded it in a hole in the wall studio we rented to make a demo tape. We cut a number of tracks, and the tape has not weathered the passage of time too well (nor was it a real good recording to start with). She flubs a word in the song, but we never got back to fixing it… too bad.
Her parents immigrated from Lebanon; they were the salt of the earth, and a stellar example of why we should not discriminate against the traveller. The guy on Ellis Island who processed them could not spell Jacquies parents surname, so he made it “Dicie” and they carried it proudly thereafter.
Anyway, it seems really appropriate to put it out there today. Soon I will post some others, especially “Birmingham Sunday”.
For now, enjoy Jacqueline Dicie (Habeeya).
p.s. This is on my own server, so Facebook can’t interfere… you might have to download the MP3 to hear it.