You Have Been Compromised

I was shuffling through the pile of that day’s mail while carrying items into the house after a day trip. I noticed a letter from my credit union and realized it was not a pitch to get a loan or a toaster. (Do banks still give toasters?) So instead of making a second trip to the garage to bring in more items, I ripped open the envelope and was not disappointed. My debit card had been compromised. The fault lies with the merchant/payment processor, which I take to mean the company that data gets sent to when I swipe my card. The credit union said I would get a new card within 10 to 14 days and could continue to use the compromised one in the meantime. Or I could call an 800 number and cancel my current card and do without. I opted to do without. What annoys me in all of this is that Visa would not identify the merchant/payment processor. I’d like to know who screwed up, but in the end Visa is no doubt taking better care of the processor than it is taking care of me. Time to occupy Visa. I should be thankful, I suppose. At least my checking account wasn’t overdrawn.

Pennsylvania Barn Stories

(This is a proposal I submitted for a Guggenheim grant in the fall. I didn't get the grant, but I still intend to do the project.)

I spent a lot of time driving the Interstate 81 and 80 corridors in Pennsylvania this summer and began to pay attention to barns. I saw old barns and new barns, deteriorating barns and barns that had been converted to other uses. I began to wonder about their stories and thus was born this proposal.

I want to not only photograph barns that have unique stories behind them but also to include their stories in a coffee table book titled Pennsylvania Barn Stories. The Penn State Press is interested, according to Kathryn Yahner (kby3@psu.edu), assistant editor, whose areas are Pennsylvania history and regional studies. When I outlined this proposal to her, she replied: “I would be happy to look at a final manuscript—this sounds like an interesting project, and one with a good potential fit with our list. Do keep me apprised of your progress. At the point where you have some sample material to share, I'd be very interested in discussing the project in more detail.”

First, I have to find the barns, and I have mapped out a plan to do that. I have as one resource The Pennsylvania Barn: Its Origin, Evolution, and Distribution in North America (Creating the North American Landscape) by Robert (Bob) Ensminger, a professor emeritus of geography. This is the only book devoted to Pennsylvania barns and the barns are specific to a certain style whereas I will consider all barns. It is an academic study, not a popular book, but it does contain some information about barns that might have stories. I’ve also found books and Websites about barns in a certain county or in a certain area and I will use those as needed. (According to the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, Pennsylvania has 63,000 farms. Agriculture is the leading industry in Pennsylvania.)

The Historic Barn & Farm Foundation of Pennsylvania has volunteered to publish in its newsletter an item about the project. I will also send news releases to news media outlets throughout the state and ask their help in publicizing the project and even identifying barns with stories. In the meantime, I’ve opened a page on Facebook devoted to collecting Pennsylvania Barn Stories. (The first half-day generated one contact and others followed.)

I don’t want to prejudge what barn stories are worth telling, but the possibilities include architecturally and historically significant barns, barns that have been in families for generations, new barns built in a different style (I have identified one already), barns that have been converted into houses (I know of four conversions and one in progress) or other uses (I know of two). An Amish barn raising should also be on the list.

Once I have a list of willing participants, I will map out photographing the barns and collecting the stories. I expect each barn will require at least two days of on-site work in order that I may photograph in the morning and evening light as well as taking interior shots during the day. I plan on using the high dynamic range process, especially for the interior shots. High dynamic range is a process that results in sharply detailed photographs. (See interior photograph of St David’s Cathedral in Wales above.)

I also want to take photographs to cover the range of seasons so I anticipate that I would return to some barns to photograph them in different seasons. Between identifying barns, photographing the barns and collecting the stories, and returning for seasonal photographs, three years is a reasonable timeline.

The 1940 Census

As you probably know by now, the 1940 census is online, even downloadable although not searchable. You cannot search by names, which is the way most of us would want to search, but when you first look for a community, assuming it was of any size, you can limit your search to a street.

The first thing I did was try to find my maternal grandparents. That took longer than expected because I thought they lived in one township when it was really another (both starting with R, by the way, which should explain my confusion). When I did find them, two things surprised me. My uncle was living with them and my grandfather, a native of Wales, was listed as having been born in Pennsylvania.

What this particular page in the census didn’t tell me is who responded to the census-taker’s questions. They were supposed to be indicated with a circled x. So I’m speculating that my grandmother was the respondent and that she didn’t know how to spell the name of the Welsh town where my grandfather was born or she just decided the hell with it, what business is it of yours, and said Pennsylvania. Even though I want my ancestry lines kept clear, I can appreciate a small act of civil disobedience, especially coming from my petite grandmother.

By 1940 my uncle would have been in his 30s so living with his parents raised questions. My older sister suggested that it probably happened because his first wife had died, and my oldest cousin (who was around 12 in 1940) backed that up and said he was depressed for a long time. My older sister (then about 2) believes that my uncle’s wife died from spinal meningitis. She and my cousin said that my aunt’s casket was placed in the front window of their house for the viewing, that no one could come inside because she had died of a contagious disease. (If your uncle’s wife dies before you’re born, was she still your aunt?)

I found my paternal grandparents in a nearby town and learned that my grandfather’s sister was living with them. Next door were his daughter and her husband living with her in-laws. I saw a lot of couples living with parents/in-laws and even one couple living with an uncle and aunt. (They would become the parents of a girlfriend of mine so their name popped out.)

Also notable was finding the circled x behind the wife’s name rather than the “head’s” name. No doubt the “head” was at work when the census-taker stopped by.

And, I also found my parents, who were then living near Harrisburg with my two older sisters. Nothing dramatic there.

The 1940 census is flush with information, some of it inadvertent. You need only to start looking.

The Three Sisters

You can never tell what the cat will drag in or what a landscaper’s crew will dig up on your property. What the cat drags in goes into the garbage rather quickly, assuming you find it rather quickly. What the landscaper digs up takes more time.

We’re having a patio built at the rear of our house. It wasn’t something I had in mind to do immediately but as soon as we finished our walk-out basement, it became apparent that we needed to do something outside. So we hired a landscape company, which sent in an architect and who, with another architect, drew up plans to create a patio, fix a falling wall, finish off a fallow area at the extreme rear of our property and create a stone wall along the front where the lawn drops off to the street.

I wanted the wall across the front because I was jealous that many of the condos across the street had stone walls that added to their appearance.

Much needed to be dug out to get our patio up and running and the wall fixed and on the first day the crew asked me if they could dump the extracted dirt in the fallow area of our property. I said no because we had long-range plans to develop that. The crew assured me they had a place to dump the dirt off site.

That worked very well until one day I looked out and discovered that the crew had dug up three huge boulders (either limestone or sandstone). I quickly ran out and asked them not to remove them from the property. I knew they would fit into our landscape somewhere. In fact, the crew wanted one of them to place at the end of the new wall. Fine, I said; I can do something with two boulders.

In the end, the crew found three more boulders and I figured out what I wanted to do. I had the crew moved the best three to the front of the house and line them up. I call the result rock art and gave it the title “The Three Sisters.” I note that I had three sisters at one time and that there is a huge formation in the Blue Mountains of Australia called the Three Sisters. (There’s also one in Moab National Park called the Three Gossips, but I didn’t think that would fly.)

We’re planning to mulch around them for now and in the fall plant a number of white birch trees behind them, although we want to check with our architect first to see what she thinks of planting Mountain Laurel. Mountain Laurel is, after all, Pennsylvania’s state flower. I remember seeing a lot of Mountain Laurel and white birch trees in the woods behind our neighborhood in the town I grew up in.

Needless to say, both are evocative and I can’t wait to see which one we plant.

Comparative States

Someone once advised me not to compare girlfriends or wives. But nobody ever told me that I couldn’t compare states where I had lived.

I have been thinking about the differences between New Mexico, where I lived for eight years after retiring in 2003, and Pennsylvania, where I lived the rest of my life and where my first ancestors arrived in 1733, giving me the bragging rights

of being a 9th-generation Pennsylvanian.

New Mexico is referred to as a third-world country, even by residents. But as I work my way back into being a Pennsylvanian, I am beginning to make comparisons that are favorable to New Mexico.

For one, the New Mexico legislature is part time. It meets for 30 days one year and 60 days the next. Pennsylvania’s legislators are fulltime and the legislature is one of the most per-capita expensive in the country. Our population declines but our legislature gets more expensive.

Then there’s the sale of alcohol. In New Mexico, you can buy booze just about anywhere. Sam’s Club was my favorite stop, but once a month I’d stock up at World Market and sometimes Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. I had variety and diversity in my selection.

In Pennsylvania … Well, everyone knows what it’s like in Pennsylvania. It’s a closed shop.

Another benefit to living in New Mexico: No annual inspection for your automobile. I remember when you had to get your car inspected twice a year in Pennsylvania. At least it got reduced to annually in my life. I’d like to see it discontinued altogether. Some would argue that it’s a safety issue, but in all my years in New Mexico the biggest problem on the highways was DUI, which is also a problem in Pennsylvania, and not unsafe autos.

The good news is that Republicans control Pennsylvania. These are the less-government folks. Want to place a bet on how soon they act? Don’t.

Unfortunately, when it comes to making things better, Pennsylvania politicians are just like the ones in New Mexico—and probably every other state.

Naked to Mine Enemies

I’ve been thinking of Cardinal Wolsey these days in relation to the firing of Joe Paterno as Penn State’s football coach. People continue to ask why he was fired and the board of trustees has yet to answer that question. Of course, the question becomes more prominent because as the timeline in the Sandusky sex abuse scandal is laid out, Paterno did the right thing and should be honored, not fired. Or so it seems until we get more information.

The Joe Paterno I know was no Cardinal Wolsey, who apparently while serving Henry VIII was quite the political animal and served Henry rather than the church only to have Henry turn on him late in his life. Wolsey died while enroute to London where he probably would have been executed.

I read a biography of Wolsey back in the 1960s and was struck by the title: Naked to Mine Enemies. I’m not sure Wolsey ever used the line but I do know that Shakespeare did in his play Henry VIII.

Had I but served my God with half the zeal
I served my king, he would not in mine age
Have left me naked to mine enemies.

As I pondered the firing of Joe Paterno and the unstated reason(s) behind it, the phrase came back to me. I finally realized that there is no unstated reason for the firing, that Paterno had over the years accumulated enough enemies that in a moment of vulnerability his enemies prevailed over his supporters. Look at all of the negative stories about Joe’s past that have been published since he was fired. Few would dare to write such stories while he was the coach.

Why was Joe fired? He stayed too long. While most people, including those in Old Main and on the board of trustees, retire at 65, Paterno kept on coaching and had enough support to get away with it. Even when he was asked to step down, he had enough power to thumb his nose at the president of Penn State and to continue coaching. Even at the conclusion of the last season, his legacy intact as the winningest Division I coach in college football, he refused to step down. He wanted one more season and seemed to suggest that there would be more after that.

Leaving aside the current sex abuse scandal, I always thought that Joe had the right values for a football coach. Certainly, he was not perfect, but his stated values were worth emulating. I long said that Joe had a right to retire on his own terms—but at the same time he should have retired a while back.

By insisting on continuing to coach, Paterno left himself naked to his enemies. In the end his vulnerability was greater than his legacy. Like it or not, he was fired.

Facts and Discussion Boards

There’s a great line that we often hear in newsrooms. It’s meant as a joke, but some non-newsies might wonder.

The line goes: Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.

The implication is that a reporter will ignore the facts in order to create a more interesting story, a story that will attract more readers than one based on facts.

Having become addicted to Facebook and newspaper discussion boards, I’m beginning to think the line is universal rather than limited to newsrooms. As I follow, in particular, the discussion at the sex abuse scandal connected in some way to Penn State, I marvel at the number of posts that are factually wrong. I marvel more when the originator is corrected and stands by his original posts.

The standard of proof is very low, unlike in any newsroom I ever worked in. Newsrooms, especially when working on controversial stories, have a two-source rule. You need at least two independent sources saying the same thing before you’ll consider putting the information in a story. And the sources can’t just be anybody.

There was a post the other day claiming that a certain downtown State College development project included a penthouse suite for former Penn State president Graham Spanier. I asked for a source. The originator said one of the developers told him that. Nothing on paper. Just hearsay.

A couple of weeks later Penn State, which had committed to two floors of office space (not a penthouse), backed out of the project and the Spaniers coincidentally purchased their own condo in a neighboring township.

That did not stop the posts about the penthouse.

Of course, the “facts” about Joe Paterno and what he did when informed of a former assistant’s behavior are as fluid as the Mississippi River. The ones that suit a person’s disposition toward Penn State or Paterno are the ones that get posted, followed by “corrections” from others.

I have enough examples to fill a book.

Now there’s an idea. A book.

When I see misinformation repeated on a discussion board, I am reminded of a quote attributed to Mark Twain (but which I can’t verify): Rumor is halfway around the world before truth gets out of the starting gate.

And that was before the Internet!