In the early thirties when I was just a wee laddie, laundry day involved the use of a mangle. It was used to iron bed sheets, tablecloths, and other items too large to conveniently iron by hand. Mom had one, and I remember watching her use it. The piece to be ironed was smoothed and [...]
Boy, does this shot bring back memories! When I was a boy we often visited our paternal grandparents on their farm near Iola, Kansas. The big evening event for us Ayers kids was going out with Grandfather Ayers to bring in the cows for milking, I think about a dozen, and watch him milk those [...]
Here’s another golden oldie, to me at least, from the web site predecessor to the Orlop. It was written in 2002 after my return from a medical mission trip to an indigenous Indian tribe high on a Costa Rica mountainside. As a postscript, similar missions in the following years, in which I was not a [...]
An ex-Gates Radio executive, Larry Cervon, died recently and left a couple of albums of pictures with Bob Weirather, a recently retired Gates/Harris engineer, from one of which comes this picture of a cool and confident Engineering Manager at a Sales meeting in about 1967. I must have been younger then. The scenario that brought [...]
This little essay was first posted eight years ago, in August 2001, before the days of the Orlop when I was at dayers.net. Here I am once again re-living my 15 minutes of fame as a blue water sailor in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Santa Barbara. Something strange happens when a flatlander [...]
That’s what we were singing and dancing to in 1948, you will be amazed to know. It occurs to me that that year may have represented the apogee of American ascendancy on the world scene, which also may mean that we have generally been going downhill for the last 61 years. Anyone want to argue [...]
I found myself strangely moved while reading David McCullough’s account of Harry S. Truman’s presidency in 1947, as he helped Congress confront the Soviet menace in the aftermath of World War II. I was just a snotty-nosed high school junior at the time, puffing on my saxophone and clarinet in “The Stardreamers” at school dances; [...]
Let me share my morning journal entry for this quintessential summer morning. Fri Jul 3 2009 7:30 AM 63, clear. I remember how it used to be on mornings like this when I left the house on Rogers Court for my morning jog, on down the hill, a right and a left and over the [...]
Mark Twain makes perfect reading taken in small snatches. Thanks to the Gutenberg Project, I have some 21,000 beBook pages of his writings. First up was Innocents Abroad, 1st edition, 1869, complete with strange spelling and usage. I’ve been following his account of a bunch of tourists taking a grand European tour with nary a [...]
My Pride model, that is. I keep chipping away at the Pride of Baltimore and the Fair American (admiralty style model of a 1780, 18 gun schooner man of war), but I laid the keel for the Pride in October, 2004, and started the Fair American in August, 2005. I must also admit that I [...]
