Bread Making

I don't recall what started it, but a couple of months ago, we got to talking about homemade bread.  It came up in conversations a few times and I started thinking about it.

I've always told Louise that beer is just liquid bread; they both have all the same ingredients (grain, yeast and water).  Beer, of course does have the additional ingredient, hops, but it is just a flavoring as are caraway seeds in rye bread.  This has been my excuse for the consumption of a few bottles of "liquid bread".

The other day, I finally took action.  I was at Whole Foods (or as my son, Dan, calls it, "Whole Paycheck"), and decided to look for rye flour since I had a yearning for rye bread.  Sure enough, there it was on the shelf so I purchased some.

I went home, found a reasonable looking recipe on the internet, and proceeded to make my own rye bread!  Surprisingly, it turned out quite nicely although I did trash the kitchen in the process.  It turned out so good, in fact, that I made another batch the next day and made two smaller loaves instead of one large one.  My neighbor, T.J., was the recipient of one of the two smaller loaves and, unless he was lying to me, really enjoyed it.  Of course, what are you going to say when your neighbor forces a loaf of bread on you?

Yesterday, I decided to try regular old homemade white bread.  Amazingly, it came out great too.  There's nothing to this bread making!  In my usual fashion, I'll probably wind up spending a lot of money on equipment to continue this and then stop as soon as the equipment has been purchased.  Lets see, we need a Kitchen Aid mixer, a bread machine, an outdoor stone oven, what else?

More bread projects will include English muffins, French rolls, and those really hard crusted rolls that taste so good!  I'm glad I don't have to worry about a gluten free diet!

A New Hex Beam

This blog, much like my entire life, has an identity crisis.  It kind of started out as a ham radio blog then became an on-line diary.  Today, however, we are going to go back and talk radio some.

A couple of years ago, I purchased a Mosley three-element tri-bander antenna.  It covers three bands: 20, 15, and 10 meters.  It worked fine until about four months ago when the SWR went to pot on 20 and 15.  Because it still works fine on 10 meters, I was sure that the problem is at a trap but I had not laid the tower down to check it yet.

The other day, after running an OMISS net on 17 meters, I decided I needed to do something so I acquired a 6-band hexagonal beam from KIO in Alabama.  Apparently, the phrase "hex beam" is copyrighted by someone else because KIO is careful to call theirs "hexagonal beams".  Anyway, this beam looks like an upside down umbrella frame.  A friend suggested that if it were mounted lower, she could use it to dry her delicates.  Perhaps the rf energy would help.

A very nice feature of it is that it covers 6 bands without using a tuner: 20, 17, 15, 12, 10, and 6 meters.  It also uses only one feedline which is very nice when you are shelling out big bucks for coax.

The hex beam is basically a two-element beam on all bands where the driven element is in the shape of a "W" and the reflector is in a horseshoe shape around it.  Being a two-element beam, it is not going to have the directional characteristics that a larger antenna would have but, as the old saying goes, you can't have everything.

Yesterday I took the Mosley down and put the hex beam up in its place.  I know that the World is full of anecdotal stories but here is one for this antenna.  There is a gentleman who lives in Florida, Dick, KI4QMB, who has a penchant for running one watt on the OMISS nets.  I'm not a big QRP (or low power) fan but many people are and that diversity is what makes ham radio so much fun.  At any rate, I had NEVER heard Dick on 20 meters, not even a peep, until yesterday with that new hex beam.  Not only could I hear him but we were able to have a QSO!

Now to fgure out what happened to the Mosley and fix it!

Vacation, 2013

I know that this is kind of like breaking out the vacation pictures and forcing everyone to look at them but our just-completed trip was a hoot and I want to tell you about it.

For the past several years, we have gone to Colorado to escape the summer heat but, for several reasons, we decided this year to go to Minnesota and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  The National Forest Service in Colorado has gotten "stinky" about camping in their campgrounds, to the point of making us decide to go somewhere else.

When we started talking about the U.P, our friends, Mary and Luther, indicated that they would like to go with us.  We decided to leave on July 17.  We got the motorhomes ready and prepared for the trip.  Our first stop was to be Wallace State Park in Missouri and that was the "kickoff" of our trip.

Our next stop was Clear Lake, Iowa.  For "rock and roll" fans, you know that this was the site of Buddy Holly's last concert before his death in a plane crash.  He, Richie Valens, and J.P. Richardson ("The Big Bopper", were killed when their plane left Clear Lake.  A side note is that Waylon Jennings and Tommy Allsup who were also members of the band but were not on the plane that crashed.  Many years later, we had the pleasure of meeting Tommy Allsup in Mannford; he was a friend of a good friend of ours, Faye Carroll.  We also toured the Winnebago factory in Forest City, Iowa, and got to watch Winnebago motorhomes being made.

Our next stop was Minneapolis where we went to the largest shopping mall in the United States, Mall of America.  Luther and I weren't thrilled with it but Mary and Louise were.  We also paid a visit to the nearby IKEA store which is amazing.

The next stop was Duluth, Minnesota.  Although I had been there on business several times, I had never been impressed with the city.  Being on vacation was different, however.  We found a campground right on the water.  In fact, our motor home was backed up right to the water on the pier.

One of the highlights of our trip was seeing the parade of "tall ships" come through Duluth.  We were close enough to walk from our campground to the channel to see them.  These are mostly replicas of the sailing ships of the 1700's and 1800's.

From Duluth, we went to Grand Marais, Minnesota for a couple of days where we camped in wilderness area.  We took a side trip while there to Thunder Bay, Ontario.  Then we were off to Copper Harbor, Michigan, a peninsula in northern Michigan.  We spent four days there and the scenery was beautiful.

From Copper Harbor, we went to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan for three days.  A highlight of our visit there was a boat tour through the Soo Locks and back through the Canadian side.  Once again, we were parked in an RV park right on the water.

After leaving the Soo, we went to St. Ignace, Michigan.  St. Ignace is a tourist town on the north end of the Mackinac Bridge and is a ferry ride away from Mackinac Island.  Mackinac Island is a famous tourist spot and is known for its lack of gasoline powered vehicles.  Everything on the island is "horse driven".  By the way, "Mackinac" is pronounced "Mackinaw" - I don't know why, it just is.

After we left St. Ignace, we spent a couple of days getting to Elkhart, Indiana.  Luther and Mary's motor home was made in Elkhart and we took a tour of their factory.  We also had some good Amish food to eat there!

After a couple more leisurely days of driving through Illinois and Missouri, we got back home on August 16. All in all, it was a fantastic vacation.  I must admit that Luther and I both did some minor body damage to our motor homes but all that can be fixed!

OK, I promise you I won't do any more of these vacation rambles until the next trip!

Genealogy Revisited

I continue to spend far more time than I should working on genealogy.  Every morning the computer gets turned on (electrically, of course) and Family Tree Maker is loaded.

Someone asked me the other day if I had found anyone famous in our family tree.  About the most famous relative I've found is Senator Lamar Alexander from Tennessee.  I did work on the trail of a link to the 12th President, James Polk, but I finally convinced myself that there was no link there.  There were several Alexanders who were instrumental in the American Revolution but they weren't famous, or at least they aren't well known today.

We haven't discovered anyone famous on Louise's side either.  We did, however, discover that my ham radio friend, Dave, is my wife's fourth cousin through a guy up in the Joplin, Missouri area.  That was a surprise!

What is as fascinating as finding famous people is examining how someone in your family fit into the grand scheme of things 100 or 150 years ago.  For an example, look at the story of my great great grandfather, Greenberry Stephens.

Greenberry was born in 1830 in Benton County, Missouri, the second oldest of a family of six boys and three girls.  His father was a farmer as was Greenberry.  In fact, looking through older censuses, most people did list their occupation as farmers back then.  What a change from today.

In 1861, when the Civil War broke out, Greenberry was 31 years old and, being a good southern man, joined the Confederate Army.  Missouri was split on the allegiances of its citizens; some favored the North but many were Confederates.  At any rate, Greenberry was captured by the North and was sent to an unnamed prison.

Many southern soldiers captured during the war were allowed to sign an oath of allegiance to the United States and then return to their homes.  One thing you did not want to do was sign an oath and then get caught again, which Greenberry did.  He was charged with the crime of "bushwhacking" and convicted.

This time, Greenberry was sent to the Gratiot Street Prison in St. Louis, and then later transferred to Camp Morton in Indianapolis.  We know how poor conditions were in these prisons and, if you were unlucky enough to be in one of them, your chances of surviving were pretty bad.

Greenberry did not survive Camp Morton; he died there on February 26, 1864.  We have found a couple of letters explaining this event - the first is from Greenberry (while he was still at Gratiot Street Prison) to his wife, Nancy,  where he knows that he might not ever see her again.

The second one if from someone in charge at Camp Morton informing Nancy that her husband had died.

While his death was a tragic event for the family, it was an indicator of all of the tragedy of the Civil War and it makes one realize what a horrible period that was.

It is also what makes me get up early in the morning and load Family Tree Maker!

Oklahoma Weather

Well, someone pushed the "summer" button and we instantly went to hot weather!  The forecasts call for highs in the mid-90's and lows in the mid-70's for the foreseeable future.  Oh, well, spring never lasts long enough.

The only good thing about moving from spring to summer is that we also get rid of tornado season.  This year has been a particularly bad one for Oklahoma and especially the Oklahoma City area.  The death toll from their two major outbreaks now stands at 47 people.  The real tragedy is the loss of the children in the school that took a direct hit.

I suppose that if we lived on the east coast, we might not look forward to summer.  They have to face the start of hurricane season.  By the way, while I was writing this, I heard a guy calling "CQ" on the radio and I answered him.  CQ is what you call when you want anyone to answer you.  He was located in Delaware and the first thing he mentioned was our tornadoes.  He told me that yesterday, they had a tornado watch in Newark, Delaware.  Go figure!

Will Rogers, our famous Oklahoma sage, once said that if you don't like the weather in Oklahoma, just wait a few minutes.  I have a feeling that he was talking about spring and fall, not summer.  I think we are in for a long stretch of hot weather.

New Radio

As a result of my trip to Dayton to the Hamvention, I did acquire a new radio.  I didn't actually purchase it at the show but I did compare all the radios on my list and make a decision.

I wound up with a Yaesu FTDX3000 transceiver.  For non-hams, that is about a Buick in the Chevrolet-Buick-Cadillac scheme of things, not the top of the line, but not the base unit either.  The word "transceiver" comes from "transmitter" and "receiver" since this radio has both functions built in to one case.

The upper picture shows the complete radio and the lower picture the TFT (thin-film transistor) LCD display.  Interestingly, the meter with the needle is not really a meter but a digital representation of a meter.

Transmitters are relatively simple devices and most of them do about the same thing, receive an audio signal from your microphone, convert it to radio frequency (rf) energy, and transmit it out.  However, the key to a good radio is not the transmit function but how well it receives a signal.  The receive function is the justification for my purchase of this new radio.  It has a much better receiver than my old FT950 which was still a good radio.

I was fortunate enough to sell the FT950 to a new ham in Oklahoma City.  It will make him a nice radio to learn with.  As for me, I think I'm about done for a while!

Autobiography, Chapter 7

Bob Langston worked in Personnel when I was hired at Vickers.  He told me that they were really looking for a graduate engineer with three years of sales experience but, since they were only paying $590 per month, they would take me.  That really made me feel loved and wanted.

Pres Whitson was the Personnel Manager, Bob’s boss.  Pres interviewed me as well and kept asking me if I would transfer if the occasion arose.  I kept telling him that, of course, I would.  I found out later that he was against hiring me because he was convinced that I would not move.  A year later I proved him wrong.  On June 4, 1970, I went to work for Vickers.

Louise and I had moved into a very nice house at 43^rd St. North and Cincinnati Ave. in Tulsa when we first moved there.  It was much better than we had expected to be able to afford and, sure enough, we couldn't.  After about 90 days, I had to tell our landlord that we couldn't afford to make the $125 per month rent and that we were going to have to move.  We moved into an 8’ by 46’ trailer house  at 6619 East King Street.

Before we moved, however, we had one experience which was somewhat funny.  Kenneth Moser, the guy I had tried to join the Police Department with, had a beat which covered my home.  He called me one night and asked if he could come by and drink a cup of coffee.  I told him I would be delighted and he said that he would bring one of his cohorts by.  In a little while, Kenneth showed up in his black-and-white and his partner followed him in in another black-and-white.  We all went inside and sat there for about 30 minutes drinking coffee when Kenneth announced that they had to go back to work.  When we opened the front door, the yard was full of people!  All the neighbors saw the police cars and thought that these white people had done something terribly wrong!

My first job at Vickers Tulsa Division was inside sales.  This company had started out in 1929 as the Tulsa Winch Manufacturing Corporation by Mr. Harley Pray.  It had been on the east side of downtown Tulsa for many years and had moved into the former Hale-Halsell warehouse on East Pine Street in December, 1968.

Mr. Pray started Tulsa Winch by making winches out of the rear ends of Model T trucks.  The gears used on those rear ends are very similar to the gears made today by Tulsa Winch.  When he ran out of used gears he had to start making his own.  The company grew and prospered and, in fact, won the U.S. Navy’s coveted “E” award for excellence during World War II.

In 1946, Mr. Pray decided to retire and sold the company to Vickers Hydraulics, a division of Remington Rand Co.  Harry Vickers had pioneered automotive hydraulics in Detroit and had built Vickers into the World’s premier hydraulics company.  Later Remington and Sperry merged and formed Sperry Rand Corporation.  Sperry Rand was most noted for building the World’s first true computer, the Eniac.

Enough of company history.  My job was to answer phones, take orders, expedite customer shipments, and field complaints.  There were four inside guys at the time: Garry Strouse, Fred Lamar, Bill Lewis, and me.  We had a supervisor, Johnny Kirk, and two secretaries, Janice Bain and Sherry Richardson.  It took me about two weeks to get up enough nerve to start answering the phone but I caught on quickly after that.  I’m convinced that having a farm background really helps in learning mechanical things.

There were three outside guys who worked out of that office as well.  They were Bernie Jiles, Jack West, and Chuck Bookout.  Bookout probably knew more about the technical aspects of our product line than anyone else.  When I would get a tough call, I would ask him to take it and he would always refuse.  It infuriated me but it did cause me to have to go to engineering and find out the correct answers for myself.  I became a better salesman because of his attitude.

Our general manager at the time was Russ Dupuis, an old-school manager who came into our sales office every day and looked at the sales sheet on Garry Strouse’s desk.  Russ had been with Vickers for many years and at Tulsa for about 10.  He retired in 1971, just a year after I went to work there.  The Marketing Manager was Chet Lenik, a Polish guy from Detroit.  When I first went to work at Vickers, he called me into his office and told me that if I heard any good Polish jokes he wanted to hear them.

Louise and I really enjoyed this time in our lives.  We were newlyweds, out on our own, and having a good time.  Louise worked at the Braum’s Ice Cream Store just around the corner from our trailer and I was having a good time in my new job.  We also met our good friends, Jerry and Marlene McCain, while living in the mobile home park.

Like us, they were just good country people, he from Jackson, Tennessee, and she from Jacksonville, Florida.  Jerry had been in the Navy and had met Marlene while stationed in Jacksonville.  After they married, they moved to Tulsa so he could attend Spartan School of Aeronautics.  He wanted to get his A & P (airframe and powerplant) license so he could become an aircraft mechanic.

We had a wonderful time living next door to Jerry and Marlene.  One Sunday morning, Louise made some biscuits from scratch and they didn't come out quite right.  In fact, they were terrible.  Well, I called Jerry and told him to meet me out in the yard.  We played a game of catch with the biscuits and not one of them ever broke!

Eventually, an opening in outside sales came up, this time in Detroit.  This was a major promotion and most people would have killed for it.  Of the four of us, one, Garry Strouse, had made it clear in the past that he would not transfer.  For some reason, the company didn’t want to offer Bill Lewis the job, so that left Fred Lamar and me.  Fred had seniority on me so they kept offering the job to him.  I wanted it badly so I kept badgering Estill Sherrill, the Sales Manager, for the job.  Finally, they decided that Fred just was not going to move, so they told me I had the job.

Being transferred from Tulsa to Detroit meant a raise from $690 per month (I had gotten a couple of raises) to $850 per month.  All of our friends told us that we would hate living in Detroit but the job opportunity was too good to pass up.  In early June, 1971, while the company was on strike, Louise and I moved to Detroit.

We found a small apartment at the corner of 14 Mile Road and John R., in Troy.  If you are familiar with Detroit, you know that the northernmost boundary of the city is 8 Mile Road, so we were six miles north of there.  Troy was a fairly young, growing suburb, and we were happy to be living there.  There was a giant mall across the road from our house, Oakland Mall, and just about everything you could think of was within close proximity.

Louise quickly got a job at a card shop in the Mall, Memory Lane, and developed a bunch of new friends.  I am convinced that this was the reason we liked Detroit so much.  We both had new jobs and were meeting new people and everything was right.

The apartment complex we moved into was named Canterbury Square.  It consisted of several buildings, each with eight units in it.  The day we moved into our building, not a single neighbor knew any of their neighbors.  However, within two weeks, Louise and I knew everyone In the building and, within six weeks, everyone in the building knew everyone else.  I really don’t give us credit for anything except being stupid enough to want to meet everyone.  Some of the neighbors included Chuck Schiff (our accountant friend who lived upstairs), John and Mary Bone, and Chuck and Sue Mowat.  Mrs. Cooper, a lonely widow, lived next door to Chuck Schiff.

One problem we had was that Louise did not know how to drive.  I’ve kidded her forever saying that the next time I get married, the first question I’m going to ask the prospective bride is whether she has a drivers license.  Louise did not want to learn but I wanted her to.  We set a practice time for every evening at 5:30 p.m. when I was in town.  After about 90 days, she was ready and took her test.  She passed it with flying colors.

I was in outside sales and my territory was Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia.  I worked out of an office at the Vickers Warehouse in Ferndale, about five miles south of our apartment.  I was assigned to train under a fellow by the name of Dick Karr, who had been in outside sales for Tulsa Winch for several years.

In retrospect, I was a very poor salesman at this time.  I was definitely not assertive, which you need to be, and I didn’t know the product line as well as I should.  I was reluctant to travel much, because I didn’t want to spend the Company’s money so I didn’t see my customers as often as I should.  In spite of all this, my bosses thought I was doing a good job so they were happy with me.

After about a year and a half, we had a reorganization in Tulsa and Jack West became my new boss.  Jack called me up one day and said he needed to talk to me and would meet me at the airport that evening.  Well, if he was going to fly over 1000 miles just to have a meeting with me at the airport, it had to be important!  When I met with him that evening, he told me that I was going to be transferred and had my choice of Chicago or Tulsa.  Inside I was screaming “Tulsa” but I played it cool and told him I would have to talk to Louise.

Of course, Louise wanted to move back to Tulsa as well so we took the transfer home.  In October, 1972, we moved back to Tulsa, into an apartment building on Harvard just south of Pine Street.