Close Relatives

One of the things that is always in the back of your mind if you do genealogy is that you may find a close relative that you didn't know you had.  I've wondered if I had a half brother or sister I didn't know about, or a first or second cousin.

That thought is at least a small part of the reason I decided to have the DNA test done, along with the DNA from my wife, Louise, and brother, Milt.

Well, yesterday it happened.  I got an email from a second cousin who I had no idea even existed.  Her grandfather and my grandmother were brother and sister.  I am extremely excited to find out more about these people.  Milt, my brother, is too since he was closer to Grandmother Alexander than the rest of us.

This picture shows my grandmother and me many years ago, probably about 1957 or 1958.  She died in 1967 so my memories of her are distant.  I can't wait to find out more about her brother's grandchildren!

Purple Martins

The other day I put up our martin houses.  I have two poles with twelve plastic "gourds" on each pole.  I know that, when we return from South Texas in early March, its time to get the martin houses up, even if I haven't seen any of the birds.  Sure enough, I got the gourds on the first house and before I could get the second one up, there were martins sitting on the first one!

Were they just lurking around somewhere out of sight, waiting for me to get their houses put up?

Martins are part of the swallow family and among that family's largest members.  They are migratory birds and spend their winters in South America, returning to our area in the spring.  Interestingly, they depend almost entirely on humans for their nesting places, using only gourds or houses put up by us.  They do have several enemies, including starlings, sparrows, snakes and hawks, and I have fought them all.

I used to have the familiar hexagonal houses with round entrance holes in them.  The starlings loved these things and I couldn't keep them out.  The gourds I use now are equipped with starling resistant entrance holes, or SREH.  These holes are slightly smaller than a semi-circle and the dimensions are critical to keep starlings out and let martins in.  The change to these gourds did solve the starling problem.

Sparrows are not so easy.  They, like starlings, are prone to evict martins and take over their houses.  About the only way to keep them in check is to clean out their nests on a regular basis.  The use of gourds does make it harder for snakes and hawks to attack them but I have seen it happen.  In fact, one night I caught a snake which had climbed the steel pole and gotten his head into the opening of one of the gourds.

For decades we were told that the martin was a mosquito eater and, because of that, we should do all we can to keep them around.  That story has been almost completely debunked now - martins do eat flying insects but mosquitoes are a small part of their diet.  In spite of that fact, the martin is a very gregarious creature and I love to watch them fly, sing, and interact with each other.  I think I'll continue to be a martin "landlord".

Drag Racing

I'm one of those people who had been to a few drag races as a spectator but who had never been involved with the sport.  In 2000, however, at the urging of my neighbor, Jess, and my son, Dan, we finally decided to try it.  Some people would think 54 years old is a little old to start something like this but I didn't.  After all, Warren Johnson, a professional drag racer, was way older than me!

We had a little '63 Nova street car and we put a mildly warmed up small block engine in it, a powerglide tranny behind that, and a pair of 9" slicks and 4.56 gears in the rear.  We didn't have any idea what we had but we went out and tried it.  I was convinced that it would run in the high 11's; low 13's was more like it!  After a torque converter change, it did get down into the mid-12's on a consistent basis.  For you non-racer's, that number is the elapsed time in seconds to run a quarter mile distance.

My first real racing, after several weeks of test and tune, was at the Spring Nationals in Tulsa.  Believe it or not, I won my first two rounds in the No E (no electronics) class and began to believe that I could go all the way.  On the third round, I pulled up to stage and the flagman waved me off, saying I was leaking fluid.  As I got out of the car and headed up there to have a gentlemanly conversation with him, I glanced back at the car and noticed the stream of antifreeze pouring out.  End of conversation!  After tearing the engine down, we discovered porosity in a head which had to be welded and machined.

The Nova had been running hot so we used this as justification to put it on alcohol.  As my engine building buddy said later, "Wait a minute – the engine was running hot so we changed the fuel we are burning instead of addressing the cooling problems?"  Well, why not?

We found out that the learning curve on getting enough alcohol to the carburetor is much steeper than we had imagined.  We spent several weeks, and several hundred dollars, on fuel logs, regulators, pumps, AN fittings and other miscellaneous stuff getting the car to run right.  Meanwhile the season was dwindling away and all I could do was go to test and tune!

Finally, we had the old Nova back to about as quick as it had been on gas.  We then decided that we needed bigger jets.  If a little fuel is good, then more is better, right?  In went the new jets and back to test and tune we went.  In the meantime I should tell you that my son and I had been trading off the driving because we both wanted to drive the car.  Obviously, my reaction times were much better than his because age and wisdom outdoes youth and exuberance any time!  Anyway, the night we went back to test and tune with the bigger jets, my 25 year old daughter, Rachel, who is a mother herself also wanted to drive.

That night, I made two passes, my son made two, and my daughter made five.  Her first one was a 17-something at about 80 miles per hour.  Her last one was a 13.32 at 102 mph.  She was beginning to catch on!  In the meantime, none of the passes any of us made was within a half a second of our old times!  Apparently, the new bigger jets just killed the engine!

Although by now, I had invested considerably more money in drag racing than I had promised my wife I would, I decided to play my hole card.  Telling her that the '63 was unsafe because it didn't have a cage and only had lap belts, I began to shop for a better car.  A friend of mine, Kent the engine builder, gave me a lead on a '71 Nova "roller" which was for sale and I went to look at it.  I knew before I even got out of the truck that I was going to buy this car.  In keeping with the story that I had told Louise, I told the guy who had the car that I didn't really want to go faster; that I was just looking for a safer ride.  He looked me in the eye and said, "You can lie to your wife but don't lie to me!".

Anyway, I wrote him a check and carried the '71 home.  My son and I pulled the motor and tranny out of the '63 and began the task of putting it into the '71.  In the meantime, I had ordered new, smaller jets for the carb.  Remember, the big ones had killed the performance of the engine.  So we were hooking up the throttle linkage in the new car and I told Dan to watch the butterflies to make sure everything worked as I pushed the throttle.  He hollered, "Hey, Dad, the back two barrels aren't opening!"  To make a long story short, when I put the bigger jets in the carb, I had gotten the accelerator pump in a bind and the back two barrels were indeed locked up.  I don't know which feeling was stronger, the one of relief that the problem had been found or the one of stupidity that I had done such a boneheaded stunt! I told Dan that, if he had done something like that, I would have kicked his #@%*.

In spite of all of our trials and tribulations that year, we thoroughly enjoyed drag racing as a participant sport.  One of the neatest things is to meet new people and share experiences with them.  Sometimes I'm tempted..........