It’s been a struggle getting this post ready for publication. More than a month has passed since the last post. The fight is part of my battle with Parkinson’s Disease. Besides the more visible motor symptoms—tremors, slowness, shuffling, stooped posture—one of the numerous non-motor symptoms of the disease is apathy, a lack of interest in what were normal activities. It’s been hard to convince myself to get going and do things. The Blog has been one of the victims of my apathy, but I’m working my way through it.
I haven’t been traveling or doing much photography. I have, though, recently done a little more writing on my life stories. This post contains three of my stories from earlier years; one from high school, one from college, and one from hillclimbing days.
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| 1978 solar eclipse visible from central Oregon. A photo of mine similar to this one was published in Sky and Telescope Magazine. |
One of the Reasons I Became a Teacher
As a freshman at Montclair HS in SoCal I was very active in the science club and even wanted to be an astronomer as an adult. Two field trips I vividly remember were a lunar eclipse and a visit to Griffith Park Observatory opened to the public in 1935.
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| Not Griffith Park Observatory, but the Keck Observatory on Kitt Peak near Tucson. |
The first trip was to Griffith Park in Los Angeles (famously used in the 1955 movie “Rebel Without a Cause” staring James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo). It was a fantastic place to visit with all kinds of firsts for me. I saw my first large telescope (a 12" Zeiss refractor), first Foucault pendulum (used to demonstrate the earth’s rotation), and saw my first planetarium show. I can vividly remember the sights and sounds of the whole complex. That experience certainly increased my desire to become a professional astronomer.
Lunar Eclipse in April of 2014
The lunar eclipse trip did also. I believe it was a Friday night when I was picked up by Mr. E.P. Gossweiller (my general science teacher) and Mr. Orville Peterson (head of the school’s science department) at about 9:00 pm. We drove into the mountains for about an hour to a spot where we’d have a good view of the moon as it gets covered by the earth’s shadow. We watched with a small telescope and binoculars while we drank hot chocolate. It was a great and memorable experience—the kind I later wanted to give to students. [Oh, BTW, the dream of becoming a professional astronomer died in advanced maths class.]
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| Solar Eclipse of August 2017 Photographed from Salem, Oregon. |
Defeating the Undefeated
At one of the speech tournaments that the Linfield College Speech Team attended when my partner, Mike Harrell, and I were seniors was the New York City College tournament. Early in the tournament we were matched against a superior team from Harvard who had an unbeaten record on their affirmative case about reducing US foreign policy commitments. We knew their reputation and their record, after all, it’s hard to hide when you haven’t lost an affirmative case all season (they weren’t as good on the negative, though). As we started the debate and listened to the affirmative case Mike panicked. He was supposed to be first negative speaker, but he whispered to me, “I don’t know what to say—I’ve got no arguments against their case.”
Sam Donaldson one of my top Canby HS debaters, 1986. Stacy Shiver, one of my top debaters at Brookings Harbor HS, 1984.
I didn’t know what to say either, but I told him I’d take his speech and he could be second negative speaker. Just before I got up for my ten minute speech I told Mike, “You’re job is to figure out how to beat them!” I got up and babbled on for eight minutes without saying anything significant or coherent. The second affirmative speaker pointed out to the judge how weak my arguments were and the judge agreed—I got the lowest speaker points I’d ever received.
As he got up to give the second negative speech, the one that should have been mine, Mike said he had an idea. In his speech he brought up one small logical flaw in the affirmative case that undermined all their assumptions. It was a small point, but the affirmative case completely fell apart. We won that debate and ended up in the top two in the tournament. The team we beat never used that affirmative case again.
The End of My Car Racing Career
VW Golf GTI 1988
It was probably 1989 or '90, a few of years after we moved to Canby, that the Big Crash happened. We were racing our red VW GTI in the Larison Rock Hillclimb (off Hwy 58 east of Oakridge) and making a good show of it. Each day of the hillclimb each car got two runs on the closed two mile mountain road with lots of turns and several hundred feet of elevation gain. I was entered in the Stock Class (unmodified) for my size vehicle. Anne didn’t drive in this race, she was the head timer for the races which had several check points with observers. On the third run I had set the course record for my class car—it was a good racing year and I had set several class records on other courses.
As I got ready for my fourth run I planned where I could pick up a few seconds on my own record. About half way though my run I knew I had picked up time and pushed harder at one of the fastest turns on the course. I made my error as I exited the left-hand corner—I lifted my foot off the gas as the car started to skid toward the right edge of the road and the forest below. What I needed to do was keep my foot in it (stay on the gas) and power through the skid. Instead, I tried to steer through the skid and pulled the car off the left side of the road into a ditch and dirt bank. It was better than hitting the trees sideways at 60+ miles an hour, but I still ended up on my nose (the car’s front) after plowing up about 40 feet of ditch.
I was shaken but not hurt—the car had racing seatbelts (harness) and I wore a helmet. The car was another matter. The front wheels dangled from the suspension barely attached to the car and there was little left of the front end. The engine wasn’t too damaged, but was pretty useless with no front wheels.
My first thought, after checking that I had all my parts, was to let Anne know I was okay. Her story was that as timer of the race she would get reports of a car’s progress through the course—“Car 20 though turn 4,” and so on. On my run she heard, “Car five though turn 6,” then nothing else. At this point she knew I had f**ked up and something was wrong with the family car. I told the first of the rescue crew, “Tell Anne I’m okay!” And that we’d be walking home.
There are several take aways from this story. It was the last hillclimb I ever entered. It wasn’t a good idea to risk the family car. It cost over $5000 to repair the damage to the GTI. I then took up golf seriously—much safer.
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| Our first VW Rabbit GTI in an autocross race, 1983. |
NEXT: I'm looking forward to getting some good photos on a short trip to central Oregon.
