Recently in Family Category
The St. James was our last civilized night's sleep before our near-100-mile Philmont trek, and our first real meal off the trail this past July. Glad to see the tradition going on. "Situated in Cimarron, New Mexico, at the entrance to the Enchanted Circle, the St. James Hotel is more than just a lodging destination; it offers an invitation to immerse oneself in the history, flavors, and rugged charm of the Old West. Originally under the stewardship of Bob Funk Sr. and the Funk family since 2009, the reopening under Chad and Alyse Mantz will ensure the family's love for Western heritage continues into the future. With their leadership, this historic hotel and its acclaimed bar and restaurant are set to reclaim their status as New Mexico's premier destination for adventure, hospitality, and unforgettable dining experiences."
The U.S. Dialect Quiz: How Y'all, Youse and You Guys Talk - The New York Times
My dialect map pinpointed Tulsa, Oklahoma City, and Wichita as the cities to which my dialect is closest (because of my use of the terms "crawdad," "service road," and "pop," respectively. I'm furthest from Worcester, Springfield, Mass., and Providence because I pronounce "aunt" as "ant."
Fascinating to read the names of long-lost school districts and schools. This was just after the peak of Tulsa Public Schools enrollment, before round after round of closures, with 10 high schools (including Mason), all accredited by the North Central Association, 21 junior high schools (including Carver Middle School, the only school in the district to carry the middle school designation), and 76 elementary schools. Dependent districts Mingo (4 teachers) and Leonard (12 teachers) still existed, as did Red Bird (3 teachers) in Wagoner County. I see Verl A. Teeter listed among the publishers and publishers' representatives; I remember him as a consultant at Catoosa Public Schools who tested me when I was in kindergarten.
Tulsa Restaurant Equipment & Supply
The other day we needed some 8 oz. styrofoam bowls and lids to hold soup and mac-n-cheese for a fundraising lunch at school. It was too late to order from Amazon, and the item was too specialized to be available at the grocery store or a warehouse club. We only needed about 60-75, not a thousand.
Tulsa Restaurant Equipment & Supply, on the south side of 31st Street west of Mingo, is open to the general public as well as the pros and sells food service in quantities large and small. Individual sleeves of 50 styrofoam bowls and 100 matching lids were marked for sale, or you could buy the entire box of 1000. A "street view" type virtual experience gives you a preview of what they have in stock. There are pots and pans, pizza paddles, plastic cups, flatware, fry baskets, wire storage racks in kits to assemble yourselves, all types of takeout containers. Glad to know they're there. Open 8 am - 6 pm Mon - Fri; 9 am - 4 pm Sat, closed Sun.
10 Secrets of the Hotel Pennsylvania, Under Demolition - Untapped New York
Demolished earlier this year, it was built in 1919 as a companion to the original Penn Station across the street, and both were designed by McKim, Mead, & White. It was the largest hotel in the world when it opened. Its phone number inspired a hit Glenn Miller song, "Pennsylvania 6-5000." In 1981, as the New York Statler, it was the headquarters hotel for the National Invitational Tournament, held across the street at Madison Square Garden. The University of Tulsa Golden Hurricane, with Nolan Richardson in his first year as head coach and great players like Paul Pressey, Greg Stewart, and Rondie "Poindexter" Turner, prevailed over West Virginia and Syracuse to take the NIT title. My best friend was given a trip to the NIT with the team as an early high school graduation gift, and he invited me along. Another high school friend joined us, and we stayed in a very small room at the very aged Statler, where the soda machines sold only White Rock beverages and the TV was black and white (no cable). Tulsa radio and TV sportscasters set up in the hotel's lobby to interview players, coaches, and the fans who made the trip. The team's charter flight to LaGuardia was my first ever plane flight, and I had my first (and for many years, only) alcoholic beverage, a celebratory cup of champagne, on the flight home after the final victory.
MORE: New York Times feature story on the Hotel Pennsylvania and the preservationists who tried to save it.
Long gone, DEC is still powering the world of computing | Ars Technica
"In 1977, DEC introduced the VAX, a new line of minicomputers that featured a 32-bit instruction set architecture and virtual memory. Its operating system, VMS, was a multi-user, multitasking OS that provided features we now take for granted, including virtual memory, file sharing, and networking. It amassed a wide variety of third-party software packages that made it the most popular system in its class."
In 1982, 6.001, MIT's first-semester computer science course, used a DECsystem 20 running TOPS-20, with Emacs for the editor. In '89 I had to adapt code from a PDP-11/55 to a PDP-11/70 on a British Airways 737 ground maintenance simulator and hope nothing clobbered the brute-force entry I stuffed in the memory map; I carried the software with me from Oklahoma to England on a 20 MB disk pack the size of a large pizza. In the early '90s, we had a machine running VAXeln (a preemptive RTOS) as host computer for a human centrifuge. The same model computer and OS was used for years to run Oklahoma's Pikepass toll tag system, something I spotted when visiting the Pikepass office at the Tulsa end of the Turner Turnpike. 1993 was probably the last time I touched anything DEC except perhaps for the occasional VT100. When I graduated, Digital Equipment Corporation was a major employer along Boston's Route 128 beltway, but they were overtaken by the PC revolution.
BASIC Computer Games - Wikipedia
I have memories of typing computer programs printed in a magazine (Byte, Creative Computing) into our TRS-80 Model I, with the cassette drive for storage. The favorite was the Star Trek text-based game, where you chase Klingons across an 8x8 map of quadrants, and try to destroy them with phasers and photon torpedos, one command at a time. We had it on the Wang 2200 at school as well. Here's the 1978 edition of BASIC Computer Games. Hunt the Wumpus was another favorite; I modified the playing field from a dodecahedron (12 nodes, 3 adjacent to each) to an icosahedron (20 nodes, 5 adjacent ).
MORE: History and source of the 1971 version of Star Trek, with screenshots.
Songs Of The Letter People (1972) - YouTube
The original Letter People songs, from back in those simple times when boys were consonants and girls were vowels. (This was deemed an offense to equality in a later edition. And don't even ask Mx. Y about xir pronouns.) These songs were used with posters and inflatable figures of the Letter People to teach phonics to kindergartners. My mom, Sandy Bates, had a set of these for her Catoosa kindergarten classroom. (I helped blow up the Little People when she first got them.)
Law & Liberty - Mark Judge - Men Searching for Their Lost Tribe
Mark Judge writing in Law & Liberty: "There are plenty of enemies to fight in the world, and they're not all in the hills of Afghanistan. They are the enemies of loneliness, illness, and despair that come to all tribes, modern or not. When my mother was diagnosed with dementia and I became her primary caretaker, a lot of my dreams were put on hold, including going to Hawaii to see the childhood friend who had contacted me on Facebook. I soon discovered that other members of my tribe also had parents who are now elderly and enjoy a visit from someone like me that they had watched grow up. Making the rounds a couple times a week to check in on them shows it doesn't take a fire fight or a hurricane to become what the men who were leaders in our tribe growing up in Maryland taught us to be, or at least try to be. In the words of the Jesuit motto of my high school, we should be men for others."
Dinosaur Fever - Sinclair's Icon - American Oil & Gas Historical Society
Sinclair began marketing under the symbol of the brontosaurus (as it was then called) in 1930. The company displayed life-size dinosaur models at the World's Fairs in Chicago (1933), Texas (1936), New York (1939). Sinclair stations gave away dinosaur stamp collecting books.
A new set of models was created for the 1964 New York World's Fair. It was shipped down the Hudson River by barge to New York City, and after the fair, the models toured shopping centers across the country. Visitors to Dinoland at the fair and to the traveling exhibit could use the Mold-A-Rama to make their own plastic dinosaurs for a quarter each. The exhibit visited the west parking lot of Tulsa's Southland Shopping Center in 1966. (Southland was enclosed and renamed Promenade Mall in the 1980s.) I vaguely remember visiting a Sinclair dinosaur exhibit in a rail car and getting plastic dinosaurs when the exhibit stopped either in Nowata or Coffeyville around the same period.
Where are they now? The corythosaurus is on permanent display in Riverside Park, in Harry Sinclair's hometown of Independence, Kansas. The apatosaurus and tyrannosaurus are at Dinosaur State Park in Glen Rose, Texas, triceratops at the Museum of Science & Industry in Louisville, KY, stegosaurus at Dinosaur National Monument in Jensen, UT; ankylosaurus at Houston Museum of Natural Science, struthiomimus at the Milwaukee Public Museum, and trachodon at the Brookfield, Zoo near Chicago. "Sadly, Ornitholestes was stolen and never recovered."
