Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

The 1926 Glomerata, part one

After a long time away from this feature, we return to the dusty old pages of old yearbooks. Enjoy a few pretty pictures from the Plains.

We go now to the 1920s, right in the middle of what might be the tumultuous era in the old alma mater’s history. Spright Dowell, who never enjoyed support as the president, was coming to the end of his time on the plains. He’d come over from the state department of education, which even, back then, referred to itself as The Department. Dowell replaced Charles Thach, an alumnus who’d been on campus for decades until 1920, just before his death the next year. They were engaged in political warfare with their cross-state university rival (with cloak-room maneuvering that went far beyond athletics.) State funds were low, there were charges of ethics problems through the Cooperative Extension Service. The university also had to survive a proposal that would move the campus 50 miles west, to the capitol city. Dowell wasn’t exactly against that idea, and that cost him in the eyes of his faculty and students. Also, the Great Depression was on the horizon. No one knew that in 1926.

Dowell knew, however, that he replaced a beloved man, and sometimes blamed that for his lot in life, because the real issues — disrepair of buildings, outdated equipment, debt, underpaid faculty — weren’t enough to blame. He wanted more money from the state, which often looked at the university as a secondary concern, despite its land grant status and importance to the region. People seemed to like him, there was a complimentary note about his welcoming style of conversation in this annual, but didn’t think he was equal to the job. He’d lost the alumni, the faculty were over him. Enrollment wasn’t keeping up with regional competition. Dowell might have been too much of a holistic bureaucrat for the moment, and didn’t bring the requisite passion for the place, but there was also the problems in athletics, particularly football. After the 1924 season the team was 4-4-1, and alumni wanted Dowell to be brought before the board of trustees, with students called to testify. This was the lever that moved alumni, but statewide politics that had nothing to do with sports were also at play. The students hanged him in effigy.

This is the cover of the 1926 yearbook.

The book was dedicated to Maj. John Everard Hatch, “who has been an inspiration to us throughout our four years of college life … in token of our love for him as a man, our admiration for him as a solider and our devotion to him as a leader.” Hatch retired as a colonel. He and his wife, Helen, are buried at West Point. They had a daughter and two sons, both of whom served as officers in the Army. They would have all been 10 or younger here. His father was a brigadier general, buried at Arlington.

Sometimes it is easy to think of the way-back-then as a monochrome moment, a sepia-toned, yellowed piece of paper is what we’ve got. That’s what we see, after all. But this book is here to show you, they knew about color. There are several plates like this marking the different sections of the book. Though, to my knowledge, we didn’t often have tigers walking a path to Samford Hall.

Nevertheless, it is the 1920s. The photos here are large shots of buildings, which we’ve discussed before, and small headshots, like these, of the senior and junior class officers.

Vice president of the senior class was Leon Nelson, who was from Gadsden. He went to Florida to coach and then to coach in south Alabama. A decade hence, he was the head football coach back home in Gadsden, and had a legendary decade-long run there. He went back to Florida in 1948, where he stayed until 1964. The stadium there is named in his honor. He died at 67, in 1970, in Miami.

Owen Frederick Wise return to Auburn in 1970 to receive an honorary doctorate. He was the director of the state’s Vocational Rehabilitation Service where he worked for more than 40 years, started in 1928. He died in Montgomery, in 1973. He had his wife, Louise, had two daughters, and at least one of them went to Auburn and would be listed as one of the Glomerata’s favorites — a fact which was mentioned in her obituary, at 88, in 2023.

Louis Howle left school and signed on with the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, where he worked for 43 years. He and his wife had two daughters. He died in Atlanta, in 1983.

Robert Young Brown went into the foreign service. He was stationed in Baghdad, Cairo, Bogota, and Panama in the 1930s. He would also serve in Montevideo, Manila, and Athens. He was named consul general in Jamaica in 1950. He retired in 1957, and served in the National Defense Executive Reserve. He died in 1964.

Dorothy Duggar was from Auburn, hers was one of those reasonably prominent families. She would become the first woman to graduate from the university with a degree in architecture. She stayed in town, and became well-known herself. She died in 1975 and is buried at Pine Hill.

Did these juniors do much? Eldon Pruett got married in the fall of 1926 and graduated in May of 1927. His wife became a teacher. He did too, becoming a coach at neighboring Opelika High. He stayed in the Army reserves, left OHS to serve in the war. At some point he did a stint in Korea. He became a lieutenant colonel, and a business manager when he returned to civilian life. He was active in local society, ran for the county school board, married off two daughters. His nickname in college was Dizzy, and people still called him that three decades later. He died in 1968.

S.H. Lynne was a track star at Auburn and was hired as a coach at Alabama. He also studied the law there, and then became a county judge in 1934. He was named to the federal bench in 1946 by Harry Truman. When he died, at 93, in 2000, he was the longest serving jurist. His obituary recalls that his order kept George Wallace from barring two black students from attending the University of Alabama, though he wasn’t known as a proponent of integration.

His classmate and fellow class officer Moreland G. Smith was a civil rights activist, and architect. He joined a Nashville firm, studied at MIT, and then put out his own shingle. He designed a city hall, and an apartment complex where Rosa Parks would later live. He served in the Army Corps of Engineers. He later designed Montgomery’s Garrett Coliseum, served on the board of trustees at Tuskegee. He also worked on a church, a library and three county courthouses. He sold most of his interest in the architectural firm Sherlock, Smith & Adams because the very racist governor was threatening a bank with which they did business. He moved to Atlanta and joined the Southern Regional Council. He and his wife, Marjorie, had three children. He died in 1989.

It looks as though Rodney G. Carter became a teacher, and then a principal. He’s difficult to pin down, however.

All of the senior headshots look like this, though Sarah Frances Blackman is the only one smiling.

If I have the right woman, it seems that she got married in 1953. It’s possible she lived in Florida. And, if I found the right one I think I’ve just stumbled upon my favorite newspaper mention in this long-running project. In 1983, Frances Blackman was demonstrating the microwave. No wonder she was smiling, decades and decades earlier.

The next woman is Mrs. Margaret H. Blair. She would go on to work at the Georgia Teachers College and the University of Georgia. By the mid-1940s she becomes nationally renowned in clothing and textiles. She’s in her 30s here, but she’s difficult to trace. She died in Savannah, Georgia, in 1973. Her sister, Agnes Harris, was at this time the dean of women at Auburn. The next year she went over to Alabama.

I only included the third guy because he was easy to find. Samuel Bonifay studied electrical engineering, became a meter tester, and eventually settled in Anniston, working for Alabama Power for almost 40 years. He served as a captain in the reserves, retired in 1966 and had a daughter and two grandchildren when died at 75 in 1977.

On that same page, at the bottom of the column, is Margaret Brown. She was studying education and, if you’ll read her blurb, was a total jock.

The varsity team didn’t form until 1971, of course, but women were doing things prior to that. And this, in 1926, is the first time I recall the yearbook bragging about it. Unfortunately, the athletic department doesn’t record or recognize those earlier teams. And Brown, of course, is quite the common name.

This is Wiliam Alton Goode, he was studying agriculture, livestock in particular. He’d eventually own a dairy concern. He died in 1979, age 75, the father of a son and two daughters. He is from one of my ancestral haunts and I bet someone in my family knew him.

I don’t profess to being an expert on the photography or portraiture of the era, but I bet this woman, Oriel Nevada McGinty, was desperately ready to be done with the 1920s.

She was the oldest of five from nearby Camp Hill. She was to become a teacher. She died at 86 in 1976.

It is a shame the photo isn’t bigger, but you can tell that the band is awfully proud of those capes. I bet they were new.

“They weren’t good, but they had rifles, and so we’ll say whatever nice things they want us to.”

Earlier we learned that the athletics were struggling. The solution was a rebuild. The university brought in David Morey, center. He was an All-American football player for Dartmouth College and a pitcher for the Philadelphia Athletics. Auburn was his third stop, where he stayed for three years. He went 10–10–1 in football, with the high water mark being a 2–0 win against Tulane in the first game of New Orleans’ Sugar Bowl. In 1927 his quarterback was expelled for sneaking into a women’s dorm after a night of drinking. (Could you imagine that headline today?) His team started 0–3 and he resigned. he went back north to coach again.

Some of these other guys would have distinguished careers on the plains. These guys all came in together, Red Brown, who coached the freshmen, Boozer Pitts, Morey, Mike Papke, and the great Wilbur Hutsell.

Pitts was a local boy, and was a standout player at Auburn in the glory days. He was a center at 190 pounds. He’d coached the team in ’23 and ’24, and would step in for Morey in 1927. Aside from World War II, when he served as an army officer, he taught math at the university for more than 30 years. He died in 1971.

Papke would coach the basketball team for three seasons and still has the second-highest winning percentage on campus.

Wilbur Hutsell was fast his whole life, being a conference champion in the 400 when he was in college. He’d been on campus for a few years as the first track and field coach. In his career he sent five athletes to the Olympics. He also coached the basketball team for a time, before Papke came along. He trained the 1924 Olympics wrestling team and was an assistant track coach for the 1928 Games. He was also the athletic director, twice. The track venue on campus was named in his honor and he was inducted into four different halls of fame.

Morey, on the gridiron, had guys like this to work with. No idea who they are, as there’s no caption. The football team began their rebuild, in 1925, going 5-3-1. The yearbook says they were a thin team. As yearbooks must do, they were incredibly optimistic about the future.

They were wrong. The team would go 5-4 in 1926 and wouldn’t see a winning season again until 1931. None of the fans knew that. Some 5,000 fans came out to see the homecoming game, a 19-0 loss to Virginia Tech. It was the largest crowd to ever watch Auburn play. In contrast, the 2026 A-Day game, the spring scrimmage, had 34,276 fans in attendance.

There were quite a few on hand for this game. Not sure where it is, but I want to say Columbus. The sports photography had a long way to go, in the 1920s, and this is the best of the shots assembled here. But, still, look at that referee running in at the end of the play.

This is the captain of the team, Edward “Red” Hawkins. He was a senior from Bessemer, studying civil engineering. He got married in 1928 to Mildred and graduated in 1929. He taught and was the athletics director of a high school for some time. He joined the U.S. Forest Service and then the war came. Overseas for more than two years, he was stationed in Calcutta, India for at least part of that time, where he was promoted to lieutenant colonel. Ten days after his 90th birthday, in 1992, he died in south Alabama.

This is the rat football team. The freshman team, and the first one in the university’s history. It says here that some 120 “freshies” came out for the team. Twenty-two of them are listed above this photograph. It looks like a pretty fierce group to me.

Cheerleading was different then. These guys didn’t merit a real mention here, but they did get this photograph. I wonder if they had to supply their own white-on-white cheer uniforms. We do learn the cheer leader is Charles Roberts, a junior from Wadley studying electrical engineering. He’s the guy in the middle.

Roberts worked at Georgia Power, where he was a vice president for a quarter century. He cheered on the Red Cross and the United Givers as chairman of the local fund drives. He’d been president of the Rotary, the chamber of commerce and the Georgia State Fair Association. When he died, at 67 in 1971, he had a son and daughter, and seven grandchildren. His wife died three years prior, almost to the day.

Here’s the captain of the basketball team, which earned a two-page spread. Bill McKinney was from Mobile. He was studying electrical engineering. The season was still underway when the Glom went to print. They finished 5-10, but were looking forward to better days. And the next few seasons were better.

McKinney came from a time before load management. We learn here that he’d played every minute in the last two seasons. He made it to 98, his time at the university and his four varsity letters, his time in ROTC, and his being a team captain are sentences three through seven in his 2003 obituary. But he was more than an Auburn Man — they for sure got that in his obit, as well they should. He was in the Rotary Club. He worked for the American Blower Corporation, which made industrial fans, for two decades. He started McKinney Associates in 1948 and, it says here, he never missed a day of work until he retired at 97.

One of the guys on the team is the great Emil “Snitz” Snyder. Streak was his college nickname for a time, and he came by it honest. He was a three-sport start, but it was the track where he shined. He held the American record for the 300 meter race for a time, at 48 seconds flat. He ran the 100-yard dash in 9.8 seconds. In two years he would become Auburn’s first Olympian. He would win a heat race in the 400 meters, but didn’t advance past the quarterfinals.

After school, Snyder coached football for 30 years. I grew up near a stadium named in his honor. The mayor said “Everyone didn’t love him — no man can claim that — but everyone respected him. Not many can claim that.” Wilbur Hutsell, who we met above, said “I never played for Snitz. I envy those more fortunate.” The newspaper wrote “He produced so many outstanding athletes for Bobby Dodd at Georgia Tech that he was often accused of running a Tech training camp.” He trained at least three All-Americans and one football national champion. He won seven state football championships. His basketball team was a state runner-up. During World War II he ran a physical fitness program on a college campus. The Boston Celtics came to town and his team beat them. He died, at 72, in 1978.

This is Cecil Stewart, captain of the baseball team. The Glom says “his uncanny ability to wield the willow and handle the horsehide is sure to carry him to the top.” Those are both baseball references, though I had to look up the first one. Stewart played seven years of minor league ball as a second baseman. Soon after he hung up his spikes he got married. He and his wife, Catherine, started their lives in Dallas. Geechie, as he was known as a young man, died at 85, in 1988.

Here’s one more baseball shot. The guy on the right is Ben Sankey. They bragged about him here as a shortstop, and they weren’t wrong. He spent three years in the bigs, playing all around the Pittsburgh Pirates’ infield. He died in Georgia in 2001, at 94 years old.

Last one for the day, these are the track and field captains. I’m not sure what the Ts mean on the uniform. Leon Lavert “Nurmi” Nelson has them, but the whole team does not wear them. Nelson was also the vice president of his senior class, we learned about him, above.

The other guy is George Clifford Murrow. He ran cross country. He got a masters degree at Alabama. He became an educator, and then a principal, which was one of his job titles for 32 years. In the summers he worked as a funeral director. He retired in 1971. He died in 1988, survived by his wife, Ola May, and two daughters.

All of these will wind up in the Glomerata section (eventually). You can see others, here. Or maybe you’d like to click through to see all the covers. The university hosts their collection here.

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26
Aug 26

Another day closer to being ready for the semester

Another one of my classes was locked down today. I’m sure I’ve said that recently. Probably about that class, but it is official official now. The syllabus has been uploaded. I’m not touching anything else with it, build-wise. Of course I have to work on lectures, but there’s time for that. For now, it is organized and mostly coherent.

The last thing to do was to fix the syllabus. Change the dates. Change the time and date details. Add some standard university boilerplate. Wonder why this was a nine-page document. My afternoon goal was to cut that down. Eventually, I made it five pages. Here’s how you do that.

You press the delete button a lot.

When you add things you have to delete things. Paragraphs and sentences can be made redundant. Then you can move sections around to take advantage of page breaks. Then you can reduce sentences to their Hemingwayesque destiny. Finally, you can just delete a whole two-page section with information that exists elsewhere, anyway. Voilà! Five pages!

If you’re not leaving the bulk of your work on the cutting room floor, you’re not doing your best work.

I also locked up my online presentations class with a new thumbnail image: owls staring at a computer. Tomorrow, I’ll go through my org comm class once more to make sure that it’s ready. Monday, I’ll put the finishing touches on the first week’s slide decks. Tuesday, I’ll hit the ground stumbling.

If you wanted to see the new sunglasses shelf in its natural location, and I’m sure no one did, here it is. One piece of scrap plywood for the back, two bits of leftover pine for the sides, one of the rip cut to match the other. Two other pieces of extra wood crosscut into shelves. Glue on the sides, brad nails on the shelves. Wood screws for the cleat, which was was also leftover. Six shelves, lots of sunglasses.

It does what I wanted it to do.

I hate it already.

I do not know why my lovely bride has two helmets in the garage. She can only wear one at a time. (She has at least three active helmets right now.)

The sunset looked promising from the backyard.

Over at the north corner there was a nice mixture of colors amidst the tangle of plants. The roses and the hydrangea are having a fine time of it. I think we might have developed a second hydrangea in there, somehow. Just there on the right the famous honeysuckle is sneaking into the shot.

Looking to the west, the sunset got serious quickly.

That’s a good argument to knock off work at key times. You can only catch that by chance unless you make the actual effort. Make the actual effort. You don’t want to miss views like that.

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25
Aug 26

Back to it

Today was a day of waking up at a reasonable time. I had forgotten there was a 7:30 a.m. I am not the morning person. I’m fine when I wake up, but just let me sleep in. It’s my natural condition. So imagine, if you will, the 10 or so years I did morning news. I had one job where I was in the studio at 4:30 a.m. That might the next job’s 6 a.m. arrival seem positively easy. The upside was that you had an afternoon to get errands done. The downside was you can’t, in your 20s, convince people you need to be in bed by 8 p.m.

Reader, I never was.

I was not last night, either. I only had to wake up at 7:30. This was rude enough.

Fortunately, my classes are all in the afternoon and evening.

Anyway, we had a meeting at 9:30 a.m., our first faculty meeting of the semester. This involved sitting in a classroom, reading an agenda, talking about the various items. Trying to stay on track and on schedule, and so on. (This group has a terrific sense of staying on time, and that’s a nice thing to be a part of.) It ran for six hours, this meeting. Six hours is not easing back into things. I suppose all of the work I’ve done these last four weeks have been the easing back into things. And, also, the sudden increase of email that has coincided with the work. Perhaps that has been the easing back in. (Just four more days of easing back in until the full stride begins. But I don’t want to wow you with all of that just now.)

The good news is that we’ll be on the clock for the work next week. Once we get started, then we can get started. The feeling before classes begin is an odd one. It is a stew of excitement and anxiety and you-still-have-time and you-have-no-time and there-are-days-to enjoy-yourself-so-relax and who-can-relax and, also, I-need-more-days-with-which-to-relax. This paragraph breaks no new ground — as opposed to every other ‘graph on this site. It has always felt like that. I suspect the days before a new semester begin feel like that for a lot of people. I imagine it always will, at least so long as we have semesters and people teaching in them.

And now, notes from real life.

We went out for a morning bike ride yesterday. A simple 20-miler, one of the traditional routes. I decided, wisely, that instead of trying to stay out front for as long as possible, I would ride sensible, hanging onto my lovely bride’s wheel, and then maybe I’ll still be there at the end. Going out front would have probably been a better option. She’s riding so well lately and I am not and that’s how you find yourself going 20-plus miles an hour and squinting into the distance, trying to determine if you can still see someone in the distance.

Nothing on that ride was terribly bad. She’s just super great at the moment.

Some farmers, in some places, talk about a second season. We have that here, and here’s evidence of that. I rode this same route a few weeks back and the corner was taller than me. Now, it is not.

This, if I remember my corn growing rates, is pushing the boundaries of the science, which is pretty cool. Double-cropping is a growing thing, and I need to read more about it. I can’t recall if it is efficient or inefficient. (Most likely that depends on the crop.)

For today’s bike ride I recreated a route I did three years ago, this week. It was a ride-every-road-within-shouting-distance-until-you-get-to-20-miles route. I did it at just below a tempo pace. I finished it two minutes and two seconds faster than I did in 2023. I wish it had been faster.

After my ride I finished this project. It’s the same picture I shared yesterday, because the face of it looks the same. This evening I had to attach the cleat to the back. From there, hang the cleat on the wall.

This took four screws, but they had to be precise because the cleat isn’t quite large enough. The cleat isn’t quite large enough because it is a leftover cleat that I made last summer. I got a corner cabinet and mounted it in a dead space in the garage and there sit the bike shoes and the helmet. All of this was an effort to get the bike stuff all the tool stuff. Only, lately, the sunglasses and have migrated back to the tool stuff. So, I had some extra lumber and wanted to try my new brad nailer and everything worked out well. Until I had to get those screws in. There were about three millimeters for error because, again, I cut twice and measured once on this project. It is garage furniture.

And now it is sitting on a wall cleat and holding sunglasses and it doesn’t even wobble when the garage door goes up and down.

There are no cats in this tunnel. Phoebe ran into the room for attention and settled down in her favorite spot for speculative belly rubs. I gave her a nice pet and then shot this, just because I like the way the light was playing off the tunnel.

That’s a new tunnel that my mother sent the cats. We now have two tunnels, so our jealous sibling cats can get along with one another. I’d randomly move them around the house, but these little guys are such creatures of habit I’m not sure how they’d react to upsetting their routine with such an offensive gesture.

Outside, I looked up just in time. This plane is going to London. By the time you read this, of course, the people are already there. Probably over the jet lag. I wonder what they’re doing today.

Sometimes you should look up even when there’s no rumble or roar of an aircraft overhead. Sometimes you just get lucky. Just about every time, really, if you think about it.

Think about it.

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24
Aug 26

And so begins the last week of summer

The penultimate weekend. There should be something grand here, but there’s not. At least the last weekend of summer has plans. I think I’d rather have the plans this weekend and nothing next weekend, but the people that schedule big citywide events don’t ask me these things.

It’s nice not being asked a lot of things. But if you never get asked things you can’t have input. It’s a tradeoff. And of all of the tradeoffs we make in life, many of them are worse than that. Still, if someone asked your thoughts, you might think your thoughts had value. You might think you could maybe contribute in some way. You might think it was appreciated, what you had to offer. Cities should ask your thoughts on when they schedule big events is all I’m saying. If I am, in fact, talking about cities.

And of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be? There’s a huge cycling event next weekend and we’ll be there to see it. Guess what photos I’ll be showing you this time next week.

Today, though, it’s just the usual from around here. For instance. Like many of you, I am a newly minted Internet Ancient Greek scholar. And, finally, we went to watch The Odyssey. Knowing I’d have some important thoughts in line with my public scholarship I dressed for the occasion.

These were my thoughts: the movie was very loud. I’d like to see it again, a version without the score. Also, it was a good movie. On the other hand, I’m not sure it met the hype. On the third hand, how you can you live up to an epic. On the fourth hand, it was still sweeping and grandiose. It was also a good set of cast members, but on the fifth hand — five hands, what am I, one of Zeus’ misbegotten offspring? — not everyone seemed well cast. On the sixth hand, I don’t think this movie will age much better than the Romans-with-English-accents era of 1950s and 1960s cinema.

Also, I really would have liked to have heard the siren’s song. You’re going to eventually tell me that the Trojan horse was some iconic visual element, you’re going to go long (and rightly so!) on the great pains to be authentic with clothing and brag about the visual effects, you could give me the siren’s song.

It’s been a long time since I read The Odyssey. I think we read portions of it in high school. In an undergrad literature class I read The Iliad and the Odyssey. I’m not sure — because time makes me forget things — if the professor was truly an expert in the Greek classics or she was just covering bases, but if I had that to do over again I’d insist. Epics of the western culture demand expertise, I’d say, so that I will be better prepared to comment on this after I see a movie in a few decades. But with that in mind, this. The movie changes Homer’s story. That’s fine. It’s art. And also it was an oral tradition. Things change. If you want Homer, read Homer. If you can’t read Greek, get in your time machine and … well, yeah, that’s still a problem. Fine, there are several dozen English versions in part or in toto. I think one was written by someone who doesn’t write English. E.V. Reiu’s translation in the 1940s was the first. Richard Lattimore’s translation is well regarded for accuracy. The relatively recent work of Emily Wilson’s is an excellent version for people new to Homer — she is also the one catching a lot of social media broadsides. Go figure. Anyway, the changes itself aren’t bad. People will quibble with how some of the changes come about. And as I am realistic about the Homeric question — probably there’s more than one author, certainly the story changes over time, also, and this is important … it’s fantasy I’m OK with the descent into madness version here. It has been a long while since our last film that was universally regarded as a descent into madness theme.

Or was that just the woofers in my theater?

I set out Sunday afternoon for a moderately different route. The river run is a simple out-and-back to the river and it gives you a steady 15 miles — yep, 15 miles, every time — and you’re back in the neighborhood in 45 or 50 minutes. But the weather was nice and I figured I’d try a different road. It starts like this. When you get to the river you can turn left or right. Usually, we turn left. But I’ve gone the other way a few times, just for variety. And when I go to the right I take the first right, effectively doubling back with two-plus extra miles for the effort.

But, I thought, what happens if I turn right … and don’t take that first right. So, yesterday I took the second right. I chose this one because I looked at it on a map beforehand and the street name has something to do with tall climbs. There are none of those around here. In fact, at one point on the river road you are three feet below sea level. Well, let’s see what’s on that road. It is the usual array of warehouses, which are the state flower. Also, these guys.

Hey, there’s the hill the road sign was talking about. Actually, it’s a five-mile road (and I was only punish passed twice) and there are four of these hills. You might call them rollers. By the end of the road which was so boastful of its hills I’d climbed about 120 feet.

I’m not judging. I’m merely pointing out that the terrain here is flat. I’m faster on flat roads than I used to be, but I probably couldn’t get over a proper climb without a tow rope anymore. (I did two big hills in Switzerland last summer, first climb in a few years, and it felt exactly as I remembered. My chain and derailleur fell apart before I could complete the whole hilly route, however.)

Anyway, back home, and I finished up the work on this rough little piece. I used my new brad nailer to mount these little bits as shelves. It’s garage furniture, I cut once and then measured twice, and this will get the job done.

I’ll make another version that’s smaller and neater, one day. I have already mapped out the plans in my mind. For now, I just have to attach the cleat to the back of this one and put it on the wall. But fun like that you have to spread out over several days. We’re not totally uninhibited.

Here’s the view, last night, as I took out the garbage. It’s about midnight.

Believe it or not, there are three planes in that shot. One of them flew directly overhead, and had no ADS-B transponder signal. It came from Washington D.C. Those tracker apps are such great fun, and the flights without all of the information might be the most fun of all. Sure, that one plane is going to Boston and the other to Florida, but the mystery of this plane, that’s loads of fun.

Speaking of fun, the first meeting of the semester is tomorrow. We’re easing into things with a six-hour effort.

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21
Aug 26

A day in rebellion

Because I did not do it yesterday, because I was working, I spent the morning running the weed eater. The backyard needed it. Also, I plucked some giant mutant dandelions. The web will tell you that dandelions can grow two feet tall, and if I knew that before just now I would have taken photos of the three and four-feet tall stalks that were threatening the rose bushes. My plan had been to hit just the edges of the lawn, the high spots at the fence, and the parts that were growing beyond their design intention. But, you know how it is with weeds. One thing leads to another and before long I had built up a decent sweat and a giant lawn bag full of mint and whatnot.

Want some mint? Come get some mint. Be sure you want it first. It’s an opportunistic plant, willing to grow in any free space, and it is all but impossible to eradicated.

Give the mint three pieces of credit, though. It pulls up easy. And it will choke out just about any other weed. It smells pleasant. And now the car smells like mint. I took the recycling and the green things to the county drop off site after my lovely bride did a bit of weed-pulling too. So there I was, two big containers of glass, aluminum, and a bit of plastic to drop. Two bags of weeds. Great armfuls of boxes. I even put them in the car well this time, such that I was a whirl of efficiency at the county site. The one other guy doing his part to save the earth was amazed at my industry. Two trips to the cardboard bin, two long walks to the mixed recycling. The only wasted motion was when when I accidentally closed the trunk too early.

Back home I left the garage open, and broke out some of the tools with which one works wood. I had, by then, just decided I wasn’t going to get in front of a computer today. (Except I am now, but that’s different, somehow.) The weather was just right, in the shade, anyway. And I decided to make a little thing for the garage. One of the few shortcomings in our house is that the garage is awfully crowded. And the wall upon which I store the tools with which one works wood is also where the bikes and various cycling accessories live. There are two problems with this. Last year I got tired of all the helmets and shoes and whatnot sitting on top of my table saw, so I got myself a corner cabinet, made myself some French cleats and now we have two shelves for helmets and shoes. But, still, the sunglasses have worked their way back down to the saw area. I’m the biggest perpetrator. So lately I envisioned a little sunglasses holder that will also go onto the elongated French cleat.

Today, because the weather was nice, in the shade, and I was in a computer rebellion, I decided to take the afternoon and make that happen.

The problems are these. One, I’m not an especially good woodworker. You improve with practice, though. But this brings me to my second problem. Space is limited, and so I don’t practice all that much. I had to go downstairs to fetch the ladder so that I could climb up it to see what scraps of old lumber I’d use. I had to move the miter saw to get to the table saw. I had to pull the table saw into the drive way. I had to run an extension cord. I had to peer through the garage shelves (which desperately need attention, which is my fault, and something I’m looking forward to addressing on a not steamy day) for things like a framing square, pencils, the table saw fence, the orbital sander, and so on.

Once I had all of the right things I proceed to doing the work, breaking down a random bit of plywood I picked up from somewhere, and then ripping a lovely bit of pine for the sides of my shelves. And then gluing one of those sides to the plywood. Then I dug out my brand new brad nailer. I picked this up sometime back and now was the time. The battery was charged, some long brads came in the box (I picked up some others, too, and they’re on that shelf … somewhere.) I drove in my first-ever brad nails today. I felt macho doing it.

With my ear protection on and everything. The brad nailer works well. It is also louder than you’d expect.

Then I ripped some more pine, so that I could crosscut it for the shelves themselves. Here I managed to not hurt myself, but relearned a lot of things about what not to do with your table saw.

(I’ll never hurt myself on the table saw. I fear it enough to respect it. I will hurt myself on pretty much any other thing. Though, today, happily, I didn’t hurt anything.)

I decided to make the shelves larger than I’d envisioned. I figured maybe it will evolve into a storage space for something else one day. Besides, it just didn’t seem like a small project day. I don’t know how to explain that, otherwise, but you should always listen to your gut around power tools.

Plus, I figured, you can never have enough space for the little things you carry.

Anyway, all of the pieces got cut. And I made a little dry fit test. It’s going to look something like this.

I glued up the second side. I’ll drive some brad nails into it this weekend, just for fun. And I’ll develop a process to space out those shelves, too. They’ll be attached all in one go at some point soon. Then we’ll just have to install the cleat on the back.

I sanded all of this down, but decided I’m not going to finish it. It’s garage furniture, after all. The Yankee might want to. She likes staining things. So I’ll leave that up to her.

Anyway, by this point, on a project where I decided to do more thinking than measuring, I realized I was approaching being done for the day. This is an important thing to consider because there’s still the cleaning up and the putting away. I timed this. It took 32 minutes to throw away the little bits, to put the sander and the sand paper and the square and the ladder away, to find a place the shelves can safely sit while the glue fixes, to put the table saw back in its corner, and the miter saw back on the table saw, to roll up the extension cords and, finally, to clean up my sawdust.

Truly, it is the most first world problem that ever existed, but set up and tear down is an investment all its own in my scenario. I need a shop so that I might do more of this, and get better at it. Which is to say, really, I shouldn’t buy any more second hand tools. There’s no room in my non-space. A new space can’t be the basement — too much sawdust and noise. It can’t be the garage — that’s where the cars live. I don’t have an outbuilding for this, nor is ours the sort of neighborhood where that would fit in. And I can’t afford an off-site location. So I’ll dabble, me and my average to poor carpentry skills, when the weather and scheduling and big chunks of available time permit.

The good news is that I have plenty of projects in mind.

This evening I’ve spent chatting with The Yankee, making weekend plans, having dinner, catching up on the day’s news, doing the dishes, doing this … pleased I spent a day doing something that was just for fun. Aside from the weeds, anyway. Backyard looks good, though!

Someday, soon, the sunglasses will, too.