Walking the Berkshires

Here Comes Another One

Folks in the Berkshires are unlikely to warm up to the new line of presidential 1$ coins scheduled for release every three months, beginning in 2007.  We had no use for the previous attempts to put higher value change in our pockets, either.  Since 1879, Crane & Co. of Dalton Massachusetts has won the exclusive right to produce the paper used in United States currency, so as you might imagine the paperless dollar is especially unwelcome here.

Poor, unloved Susan B Anthony was a doomed dollar coin design, too difficult to distinguish from a Quarter.  The Sacagawea dollar that succeeded it had the advantage of a different size and golden color, but ended up hoarded by collectors rather than recirculated in the economy.  While promoters of the US presidential series see it as capitalizing on the highly popular line of State Quarters, these dollars are essentially commemoratives of greater educational value and collectibility than utility as currency.  They do not replace the paper dollar, nor the Sacagawea one. 

They also present something of as challenge to casual collectors.   If you want to collect the entire run of US quarters for the fifty states, you'll end up putting $12.50 away in your sock drawer.  If you have two kids, and want to be able to display the reverse side as well, it will set you back $50.  Do the same with the dead presidents up to Reagan (counting Grover Cleveland twice, since he gets a coin for each of his non-consecutive terms), and you are talking about $152. But figure that at a rate of 4 coins a year, Gerald Ford would be 102 in 2015, two years before his dollar would be up as 38th president and the minimum amount of time after a former president's death for him to qualify for his portrait on a coin. So any way you look at it, acquiring the whole thing from loose change is likely to be both harder and more of a hardship.

Automatic transit ticket vending machines in Philadelphia, New York and elsewhere have become massive distribution centers for dollar coins given out as change.  Put a $20 in for a $2 fare and you'd better have deep pockets or a large purse.  But don't plan on spending any of it in the Berkshires.  We like our dollars tattered and locally produced.

A Nose for Trouble

Nautical charts of the coastal waters of the Eastern United States still mark the positions of unexploded depth charges from WWII.  As long as you are not on a fishing trawler or incredibly unlucky about you drop your anchor, these pose a minimal risk to human life and property.  On the other hand, there are upwards of 20 million land mines strewn across half the countries in Africa, and these are by no means precisely mapped.  Landmines kill or maim tens of thousands of civilians every year.  I remember parts of northern Namibia in the early 1990s that had not been de-mined, were unavailable for cultivation, and that produced new casualties every month.  Cambodia, Afghanistan, Angola and Mozambique are among the most heavily mined countries on earth, and the social and economic consequences of land mines for these under-developed nations has been likened to a pandemic.

De-mining resources are expensive, limited and insufficient to the daunting task of clearing mined land decades after the armed conflicts when the explosives were laid have ceased.  Affordable, effective mine detection methods are desperately needed.  The Belgian de-mining research group APOPO, whose Flemish acronym translates: "product development geared toward the de-mining of antipersonnel mines", has hit on a novel solution with mine-sniffing rats.

The Gambian Giant Pouch Rat is as large as a domestic cat.  They apparently make good pets. According to APOPO,

"Compared to dogs or mechanical sensors rats have many potential advantages. They have a highly developed olfactory organ, they are small and as such, easily transported and accommodated. A rat kennel can be relatively small and still facilitate a high number of rats: 20-30 rats can easily be transported in one car. Second- or third-generation rats that have been socialized are friendly and easy to respond to for humans. More specifically, African Giant Pouched Rats are endemic in Africa and resistant to most tropical diseases. Another advantage they offer is that they are easy to breed and train due to their explorative behaviour and good search motivation. Another asset is their ability to remain concentrated for longer periods of time. And finally, they are trained on food reward and as such do not bond to an individual handler, so that in an operational stage, one handler could deal with many rats consecutively."

Results have been very encouraging in Mozambique where the rats have been deployed.  The New York Times did an article two years ago about the field trials and so far each rat is averaging an 80% detection rate and less than 10% false detection.  Using three rates at a time yields nearly 100% detection rates. 

A gift in support of these mine-sniffing rats will be among my charitable donations this holiday season.  You can do so here.

Cabinet of Curiosities

The title of this post probably should have been the name of this blog.  So one might assume, given my recent posts dedicated to the unusual, the archival, and the scannable items of historic interest that I have accrued in my first four decades.  I confess that coming from a family of hoarders, with an eye toward the historic record as well as an inability to declutter, I have more family relics to begin with than is, perhaps, the norm.  Yet a curator must also accumulate as well as conserve, and my great grandchildren may find items in their inheritance for which I am the source and which may provoke as much curiosity from them as 130-year-old tortillas and Union army uniform button earrings have for me.

Here, for example, is one of several unusual teeth they might discover among my effects.  It is a wicked looking, scimitar shaped canine tooth from the upper left side of the jaw, about 18 mm long.  It has small serrations on the cutting edge.  It comes from one of the most omnivorous of African creatures, the Chacma baboon, and is from the skull of a partially grown individual that perished at the bottom of an empty water tank in northwest Namibia. 

This same tank caught another curious baboon when we were living there, a 3 month old female that was part of our family for several weeks and turned our lives, and hearts, topsy turvy.  We called her "bubblegum", a play on the Afrikaans word for baboon: bobbejaan . In some ways, she was our first child. There is a story here and one of these days I'll tell you about it.

Another item from this period in our lives is this remarkable necklace of sinew, plastic beads, and skinned bird feet. It was made by Ju/'hoan bushmen of the western Kalahari from the feet of one of several species of francolin, a bird traditionally held to have magical properties in their culture.  Viv lived and taught in Bushmanland from 1990-1992 when first we met, and I can vividly remember driving with her out into the bush to visit some of the scattered Ju/'hoan settlements and trade clothes and food for bead work and bows with poison-tipped arrows.  It was another world, out there in the thornveld with flamingos in the salt pans and baobabs stretching their tangled, ancient limbs above the savannah.  There were no tourists then - Namibia was barely independent - and we were as much a novelty to the Ju/'hoansi as they and their land were to us.

Our house is festooned with relics from our Africa years.  There are masks and spears and drums and items of adornment.  There are carved drinking cups and a great, bell shaped horn fashioned from clay and beeswax and fiery red seeds and oryx horn, played by ovaHimba herd boys when watching after cattle. There are woven baskets and containers of all sizes and descriptions, piles of gemstones from the dry riverbeds on western Namibia, and beaded pouches of antelope skin.  Most especially there and memories and friendships, far more precious to us than the items that represent those times.  That is the lesson of curiosities: those mementos that call to mind relationships and experiences are of greater value than the merely odd and foreign.  The stories that go with the objects make them true touchstones, windows to other times and places.

Up a Lazy River

For all the insults it has endured - PCB's courtesy of GE at the head of the list - the Housatonic is still a beautiful, living river.  This section is a couple of miles upstream of Cornwall Bridge where I work. A few weeks ago I stopped to watch the sun sparkle on the water and the autumn leaves blazing along the sunlit western shore.  The eastern bank was dark in the early morning shadows. This is about where the two bears I saw a week afterwords were coming from when they crossed my path and headed into the tall timber. 

Now the leaves are down and the river is thick with floodwater after heavy rains.  Its many moods often mirror my own.

Not Just Another Brick in the Wall

The brick oven pizzeria chain Bertucci's had a problem.  Its wood-fueled ovens were producing a lot of ash and there were concerns about impacts on air quality.  It's wood supply was hard to keep dry, and it was sometimes necessary to leave the next day's supply inside the oven after closing to dry out.  These are big ovens, too, and require a great deal of fuel.

Enter Bio Bricks™, a product that is clean burning, produces just 1% ash, is renewable and utilizes low value forest products.   A Connecticut producer makes fifty tons of these a day and can't keep up with demand.  In fact, the biggest challenge facing this entrepreneur is a steady supply of dry wood chips of the appropriate size and consistency (ideally not more than 8% moisture content).  The chips are fed into a hopper and compressed into bricks that are held together by the heated lignants in the wood.  Bio Bricks have no additives and use chips and sawdust from clean wood (not pallets).  You only need three of them to make a fire in your wood stove or fireplace, they are bug free, and can be stored indoors. 50 packages of these bricks are the equivalent of 1 1/2 cords of wood and are competitively priced.

The chimneys in Bertucci's restaurants only need to be cleaned twice a year instead of every other month since the switch to Bio Bricks™.   As an alum of the pizza line at the Bertucci's in North Andover - ask me sometime about how to run 30 pizzas through a brick oven; that's one of my life skills - I can see how this product helps grow their business. Might be worth checking out yourself.

Changing the World, One Widget at a Time

At the bottom of the sidebar of this blog I've added a new Widget that helps match donors with charities in their areas of interest across the world.  The brief on Universal Giving is that 100% of all donations go to the organizations selected.  Concerned about the status of women and gender-based persecution in Iraq?  There's an NGO listed here "dedicated to combating violence against women, including domestic violence and threats of honor killing."  Or how about using rats for landmine detection?  There are so many charities and they all have different goals and capacities, but this appears to be a simple way to identify some very creative aid projects and make it easier to direct charitable resources to worthy efforts you might otherwise not have discovered.  Have fun exploring, and let me know what you think.

Free Passage, Then and Now

I recently applied to renew my US passport, and in due course received a clean blue replacement for my dog-eared, travel-stained identity papers with their inked record of my comings and goings in Africa and Europe during the 1990s.  It had all manner of tamper proof, high tech encoding, although it will soon be obsolete when the new US e-Passport starts to come on line.

Compare that with this document, a special passport issued to my Gr-great grandfather in 1890 for a trip to England.  It is so large I had to scan it in two sections.  It is printed on the front half of a large sheet of thick parchment paper, folded in half, and with a rich, full page watermark bearing the seal of the Secretary of State that is visible when held to the light.  It is also signed by Secretary of State James G. Blaine who was then serving in the cabinet of Benjamin Harrison cabinet but had previously been Secretary of State in the Garfield administration.

The passport reads more like a gentleman's letter of introduction than an identity document, but confirmation of American citizenship and a request of foreign powers to treat the bearer as they would wish their own citizens traveling in the United States to be treated was apparently sufficient to safeguard my ancestor's security abroad, at least in civilized England.  The contrast with modern passports, security features and tracking protocols is rather dramatic.

Fort Wingate Flatbread, 1886

Here's something you don't see everyday.  You are looking at a piece of bread that is 130 years old, give or take a couple of weeks.  I have a small box of it - brittle, wafer thin, the greenish brown of old parchment - and know what it is because of an extraordinary letter that was preserved along with it in my great grandmother's desk explaining its origins.  It does not explain why anyone thought to keep it and pass it on to future generations, but 92 years after the letter was written and the bread mailed to Elizabeth New Jersey from New Mexico Territory, both were given to me by my Great Aunt Margie who thought it might make an interesting item for show and tell, if we had such a thing in the 4th grade. 

The letter was written by Major Daingerfield Parker (1832-1925) of the 3rd United States infantry, who married Amelia Nisbet (1832-1906), a much younger sister of my Gr-gr-great grandmother Catherine Ann Nisbet.  It was written to her son, my Gr-great grandfather, William Nisbet Olmsted (1839-1898), Major Parker's nephew although not much younger in age.  Daingerfield Parker had served in the regular army since April, 1861, and is mentioned in the autobiography of Buffalo Bill Cody from the great showman's days as an army scout.  The letter itself is a wonderful bit of frontier ethnography, and I reproduce it here in full:

Fort Wingate, New Mexico   Oct. 21, 1886

Dear Mr. Olmsted -  Enclosed is a specimen of bread that is rather a curiosity in its way.  It is from the Indian pueblo, a village of the Zuñi - 40 miles distant from here - This village is inhabited by the tribe of Indians described by Mr. Cushing some time since in the Century or Harper's Mag.  They live in houses, piled as it where, one on top of another in terraces, using ladders to go from one story (or house) to another which (ladders) they pull up after them at night, thus 'closing up house.'

The bread is made of a green colored corn, finely ground, reduced to the consistency of cream, and then poured on a large flat stone which is heated, and the bread rolled out as fine as you see it & thus baked.

Amelia improves very slowly, but I think the improvement solid.  She is, however, not able to bear the weight on the foot as yet.  Love to all -

            Very truly yours,  Daingerfield Parker"

I have often wondered what a museum conservator would make of this "curiosity", and whether one could deduce which strain of "heirloom" green corn was used in its fabrication.  How it lasted all these years is quite a marvel. 

Plane Spotting

In 2003, the United States military developed special decks of playing cards to help identify the most wanted Iraqis from Saddam's regime, but the concept of using this device as a training aid is not new.  It dates back at least to WWII, when cards with aircraft silhouettes were produced to aid in civil defense and particularly to assist civilian spotters in identifying Allied and Axis planes. 

I have a complete deck of early war spotter cards in very fine condition, yet another gift from my Great Aunt Margie, who during the war and for decades afterward was an aviation securities analyst with Scudder, Stevens & Clark, Investment Counsel.

The cards were produced by the U.S. Playing card company of Cincinnati, Ohio, with the familiar "blue  bicycle" design on the back.  The front of the cards show a head on profile and either a side view or the view from below, all in silouette as an observer would encounter them.  Later editions showed all three siloutettes. Each suit represented the aircraft of one of the warring powers, and appear to have been assigned and selected for their propaganda value as well.  The Japanese are clubs, the lowest value, basest suit.  The Germans are diamond hard and bloody.  The plucky British are hearts, and the top suit, the Spades, are the Americans.  I can detect no such hierarchy in the assignment of individual planes to the value of the cards, however, and high cards are just as likely to be fighters as bombers.

Along with the requisite "joker", there is a card with instructions for use:

"This special pack of spotter playing cards has been prepared to assist you in learning the characteristics of United Nations and Enemy Aircraft.  While the primary purpose of these cards is to show you how one type of airplane can be distinguished from another, we have by adding regular playing card indexes, created a combination, entertaining as well as educational. As playing cards, they may be used for all games where a conventional pack is required, such as Bridge, Poker, Hearts, Black Jack, etc.  Howver, in order to take full advantage of the special face arrangement, it is suggested that during the course of play the different airplanes be carefully observed and their peculiarities mentally noted.  Thus you will be acquiring information of extreme value whether you are a soldier or a civilian, with or without direct appointment as Aircraft Spotter in your Civilian Defense Organization..."

The cards do not appear to have been played with, although the box shows slight wear, but perhaps they were consulted for their educational value as the manufacturers intended.  The deck came to me piled in among Mahjong sets and board games from Margie's summer home on the Jersey Shore, where there would have been blackout curtains along with the victory garden, and eyes turned to the gray Atlantic horizon in anticipation of more than just the sunrise. 

Uncle Ned Olmsted: An Armistice Day Tribute

Yesterday was Veterans Day (observed) in the United States, and some people had a paid holiday.  I prefer to spare a thought on the eleventh day of the eleventh month for the Armistice that ended the first great cataclysm of the 20th century: one with repercussions that echo to the present day although just a handful of soldiers from the Great War are still with us. What they endured defies description.  Imagine English platoons kicking footballs ahead of the charge at the Somme to distract the men from the shells and machine guns and the 400 murderous yards they had to cross to reach the German trenches!  In 1942 more than half the men being cared for in our V.A. hospitals were "shell shocked" casualties of the First World War.

Two of my Gr-great uncles were veterans of the Great War, both in  the 27th (New York) Division.  These medals were awarded to Sergeant Stanley Clark of Newburgh, New York, who served in one of the National Guard units that comprised the 27th Division.  Others like them appear on the uniform of the soldier above, Edward "Ned Olmsted", who served from the Spanish American War until 1936 when he retired as a Brigadier General.

Ned Olmsted enlisted as a private artificer on May 17th, 1898 in the elite Squadron  "A" Cavalry of the New York National Guard.  These photographs were taken of him and his wife, Clementine Davidson Ladley, around the time of their marriage in 1901 when he was a corporal.  He served with the cavalry as a citizen soldier while employed as an "engineer salesman" for various companies in Philadelphia and New Jersey.

During the early 1900s Olmsted advanced through the grades in the cavalry as sergeant, 1st lieutenant (as he appears at right) and finally as Captain of the 4th Troop of Squadron "A".  In 1912 he was appointed as aide to Major General John F. O'Ryan, commander of the New York National Guard, and from this point on he served as a staff officer and his career was closely linked to that of the Maj. General.  He is mounted at left on a regimental horse named "Brooklyn" at training excises in Fishkill, Dutchess County, New York.

In 1916 Major Ned Olmsted was Assistant Chief of Staff of the Sixth Division under General O'Ryan on the Mexican Border in the hunt for Pancho Villa.  The entire national Guard was called up to patrol the Texas border while the regular army units under General Pershing rode in pursuit of Villa.  Maj Olmsted and the New York troops were based at Fort McAllen, Texas.  O'Ryan was a strict disciplinarian and dedicated to bringing his National Guard units up to the regular army standard.  he was an early advocate of "live fire" training exercises and his methods often produced spectacular results.  Far from idling away along the Rio Grande, the New York Troops were trained under conditions similar to those then prevailing in Europe where the United States was not yet a belligerent.  Soon after returning from Texas, this training would be put to the test as America entered the Great War.

The New York Guard Units were reorganized in 1917 as the 27th Division.  Its  insignia, at left, includes a symbol representing the letters NYD for New York Division, against the stars of the constellation Orion, a clever play on the name of its commander.  On August 30, 1917, the 27th Division paraded down 5th Avenue passed the New York Public Library where there was a reviewing stand for immediate families.  After months of training and further reorganization they embarked for Europe in the Spring of 1918.

Edward Olmsted, still on O'Ryan's staff, had preceded them, having in the meantime graduated from the Special Course for Intelligence Officers at the Army War College in Washington, DC.  He served as Major and Lt-Colonel in France and Belgium as Assistant Chief of Staff, G-1, in the 27th Division.

The 27th was initially stationed in the East Poperinghe Line, and participated in actions at Dickebusch Lake and Vierstratt Ridge during the late summer of 1918, and then in September the struggle to break the formidable German defenses of the Hindenburg Line. On September 25th, the division participated in the Somme Offensive and provided a break through of the Hindenburg Line itself forcing the Germans into general retreat. After a final confrontation with the retreating Germans at the Le Selle River the Armistice ended the fighting and the division was sent home in February of 1919, to be mustered out several months later."  New York State Military Museum

Uncle Ned came home from the war with many souvenirs, including a Prussian officer's spike helmet which my grandmother remembered playing with as a girl.  She who was so loathe to part with the very least of our family items - battlefield loot among them-  shook her head with disapproval when recalling that his entire collection of militaria from the trenches of Europe had been given to Pingry School in Elizabeth, NJ  which Uncle Ned had attended as a boy.

A fine photographic record of his military career remains, however, and records his  advancement in the peacetime National Guard of New York and later New Jersey.  He received the Distinguished Service Medal and numerous other decorations honoring his campaigns and long service.  He was Acting Chief of Staff for the 27th Division after the War until 1924, when he transferred to the New Jersey National Guard as Assistant Chief of Staff (G-4) for Major General Quincey Gilmore, commanding the 44th Division, and later Colonel and Chief of Staff of the 44th Division under Major General John Toffey.

After 37 years in the military, Uncle Ned Olmsted was promoted to Brigadier General in 1935 and  resigned from the New Jersey National Guard, transferring to reserve status in the New York N.G. so that the following January he could retire from the armed forces of the State in which he served for the majority of his career. 

The proceedings of the Thirteenth Reunion of the Olmsted Family, held at the Hotel Martinique in New York City on October 24th, 1936, feature an extensive biography honoring his military career and years of public service.  He was extremely proud of his Olmsted heritage and both a loyal member and frequent officer of the Olmsted Family Association since its founding in 1911. 

Uncle Ned Olmsted died in 1941.  The war dead from the Great War are estimated at more than 9,450,000 - not including civilian casualties and the 20 million who died in the Great Influenza of 1918 that nearly carried off my grandmother.  Today, there are no more than 51 veterans who survive from those terrible years of 1914-1918.  We shall not see their like again.