You're In The Army Now

How Did He Look & You're In The Army Now with Abe Lyman and His Californians
Comrade Misfit posts a video that starts with a snippet of this tune and boom, old memories pop up. My dad used to sing this song, or snatches of it. Finding a straight up version from the old days took some looking. A number of people have reimagined the tune with all kinds of different music, none of which I have ever heard.

You're In The Army Now
Performed by Abe Lyman and his Californians; V ocals by The Chorus
Recorded November 27, 1940

We're in the Army now.
We’re not behind a plow.
We’ll never get rich diggin’ a ditch.
We're in the Army now.

We're in the Army now.
We're in the Army now.
We'll never get rich on the salary which
We get in the army now.

We're eating Army grub.
And let me tell you bub,
We know what it means
They're feeding us beans
We're in the Army now.

We're marching everywhere.
It's getting in our hair.
We follow the rules
and follow the mules
We're in the Army now.

We're in the Army now.
We're making dough, and how!
On twenty-one bucks
Who says we're bucks?
We're in the Army now.

We left our wives behind
I wonder if they mind?
Who gives a hang?
We're with the gang,
We're in the Army now.

No more we'll have to hear,
"How late will you be, dear?"
We go where we please.
And do what we please.
We're in the Army now.

We're happy as can be.
Have lots of company.
The cooties at night
Drop in for a bite.
We're in the Army now.

Clarinet

Swing Republic - Together (feat. Artie Shaw)
When I was in grade school I took up the clarinet. I was never any good at it. I suspect that was because whatever sounds I made never sounded like music to me. They were just a series of notes. The notes were written on the page, I moved my fingers and blew and sound came out. But it never sounded like a tune to me. I don't know what it sounded like to anybody else. Nobody complained, but nobody complimented me either. 

I also remember making an elaborate crayon drawing of a band playing on stage and the guy in front playing the clarinet. 

I do not remember what inspired me to choose the clarinet or make that drawing, and since then I have not heard anybody playing a clarinet that made any impression. That is, until I heard this song by Electro Swing Republic featuring Artie Shaw. Now that clarinet caught my ear but good. Artie Shaw is from the big band / swing music era, but that's all I know. I pulled up a YouTube video of Artie playing Alone Together, but it doesn't seem to be the same tune. I don't know where Electro Swing found this tune, but I think I may have found my clarinet inspiration.

Road Trip Notes

Our trip took us from Portland, Oregon to Sioux City, Iowa and back. We covered 3900 miles in ten days. We took the northern route (I-90) through Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota on the way there and the southern route (I-80) through Nebraska, Wyoming and Utah on the way back. We dropped the kids off at the airport in Omaha, Nebraska, on our way out of town which put us a hundred miles farther south, which was enough to decide us to take the southern route back to Oregon.

Pasco, Kennewick, and the Hanford Nuclear Disaster

Pasco and Kennewick are a pair of booming small towns in south central Washington state. All I can think of to explain the apparent prosperity of this area is the huge amount of money the Federal Government is pouring into the cleanup of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.
    The Spokane - Coeur d'Alene corridor is jammed. Not sure what the deal is here. It's a little farther from Hanford, but Spokane is the big city in this neck of woods, so Hanford could still be having an impact. Coeur d'Alene is a popular resort area and is getting more popular every day.
    Driving across Montana and South Dakota were relatively peaceful affairs. Drivers mind their manners, no pushing of shoving. Start getting closer to populated areas and the number of fude ruckers starts going up.


Big rock crushes car This is how tailgaters should be dealt with.
We have made 3 road trips back to Iowa in the last few years, and some of the places are starting to get familiar. The barrel racer waiting tables at the Rapid City Best Western motel was still there, which was a pleasant surprise.

Driving back Nebraska was expectedly empty, but had a high percentage of yahoo drivers. Wyoming was unexpectedly fine. Last time I went through here it was wall to wall trucks and the few cars I saw were all going a hundred, which was a little scary. So I-80 was a pleasant though long cruise until we got to Ogden, just north of Salt Lake. Then it was push and shove all the way to Boise. I think the Mormon population explosion is bursting the confines of their Salt Lake City domicile and they are heading out. West and south is all desert. East are the Rocky Mountains, so north is the only road open to them, and they are using it.

We encountered the worst traffic of the trip during the last little bit of driving home across Portland to Hillsboro. Not surprising I guess since Portland is the biggest city we drove through.

P.S. I think someone is plotting to deprive Americans of beef. All the way across Wyoming we see all this grass and hardly any cattle. Hamburger is still relatively cheap, but the price of steaks are getting astronomical. I think someone is conspiring to keep people from raising cattle. Probably some Democrats in the Department of Agriculture.

Cursive

Purple Noon - Identity Theft
When I was at Lafayette Elementary School in West Seattle, they taught penmanship, otherwise know as cursive writing, in the fourth grade. Our teacher, Dorothy, was constantly admonishing us to hold our hand and forearm up and not rest them on the table. This was virtually impossible for me. I did manage to learn to write the letters in cursive and I can write legibly in cursive, mostly, now, but it's not what you would call fluid or elegant. Passable, I suppose.

I never figured out what Dorothy was on about until I saw the movie Plein Soleil (above, aka The Talented Mr. Ripley) as part of a French film class in college. In the movie Tom Ripley practices forging his target's signature by writing it in really big letters on the wall. He is using his whole arm to do this. His hand and wrist are a rigid extension of his forearm. This is what my teacher was trying to tell us. I have tried practicing writing using this technique but it's a hard habit to develop. If I had been trying to write great big letters on the blackboard back in elementary school, I might have had more success, but trying to develop fine motor control of my whole arm was, at that point, beyond me.

There might be a video out there that demonstrates this technique, but I have been unable to find one.

Inspired by Bayou Renaissance Man

Update January 2018 replaced missing video.

IBM Mainframes

No it's not an Intel RAMdisk (on the left), though we'll just have to take their word for it that there is anything inside the box at all. Shoot, the box probably has gone to the scrapyard by now.

Cleaning out my files this morning I came across a notebook about the IBM 370 that I put together back in 1986 (!?!). I was working with a group in Phoenix that made their bones building RAM disks for mainframes using Intel RAM chips that only half worked. Intel couldn't, or didn't want to, sell these chips on the open market, but they had a bunch of them and they were piling up fast.
    Then someone realized that:

• mainframe computers didn't really have a size or weight restriction, 
• accessing RAM was much faster than transferring data to a disk, and
• while parts of Intel's broken RAM chips did not work, other parts did.

So they designed a circuit to use the working halves of the broken chips, designed and built big circuit boards, populated them with these broken chips and loaded the boards into big mainframe size cabinets.

    This business went great guns for a few years but by 1986 it was all but dead. This group of people had become experts in communicating with IBM mainframes, so they were looking around for a way to make use of that knowledge. The finally hit on making an universal adapter that would allow you to connect your Multibus I circuit boards to an IBM mainframe.

    They planned on selling a bunch of these things, so I got assigned to help out. I was there for a year. They sold a few, but the market never materialized. Since I didn't have much to do, I occupied myself reading about the IBM 370. Since IBM documentation was written by a bureaucracy, for a bureaucracy, it was not what you call concise. I pulled out what I thought was useful and drew up some tables to illustrate some of their more arcane features. When I left the group I put the notebook on the shelf.

IBM is still building and selling mainframe computers. They are no longer as large as a locomotive, now they are more the size of a couple of vending machines or commercial refrigerators. If you are nerd curious like me you can download all 1700 odd pages of the z/Architecture Principles of Operations, which seems to include the entire instruction set.

Also, while cleaning out my files, I came across a notebook of tedious details about Intel Multibus I computer systems. This notebook is now totally useless. I threw it out. Since IBM's latest processors are simply an outgrowth of the old System 360, my IBM notebook might still have some value. Now all I have to do is get it up on the net.

Jerrie Mock

Comrade Misfit put up a post about Jerrie Mock this morning. It didn't mean much until I followed the links and found she flew from Columbus, Ohio. That rings a bell! I was in Columbus then, and I remember there was a big fuss about Mock somebody. This happened right around the time Kennedy got shot, and that kind of overshadowed everything from that time period. Poking around, I came across this newspaper clipping:

Front page of The Columbus Dispatch, January 19, 1964, Via dispatch.com

So it wasn't just Columbus, it was Bexley, the same small suburb of Columbus where I went to junior high school.

Statue of Jerrie Mock at The Works

     More digging uncovered a statue erected at The Works in Newark, Ohio. Newark is about 40 miles East of Columbus. After we moved to the farm near Highwater, Newark became the local 'big city', i.e. where you went if you needed something more than a loaf of bread. I'm not sure why Newark got the statue.

Jerrie's flight path. Joan's flight path.

At the same time that Jerrie was making her flight, Joan Merriam Smith from California was making her own attempt.

Three Eight Charlie - Amazon has one copy of her book available for $500. Phoenix Graphics is selling paperback versions for $18. Kindle doesn't count.

P.S. I was delivering The Dispatch then. Did you see what it said on the front page? 208 pages! I don't think you could get 208 pages if you piled up an entire months worth of The Oregonian.

Ammonia

From a Houston Post dateline: "As the sign says, the weather is fair, it's 83 degrees and the time is 11:17 a.m. The date is also May 11, and that white cloud in the distance is the toxic blanket of anhydrous ammonia fumes which resulted from a tank truck crash at Southwest Freeway and the West Loop which killed five persons. The Texas Air Control Board took the picture from its offices at 5555 West Loop South."

A post by E.B. Misfit prompted me to recall the great Ammonia Truck Explosion of 1976 in Houston, Texas. I used to pass that Pearl Beer sign on the way to work every morning.


View April 2013 in a larger map
The blue line is the route the ammonia truck took, heading North and taking the exit from 610 onto the Southwest Freeway heading West, except it didn't make it. I was working in the same building as Gilbert Plumbing (the green square) and I remember hearing the great big boom. Fortunately the wind was blowing away from me. It was a big deal when it happened. People died, people injured, freeway damaged. I remember hearing that the ammonia peeled the paint on a bunch of houses to the North East of the accident. And then there was the giant storage tank we came across in Iowa some years ago. As I recall we were on our way from Rockwell City to Sioux City, but for some reason we weren't taking the normal route. At one of the crossroads there was a giant circular storage tank. In my mind's eye it was 500 feet in diameter and a hundred feet tall, and it was full of something dangerously unpleasant, like ammonia or fertilizer or natural gas. I can't recall exactly, it was a long time ago. But it was so weird seeing this mammoth tank out in the middle of nowhere. Of course it makes sense to put it out there, I mean these things are dangerous, and you would not want to be around if it blew up. I went looking for it using Google and Google Maps, but no luck so far. Of course, I could be way off. Or it might have blown up, though I think I would have heard about it.
Update March 2016. Replaced 'red line' with 'blue line' on account of Google Maps changing the color of the line on the map without consulting me. Hmmph.

Sunshine

Sunshine - Jonathan Edwards original song and lyrics
I hadn't heard this song in a long time. Michigan Mike brought it to my attention. He thinks Mr. Edwards is "preachy and no fun". Perhaps. I remember getting called up by the draft board for my physical (1970). I had just finished four years of being told what to do (high school) and I was not the least bit interested in signing up for anymore of that, so this song kind of resonated with me.

Dad burn commies. If it hadn't been for Stalin and Mao, our fearless leaders wouldn't have been panicked into fighting all these little stinking wars all over the world for the last 60 odd years. Or maybe I should blame Senator Joe, Robert MacNamara and Henry Kissinger, fear mongers all. Or maybe that's what you get with a democracy made out of ordinary people.

Update March 2019 replaced missing video.

1952 Chevrolet Pickup Truck

1952 Chevrolet Pickup Truck

Mine looked something like this (if you squinted your eyes). Mine had numerous flaws, but this gives you an idea.

I found this disaster when I was living in Houston many years ago, probably around 1975. I needed a cheap car and I found this thing advertised for $400. It was night when I went to look at it. The six cylinder motor was knocking. It had new red paint and good, late model bucket seats. I talked it over with my girlfriend at the time, but she didn't have a clue. I may have known something about mechanics, but I sure didn't know what the heck I was doing. I bought it. It must have been in a flood. The entire floor of the cab was rusted out, and the wood in the bed was half gone. The engine was a GMC 270 straight six that someone had transplanted into this vehicle. I pulled the engine and rebuilt it in the single car garage attached to our rental house. I think it must have cost me close to $600 in parts and machine shop work.

One of the first things to do when reassembling the engine was to put new freeze plugs in. These are little sheet metal cups that are a press fit in holes in the side of the block. The idea is that if someone doesn't put anti-freeze in the coolant, and the engine coolant ever freezes, the expansion of the ice will force these plugs out and save the block from cracking. The auto parts store didn't have the right size freeze plugs. They were some weird size like 1 21/32", only used on this particular engine. I didn't have time for this. I got the next size up, put a punch in the center, and beat on them until they were cone shaped and the diameter had shrunk enough for them to fit. What a pain.

I was trying to be methodical when I put it together. I even went to the trouble to plasti-gauge the main bearings on the crankshaft. This is a somewhat involved procedure:

• guess-timate the amount of clearance there should be,
• obtain the correct size of plasti-gauge,
• cut a length of plasti-gauge slightly shorter than the length of the bearing journal (not the diameter),
• assemble the bearing and cap,
• torque down the bolts to their specified values,
• take the bearing back apart, and
• compare the width of the now smushed plasti-guage to the chart on the package.

They were all a little on the close side. Now what do I do? I hadn't thought this far ahead. Well, phooey, I'll just bolt it together anyway.

Got the piston, rings, connecting rods and bearings all assembled. Now for the head. Everything goes well until I try to torque down the last head bolt. It's stripped. Great. That's just great. Pull all ninety zillion head bolts back out. Lift the hundred ton cast iron cylinder head off. Go to the auto parts store and spend another $20 for helicoil kit. Drill out the hole. Retap it with the special heli-coil tap. Screw the magic helicoil into the newly rethreaded hole. Put it all back together again. I suspect I used my new head gasket a second time, even though proper protocol says otherwise.

Helicoil

Cutaway of Helicoil installed in an aluminum casting

Helicoil Kit

Get down to the very end, and I have two bolts left over that screw into two holes at the bottom of the timing chain cover. Problem is, they don't hold anything together. The threads are in the cover itself. The holes behind the cover have no threads. I already had the oil pan on or I might have figured out what the problem was. As it was I left it, and it leaked, which was no big deal. All of my vehicles had always leaked. It was just a fact of life. It wasn't until a couple of years later that I figured out that the bolts were supposed to be inserted in their holes from inside the engine. The clear holes were in the front main bearing cap. The bolts went through these holes and screwed into the special tapped holes in the timing chain cover and pulled the bottom of the timing chain cover up against the front main bearing. Once I did that, which required removing the oil pan, the leak stopped. Huh, imagine that.

After I got done putting this monster back together, I painted the whole thing Caterpillar yellow. It was sort of impressive, if you are impressed by that sort of thing. I also hooked it up and ran it while it was sitting there in the garage. Just to make sure that it was going to work, you know. Here's a picture of a real Caterpillar engine, so you can get some idea of what it looked like. Getting the right shade of yellow on a computer monitor is a bit of a trick. I think this one is pretty close, at least on my screen. 

Caterpillar Engine

This page has some good illustrations of old Chevrolet 6 cylinder engines, both external, exploded views. They are very similar to my GMC engine.

Eventually got it back in the truck and got it running, which was great, for about three minutes. I figure that's how long it lasted before something else failed. I ended up replacing or repairing the:

• wiring
• transmission
• rear wheel bearings
• front wheel bearings
• steering joints
• tires
• front springs
• support frame for seats

I think I must have had to do something about the brakes because at one point I was having to fill the master cylinder with brake fluid every day. I left work one day in Austin and didn't have to use my brakes until I came to a stop sign at a major street and then I suddenly discovered I didn't have any brakes. That was exciting. I managed to slow down enough to make a right hand turn onto the street. Fortunately there were no cars coming. Eventually I was able to pull off the road and come to a stop. I must have fixed it because I kept driving it. I am pretty sure it wasn't the master cylinder. The master cylinder is mounted on the frame underneath the drivers feet. Crawling underneath wasn't a problem, it's a pickup truck after all, put the whole thing was completely corroded. Getting it apart would have been short work for a cutting torch, but I didn't have one of those. But evidently the master cylinder, in spite of being really ugly, wasn't the problem, because I didn't have to touch it.

The transmission was another learning experience. The first problem was the column shifter, never great to start with, it was completely hosed by the time it came to me. Fine, replace it with a floor shifter. The floor of the cab has plenty of holes, one more isn't going to make any difference. That worked for a bit, but then it started popping out of third gear. So I dropped the transmission and took it down to the junkyard to get a different one. Got one and put it in, and, great. This one pops out of first gear. Well, that sucks, but we can live with it for a bit. At least this stays in gear on the road.

I took both of them apart and reassembled them a couple of times, looking for something wrong, but never could find anything. I got to be pretty good at it. Manual transmissions are relatively easy, except for this one bearing in very center of things. It is an uncaged roller bearing, meaning the rollers are just in there loose. They are just enough to completely fill the space so they hold each other in alignment, so to speak. When you pull it apart these rollers fall out all over the bottom of the transmission. Putting it back together is a bit of a trick. The loose roller bearings that ride in a cup in the aft end of the input shaft and on the forward end of the output shaft. The trick is to pack rollers into the cup in the input shaft using really thick grease. The grease holds them in place while you slide the input shaft into position.

 
The problem with these transmissions was that the corners of the engaging teeth were just too worn. If I had both of them I could have probably made one good one, but I had to leave mine with them or pay the core charge. I never found out just what that was.

A year of two later I glommed onto a four speed from a friend who had an old Chevy that died. I took it to a shop and asked them to swap it out. I fully expected them to have to cut the driveshaft and weld it and balance it and all sorts of mystical stuff, but they just bolted it in. The U joint didn't even fit the yoke on the axle, they just tightened up the caps until it was secure. I was surprised. It worked fine.

This truck had a rear bumper made out of an old roadgrader blade edge. I needed a trailer hitch at some point, so I got an 18" long piece of 6" angle and welded it to the vertical face of the bumper. Some old geezer told me it wasn't going to work, the grader blade was hardened steel and would snap when I put a load on it. Yeah, sure, old man. Turns out he was right. Fortunately it didn't turn into a disaster, just another minor annoyance in everyday life.

Update: a couple of items I forgot that show just how old this truck was.

Timken Tapered Roller Bearing

Ball bearings in the front wheels. I wasn't long after this that everyone had changed over to Timken tapered roller bearings. The rear axle used rollers, but the front still had ball bearings.

Single Leading Shoe Drum Brake

 
Single leading shoe brakes. It would be decades before disc brakes became standard, but I thought all drum brakes had always been double leading shoe. With drum brakes, if the actuator pushes the shoe in the direction of rotation, then there is a kind of wedging action that makes the brake more effective. Going in the opposite direction you do not have this advantage. The brake had fixed pivots for the shoes at the bottom, so only one brake shoe got this mechanical advantage. Not long after this, the fixed pivots were replaced with a floating link, so both shoes were pushed in the direction of rotation.

Worm and Sector Steering Box

I suspect the steering gear was a simple worm and sector (above), not the fancy recirculating ball (below) that was the standard for a long time before rack and pinion took over.

Worm and Nut Steering Box

Update July 2015: Replaced original with copy from Google Drive that still had pictures.
Update November 2016 replaced missing pictures.
Update January 2022 replaced missing pictures.

Ambulance Driver

Ambulance Driver posts some entertaining stories on his blog, so when I found he had published a book I bought a copy. It contains a number of short stories about his experiences as an EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) in Louisiana. Some are tragic, some are humorous, some are a little of both. Turns out he has another book out now.

Ambulance Driver is a pretty smart guy, and it seems that more than once someone has asked him why he didn't go to medical school and become a doctor. It seems that life got in the way. It kind of reminds me of my situation. I am usually the smartest guy in the room, which enables me to do most any kind of work, but after a few months at any job I am usually frustrated by the incompetence of the organization I am working for. I probably should have gone on and gotten a higher degree. Then I would be officially smart, and I might have found some more challenging work or a more productive career. Coulda, shoulda, woulda.

Well no, not woulda. By the time I got through with high school I was thoroughly sick of school. I listened to the blather about how these guys with 8th grade educations had made fortunes and I figured I could do it to. That's what I wanted at the time: money. Eventually I did go back to school and got a Bachelor's degree and got a job making decent money. But I never found the massive financial success that some people in hi-tech did. The work was interesting and there was plenty of it, and that was what drove me: solving problems. I never connected the dots between office politics and financial rewards so I was pretty much out of the loop when the big bucks were passed out.

So now, here I am at an age when most people are thinking about retiring and I am thinking about going back to school.

Update March 2016 replaced missing picture.