Yes, It Has Been Worse, And It REALLY Sucked

I had to chide a friend on Facebook because he kept trying to make folks feel -- OK, "better" is not the right word, but perhaps have a better perspective -- of the current world pandemic.

He'd just post random snippets: Two percent of the nation's population died in the Civil War.  A quarter of Europe died in the Black Death.

And so on. So, I asked him, "Are you saying don't sweat it if less than 1 percent of the population dies now? "

He insisted not, but still, his statements lacked context. I like to tell folks this is why you leave the writing of irony to professionals.

And we really have had some jerks imply that, sure, a 1 percent death rate (which would be 3 million Americans) would be sort of acceptable if it meant saving the economy.  The idiot lieutenant governor of Texas actually said old folk, who are rated most vulnerable to Covid-19, would certainly be willing to take a greater chance on dying if it means re-starting the economy sooner for their grandchildren.

No clue on whether he discussed this with his mother.

This quickly morphed into old folks being asked to die for the Dow.

Pat Bagley from the Salt Lake Tribune on one
method of slowing the pandemic.

Needless to say, as a 71-year-old member of that more susceptible class, I decline the honor of saving the economy.  And now I read that Trump is saying he'll consider it a victory if only 100,000 of us die, which I guess is an improvement.

One suspects he will try to claim that, but for his work, it would have been worse. I like to think that, but for his lollygagging and happy talk in January, or even his slacking off last year when he was clearly warned of critical deficiencies in our national preparations, we might be in much better shape now.

That said, the hard truth is that there really have been vastly worse disasters right here in this country, and world-wide even more.  More than half a million Americans died in the 1918 misnamed Spanish Flu (should be the Fort Riley, Kansas, flu). Nations do recover, although what they look like is never known until later and isn't always nice.

Interestingly, memories of such things are not really big.  I just watched an episode of the PBS Program "The American Experience" on the 1918 flu that said the process of forgetting it began almost immediately.  It wasn't anything intentional.  No books were burned or papers censored. People just didn't want to talk about it.  Horror is never fun.

Of a similar nature was the journal of the Great Depression years kept by one farmer who almost destroyed it because such a terrible time didn't deserve to be remembered.  Fortunately it was saved -- I can highly recommend "The Worst Hard Time" by Timothy Egan, which uses it and much else, to tell the story of the Dust Bowl.

How bad was that?  The title tells it. Never mind flu, just taking a breath of the dust-laden air could kill you.

The New York Times ran a story the other day mentioning that Samual Pepys (pronounced "peeps") described the Great Plague of 1665-1666, so I got out my copy to read up.

Wow.

Pepys was a British government official -- head of the navy, in fact -- who kept an amazing diary for almost 10 years, from 1660 to 1669, when his eyesight failed.  His diary covers several critical historical events and he was a very dedicated historian, writing much daily, in great detail.  His diary is a goldmine for anyone who wonders "what was life really like back then?"

His description of the plague is riveting. 

Thousand dying every week just in London.  People were ordered to "social distance" by staying home, and many feared to go out anyway. Then as now, nobody knew of any cure.

Plague doctor. The beak on the mask
held herbs to keep the disease away.

On Aug. 10, 1665, Pepys notes that he re-wrote his will. "And an odd story of Alderman Bence's stumbling at night over a dead corps (sic) in the street, and going home and telling his wife, and she at the fright, being with child, fell sicke and died of the plague."

On Aug. 28 he is "Up and being ready I out ... having not been for some days in the streets; but now few people I see, and those looking like people that had taken leave of the world."

On the 30th he notes "But Lord! How everybody's looks and discourse in the streets is of death and nothing else, and few people going up and down, that the towne (sic) is like a place distressed and forsaken."

By Sept. 16 all of London was a ghost town.

"Thence I walked to the Tower; but Lord! how empty the streets are and melancholy, so many poor sick people in the streets full of sores; and so many sad stories overheard as I walk, everybody talking of this dead, and that man sick, and so many in this place, and so many in that. They tell me that, in Westminster, there is never a physician and but one apothecary, all being dead, but there are great hopes of great decrease this week: God send it!"

Sound familiar?

Samuel Pepys

And then in September of 1666 the Great Fire of London struck.  By then 200,000 people had died of plague.  I see some  speculation that the fire, which destroyed most of central London, helped stop the plague by killing all the rats and fleas. Every cloud has its silver lining, I guess.

That has to be seen as an unintentional byproduct, however, and I sincerely hope no Texas government officials are considering that method of stoping the current pandemic. It would boost the building trades, it is true, but still, let's not.

You can download the diary of Samuel Pepys for free from Project Gutenberg (click here.)

The diary also has its own web site so you can read whatever you want, or just "today in Samuel Pepys Diary" at this site (click.)

I can strongly recommend "The Worst Hard Time" by Timothy Egan.  You can find used copies for essentially the price of postage at Abebooks.com.

You can watch the PBS video of the 1918 influenza here (click.)

Who Made This Crap? China, of course!

There's this great scene in the film "Armageddon" with Bruce Willis where the space shuttle they are using to get away from the death astroid is broken.

Something's wrong with one of its complex, sensitive parts and the engine won't start.

So the Russian cosmonaut, who always sounds drunk, starts wailing away at it with a wrench screaming "American components, Russian components, it's all the same and it's all made in Taiwan!" at which point sparks fly, the engine kicks over up and everyone goes home happy.

Except Bruce. But earth is saved, so fair deal (click here for clip).

Where's that Russian guy when we need him?

I was asking my son the other day "Who do I kill to make all this stop?" OK, I have some anger issues but I suspect even that drastic a measure, let along wailing at something with a wrench, is not going to
fix this mess.

Interesting article in the New York Times today (click here) about the really incredibly silly situation the US finds itself in: It can't buy enough 75 cent face masks.

The irony hit me while walking the dog. An F35 -- $130 million -- flew over.  We've bought a few hundred of those, and more are on the way, because someone decided we needed to stock up on F35s.

But the strategic reserve of face masks, which we are now realizing is a critical wartime medical supply, reasonably should hold a billion or so of them. It had 35 million before this started and now sewing groups in cities and towns are learning how to make them again because industry can't.

Last time we had sewing groups making bandage and face masks, "Over There" was a hit on the radio and Kaiser Bill was on his last legs in World War I.

I kinda thought we'd gotten beyond that, what with this being the richest nation on the planet, but here we are (click).

Oh sure, order more from China, which makes 100 million a day. But China sells to China first. Can you blame them?

As the article makes clear, part of the larger problem is not just that critical medical supplies of all sorts, not just face masks, are now made in China.

Bean counters in industry, wanting to maximize shareholder value, looked for cheap labor to cut costs. Plus, a lot of the medical stuff we use these days is one-time and disposable. You get better sterility that way, but that's also how a typical hospital can use thousands of the things in one day.

The really big picture is how so vastly much of America's lower-tech production is gone overseas.  Economists like to point out that we supply the intellectual capital and produce a lot of higher-tech stuff -- like F35s -- and leave the cheap low-tech stuff to the Chinese.

That's great until you need something low-tech and the Chinese don't want to sell it to you.  Like a face mask.

And DO NOT blame the Chinese for any of this.  American businessmen made these decisions, nobody else. Remember how Whirlpool closed a factory in Evansville, Indiana, in 2010?  The place was making money, just not enough money. So off to Mexico went the jobs. But hey, look at these cheap washers and dryers!

There is also the problem of "just in time" production.  Nobody likes to keep inventory any more because piles of unsold stuff aren't making you money.

I suppose you can wonder why hospitals don't keep their own stocks to handle emergencies but, remember, hospitals in this country, anyway, are run to make money.  Bean counters control them too, and you know how bean counters feel about large inventories.

Been shopping for toilet paper lately?  National TP production was set to match demand. This worked fine until a national emergency caused everyone to feel a need to stock up.  If everyone only took two packs instead of their normal one, there's a 100 percent increase in demand with no production capacity to match it. Manufacturers are reluctant to increase capacity because this spike will end and then they'll have excess capacity sitting there not making them money.

We're seeing the same thing with bread, flour, sugar, other basics.  Even aspirin is backordered. How the heck does aspirin become short supply?

If Mexico ever decides to quit selling us vegetables we're going to be in big trouble. Utah is growing homes where it used to grow veggies. The state's best prime farmland in Davis County now grows, mostly, lawn.

Will the powers that be learn the lesson here? I'm not holding my breath.  Obama's administration used 100 million of the face masks in the strategic reserve for the H1N1 crisis and didn't replace them.

Trump's administration ran a simulation of a pandemic last year that pointed up this, and a lot of other problems, but apparently Trump's much vaunted business administration skills don't extend to restoring the inventory of face masks.

One hopes the coronavirus thing will get manageable in the near future, folks will calm down and start digging into the TP stocks clogging their garage and life will sort itself out.

It could be worse. Was talking my friend Larry this morning.   He's 81 and remembers some of the shortages during WWII when, he said, "everything was short," although he doesn't recall TP being an issue.

Wartime rationing prevented a lot of shortages by preventing excess buying; if you had flour coupons, you bought flour. No coupon, no flour.

Then it was shoe leather, he said. "I had to put cardboard in my shoes when the soles wore out. I remember my mom would get mad at me if I went out when it was wet because the cardboard would melt."

I have heard no hint that the Chinese are going to stop selling us shoes any time soon.  Because, of course, who do you think makes them? 

Of Social Distance and Political Idiots

Well, here my family all are, well into "social distancing," which is a fancy name for "stay the hell away from, well, everyone."

Family. Friends. Work. School. Everyone.

This is not easy. I have been crying for my grandchildren.  We are fortunate to live when we do, however.  I like to read stories about Arctic explorers, among other things, and the tales told of the 1800s are mostly of individuals, and teams, that went off to explore and didn't plan to come back for several years.

During all that time they were completely cut off -- no mail, no telephone, no radio, no hope of rescue if things got ugly.  "We'll be back in two years," was what they would say. "If we're not back in three, send someone to look."

Members of the doomed Franklin expedition, which went out in 1845 to find the Northwest Passage, left such a message. They are still being found where they died.

 .

So I can't complain when my entire family is up on my computer screen, my grandkids wiggling and squirming and playing games, trying to hog the spotlight.  It's chaos, but chaos I can be part of. And we're together.

This is not easy.  We humans need touch and closeness.  We are social animals and those are part of our make-up. One of my kids was telling me yesterday how deeply he missed his mother's hugs.

Families, especially, need everyone in that family.  Studies have shown that grandparents have a huge impact on their grandchildren's development.  They are critical for passing down family traditions, teaching family values, holding the whole family together.  Tribes that revere their elders do so because they know the critical role those elders play long after they are physically able to work, or fight.

And then we have Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (click) who seems to think that America's elderly are expendable in this situation. Actually said they should accept higher risk for the greater economic good.

I've heard others say this -- that a certain level of death from this pandemic is inevitable and the question is how to balance effort with an acceptable level of dead. Mr. Patrick's statement strikes me as bravado from someone who, I am guessing, is actually pretty sure he will survive because he's so clever.

It's the old "Some of you may die, but it is a sacrifice I'm willing to make" thing. To which I replay, "Gee, thanks for the honor, but no thanks."

Sadly, doctors in ICUs around the world are having to make decisions that impact the elderly more already.  Given someone who is 80 years old and has a 5 percent chance of surviving, and one who is 40 with a 50 percent chance,  and only one ICU bed, they grit their teeth condemn the old one to die a lonely and horrible death.  (Click for NY Times Story Here)

But that's medical triage.  That happens.

This is economic triage, the argument that we're killing the nation's economy to save too few lives.

Anything about that ring harsh to you?  We've been hearing for years from folks like Mr. Patrick how precious all life is. Now he has a chance to prove it and he says, "Well, some lives, maybe not."

Doesn't that include mine?

I hear daily from my kids about how they want me to take care of myself. Stay home, they say. Stay safe.

My granddaughter made a cake and wrote "stuck together"
to show how we're all in this.

They get it, and I get it. Which is why I am absolutely paranoid at this point. I have to honor their work to keep myself safe.

But more, a family is an integrated unit.  It needs all its parts, equally, to survive and grow.  Folks like Mr. Patrick, who seems to think some parts are more equal than others, have an astonishingly jaded and selfish world-view.

But I hear you ask: "What about the consumer and service economy, which is, yes, more than 70 percent of the whole national economy? Will a 3-month shutdown ruin it?"

Let's have a little perspective here.

World War II turned Germany's economy -- service and industrial -- into flaming piles of rubble. Whole cities were laid waste. Unemployment was probably 90 percent. They were bartering cigarettes for food.

Ten years later, Germany was the industrial and "service economy" leader of Western Europe.  You honestly telling me the people of the United States couldn't do that?  Or more?

Trust me: Cruise ships will still be here. When this is over you'll still be able to get a haircut, go to a movie, eat dinner out.

Until then, stay together, all of us. We don't have anyone else, and none of us is expendable.

Of Wounded Dogs and International Disasters

So Jo is sleeping again.  

This is a good thing — she spent much of yesterday sitting because lying down hurt, and had to be coaxed to lie down because sitting and almost-sleeping sitting up just wasn’t working, but she finally did get down and went to sleep.

And at night.

And today.

These are trying times.  As I write this Jo is healing from a severe dog bite and surgery and if that weren't bad enough,  the world seems to be going to hell.  

More than a few of those plague/disease/disaster movies seem to be coming true and, as one friend said, our alleged leaders all seem to sound like the mayor in the movie “Jaws,” always trying to tell folks that no, don’t worry, no problem, go back swimming, a few folks always disappear around here, it’s no big deal.

I sit here at home and read too much news about that crap and feel my gut tighten up, my head buzz, my eyesight go tunnel.  I worry if I’ll ever be able to buy bread flour again, or is this it?  This one bag I have hidden away is it, and then we all starve?

Which is silly.  Not gonna starve.  

I did this to myself. I mean-I’ve been on this planet for 71 years now and never once, not one day, missed a meal for lack of opportunity.  This simply is not a nation where one cannot get food somewhere if one has any means at all (which is why it is so tragic that so many do not.) 

Such a change. 

A month ago I was lazing around the house thinking, several times, that wow, this is pretty good.  The world is humming along, everyone at least in the immediate family is healthy, I had absolutely no deadlines or even horrible stresses. I was the ultimate retired guy.

That was pretty selfish thinking, now that I ponder it.  

We have two family/friends battling cancer, and one of them is pretty close to losing the fight. Climate change is making the world go weird, politics has gone insane, who am I to sit and be smugly content?

This strikes me now, even as I write it, as something out of a Greek tragedy, the unseen foreboding, the signals not paid attention to. The dumb contentedness and then — BOOM.

I was not totally at sea.  There were the tiny little voices saying “Watch out!” that are oh so easy to ignore. 

But what was I going to do … tell our broker to get all the stocks in cash at once? Buy gold? 

Panic is never wise.

Order that month supply of MREs? Tempting but then you have to eat them. Ever eat an MRE?  It helps to be really hungry.

The larder here at home is already full of staples.  Stupid to jam more in. Even if you do, as the saying goes, if everything falls apart that won’t matter and if it doesn’t fall apart, well, we’ll muddle through somehow.

It started falling apart quite suddenly, actually. Through February the stock market was on its usual helium high, stores were full. I went to SLC on March 9, a Monday— to pay my taxes.  While there I stopped off at Trader Joe’s and admired all the well-stocked shelves. Bought some stuff. Eggs. Chocolate. Coffee.

Stopped at Smiths and admired the mostly stocked shelves there. Bought some stuff. 

Tuesday I was at the eye surgery doctor’s place all morning getting my eyes examined.  With them dilated, I didn’t go anywhere else that day.

Was hearing rumbles Tuesday night. Went back to Smith’s Wednesday morning, bought more stuff — some soup, canned chili.  We didn’t need any, I bought more anyway.  We now have lots of canned chili. 

Don’t ask me why.  It’s not as if we eat that much canned chili. It’s more that I have always had this urge to be well-prepped although, get real, I’d starve in a month on my prepping skills. Or get royally sick of canned chili.

But the place was normal.  Moms with kids were pondering lunch meats and frozen foods. Nobody was sweeping stuff off shelves. I could buy all the tuna and chunky soup I wanted. I went home, ate lunch, took a nap.

That same afternoon I saw folks putting up posts on Facebook of the “Have people gone nuts?” variety. These posts were describing long lines in grocery stores and people sweeping whole displays of Hostess cupcakes into their baskets. 

I didn’t go look, but poo-pooed them.  Really? 

Actually, yeah — go figure.  And that’s the way it’s been ever since—people going mad over stuff they have never bought in bulk before.  Vicarious desperation made me feel a small twinge of victory when I found a three-pack of pocket tissues the other day — 10 tissues each! — at the local dollar store. Buying something at another market just so I can say I did — a small jar of peanut butter, some packs of bread yeast.

I don’t understand it, honestly, except from a psychological standpoint, why folks are acting nuts. I know when that happens I, too, am strongly tempted to act nuts and grab stuff I don’t really need — like 3-packs of pocket tissues. The British, I hear, are panic buying tea.  

That’s how we finished the week and weekend. Watched news stories of the virus spreading, the markets crashing.

I took Jo for a walk Tuesday.  Nice sunny day. We went through the cemetery, did the full two mile walk.  Saw some lady with two dogs, including a puppy that was all over on its leash, didn’t pay them any mind.

Then from across the field there saw the larger dog, a pit, take off and wondered why the owner was letting it run loose, but I guess it had broken loose. I saw it curve around and come at us and instead of stopping and sniffing like most dogs do it snarled/grabbed at Jo — loud yipping, I waded in and kicked it hard in the chest, then yelled at it as it backed off.

Kept walking, checked Jo, saw nothing, kept walking, lady came walking towards her dog apologize/waving and I kept going, thinking that was the end of it. 

But later Jo was limping and I found blood. Vet found a slash and bruising. Surgery.  Home with a collar.

Rough rest of the day — she had those post-operative stares where all you can do is sit and look and hope to die quietly while your body figures out what just happened.  That night I did get her to lay down in her bed in the bedroom, but at 4 a.m. she was up and I needed to take her out. Carla needed to sleep so I just took Jo’s bed out to the living room, put on clothes and went out with her.

Which was where we were at 7:09 when the earthquake hit. Good noise and rocking and rumbling, but nothing crashed down. It was a 5.7 near Magna.. Caught Ben taking a shower.  Scared the bejesus out of everyone, and like we needed a new source of stress?

Many jokes of locusts being next.

Jo had a quiet painful day yesterday.  She would move when urged, or led with a treat, and it was afternoon before I got her to lay down and sleep for a while.

  

Tending to her has been a good distraction for me — a dose of reality amid all the chaos and doom and gloom and fear.  I can stare at the news all day and all night, but there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. The world is a giant ocean and I am just a minnow — I will go where the ocean goes, powerless to do more than wave my little fins. I can think I'm making a difference, but if the ocean swell takes me 100 miles one way, my paddling only gets me back a couple feet.

But a hurting dog is real, something I can deal with, a ground point. It is someone who needs me to be there, to act, to do.  She is a family member in need.

And today — March 19, my 71st birthday — she’s a lot brighter, pretty close to normal in outlook.  Still favoring that right front leg, which also got a nasty bruise, but she is being Jo again.  This all made me realize how much I’ve grown to depend on her and how little I think of that.  

So here we are.  The world is going to hell, idiots are panic buying toilet paper, but I made it to 71 in pretty good stead.

And my dog is doing ok. She's watching for the mailman again. 

Life’s no longer that care-free fantasy I enjoyed in that bygone era of last month, but I still have very little to complain about.

Signet 35 a significant performer

The Signet 35 family -- Civilian, Army, Air Force.

Got lucky shopping at the local thrift store: Scored a really sweet Air Force version of the Signet 35 at a price that could not be avoided, and it got me thinking that maybe I should actually run some film through one of these wee beasties.

The Signet 35 is an odd duck. It replaced the Kodak 35. Sold beginning in the early 1950s, it featured a nice design and built-in rangefinder.  The Kodak 35 it replaced was a Frankenstein, with the rangefinder a clumsy add-on.

Unlike the other Signet cameras, and the Kodak 35s, it is made of cast aluminum and all-metal construction.  The others are bakelite with metal parts screwed on. It is clear this was made to be a serious camera, able to take some knocks.

U.S. Air Force version

Word on the street is that it was meant originally for the military. It was to be a simple but sturdy camera for use on the platoon level to document combat stuff that didn't need a professional. In that vein, it's small, simple, sturdy, just the thing to hand to a guy carrying a rifle and tell him to "take some snaps." Half an hour with the instruction manual and you're there.

It has a simple 4-speed-plus-B 25-300 shutter and a self-explanatory exposure calculator on the back. There are two hyper-focal marks on the focus scale. It is all designed to make picture taking as fool-proof as a higher-level camera in 1953 can make it.

As mentioned above, it came in military versions: Black anodized aluminum and leather for the Air Force, green leather/black anodized aluminum for the U.S. Army Signal Corps. The civilian model, in gray leather and polished aluminum, is exactly the same camera. Production went on for a decade, so there's lots of the civilian ones around.

The military models are scarce collectibles, selling in the $600-plus range; the civilian models are less than $75 in good working order. On-line resources show how to clean the usually-hazy viewfinder and revive an aged balky shutter.

U.S. Army Signal Corps version

They're pretty cameras.  The 1950s design is subdued and clean, with big knobs to wind the film and fire the shutter. The controls are all easy to use even with gloves. It fits in the hand comfortably, with a nice rounded form and good heft to help hold it steady. At the same time, it is compact, solid, easy to carry in a pocket or bag.

Is it any good?  That all depends on the lens.

The old Kodak 35s -- both with and without rangefinder -- had a Kodak "anastigmat" lens, which is a simple lens that does OK, I guess. You get pictures. They're nothing to write home to mother about as far as definition, sharpness go. For snaps to put in the album, they're fine.

Kodak 35 RF

The Signet 35 has a 44mm Ektar. Very cool.

Ektar lenses were Kodak's premium optics, the top of the line, pro grade, carefully made and installed.  They are similar to the Zeiss Tessar, which may or may not mean anything to you. All you need to know is that Leitz, Zeiss and, yes, Kodak, all used the Tessar formula to make really wonderful optics. Many still do. I have seen this particular Ektar compared to the legendary Leitz Elmar.

So I loaded a roll of Kodak Plus-X (which is now discontinued but was being sold when these cameras were) into my civilian model. I grabbed a light meter and set out.

I wandered down some new-to-me streets here in Ogden -- Lincoln over near 28th Street, then over around by the LDS temple down on 22nd Street. The dog and I just rambled, snapping this and that. We finished on Two-Bit street taking random street scenes just to burn the rest of the roll.

Gotta tell ya: Very impressed.

The first print I made was of this 1970s Chevy (Impala?)  that the owner said he's owned for more than 40 years.  It's more-or-less restored, he's very proud of it, and it looked real nice.  I promised not to put it on eBay as I took a shot.

I got very excited as this print came up in the developer and I took it out of the fix -- I'd focused on the back bumper and it's really clear and sharp. Tonal rendition is as much the film as the lens, but the image is crystal clear and, as I said, very sharp.  The negative would go larger than 8 by 10 inches easily. I would rate this image beside one shot with one of my Leicas.

Same with the other prints, which I scanned for this blog: The negatives were a bit dense, which tells me the shutter speeds on my example are probably running a bit slow after 65 years, but making prints was no problem and they were all very good. The focus is very accurate, the images are very sharp.

I really don't like the kind of viewfinders these and many others of that era have, including the screw-mount Leicas.  They're a simple look-through optic with a very tiny eyepiece that you have to shove your eyeball up against.  Glasses wearers find these difficult.

There's also no bright-line or sharply defined edge inside the viewfinder, so you have use a bit of zen to tell where the edge of the frame is. I suspect the viewfinder sees a bit less than the lens does to allow for parallax error when you focus close.

That said, the triangular rangefinder spot is big and easy to see.  The final prints look to take in about what I wanted as far as what I remember seeing through the viewfinder. Once you remember to manually cock the shutter after advancing the film, shooting it is uncomplicated.

All-in-all it's a sweet little camera. It's not the camera I'd take on vacation -- I really prefer wider-angle lenses and interchangeable lenses -- but if I were forced to it would certainly do good job.

If you see one at an antique shop or flea market, give it a look, and if you find a black or green one jump on it.

Focus was accurate.

Mailboxes make interesting still-life displays

Horses on Two-Bit Street

A guy on Lincoln Ave. built this little memorial to Ogden's founding

Farr's Ice Cream is an Ogden institution

Sadie's coffee shop is also an Ogden institution

Moon Glow is dimming to nothing

Moon Glow in 2018

One of my self-appointed jobs at Union Station has been to occasionally document the state of the museum's and city's rail cars stored at Ogden Business Depot.

There's some real history out there which, sadly, is being horribly neglected.

There is a couple of wood Saltaire excursion cars slowly moldering away to kindling. The shell of a Bamberger inter-urban rail car that once ran from Ogden to Salt Lake City is rusting away.

Saltaire Excursion Car

But most sad of all, Moon Glow is pretty much done for.

Not that that's anyone's fault.  In the world of historic preservation, triage has to take place: You save what you can.  What you can't save, gets lost. Money is always the key, and saving these things takes a lot of it.

In 2012, when I still worked at the Standard-Examiner, I did a story on the status of the one surviving remnant of the Train Of Tomorrow.  You can read it here (click!). The elevator version is that Moon Glow was one of four cars built by the Union Pacific Railroad to show travelers in the US how amazing rail passenger life was going to be after World War II.

Just one problem: Automobiles.

Americans were increasingly buying and driving them, to the detriment of rails everywhere. As early as the 1920s Ogden's trolly car system was facing stiff competition, and losing. Why take a train when you can drive?

Things got worse in the 1950s. President Eisenhower admired Germany's Autobahn highways so much that he felt the US should have the same thing. Interstate highways were for defense, allegedly, and funded that way, but car drivers loved them.

So the Train of Tomorrow toured the nation in1947, amazed everyone, and then went away. GE, which built it, had trouble even selling it to a major railroad.  UP finally bought it, but it never achieved the nation glory it was aimed at.

Most of the Train of Tomorrow cars were eventually scrapped, but Moon Glow was adopted for use as an office by a scrapping yard in Idaho.  That was where some volunteers from Ogden found it.  They pulled together enough funds to bring it to Utah, and started some preservation work, but it all went south from there.

Moon Glow today.

With no long-term funding in place, each step made matters worse.  Accessories in the car were removed, stored, and lost.  Windows were taken out, stored, and lost.  Buildings that parts of the car were stored in got torn down, and the parts were lost. There was no money to preserve them, no permanent staff anywhere to monitor it.

The viewing dome today. I'm unsure if
the sign is someone's sick joke

It ended up at BDO, first stored in a building. When the building was torn down it was moved to a siding and covered in plastic.  The plastic shredded in the weather, now it sits open to vandals and weather.

Moon Glow's dream

Get the theme here?  Every step of the way it just gets worse and worse. Good intentions are one thing, but a full plan to save it, and the funds to do it, never existed.

When I visited it last week I took more pictures.  As you can see, there's not a lot left. There's a metal shell. The concrete floors are still there, but beyond that it is very efficiently gutted.  Last I heard, renovation would cost $3 million, but really, who knows? 

Moon Glow's reality

What will happen? No clue.  For 15 years Union Station and the museums were managedby the Union Station Foundation, which barely had funds to keep the doors open.  Renovation of collection objects was simply impossible.

Ogden took back management of Union Station, and the collections, a year ago. Does it have these funds?  It has more pressing problems, such as removing asbestos from the Laundry Building next to the station, or upgrading the station's 95 year-old plumbing, or renovating the 95-year-old Union Station itself.

Rusted hulks of bygone rail cars are way down on the list.

I'd much rather see the Saltaire cars saved -- it would be a lot cheaper and they have more Utah connections anyway.

Moon Glow is rail history, and maybe there's a rich guy somewhere who can afford to take it on. Absent that, though, it's time to face the inevitable.

In 1872 Women's Lib (sort of) Was the Rule

In 1872, it would appear, women in the LDS Church saw life just a teensy bit differently than the stereotypes of today.

Pro-vote?  Of course.
Equal pay for equal work? Darn right!
Equality under the law in all things?  You better believe it, buster.
Polygamy?  Well, yeah, actually.

OK, so some things are different, but it was 147 years ago and things have changed. Still, it is fascinating to see how they were back then.

I made this little discovery thanks to the efforts of the J. Willard Marriott Library's amazing historical newspapers project, which is working to get every copy of every newspaper eve published in Utah on-line, digitized. If you haven't yet discovered digitalnewspapers.org yet, stop what you are doing and go look at it now.



One of its most recent additions is the complete "Woman's Exponent," which was published from 1872 until 1914. Listed as a "semi-official" publication of the LDS Church, its goal (according to the entry in Wikipedia) to uplift women of the LDS church and to educate women about the women of the LDS Church.

You can read the entire newspaper here:  CLICK LINK.

How closely tied was it to the church?  Its first editor, Louisa Lula Greene, was the grandniece of Church President Brigham Young.

Now, as to the paper's content, as hinted above.

Consider the time: It is 1872 Utah. The state is run by Brigham Young, whose word is law. He sanctions you being made editor of a newspaper aimed at women in Utah. Do you think that you will, for one instant, print something that would not be approved by your grand uncle, let alone the rest of the community?

I bet not. It's rather unlikely.

Which tells me that the women of Utah in 1872 were a lot different in outlook, and expectations, than the women of Utah in the late 20th Century, say, the ones who worked against the Equal Rights Amendment, just to pick one example.

How so?  There's a general tone of "look how amazing women are" in the news coverage, both local and around the world. To wit:

"Springfield, Mass., has elected Miss Sarah J. Williams to be City Physician. Twelve doctors of medicine in pantaloons contended for the honor and emolument of bleeding the Springfield paupers; and wise as they were they were all beaten out of the field by a woman."

Or ponder the ill-suppressed rage in this slap at male dominance: "Society will not tolerate a woman who objects to live with a drunken, brutal husband. She married for better or for worse, and though the man becomes worse, she must pay the penalty. Mrs. Nelson, wife of Joseph Nelson, a blacksmith living near Sedalia, Mo., unable to live with her lawful husband, tried to live away from him. Society said nay. Joseph said no, and made her return. On Sunday the 17th ult. after she had returned home, he killed her. Enlightened society! Exalted husband ... or ought to be!  Happy wife, in a better world!"

But perhaps it is best said in an editorial, unsigned so presumably written by Ms. Greene, that lays out the general principles of the newspaper.



The paper doesn't advocate for women's suffrage, it says, because in Utah they already have it. In a hint that it will not oppose plural marriage, it says the paper has "no particular wrong to contend  against, inflicted up us by our husbands, fathers, brothers, or the male portion of the community; and no special claims to champion, throwing down the gauntlet against all comers...We do not propose to speak for a few of the women of Utah who with disappointed hopes or perverted minds may be disposed to rail in bitterness against the principles, honestly entertained by a whole community."

OK, so "don't rock the boat" as editorial policy.

But, in another editorial on the following page, Ms. Greene takes a more proactive tac for the rights she thinks women should have.

How about access to jobs?  Not all women have husbands to care for them, and yet society prevents them from having good paying jobs, and makes it clear this is why some women are forced into prostitution.

"She  should have the right to live, and live purely, and not be compelled by the force of custom and fortuitous circumstances to seek a living death that the physical body might be sustained. And to secure her this right, she should have access to every avenue of employment for which she has physical and mental capacity."

Equality under the law?

"She should not be held more responsible than man -- if as much -- for sexual crime. As the world goes if she sins and falls the ban of society is placed upon her, she is ostracized and driven deeper into a course of wickedness, while her partner in guilt, her tempter and destroyer, walks erect and unabashed, received, encouraged and it may be petted by those of her own sex who would spurn her as an unclean and loathsome thing. He should be held equally degraded -- more so, as more culpable, and deserving the severe penalty."



The right to vote?  They can in Utah (a right they lost with statehood), but this paper argues strongly for the right for all, a right now denied "simply because nature qualified them to become mothers and not fathers of men.

"They may own property, pay taxes, assist in supporting the government, rend their heart-strings in giving for its aid the children of  their affections, but they are denied all right to say who shall disburse those taxes, how that government shall be conducted, or who shall decide on a question of peace or war which may involve the lives of their sons, brothers, fathers and husbands."

Susan B. Anthony couldn't have said it better, but a Utah Mormon woman said it in 1872.

The Woman's Exponent folded in 1914 due to financial pressures.