Newspaper failing? Maybe your newsroom sucks ...

A couple of years ago Dilbert ran a comic where Dilbert is telling the pointy haired boss "I know these cubicles have always sucked the life out of me, but lately it seems to be getting worse."

In the second frame the boss is talking to a demon sitting at a control panel with lots of vacuum hoses leading this way and that. The machine labeled "Lifesuck 3000" and the boss is saying "They noticed."

I thought of that as I visited the expansive offices of "Slug Magazine" (click!) on Monday with Younger Son Ben, who is a senior writer for that publication.

He doesn't get paid, but he does get to go to concerts for free when he reviews them, and gets free books and DVDs, and he gets to see his writing published, so it's a fair deal.

The newsroom took me back to my early days in journalism -- newsrooms were never palatial or even very organized, but one thing they always were was open. Desks were set around here and there and all the reporters sat together, working away, talking to each other, sharing jokes and tips and stories and laughs and tears.

I remember once, in the Standard-Examiner's old newsroom, hearing one of the reporters on the phone, crying because a friend/relative (I forget) was having an emergency, she was needed, but she was scheduled to work the night shift that night.

Three of us overheard her and said "Go, you're covered" before she could put the phone down.

That's the way it was. Everyone was family.

Slug's newsroom, which is very tiny (I suspect a lot of writers, like Ben, send their stuff in remotely) but is very open, very loose, decorated somewhat haphazardly. There's a bar (!) and a few desks set up next to each other. There's good light and windows. The couple of people we saw there working were having a good time chatting as they typed.

It is not possible to overstate how important this sort of arrangement is. Writers are creative people, and creative people feed off of each other. It pays to give them a good place to do that.

The S-E, sadly, moved to BDO 13 years ago and took over a huge room full of leftover cubicles that the federal government had bought. They were tall, ugly, soul destroying. Reporters were spread around among pods. Bureaucratic divisions were enhanced by physical divisions. Windows? Only for a lucky few.

It was bad enough when there were 12 or 13 reporters working city desk, but as the number dropped the isolation got worse. Half a dozen people spread among four or five pods, all separated by 5-foot walls, is horrible.

The last two publishers, and probably the current one, felt the cubicles were a disaster, but nobody was willing to spend the money to replace them. I admit that my daily trip onto those faceless, nameless, bland and lonely corridors got harder and harder as the years went by and the numbers of other people got fewer and fewer. It felt as if I were trapped in some weird French art film, wandering empty hallways forever, seeking a way out.

Not saying cubicles were why I retired, but they didn't exactly send the message that I should stay. When Union Station dangled an office with a window, I jumped, and my kitchen table has lovely light as well. And flowers!

More critically, cubicles destroy the dynamics of the newsroom -- there's no interaction, no community, no human togetherness. Yeah yeah, I know: The bosses say people can get up and go talk, but that having to get up is a barrier. People tend to turn their cubicles into personal caves and never look around. Why does management put up barriers to productivity?

It won't solve all of the Standard-Examiner's problems, not by half, but if the new publisher wants to take a huge step in the direction of building a winning, productive news team, he'll bite the bullet and trash the cubicles.

Cycling heaven? Ogden has a loooooooooooooong way to go

Just got back from spending the day in Salt Lake with my younger son Ben. I parked the vehicle at his home, in the 1500 block of Redwood Road, and we cycled into town, as far as 9th and 9th and back again.

And never had a problem. Salt Lake City has been pretty aggressive in building cycling lanes and otherwise making bicycles welcome. It has lanes in city streets where, because there is not room for a separate cycling lane, the entire lane of traffic is so designated. Cars and bicycles are equal.

More important, Ben said, the drivers in Salt Lake City have show that they have advanced well along the learning curve, accepting cyclists as part of the normal traffic flow, respecting their right to the road and so on.

"It's been years since I was yelled at or had water balloons thrown at me," Ben said.

The reason I bring this up is that Ogden's mayor recently came back from a trip to Taiwan with the wish to make Ogden a national cycling center. I know he's hoping to bring in more cycling manufacturers and suppliers like Quality Bicycle Products out in BDO, but he must know that the way to attract more of those companies is to make his city the sort of place the people who own them will feel comfortable on two wheels.

Not must mountain biking, either.

As this article on the Business Insider web site (click)  makes clear, Americans in general have got to quit thinking of bicycles strictly as sports toys. They are a way to get around, so while Ogden's system of trails for mountain bikers is really cool, Ogden's and Weber County's token attention to making the roads welcoming for cyclists who want to commute, go to church, go shopping, go to the library, is beyond pathetic.

Lanes? Routes? The River trail is a good way to get to Riverdale (a friend of mine said she can get from her home at the mouth of Ogden Canyon to Riverdale quicker on her bicycle using the trail than in a car) and the rail-trail from Ogden to Salt Lake City is nice, but what else is there?

Ogden should have pressured UDOT to put bike lanes on 12th Street when it rebuilt it. UDOT will tell you that it left nice wide shoulders for bikes, but bike lanes send the message that bicycles belong there.

And, frankly, want to bet that the first time someone wants to put more lanes on 12th Street those shoulders will disappear? If bicycle lanes are there, and mandated, maybe they'll be protected.

The city talks a lot -- it puts up signs marking bicycle routes, but signs are just that, signs. And the police need to get involved to rein in the anarchy out there of people riding on the wrong side of the road all the time, skipping past lights, weaving dangerously, and so on.

I'm riding my bicycle to work these days -- I need to. Retirees can't afford $3.50 gasoline. I would love it if my city made that easier to do. And, really, it wouldn't be that hard. Just go to Salt Lake, take a look around, and come back and do likewise. It won't put Ogden in the Copenhagen class, but it will be a good start.

Hidden treasures at Union Station?

Saw a bunch of guys in orange shirts hauling a pile of scrap lumber out of the old Laundry Building south of Union Station, so I wandered over to check it out.

The men in shirts, guests of the Weber County Correctional Facility, were doing community work, helping clean out the entrance to the building, really a long drive-in loading dock area on its north end.

Leon Jones, chairman of the foundation's board, was supervising.  He hollered at me to stop when I started to walk in and check the area out. "It's full of dust and bird droppings and maybe asbestos," he said, and then I saw the face masks on the workers and turned around.

Union Station was grateful for the free labor -- Foundation Director Roberta Beverly said she's always all about free because the foundation is constantly scrambling for money to do, well, anything.

For example, inside the area being cleaned, way back, I saw a car. "What's that car about?" I asked Leon.

Leon, who used to work for Autoliv, which makes airbags, said that car is a 1981 Mercedes diesel that was given to the company with 150,000 miles on it to test air bag technology.

The company put bags in it and tested them this way and that, setting them off and testing the chemical residue and so on, "and then finally one guy said, 'OK, I'm going to do it. I'll get in and let the air bag go off.'"

Presumably he lived.

The car was surplus at that point, so Autoliv donated it to Union Station and Roberta drove it for a number of years. "I put the third 100,000 miles on it," she said, although she's not sure of the current mileage, and admits to one fender-bender, which left the front bumper dangling. She quit driving it when repairs got too expensive, which is common for any Mercedes.

The car apparently is a classic, so Union Station is trading it to Crawford Doors in exchange for a new garage door on the entrance to the Laundry Building dock area, currently guarded by flimsy chain link gates.

Odd treasures are always showing up or being uncovered at Union Station, Roberta handed me a silver-looking medal that someone donated half a dozen of to the station. Any idea what this is? She said.

It's a giant coin commemorating the 1969 100th anniversary of the driving of the Golden Spike. She had found one web site where the person writing about a coin like this one said it was pure silver, five ounces, which at current values would make it worth about $125 if melted down.  But is it really silver? Leon and I and the prisoners pondered the thing, weighed it in our hands, tapped it on the ground and listened to it ring.

"Pewter," Leon announced. Several of the prisoners agreed, displaying a very interesting -- and not surprising -- knowledge both of jewelry and the local pawn shops where I could get it valued.

I took the coin over the the Gift House on 25th Street where Scotty Van Leewuen took one look, said "that's not silver," and showed it to the clerks, who agreed. Some sort of nickel alloy, they said.

Scott remembers those coins, which were made in 1969 to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the Driving of the Golden Spike.  Nate Mazer, who shotgunned that effort, had them struck to put into the stocks of commemorative rifles and also gave them out to local businesspeople as souvenirs.

So what are they worth? Nothing for their metal, but I told Roberta she could probably auction them to rail fans for $50 each, and even offered that much myself, just because it's so cool.

Calling beans on a liberal latte stereotype

Someone on Facebook who is of a right-wing bent recently said he enjoyed pissing off “latte liberals,” which made me wonder, “when did drinking a latte make you a liberal?”

And what do conservatives do -- mash their coffee beans with their gun butts and boil the shards? Political correctness is getting weird if that's so. 

Or maybe he was just implying that liberals are fussy about their coffee, while conservatives are more hard-fisted. If this keeps up, liberals and conservatives are going to need a score card to know what sort of coffee they're allowed to have. Do you dare vote for Orrin Hatch but still have cream with your Columbian? What about iced coffee? What does that say about my stand on free trade?

Sadie, down at Grounds for Coffee on Ogden’s 25th Street, would go broke if she only served liberals. I mean, Ogden used to be the Democratic stronghold of Utah, but not lately, and since when is a Democrat in Utah a “liberal,” anyway?

I accused my Facebook friend of being careless with his stereotypes, an all-too-common occurrence these days. 

The term “liberal” itself is really more of a general-purpose curse word than a description of actual political leaning. I live very modestly, am careful with money, charitable to those in need and care about my fellow man -- all things that would have identified me with Eisenhower back in the 50s. Not any more.

Scientists used to be the most conservative folks around -- those guys who thinks with a slide-rule tend to be finicky with their finances, hate waste and wear the same clothes for a month at a time. 

But suddenly someone didn’t like the findings those scientists were coming up with -- climate change! -- and decided they must be liberals. Why? Because it’s easier than sitting down with those findings, going over them and figuring out another explanation for the data, an exercise a couple of famous climate deniers have tried, to their chagrin when the findings turned out to be right.

Sometimes this stuff happens for the silliest reasons. When France declined to take part in the Gulf War, or was it the Iraq war? I forget. Anyway, they didn’t want to play with us about something military, the Simpsons ran an episode in which Homer Simpson called them “cheese eating surrender monkeys,” and suddenly the French were a national scape-goat. 

Remember Freedom fries? And I remember some TV show in which a French military commander, dealing with US soldiers, was portrayed as distinctly light on his feet, if you get my drift.

Never mind the French tried to win World War I through a strategy of “elan!” which essentially meant having all their soldiers charge the other side’s line, ignoring the machine gun bullets cutting into them. Or that they lost hundreds of thousands of men killed in the first six months of World War II, surrendered only after it was tactically impossible to do anything else, and waged successful underground war the rest of the time. D-Day succeeded because French partisans died to get our guys information.

And France lost more men in Vietnam than we did. 

But facts are facts and silly stereotypes are, well, silly. 

I get called a liberal a lot, but I’m no fan of lattes. When I go to Sadie’s I usually have the French Roast, black. 

Not sure what that makes me, but it’s good coffee.

A really cool one-of-a-kind pistol

Ward Armstrong probably knows more about Browning pistols than anyone else on the planet. At least that’s the impression one gets.

I had the pleasure of finding him being the docent at the Browning Arms Museum on Tuesday in Union Station. I forget why, but he started out talking about a recent visit to the museum by Roy Huntington, publisher of American Handgunner Magazine (www.americanhandgunner.com) , and Bill Laughridge, of Cylinder&Slide, a Nebraska company that does custom pistolsmith work. Ward called Laughridge the foremost expert in the nation on the 1911 Browning pistol.

Laughridge and Huntington visited Ogden in September to photograph the original prototype of the 1911 in the museum’s collection, one of two made before Browning put serial numbers on the prototypes, so they don’t get much earlier. A post in the museum display speculates this particular pistol was made around 1905, when John browning was working up ideas for the 45 calibre piston the military was seeking.

Ward Armstrong and the 1911 prototype

Is the gun in the Union Station collection the first or second? Nobody knows, nobody cares. They don’t get any earlier than this one, though. One of the later prototypes, the ones with the serial numbers, recently sold for $250,000. This one? No way of knowing, it’s not going anywhere.

Laughridge’s story about his encounter with the 1910 prototype can be read here: http://www.cylinder-slide.com/1910hammerless.shtml. 

The most interesting part of the visit, Ward said, came with Laughridge asked for permission to take the prototype, this one-of-a-kind priceless pistol, apart so he could photograph its innards.

“And I said sure, and he said in the article after I left he thought ‘What if I can’t put it back together?’”

But he did, and there it hangs in the collection display. Reading his description of taking the pistol apart it’s fun to see his amazement to be handling a pistol worked on by John Browning himself. As a prototype he can see the signs of hand work everywhere -- small filing marks, tiny adjustments, design elements that were not used in the production guns, and on and on.

If the guy had been handling the Arc of the Covenant he couldn’t have been more overwhelmed. 

I was interested to read the report on how the 1911 was tested by the military to see if it could handle the rigors of combat. It was test fire six thousand times, then tested with deformed cartridges, rusted with acid,submerged in sand and mud and fired again.

It never failed.

Contrast that with the way the military adopted the M4 (later M16) rifle for our troops in Vietnam. The rifle did OK in initial tests in the US, but when it was given to the troops in Vietnam it couldn’t handle the humidity and rapidly rusted, leaving whole platoons in combat with rifles that had jammed. 

Meanwhile the Russian-designed Kalashnikov was capable of firing even after a mud/sand bath, and some of our troops used those instead. Chroming the internals of the M16 solved the problem, but it never would have happened if they’d tested the guns as well as they’d tested the 1911.

Ward took me over to see me the the miniature gun collection donated by Matthew Browning Ellis, the grandson of Matthew Browning, but stopped for a second to show the display of the 1911 prototype to a guy in biking leathers holding a helmet.

“So that’s the holy grail right there,” the guy said, his voice soft with, yes, reverence. He and Ward talked briefly about how the thumb safety was added to make the pistol more dependable for the cavalry, and then Ward quietly walked away, leaving the guy alone to look.

Ask little, get much at Union Station Archive

A friend wanted to know how many lines of track Union Station served when it was dealing with the heavy passenger traffic of the 40s and 50s because she does a really fun travel blog that you can read here: (click)

"Maybe eight," was my guess, but in Journalism, as the Micky Mouse Club used to say, we never guess, we look it up so I asked Gene Nopper, who was manning the desk at the Union Station Library Archive Wednesday morning.

Now, most places, you ask "how many," the answer is pretty straightforward: Eight, or ten, or five, or something. What do you expect?

Not here.

Gene, in his late 70s, squinted, pondered, said he wasn't sure and turned to a big picture of the rail yards at night taken sometime in the way-past and started to count rails .

"I think 11," he said, but then counted again and got 13, and I pondered, figured maybe 12.

Then Gene sat down to a computer and pulled up an aerial view of the yards, taken in the 50s. On that we could see five barns, those V-shaped covers that passengers stand under with a track on each side, "and along here is track 11," he said, which went by the ice house over on the west side of the tracks. Back when refrigeration on the trains was provided by ice, the trains would go by that house, ice would be poured in through the roof of he refrigerated car and it all stayed cold.

Gene Nopper

"They only used the first three or four tracks for passengers, as I recall," Gene said. "The farther tracks were for freight, or storage," at least, he said, when he was working there.

Oh? An eyewitness.

Yes, he said, he worked there from 1950 to 1960. "I was here when it was a station when it was big," he said, working summers to get through college.

The railroad was in his family, he said, and dug out a picture of his father, Cyril Nopper, standing in the burned wreckage of the 2nd Union Station that burned in 1923. His dad worked there, he said.

Ogden in his time at Union Station was so different from now it is impossible to describe. He worked in the laundry, in the commissary, on the dining cars, in the baggage cars and on the platform, doing the railroads grunt work, watching the city hum around him.

"It was an exciting time. 25th Street was never quiet," he said. "I could come out of the baggage room at 3 a.m., go up 25th Street, find a restaurant for lunch or breakfast and it was always full," both with passengers from trains passing through and with locals.

He misses the old buildings by Union Station that are now gone: The Railway Express building, which was the UPS of its day; the Commissary building, both south of Union Station.

The Laundry Building is still there, derelict, a future extension for the Union Station Railroad Museum if Union Station Foundation ever wins the lottery. In its day it did all the Union Pacific's laundry and from Sun Valley ski resort.

Could the railroad have that much laundry? All it had were the tablecloths from the dining cars, he said, and the bedding the sleeper cars generated.

Cyril Nopper, 1923 (Union Station Archive)

But this was the one laundry for the whole railroad. "The laundry processed dirty linen from Sun Valley to Chicago to Los Angeles; it came on the baggage cars," he said.

The laundry building wasn't built until after World War II. The railroad figured passenger travel would boom and wanted to be ready. Sadly, the 1950s marked the decline of passenger rail.

"You could come down here to the depot in the 40s and you could buy a ticket to any city in the United States," he said, and get there, too. The nation's rail network was that big.

All gone now. What killed it?

"Dwight Eisenhower, the automobile and the Interstate Highway System," he said.

President Eisenhower came home from World War II with memories of how quickly Germany could shift whole divisions of troops across the country using the modern Autobahns. He had visions of the United States doing the same thing, which is why the first bills for funding the Interstate Highways were defense acts.

Interstates are everywhere,  the automobile is king and Union Station in Ogden doesn't have any passenger rails any more. It has the memories of them, though, and to hear those all you need to do is go to the station and ask.

Rebuilding History One Bolt at a Time

There was indignation in Union Station’s repair shop Saturday morning over a letter to the editor in that day’s Standard-Examiner saying, essentially, that history was stupid.

The shop is full of people working their buns off to restore history, to bring it alive again. And some teacher’s aide writes a letter to the editor (in Saturday’s paper -- click!) saying that students don’t know about Ogden’s history, don’t care and we need to work for the future?

Gad.

I found the letter puzzling on several levels. The letter’s author says she is working with students, presumably to teach them.

She notices that there is something lacking in those students' knowledge of their city's past. Rather than correct that lack -- TEACH them -- she derides the newspaper for mentioning that subject, thus blaming the paper for pointing out those students' lack of knowledge and confusing them, or puzzling them.

Anyone else see a problem?

Richard Carroll stands by the newly built tender for D&RGW Engine 223

Instead of sticking her head in the proverbial sand of ignorance, she should bring those students to Union Station’s repair shop on Saturday morning, where those students might learn something.

Mike Burdett, a member of the Golden Spike Chapter of the Railway and Locomotive Historical Society, was waving a copy of the letter around, amazed that anyone could be so stupid. If that teacher is right, he seemed to be saying, what was the point of what the people in the shop are doing?

They’ve been working at it for a long time. As I walked up to the shop Saturday morning I saw several of the guys working on an old freight car parked behind Union Station, a rusty red thing with “Be Specific, Ship Union Pacific” painted on its side.

The UP hasn’t used that pitch in decades. Maurice Greeson, who was directing the efforts, said that car was the first place the members of the chapter worked, way back in the mid-90s, and pointed out the lights and electrical panel they had installed.

The Chapter has been working since about 1995 to restore the D & RGW Locomotive 223.  Richard Carroll, one of the founding members of the chapter, said the car and engine both used to be parked over behind the old candy building that used to be south of Union Station. Since the freight car was parked near an electrical pole, it was a simple matter for the guys to run a line down.

These are clever people that way -- retired railroaders, mostly, but also with other skills. Maynard Morris used to be a nuclear engineer, for example, and all the other volunteers have varying degrees of mechanical or technical skills.

The Chapter wants, eventually, to get No. 223 running. The engine itself sits outside looking pretty far gone to me but, I am told, it is salvageable. When you consider that the museum has cars in its collection that started out as rusted frames and piles of old parts and now look showroom new, their optimism is understandable. 

All it takes is time and money.

The Chapter’s work has been slow but steady. It’s most visible successes are the tender and cab to # 223.  Years ago Morris went over the old tender, which was too far gone for salvage, with a ruler and caliper, taking thousands of precise measurements. He came up with a complete set of construction blueprints. 

The nearly-finished tender now sits in the shop, glorious. The wooden cab for the engine has been reconstructed and sits next to it.

Maynard Morris shows the train shop to a couple of guys who just dropped by

Carroll said the repair shop is a lot better workplace than the old freight car. Back when Union Station was run by Ogden City he and then-manager Bob Geier made a pitch to the city council for funds to get the shop up and running.

“I actually prepared a presentation to the city council  -- my minute of fame -- and they looked at me like ‘Who is this guy?’ but then Jesse Garcia -- remember him, he was on the council? -- stood up and he really supported me. He convinced the council we really needed to do this, so they gave us the money.”

That was about 1998. Since then the shop has been fully equipped with heavy machinery -- lathes and mills and other stuff -- courtesy of military surplus policies at Hill Air Force Base and a lot of scrounging by the guys. 

Donated funds also buy a lot, and if you have any funds to donate, feel free to do so. You can go to this web site:

http://www.trainweb.org/GoldenSpikeLRHS

and give freely.

Steve Smith, left, and Jon Alvey

The level of expertise of these people is amazing on many levels. They’ve built that entire tender out of whole cloth, just about -- donated steel was bent and molded and riveted by hand. In many cases the volunteers have had to make the tools they needed to make the parts they needed. It is as authentic as they can make it.

These people live and breathe trains. As I stood I watch two of them -- a young guy named Jon Alvey, and an older volunteer named Steve Smith -- try to one-up each other on their knowledge of Utah’s railroad past.

I tried to take notes, but was quickly left in the dust:

Steve: “What’s the O, R and U?”

Jon didn’t know. It’s the company that ran Union Station, separate from the Union Pacific and other companies whose trains were served by it, Steve said. 

“What’s the Cottonwood Transportation Company?” Steve asked.

“In Salt Lake City, serving the old silver mines,” Jon said, up one of the Cottonwood Canyons. 

“Where’s the Utah Eastern?” Steve asked. “What Survey Railroad came through Daniels Canyon?” 

And so on. Jon held his own pretty well, too. 

I think the answers to that last question was “Denver and Northwestern Pacific, later known as Denver Salt Lake,” but my notes were very hurried.

Right or wrong, the point is, these guys know  history, and know why it has to be preserved and are working to do so. 

They are a huge resource for anyone who wants to use them, too -- On Saturday a couple of guys nobody knew wandered by, said “what’s up here?” and quickly got a tour.

Instead of writing letter to the editor advertising her own ignorance, the author of that letter ought to do the same. The volunteers are there every Saturday at 9 a.m., rain or shine, working away.

Drop in, look interested, they’ll take you in and, if you aren't careful, put you to work. 

4th Amendment? We don't need no stinking 4th Amendment!

The headline is a rift on a famous line from "Treasure of Sierra Madre," of course, discussing the need of badges by outlaws pretending to be police, which is actually applicable to the situation we have today.

When you ignore the 4th Amendment against illegal search and seizure without warrant, trial, conviction, or anything else, why indeed to you need badges?

I am thinking of this on this bright snowy Monday because of an article in the New York Times written (OK, dictated) by a prisoner of the US (badges!) in Guantanamo, Cuba, where, apparently, it is perfectly legal for the United States (badges!) to hold unconvicted people without warrant, charge, conviction or anything else, going simply on the word of -- who? No clue, someone with a badge, I guess -- that this person needs to be held.

You can read the article here -- click --- and when you do, ponder that the government that feels it can hold someone like this, for this long, simply because that same government says this person needs to be held like this for this long is the same government you expect to respect your rights under the 4th Amendment to the Constitution.

Me, I just really love it when I hear the Tea Party types, and others, going on about how sacred the Constitution is, their love of the 2nd Amendment and on and on -- they have no idea, or refuse to see, that the whole thing has long ago been rendered a sham. If not by Guantanamo, then by the quaintly-named "Patriot Act" or by the way Congress, and the rest of government, ignores the real needs of the residents of this country.

Don't think you are immune. If their lawyers have told them they can do it to this guy in Gitmo, they've got lawyers who will figure out a way so they can do it to you. Bet on it.

Chez Hamburger Helper?

Why can't every restaurant have at least one Hamburger Helper dish on the menu?

I know, the boxed mixes with sauce that "thickens on standing" and the dried pasta to which one adds a pound of browned grinded up beef, are something of a blue-collar staple, at best. They're certainly not 5-star rated restaurant fare. In the first "Vacation" movie with Chevy Chase his poor relatives are seen grilling hamburgers with hamburger helper but no meat, just the helper.

Lots of people eat them at home, but why not elsewhere?

What can I say -- I love those things. There must be 40 flavors (click) not counting the tuna alternatives, which would make a great Friday special.

As young marrieds, my wife and I had them weekly, at least, when the kids were growing up because they were quick and good. When my kids got married and set up housekeeping on their own they introduced these things to their wives and kids who, much to their astonishment, liked them.

And so it goes.

But you  never see them at a restaurant. You might see some sort of goulash thing, which is close, but that only rarely. Sadly, most restaurants these days serve food that is either grilled or deep-fried. Something that has to be browned, then simmered, must be too complicated.

There's a lot that's not on restaurant menus any more: baked apples used to be a staple, but no more. A while back my wife got a hankering for liver and onions -- think you can find that on any menu in Utah? Well, at Lamb's Grill in Salt Lake City you can, but almost nowhere else. If it's not deep-fried, it's not. Lamb's at least really cooks real food -- their menu includes Waldorf Salad, calf liver, trout (although not a whole trout that got boned at your table, like it used to be) and use to offer baked apples, but seems to have stopped those. The last two times we tried to order them we were told the apples were not in season.

But Hamburger Helper should be easy. The kitchen could make a couple boxes worth in advance and serve it up as needed. Run out? All you need to do is simmer it 10 minutes and there you are. And leftover are just as good nuked the next day.

How about a Hamburger Helper Restaurant franchise?  Heck, I'd go.

A tale of goats and fine automobiles

Utah, where once upon a time a goat could eat your car’s license plate.

And, no, not because goats eat tin cans. They don’t, silly person.

I was killing time talking to Alex Jolin in the Union Station’s antique car museum. Alex, who sells real estate for a living, has a volunteer badge indicating he’s got 900 hours, although he admits he doesn’t put so many in since the real estate market started picking up. 

What does he do at Union Station? He details the cars.

Now, these are cars that already look pretty darn good. Showroom good. What Jolin does is keep them that way with a light dusting, “and sometimes we can take them outside and wash them; we do have a vacuum cleaner.”

“But basically we don’t do anything more than maintain the beauty they already have. We just try to preserve what we have.”

Get that? This guy has a job that consists entirely of making gentle love to some of the most gorgeous vintage automobiles on the planet. 

There is much to love. Their paint is glossy, flawless, their chrome and brass polished to a fault. He gets to come down for an hour or so every week and gently handle those things.

He also fills in as a docent, and does some tours.

Ed Vendell and Alex Jolin in front of a 1929 Graham Paige

As we talked we stood by a 1929 Graham Paige, which is on loan from a member of the Union Station board. Most of the rest of the cars were part of the Browning family collection that used to be house in Ogden and rotated in and out of the museum. When the Browning family sold its collection it let the museum keep what was there. I don’t have the space here to list all the cars -- go see. 

Jolin does this cleaning and maintaining, which some might consider tedious, because “they’re just beautiful, I’ve always loved cars, and it’s easy to do.”

And it gives him a feeling of contributing to the museum, to the community as well.

Plus, it lets him hang around with the other volunteers. Ed Vendell, who’s in his 80s, said he likes to hang around with the cars because he owned so many during his lifetime. He had British and American “and quite a few Volkswagens,” and liked them all, pretty much, “except the Hillman Minx; it was the worst car I ever owned.”

The amazing cars in the collection “sure give us a feel for the number of talented people who existed in the US who knew how to do this kind of bodywork. I had some people from England come in who said ‘I didn’t know Americans could make cars like this.’”

And, of course, once they could. Remember in the 1970s when Chrysler was making cars that were crap, pure and simple? Everyone blamed the workers, but it was really the pencil pushers and bean counters who cut so many corners, and rushed the assembly lines, that fenders were falling off the things before they left the showroom floor. The workers just did what they could with the tools the were given.

Ed Vendell in the rear view mirror of a 1930 Cadillac

We went and admired the 1930 Cadillac with a V-16 engine.  Someone had told Ed -- incorrectly, as it turned out -- that this car had a place to stow a gun and we wanted to look for holsters.

“The story goes, General Motors said they were going to build the finest car in the world and they started with this  model,” he said, a V-16 model in a custom body by Fleetwood, one of only two made.

The Browning family bought this one, nobody knows where the other one is. Care to imagine the worth? 

What about that license plate and the goats?

Well, covering one wall of the museum is a collection of Utah license plates. Until recently, Utah gave you a new plate every year. Steve Sherwood, another volunteer who dropped by (they do a lot of dropping in, these volunteers. Can’t seem to stay away.) said this collection was donated and is pretty complete.

“Didn’t I read somewhere that during World War II they made plates that goats would eat?” I asked.

Yes, he said, and pointed to 1944. 

Metal shortages meant that Utah had to try a couple of different things. In 1942 they stamped new plates out of leftovers from 1941. In 1943 they gave people a sticker to put on the previous year’s plate. In 1944 they tried making plates out of a sort of plastic.

A soy-based plastic, as in soy beans. Soy beans are edible.

So a few farmers lost their plates to goats and complained. After the war the state went back to metal.

Cigars, who knew?

Not just any cigars. Union Pacific cigars. Be Specific, go Union Pacific and one has to assume these are primo cigars, too.

Or maybe not. I dunno, not being a smoker. On the side of the box it says the cigars are mostly tobacco, but also contain a bunch of stuff that is not tobacco. Is this normal for cigars? For Union Pacific cigars?

Again: I dunno. 

A box of these cigars showed up in the Union Station archives a while back. Lee Witten, the chief archivist, showed them to me as an example of “the cool stuff we get down here.” Someone just brought them down, there they are.

Now what?

Save them. Preserve them. Figure out why they exist at all. Put them on display. That’s what archives do.

This is why I decided to volunteer down at Union Station. The railroad, car and gun museums are constantly getting really cool stuff donated, or found, or it just sorta shows up.  The Foundation lacks money to go out and acquire things, so it really does have to depend on the kindness of strangers. 

Just to run the place depends on kindness. Volunteers do most of the guiding and touring around the museums, but the guys who do that are doing it out of love and deep-seated knowledge, so they’re providing a service with a level of quality that money can’t buy.

Monday morning, just wandering around getting acquainted, I met Ward Armstrong, who  is a past president of the Utah Sports Hall of Fame, former owner of a sporting good store in Ogden that shut down way before my time (around 1972) and guru, so said Foundation Director Roberta Beverly, of all things guns.

Armstrong dragged me into the Browning gun collection to show me a display on gun engraving that Darwin Brimhall, another volunteer, had put together. Brimhall gave me a quick rundown of how the Browning company makes its intricately engraved guns, the sort of guns that sell for a zillion dollars. The museum display includes some very unique items used in that process.

There is very little about guns of any sort that the guys in the museum don’t know.  I plan on dropping in often because every time I see one of those guys I know that all I need to do is point to a gun, say “wow, that’s cool,” and off they go.

Museums preserve a way of life from the past that we wish we could see again. It is fortunate much of that past is in the memories of these volunteers.

Some times we have to extrapolate. Take those cigars. 

Last time I rode Amtrak it was nice, but not the sort of high class operation that first class diners on trains in my father’s generation would have expected. Amtrak dining is very nice, and the food is good, but the whole experience is a bit pedestrian -- plastic tableware, a rather limited menu, things obviously microwaved.

Those cigars speak of fine linen tablecloths, real china, real silverware,and cooks down below preparing the sort of meals you dressed for, almost. Check out a  copy of the film “From Russia with Love” and look at Bond ordering wine with dinner, if you want to get a feel for it.

And you can imagine the guys (it was always guys back then, highly sexist) sitting around in the lounge cars after dinner with their brandy, trying out one of the Union Pacific’s finest cigars.

I wouldn’t try these. They’re almost certainly dried out beyond consideration. For all I know they were horrible even when brand new.

Be that as it may, they represent a little bit of the past that just sorta showed up at Union Station one day.

Pretty cool, eh?