History
I Run with an Older Crowd
Remember Joetta and Bob? From my trip with the Surveyor back to Kansas and Montana? Well, they came to visit us this week along with Joetta’s cousin, Bill, and his wife Shirley. Accompanied by some local historians, they toured all H. P. Larrabee’s old haunts from Larrabee Valley to Blocksburg to Indian Island in hopes of learning more about their great-grandfather and maybe helping our county heal some very old wounds. We had a wonderful and kind of old-timey luncheon up at the Murphy Ranch, and I finally got to meet Virginia Sparks, who has written articles for the paper and historical society for years. It was a real treat to discover she also has a wicked sense of humor. She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s about to become my new best friend.
Story Machines is Online
I just noticed that the Western Folklife Center put my short from this year’s National Cowboy Poetry Gathering online. If you didn’t get a chance to see any of the Deep West Videos this year, be sure to check them out. Mine was in very good company!
Wall Flowers
The Purple Cowboy and I took these photos this morning while we were checking the trough in the horse pasture. The house is an old homestead.
Outlaws, Dynamite, and Really Nice People
Sometimes people do really, really nice things! Take my friend Taki Telonidis at the Western Folklife Center for example. When I asked him for advice about how to clean up a 1970s cassette recording of my great grandfather explaining how he and his brother moved a herd of horses from Montana to Washington in 1903, Taki said, “Oh, just send me the file. I’d be more than happy to do it for you.” He made it sound like it was just a lil’ ol’ thing, but after receiving his new and improved version in the mail a few days ago, I’m pretty sure he spent a fair amount of time on it. I was so excited (and grateful) that I converted it to streaming Quicktime over the weekend so I could share it here with you. There are still a few parts where it is difficult to understand (particularly right at the beginning), but there are some things technology still can’t fix.
Great Grandpa Jack was just a teenager when most of this story takes place, and it is not short on thrills and excitement. There is even some gunplay as they try to cross the Flathead Reservation without paying the required toll. They had very little money at the time and simply couldn’t afford it (at one point they even have to trade horses for food). One of the things that interested me most about his tale, though, is the political and sociological picture he paints of life in the Northwest around the time of the trip.
His brief mention of the dynamite-induced destruction at the Bunker Hill Mine in Idaho was something I’d never heard about before, and I immediately had to find out more. What I learned is there were large and violent labor strikes in 1892 and 1899 at the mine because Bunker Hill had managed to remain non-unionized. When Governor Frank Steunenberg--who entered office as both a Democrat and a Populist--asked the federal government to send troops to quell the unrest in 1899, the miners felt betrayed. The troops rounded up and held hundreds of men in “bullpens” without hearings or formal charges, and a few even died. Steunenberg was later killed by a bomb at his home in 1905. Big Bill Haywood, a prominent figure in the labor movement at the time (and a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World), was one of three people charged but later acquitted due to lack of evidence. I recently picked up the very thick and detail-packed Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America by J. Anthony Lukas, which is about these events. I’ve only read a few chapters so far, but I feel comfortable recommending it if this sort of stuff interests you.
Additionally, Grandpa talks about the outlaw Harry Tracy, who escaped from an Oregon prison in 1902 and (according to Grandpa) shot up Cle Elum, Washington, as well as some other places before finally being tracked and killed by a posse. Hollywood made a movie about it in the 1980s starring Bruce Dern and, it turns out, Gordon Lightfoot (Sundown, you better take care...)? Anyway, Grandpa claimed to have owned one of Tracy’s guns.
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They Call Me DJ Old-Timey
Just a few days after my last post I was able to get the PhonOcord to play those records, although for the most part pretty faintly. It is tempting to leave you thinking that this accomplishment might have involved some tools or arcane knowledge of vintage electronic components, but the truth is I figured it out while talking to my mom on my cellphone one night while coming home from San Francisco. It turns out that these are special records that play from the inside out! Problem solved!
Well, not really because they still need to be digitized. I decided that since there are so many of them, it would be unfair to burden Mattmarg with this task. So I ordered a USB turntable (you heard me right) that I thought was special because it would allow me to capture sound at 78 RPMs. I felt kind of dumb when I realized that you actually just digitize the sound at 33 or 45 RPMs and adjust the speed of the file with a pulldown menu in the accompanying software. Nevertheless, I’m extremely happy with it and excited about getting this project started. After a couple of test runs yesterday, though, it’s become apparent that I have a lot to learn about cleaning up audio files. Since a lot of the records are made from cardboard, they sound pretty dirty. I sure hope there is something that can be done for them.
Putting It on the Record
Forget podcasting! Witness home audio recording technology circa 1946 in all its glory! I give you the Packard Bell PhonOcord 1052! Record live sound or from the radio (or both!) and right onto 78 LPs! It also has a public address mode, which I think may have been used for square dances (at least by my grandparents).
I drove up to my aunt’s last week to retrieve the mysterious machine my grandpa used to record that file I shared here last month. It turns out that there are oodles of little records made from everything from cardboard to shellac to metal, which Grandpa not only used to document family events (such as my mom’s first day of school) but also holidays at the neighbors’ and other community parties.
Once we got it opened and plugged in, I immediately turned on the radio and dialed in a station, half expecting to hear Nat King Cole crooning I Love You for Sentimental Reasons or maybe Harry Truman delivering a speech. Instead, through the AM crackling and whistling, we got some Internet pundit blathering on about Web 2.0. It would be inaccurate to say this experience was disappointing since we were both astonished the thing even worked, but I guess I was subconsciously hoping the magic box might unlock a time portal or some other life-altering vortex (should I be embarrassed that I’ve probably seen The Purple Rose of Cairo 20 times?).
We weren’t so lucky with the phonograph. It will spin records, but there is a problem getting the sound from the needle to the speaker. I’m not sure if it will still cut records either, but I’m hoping to get it all fixed up so I can capture some sound of my own. Among Grandpa’s recordings were a ton of blanks, and my wee little brain has been working overtime evaluating all the completely unuseful things I could make with the PhonOCord. Capturing sound with my minidisc and iPod is so boring! In the meantime, Mattmarg is going to help me digitize the rest of the recordings using his turntable and an iMic.
Also, I’m wondering if anyone out there can tell me more about home audio recording in the 1940s and ‘50s. I’ve only met one other person whose family had something like our PhonOcord. I did a little research online and there is surprisingly very little about these machines, although it does appear several companies marketed them as home entertainment. Based on Google results for a site called Shellac.org (which is maddeningly down at the moment), it even looks like Packard Bell offered a script subscription service for people to record their own little radio dramas.
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