Lookit What I Got in the Mail Today!

[Recommended listening while reading this post: "Teach Your Children" by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young.]

My friend ronniecat visited Cuba recently, and sent me a souvenir from her trip. When I opened the package, the first thing I saw was the box -- a delightful recipe box with a chicken theme, appropriate for Ft. Harrington. Inside the box was the brown baseball, which ronnie described thusly in her note that accompanied the package:

"... I bought this at a market in Old Havana [...] these had wooden balls at the core [...] when Cubans play 'beisbol,' this is typical of what they're playing with, though this is a step up, as store-bought, from 'I made it myself' balls!"

Unknown to ronnie, after the box, and after the ball, a whole series of memories came tumbling out of the brown paper package:

When I was a little kid in Upstate New York, I loved the game of baseball, and I was enchanted by the Brooklyn Dodgers, whose games I could hear on the radio. I was a chunky, awkward little kid, though, and wasn't very good at athletic enterprises:

Little League tryouts, spring, 1958. I'm the kid throwing at the target.

When I was 11 years old, I tried out for Little League. I was one of the few kids who didn't make the cut for any team at all. I was crushed. My Dad was inspired.

He built a number of training facilities around our home in the backcountry, including:

Hand-eye coordination wall, 1959

... this "bounce-back" stone wall and flagstone terrace. Its function was to improve my fielding abilities by providing unpredictable ricochets which trained me to react to batted balls quickly (very quickly, since I was to use a tennis ball, not a baseball), and...

Batting cage, 1960

... a batting cage, where he would pitch balls to me from the regulation 60 feet, 6 inches away. He enticed me to learn to switch-hit by having me simulate the Dodgers' (by then in the faraway land of Los Angeles) lineup according to whether the hitter was right- or left-handed.

It became clear pretty soon, though, that hitting wasn't going to be my strength, so we switched to pitching. By 1962, he had trained me to throw accurately enough that I could do pretty well in summer-league competition:

Me pitching for the Norwich Masons against the Sherburne town team, 1962

By then, I was in high school, and the goal was to be a pitcher for the Norwich Purple Tornado. Dad's training went into high gear. My athleticism was still meager, but I was a strong, chunky guy, and Dad knew a thing or two about leverage. In the summer of '62, he had me throw over and over again with a prop that engaged my best assets (ahem), husky thighs and a big butt: a folding chair placed right in front of me. By having to kick my left leg over the back of that chair, I learned to bring maximum force into my pitches, and eventually developed a nasty fastball. Poor Dad, the batter in all this training, developed quite a colorful left side that summer from all the bruises. Velocity, he could train me for -- accuracy, not so much. Unfortunately, I can't find a picture in his slide trove of the infamous chair.

Fireballer in training, 1963

All of his and my efforts paid off in 1964, my Junior year in high school. I made the varsity team, and was their ace starting pitcher for that one season. There is not a single picture of that chapter. Dad couldn't stand to do anything but sit on the back rail of the bleachers while I was pitching, anxiously chewing on his fingernails, and he never brought a camera to any of my games as a varsity pitcher. I did okay, not great, because I still couldn't accurately guide my pitches -- I still hold the league record for hit batsmen in a season (primarily because the league dissolved the next year, but still...), and the Catholic kids who batted against me would cross themselves before every pitch.

The coach was a former minor-league pro player who knew some scouts, and (I think as a favor to my Dad, but I don't know for sure) he brought in a Yankees' scout to watch one of my games. His advice to me after the game was blunt: I could throw balls past high school kids, but there was no way I could ever do well even in the low minors, so I should concentrate on my studies.

So I did. And I never played organized ball again after that season, but I wasn't bitter about it at all. I pretty much knew that was the case, anyway, and Dad and I had already proved that I was better than somebody who couldn't make Little League!

More importantly, Dad and I had worked on something important together, for crucially formative years for each of us, and had accomplished much more than baseball alone could account for.

Veterans' Park, Norwich, New York: the home field of the Norwich Purple Tornado

I took the last picture in the summer of 2001, when I made a pilgrimage back to Chenango county to scatter my parents' ashes in the nearby Whaupaunaucau forest, across Thompson Creek from the little house I grew up in, and its hillside lot where Dad built the batting cage and all the rest. The little grandstand looked bigger when I was playing earnestly there, and you can see the corner rail, high up in the back, where Dad sat and gnawed his fingernails so many years ago.

Thank you, ronnie. Thank you so very, very much.

[Coda: the title of this post is meant to echo the one you can see by clicking here.]

Lookit What I Got in the Mail!

Dead Cow

Brian Fies just made my day! Regular readers of this blog (and the six of you know who you are) will recognize this as an illustration of the end of my Dad's story about burying a cow in "What a Man and Two Boys Really Makes," originally posted last month. That blog entry has now been updated to include this little gem.

I think I'll hang the original artwork, with frame but without explanation, on my office wall, and just let visitors wonder...

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What a Man and Two Boys Really Makes [updated]

[Update, August 22, 2007: Brian improved the content of this post immeasurably today -- you'll see how in the last drawing!]

Brian Fies recently posted a fascinating blog entry about certain aspects of how to draw mammals in cartoon form. Included was this great example of how not to do things, a “table-leg" cow, which I hope Brian will forgive me for filching from him without permission:

When I first saw that, I was reminded of a story from my Dad’s youth that he used to tell frequently (you’ll see why I was reminded of it if you actually read this blog entry all the way to the end!) I forgot about that until yesterday, when I stumbled upon his typewritten account of the incident when sorting through some old papers in my office. I’ve reproduced it below (courtesy of OCR software from HP, which is entirely responsible for any misspellings or typos, and that’s the truth).

But first, some background:

Dad was born in 1915, the seventh of eight children of a machine-gang foreman (and trolley motorman) in Syracuse, New York. He was a teenager during the Depression, and, to help ends meet, he was sent off many summers to work for room and board at a farm owned by friends of the family, Wilbur and Leta Saltsman. The farm was near the hamlet of Stone Arabia in the Canajoharie region of the Mohawk Valley, Upstate New York.

Readying a field for winter, Saltsman Farm, Fall 1946.

Dad treasured his summertime experiences on the farm, and kept in close touch with Wilbur and Leta throughout the rest of their lives (and Wilbur lived to be 100.) Dad passed away in 1999 at 83, and left behind thousands of pages of carefully typewritten reminiscences of his life – and a large fraction of them are of Wilbur and Leta Saltsman’s farm in Stone Arabia. The one below is left unedited [except for an early addition to clarify the dates]. The pictures in this post are from Dad’s collection of photos – equally as dauntingly large as is his body of written work to anyone foolish enough to try to catalog them. (Which reminds me: throughout his life, Dad proudly acknowledged Leta Saltsman’s assessment that he was “the stupidest smart man I ever did see!,” because that meant she thought he actually was smart, no matter what the qualifiers. Late in life, he passed that title along to me. Thanks, Dad.)

The black-and-white photo is from an early album (the caption is written in white ink in Dad’s hand) and the color photos are from a visit to the farm in 1946 to show off his new bride, my mom-to-be. Please click on any image to see a bigger version.

Enjoy!

- The Burial of the Cow -

A True and Virtually Unembellished Report

Of an Incident in the History of the Saltsman Farm Participated in, Attested to, and Related By

Lynn Harrington

*********************

The episode I have in mind took place nearly 60 years ago [now 76 years ago, in 1931 – SH]. I was 16 at the time, give or take a year, and Bob Ellwood was about a year older. The principal character in the incident was one among some 50 milk cows in Wilbur's herd. She was a big-bodied black-and-white Holstein, a good, productive milker and a valuable animal. It was summertime, and the cows were turned out to pasture after milking each morning and even­ing. Wilbur noticed that this cow's yield of milk was dropping off prematurely, and she seemed to be off her feed. So one evening he decided to keep her in the barn overnight, so he could check on her before bedtime. I went to the barn with him that night. We had left a forkful of nice green hay in front of her, but she hadn't touched it. She was lying down, just not doing anything, and Wilbur said he guessed he would have to call the vet to come take a look at her the next morning.

The Saltsman Farm central area, Fall, 1946. Note the cars (click on any image for a larger, better view.)

When morning came we found the cow wasn't going to need the vet. She had gone on to greener pastures. It was not an occasion for levity, but the thought now runs through my mind that after all those years of literally kicking the bucket, she had finally kicked it figuratively. In the process, she left us with a substantial problem of disposal. In those parts at the time if a farmer had a sick cow, what they called a knacker man would come and haul the poor critter away, to be butchered for dog food (or maybe hamburger). But they didn't want dead animals. There was no rendering plant within a long distance, and the carcasses were hard to handle. So it was up to us to dispose of that big old cow ourselves.

We hitched one of the horses to the stone boat, drew it up close to her, and the three of us, with a lot of grunting and straining, managed to get her loaded upon it. Then we let the horse drag the load out to a back corner of the day pasture, behind the barn. We had to get on with the milking, so Wilbur said we should dump her off the stone boat and leave her there. Bob and I were to bury her later. As it turned out, we didn't get to the job that day. We had the makings of several loads of hay all cut and drying fast in one of the meadows, and the forecast was for rain the coming night. Putting first things first, we spent the day hard at getting that good hay into the barn before the rain came. We didn't finish until about dark. Wilbur said that Bob and I should bury the cow first thing after morning chores the next day.

We were in the midst of a typical summer heat-wave just then, and by the time we boys got out behind the barn with our pick and shovels, we found a much larger cow than we had left there the previous morning. She was so bloated that her legs stuck right straight out as she lay there on her side. I sure didn't relish the idea of digging a hole big enough to accommodate such a carcass in that heat. Bob stood there for a few minutes, studying the situation. Then he said we didn't have to dig so big a hole. He took the pick and, working back of the cow, dug the sod out of what you could call a mirror image outline of the cuss. I just leaned on my shovel and watched him, wondering what he was up to. When he had finished that outlining, he explained. We could dig the dirt out of the figure he had marked out, going down deep enough to accommodate the cow's body. Her head and neck and legs would go into the exca­vations he had marked out for them, and he had even marked out a little trench for her tail. Once we had done the digging, all we would have to do would be to take her by the hoofs, flip her over, and she would drop right into her custom-made grave. Then we could cover her up, and the job would be done, with a minimum of digging.

That sounded like a pretty good idea to me, even though I felt a sort of uneasiness nagging at me, arising from what I had seen of the outcome of previous good ideas Bob had tried. For instance, there was the time we had what we fig­ured would be three loads of hay ready to get into the barn. Wilbur was away that day, so Bob sort of elected himself fore­man. He decided that we could make just two loads of it, by building them bigger than usual.

A load of hay on a wagon at the Saltsman farm in the Fall of 1946, about 15 years after this story took place. The woman is my mother; I was born the following June, so I may or may not be in this picture.
Notice the two-wire fence in the background: it's an electric fence, high-tech for '46.

That would mean one less trip to and from the meadow, and by leaving the second jumbo load on the barn floor for unloading the next day, we would only have to unload and mow away what amounted to a normal load-and-a­-half that afternoon. So off we went, I driving the team and tromping down the hay as he spread it out as it poured off the trailing pitcher. He built a whopping load, all right. It bulged out way over the top of the rack at the front of the rig and stuck out pretty far on both sides. After Bob slid down off the load to unhook the pitcher, he decided that he wouldn't try to climb up the rack onto the load for the ride back to the barn. "You take it on down," he said, "and I'll walk back." The team really had to lug to get that load out of the field and up to the summit of the lane before beginning the descent to the barn. Unloading of the wagons was done from the second level of the barn, which was reached by a pair of built-up driveways and short, roofed-over little plank bridges. The usual practice, as we approached with a load was to stir the horses to a faster pace, to give them a start for the incline of the driveway. This time was different. I could see right away that the load would never fit through the doorway, and even if it did, I was going to be swept right off the top of the load, even if I lay down flat. So I stopped the team. Bob was coming right behind, and yelled, "What did you stop for? They needed a start and you know it!" I slid down from the load and told him, "You built that load. You get it into the barn."

Bob fumed for a minute, then went to the horses' heads and took a short hold on the lines from their bridles. He tugged a t them, hollering for them to "Giddap!" The team knuckled down to the job, which was going to be a tough one. Bob, pulling on their lines, led the way up. Digging hard, the team got through the door and I heard the thunder of their hoofs pounding on the planks of the bridge.

And then, very suddenly, there was silence.

Bob hustled around and came out through the other door to look the situation over. It was plain to see what had happened. The first couple feet of that overload had wedged through the doorway, but that was as far as it was going. It was plugged in there, tight as a cork in a bottle. We had to unhook the team and lead them out to stand in the shade while we labored with might and main to fork off enough hay to get the load down to a size that would squeeze through. We forked some of it off the top, then tugged wads loose from the sides, sweating and straining to get things righted before Wilbur got home. We made it at last, but that was all the hay we got in that afternoon. We didn't bother to explain to Wilbur why we hadn't finished getting in all the dry hay, and he didn't ask. He just put it down to time wasted at some kind of tomfoolery he would just as soon not know about.

But to get back to the cow. We dug as Bob pro­posed, with the bulk of the dirt coming from the hole we were preparing for the main part of her body. Then we used the pick to clear out the trenches for the head and neck, legs, and tail. It was hot work, and as you might imagine, the flies were gath­ering around us pretty thick by that time. What they call olfac­tory exhaustion set in before long, and we were spared the annoyance of the odor that accompanied our work.

At last we had finished all the digging we figured would be necessary. Then we went to the side where the cow's legs stuck out. Stooping down and using both hands, each of us on the shank of one of the legs extending closer to the ground, we were set to flip her over and let her drop neatly into the excavation. "I'll count 1, 2, 3, HEAVE," Bob said. We both knew she was going to be heavy, but we really didn't realize how heavy until Bob's "HEAVE" sounded. We knew right then that there wasn't going to be any flipping. We were in for a real job just to roll her over. But roll her we did. We never got to the point of rolling her all the way over, however. By the time we had her with her legs sticking straight up, the dirt at the edge of our dig gave way, and down she slid into the hole, with enough dirt sliding down under her so that she came to rest with her body just barely below ground level and those cussed legs aiming at the sky.

There was just no way we were going to move that cow any farther. We decided to make the best of a bad job, and set to work moving her neck and head down into the place we had prepared for them, but at an angle quite different from the one we planned. The only thing that remained to do was to cover her up as thoroughly as we could. When we had finished there was a considerable mound of dirt on top of the gravesite, and sticking up through it were the cow's vertical shanks and hoofs. We could have buried the tail, but Bob thought it would look a little more as if we had planned it that way if we left the tuft at the end of the tail sticking up above ground, to make a set with the legs.

And so we had buried the cow. By that time we were content to live with the unorthodoxy of the burial, and as a matter of fact thought we had done rather a special job. Wilbur thought so, too, when he saw what we had done, but from his viewpoint "special" had a somewhat different con­notation than it had for us.

All in all, the episode reminded me of a tart observation I had heard a neighbor make when he called on Wilbur one day. The two of us were working together on some­thing when this old time farmer showed up. He looked me over with what seemed a jaundiced eye, and said, "This young-feller gain' to be one of your hands this summer?" When Wilbur said I was, the man said, "Well, I guess you know your business, but you know the old sayin', 'A man and a boy makes a man and a half; a man and two boys makes just a man. '" I winced at the time, but the old fellow was pretty close to the mark.

===============================================Lynn Harrington, 1980.

Chenango

County Scenes

If I lived on the planet Mercury, I would be about 250 years old. If I lived on Mars, I would be coming up on my 32nd birthday. But I live on Earth, where I just turned 60, which seems to be a significant thing, if I let it.

And I'm letting it.

It's set me thinking off in a number of directions. One of those is, predictably, where I came from in the geographic sense: Chenango County, upstate New York.

The last time I was there was in August of the year 2000, when I went back to scatter my parents' ashes. They spent the last 15 years of their lives in Florida (and came to regret that decision more and more as time went by, because they loved upstate more than they knew when they left), and they died within weeks of each other in 1999, after 55 years of companionship. Their ashes spent the winter of '99-'00 in elegant wooden boxes here at Ft. Harrington in California, and I carried them back across the country to Chenango in the height of my home county's finest season, summer. Mother's youngest brother traveled from his home in Georgia to meet me there, and we scattered his sister's ashes, mingled with her husband's, in the Whaupaunaucau State Forest, just across the Thompson Creek Valley from their longtime home, and the place where I grew up.

I won't divulge where, exactly, the scattering occurred, because it was done without benefit of permit and I don't want them disturbed by any but natural forces. I will say, though, that it was a place where we often walked to and, when we did so, the forest hadn't grown to the point where it is now. It was within sight of our house.

I took the few days around that time to wander, solitary (since Diane didn't accompany me on this trip), through places of memory and significance. Some of those are pictured below:

Ralph and Marie Inman's House, Washington Street, Oxford, New York

The house on Washington Street in Oxford is the site of my first memory. Mom and Dad rented the upper floor from the Inmans, and I was three years old when we moved from there to our little house on King's Settlement Road outside of Norwich in 1950. My earliest memory is of my mother telling me that we were going to move. I have no idea how I felt about it, or what I thought that meant... but I remember, clear as the keyboard in front of me now, the plate of hot dog pieces and baked beans that was in front of me at that moment.

Little baseball field near Gibson School in Norwich

This was where my friends and I would play pick-up baseball games in the summertime when we were, oh, maybe nine to twelve years old, and I do believe that the screen is the same one that was there 50 years ago. Our games were spur-of-the moment things, not "organized" in any sense of the word, and we would gather by way of telephone "do you wanna play ball?" and "on the hill" and by way of bicycle, with a treasured baseball glove hanging from the right- or left-handlebar by its wrist-strap. Sometimes we'd play from when dew still wet the grass until the sun went down over West Hill. Just to the right of the bare patch around "home" is where I, barefoot, stepped on a bee in '57 or '58, and my heel still has a little, tiny white scar to remind me.

Veterans' Park, Norwich

Only a few years later (but it seemed like an age then), I was pitching on this regulation-sized diamond. I was a pretty decent high school pitcher. At every game I pitched, my Dad (who was my primary coach and instructor) sat on the railing behind the top row of the little stands (upper-left), with the tips of the fingers of his right hand between his lips, as though he were chewing on his fingernails. Looking at the picture above, I swear I can still see him there.

Grand houses on North Broad Street, Norwich

Norwich was a fairly typical upstate town, if off any beaten track since the Chenango Canal and the NYO&W railroad went out of business. A few wealthy families lived in fine houses on the main thoroughfares, Broad Street north-and-south and Main Street east-and-west. I knew a few kids from those families, but most of my friends were from...

Houses near the old railyards, Norwich

... the neighborhoods off the grid's axes, the neighborhoods of primarily Italian ("the St. Bart's Church kids") and Irish ("the St. Paul's Church kids") 2nd- or 3rd-generation families who had come to Norwich originally for work in the shoe factory, or the textile mill, or the "pill factory" (the Norwich Pharmacal Company, where my dad was an executive and my mother was a research biochemist.)

North Norwich from the East

While the County Seat of Chenango, Norwich had a population of only around 8,000 in the 1950's and '60's. The county was (and is) very rural, and its scenery is pastoral. Above is a view from a hilltop cornfield down into the Chenango River Valley and the hamlet of North Norwich.

Pastorale #1: Long view

View down the Thompson Creek valley westward to the Chenango Valley in the distance. This is the little valley in which I did most of what growing up I managed to do.

Pastorale #2: Meadow Detail

The Chenango River runs north-south through its County, eventually merging with the Susquehanna in Binghamton. It follows an old glacial track, as do most of the watersheds in its part of upstate New York, from the Finger Lakes to the western slopes of the Catskills:

Downstream View

Upstream view

The Red Mill Bridge

The Red Mill Bridge crosses the Canasawacta Creek on the west side of the "city" of Norwich. It marks a peaceful, still part of the creek, rich with flat stones on the bottom, which could be upturned in summer to find all sorts of wonderful critters hiding underneath them, or could be picked up and tossed with skill to skip across the surface in ever-shortening jumps... just as the years since I did that have jumped and skipped in ever-shortening steps across their decades.

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Now, here's the rub: Two of the pictures above are impostors: they were taken in counties not named Chenango in a State not named New York. Can you identify them? If so, can you identify where they were taken?

I'll let any who want to take a shot at it do so in comments for a week (or until someone nails both of them, if that happens sooner.) Good luck!

Empty Chairs

Above is a picture of Ft. Harrington's "potting shed" -- actually, in practice, a little storage house that's mostly used as an animal infirmary for those of our menagerie who require its benefits. It's a well-insulated, spacious (for a little quadruped or a bird), private place, just right for healing.

It is also the last place Max lived in on a regular basis, before he joined the many animal companions I've had who have pre-deceased me.

While wandering out there this evening to store some stuff, a couple of things occurred to me.

First: I haven't updated this blog in a while. That's because I'm working up a major (for me) piece on astronomical images... which actually, probably won't really be of interest to the four or five people who read this thing (:-)).

Second: Looking at that place where Max used to live reminded me, again, of how tenuous our connections are to others -- of whatever species -- because of our inevitable mortality.

My Dad had a large number of "chestnuts" that he would trot out whenever appropriate. This is one of them: "What really makes you feel old isn't gray hair or wrinkles or infirmities -- it's the empty chairs."

Here is a picture of full chairs:

It was taken by my Dad in the summer of 1968 and shows (from left to right) me, my then-wife Mary, my mother, my Dad's place, and my son, Doug, in his high chair. We are in a picnic area that my Dad constructed in a back lot behind the house I grew up in (visible in the background) in upstate New York.

Of the five people involved in this photo (including the guy behind the camera), I am the only one left alive. Mary died in 2004, Mom and Dad in 1999, and Doug in 2006. Their chairs are all empty now, and, man, does that make me feel old.

What makes me feel young once in a while is the realization that whatever I do for my students will be part of their memories years from now, after whatever grade they get in my course ceases to be of any importance, and it should be a warm part of their memories. Warmth and youth trump empty chairs.

So, ultimately, does the fact that our chairs used to be full. Below, my Dad is pitching to me in a baseball batting cage he built in our back lot. Good God, how full can a chair be, and lastingly so? Not much more, to be sure.

Max Came Home on Wednesday

I took Kelsey-the-Dog in for his annual checkup this past Wednesday before going to work. Kelsey checked out fine, as always, and the staff had a little package ready for me to pick up. Its contents are shown above.

Click here to see more about Max. (To racsers: you've seen this before, but it's okay to see it again!)