Robert Pence

Very appropriate, Clueless,Ohio. The ethnic newspapers have faded from a lot of people's consciousness, but they once were an important part of large, cohesive immigrant neighborhoods. A Macedonian Tribune has been published for a long time in Fort Wayne, but to my knowledge it has never had a building of its own. Huntington, Indiana - home of the Catholic weekly newspaper, Our Sunday Visitor, from 1925 until a new, larger facility was completed nearby in 1961. Father John Francis Noll, later to become Bishop of the Fort Wayne - South Bend Diocese, originated the paper in 1912 to combat anti-Catholic propaganda that was rampant among mainstream and independent publications at the time, and continued to be directly involved in its publication throughout his career.

The Lincoln Tower, at 116 East Berry Street in downtown Fort Wayne, Indiana, was completed in 1930 as headquarters for Lincoln National Bank and Trust. The Art Deco tower stands 312 feet/95 meters tall and is decorated with plaques representing aspects of Abraham Lincoln's Indiana boyhood. Prominent Fort Wayne architect Alvin M. Strauss collaborated with Cleveland firm Walker and Weeks to design the tower. The general contractor was Buesching and Hagerman. In my earliest memories of the Lincoln Tower, red candelabra decorated all the windows during the Holiday Season just as they do now. In 1946 and 1947 we lived on Fletcher Avenue just off Maumee Avenue, more than a mile east of downtown. From our back yard at night we could hear traditional Christmas music that was played on an electronic organ in the tower and broadcast from large speakers on the parapet. The alternating white and red beams from the beacon atop the tower could be seen from great distances as they swept across the night sky. This 1983 view of the Lincoln Tower was photographed looking south along Court Street, before the creation of the present Courthouse Plaza 19831630-0015 Photo Copyright © 2010 by Robert E Pence

Through the 8th grade I attended a township school with two grades per classroom and alternating recitation and study times. The rowdy roughneck kids could expect frequent beatings with a wooden one-by-four paddle about two feet long or strappings with a leather belt until they were red-faced and bawling, and then were expected to go back and take their seats as if nothing had happened. It was a time and place when corporal punishment was routine, and if you got into trouble at school, you could expect worse when you got home. My teacher in the fifth and sixth grades, a big bruiser of a macho guy, took an early dislike to me that I only figured out years later probably was related to some sort of negative dynamic between his wife and my lesbian aunt and some of her friends. That, and the fact that I was the farthest thing from a jock that you could imagine. I was singled out fairly often for gratuitous physical persecution. He wore rubber-soled shoes, had his desk at the back of the classroom, and often came and went via the coat room alongside the classroom, so that during study times we never knew if he was in the room or not (we were forbidden from turning around and looking to see). Once in the sixth grade during a study time, he came up silently behind me and, with a geography book, one of those old wide, thin ones, hit me across the back of the head hard enough to knock me out of my seat. I may have been visibly daydreaming - I did that a lot - when it happened, but I wasn't making any noise or doing anything to annoy or distract anyone else. Another time, in the music room in the basement, a room with straight-backed wooden chairs arranged in semi-circular rows around a piano, he slipped up behind me and picked me out of my chair by the collar and belt and tossed me across two rows of chairs. Everyone else in the room, including the music teacher, pretended not to notice anything unusual. I never did figure out what might have triggered that one. Some things are hard to get past, and every now and then when something reminds my of my experiences in his classroom I experience a flash of anger and regret that that b*****d is dead, and I can't go to the nursing home and sneak up behind his wheelchair and knock his decrepit, feeble a** out onto the floor with a geography book.

Now you are a party animal! But I'll probably be up well before daylight on New Year's Day, starting 2011 with a clear head and an optimistic outlook and fixing another mug of hot cocoa to enjoy with my morning paper.

Why, yes, you're right. I can't for the life of me understand why on earth he seemed to find me annoying! :angel: :-D

During my time working for IBM providing on-site IT support for a client, I got a new boss. Soon after his arrival, he joined a small group of us at lunch in the company cafeteria and asked us to point out the client firm's managers and executives, and give him some background. After we gave him the run-down on a few VPs, he asked, "Is there anyone else important here that I should know about?" I told him, "David, if an executive vice-president gets injured or killed or quits, it may take six months to a year or more to replace him or her. In the meantime, everything usually keeps running as usual. The really important people are the hourly-waged ones processing payments and taking phone calls. If one of them quits, HR has to find a replacement ASAP. If they don't, the quality of customer service suffers and that affects everyone's jobs including ours." That was the first time I read disapproval all over his face.

Great to browse these again !

So? I'm retired and don't have co-workers to bitch to, my family never did listen to me, I don't care to hang out at a bar with all the ignorant redneck pissers and moaners, and I don't want to drive away my few local friends. Where else am I gonna' vent? :x :wink:

Have a nice mug of hot cocoa, and probably be asleep by 10pm.

Please. I'm anal about punctuality! I give a 10 min. grace period then im out! This is my #1 pet peeve. It just shows a glaring lack of respect for your time and assumes that their time is somehow more valuable and we can just wait. I pride myself on always being there at the scheduled time. In the off chance that something happens and I'm runngin slightly behind, I be sure to let the party waiting know and apologize profusely. If it was my meeting, or if the person holding it didn't outrank me by at least three salary levels, I used to insist upon meetings starting on time, and protested if the meeting's moderator tried to backtrack to help latecomers "catch up." There's a name for delaying the start of a meeting or backtracking to accomodate people who can't manage their time; it's called Punishing the Punctual. It's wrong to penalize all the people who make an effort to be on time, and Punishing the Punctual just leads to fewer people valuing punctuality, and and more delays and backtracking and wasted time. It only took a few instances of my commandeering meetings to get them started on time or to keep them on track, before my bosses and coworkers "got religion" and started emphasizing punctuality. Oh. Another thing I used to do - this was before workplace smoking bans - was get to the meeting room early and remove all the ashtrays. Aside from health issues, the smokers often were the ones who dragged meetings out by belaboring peripheral issues, and making smoking inconvenient made them want to get done with business and get out.

Before the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge opened in 1950, automobile traffic between Memphis and West Memphis crossed the Mississippi River on narrow, plank-surfaced roadways on the outside of each of the Harahan Bridge's trusses, with minimal railings between the roadways and a long drop to the river.

Unleaded $3.09 this evening at Kroger in Fort Wayne.

Wonderful thread. I'd heard about that Russian enclave, but hadn't seen many photos of it.

Virginia & Truckee No. 21 J.W. Bowker built 1875 in Philadelphia by Baldwin, on display at California State Railroad Museum in Old Sacramento

This evening I stopped at Barnes & Noble to see if they had a particular book; Beating Cancer with Nutrition (no problems now, but as a 3X survivor I think it's good to stay ahead of the game). I didn't find it in the Health section, so just to be thorough I looked across the aisle in the Women's Health section. There it was, right next to a book on prostate cancer. I told the guy at the customer service counter about it, and he just smiled and shrugged.

<<DING!!>> :clap:

That's a well-written letter. I'm very much in favor of 3C and expanded passenger rail service throughout the Midwest. I think Mr. Conn's letter brings up another issue, though. He's employed at The Ohio State University and lives in Yellow Springs. Before I-70 existed, how many people in the Midwest would have chosen to live where they had to commute that far to work, or would have taken a job that far from where they lived? Much of today's traffic congestion is a consequence of bad land use promoted by flawed public policy, and a large part of that flawed public policy consists of providing subsidized regional and intercity expressways that facilitate sprawl, dispersed living arrangements, and long commutes.

Ironic, when there's concern over rising fuel prices and peak oil. With large vans, SUVs, and heavy-duty pickups, even diesels, the drop in mileage at 70mph compared with 55-60mph is very significant. Some operators of big rigs used to justify speeding by saying that their trucks ran more efficiently at higher speeds, but I came to doubt the truth in that when many truckers slowed down as fuel prices spiked a couple of years ago.

Excellent photos, and a testimonial to how many skilled and experienced craftsmen have lost their livelihoods to mergers and consolidations run by businesspeople more concerned with maximizing profit than with providing value and a unique product.

Beautiful set! An elegant Italianate Victorian with a belvedere and many other neat and tidy historic gems. And a direction sign with an apostrophe error; "Grand River Cellar's."

Sadly, most of the stuff built from the sixties on up isn't even sexy when it's being demolished - two-by-fours and plywood or chipboard sheathed in brick veneer! It doesn't even make a satisfying, resounding, dust-billowing crash when it comes down. :cry:

Have you gotten your pink Cadillac yet?

There's an interesting thread of photos from various parts of Ukraine on SSC. http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=803254

I don't know enough about European and Asian railroads and rolling stock to offer any meaningful comment on the locomotive. I can only venture that it looks like it was built for fast passenger service. The styling is quite stark and functional.