Documentary film maker Gino DelGuercio will host the second in a series of documentary films at the Ames Free Library tonight at 6:30. Tonight's film is the Oscar winning "Man on a Wire." The film was released in 2008 and documents the never to be duplicated 1974 feat by Phillip Petit when he wire walked between the two towers of the World Trade Center for 45 minutes.
This is a very special documentary of an exhilarating event. I once had a summer job where I had to climb 50 feet up a ladder to paint a third floor of a house. That was scary enough. I can't imagine walking on a cable 1350 feet above New York. I vaguely remember this exploit which unfortunately for Mr. Petit occurred on the day Nixon resigned. Can't wait for 6:30!
Welcome
A curiosity shop is a place of odds and ends in a wide range of categories. One never knows what one will find on any visit, and that is the goal of this blog. Here you'll find postings on doings around Easton, the world's environment, history, recipes, fly fishing, books, music, and movies with many other things thrown in as well. Hope you enjoy it and keep coming back.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Monday, March 26, 2012
Zombie Apocalypse II: The Revenge of the Economists
I've started this blog four times! While we can probably produce enough food in Easton to feed everyone here, the question of why we don't is much more complex. Master of the Grange Lee Williams is a staunch believer in the capitalist system, but he uses a phrase "capitalism with reins on" that is an effective analogy. Capitalism is all about letting free markets decide. Adam Smith believed that the interplay of buyers and sellers would produce the best possible product at the lowest possible price. It doesn't always work out that way, but it does so more often than any other economic system we have so far devised. When it does work, it's like the old grey mare trotting along and reliably getting you where you want to go. However, there are flaws in capitalism that let it stampede off in the wrong direction sometimes. Hence the need for reins in the form of some level of regulation to keep the mare trotting along.
The crisis that set off the Great Recession was a clear example of lack of reins that allowed banks and investment houses to run amok, but there are many factors in our agricultural system that have pushed us in the wrong direction. Some are inherent in capitalism itself and some are corruptions of the system caused by human nature. For example, capitalism predicts that the marketplace is always seeking a balance between quality and price. The best way to get the lowest price is to produce something in a place where the best raw materials are available. Easton no longer has a large iron/shovel industry because, despite having a supply of bog iron, the coal of Pennsylvania was closer to the rich iron ore of Minnesota. The same thing began to happen to Easton farmers when the deep rich soil of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois first came into production. Today, you can buy tomatoes year round at a relatively low price because they can be grown cheaply in California and shipped here. The problem California farmers had to solve was that tomatoes are a highly perishable crop. They solved the problem by engineering a tomato that ships well at the cost of flavor. Until recently American consumers were happy with year-round, cheap, tasteless tomatoes.
As an aside, you can now get sweet corn in most months of the year. This is a triumph of agricultural science. The sugar in sweet corn begins to convert to starch as soon as the crop is picked. In the old days local corn was always going to be sweeter than corn that had been trucked in from places as close as New jersey. Shipping fresh sweet corn from California or Mexico was impossible so corn became one of the first vegetables to be canned and frozen. Unfortunately, the corn season around here only lasts a few months. The demand was year round. Enter the development of "supersweet" corn varieties that were created to have a much higher initial sugar content. If a little bit of that turns to starch in shipping, the supersweet corn is still edible when it arrives at your local supermarket during winter. The folks at Gerry's farmstand in Brockton really know their corn, and they, and I, believe that while the supersweet varieties taste sweet, older varieties like "butter and sugar" have more corn on the cob flavor. Ironically, butter and sugar is actually one of the very first supersweets-it just doesn't taste that way in comparison with today's varieties.
I undertook my study of whether Easton could feed itself because I thought it couldn't. I was looking for a percentage, small I thought, that we could produce as a goal for the Agricultural Commission. I certainly didn't want to bash supermarkets. I like the quality of year round apples for example. Unfortunately, apples show up another flaw in capitalism-externalization of costs. A cost is externalized if the account books of a business don't write it down. I used to teach near an adhesive factory that pumped industrial waste into a stream that ultimately flowed into the town's water supply. The cost of safely disposing of this waste was externalized among all the citizens of the town whose water was potentially degraded.
Ever hear of the tragedy of the commons? Once upon a time there was a common pasture that had the capacity for grazing 100 sheep who would be fat and happy. The common was used by 10 farmers who grazed 10 sheep each. The smart farmer figured out that sheep look very much alike and that no one would notice if he added one sheep to his flock. The 101st sheep and all the others would all be a little bit less fat, but the smart farmer would have one more sheep to take to market. Unfortunately, his fellow farmers soon caught on and began adding sheep themselves. Rationally, the benefit of adding additional sheep to sell outweighed the loss of weight which was distributed among all the farmers' sheep. Until the day the grass didn't come up in the spring due to overgrazing. Modern apple growers in places like Oregon and Washington externalize costs. While they do count shipping costs, they don't count the carbon dioxide produced in sending the apples to market. Consumers buy more shiny, perfect apples so farmers externalize the cost of the pesticides, "only a minimal chance" of being carcinogenic, onto the one in a million person who actually gets cancer. They also externalize the number of illegal alien apple pickers who die on the way to the fields-I saw a documentary on that. All of these externalizations could be internalized (and perhaps stopped) with the right amount of "reins." Or we could just start eating stuff produced closer to home where we could keep an eye on it despite higher costs and seasonality.
The crisis that set off the Great Recession was a clear example of lack of reins that allowed banks and investment houses to run amok, but there are many factors in our agricultural system that have pushed us in the wrong direction. Some are inherent in capitalism itself and some are corruptions of the system caused by human nature. For example, capitalism predicts that the marketplace is always seeking a balance between quality and price. The best way to get the lowest price is to produce something in a place where the best raw materials are available. Easton no longer has a large iron/shovel industry because, despite having a supply of bog iron, the coal of Pennsylvania was closer to the rich iron ore of Minnesota. The same thing began to happen to Easton farmers when the deep rich soil of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois first came into production. Today, you can buy tomatoes year round at a relatively low price because they can be grown cheaply in California and shipped here. The problem California farmers had to solve was that tomatoes are a highly perishable crop. They solved the problem by engineering a tomato that ships well at the cost of flavor. Until recently American consumers were happy with year-round, cheap, tasteless tomatoes.
As an aside, you can now get sweet corn in most months of the year. This is a triumph of agricultural science. The sugar in sweet corn begins to convert to starch as soon as the crop is picked. In the old days local corn was always going to be sweeter than corn that had been trucked in from places as close as New jersey. Shipping fresh sweet corn from California or Mexico was impossible so corn became one of the first vegetables to be canned and frozen. Unfortunately, the corn season around here only lasts a few months. The demand was year round. Enter the development of "supersweet" corn varieties that were created to have a much higher initial sugar content. If a little bit of that turns to starch in shipping, the supersweet corn is still edible when it arrives at your local supermarket during winter. The folks at Gerry's farmstand in Brockton really know their corn, and they, and I, believe that while the supersweet varieties taste sweet, older varieties like "butter and sugar" have more corn on the cob flavor. Ironically, butter and sugar is actually one of the very first supersweets-it just doesn't taste that way in comparison with today's varieties.
I undertook my study of whether Easton could feed itself because I thought it couldn't. I was looking for a percentage, small I thought, that we could produce as a goal for the Agricultural Commission. I certainly didn't want to bash supermarkets. I like the quality of year round apples for example. Unfortunately, apples show up another flaw in capitalism-externalization of costs. A cost is externalized if the account books of a business don't write it down. I used to teach near an adhesive factory that pumped industrial waste into a stream that ultimately flowed into the town's water supply. The cost of safely disposing of this waste was externalized among all the citizens of the town whose water was potentially degraded.
Ever hear of the tragedy of the commons? Once upon a time there was a common pasture that had the capacity for grazing 100 sheep who would be fat and happy. The common was used by 10 farmers who grazed 10 sheep each. The smart farmer figured out that sheep look very much alike and that no one would notice if he added one sheep to his flock. The 101st sheep and all the others would all be a little bit less fat, but the smart farmer would have one more sheep to take to market. Unfortunately, his fellow farmers soon caught on and began adding sheep themselves. Rationally, the benefit of adding additional sheep to sell outweighed the loss of weight which was distributed among all the farmers' sheep. Until the day the grass didn't come up in the spring due to overgrazing. Modern apple growers in places like Oregon and Washington externalize costs. While they do count shipping costs, they don't count the carbon dioxide produced in sending the apples to market. Consumers buy more shiny, perfect apples so farmers externalize the cost of the pesticides, "only a minimal chance" of being carcinogenic, onto the one in a million person who actually gets cancer. They also externalize the number of illegal alien apple pickers who die on the way to the fields-I saw a documentary on that. All of these externalizations could be internalized (and perhaps stopped) with the right amount of "reins." Or we could just start eating stuff produced closer to home where we could keep an eye on it despite higher costs and seasonality.
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Planning for the Zombie Apocalypse
Hey, don't blame me. Would you read a blog with a title like "Agricultural Options for Easton?" I have every confidence that our excellent public safety departments would be able to defend our borders from the coming Zombie Apocalypse especially if they had assistance from those folks who have been stockpiling Stinger missiles in their backyard as a show of support for the 2nd Amendment. The big question is would Easton be able to feed itself if it was shut off from the rest of the world?
As Chairman of the Agricultural Commission, I was looking for some goals for promoting agriculture in town and came up with the idea of feeding everyone in town sustainably. Now if you can't live without bananas, avocados, and oranges, you may want to move to further south, but the rather surprising answer I discovered is yes Easton could probably grow enough food to feed 23,000 people. Let's assume that there will be signs of the approaching zombie problem (the election of Rick Santorum for example) that would allow us time to stockpile seeds, animals, and farm equipment. I'm also assuming we wouldn't want to change from our truly bizarro American diet overnight. That means you'd need to grow 83 pounds of tomatoes, 87 pounds of potatoes, and 24 pounds each of sweet corn and melons per person. Everyone would need 32 pounds of cheese as well. That's two million pounds of potatoes per year!
Easton isn't exactly Iowa so my calculations used crop yields from the Massachusetts Department of Agriculture. I also assumed, based on the few zombie movies I've seen, that we'd like to keep all our woodland for hiding places just in case the living dead break through. I then calculated crop needs for apples, melons, peaches, pears, strawberries, bell peppers, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, cucumbers, green beans, lettuce, onions, peas, potatoes, summer squash, sweet corn, and tomatoes. These are the crops I had both consumption and yield data for. Obviously, there are other useful crops that we could grow here like turnips, parsnips, and rutabagas. Given average crop yields for the state we'd need only 750 acres to grow all the crops mentioned above. That would fit into the current open fields of the town especially if we include those big backyards that draw the ire of the smart growth urbanizers. How can you call it smart growth if you aren't thinking about food security disasters like attacks from the living dead?
Two things are missing from these calculations: grain and meat. As I learned from watching King Corn, modern corn meal breeds of corn produce giant yields so I think we could at least bake corn bread. Wheat never grew well here so most old time farmers made bread from "Rye and Injun" meaning rye and corn meal. We'd also probably want to add some barley and oats. I'll have to figure out the space needs for this one of these days.
A lot of protein needs could be taken care of by ducks and chickens who can be useful eating insects and weeds in the field and require very little space. Cows would be more of a problem. They take up a lot of space and aren't as efficient turning food into protein as poultry. Still dairy products would seem to be needed. Maybe we should turn to goats, sheep and pigs. No, I'm not suggesting milking pigs, but they are good at turning food scraps into meat. I'll have to work out the details for animals someday. In a pinch you could always eat brains; my zombie friends tell me they taste delicious:-)
What's the point of all this? While I don't expect Easton to feed itself anytime soon, I think we can definitely have MUCH more locally grown produce that is fresher and more nutritious. Using local produce we could also cobble together a healthier, less processed diet. What about the cost? More on that tomorrow.
As Chairman of the Agricultural Commission, I was looking for some goals for promoting agriculture in town and came up with the idea of feeding everyone in town sustainably. Now if you can't live without bananas, avocados, and oranges, you may want to move to further south, but the rather surprising answer I discovered is yes Easton could probably grow enough food to feed 23,000 people. Let's assume that there will be signs of the approaching zombie problem (the election of Rick Santorum for example) that would allow us time to stockpile seeds, animals, and farm equipment. I'm also assuming we wouldn't want to change from our truly bizarro American diet overnight. That means you'd need to grow 83 pounds of tomatoes, 87 pounds of potatoes, and 24 pounds each of sweet corn and melons per person. Everyone would need 32 pounds of cheese as well. That's two million pounds of potatoes per year!
Easton isn't exactly Iowa so my calculations used crop yields from the Massachusetts Department of Agriculture. I also assumed, based on the few zombie movies I've seen, that we'd like to keep all our woodland for hiding places just in case the living dead break through. I then calculated crop needs for apples, melons, peaches, pears, strawberries, bell peppers, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, cucumbers, green beans, lettuce, onions, peas, potatoes, summer squash, sweet corn, and tomatoes. These are the crops I had both consumption and yield data for. Obviously, there are other useful crops that we could grow here like turnips, parsnips, and rutabagas. Given average crop yields for the state we'd need only 750 acres to grow all the crops mentioned above. That would fit into the current open fields of the town especially if we include those big backyards that draw the ire of the smart growth urbanizers. How can you call it smart growth if you aren't thinking about food security disasters like attacks from the living dead?
Two things are missing from these calculations: grain and meat. As I learned from watching King Corn, modern corn meal breeds of corn produce giant yields so I think we could at least bake corn bread. Wheat never grew well here so most old time farmers made bread from "Rye and Injun" meaning rye and corn meal. We'd also probably want to add some barley and oats. I'll have to figure out the space needs for this one of these days.
A lot of protein needs could be taken care of by ducks and chickens who can be useful eating insects and weeds in the field and require very little space. Cows would be more of a problem. They take up a lot of space and aren't as efficient turning food into protein as poultry. Still dairy products would seem to be needed. Maybe we should turn to goats, sheep and pigs. No, I'm not suggesting milking pigs, but they are good at turning food scraps into meat. I'll have to work out the details for animals someday. In a pinch you could always eat brains; my zombie friends tell me they taste delicious:-)
What's the point of all this? While I don't expect Easton to feed itself anytime soon, I think we can definitely have MUCH more locally grown produce that is fresher and more nutritious. Using local produce we could also cobble together a healthier, less processed diet. What about the cost? More on that tomorrow.
Friday, March 23, 2012
Hey, Rosetta Stone! Can I Buy A Vowel?
Rhybudd: Nid tw tystysgrif yn profi pwy ydych chi. No, though many believe it's already happened, I haven't gone completely around the bend. Great Britain is devolving and any official document from Wales is now bilingual. The first sentence says "Warning: A certificate is not evidence of identity."
I've mentioned before that my great great grandfather Abraham Hands was rather a mystery. We knew he was Welsh and supposedly came to the US in 1865. For the longest time things were stuck there. There were Hands around Birmingham, England, but none in Wales. With Ancestry.com the Welsh family popped into view with both British and American records connecting Abraham and his wife Amelia to my great grandfather Frederick. Censuses in 1880 and 1910 indicated that Frederick had arrived in America in 1865 when he was eight years old. However, the family doesn't show up in the 1870 census and Frederick's brother Herbert claimed to have arrived in the US in 1876.
So when did Abraham come to America? Turns out he didn't. A kind Welsh researcher noted a death certificate for an Abraham Hands in Abergavenny, Wales in 1863. Abergavenny was where Frederick and Herbert were born so it was worth a look. I e-mailed to the General Register Office in England and got a copy of Abraham's death certificate. The certificate included a copy of the original book entry which was happily in English. Unlike American death certificates, the parents weren't listed so I was left to connect this Abraham to my family with circumstantial evidence. First, he was from Abergavenny where my Abraham and his family lived in the census year of 1861. That Abraham's occupation was given as a commercial traveler, the same as the man on the death certificate. Finally the age matched. This man who suffered a fall and blow to the head in June of 1863 and lingered until early September was my great-great grandfather. The family lived on Frogmore Street and a so far unconnected William Jacob Hands was in attendance at the death.
What of Frederick's claim that he arrived in the US in 1865? It's hard to fathom. Some deep digging turned up the fact that he became a citizen in 1889. His brother Herbert who claimed to have arrived in 1876 became a citizen in 1883 after the normal seven year waiting period. I don't know when Frederick died, a visit to Forest Hills Cemetery is probably in order, but he didn't appear in Ancestry's census records after 1920. Then suddenly he popped up as Frederick Hans in 1930. There he claimed to have arrived in 1881, a good trick since he was listed in Boston's 1880 sentence, but much more reasonable given the 1889 citizenship date.
Genealogy is often considered to be just a long list of names. I enjoy it for the puzzles that need to be solved and for the connections to history. In the 12th century a Norman soldier named William de Braose invited all the leading male citizens of nearby Wales to his castle at Abergavenny for a Christmas party. His soldiers then hacked the unarmed Welshmen to pieces ending any future disloyalty to the English crown. That William was an ancestor of my mother. Strange how both sides of the family are connected in a little town in Wales.
I've mentioned before that my great great grandfather Abraham Hands was rather a mystery. We knew he was Welsh and supposedly came to the US in 1865. For the longest time things were stuck there. There were Hands around Birmingham, England, but none in Wales. With Ancestry.com the Welsh family popped into view with both British and American records connecting Abraham and his wife Amelia to my great grandfather Frederick. Censuses in 1880 and 1910 indicated that Frederick had arrived in America in 1865 when he was eight years old. However, the family doesn't show up in the 1870 census and Frederick's brother Herbert claimed to have arrived in the US in 1876.
So when did Abraham come to America? Turns out he didn't. A kind Welsh researcher noted a death certificate for an Abraham Hands in Abergavenny, Wales in 1863. Abergavenny was where Frederick and Herbert were born so it was worth a look. I e-mailed to the General Register Office in England and got a copy of Abraham's death certificate. The certificate included a copy of the original book entry which was happily in English. Unlike American death certificates, the parents weren't listed so I was left to connect this Abraham to my family with circumstantial evidence. First, he was from Abergavenny where my Abraham and his family lived in the census year of 1861. That Abraham's occupation was given as a commercial traveler, the same as the man on the death certificate. Finally the age matched. This man who suffered a fall and blow to the head in June of 1863 and lingered until early September was my great-great grandfather. The family lived on Frogmore Street and a so far unconnected William Jacob Hands was in attendance at the death.
What of Frederick's claim that he arrived in the US in 1865? It's hard to fathom. Some deep digging turned up the fact that he became a citizen in 1889. His brother Herbert who claimed to have arrived in 1876 became a citizen in 1883 after the normal seven year waiting period. I don't know when Frederick died, a visit to Forest Hills Cemetery is probably in order, but he didn't appear in Ancestry's census records after 1920. Then suddenly he popped up as Frederick Hans in 1930. There he claimed to have arrived in 1881, a good trick since he was listed in Boston's 1880 sentence, but much more reasonable given the 1889 citizenship date.
Genealogy is often considered to be just a long list of names. I enjoy it for the puzzles that need to be solved and for the connections to history. In the 12th century a Norman soldier named William de Braose invited all the leading male citizens of nearby Wales to his castle at Abergavenny for a Christmas party. His soldiers then hacked the unarmed Welshmen to pieces ending any future disloyalty to the English crown. That William was an ancestor of my mother. Strange how both sides of the family are connected in a little town in Wales.
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Community Gardens and Community Farms
Yesterday, I was on a three person subcommittee of the Agricultural Commission with the other two members holding opposing views on where to locate the new community gardens. There's nothing like standing in a field knowing that you have the deciding vote while wondering whether deer ticks are crawling up your leg. A community garden is a place where people who don't have space for a garden at home can rent a plot for a year. The cost of the rental goes to maintaining things like fencing and water. The Natural Resources Trust of Easton has run a successful community garden for many years on their property in North Easton.
The two choices for the new garden, scheduled to open in 2013 and run by the Agricultural Commission not the NRT, were the field immediately north of the entrance to the Wheaton Farm main parking area (adjacent to the historic Daniel Wheaton House) and the Galloway Farm property known to old timers as Sam Wright's Farm and to everyone as the place where the silos used to be.
It's been a goal of the Friends of Wheaton Farm for many years to move the main parking area of this great 1,000 acre park to the street in order to limit the opportunity for illicit activities. During my last FOWF clean-up we found both used condoms and a used pregnancy test in the parking lot, and the lot is also suspected of hosting nocturnal drug deals. I'm surprised Rick Santorum didn't come there to speak during our pre-primary days! The idea was to put a 120 foot by 100 foot garden in next to the access road with a parking lot in front that extended from the current access road to an exit opposite Prospect Street. This parking lot would be the most expensive part of the initial project although piping for water would also have to be provided. Finally, the field while flat, and for Easton relatively stone free, would need to be improved with fertilizer and searched for Native American artifacts.
Galloway Farm already has a small prexisting parking area at the end of a very narrow one car dirt access road, and it has a well that could provide water for the cost of the electricity to run the pump. Electricity is also available on site. Besides the narrow access road, the potential community garden site is a hike away from the parking area because the adjacent part of the field is too wet. On the other hand because cows grazed the field until very recently, it has greater fertility than the Wheaton Farm field.
Here's what was decided. The community garden would be located at Wheaton Farm, but the size of the parking lot, while larger than the current one, would be reduced with access and egress on the current access road. The original lot would stay for the first year, but would eventually be turned into a road with a drop off spot for canoes and horses. As initially planned, the garden would be landscaped preferably with berry bushes and dwarf fruit trees to reduce its visual impact. The initial 12,000 sq. foot garden would host 15 garden plots. Final approval for this idea rests with the Conservation Commission with input from FOWF; both have given strong initial support.
Standing in the Galloway Farm field, an idea came to me that I had heard at the Farm to School Conference last week. Why not a community farm? What is a community farm? It is a non-profit organization established for the purpose of running a commercial farm for the benefit of the town. It would be run by a competent farmer and be supported by an active Board of Directors who would seek grants and run fundraising events. Community farms are active in about 80 Massachusetts communities with another 80 or so in the planning stages. People support them by buying CSA shares which often include a mix of cash and sweat equity. Unlike community gardens, community farms often have livestock, poultry, riding schools, and summer camps as well as produce and orchard products. Community farms are also a locus for environmental and agricultural education programs. Most of these farms are organic in recognition of the dangers of toxic chemicals in our environment. Still a dream at this stage, but you'll be hearing more here on this spot.
The two choices for the new garden, scheduled to open in 2013 and run by the Agricultural Commission not the NRT, were the field immediately north of the entrance to the Wheaton Farm main parking area (adjacent to the historic Daniel Wheaton House) and the Galloway Farm property known to old timers as Sam Wright's Farm and to everyone as the place where the silos used to be.
It's been a goal of the Friends of Wheaton Farm for many years to move the main parking area of this great 1,000 acre park to the street in order to limit the opportunity for illicit activities. During my last FOWF clean-up we found both used condoms and a used pregnancy test in the parking lot, and the lot is also suspected of hosting nocturnal drug deals. I'm surprised Rick Santorum didn't come there to speak during our pre-primary days! The idea was to put a 120 foot by 100 foot garden in next to the access road with a parking lot in front that extended from the current access road to an exit opposite Prospect Street. This parking lot would be the most expensive part of the initial project although piping for water would also have to be provided. Finally, the field while flat, and for Easton relatively stone free, would need to be improved with fertilizer and searched for Native American artifacts.
Galloway Farm already has a small prexisting parking area at the end of a very narrow one car dirt access road, and it has a well that could provide water for the cost of the electricity to run the pump. Electricity is also available on site. Besides the narrow access road, the potential community garden site is a hike away from the parking area because the adjacent part of the field is too wet. On the other hand because cows grazed the field until very recently, it has greater fertility than the Wheaton Farm field.
Here's what was decided. The community garden would be located at Wheaton Farm, but the size of the parking lot, while larger than the current one, would be reduced with access and egress on the current access road. The original lot would stay for the first year, but would eventually be turned into a road with a drop off spot for canoes and horses. As initially planned, the garden would be landscaped preferably with berry bushes and dwarf fruit trees to reduce its visual impact. The initial 12,000 sq. foot garden would host 15 garden plots. Final approval for this idea rests with the Conservation Commission with input from FOWF; both have given strong initial support.
Standing in the Galloway Farm field, an idea came to me that I had heard at the Farm to School Conference last week. Why not a community farm? What is a community farm? It is a non-profit organization established for the purpose of running a commercial farm for the benefit of the town. It would be run by a competent farmer and be supported by an active Board of Directors who would seek grants and run fundraising events. Community farms are active in about 80 Massachusetts communities with another 80 or so in the planning stages. People support them by buying CSA shares which often include a mix of cash and sweat equity. Unlike community gardens, community farms often have livestock, poultry, riding schools, and summer camps as well as produce and orchard products. Community farms are also a locus for environmental and agricultural education programs. Most of these farms are organic in recognition of the dangers of toxic chemicals in our environment. Still a dream at this stage, but you'll be hearing more here on this spot.
Monday, March 19, 2012
King Corn
One of the keynote speakers at the Farm to School Convention last week was Curt Ellis. Back in 2007 he made a movie called King Corn about the impact of cheap, tasteless corn on American society. In the last few years he has founded Food Corp, a non-profit that tries to bring some of the food advantages we have here in Easton to poorer communities. He compared corn and carrots in his keynote. Here in New England most of the corn we see is green corn produced for human consumption right off the farm. Most corn in America, however, has been developed to be full of corn starch often with resistance to powerful herbicides built in. Mr. Ellis' point, elaborated in King Corn, is that recent human meddling with corn has turned what was once a healthy food into an dietary and environmental disaster.
Carrots, on the other hand, have taken the opposite journey. Descended from wild plants in Afghanistan that are related to our Queen Anne's Lace, for several thousand years carrots were only used in herbal medicine. The seeds were more likely to be eaten than the bitter woody root. Along its journey on the Silk Road, farmers changed the pale bitter root into one that had several different shades of yellow, red, and purple and more sweetness with less woodiness. Finally Dutch farmers in the 17th century produced the orange carrot we know today. Unbeknownst to these farmers they had maximized the amount of beta carotene in the root. Beta carotene is used by our bodies to produce Vitamin A. So while farmers working on corn produced varieties filled with tasteless starch that could only be turned back into food through chemical processing, farmers working on carrots produced a big boon for human health. Add the fact that carrot production is harder to mechanize, and you have a poster child for good agriculture. This caused no end of joy on my part because Soups On Center's Carrot-Ginger Soup is a regular feature of my diet.
I checked out King Corn through my Nook Color on Saturday morning. Mr. Ellis and a college friend had discovered that their great grandfathers had come from the same tiny Iowa town so they decided to go there and see how farming had changed. Ultimately, they leased an acre of farmland and followed the corn they grew from seed to high fructose corn syrup, cattle feed lots, and ethanol. Unlike Waiting for Superman, a crass, exploitative polemic about American education, King Corn follows the evidence carefully and objectively to discover what one policy change did to American agriculture. This change came back in 1973 when Earl Butz, Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture, convinced Congress to end subsidies to not grow crops and instead began to pay them for producing a surplus. Today, corn prices are so low that the only profit comes from the government subsidy. This kind of subsidy created a consolidation of farms into commercial units "where the tractors didn't have to turn around as much" and destroyed the family farm. Still, one of the climactic scenes in the film is a visit to the aged Earl Butz who, despite all the evidence of damage to public health, animal welfare, and the environment, cogently and rationally defends the fact that we now spend much less on food than we did just fifty years ago.
King Corn is available as a streaming video from Netflix. I recommend it highly.
Carrots, on the other hand, have taken the opposite journey. Descended from wild plants in Afghanistan that are related to our Queen Anne's Lace, for several thousand years carrots were only used in herbal medicine. The seeds were more likely to be eaten than the bitter woody root. Along its journey on the Silk Road, farmers changed the pale bitter root into one that had several different shades of yellow, red, and purple and more sweetness with less woodiness. Finally Dutch farmers in the 17th century produced the orange carrot we know today. Unbeknownst to these farmers they had maximized the amount of beta carotene in the root. Beta carotene is used by our bodies to produce Vitamin A. So while farmers working on corn produced varieties filled with tasteless starch that could only be turned back into food through chemical processing, farmers working on carrots produced a big boon for human health. Add the fact that carrot production is harder to mechanize, and you have a poster child for good agriculture. This caused no end of joy on my part because Soups On Center's Carrot-Ginger Soup is a regular feature of my diet.
I checked out King Corn through my Nook Color on Saturday morning. Mr. Ellis and a college friend had discovered that their great grandfathers had come from the same tiny Iowa town so they decided to go there and see how farming had changed. Ultimately, they leased an acre of farmland and followed the corn they grew from seed to high fructose corn syrup, cattle feed lots, and ethanol. Unlike Waiting for Superman, a crass, exploitative polemic about American education, King Corn follows the evidence carefully and objectively to discover what one policy change did to American agriculture. This change came back in 1973 when Earl Butz, Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture, convinced Congress to end subsidies to not grow crops and instead began to pay them for producing a surplus. Today, corn prices are so low that the only profit comes from the government subsidy. This kind of subsidy created a consolidation of farms into commercial units "where the tractors didn't have to turn around as much" and destroyed the family farm. Still, one of the climactic scenes in the film is a visit to the aged Earl Butz who, despite all the evidence of damage to public health, animal welfare, and the environment, cogently and rationally defends the fact that we now spend much less on food than we did just fifty years ago.
King Corn is available as a streaming video from Netflix. I recommend it highly.
Friday, March 16, 2012
Things to Talk About
I was at a Farm to School Convention in Sturbridge yesterday learning about local frozen broccoli sales to school lunch rooms and how we can teach kids where their food comes from. On the way home I stopped in at Maguire's and found a group that had been to Mary Nolan's funeral. Mrs. Nolan was 88 years old and the matriarch of family that includes 21 grandchildren and 35 great grandchildren. Mrs. Nolan was a Freitas and also has innumerable nieces, nephews, and cousins. Because of an unfortunate schedule I missed both the wake and the funeral, but Mrs. Nolan was so well-liked that she was remembered fondly by many during the last several days in many places in town. A former paper boy recalled that she always had a home baked goodie ready for him when he delivered the paper. I recalled the tremendous help she was during the production of the Frothingham Park video. She gave of her time behind the scenes with background information about the park in the late 1930s and early 1940s and then had a star turn in the film itself. I can still remember her sitting in the stands with friends waiting for her chance on camera taking in all the bustle of a professional film production and chatting about the old days in town. I'm sure her extended family will miss her forever, but many other folks in town will remember her as well.
Speaking of Maguire's, along with the traditional Irish fare this weekend they will be featuring a "New Irish Cuisine" salmon and shrimp salad over romaine with walnuts and cranberries that is outstanding.
I took my IPad to Sturbridge yesterday and can highly recommend the app called Penultimate that turns the IPad into a notebook that can be written on with a stylus. My 47 pages of scribbled notes were then turned into a PDF file that I sent to my e-mail address. No, it doesn't turn my terrible handwriting into a typed manuscript. There are some things that are still beyond the range of even the best technology.
A couple of interesting websites popped up this week. The first is wikipaintings, an online encyclopedia of painting that is still in beta testing. Its a very large collection of art arranged in some interesting ways. The paintings are all supposed to be found on the Internet, but I found quite a few that are neglected by other major art sites. Don't be fooled by the initial offerings for each artist. Check under the main slide show for additional works. The other site is National Geographic's story of a lost Leonardo da Vinci painting of a tragic beauty from the Renaissance.
Speaking of Maguire's, along with the traditional Irish fare this weekend they will be featuring a "New Irish Cuisine" salmon and shrimp salad over romaine with walnuts and cranberries that is outstanding.
I took my IPad to Sturbridge yesterday and can highly recommend the app called Penultimate that turns the IPad into a notebook that can be written on with a stylus. My 47 pages of scribbled notes were then turned into a PDF file that I sent to my e-mail address. No, it doesn't turn my terrible handwriting into a typed manuscript. There are some things that are still beyond the range of even the best technology.
A couple of interesting websites popped up this week. The first is wikipaintings, an online encyclopedia of painting that is still in beta testing. Its a very large collection of art arranged in some interesting ways. The paintings are all supposed to be found on the Internet, but I found quite a few that are neglected by other major art sites. Don't be fooled by the initial offerings for each artist. Check under the main slide show for additional works. The other site is National Geographic's story of a lost Leonardo da Vinci painting of a tragic beauty from the Renaissance.
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
"What Do You Know About Water Quality?"
The title of today's blog was the rather belligerent question that came from a friend when I told him that I would be part of a stream team testing our Queset Brook as part of a larger project to monitor the Taunton River watershed. I actually know a fair amount since sporadic water testing has taken place at the NRT since the 1970s, and I did a summary report for them when I was on the Board of Directors.
It's an important topic and admittedly I knew next to nothing when I started. Why is the topic important? Queset Brook, really the subsurface flow that goes along with the brook, is the major source of water for our largest well. Water quality from that well is very good to excellent, but as older residents know we never used to have to heavily chlorinate our water, something we occasionally have to do now especially after very heavy rain events. The little summaries of water quality we get from the water department is only a tiny fraction of the raw data that flows into the department from their extensive state mandated quality control program, but that data only looks at water at the well head after it's passed through nature's generally effective filtration system and that is much, much better than any surface water.
But what about the water in the stream before it is filtered? Well, it depends. The short answer is that old septic systems in North Easton can overflow, perhaps with no surface indications, during heavy rain events and extensively pollute the Queset from Shovel Shop Pond downstream to the point where you shouldn't wade in it. On most days, however, water quality is still pretty good. Not pure mountain stream good, but good for a stream with so many people living nearby.
How do we know this? There are two kinds of water testing. The project I'm involved in is chemical testing. Another option is a complex indexing of plant and animal life in the stream. The records at Sheep Pasture include both types. Nonchemical testing depends on the fact that some macroinvertebrates (creepy crawlies big enough to see without a microscope) don't like polluted water. By that test the Queset is doing pretty well.
The Taunton River Watershed Alliance has a contract to use volunteers to collect water samples that will be chemically tested by professionals. My stream team includes Carrie and Andrew from Bridgewater, and we are collecting a monthly sample on the Queset in Easton and on the Town River in Bridgewater. Once a month we go to our stream at a specific time and collect a big bucket of water from the fastest flowing part of our stream. Water is checked for color, smell, and temperature before it is divided into bags and bottles. The water yesterday was at 10 degrees Celsius about 50 degrees Fahrenheit which explains why I haven't caught any fish yet this season. The water was a light yellow color from the decaying oak leaves and iron in the water, and it was odor free.
The bags, specially designed sterile plastic, collected the water for fecal coliform tests. That's an indirect measure of the potential poop in the water although coliform bacteria are found in throughout the environment. It's a cheap and effective alternative to the more specific test for enterococcus bacteria that is found in mammalian guts. A big bottle of water was collected to measure the amount of suspended solids in the water while two smaller bottles were filled to measure nitrogen and phosphorus, two mineral measures of pollution. The two most complex things the stream team is responsible for are the tests for dissolved oxygen and salinity. The Taunton River is very special in that salt water from the Atlantic pushes far up the river on a daily basis. At the very top of the watershed on the Queset there is no chance of a high salt reading unless road salt washes into the stream, but the hydrometer used for the test is hard to read and the salinity has to be determined from a chart that uses the hydrometer results and the water temperature to figure out salinity. Dissolved oxygen is also finicky. The colder the water and the more turbulent the surface, the more oxygen for animals like fish to breathe. Some parts of the Queset get so warm and slow in the late summer that there is not enough oxygen to support fish. Any bubble in the jar or excessive jiggling of the bottle or even improperly dropping the seal into the bottle can influence the test. Chemicals are then added, the bottle sealed and then shaken 25 times.
Yesterday, the first big challenge was not falling in the Queset since the test fell afoul of the change to Daylight Savings Time and had to be done in the early morning gloom. A second challenge was not getting a visit from the police wondering what we were doing! By the time we got to the Town River the sun was up, and a local husband and wife walking their dogs gave the time a lot of encouragement. They were concerned about local farm runoff into the stream. We finally finished and Andrew and Carrie headed for Taunton with our samples. The testing company is based at the Taunton Sewer Treatment plant. We'll appear at our test sight once again on the second Tuesday in April.
It's an important topic and admittedly I knew next to nothing when I started. Why is the topic important? Queset Brook, really the subsurface flow that goes along with the brook, is the major source of water for our largest well. Water quality from that well is very good to excellent, but as older residents know we never used to have to heavily chlorinate our water, something we occasionally have to do now especially after very heavy rain events. The little summaries of water quality we get from the water department is only a tiny fraction of the raw data that flows into the department from their extensive state mandated quality control program, but that data only looks at water at the well head after it's passed through nature's generally effective filtration system and that is much, much better than any surface water.
But what about the water in the stream before it is filtered? Well, it depends. The short answer is that old septic systems in North Easton can overflow, perhaps with no surface indications, during heavy rain events and extensively pollute the Queset from Shovel Shop Pond downstream to the point where you shouldn't wade in it. On most days, however, water quality is still pretty good. Not pure mountain stream good, but good for a stream with so many people living nearby.
How do we know this? There are two kinds of water testing. The project I'm involved in is chemical testing. Another option is a complex indexing of plant and animal life in the stream. The records at Sheep Pasture include both types. Nonchemical testing depends on the fact that some macroinvertebrates (creepy crawlies big enough to see without a microscope) don't like polluted water. By that test the Queset is doing pretty well.
The Taunton River Watershed Alliance has a contract to use volunteers to collect water samples that will be chemically tested by professionals. My stream team includes Carrie and Andrew from Bridgewater, and we are collecting a monthly sample on the Queset in Easton and on the Town River in Bridgewater. Once a month we go to our stream at a specific time and collect a big bucket of water from the fastest flowing part of our stream. Water is checked for color, smell, and temperature before it is divided into bags and bottles. The water yesterday was at 10 degrees Celsius about 50 degrees Fahrenheit which explains why I haven't caught any fish yet this season. The water was a light yellow color from the decaying oak leaves and iron in the water, and it was odor free.
The bags, specially designed sterile plastic, collected the water for fecal coliform tests. That's an indirect measure of the potential poop in the water although coliform bacteria are found in throughout the environment. It's a cheap and effective alternative to the more specific test for enterococcus bacteria that is found in mammalian guts. A big bottle of water was collected to measure the amount of suspended solids in the water while two smaller bottles were filled to measure nitrogen and phosphorus, two mineral measures of pollution. The two most complex things the stream team is responsible for are the tests for dissolved oxygen and salinity. The Taunton River is very special in that salt water from the Atlantic pushes far up the river on a daily basis. At the very top of the watershed on the Queset there is no chance of a high salt reading unless road salt washes into the stream, but the hydrometer used for the test is hard to read and the salinity has to be determined from a chart that uses the hydrometer results and the water temperature to figure out salinity. Dissolved oxygen is also finicky. The colder the water and the more turbulent the surface, the more oxygen for animals like fish to breathe. Some parts of the Queset get so warm and slow in the late summer that there is not enough oxygen to support fish. Any bubble in the jar or excessive jiggling of the bottle or even improperly dropping the seal into the bottle can influence the test. Chemicals are then added, the bottle sealed and then shaken 25 times.
Yesterday, the first big challenge was not falling in the Queset since the test fell afoul of the change to Daylight Savings Time and had to be done in the early morning gloom. A second challenge was not getting a visit from the police wondering what we were doing! By the time we got to the Town River the sun was up, and a local husband and wife walking their dogs gave the time a lot of encouragement. They were concerned about local farm runoff into the stream. We finally finished and Andrew and Carrie headed for Taunton with our samples. The testing company is based at the Taunton Sewer Treatment plant. We'll appear at our test sight once again on the second Tuesday in April.
Monday, March 12, 2012
Diet Apps and a TED recommendation
Yesterday we were looking at the jargon of carbohydrate counting: total carbs, glycemic index, and glycemic load. You'd think that all of this could be rolled up into a calculator that would take the glycemic load and turn it into a prediction of where the blood sugar would end up. Unfortunately, other factors like exercise and the general state of your health, also impact blood sugar. The best app I have found to calculate all that is Diabetes Buddy. This app has a decent database of total carbohydrates in many foods and provides space for entering exercise and blood sugar test scores. It then summarizes the information in a calendar entry that includes the average blood sugar of your tests, your total carbs, and the amount of exercise. What have I learned in five days of testing my blood sugar three times a day? My best average blood sugar (normal!) came on a day when I totaled less than a 100 grams of carbs and at least 30 minutes of light walking. My second best day (14% above normal) occurred on a day with 144 grams of carbs and an hour of moderate walking. My worst day was yesterday with only 125 grams of carbs, but no exercise to speak of. If you managed to make it through this paragraph, you can begin to understand how boring it can be to talk to a diabetic. All the data is a way of fighting back against a body that isn't working the way its supposed to be. It's better than talking about the tingling in the toes from nerve damage, or the freezing fingers from poor circulation, or worrying about going blind.
So if you want to avoid having to write a paragraph like that some day, you might want to try my other three apps. The first is Low Carb Diet Assistant which allows you to enter a lot of the data in Diabetes Buddy, but I use it for its incredible database of total carbs in specific restaurants meals. The next two apps are battling it out for my glycemic index/load business. One is A Low GI Diet-Glycemic Index Search and the other is Low GI Diet Tracker-Glycemic Index Manager and Search. The first one has a colorful way of showing the data and the ability to create a favorites list so you don't have to look up the same meal over and over. The second one gives you more information on things like the ratio of proteins, carbs, and fats, and the ability to track your daily intake, but no favorites list. The app store reviewers rate the newer update of #1 at three stars and the December 2011 update of #2 at four plus stars.
OK, enough about diets for awhile. I watched a wonderful presentation at TED.com by Susan Cain on being an introvert. In a nation that promotes extroversion, this is a wonderful plea to understand the 1/3 to 1/2 of the population that isn't outgoing. Like all TED lectures it's less than 20 minutes long, but full of useful information, warmth, and humor. If you aren't an introvert, it's easy to misunderstand us and in a society that overvalues being outgoing that can be disastrous for many people. Just ask me about that one hour interview that "ruined" my life!
So if you want to avoid having to write a paragraph like that some day, you might want to try my other three apps. The first is Low Carb Diet Assistant which allows you to enter a lot of the data in Diabetes Buddy, but I use it for its incredible database of total carbs in specific restaurants meals. The next two apps are battling it out for my glycemic index/load business. One is A Low GI Diet-Glycemic Index Search and the other is Low GI Diet Tracker-Glycemic Index Manager and Search. The first one has a colorful way of showing the data and the ability to create a favorites list so you don't have to look up the same meal over and over. The second one gives you more information on things like the ratio of proteins, carbs, and fats, and the ability to track your daily intake, but no favorites list. The app store reviewers rate the newer update of #1 at three stars and the December 2011 update of #2 at four plus stars.
OK, enough about diets for awhile. I watched a wonderful presentation at TED.com by Susan Cain on being an introvert. In a nation that promotes extroversion, this is a wonderful plea to understand the 1/3 to 1/2 of the population that isn't outgoing. Like all TED lectures it's less than 20 minutes long, but full of useful information, warmth, and humor. If you aren't an introvert, it's easy to misunderstand us and in a society that overvalues being outgoing that can be disastrous for many people. Just ask me about that one hour interview that "ruined" my life!
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Back to the Diet
Yup, several months ago I promised to look into a diet that was both healthy and environmentally friendly. I even created a reading list, none of which I have had the time to read. Luckily, as you more likely to hear even from aging boomers like me, "there's an app for that." Several in fact.
I have a gazillion cookbooks around the house, but seldom have the time to cook anything other than old standards. Still if you are going to start a diet I thought having a cookbook or two on my IPad wouldn't hurt. i started with the app version of an old favorite cookbook "How to Cook Anything." In the app world this was an expensive purchase at $9.99, but it is well worth it because of extensive entries on ingredients, techniques, and basic and advanced recipes. There is a vegetarian version of this book as well. You could just stop there, but I went on to add two more recipe apps. Big Oven claims 170,000 recipes with additions like menu planners, shopping lists and the ability to rate and post recipes. You can get the recipes without the inevitable "free membership," but the advanced features require you to give up your e-mail address. Access to the 170,000 recipes is free, and the site is highly rated. Punchfork, also free, searches popular food blogs for new recipes. Armed with all this, I should never be bored with a standard recipe again!
I'm going to get a little scientific in a moment so I added a unit converter app to change grams to ounces. The app I chose also converts currencies and just about everything else except Baptists to Unitarians. I also added a little free app called Sous Chef that has multiple kitchen timers, a place to enter recipes and then convert them to smaller or larger portions, a table of kitchen conversions like tablespoons to fluid ounces, and a reference section to notes. The free version of this program has ads, the "pro" version without ads costs a whopping 99 cents. Either version is worth it just for the multiple timers.
Ultimately, food is just protein, carbohydrates, and fat. When it comes to creating the framework of a diet, these are the things that give you the calories needed to fuel your body. The very important stuff like vitamins, minerals and antioxidants should be added into your diet after you build your framework. You've probably read about or tried a diet that emphasizes one or another of the major building blocks. For a type two diabetic like me, carbohydrates have to be the focus of any diet. Since there is an "epidemic" of type II diabetes going around you might be interested in understanding carbohydrates as well.
Basically, a carb based diet sets a limit for total carbs in a day, but carbs come in two varieties fast or slow. Fast carbs cause a spike in blood glucose and the up and down spikes of a diabetic who has trouble processing carbs probably causes most of the damage of the disease. Fast carbs are needed for bursts of energy. If your exercise level suddenly goes from couch potato to jogger you might need a shot of sugar, but for the most part maintaining a steady flow of fuel to the body is the goal. Since we're only eating three meals a day instead of constantly snacking (often suggested for diabetics and a good idea), you need to be able to measure the impact of the carbs in a meal on your blood sugar. This is where the Glycemic Index comes in. This is an estimate (lots of things can change it) of how much of a certain carb will raise blood sugar. Cane sugar has an index of 100 and the index is created in relation to that so the carbs in a baked potato (without skin) have a GI of 98, beer has a GI of 36, and V-8 has a GI of 43. Anything under 55 is considered carb healthy because the sugar in the carbs is broken down slowly.
But wait there's more! There is a new concept called Glycemic Load which combines the Glycemic Index of a food with the amount of carbs in the food. Foods with a GL or below 10 are considered most healthy for general consumption. Mostly foods with a low GI also have a low GL, but, blessedly, some high GI foods like watermelon are low GL foods because watermelon is mostly water with relatively few carbs.
What you end up with is a giant math problem-find the number of total carbohydrates of the right type that will allow you to maintain a steady blood sugar no matter what your activity level. This is why diabetes is such a hard disease to manage. Its effects are insidious and the calculations needed to keep it at bay are complex and ever changing. Luckily, there is an app for that as well with better ones potentially on the way. More on that tomorrow.
I have a gazillion cookbooks around the house, but seldom have the time to cook anything other than old standards. Still if you are going to start a diet I thought having a cookbook or two on my IPad wouldn't hurt. i started with the app version of an old favorite cookbook "How to Cook Anything." In the app world this was an expensive purchase at $9.99, but it is well worth it because of extensive entries on ingredients, techniques, and basic and advanced recipes. There is a vegetarian version of this book as well. You could just stop there, but I went on to add two more recipe apps. Big Oven claims 170,000 recipes with additions like menu planners, shopping lists and the ability to rate and post recipes. You can get the recipes without the inevitable "free membership," but the advanced features require you to give up your e-mail address. Access to the 170,000 recipes is free, and the site is highly rated. Punchfork, also free, searches popular food blogs for new recipes. Armed with all this, I should never be bored with a standard recipe again!
I'm going to get a little scientific in a moment so I added a unit converter app to change grams to ounces. The app I chose also converts currencies and just about everything else except Baptists to Unitarians. I also added a little free app called Sous Chef that has multiple kitchen timers, a place to enter recipes and then convert them to smaller or larger portions, a table of kitchen conversions like tablespoons to fluid ounces, and a reference section to notes. The free version of this program has ads, the "pro" version without ads costs a whopping 99 cents. Either version is worth it just for the multiple timers.
Ultimately, food is just protein, carbohydrates, and fat. When it comes to creating the framework of a diet, these are the things that give you the calories needed to fuel your body. The very important stuff like vitamins, minerals and antioxidants should be added into your diet after you build your framework. You've probably read about or tried a diet that emphasizes one or another of the major building blocks. For a type two diabetic like me, carbohydrates have to be the focus of any diet. Since there is an "epidemic" of type II diabetes going around you might be interested in understanding carbohydrates as well.
Basically, a carb based diet sets a limit for total carbs in a day, but carbs come in two varieties fast or slow. Fast carbs cause a spike in blood glucose and the up and down spikes of a diabetic who has trouble processing carbs probably causes most of the damage of the disease. Fast carbs are needed for bursts of energy. If your exercise level suddenly goes from couch potato to jogger you might need a shot of sugar, but for the most part maintaining a steady flow of fuel to the body is the goal. Since we're only eating three meals a day instead of constantly snacking (often suggested for diabetics and a good idea), you need to be able to measure the impact of the carbs in a meal on your blood sugar. This is where the Glycemic Index comes in. This is an estimate (lots of things can change it) of how much of a certain carb will raise blood sugar. Cane sugar has an index of 100 and the index is created in relation to that so the carbs in a baked potato (without skin) have a GI of 98, beer has a GI of 36, and V-8 has a GI of 43. Anything under 55 is considered carb healthy because the sugar in the carbs is broken down slowly.
But wait there's more! There is a new concept called Glycemic Load which combines the Glycemic Index of a food with the amount of carbs in the food. Foods with a GL or below 10 are considered most healthy for general consumption. Mostly foods with a low GI also have a low GL, but, blessedly, some high GI foods like watermelon are low GL foods because watermelon is mostly water with relatively few carbs.
What you end up with is a giant math problem-find the number of total carbohydrates of the right type that will allow you to maintain a steady blood sugar no matter what your activity level. This is why diabetes is such a hard disease to manage. Its effects are insidious and the calculations needed to keep it at bay are complex and ever changing. Luckily, there is an app for that as well with better ones potentially on the way. More on that tomorrow.
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
The Morelli Gang
The nascent New England mob became involved in the Sacco-Vanzetti case after the two men were convicted. A member of the gang, Celestino Medeiros, in jail and facing the death penalty confessed that the Morelli Gang pulled off the robbery that Sacco and Vanzetti were blamed for. There was enough of a story here that some today still believe the Morellis were involved. For instance, members of the gang had weapons similar to those used in the crime, one member of the gang bore a striking resemblance to Sacco, and the gang was already having shipments to the shoe factories involved "falling off the truck" or in this case the train.
Medeiros was not good on the details, however. He told authorities that the payroll was in a bag when it was actually in a metal box, and he was very careful not to implicate himself in the crime. I suppose it's possible that the Italian anarchist movement was buying it's ammo from the Morellis, but its hard to overcome the evidence of the shells in Sacco's possession mentioned in the last post. I still believe Sacco guilty, Vanzetti probably innocent. Someday we should look into a similar payroll robbery in Bridgewater that the men were possibly involved in.
The Braintree-Randolph-Holbrook area hadn't heard the last of the Morelli Gang. In the years after the robbery in Braintree, the gang used the bootleg trade to organize the first New England branch of the Mafia. Illegal alcohol was produced in a border area of Braintree called Hell's Kitchen so the police departments of all three towns became involved in both corruption and the suppression of the trade. I was lucky enough to have the grandchildren of the two police chiefs from this era in my class. In Holbrook that would be "Two Gun" Baker and in Randall Pat McDonnell. Both men often fought the mob single handedly as members of their department were on the side of the bootleggers. Baker's career needs research by some Holbrook local historian, but McDonnell's career in Randolph is better known because his wife kept a scrapbook of his newspaper clippings, and Pat himself lived to almost a hundred years old and served Randolph as a Selectman into his nineties.
I'll always think of McDonnell as the man with the motorcycle because in his early days on the force that was his vehicle of choice. The bootleggers knew this too and set a trap for him. McDonnell would often patrol the wooded road along the Braintree Reservoir. The bootleggers strung a wire across the road to decapitate him when he drove by. He was saved from this gory fate when a fish and game warden driving through snapped the wire and reported it to McDonnell. The town fathers of Randolph had turned to McDonnell as one of the youngest members of the force and the least likely to be corrupted. That was indeed true; he took to raiding speakeasies and stills on his own without telling the rest of the force. One day he busted a speakeasy only to find Randolph police officers among the customers.
As McDonnell's fame grew so did the power of the Morellis. There was little he could do about their operation in Braintree, but when the gang expanded into Randolph, McDonnell sent word that they should "get out of town." According to local legend, members of the gang marched on the police station in Crawford Square only to discover that McDonnell had his informants also. The gang members found him standing behind his motorcycle in the Square with guns drawn. The Morellis "git." Hard to believe that Massachusetts had a "High Noon" showdown in the 1920s, but you know what the newspaper editor said in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
Medeiros was not good on the details, however. He told authorities that the payroll was in a bag when it was actually in a metal box, and he was very careful not to implicate himself in the crime. I suppose it's possible that the Italian anarchist movement was buying it's ammo from the Morellis, but its hard to overcome the evidence of the shells in Sacco's possession mentioned in the last post. I still believe Sacco guilty, Vanzetti probably innocent. Someday we should look into a similar payroll robbery in Bridgewater that the men were possibly involved in.
The Braintree-Randolph-Holbrook area hadn't heard the last of the Morelli Gang. In the years after the robbery in Braintree, the gang used the bootleg trade to organize the first New England branch of the Mafia. Illegal alcohol was produced in a border area of Braintree called Hell's Kitchen so the police departments of all three towns became involved in both corruption and the suppression of the trade. I was lucky enough to have the grandchildren of the two police chiefs from this era in my class. In Holbrook that would be "Two Gun" Baker and in Randall Pat McDonnell. Both men often fought the mob single handedly as members of their department were on the side of the bootleggers. Baker's career needs research by some Holbrook local historian, but McDonnell's career in Randolph is better known because his wife kept a scrapbook of his newspaper clippings, and Pat himself lived to almost a hundred years old and served Randolph as a Selectman into his nineties.
I'll always think of McDonnell as the man with the motorcycle because in his early days on the force that was his vehicle of choice. The bootleggers knew this too and set a trap for him. McDonnell would often patrol the wooded road along the Braintree Reservoir. The bootleggers strung a wire across the road to decapitate him when he drove by. He was saved from this gory fate when a fish and game warden driving through snapped the wire and reported it to McDonnell. The town fathers of Randolph had turned to McDonnell as one of the youngest members of the force and the least likely to be corrupted. That was indeed true; he took to raiding speakeasies and stills on his own without telling the rest of the force. One day he busted a speakeasy only to find Randolph police officers among the customers.
As McDonnell's fame grew so did the power of the Morellis. There was little he could do about their operation in Braintree, but when the gang expanded into Randolph, McDonnell sent word that they should "get out of town." According to local legend, members of the gang marched on the police station in Crawford Square only to discover that McDonnell had his informants also. The gang members found him standing behind his motorcycle in the Square with guns drawn. The Morellis "git." Hard to believe that Massachusetts had a "High Noon" showdown in the 1920s, but you know what the newspaper editor said in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
Monday, March 5, 2012
Sacco-Vanzetti 2
In the early 80s I took a group of students to Washington for Project Close Up, a week long study of government which was still functioning at the time. There were teachers there from all over the country, but I ended up rooming with a teacher from Sharon who was obsessed with the Sacco-Vanzetti case. He used the case as an annual source for teaching kids to research real issues. He was convinced that the ballistic evidence that linked one of the fatal bullets to Sacco's gun was cooked by the police.
Looking at the issue then, he had cause for concern. The science of ballistics was in its infancy then and the Red Scare was on so why not make up evidence to get two "dangerous" radicals off the streets? Add that one of the officers who examined the bullets was never convinced that the bullet came from Sacco's gun and that the defense, on appeal, hired an expert who switched parts of Sacco's gun with two new ones; and there was certainly room for doubt that the state did little to remove for decades.
Both men were armed and testimony was brought in that Vanzetti's gun was the .38 carried by the payroll guard which disappeared during the robbery. This evidence was even more controversial. Ultimately evidence came forward that the guard carried a .32.
Modern tests from the 1980s linked the death bullet to Sacco's gun, but I took this with a grain of salt given all the possibilities for error. Then another test occurred. When Sacco was arrested, he was carrying a box filled with bullets from a variety of manufacturers. Sacco had originally lied that he had bought a closed package of bullets because he didn't know the brands were mixed. One bullet, an obsolete type, wouldn't even work in his gun, but a shell casing of that type was found at the crime scene. The new test conclusively proved that bullets in Sacco's package were made in the same machine as other bullets from the crime scene.
There are numerous other reasons for reaching the conclusion that Sacco was guilty including a shaky alibi and the subsequent statements by dedicated supporters who believed that his insistence on his own innocence contributed to Vanzetti's execution. What about Vanzetti? I was lucky enough to have one very competent student, Cynthia Platter, who was enthusiastic to research the case and had connections in Plymouth, the town where Vanzetti was allegedly peddling fish on the day of the crime.
The case against Vanzetti has always been much sketchier than that against Sacco. I believe if he had a separate trial today and not at the height of the Red Scare he probably would have been found not guilty. He might even have been innocent as he proclaimed to his dying day-something Sacco stopped doing. Ultimately, my student came to believe the testimony of the Plymouth Italians who said that Vanzetti had sold them fish on that day. She had talked to relatives of these people and came to believe their stories. The jury was not so sure. Vanzetti's witnesses testified through interpreters or in broken English and the question remains "how could a witness connect Vanzetti and his fish to the day of the crime when he sold fish every day?" If the witnesses were right, Vanzetti couldn't have gotten to Braintree on the train by the time of the robbery. However, Cindy did uncover one old timer who had a chilling story. He said one day he and Vanzetti were digging a ditch outside of the Plymouth Cordage Compnay when the payroll delivery passed them. Vanzetti turned to his friend and said something like "Think how rich we could be if we robbed the payroll." Of course, having dug some ditches myself, I might have said the same thing, and, so far, I haven't robbed a payroll.
So you if you believe Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty you have to find three other people to help with the robbery. Most start with Boda and Coacci who were linked circumstantially to the Buick found in the West Bridgewater woods. A fifth anarchist named, Orciani, had connections to the other four and was suspected by the police. He had a punched time card from his factory job that established an alibi, the prosecution believed he had a friend punch in, so he was never tried.
Another enterprising group of Italians also had five members available for the robbery. This was the Morelli Gang. The Morellis were upwardly mobile and about to expand from robbery to bootlegging. The Morelli's were good "organizers" in the crime business. One of the Morelli's became the first godfather of the New England Mafia.
Could the Morellis have done the crime? See you tomorrow for the answer and stories of bootlegging in Randolph and Holbrook.
Looking at the issue then, he had cause for concern. The science of ballistics was in its infancy then and the Red Scare was on so why not make up evidence to get two "dangerous" radicals off the streets? Add that one of the officers who examined the bullets was never convinced that the bullet came from Sacco's gun and that the defense, on appeal, hired an expert who switched parts of Sacco's gun with two new ones; and there was certainly room for doubt that the state did little to remove for decades.
Both men were armed and testimony was brought in that Vanzetti's gun was the .38 carried by the payroll guard which disappeared during the robbery. This evidence was even more controversial. Ultimately evidence came forward that the guard carried a .32.
Modern tests from the 1980s linked the death bullet to Sacco's gun, but I took this with a grain of salt given all the possibilities for error. Then another test occurred. When Sacco was arrested, he was carrying a box filled with bullets from a variety of manufacturers. Sacco had originally lied that he had bought a closed package of bullets because he didn't know the brands were mixed. One bullet, an obsolete type, wouldn't even work in his gun, but a shell casing of that type was found at the crime scene. The new test conclusively proved that bullets in Sacco's package were made in the same machine as other bullets from the crime scene.
There are numerous other reasons for reaching the conclusion that Sacco was guilty including a shaky alibi and the subsequent statements by dedicated supporters who believed that his insistence on his own innocence contributed to Vanzetti's execution. What about Vanzetti? I was lucky enough to have one very competent student, Cynthia Platter, who was enthusiastic to research the case and had connections in Plymouth, the town where Vanzetti was allegedly peddling fish on the day of the crime.
The case against Vanzetti has always been much sketchier than that against Sacco. I believe if he had a separate trial today and not at the height of the Red Scare he probably would have been found not guilty. He might even have been innocent as he proclaimed to his dying day-something Sacco stopped doing. Ultimately, my student came to believe the testimony of the Plymouth Italians who said that Vanzetti had sold them fish on that day. She had talked to relatives of these people and came to believe their stories. The jury was not so sure. Vanzetti's witnesses testified through interpreters or in broken English and the question remains "how could a witness connect Vanzetti and his fish to the day of the crime when he sold fish every day?" If the witnesses were right, Vanzetti couldn't have gotten to Braintree on the train by the time of the robbery. However, Cindy did uncover one old timer who had a chilling story. He said one day he and Vanzetti were digging a ditch outside of the Plymouth Cordage Compnay when the payroll delivery passed them. Vanzetti turned to his friend and said something like "Think how rich we could be if we robbed the payroll." Of course, having dug some ditches myself, I might have said the same thing, and, so far, I haven't robbed a payroll.
So you if you believe Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty you have to find three other people to help with the robbery. Most start with Boda and Coacci who were linked circumstantially to the Buick found in the West Bridgewater woods. A fifth anarchist named, Orciani, had connections to the other four and was suspected by the police. He had a punched time card from his factory job that established an alibi, the prosecution believed he had a friend punch in, so he was never tried.
Another enterprising group of Italians also had five members available for the robbery. This was the Morelli Gang. The Morellis were upwardly mobile and about to expand from robbery to bootlegging. The Morelli's were good "organizers" in the crime business. One of the Morelli's became the first godfather of the New England Mafia.
Could the Morellis have done the crime? See you tomorrow for the answer and stories of bootlegging in Randolph and Holbrook.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
"That was Shelley Neal"
I lived in Braintree until I was 12 then taught in Randolph and Holbrook for over twenty years. Sacco and Vanzetti, the Morelli Gang, Two Gun Baker, Pat McDonnell, and Hell's Kitchen were all living parts of the history of that area. On Friday evening I listened to dinner table conversation on the famous Sacco and Vanzetti case where two Eastoners traded much misinformation on the case. I was in no mood to straighten them out then, but here's a little bit about the famous case with some websites for you to dig deeper.
As a cub scout my den toured the Hunt's Potato Chip factory. Our guide was a friendly older man who made sure we all got plenty of free samples. After we left I remember my mom saying to another den mother in rather hushed tones "That was Shelley Neal." I don't know if she went on to mention Sacco and Vanzetti or whether she simply said he was involved in a famous court case, but that was my first introduction to one of America's most celebrated crimes.
Today Mr. Neal rests a few feet away from my family plot in the Blue Hills Cemetery, but on April 15, 1920 he was the luckiest man in America. At that time he was the local American Express Agent in Braintree and every Thursday he had the job of meeting the 9:18 train, picking up the payroll for two nearby shoe factories, loading the nearly $30,000 onto a horse drawn express wagon and driving it to his office. On the way he noticed a dark blue Buick touring car that he had never seen before. Mr. Neal's office was in the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company headquarters now the site of a McDonald's in South Braintree Square. He dropped off the money and went back to work not knowing that he was soon to be one of the many witnesses to a terrible crime. Over the next few hours other people would report seeing this car as well.
Around 3 o'clock the Slater and Morrill paymaster and his guard picked up the money at the office and began walking down the street to the shoe factory. Just as they reached the railroad they were confronted by two men who shot and killed them both and took the money. The blue touring car roared up the hill, the men jumped in and then the car tore up the street, took a left towards Holbrook and disappeared. You can read Mr. Neal's testimony here.
I've been using the main page from Doug Linders site for my chronology today although the Internet has many S/V sites.
A dark blue Buick with no license plates, later shown to be stolen, was found in the woods in West Bridgewater. Beside the stolen car were tracks of a second smaller car. An Italian anarchist (not a communist-even the communists thought anarchists were crazy) named Coacci was supposed to have been deported on the day of the robbery. Coacci lived in West Bridgewater and had just quit his job at the Slater and Morrill factory in Braintree. He didn't appear for his deportation and then acted suspiciously afterward-claiming his wife was sick on the 15th when she wasn't, insisting he now wanted to leave the country immediately, and saying he didn't need to leaving support money behind for his wife and kids. The police put two and two together and went to Coacci house where another Italian named Boda showed them around. In the garage there were tracks of two cars, a larger and a smaller one. Boda said he owned the smaller car, an Overland, that was being repaired at a garage at the intersection where the Hockomock Liquor Store is today. When the police returned to question Boda three days later. The house was empty and all of its sparse furnishings had been removed. However, the Overland was still at the nearby garage so the police set up a sting with the garage owner. On the night of May 5th Boda showed up on a motorcycle with two friends to pick up the car, but became suspicious when the owner of the garage tried to stall him while his wife called the police. She had to run next door because they didn't have a phone! Boda took off on the motorcycle while the other two men walked off towards the streetcar line to Brockton.
These two hopped on the trolley about 9:40 pm. At 10:04 when the trolley stopped in Brockton, two policemen entered the streetcar and arrested two men who turned out to be Sacco and Vanzetti. Sacco proved to be armed with a .32 caliber revolver. Vanzetti, who always claimed to be a pacifist anarchist, was armed with .38 caliber Harrison and Richardson revolver. Sacco's gun matched the caliber of a gun used in both the Braintree crime and a shoe factory robbery-murder in Bridgewater (from 1919). Ballistics tests, still controversial to this day, linked the gun to the Braintree crime. Sacco had also been absent from his job in a Stoughton shoe factory on the day of the crime. Vanzetti's alibi was stronger, but it depended on the testimony of other Italians in Plymouth. The trial began on May 21, 1921, and people still believe that this was one of the most biased trials in American history. After the men were found guilty and sentenced to death, six years of protests tried to save them before they were finally executed on August 23, 1927 (not the 1930s).
Quite a few years ago we had Christopher Daley come and speak to us at the Easton Historical Society. Mr. Daley is a fine local historian who has focused his study of the case on the surviving places associated with the crime and the police investigation. Here is a link to his website where he shares pictures of the places that still stand. His site also has a links page that will take you to other S/V sites.
Over the years I've done a little Sacco-Vanzetti research on my own, and I'll share that tomorrow.
As a cub scout my den toured the Hunt's Potato Chip factory. Our guide was a friendly older man who made sure we all got plenty of free samples. After we left I remember my mom saying to another den mother in rather hushed tones "That was Shelley Neal." I don't know if she went on to mention Sacco and Vanzetti or whether she simply said he was involved in a famous court case, but that was my first introduction to one of America's most celebrated crimes.
Today Mr. Neal rests a few feet away from my family plot in the Blue Hills Cemetery, but on April 15, 1920 he was the luckiest man in America. At that time he was the local American Express Agent in Braintree and every Thursday he had the job of meeting the 9:18 train, picking up the payroll for two nearby shoe factories, loading the nearly $30,000 onto a horse drawn express wagon and driving it to his office. On the way he noticed a dark blue Buick touring car that he had never seen before. Mr. Neal's office was in the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company headquarters now the site of a McDonald's in South Braintree Square. He dropped off the money and went back to work not knowing that he was soon to be one of the many witnesses to a terrible crime. Over the next few hours other people would report seeing this car as well.
Around 3 o'clock the Slater and Morrill paymaster and his guard picked up the money at the office and began walking down the street to the shoe factory. Just as they reached the railroad they were confronted by two men who shot and killed them both and took the money. The blue touring car roared up the hill, the men jumped in and then the car tore up the street, took a left towards Holbrook and disappeared. You can read Mr. Neal's testimony here.
I've been using the main page from Doug Linders site for my chronology today although the Internet has many S/V sites.
A dark blue Buick with no license plates, later shown to be stolen, was found in the woods in West Bridgewater. Beside the stolen car were tracks of a second smaller car. An Italian anarchist (not a communist-even the communists thought anarchists were crazy) named Coacci was supposed to have been deported on the day of the robbery. Coacci lived in West Bridgewater and had just quit his job at the Slater and Morrill factory in Braintree. He didn't appear for his deportation and then acted suspiciously afterward-claiming his wife was sick on the 15th when she wasn't, insisting he now wanted to leave the country immediately, and saying he didn't need to leaving support money behind for his wife and kids. The police put two and two together and went to Coacci house where another Italian named Boda showed them around. In the garage there were tracks of two cars, a larger and a smaller one. Boda said he owned the smaller car, an Overland, that was being repaired at a garage at the intersection where the Hockomock Liquor Store is today. When the police returned to question Boda three days later. The house was empty and all of its sparse furnishings had been removed. However, the Overland was still at the nearby garage so the police set up a sting with the garage owner. On the night of May 5th Boda showed up on a motorcycle with two friends to pick up the car, but became suspicious when the owner of the garage tried to stall him while his wife called the police. She had to run next door because they didn't have a phone! Boda took off on the motorcycle while the other two men walked off towards the streetcar line to Brockton.
These two hopped on the trolley about 9:40 pm. At 10:04 when the trolley stopped in Brockton, two policemen entered the streetcar and arrested two men who turned out to be Sacco and Vanzetti. Sacco proved to be armed with a .32 caliber revolver. Vanzetti, who always claimed to be a pacifist anarchist, was armed with .38 caliber Harrison and Richardson revolver. Sacco's gun matched the caliber of a gun used in both the Braintree crime and a shoe factory robbery-murder in Bridgewater (from 1919). Ballistics tests, still controversial to this day, linked the gun to the Braintree crime. Sacco had also been absent from his job in a Stoughton shoe factory on the day of the crime. Vanzetti's alibi was stronger, but it depended on the testimony of other Italians in Plymouth. The trial began on May 21, 1921, and people still believe that this was one of the most biased trials in American history. After the men were found guilty and sentenced to death, six years of protests tried to save them before they were finally executed on August 23, 1927 (not the 1930s).
Quite a few years ago we had Christopher Daley come and speak to us at the Easton Historical Society. Mr. Daley is a fine local historian who has focused his study of the case on the surviving places associated with the crime and the police investigation. Here is a link to his website where he shares pictures of the places that still stand. His site also has a links page that will take you to other S/V sites.
Over the years I've done a little Sacco-Vanzetti research on my own, and I'll share that tomorrow.
Friday, March 2, 2012
My Friend Bonnie
Bonnie the bunny was put to sleep around 4 pm today. Dr. Chris at Lloyd's determined that her legs had atrophied and rather than put her through difficult tests that it would be best to end her life. She was about 7 1/2 and had three good years with her friend Edwin after being rescued by the Animal Protection Center from an abusive home. I was not with her when she passed on because I'm now only a volunteer at Sheep Pasture, but Louis and Jen fought very hard to save Bonnie, and we all thought for a time she might be recovering. Rich also did a wonderful job caring for Bonnie. And thank you readers for all your good wishes in the past few weeks. I'm very sorry that I didn't give her her carrot this morning, but everyone felt she might do better at the vets without it. Sorry little girl.
I'm very concerned for Edwin. Since Bonnie was taken to the NRT hospital zone, he has been doing his best to find her to the point of chewing through his gate and escaping into the Heavy Horse Barn. Never a heavy eater, I think he has lost weight too. Hopefully now that I'm not caring for Bonnie, Edwin won't smell her scent and get used to living alone. Here's the last picture of the two together:
Bonnie's grumpy expression here hid a warm heart. Even today she rushed over to see me in her hospital cage. Edwin was very devoted to her; he was a real white knight. Some thought at first that he might have hurt her by trying to get her to move around, but the evidence now points to some kind of disease of old age.
I'm very concerned for Edwin. Since Bonnie was taken to the NRT hospital zone, he has been doing his best to find her to the point of chewing through his gate and escaping into the Heavy Horse Barn. Never a heavy eater, I think he has lost weight too. Hopefully now that I'm not caring for Bonnie, Edwin won't smell her scent and get used to living alone. Here's the last picture of the two together:
More about Bonnie and Other Stuff
Dear little Bonnie the bunny has taken a turn for the worse. She'll be going to the vets today and may not be coming home. Last Friday she was a little lethargic with her foot dragging again. She also had some tummy problems. The last several days she has been much more active with good foot movement, but when she was weighed yesterday, it was discovered that she had lost two pounds. Bonnie is a big girl so the weight loss wasn't that obvious. Still, it's very troubling since throughout her time in the hospital cage she has had a hearty appetite. This is certainly a negative indication perhaps a sign that her leg drag is caused by a tumor. Meanwhile Edwin, Bonnie's friend, is still going through separation sadness-he scents her on me when I feed him and tries to run out of his cage to find her.
Tempering my general sadness-Bonnie is one of the few things keeping me at NRT these days-is the discovery that my grandfather had a brother who had at least three kids. Strangely, at the same time, a genealogist in England has discovered more information about my grandfather's uncle who remained in Wales and my grandfather's grandfather who contrary to family legend apparently didn't immigrate to America. Coleman Hands, the great uncle, had two daughters, one died young in 1940 and I haven't found anything on the other. The son was named Frederick Carville Hands, born in 1913. The Frederick came from his grandfather and the Carville from his uncle. Through high school at Carl Schurz in Chicago and into at least his first year at the University of Illinois he was called Carville. Later, in his fraternity days, he was known as Fred. My dad born in 1918 also had Carville as a middle name as do I. Fred Hands was a minor tennis star at both the high school and college level serving as the Illini captain in his senior year. Besides being in a fraternity, Fred was in the Varsity Athletes Club and the Future Chemical Engineers Club. One final reference, a private members photo on Ancestry.com indicates he may have died in 1979. Here's a picture of my long lost relative:
What happened after college? Are there Hands cousins out there whose family tree doesn't dead end in failure? And what of the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the oldest brother who stayed home in Wales? Stay tuned and if you can, spare a kind thought for my friend Bonnie.
Tempering my general sadness-Bonnie is one of the few things keeping me at NRT these days-is the discovery that my grandfather had a brother who had at least three kids. Strangely, at the same time, a genealogist in England has discovered more information about my grandfather's uncle who remained in Wales and my grandfather's grandfather who contrary to family legend apparently didn't immigrate to America. Coleman Hands, the great uncle, had two daughters, one died young in 1940 and I haven't found anything on the other. The son was named Frederick Carville Hands, born in 1913. The Frederick came from his grandfather and the Carville from his uncle. Through high school at Carl Schurz in Chicago and into at least his first year at the University of Illinois he was called Carville. Later, in his fraternity days, he was known as Fred. My dad born in 1918 also had Carville as a middle name as do I. Fred Hands was a minor tennis star at both the high school and college level serving as the Illini captain in his senior year. Besides being in a fraternity, Fred was in the Varsity Athletes Club and the Future Chemical Engineers Club. One final reference, a private members photo on Ancestry.com indicates he may have died in 1979. Here's a picture of my long lost relative:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)