The Eisenhauer Twin Engine Truck

Eisenhauer Twin Engine Truck

Mac's Motor City Garage has the story:

In the pleasant little town of Van Wert, Ohio near the Ohio-Indiana border, there’s an enterprise called the Eisenhauer Manufacturing Company with a tradition of thinking outside the box. The company got its start during World War II supplying the military with bogie wheels for army tanks, while today it manufactures specialized precision stampings of all kinds for the auto industry. And between 1946 and 1957, the family-owned firm developed a most unusual prototype truck it called the Eisenhauer Freighter, featuring twin engines, eight-wheel drive, and three steering axles.

Eisenhauer Twin Engine Truck Chassis Plan

Eisenhauer is still in business. While they make parts for all kinds of things, including trucks, they don't make trucks anymore.

Via Jack

Shag

Elvira

An old incident popped into my head at lunch today. Is it worth relating? Maybe yeah, maybe nay. We shall see.

Mobile Home Tractor

This was around 1970. I caught a ride with Shag and his old lady back to Newark, possibly from Columbus. Shag was a biker, as in motorcycles. He wasn't a big guy and he wasn't much older than me in years, but he was infinitely older in terms of experience. I have no idea how I was allowed in the same vehicle with him, much less seated next to his woman.

Shag made his living delivering mobile homes, and we were riding in his truck that he use for hauling these mobile homes. Anyway, we're cruising along and we see a car on fire off the other side of the road. Shag stops, grabs his fire extinguisher. runs across the road and attempts to quench the fire. It was basically hopeless, the fire was too far advanced and the fire extinguisher was too small.

We're watching Shag fight the fire and his girl steps on the gas and the engine revs up and starts roaring. This brings Shag running back, where upon the two of them have words. Shag was upset that she could be damaging his truck, the girl (I cannot remember her name) did not want him getting hurt. First time I encountered that kind of behavior.

As I remember her, Shag's girl looked a lot like Elvira (above). Her appearance, whenever I saw her, was always pitch perfect. She worked selling movie tickets at the Granville Opera House. I don't think I ever exchanged more than a couple of words with her. With that makeup and hair she was on another level.

Granville Opera House / Movie Theater

The Opera House was managed by Bob, a pothead in a tweed jacket. He kept a water pipe filled with whiskey in his office. I never understood how this place stayed in business. Maybe the college kids from Denison filled it up on the weekends.

Can-Am

McLaren’s amazing Can-Am cars reunite at Laguna
McLaren Automotive

Back around 1970, me and my car-addled friends went to Mid-Ohio to watch the Can-Am races a couple of times. I was in love with Can-Am cars. Simple cars with big American V-8 engines, not those over engineered and over-priced sewing machines from Europe.

Norfolk Southern Proxy Fight

East Palestine Train Derailment Explained
Practical Engineering

Seems that every year publicly owned companies select people to serve on the board that governs the company. Normally, if the company is making money, these proxy votes, as they are called, are of no interest  to anyone and the election of the board is uncontested.

Every once in a while something comes along to upset the apple cart and then we get a proxy fight. I got a notice of one at Norfolk Southern this morning. I doubt whether my few shares will make any difference, the fight will be between big factions. It might be interesting to see how this one plays out.

Ancora Holdings Group is challenging the board. They wrote a letter to the current chairman that included this line:

We made clear that your current CEO has presided over industry-worst operating results, sustained share price underperformance and an ineffective and tone-deaf response to the preventable derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.

You remember the train wreck in East Palestine, Ohio, right? 

A train derailment occurred on February 3, 2023, when 38 cars of a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying hazardous materials derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, United States. Several railcars burned for more than two days, with emergency crews then conducting a controlled burn of several railcars, which released hydrogen chloride and phosgene into the air. As a result, residents within a 1-mile radius were evacuated, and an emergency response was initiated from agencies in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virginia.

Phosgene is some nasty shit. 

Merry Christmas

Trinity Church and the John Hancock Tower in Boston, Massachusetts

My wife and I went to a Christmas service last night at St. Matthew Lutheran Church in Beaverton, Oregon. Haven't been to church in a while but we went last night.

The sermon was mostly about Phillips Brooks (1835-1893), pastor extraordinaire of Trinity Church in Boston. He is also the author of O Little Town of Bethlehem. He was inspired to write this tune when he visited Bethlehem in 1865, which is when the American Civil War came to an end.  

While the pastor is talking about Phillips Brooks and peace, he throws in that Pax Romana (Peace of Rome), the ruling order in Bethlehem back in the day, wasn't really about peace, it was about order, which is one of fundamental precepts of any kind of civilization. Well, now he's got my attention, which means I'm going to need to write a blog post, and here we are.

Trinity Church, Boston, Massachusetts

From Wikipedia:

[Trinity Church] is the birthplace and archetype of the Richardsonian Romanesque style, characterized by a clay roof, polychromy, rough stone, heavy arches, and a massive tower. This style was soon adopted for a number of public buildings across the United States.

Man, that is one ugly building. Reminds me of the Licking County Jail in Newark, Ohio.

Licking County Jail, Newark, Ohio

Modern Life

Rendering of a three-data center campus Facebook is currently building in New Albany, Ohio

Whenever I bother to think about my computerized life I am astounded by the plethora of amazing computer applications that we have at our fingertips. For starters, lets look at Google Maps. There are nearly 300 million vehicles in the USA. If only one percent of the drivers are using Google Maps at any one time, that's still three million smart phones connected by the cellular telephone network to a server farm that is collecting location data and sending back map information.

Then there's spoken voice programs that can turn your spoken words into text in your language, or another language. Meanwhile another zillion or so other smartphone users are receiving music over the air, another zillion are having telephone conversations, another zillion are sending text messages, and another zillion are playing games.

The people who organized the development and deployment of these computer applications and the electronic infrastructure needed to support them are making a ton of money. This has distorted our society a bit, but that is always happening. Somebody comes up with a new idea and those who latch onto it prosper (or fall) and everyone else complains about the disruption.

Some people like to complain about the way things are, the way things are being run, the way the people in charge are handling things, but that's just the nature of people. People can always find something to complain about, some people enjoy complaining so much that they make complaining into a career.

Generally speaking, people will latch onto whatever will help them prosper. How well one is integrated into society will determine how successful you will be. If you have a family that supports you, encourages education and teaches you to be responsible, you can be more successful. People without that support can still succeed if they are smart and driven. That's still going to leave some people in a hole, which is how our modern welfare state got started. It's also how criminal gangs get started.

P. S. New Albany (site of Facebook data center shown at top) has appeared here before.

New Albany Ohio

Site of Intel's new fab in New Albany, Ohio

Intel is building a new microchip fabrication factory in New Albany, Ohio. They announced their plan a year ago. Amazon has purchased 400 acres there as well. New Albany has come a long way from when I used to pass through there.

Google Maps

Shag

Mobile Home Tractor

We were talking about people we used to know and the subject of bikers came up, as in motorcycle gang type bikers, and this dislodged an old memory.

One evening I caught a ride home from Columbus with a biker named Shag and his girlfriend is his shorty semi-tractor. Evidently, he had a day job delivering mobile homes. We're headed for Newark which is about 40 miles east of Columbus and we see a vehicle on fire on the other side of road. Shag pulls over, grabs his fire extinguisher, gets our of the truck, crosses the road and proceeds to battle the fire. He's been over there for, I dunno, maybe 30 seconds, maybe a minute, not long in any case, and the girlfriend steps on the gas and the engine starts racing and roaring. I'm just a kid, maybe 18 years old, I've never seen a car fire before and I have no idea what she is doing. Shag runs back over to his truck and he and his girlfriend have a bit of a shouting match. He was worried about his truck being damaged, but she was worried about him being injured. Pretty tough girl to stand up to Shag, but then she would have to be to even be hanging around with him.

As I recall, the fire extinguisher was ineffective, it was too small and the fire was too advanced. We went on our way.

I remember the girlfriend though her name escapes me. She had long black hair and a pretty face that was always perfectly made up. She worked in the box office at the movie theater in Granville.

Lagonda

1937 Lagonda LG45
60 piece jigsaw puzzle

Lagonda, where have I heard that name before? Wikipedia knows:

Lagonda is a British luxury car brand established in 1906, which has been owned by Aston Martin since 1947. . . . The Lagonda company was founded in 1906 in the UK in Staines, Middlesex, by American-born Wilbur Gunn (1859–1920), a former opera singer. He became a British national in 1891 and worked as a speedboat and motorcycle engineer in Staines. He named the company after the Shawnee settlement "Lagonda" in modern-day Springfield, Ohio, the town of his birth. This is a glacially eroded limestone gorge of much beauty.

Wait, what? The Lagonda car company was founded by an opera singer? From Springfield, Ohio? Are you kidding me? The world is full of strange stuff, so I suppose that could be the way it happened.

Mad River Gorge & Nature Preserve

There is a gorge in Springfield, though it's not a giant geological feature that can be seen from space, it's deep enough to amuse the local rock climbers.

Lagonda Club Building, Springfield Ohio

Some good ol' boys founded the Lagonda Club and built themselves a clubhouse way back in 1895. It's still there.

Back in the 1930's the Lagonda car company was a force to be reckoned with. They won the 24 hours of LeMans in 1935.

Hulett Unloaders

Cleveland's Forgotten Hulett Unloaders
Railroad Street

These machines look like something out of science fiction story, but they were real and existed all around the Great Lakes for the entire 20th Century. Prime examples of Victorian Engineering. Hard to believe it took them 100 years to start using conveyor belts. I suppose once you've invested a zillion dollars in building these monsters you are going to get your money's worth out of them.

Never thought about it before, but the shipping season only lasts nine months because the Great Lakes freeze over. If you are running a steel mill you probably don't want to shut down for three months every year, which means you need to stockpile a couple of million tons of ore to get you through the winter. You'd need acres of space to store it.

And now that I'm thinking about it, Pittsburgh was another big steel town. What do you need to make steel? Coal and iron ore, so you could use a train to haul iron ore from Cleveland to Pittsburgh and then use the same train to haul coal back from Pittsburgh to Cleveland. Paying freight both ways, a railroad man's dream.

I took the dates (there are a bunch of them) and put them in a spreadsheet:

New Albany in the News

Intel's Rohler Acres Fab
I don't know how many billions of dollars they have sunk into this plant,
but defintely more than one.

 'New Albany' sounds like the name of a colony on another planet in a science fiction novel, or maybe that's just because I haven't had my first cup of coffee this morning. However, it is a small town just northeast of Columbus, Ohio. What about old Albany? I mean, if there is a new one, there should be an old one, right? That would be Scotland.

Back when I was in high school we lived on the orchard northeast of Columbus and driving to the big city took you through New Albany. Back then it was just a crossroads with maybe a gas station.

This morning I got an email from California Bob:

From Reuters News:

Intel to invest up to $100 bln in Ohio chip plants

Intel Corp said on Friday it would invest up to $100 billion to build potentially the world's largest chip-making complex in Ohio, as it looks to boost capacity amid a global shortage of semiconductors used in everything from smartphones to cars.

I thought it was weird when Abercombie & Fitch built their headquarters there, but maybe they were onto something. Beaverton, Oregon is home to Tektronix, makers of electronic test equipment, so Intel was could be pretty sure there was a technologically competent workforce here. Columbus is the state capital. North American Aviation used to have a plant there. Ohio State University and Batelle are there, so sort of the same thing.

Ohio is part of the Rust Belt that has been in decline since 1980. I suspect the unions are not as strong as they used to be, which could make it more attractive to giant corporations.

Newark, Ohio

Swisher Sweets

Back when I was a kid, back when smoking was still a common practice, Swisher Sweets were a popular brand of small cigars. When I was in high school the nearest sizable town was Newark, Ohio, which, it turns out, was the birthplace of these same Swisher Sweets. The company started there back in 1861. By 1895 they are making 300,000 cigars a day.

Jacksonville, Florida

In 1924 they packed up and moved to Jacksonville, Florida. All this comes from the company's web site.

Newark has shown up a couple other times here.

Via California Bob.

World Cup in Columbus

Not quite sure what this is. The US team and the Guatemala team? No, that can't be.

Wait, what? The World Cup is coming to Columbus, Ohio. Well, not really. It's a qualifying match, but we (USA) have a team and they are playing against Guatemala in Columbus tonight. One of the players on the US team (Christian Pulisic) played in a youth league that Detroit Steve runs, so Steve is understandably excited about this.
    I lived in Columbus for about four years when I was a kid, so I am kind of attached to the place. You don't hear much about it, so I am always surprised when something pops up.

New Albany, Part 2

Small Building in New Albany

Looking at an aerial view of New Albany I thought I would try and find the store that my dad built back in the 60's. I identified a suspect and sent out an email. Michigan Mike replied that you can use Google Street View to look at the front of the building (doh!), and sure enough that's the place.

Old windmill tower barely visible through the trees.

He also pointed out that there is an old windmill that is barely visible through the trees. He remembers there was one nearby and so for him, this confirms the location. I pulled up Street View and after some searching I found it. It's right in the center of the above picture. Notice the straight, vertical line, and the bird head shaped blob at the top. I never would have noticed it if he hadn't told me and given me some clues where to look. I mean, I do not have any memory of ever seeing this thing, so I am very surprised that Mike does.

New Albany, Ohio

Building on the Abercrombie & Fitch world headquarters campus, New Albany, Ohio

When I was in high school my dad decided that he wanted to be a farmer so he bought an apple orchard. He wanted to sell the apples he grew, so bought a lot near New Albany and put up a small store. Back in the late 60's New Albany was nothing. A crossroads with perhaps a gas station. Abercrombie & Fitch crossed my radar a few years ago and I discovered that they had built a new world headquarters campus and distribution center in, of all places, New Albany, Ohio. I was shocked. I had a real hard time with the idea that anyone would voluntarily build anything in such an out of the way place, a place with bitter cold winters and stinking hot and humid summers. I guess economics, central heating and central air conditioning make anything possible.

Abercrombie & Fitch world headquarters & distribution center, New Albany, Ohio
This view is about 0.9 miles across and 1.1 miles top to bottom.

The headquarters buildings are the irregular jumble of light gray building in the center. The distribution warehouses are at the bottom center and right. The sprawl of thick gray lines at the top center are parking lots. They hold about a zillion cars.

Inspired by a post from Comrade Misfit.

Update the next day. Iaman sent me a link to a related story in The New Yorker from 2013.

US Naval Academy Performance from Kings Firecrackers

Gayle sent me this video. The girls are impressive. I'm not sure some of their tricks are topologically possible. Gayle and Kings Firecrackers are from Ohio.

Update August 2015 replaced missing video.

How Lawson's Came to Japan

California Bob writes:

I've been wondering about this since I saw those familiar "blue milk jug" signs in Tokyo. Remember the TV jingle? "Get that juice up to Lawson's... in forrr-tyyy hours"

Well, no, not really, but I missed a lot of the 70's, and I didn't know about the "blue milk jug" signs in Tokyo either. For all you non-Ohioan's, Lawson's was a convenience store chain in Ohio many moons ago.

The Wikipedia article details all the players in the game of corporate buyouts that led to Lawson's being in Japan. Along the way, one of the players was Alimentation Couche-Tard which my feeble French thinks has something to do with digestion and sleeping late, but which supposedly translates as "Night Owl".

And for those of you who are from Ohio, here's a Blast From The Past, at least those of you who still have some memory cells.


Lawsons Big-O Orange Juice Commercial (1970's)

Update June 2016 replace missing pictures.

Restaurants & Hotels

On my last night in Columbus an old friend took me out for dinner at La Hacienda Real, a Mexican restaurant. The restaurant was nice, the prices were reasonable (less than $30 for two, including drinks), and it was delicious.

It's on Sinclair near Morse Road, in between a "Motel 6" and an "America's Best Value Inn", where I spent my last night. I don't know about it being a "Best Value", though it was cheaper than "The Place" in Newark ($53 versus $80). The thing I really noticed was the carpets. The carpet at "The Place" actually felt clean enough to walk on it barefoot. The carpet at the "Best Value" place turned the soles of my feet black. Didn't feel none too clean either.

Licking County Courthouse

Unlike the old jail, the courthouse is still in use. The older buildings on the square around the courthouse are barely hanging on, but the courthouse looks like it is going to be there forever.

Licking County Courthouse

How did they ever build such an elaborate building?

Update December 2025 replaced missing Picasa image.

A Tisket, A Tasket ...

Longaberger Picnic Basket Building

Longaberger company.

Update December 2025 replace missing Picasa image.