Tough Guys

Jim Hantzis, 2nd from left, Mary O’Donnell’s brother, Chuck, far right. Circa 1931, Indianapolis

Veterans Day brings to mind a theme that pops up at every author presentation I make. It goes like this, “My relative (dad, uncle, grandfather, cousin) served in World War II, but he never talked about it.” I think I know why. When I was a young man, my father told me that “The tough guys never have to tell you how tough they are.” This, I believe, was a widely held masculine norm in his generation. A norm that many of today’s public figures would do well to embrace.

The war was tough, no matter where you served. Some had it tougher than others, no doubt, but the norm held sway. In today’s culture of Facebook celebrity and political overstatement, instant gratification, and the pathetic pursuit of “likes,” talking about one’s toughness, indeed, flouting one’s self-declared toughness, has all but swamped our more composed natures. Damaged role models abound. I prefer the quiet composition of my father’s generation and knowing that the tough guys never have to tell you how tough they are.

The following vignette was edited from Rails of War. My author’s draft was one thousand pages and two volumes. This didn’t make the cut. Still, I think this short story might be of interest to those who wonder why their loved one never talked about the war. Reticent loved ones weren’t deficient, they were likely more composed and actualized than the blowhards we are bombarded by today, in my humble opinion. So, what follows is a true story about Jim Hantzis, Jim O’Donnell, Mary Hantzis and Mary O’Donnell, their kids, a pet dog, and rabbits. Oh, and the USS Indianapolis and the atomic bomb. I hope you enjoy.

When I was a young boy on our farm in Indiana, my father hunted rabbits with his best friend, Jim O’Donnell. They’d stalk the fields, fencerows, frozen plow furrows and woods with determination and dexterity. Both men were pretty good shots. You could say that Jim O’Donnell was a bit over-qualified for shooting rabbits since he had been a Weapons Technician Grade Three in the U.S. Navy during the war.

Jim and Mary Alice O’Donnell

Jim O’Donnell would drive out from Indianapolis with his wife and two sons, Tommy and Jim, and the grownups would organize an expedition, a not-so-big game foray, into the far reaches of our humble forty-acre farm. The Marys, Jim O’Donnell’s wife’s name was Mary as well, Mary Alice to be exact, would stay inside in our old farmhouse in the relative warmth of the oil-burning space heater and cook fried chickens, freshly dead after a mortal encounter with my neck-ringing, farm-girl mother, and mash the best potatoes on the planet. If the hunters were successful, the Marys would fry the rabbits as well.

When the Hantzis and O’Donnell families got together, there was salutary efficiency. There were three Jims, two Marys, two Toms, and one Steve. Four names for eight people.

The hunt would begin just behind our garage and fan out to all of the nearby farm buildings. The smokehouse, barn, and corncrib were built on fieldstone foundations. That’s the construction technique where a big rock is used to set a corner post, and the entire structure rises dependent upon the rock not settling too far. Poured-concrete foundations were still on the wish list when previous owners put up the outbuildings on our farm.

The good thing about a big rock foundation is that it allows all sorts of critters to live under the structure where they can eat grain and whatever falls between the inevitable cracks in the floor. Rabbits were one such critter. Besides being dead rabbit-totters, the boys were rabbit flushers as well. The advantage to using the boys was that the boys didn’t suffer from the family dog, Sky King’s, bad habits. The boys never chased the rabbit until it was full of buckshot, unlike Sky King. Also, the boys understood a few more commands than Sky King.

Jim Hantzis with 1925 LC Smith Field-Grade Featherweight

And by the way, here’s a tip for eating rabbit harvested by a shotgun. Watch out for buckshot! You never get all of the shot out when you clean the little critter and lead is really difficult to chew. Buckshot is hell on teeth no matter how much tug of war you play with the family dog.

It would take a couple hours to work the usual hunting areas. Then we’d return home, take off our muddy clothes and boots in the semi-heated utility room and make a beeline for the space heater in the living room. If we’d bagged some rodents, the final outdoors activity was to nail their hind feet to a board on the side of the garage, gut them and strip the fur off them. I remember being surprised that removing the skin from a rabbit was so easy. Dad would deliver the carcasses to mom, and she’d plop them into cold saltwater to draw the blood out. Then, she’d carve up the little bodies, and there are only a couple of meaty pieces on a wild rabbit, douse them in baking flour and cornmeal and fry the heck out of them. They were delightful.

During the meal and afterward, the men and the Marys would talk about adult stuff, and the boys would be boys. When it wasn’t freezing cold outside, we’d go poke around farm implements and build straw forts in the haymow. Dad and Jim O’Donnell were lifelong buddies and Arsenal Technical High School classmates and graduates. They always had a lot of catching up to do. After the war, Jim O’Donnell became an Indianapolis fireman. When dad returned from India, he continued working for the New York Central for a few years then got hired as a machinist for GM Detroit Diesel Allison Division in 1950. Both men worked as many hours as possible, took few vacations, and lived far apart, so they didn’t visit very often.

Jim O’Donnell had seen action courtesy of the U.S. Navy in World War II. He had served, logically enough, on the ill-fated USS Indianapolis. For those who may not know the distressing and curious story of the USS Indianapolis, I’ll offer this very brief version.

USS Indianapolis underway at sea 1943-44

The USS Indianapolis was a Treaty Cruiser built in conformance to the Washington Conference Treaty following World War I. She was designated CA-35 in the Navy’s inventory. Her keel was laid in late March 1930 under the covered ways of the New York Ship Corporation located on the Delaware River in Camden, New Jersey. Later, during the 1940s, this facility would become the world’s largest private shipbuilding facility employing more than 35,000 workers. The Indianapolis was launched November 7, 1931. Following her final fitting-out, she was commissioned by the Navy on November 15, 1932, at the Philadelphia Navy Yard.

The ship was considered a technological marvel, and she was the pride of the Navy. She was over 610 feet in length and 66 feet at the beam. She was designed for a flank speed of 32 knots. She was equipped with eight White-Forster boilers that turned four Parsons geared turbines. She had four screws and was rated at 107,000 horsepower.

She was armed with nine 8-inch guns in three turrets and four 5-inch guns. She also carried twenty-four 40mm medium range guns and thirty-two 20mm Oerlikon guns.

Following her shakedown deployment, in July 1933, the Indianapolis steamed to Bar Harbor, Maine to pick up President Franklin Roosevelt at his Campobello Island summer home and take him to Annapolis, Maryland. Thus began her long and distinguished role as a Ship of State and chosen transport for dignitaries and the president.

On December 5, 1941, the Indianapolis was ordered out of Pearl Harbor on an unusual and unexpected exercise to simulate bombardment of Johnson Island. The ship was given one hour’s notice and ordered out to sea with a third of her crew. Otherwise, the USS Indianapolis would have been moored to the Mine Dock at Pearl when the torpedoes began to fall.

This is where the curiosity begins. The Indianapolis was, after all, the president’s favorite ship and the flagship of Admiral Wilson Brown, head of Scouting Force. It was as if someone knew something was brewing.

With the outbreak of war, the Indianapolis saw her first combat some 350 miles south of Rabal, New Britain in February 1942. She was subsequently sent to the Aleutian Islands. In the spring of 1943, she became the Flagship for Admiral Raymond Spruance, Commander, Fifth Fleet. Admiral Spruance had won the naval battle at Midway.

On March 31, 1945, a Japanese Kamikaze flew into the USS Indianapolis during the battle for Okinawa. The plane didn’t do much damage but the bomb the plane released just before crashing penetrated armor on the port quarter and continued down through the crew’s mess, a berthing compartment, the fuel tanks and through the ship’s hull, exploding somewhere below the boat. The attack killed nine and injured twenty-six.

This attack and the resulting damage set in motion a series of events that would place the USS Indianapolis at the center of the worst single disaster at sea ever suffered by the U.S. Navy. Because of her damage, she was ordered to Mare Island, Vallejo, California, for extensive repairs in dry-dock. She arrived in late April 1945.

At 5:29:45 a.m. Mountain War Time on July 16, 1945, the sand of Alamogordo, New Mexico turned to glass. The conversion took less than a second and prompted Robert Oppenheimer to quote from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Those present and all forms of Gods in their Heavens had witnessed the first plutonium implosion, nineteen kilotons of Atomic Bomb. So, in the golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue morning sky lit by man’s first manufactured sun people suspended disbelief awestruck by their species’ tool-making achievement. But the military and political bureaucracy never sleeps and never tires, and was that very moment conjuring a way to get the new tool to where it could do some real good, or evil, depending upon which end of the device one found oneself.

Early that same morning, as fallout was raining on the molten glass wasteland of New Mexico, an outsized entourage of admirals, generals, technicians, and guards stood pier-side watching atomic bomb components being loaded aboard the USS Indianapolis. Wooden crates were stowed in the ship’s hangars and the uranium-235 for two bombs, sealed in a lead-lined metal container, was lashed to cleats then tack-welded to the deck in the Admiral’s Cabin. If this addition wasn’t sufficient cause for speculation by the uninformed crew, including Captain Charles McVay, strict orders were given that should the ship come under attack and find herself in extremis, the lead container was to be immediately jettisoned. And with that, the Indianapolis was off and running to Tinian in the Western Pacific.

The swift ship delivered her deadly tool in a record-setting run that averaged 29 knots. This included a six-hour stop at Pearl Harbor to refuel and replenish. It took less than ten days to cover the 5,300 nautical miles from California. A few days later, the Enola Gay B-29 bomber, flying at 31,060 feet, released the tool which promptly plummeted to its final destination 1,850 feet above Hiroshima, Japan. As the tool went about its business of converting matter to energy, 66,000 were killed instantly, and any sand in the vicinity was turned to glass. Another 74,000 died soon after that, and the Japanese began to rethink their war ambitions.

After delivering the bomb, the Indianapolis was sent south to Leyte Gulf on the East Coast of the Philippines. Some 1,500 nautical miles west of Guam, the fated ship was to join the USS Idaho for gunnery practice and refresher training. During its stop in Guam, a single coded message was sent to the Idaho about the rendezvous. The official record shows that the message was garbled on the receiving end and there was no request to repeat. So, the Idaho had no reason to expect the Indianapolis.

The Indianapolis steamed out of Guam on July 28, 1945, at a moderate 15 knots. When the watch changed at midnight July 29, the Indianapolis was making 17 knots bearing 262 degrees and secured from zigzagging. The fact that they weren’t zigzagging would play heavily into the future legal problems of Captain McVay.

Just after midnight, below the deceptively peaceful surface of the Western Pacific, Lieutenant Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto, positioned his 2,140-ton submarine, I-58, to launch a spread of torpedoes at the Indianapolis. Hashimoto selected to use conventional armaments although his boat had been modified to fire the 48-foot Kaiten manned torpedo and he had six weapons and their pilots onboard.

His first torpedo loaded with 1,200 pounds of Shimose powder struck and blew away the bow of the Indianapolis. The second hit starboard near a powder magazine and one of her fuel oil bunkers. The second explosion knocked out all electricity including radio transmitters. The radiomen onboard testified later that they had transmitted at least three S-O-S messages before power was lost.

In about twelve minutes, the ship rolled to port and went down bow first. Of the 1,197 souls aboard an estimated 880, many mortally wounded, burned and maimed, made it into the inky, oil-slicked waters alive. Their hapless bodies floated without provisions, no water, no food, very few life jackets, and even fewer rafts, scattered over thousands of yards of ocean. By the time they were rescued, they would be spread over twenty miles of water gathered in small clusters of floaters and rafters.

The next morning, as the sun peeked above the horizon, sharks began to pick-off men floating on the perimeter of clusters. Their screams were muffled only when water filled their lungs.

But surely, the survivors reasoned, their rescue would come quickly. The Indianapolis was, after all, the flagship of the Fifth Fleet. The USS Idaho was expecting them, and a search would surely commence shortly. So the floating, vulnerable, dehydrated, burned and shocked survivors hoped for the best but marshaled what provisions they had and planned for the worst.

Their flickering and faint hopefulness began to die along with more and more men on the second day in the water. By the third day, lack of food and fresh water and the remorseless terror from below pushed men beyond their limits. Dying of thirst, men began to drink the salty ocean water. Once they started drinking the salt water, their demise was inevitable, and the other men in their group would push them away to float alone. When the end came, the survivors retrieved their lifejacket and said the Lord’s Prayer as their body was set loose to drift below the unforgiving sea.

Hallucinations replaced reality and fights broke out. At the end of the third day, only four hundred men were still alive. Their lifejackets were waterlogged and losing their buoyancy, and the bodies of the dead floated alongside the living. All would have died, including dad’s buddy Jim O’Donnell the Indianapolis fireman, if it hadn’t been for a tool not quite so well designed as the atomic bomb.

On the fourth day, at about 1025 hours, Lieutenant Chuck Gwinn was piloting his Ventura PV-1 bomber out of Palau, about three hundred miles south of where the Indianapolis went down. He was on a routine antisubmarine patrol, his second of the day.

The tool that was giving his crew difficulty was a faulty antenna winch with a binding problem. So, Lieutenant Gwinn found himself leaning out of the plane, guiding the wire antenna when he saw what looked like a sizable oil slick. Believing the oil slick to be from a recently submerged submarine attempting to hide from his plane, he put the Ventura into a descent path and began a depth charge run. As he ordered the bomb bay doors open, he glanced once more at the ocean and to his astonishment saw hundreds of delirious men waving at him.

The young lieutenant immediately regained altitude and radioed Palau for help. His message was “Many men in the water,” and he gave his longitude and latitude. The Navy initially thought it was a prank and waited for confirmation. In the meanwhile, Lieutenant Gwinn descended and threw all the survival gear in his aircraft overboard for the desperate men below.

Three hours after his first broadcast, a Catalina PBY flying boat was dispatched with a twenty-eight-year-old pilot from Frankfort, Indiana at the controls. En route to the survivors, Lieutenant Adrian Marks overflew the USS Cecil Doyle and radioed its captain. He told the captain of his mission and of his own initiative Graham Claytor diverted the craft from its ordered course to aid in the rescue.

When Marks arrived, he dropped the PBY to about 100 feet and began offloading rafts and supplies. While throwing the items overboard, the crew reported that they saw men being attacked by sharks. The PBY’s crew voted to abandon standing orders and land on the roiling open sea in their relatively frail amphibious airboat. Such a landing was entirely against regulations and standing orders. But the brave men made a selfless humanitarian decision and put at risk their own lives without knowing the nationality of the men in the water. They could have been Japanese for all they knew.

They approached between swells in a power stall, tail-low, nose-high attitude. The PBY took a beating, popping rivets out of its hull and jarring the brave crew, but landed in one piece. Marks taxied to the nearest group of men and began taking survivors onboard. The PBY’s crew helped the ones with enough strength to swim to the plane and lugged the weary men onto the fabric wings of the aircraft. The PBY would never fly again, but it saved fifty-six men that night.

The USS Cecil Doyle, Talbot, and Dufilho converged on the survivors and eventually pulled 317 men from the water, 317 out of 1,197. That’s about a one-in-four chance of survival, and Jim O’Donnell beat the odds. Jim would put his good fortune to good use and return from the war to marry Mary and raise a wonderful family. He was eventually named “Man of the Year” by the Indianapolis Star in 1996 for his efforts on behalf of the survivors and his role in constructing an officially recognized memorial in Indianapolis to the USS Indianapolis.

Captain McVay was court-martialed for “hazarding his vessel by failing to zigzag.” Although the conviction stayed on his record until 2001, well after his death, Admiral Chester Nimitz remitted his punishment in 1946.

Captain McVay was able to continue his Navy career, but his life did not unfold well, and in 1968 he committed suicide. He was found with his .38-caliber service revolver in one hand and a toy sailor attached to a key ring in the other. After his trip to the United States to testify at McVay’s court-martial, Hashimoto spent the rest of his ninety-one years in Kyoto, Japan as a Shinto Priest pursuing no longer enemy ships but the way of the kami.

The sinking of the Indianapolis was big news on Tinian. At 0130 hours on August 6, 1945, the men of the Enola Gay scrawled “A present for the souls of the Indianapolis crew,” on the tool they would deploy at 0815 hours to 1,850 feet above Hiroshima.

Tom & Steve Hantzis, Circa 1955

As we sat around the Formica-top, chrome trimmed kitchen table eating fried chicken and rabbits, the boys kneed each other and giggled when my brother ate his mashed potatoes with a celery stick. The men talked about…whatever. And that’s the thing. I don’t recall Jim and Jim talking about the war. And believe me, war stories would have been soaked up by the boys like gravy on white bread. I think the Jims talked about work and old friends and made inside jokes with the Marys. I’m sure they talked about cars, football, and basketball as well.

So, Jim O’Donnell and Jim Hantzis would talk about boring subjects, the boys would haul the rabbits and occasionally get a thrill ride in dad’s 1949 four-wheel-drive jeep, and the Marys would talk about life on the farm, life in the city, old friends and the intricacies of raising boys. Our get-togethers were perfectly regular, predictable and wholesome occasions and I wish like hell I could listen in to one of them today. But as mom use to say, “If wishes were horses, we all could ride.”

If I could listen in today, it would still be a long shot that I might hear Jim O’Donnell talk about the USS Indianapolis. He told a local publication a few years back, “Everybody just wanted to put the experience in the past. It was always there, but you never talked about it.” I would probably have heard a lot of talk about how good the potatoes were or how some rabbit out-foxed one of the Jims. It’s likely the tough guys would never have said how tough they were. – © 2008 Steven James Hantzis

I have, at times, introduced myself as a recovering motorhead. I’m still working on it. About ten years ago I gifted my British racing green Triumph Spitfire to my daughter and sold our lumbering Jaguar V-12 convertible. Then, I bought a real car, a 2003 Mercedes SL500. A lovely car, the best I’ve ever owned. For those uninitiated in the dense nomenclature of Mercedes Benz, SL stands for Sportlich-Leicht. It was a grand-touring roadster.

The SL was unalloyed white, Germany’s international racing color. It featured a sumptuous gray-ash leather interior, burl wood accents, and a burl steering wheel. It was rolling art by any other name. At the touch of a button, its glass hardtop tucked into the trunk like a scene from a Transformers movie. With the top in the boot, the car was nearly windless thanks to Teutonic aerodynamic wizardry. With its sophisticated ultra-high pressure magnetic fluid suspension and its massive Michelins mated to a five-liter V-8, it handled like it was on rails.

I bought the SL used with thirty thousand miles. I pampered it for eight years and drove it from Key West to Calais, Maine. It never faltered and never failed to put a smile on my face and never failed to go fast when I wanted to. Last summer I drove it to Maine and decided it was more useful in the Pine Tree State than in Alexandria. I never liked driving in the DC area where people are rude, open car doors with abandon, smash into parked vehicles, and generally have little or no regard for nice things. And, if DC drivers don’t get you, the potholes will. In Maine, it would lead a lazy life of top-down, blue highway cruising where I would soak in the natural beauty, and coastal vibe and the only depreciating challenge would be sand in the floor mats.

And, that’s what happened – until I put it away for the winter.

In mid-November, I washed the SL, treated the leather interior, connected a battery tender, and left Maine with the knowledge that our modern two-car garage would provide shelter and a bit of warmth during the coming cold and dark. But, when we returned to Maine the week following Christmas, things got weird.

Mus musculus Linnaeus, 1758.

It was cold in Maine the week we returned. For eleven days high temperatures never rose into double-digits, and the lows were below zero. So, yes, I understand why any living creature would appreciate the relative warmth and shelter of our garage. I can appreciate this, but I never agreed to it. Not that anyone asked.

My first clue that there was a problem came when I started the SL to make sure it was okay. It wasn’t. That’s when I got the stomach-punching “Visit Workshop” message displayed in the instrument cluster. Then, the SL would not turn off. The engine kept running with the key out of the ignition. When I popped the hood to block the air intakes to kill the engine, I saw a dead mouse in the engine bay.

Along with the “Visit Workshop” message the SL told me to “Raise Roll-Over Bar.” This message, I had never seen before nor could I find anything related to it on the Mercedes owner’s group sites.

So, in early January, I tucked away this problem for a warmer time and set some old-fashioned spring traps in the garage. I was in Maine roughly four weeks between January and April and caught twenty-four invaders. In April, I mustered the courage to start troubleshooting the SL, and my first line of investigation was the fuse box-relay area behind the passenger’s seat. I popped the plastic cover under the leather interior panel, and there it was an abandoned utopian mouse commune. Abandoned because I had presumably trapped all the whisker-twitching cultists. They had used the sound insulation that Mercedes had thoughtfully padded the noisy bits with to build a bunker precisely over the fuse box, critical relays, sensors, and circuits. Then, they peed on everything and chewed the hair-width wiring that communicates the driver’s wishes and demands and conducts the neural network of SL’s deep state automotive consciousness.

I sucked everything as clean as I could with my Shop-Vac, got a magnifying glass and inspected the havoc. And, yes, it was chewed on, and peed on, and generally as smelly as you might imagine but please try not to. This filthy blight in mind-numbing proximity to pristine gray-ash leather and burl drove me to the brink. I was in motorhead shock. My cherished object of attachment the bonds to which I had forged with meticulous stewardship and my pride in its very existence within the orbit of My Things had transmuted to anxiety, maybe even panic. The onset of a separation complex hit me like a homesick freshman. It was a week before I regained nominal emotional equilibrium and the problem solver kicked in. I called Dan’s Auto.

Dan’s a square shooter and Joe, the tech who tried to mend the SL, is a stand-up guy and a patient caregiver. But, they had no luck. That’s when I called Prime Motors in Scarborough, Maine, the nearest Mercedes dealer. There would be access to the latest proprietary Mercedes diagnostic equipment and trained techs familiar with the SL’s cognitive elements, relay modules, and nervous system.

I took it to Prime, and the next day the service writer called and suggested I contact my insurance provider. I did and, yep, it was a total loss. The investigating tech estimated that over 100 of the tiny little wires would have to be repaired, and modules galore would need replacing. The service writer said the retractable hardtop module alone would cost $3,100. Thus came to an end an eight-year relationship with the best car I had ever owned. I kid not when I say I would have kept it for another twenty years or willed it to my daughter.

So, what’s the revenge? How does one go about killing every mouse and their relatives in the State of Maine?

My first line of inquiry was cats. Your every day, unrepentant American shorthair tabby is a prodigious mouse killing machine batting one-in-three, that’s a .333 OMP (On Mouse Percentage). They are nature’s Hall of Famers all. A quick online search found a feral cat support group in Portland that sells fixed and neutered “barn cats,” preferably in packs of three or more. But, I don’t have a barn. So, I tried to enlist our next-door neighbors because they have an unattached garage that might qualify as a barn, and they too, had suffered terribly this past winter when their lovely home was attacked by a vile coalition of mice, woodpeckers, and chipmunks. And, by the way, everyone says that this past winter saw an epic reign of mouse predation. Some blame it on the bumper seed crop from last year’s good growing season. Anyway, after thoughtful discussion and applied game-theory analysis over bottomless cocktails, it was decided that introducing feral cats onto Barters Island might be socially disruptive. It seems that not everybody likes feral cats. And, since our neighborhood cat, Tilly, is too well fed to bother with scruffy mice, cats as a revenge strategy were out. No, my revenge will come in a more personal and engineered form. Vengeance made of my own hands.

Before enlisting Google, I heard from three Mainers about, what I’ve deemed, the Maine Mouse Bucket. Now, before I go further, this device can be used to live-trap the vermin for kindly redistribution to someone else’s yard but I’m Greek, and it’s payback time.

If you Google “Maine Mouse Bucket” as I did, you’ll see a cheap and reportedly efficient method of trapping and dispatching mice in an abyss of deadly hubris. As I dove deeper into my research, I found that the whole world has arrived at similar inexpensive anti-mouse-rat innovations. All involve a bucket and a seemingly obvious but secretly perilous route to bait nirvana. So, assuming that Russian bots have no interest in manipulating this corner of the internet, I’m convinced that the Maine Mouse Bucket will do the trick and free my soul of its honor-bound debt. I’m on my way to Grover’s Hardware now, and I’m building at least three. Overkill? Impossible.  – SJH

In the Weeds in Palmer

Scarlet

What makes a railroad town? There was a time when seven railroads chugged through Palmer, Massachusetts. Now there are four railroads, and the one passenger number, Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited, doesn’t stop. But, railroading is not dead in Palmer, quite the opposite. Palmer is a town of working railroaders, motivated historians, and rail buffs, with civic aspirations for again becoming a stop on Amtrak’s timetable.

Palmer provided a generational double-whammy. The demographic profile was predictable at my well-attended Amherst Railway Society presentation. Railroad enthusiasts are often male and often of a certain age. I treasure them all. I also met a young woman, a recent Western New England University graduate, who is all about returning rail service to Palmer and is knee-deep in the politics of getting it done. She is a spark in the ether, if you will, or perhaps a glowing ember in the sooty plume of a relic locomotive.

Scarlet Lamothe will tell you that rail transport is the future; it’s efficient, environmentally sound, and a safe way to travel. She’ll contend that better rail service means fewer Massachusetts drivers, and all Americans can get behind that. She’ll tell you that her great commonwealth was a leader in founding this country and it now needs to lead in infrastructure innovation. Yes, Scarlet is irrefutably correct on every point.  And lastly, she’ll note Palmer’s ideal location, already primed architecturally accredited station, secure parking, and excellent restaurant, the Steaming Tender. And, again, she’s right on every point. Scarlet is articulate, bright, and engaging. So, who could resist?

Massachusetts State Senators Anne Gobi, Eric Lesser, & State Rep. Todd Smola – Palmer Rail Supporters

Well, you guessed it, the political class and the bureaucratic apparatus it controls but often hides behind. There lies resistance. But, Scarlet’s going to win. And, Palmer’s going to win. Put money on it. It’s a matter of will finding a way.

My guilty pleasure in Palmer was speaking to eighty or more rail enthusiasts on a dreary Wednesday night and not only telling the story of the 721^st Railway Operating Battalion but getting into the weedy details of railroading without losing the audience. Most people don’t care about the advantages of a Westinghouse air brake system over a vacuum brake system or the operational hazards of link-and-pin coupling versus the efficient and much less dangerous drawbar-knuckle system. I do, and I like talking about these things. Rambling on about railroad minutiae is typically a selfish pleasure, but not in Palmer. The Palmerians were ready for details.

The well-organized Amherst Railway Society fielded an outstanding audience on a slushy post-Nor’easter weekday evening. Kudos to John Sacerdote, President and Show Director. So, here’s something to put on your calendar. Next January 25-26, 2019, the Amherst Railway Society Railroad Hobby Show, the largest show of its kind on the East Coast, will kick off in West Springfield, Massachusetts. I’ll be there, and I look forward to riding Amtrak to Palmer, having a drink at the Steaming Tender, then traveling on to Springfield. There, I plan to get into the weeds with anyone looking for scintillating railroading details. All aboard! – SJH

Amherst Railway Society Railroad Hobby Show

First Impressions

We bought our house on Barters Island in Boothbay, Maine in August 2016. We closed on the 12^th and the 17^th, the third Wednesday of the month, as regular as the tide, the Barters Island Community Association held its monthly Potluck. We were newbies, but we decided to go and introduce ourselves.

Barters Island is a small island in the Sheepscot River connected to the Boothbay Region by the Trevett Bridge, one of the last human-powered swing bridges on the planet. When a boat hails for passage on VHF radio channel 9 or 13, a bridge tender comes out of her shack, lowers the traffic barriers, and then proceeds to the center of the bridge with a six-foot-long lever. She attaches the bar to a spindle in the center of the bridge and rotates the gearing twenty-four times. Once she gets everything in motion, if the wind is blowing right, she can push the lever and stand in one position without needing to walk behind it. The bridge dutifully turns ninety degrees, the boat passes, and then the tender engages the 96:1 gearing in the opposite rotation and the bridge closes. The traffic barriers are opened, often with the help of local motorists, and all returns to normal so the 318 residents of Barters Island are free to come and go as they please.

Barters Island is an old place. According to the Boothbay Region Historical Society, Mr. Samuel Barter, a housewright born in 1711, left Arundel, Massachusetts and settled on Barters Island about 1737. Back then, Maine was a colony of Massachusetts who was a colony of Great Britain. By the way, the correct local pronunciation of Barters is Batters.

Kathy and I arrived at the Barters Island Community Center, filled out our name tags, and began introducing ourselves to the friendly and welcoming forty-or-so-residents in attendance. A Barters Island Potluck involves drinks and appetizers, the main course buffet, and a dessert table. Nothing fancy and nothing overly-programmed. No one puts on airs.

Between the main course and the dessert, the Community Association president, Evelyn, made her report. The Association had helped a couple of Barters Island families who had fallen on hard times. Evelyn reviewed the fall calendar and entertained other announcements. Then, Evelyn kicked-off a raffle. The item to be won was a hod of dug-that-morning quahog clams and a bottle of oak-aged Chardonnay. A hod, by the way, is a half bushel basket, a clammer’s tool, constructed of wooden lathes and sometimes called a roller.

The locals had sussed out that my attractive, outgoing, and personable wife was a Certified Public Accountant. So, after the fundraisers worked the hall and after I played along buying $20 worth of tickets, it was time for the awaited drawing. Evelyn’s hand was almost in the Tupperware ticket trove when she announced, “Wait, we’ve got a CPA here. Let’s let her draw.” So, Evelyn held the plastic bowl above Kathy’s head, and Kathy reached up and in, and the first ticket out was, of course, mine. That’s the way to make a first impression. I might have re-donated the quahogs, but they looked delicious that warm August evening piled against the chilled, sweating bottle of wine. So we kept them and steamed them for lunch the next day. I still have some in the freezer waiting for chowder. I’ll invite our neighbors when I get around to making it.

By the way, if you want to see the human-powered Trevett Bridge in action, you better do it this summer. According to the Maine Department of Transportation (MDOT), the 86-year-old pony truss structure is clanking and not in a good way. MDOT says it’s time to go, time for an electric motor and a computer interface and so long to Terry, the smiling tender. I wonder if 8.1 million dollars’ worth of technological advancement will make as good a first impression as Terry circling with her lever. – SJH

Key to Success

Key West is good weather and good food. It’s also good people. Kathy and I have been fortunate to visit her aunt and uncle here on many occasions. Coming here in February is a treat not just for the tropical heat and humidity, scurrying iguanas, free-range chickens, and randy roosters, it’s also Kathy’s last chance to live a little before the CPA prison known as tax season. And, this visit had a bonus.

Michael Nelson at the Key West Monroe County Library organized and promoted a Rails of War presentation. Thanks, Michael. We set up outdoors on the library’s patio, and it was well attended and well-received. Key West in the winter draws a fair number of retired military folks, so we had quality interaction. And, here’s a special thanks to Robin at Books & Books who handled the retail. Books & Books is an excellent business and worth a visit if you’re in The Conch Republic.

Aunt Kathy and Vince went all out. After the presentation, they hosted an after-reception. Great party. Since the crowd was smaller than at the library, we had a chance for more in-depth dialogue and I had many “productive” conversations. Here’s to Steve for helping me with a “what to write next” challenge. Here’s to Lee for introducing me to the U.S. Coast Guard cutter, Ingham. The ship served for fifty-two years, from 1936 to 1988, and received two Presidential Unit Citations for extraordinary heroism in action against an armed enemy. The vessel is now retired and welcoming visitors in Key West. From its deck is probably the best place to watch the much-anticipated sunset. And, here’s to Dodie for offering to share her father’s war artifacts. He was one of the brave men who flew the hump in CBI.

Finally, here’s to all the fun-seeking tourists on rented motor scooters and the laid-back locals. Enjoy the sun and fun, and we hope to see you on our next solar circuit. The library invited me back next year.  – SJH

Big Four Yards

A rail yard is a place where work gets done. It’s a place where big, heavy, dangerous objects roll around sometimes without attachment and often without expectation. Big things happen in a rail yard, and you have to be alert. So, on any given day operating craft employees do their best to stay sharp and ready for surprises like an un-chocked cut of cars rolling out of the yards onto the mainline or any of a million other odd occurrences.

Yards come in different sizes. In Conrail’s old western division, the Big Four Yards in Avon, Indiana, just west of Indianapolis, was the largest in the division and one of the largest in the nation. The Big Four Yards was a “production” facility. Its purpose was to receive, classify, reassemble, and dispatch trains. Other yards were smaller affairs and were used to organize cuts of cars associated with one factory, grain mill, coal mine, print plant, or distillery. One of those smaller yards was the Westside Yard on Morris Street in Indianapolis primarily used to service the Ford foundry and other nearby industries. It was a small, unautomated yard, with maybe ten classification tracks, and usually had no more than two crews working on the first trick.

Every rail yard, no matter the size, has a crew breakroom. These are minimally furnished areas where operating craft employees eat their lunches, wait to be dispatched, or hang out between work assignments. In my day, a breakroom would be full of men because all operating craft employees were male. In the breakroom, you’d find men dozing, reading, eating, but always the center of breakroom culture was the quarter-ante Euchre game. If you’re unfamiliar with this speedy four-person bout of chance and skill, here’s some trivia. According to the people at Bicycle Playing Cards, Euchre is the reason why modern card decks were first packaged with jokers. But, even Euchre outgrew jokers.

The Euchre game tends to engender a great deal of chiding. Most of this is good-natured, some perfunctory based on the cards dealt, and some, let’s be generous, is raw and blue. And believe me, some brakemen-conductors are show-quality when working blue. Much of what they spout is hilarious. And, they are appreciated because they tend to keep their audience, in this case, the entire breakroom, laughing, alert and awake.

One such boisterous Euchre game was underway on a sunny summer day at the Westside Yard when I arrived with my seven-year-old daughter, Sara. I had a day off, and I wanted to take Sara on an up-close tour of railroad equipment. But first, I needed to check in at the breakroom to see what was happening.

The Westside Yard breakroom was a flimsy wooden shack just off the main switching lead and behind the yardmaster’s office. As we approached the screen door entrance, I could hear the banter and was a bit worried about exposing my precious, innocent daughter to not-so-innocent on-the-job railroaders.

We walked in, and everything got quiet as the crews shifted behavioral gears from unleashed male primates to civilized fellow fathers and upstanding citizens. Everybody smiled, I introduced Sara, and everybody politely said hello. Then, as I took Sara’s hand and started to leave, brakeman Steve Patterson, a comic pro who had missed his true calling in the performing arts, said: “Hey, Sara, have you heard this joke?”

I cringed. I was worried, but I shouldn’t have been. Steve was a pro. He had a family routine as well as his standard blue work. And, here’s the joke.

A frog walked into a bank and asked for a loan. The loan officer said, “Do you have any collateral?”

The frog answered, “All I have is this knickknack.”

The loan officer asked, “Do you have anything else?”

The frog answered, “Yes, I have a lily pad.”

And, at that, the loan officer shouted to his secretary, “Excellent. Knickknack, paddy-whack, give the frog a loan!”

I shouldn’t have worried. –SJH

If you want to know your animal neighbors, let it snow. A fresh coating of pure powder is a perfect, unspoiled canvas on which critters paint time-lapse landscapes of their comings and goings. We were in Maine for the recent deep freeze, and while the below-zero cold was great for our nighttime star and moon gazing, a crystalline reminder of cosmological constants, the snow presented us with mystery. More on that in a moment.

I grew up in a four-room wooden farmhouse in Indiana with no central heat. We had a brown porcelain oil-fired space heater in the living room and, as far as I remember, no means of conducting the heat to other places in the house, save convection. Still, I didn’t dread the cold, not really.

Here are two things that come to mind about that old house, the cold, and growing up. First, I was afraid that a fox would gnaw his way through the wooden siding and get into the bedroom my brother and I shared. Foxes, for some reason, had taken on mythical powers in my young mind. They gave me bad dreams.

The truth is I can hardly remember seeing a fox, as a boy. But on a small isolated Indiana farm, they were a bona fide threat to chickens. So, I must have inferred an existential threat. Officially, foxes were a pest in our neck of the woods because Hendricks County agricultural authorities paid three dollars bounty for a set of their severed ears. I cashed in only once. I used a Buck pocket knife to cut my submission from a road kill.

My other cold remembrance–fox related–happened on the cusp of spring, in late March or early April. That’s when day-old baby chicks arrived from the Indiana Farm Bureau Co-op. We usually ordered a hundred, or so. They were delivered by mail via a United States Postal Service rural route carrier. The cheeping, fluffy little hatchlings would grow to be egg-layers and fryers by summer.

The chicks lived in a flimsy wooden hen house in our smokehouse lot. There, they were kept warm courtesy of the Rural Electric Membership Cooperative, because they were vulnerable and missed their natural mothers. Their heat came from two lamps that hung over their straw-floored pen and glowed red like alien suns. The chicks would huddle and bunch under these lights and often smother one of their own. Poor things, flocking was in their genes.

During a cold snap, when the heat lamps weren’t enough, mom would bring the chicks into the house. She’d lay newspapers down in front of the oil burner in our living room and build a barrier out of who knows what to pen them in. Thus, my brother and I would have a single-species petting zoo until the weather warmed.

I didn’t think, at the time, that having chicks in the living room was wildly unusual. I assumed that other farm families were doing the same thing. We weren’t a poor family, not like our nearest neighbors. They were sharecroppers. They may not have had indoor plumbing. I don’t know; I was never allowed to go into their house although I often visited to play with their oldest boy. My father had a union job at Detroit Diesel Alison, a division of General Motors. He was a proud experimental machinist. Dad liked his work, and that was good because he spent almost every day there and he worked a lot of overtime, too.

In fact, dad and mom saved enough money that we built a new house. And, I mean, we built it. It was made of Bedford Limestone and still stands today, fifty years on. As young boys, our contribution was marginal. But my mom and dad worked really hard over three years to dig a basement (with the help of a backhoe), lay the block and foundation (with the help of the first African-American I ever met), frame the house (with the help of dad’s work buddies), set the stone (with the help of a journeyman mason) and wire the electrical circuits, plumb the fixtures and install the 1960 state-of-the-art, hot-water-in-the-floor-and-ceiling heating system.

So, with the new house finished and no sentimentality to hinder further progress, my father and mother hired a bulldozer. The operator plowed a big hole in our front yard and shoved the old house in. It went down like cardboard. Then, he covered the hole with high-grade Indiana topsoil. Buried in that dark hole was the cold of my youth and my fear of foxes chewing their way into my bedroom. Foxes can’t gnaw through Bedford Limestone; everybody knows that.

Now, we have foxes in Maine, I’ve seen them. And, coyotes, unseen but not unsung. I know the tracks from both. And in Maine, we have other substantial mammals who prefer meat for dinner. So, when I came across a fresh track on our access road that was almost half the length of my size-12 Bean boot, I was curious. I like to know my neighbors, especially the larger ones.

The track didn’t match any image provided by Google. So, armed with a loaded iPhone, I queried locals at Grover’s Hardware, and Dan’s Auto, and a Sawyer Island dinner party. I asked mostly Mainers, and I received non-definitive suggestions ranging from bear to bobcat. One opinion from a life-long son of the Pine Tree State even suggested catamount, very controversial.

So, for the sake of neighborliness, and by harnessing the boundless wisdom of the internet, I open the discussion to all reading this blog. You can reach me via my contact page for your solicited wildlife analysis. Here’s thanking you in advance. – SJH

New York City is a magical place for bewitch-able people. I’m not one of them. My wife is, however, and the lure of the Great White Way, the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, shopping, and knifing through its impenetrable social medium is her forte. It makes her happy. So, she was elated when she got tickets to see Springsteen on Broadway; she had bragging rights for a month. I too was excited within the confines of my dread of crowds, of New York crowds, and my seasonal mood constraints. These constraints start on my birthday in early November, build slowly to fill the void of waning sunlight, then amplify within the confines of indoors spaces, and are in full career by the winter solstice. As I pick through old family photos and write my Christmas cards, I become reflective, introspective and socially inert. Thus, New York City in December can be a challenge, but my wife’s happiness is overriding.

Anyway, it was a good trip. Yes, I still think of New York City as a massive rats-in-a-box psychology lab 101 experiment gone wrong, but the good outweighed the bad. Amid what ethologist, John B. Calhoun, called a “behavioral sink” I found enjoyment.

Springsteen was great. And, I mean that in a wow-he’s-a-world-class-performer-with-musical-and-poetic-chops-that-we, as-a-culture, should-all-be-proud-of kind of way. His two-hour musical narrative held my interest, made me rock in my seat, and made me plumb the depth of my moral and philosophical underpinnings. Death, sex, and rock-and-roll are the new catch-phrase for aging boomers. His lessons, from my mental notes, were: We are all flawed, we run away only to come home, and we all die but don’t give up hope.

The next morning, with Bruce still in our heads, we taxied to the American Museum of Natural History and saw Dark Universe at the Hayden Planetarium. There, the lesson we gleaned from the imminently listenable Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson was that we, the Earth and the human race, are small, very, very small. Not unimportant, but very, very small. And, the corollary to this is that the universe is big, really, really big.

I’ll let the reader draw any master conclusion from these two big-stage events. But wait, there’s more. New York wasn’t finished filling our heads with contemplatable goodies.

On Amtrak 71 back to D.C. the venerable New York Times tells me that “In the $600 billion annual Defense Department budgets, the $22 million spent on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was almost impossible to find.” The article, well worth a read, is about funding a military UFO identification program. A freshly released Pentagon video of two U.S. fighter jocks tracking an unidentified object was embedded in the article. So, questions multiply. Are we alone in the universe? Can we be found if we aren’t? Do we want to be found, really? What are the protocols if we are found or, for that matter, what should we do if we find someone else?

Back home in Alexandria after a decent night’s sleep, I take my first cup of coffee to the study and my well-read wife who stays up later than I do has left me an annotated article. Luckily, New York once again comes to rescue my curiosity and propel my inquisitiveness. The New York Times Magazine of December 10, 2017, tells me the answer to the “are we alone” question according to 2,903 of their readers. To the question “Do you believe aliens exist?” 44 percent said no, 31 percent said I don’t know, and 25 percent said yes.

I vote for yes and not merely because I’ve been reading Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, a hard-science, science fiction tome. But I confess that I am impressionable and susceptible to the loquacious Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson and Liu Cixin, a notable engineer, consultant to the China Aerospace Corporation, and the winner of nine Galaxy Awards, the Chinese Hugo Award. So, here’s the kicker on aliens, Liu Cixin believes that the iron rules of cosmic sociology lead to the conclusion that, should we identify another acculturated, inhabited planet, “Each civilization is like a hunter with a gun in a dark forest: When I see another hunter, I have no choice but to shoot him dead.”

Something to look forward to, I suppose. Meanwhile, I’m listening to Bruce who has musically resolved Mr. Liu’s Three Body Problem–the first volume of his trilogy–with his rhythm guitar and three-chords in Human Touch.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. –SJH

Please know that this is a true account of events as confirmed by a representative of Grover’s Hardware in Boothbay Harbor. The prominent characters in this abridged tale are Maine and Mainers. Some would say that’s redundant but humor the notion just for the moment.

Change is challenging especially when community consensus is a prerequisite. The weather was beautiful on March 9, 2016. The high temperature had reached into the 50s, the wind was seven knots out of the southeast, and the skies had been clear for most of the day. But, by 7:00 p.m. darkness was upon Boothbay, and a pall of skepticism advanced with the sun’s retreat. Attendance at the Boothbay Board of Selectmen meeting promised to be high, so the assembly moved from the town hall to the YMCA. True to expectations, a substantial proportion of the town’s 3,000 citizens showed up. The big draw was the vote on whether or not to vote on the proposed roundabout. Let me explain.

Mainers like to vote. They vote on everything. And that’s probably a good thing except in Wiscasset, but that’s another story involving stubbornness, lobster rolls, and traffic flow. Back to Boothbay, after robust and bounteous citizen dialogue, the selectmen voted 3-0 to allow the roundabout question to appear on the November ballot alongside the question of who would be President of the United States.

On November 8, 2016, the roundabout measure passed 1,121 to 968 and surveying and construction began almost immediately. The busy summer and early fall were tested by construction as crews labored to unravel an indiscernible tangle of stop signs and county roads intersecting in a Bermuda Triangle North, of sorts. The ancient conglomeration was a “failed intersection” characterized by no less than the Maine Department of Transportation. The plan was to superimposed a small but functional traffic circle on the mess. Now with the work mostly complete in early November 2017 and the roundabout in service, all that is left is for local motorists–because only locals are left in Boothbay this time of year–to learn how to use it.

There’s a significant backstory that I’ll summarize as follows. The story involves a flavored vodka magnate, a person from away (PFA)–that is, forty-eight miles away–who many locals believe is trying to disrupt the historic Boothbay social and economic trajectory. Yes, the magnate built a 30 million dollar mansion, luxified a sleepy old golf course and a tired hotel on the harbor, and has projected that he knows what’s best for the region. The magnate, Mr. Coulombe, was a principal supporter and financier and beneficiary of the roundabout. Hence, the roundabout was a much-discussed emotional issue.

With any change, there’s a learning curve. Since Mainers don’t travel far from home, perhaps for fear of being pegged as “from away,” many have never used a roundabout. Suffice it to say from inception to implementation; the roundabout has been on everyone’s minds and tongues.  At least it was until the Sunday before Halloween. That’s when the wind began to howl, and the rain started to sting.

The storm started around 10:00 p.m. and by 5:00 a.m., more than half a million Mainers had lost power. Virtually everyone in Boothbay lost electricity, and some were out for seven days. Barters Island, our home away from home was out for four and a half days. Thank goodness it wasn’t freezing, and the temperatures stayed between 40-60 degrees.

Now we come to the point of the story. When the people of Boothbay lost power, they stopped talking about the roundabout. All the local buzz changed to talk about the storm and trees and generators and power lines. So, if you want people to stop complaining about something, cause a bigger problem. Again, this social phenomenon has been confirmed by a credible representative of Grover’s Hardware so you can take it to the bank or if you prefer, the hardware. –SJH