evening and morning

The scaffolding has been taken down on the park side that faces downtown StAndrews. Scaffolding is still up on the Bay side, where hurricane repair work is yet to be done. We're in no hurry, although it will be nice when squirrels and other animals cannot come up onto our porch; and also when we no longer have to lock the sliding doors as security against possible intruders. Also, the sky is blocked, it will be great to use my new Xmas telescope for moon and star gazing. The five years since I gave away the telescope I'd had since 1964, I missed being able to look at the moon, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and especially Saturn, but we were moving from a 13-room house into a three room condo apartment, and nearly everything had to go. Meantime, the Bay side scaffolding makes for interesting snapshots as well as geometric patterns. 

From an online magazine "the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum in northeast Indiana has received the first Duesenberg passenger car sold to the public from a family that owned the vehicle for 100 years. The year 2020 marks the centennial of the Duesenberg Automobile and Motor Company, and CyrAnn and James C. Castle Jr. have gifted the 1921 Duesenberg Model A coupe to the museum. The car was specially built to order for Samuel Northrup Castle, who stood 7-foot tall and thus required a vehicle with some special features. The museum says the Model A Duesenberg cars were the first American passenger vehicles equipped with four-wheel hydraulic brakes and an overhead-cam straight-8 engine. Castle was the descendent of missionaries to Hawaii and was the founder of Castle & Cooke, a Hawaiian sugar cooperative. His car was the first Duesenberg Model A built for sale. Castle lived until 1959, when the car was shipped to San Francisco after being inherited by his nephew, James Christian Castle. James Christian died in 1994 and the car went to his son, James Jr."

Automobile museums are a favorite as part of my lifelong passion for cars, and there are several I'd love to have visited, including in Cleveland and Dayton, Ohio, though not on any bucket list, as I no longer want or intend to travel beyond Pensacola or Tallahassee unless AmTrak resumes Sunset Limited service that stops to pick me up in Chipley and drops me off in Tucson then on to the Pacific Ocean. In Tallahassee there's an antique car museum we've visited more than once. And in 1962, while I was an MBA student at UnivMichigan, Ann Arbor, we drove over and enjoyed Greenfield Village and the Henry Ford Museum for a day. 

After retiring from the Navy in 1978, I worked on defense acquisition projects with the Australian Embassy in Washington, DC from 1978 until we relocated to Apalachicola in 1984. Early, they sent me to Australia several times to give seminars for the Australian Department of Defence and defence industry companies. In those years I traveled all over the US with them, speaking in seminars we were conducting in cities where American defense industry firms were benefiting from Australia's purchases of American defense systems, ships, planes, torpedoes, and other weapons. In 1980 we had a seminar in Milwaukee, and instead of flying, I had a brand new car and decided to leave a day early and drive from home in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania across Pennsylvania, top of Ohio and Indiana, north into Wisconsin up to Milwaukee. Crossing into Indiana I noticed a highway sign pointing south to Auburn, Indiana, a realization exploded, and on the spur of the moment, which is how I like to live my life, not planned out, I decided to detour down and visit the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum. All three makes were on display, and it was a highlight of life's memories for a car nut. That was forty years ago, and while I yield to facts, memory has Auburn as not a large city, more homey than huge, and me parking in the shade under a tree and going into the front entrance. Visit an hour or two, chatting with a museum employee, and back on the road.

Another part of that story, which I may have told here years ago, is that driving north in Wisconsin I was pulled over by a state patrol officer, a pleasant, outgoing man who wrote me a speeding ticket and showed me with his radar gun that my radar detector was not very effective. I asked him what he would recommend, and he demurred. He asked if I had a business card, smiled saying "I collect these" as he wrote "black 1980 Caddy" on it and added it to a large stack of business cards.

When our seminar was over, I drove on up to Fond du Lac and St Paul's cathedral, where my great-uncle Heber was an Episcopal bishop from 1900 to 1935. There I met the dean and introduced myself as a postulant for holy orders in the Diocese of Central Pennsylvania. The dean gave me a tour, in the sacristy showed me vestments still in use that Uncle Heber had worn, and their pipe organ that, as I recall, was dedicated to him. He also gave me a copy of a church magazine from 1900 with a picture of Uncle Heber and his consecrating bishops on the cover, as well as a pamphlet about preaching by an Episcopal priest who had been a professor of homiletics at Nashotah House, the high church seminary in Wisconsin. In all, it was an exciting week for me, with stories to tell when I returned home to Harrisburg and my office in Washington.

Off the subject, which is my brain's concentration route, this morning I was reading an article in one of my currently favorite online pubs, The Bitter Southerner. All my traveling years, favorites, especially for airplane travel, were The Atlantic and The New Yorker, their long articles were great for cross-country and overseas flights. But here at home, unless I'm reading a novel or in some kind of study, rather than serious I like something whimsical I can read a while and put down. TBS has articles for a short trip into my or somebody's past. This morning https://bittersoutherner.com/they-like-that-soft-bread-knoxville-steamed-sandwiches?utm_source=The+Bitter+News&utm_campaign=0eadf4952b-2020_01_17_WINTER_CLOTHES_OUT&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8269ec3593-0eadf4952b-92122881&goal=0_8269ec3593-0eadf4952b-92122881&mc_cid=0eadf4952b&mc_eid=a60dd00516
Now and then, something about Florida, especially north Florida, which has always been part of The South that South Florida has never been. In the postbellum period when there was still awareness of it, which in my mind and experience lasted until about the time I graduated college, we were Alabama here, Georgia, southern Mississippi. I'm not proud of it, or to say it, but it was so, and our world view. Those things are difficult to overcome even when one is shocked into astonishment at how evil. A lifetime of keeping on putting down. 

Anyway, TBS essay on Knoxville steamed hoagies was worth my while. Where did it take me? To Jimmy's Drive In and Tally Ho for a fried oyster box. Was it $1.50, I don't remember. I do remember that in early teens I seldom to never had more than enough for a 15¢ hotdog with chili or coleslaw, and often on the way home after "League" (youth group at StAndrewsEpiscopal on Sunday evenings) when I was 13 and 14, sat in the back seat of the James' 1949 Buick Super while Susanna, driving, and two Barbaras feasted on whatever they wanted, and I always insisted I wasn't hungry because my pockets held nothing but a key to the front door of our house. That of course was my own fault, I always had a job and money, but it was in the Commercial Bank. But when I was 15 and later, and allowed to drive the station wagon full of teenagers, life changed and I moved on in charge of myself.

My other whimsical favorite at the moment is Charles LaFond's The Daily Sip. 

Where was I going with this blogpost?

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