Round Robin: Surrounded by History

For this week's Round Robin Photo Challenge: History!, I asked to see anything historic, with a number of suggested ways to interpret that term. My inspiration was a recent trip to Ft. Lowell, which I've photographed before for this Challenge. We'll get to that in a moment. But I'm also reminded tonight of a walk I took in Lucerne, Switzerland when I was 15 years old. All on my own for a few hours (maybe my brother was with me; I dont remember for sure) during a family bus tour of Europe, I walked over an old wooden bridge on which were painted frescoes of the Danse Macabre. I absolutely loved it. Part of what impressed me was that that bridge was older than the United States. Arizona as a state is especially recent - it was the last of the lower 48, coming in on February 14th, 1912, just over a hundred years ago.

But it doesn't mean this place doesn't have much history. I've showed you the ruins of Casa Grande, which go back much further than that bridge in Lucerne. Indigenous peoples were all over this land a very long time ago. Then came Padre Kino and, separately, the Spanish conquistadors, and eventually the Anglos arrived. And in 1953, an architect from Switzerland, Josias Joesler, designed the church I attend and am employed by. It was one of the last of many well-regarded projects he did here in Tucson.

Let's start with Ft. Lowell. Now it's a park, but its main claims to history are the ruins of adobe buildings from the fort that was active there from 1873 to 1891, and a little museum.

Now it's well inside the city limits, but back in the day it was miles away from Tucson on horseback. Officers' wives looked forward to their shopping trips into Tucson, which wasn't exactly the Big City, and still isn't.

Among the people stationed there during the fort's brief heyday was a surgeon named Walter Reed.

Yeah, okay, maybe that's not the most fascinating history ever. Let's venture 70 miles southeast - to Tombstone!

As I mentioned in a previous post, I took my Dad down to Tombstone on Labor Day weekend, pretty much on the spur of the moment. I was planning to go to Bisbee, but Tombstone was on the way. As we drove through there were people in costume standing around and I thought, never mind Bisbee today! As we got out of the car I heard gunfire - but it turned out to be only where paying customers could watch it. No matter.

It turned out that Tombstone was hosting a Redezvous of Gunfighters that weekend.

And there were all sorts of characters wandering about!

I even saw Bat Masterson, who left town months before the gunfight that made Tombstone infamous.

Of course the gunfight that Tombstone is famous for took place at the OK Corral - except that it didn't. Virgil, Morgan, and Wyatt Earp, and Doc Holliday faced off against Tom and Frank McLaury, and Billy and Ike Clanton in a vacant lot and alley behind the corral, and on Fremont Street. But as at least one writer has noted, that doesn't look good on a move marquee..

 The front of St. Michael's, 60 years after it was built.

I'm in the middle of promoting and preparing for St. Michael's 60th Anniversary. As I mentioned above, it was originally designed by a rather well-known architect named Joesler, who liked a "romantic revival" take on Spanish Colonial style. I've just started going through church archives and digitizing old photos and documents. I obviously didn't take any of those 1953 photos (I was only 6 years old, and living in Manlius, NY!), but if you're interested in history that goes almost exactly 60 years in Tucson, Arizona, you may want to scroll down for a peek at some of my recent entries. Then take a look at the other Robins' historic photos!

Karen

Linking List
as of Saturday, September 21st, 2013
1 AM MST

Freda - Posted!
Day One
http://fredamans.blogspot.ca

Karen - Posted!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com
http://www.facebook.com/mavarin

Carly - Posted!
Ellipsis
http://ellipsissuddenlycarly.blogspot.com

Jama - Posted!
Sweet Memories
http://mummyjam.blogspot.com

Old Tech, New Tech and Just Plain Buggy Tech

Because my Dad is sick with a cold, we didn't spend the whole afternoon together. I took him to Quizno's for a meatball sub (which he didn't even almost finish) and then to Robert's Barber Lounge for his monthly pampering - a deluxe shave and trim, complete with hot towels and scalp massage and attention to nose and ear hairs, followed by fingernail trimming. When he got back, they were serving rainbow sherbet in the dining hall, which made for a nice surprise.

After dropping my Dad off, I was able to put in a belated appearance at a wedding reception, bring John some lunch, and take the dogs to St. Michael's for a late afternoon session of playing in the park and working in the office. St. Michael and All Angels is having its 60th Anniversary this year, and we've chosen our patron saint day, Michaelmas, for the celebration, transferred to the last weekend in September. I'm right in the thick of the preparations, updating the church website, coordinating the efforts of others on publicity, editing the 60th Anniversary issue of The Messenger, and posting about the anniversary to social media sites.

One part of the preparations that I consider of particular importance (is that enough "p" words for ya?) is research into the church's history. If we're going to celebrate 60 years, it's good to know and talk about what happened in those years. So parishioners Jo Leeming (of the St. Michael and All Angels Vestry), Ila Abernathy (of the parish's Guatemala Project) and I procured a key to the church's archives, which are stored in the Womble Library. We oohed and ahhed over our discoveries there, pulled out several of the more important notebooks and envelopes, and brought them to my office at church. This afternoon was the first chance I've had since then to take a look.

I only got through half a notebook, but it was mostly really important stuff. There were pictures from the church's construction, dated September, 1953. Two of them were dated September 14, 1953, exactly 60 years before the day I scanned them on my office computer:

 

This is the interior of the church, with a man looking up at the eastern wall. The walls had not yet been plastered, and the floor had not yet been laid. But the place was already rather beautiful.

This appears to be a view from the main entrance, looking north 90 feet to where the sanctuary would be. The white cross seen here was an opening in the original north wall, into which the stained glass cross would be added. The northern end of the church has since been expanded twice, once in 1964 to add the transept (the size sections in front) and apse (a place for the high altar), and again in 1998 to add the organ chamber behind the sanctuary. The glass cross is now in the western wall, near where the choir sits.

There were more photos from later in the month, but it's clear that the building wasn't finished by Michaelmas, 1953. The dedication and first service was held Sunday, November 29th, 1953. There was a newspaper photo of that, along with a few color snapshots. Another small batch of photos showed the church as of the day after Christmas, 1953.

 

I also found an expansion feasibility study from 1959, apparently printed on ditto master or mimeograph. If you're under 40 years old, you probably don't know what those reproduction technologies were like, but I used to struggle with them in my high school days. Even in 1981, when the church printed a little black and white newsletter thingy titled "God Gave Me a Parish With Guts!", the pictures in it were dark and dot matrix-y. The newest thing I saw was a printout of an email from 1999, in which the original rector, Father John Clinton Fowler, wrote about acquiring a used pipe organ for the church, late in his tenure. It only cost $200 plus installation, but appears to have lasted only a few years before it fell apart. The replacement organ, dating from 1959 and originally built for a Cincinnati church, cost many orders of magnitude more than that to buy and install, but it's one of the best organs in this part of the country, so there.

But there you go. Even in 1999, for an important historical document, the way to preserve the data was to print it out. I started retyping the thing as I was scanning the photos, because it's not long enough to fuss with OCR for, even if I had a decent OCR program.

Still, much as I want to laugh at the old snapshots and dittos and other outdated technology found in the church archive, limited as they are in quality and shareability, I'm grateful that people took the trouble to make those physical records and preserve them. Many things from the past aren't around any more at all - or, if they are, they aren't online where I personally can get at them! I've looked at old photos and even silent black and white footage of Stalag Luft 1 where my dad was a prisoner, and at old photos of World War II squadrons and bomb groups; but I've yet to find one (outside of my Dad's small personal collection) that has my Dad in it. Large numbers of Doctor Who episodes from the 1960s and 1970s were wiped by the BBC, along with Apollo 11 footage and other important stuff. The technology of the items in the church archive is outdated, and nobody gets to see it because it consists of fragile bits of paper, locked up in a cabinet so it won't disappear or get destroyed. But the point is that it hasn't been lost or destroyed. It is therefore now available to me, to digitize and share with the world, or at least the parish.

St. Michael and All Angels Church as of December 26, 1953. 

This innocent photo killed my index page tonight.

And it's not as though current technology is so much more reliable than what they had in 1953 or 1959 or 1981. I already told you about my recent malware problems, and I can't get my new Family Tree Maker program to run for than a few seconds before crashing. More to the point, I tried to add a few of the images I found today to the church website, which is hosted on Godaddy. No matter how carefully I typed or copy-pasted the image's URL, no matter how many times I edited files to make them shorter, uploaded them again and gave them less problematic file names, my edited web page refused to display them. I had to let the church blog host the photos. At one point I added one measly photo to the church's main web page and saved it, only for the whole page to have been randomly ruined by my SeaMonkey Composer program. It's not the first time this has happened, either. Tonight, all the < and > marks were replaced with the HTML markup that makes them not be HTML tags any more. Last time, which was only a week or so ago, all the image URLs suddenly pointed to my hard drive instead of the web site, even though they were all previously in there with the full web addresses. Both times, I had to grab a Google cache version of the page, clean it up and repost it. I should know better, and always keep a backup before I edit a page.

 The back of the church, December 1953.

It's going to be worth it, though, right? If I can just get all the best of this old stuff scanned, uploaded and displayed, on web pages and pdfs that are consistently readable and glitch-free, then, THEN, we'll have the best of old and new.

 Karen

Just a short note tonight

I think I've gone as far as I can at the moment with this business of writing about my Dad, at least on a day-to-day basis. I've pretty much said what I wanted to say, and complaining about the situation every night doesn't help. There aren't that many things that happen to my Dad on a given day, nor things he does and says that are substantially different from what he did or said the night before.

Tonight he has a cold. Also, the bump on his hand is actively hurting now, not just being annoying. But that's the sum total of news.

I'm going to try to keep up on the blogging, but it's best that I find other things to write about besides this one depressing area of my life.

Karen

progris riport

Tonight when I went to see my Dad, he was napping in his lift chair, which he's never learned to operate other than just sitting in it. (Not that he needs the lift function, but I'm sure he's unaware that there is an electric motor or a remote control.) The room was dark, and for a moment I didn't think he was even in the room.

I turned on the light, and he was glad to see me. He told me about things he wanted to get done: a manicure, ear hairs trimmed, nose hairs trimmed, a shave that isn't really needed at the moment, and trimming of his already neat hair. He's constantly frustrated that he can't find scissors, razors and clippers sitting around - except when they are, because someone forgot to lock something up. When he does find a razor or scissors he always ends up mildly injuring himself, but he doesn't understand or remember that. Neither does he understand when I explain that having these tools accessible is against the rules, that he's not allowed to shave himself. I tell him that the caregivers do have the tools and it's their job to shave him and trim his nails. He only has to ask. Dad's response is basically to shrug and indicate that he has no idea what I'm talking about.

Dad also did a little inventory of the things on his little table, pointing out to me a water bottle, half full and with the cap on; his glasses case, in which he keeps both his glasses and a small black comb; and a white handkerchief. He had pulled the handkerchief from his pocket along with the pocket lining, which was poking out of his pants, completely inside out. He seemed to think he needed to remove the lining before the pocket would be truly empty. I told him it was okay to push it back in, and did so for him.

I also tried, two or three times, to explain that the nurse practitioner had not frozen the wart or lesion off his hand yet because she wanted me to sign off my permission for this minor surgery, which I did tonight. All he did was push against the bump and explain that was the best he could do with it.

This is a man who was a PhD, a college dean. Now he doesn't know how a pocket works.

As I pulled out of the facility's parking lot, it occurred to me that I'm living in a rewrite of "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes. In case you're unfamiliar with the story, let me explain. It's a science fiction tale of a mentally challenged man who receives an experimental treatment, as does a rat called Algernon. Over the course of a series of progress reports, Charly becomes more intelligent, to the point where, as a genius, he takes over the research into his own case. The rat dies, the research fails, and Charly ends up back where he started intellectually.

My dad's case isn't science fiction. There is no experimental treatment on offer. Over the past few years he has slid further and further, from near-genius level intellect to an utter inability to understand anything beyond the most concrete facts. But I know that somewhere out these in the world, researchers are working on understanding how Alzheimer's does its damage, how other forms of dementia arise, and what can be done about it. None of that is going to help my Dad. At the risk of being selfish, though, I hope to God they find some answers in time to keep me from losing the ability to understand what a pocket lining is.

Karen

No Entry

There will be no entry here tonight, other than this notice that there's no entry. I've been uo way too late, way too many nights in a row, to tackle a significant bit of writing at 1 AM tonight.

But yes, I saw Dad, and no, nobody's taken that wart thing off his hand, yet, but the nurse I like and trust is going to try again to bet it taken care of. Dad again described a series of occurances, vaguely but at some length, which I eventually figured out were tv shows he had watched. He does that - he gets invested in a tv show even if he doesn't understand what's going on, trying to help the people on the show accomplish whatever it is they are doing.

 

At the vet's office two weeks ago

 

The dogs had a busy day - hanging out at St. Michael's and visiting the park behind it twice, with two trips to PetSmart later in the day. The afternoon trip was a private lesson for Cayenne, with Kito tagging along. The evening one was a class for Kito in a group session. Kito was so frightened of going to PetSmart without Cayenne that he refused to get in and out of the car, and peed on the seat cover. But the "lie down" command that he completely failed to do in class was one he accomplished easily once he was safe at home with Cayenne.

Tonight I also worked on the 60th Anniversary issue of The Messenger - not the 60th of the publication, but of the church the publishes it. More on that later.

Karen

Welcome Home, Computer!

I got my computer back tonight, after work, after visiting Dad, but before picking up chicken wings for dinner at 8 PM. So far it seems to be fine. I've spent the evening setting it up, answering some email, updating the church's music page, and tweaking the photos in entries made over the weekend using my iPhone. Smartphones are wonderful things to have, but they are still extremely clunky to use for conventional blogging.

Monday has come and come, a day when a visiting nurse practitioner was supposed to freeze off a growth (a wart?) on my Dad's hand. It's still there. I've repeatedly requested that somebody do something about it, but I suspect that the visiting medical people mostly ignore the notes from the facility's nursing staff, let alone secondhand requests from family members of residents. But I'll keep trying. Also, where are the other seven pairs or so of my dad's pants? Thursday is his laundry day, and half his laundry doesn't seem to have made it back to him room yet. It's hard to check on all this stuff when I don't get there until after 7 PM, when everyone is gone for the night except for the evening caregivers.

Other things I want to discuss with someone there when I can include Wil's suggestion about posting Ruth's obituary, and what and how he is doing with scheduled activities. I have tried to get him involved with drawing things and he isn't interested. I took him into a hobby shop with train stuff and he wasn't interested. A few days ago he apparently was involved in some sort of craft project, but I was completely unable to deduce what it was he was trying to do or make, and what went wrong. Whatever it was, I don't think he finished it. But I'd still like to find something he can do besides watching tv without comprehension, looking over newspapers, going to meals, going out with me and obsessing about his facial hair. That's his world right now.


Karen

Travels With Frank: The Small Stuff

I didn't get my computer back today. In fact, I haven't heard a word from Staples since I prepaid for the servicing. I hope they didn't forget that I came in and paid, and that the computer isn't impossible to clear of malware. I should have called today, but forgot until after Staples' closing time.

So let me just post a few photos with a brief explanation. My dad is very interested in visual detail, something he's still capable of as words and concepts and memories of past and present increasingly elude him. Before the strokes and Ruth's death, he used to build extremely detailed Model railroading layouts in N-scale, the smallest of the commonly available sizes for such things. I'm told that he used to paint even the faces of tiny people inside the N-scale school buses and the like!

So today, when I realized that the Gadsden-Pacific Toy Train Operating Museum reopened today after bring closed all summer, I took him down there for a very enjoyable 45 minutes or so. I just wish there was a way to get him involved in working on such things again, instead of just looking at them. But I suppose that's asking far too much if him at this point.

Karen