Journey to Grand Canyon (Part I)

For most of my adult life, I have dreamed of visiting the Grand Canyon, “the huge hole in ground” as my husband called it. Life got in the way, and we discovered other amazing places in America and abroad which we visited. Timing was perfect now and we flew for four and a half hours to the scorching lands of Phoenix, Arizona.

People kept telling us that the 100-plus Fahrenheit temperatures were just a dry heat and thus it posed little threat as long as we drank gallons of water per day. Upon hearing such comments, my thoughts went immediately to, my oven has dry heat, and I would not want to stick any part of me inside.

Sure enough, everybody we met was carrying bottles of water, some smaller, some larger, but plenty of water in case they were overcome by heat. So far this year, Phoenix had two homeless citizens who died of heat stroke.

On the first day, on my way to the Heard Museum downtown, I took the purple-colored light rail they called the metro.  The station was one block from our hotel and right across the green cross marijuana dispensary.

A gaggle of homeless people were congregating in the station, cheering one guy who walked out of the dispensary with a bag and a joint in hand which he promptly offered to share with me or anybody nearby. I declined and moved closer to the end of the platform. Two metro employees were standing close to me and seemed oblivious to and unconcerned about the drug use in front of them.

When the metro arrived, the interior was quite cool and pleasant and most of the car was occupied by homeless people riding to escape the suffocating 103-plus Fahrenheit heat. Some were obviously mentally ill. A kind man offered me his seat but I declined since I was getting off at the next stop. The car was otherwise clean and so were the streets.

I was told by the friendly Sudanese taxi driver, who took me from the airport to the hotel, that 10,000 visitors had descended for the week on downtown Phoenix for various conferences and he was doing a lot of taxi business. I regretted getting into his taxi as it reeked like someone had died inside. I made a mental note to avoid taxis from then on.

Once we discovered Waymo, it was a no-brainer, we did not use Uber or Lyft as the Waymo prices were lower and the Jaguar driverless SUVs were amazing and certainly drove safer than my husband and I combined. I am not sure how much radiation we were exposed to each time from all the devices, radar, lidar, GPS, Internet connection, Wi-Fi, etc. that made Waymo's SUVs driverless.

I walked slowly from the station to the museum in the stifling heat and I felt like my legs were made of lead. When I left Virginia, the temperature in the morning was in the upper 60s Fahrenheit. Now it was 103 F. I stopped often to rest and drink water, no shade anywhere to seek refuge from the beating sun, and finally reached my destination for the morning. I heard some birds chirping and I could not figure out where they were hiding from the infernal heat.

The Heard Museum was a lovely complex of southwest style buildings with cacti gardens and fountains in various inner courtyards. Statues and amazing varieties of cacti surrounded the inner courtyards where the sunshine scorched the flowers so intensely that they required umbrellas just like humans did.

The welcome sign described the 12 galleries named after various non-tribal sponsors, the world class café, and the outdoor sculpture gardens, a place for “advancing American Indian art.”

The museum did not allow bottles of water inside, so I had to check mine in. I was not sure what type of museum this was, but I soon discovered that it was more than about art, it was a Native American Heritage Museum staffed entirely by Native Americans, including the museum board.

The guide told us that the original Heard Museum had been anthropologically themed with artifacts from around the world which the Heard family had collected, including the majestic palm trees surrounding the property which had been brought from Egypt by Mr. Heard.

The museum housed beautiful black pottery by Maria Martinez (1887-1980), an artist from San Ildefonso Pueblo in New Mexico, and her family whom she taught the unusual craft of black pottery making.  Other San Ildefonso pueblo pottery displayed was polychrome but done with so much attention to its design, detail, and color that it was seldom rivaled.

More galleries included the Sandra Day O’Connor Gallery with a collection of dolls with beaded native American costumes, photographs of tribal cars, blown glass artifacts attached to thick sticks, and other artwork from Arizona’s 22 tribes, rugs and stories of the Navajo code-talkers during WWII, and photographs of Native Americans who died in recent wars.

Navajo code-talkers blanket

A heartbreaking section dealt with photographic and descriptive history of the Indian Schools which took children away from their homes and tribes. The government sent them far away to Indian Schools like the one in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where they were forced to be white, to forget their roots, their language and culture, in order that the government could confiscate their ancestral lands.

The children fought back through their arts and crafts, drawings, games, and other methods. They were able to organize and keep their culture alive despite being prisoners in these schools, to a degree that the white government men did not expect. Some children did forget their own languages if they were taken too young.

Another exhibit included amazing basketry donated to the museum by a local Indian grocery store. Such artifacts are priceless and rarer to find as intricate basket weaving is becoming a dying art, the guide said.

One of the visitors asked the guide what the correct term was to call tribal peoples, i.e., Native Americans, Indians, indigenous peoples, etc. and the guide did not have a satisfactory and definitive answer – whatever the government decides.

I asked the guide if any of the displays remain from the time when the Heards were alive and she said no, all those artifacts had been moved to the basement and stored after Mr. and Mrs. Heard had died and the museum board became entirely Native American. I inquired why they had not changed the name of the museum from Heard to the Native American Heritage Museum, which is its true content today, but she did not have a good answer.

On the ground courtyard, large posters attached to the adobe walls talked about the Heard family. Dwight Heard had moved from Chicago to Phoenix in 1895 after he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and was advised by his doctors to move to a drier climate. 

According to the museum's archives, "In Phoenix, Dwight Heard became one of the largest landowners in the Salt River Valley. His investment company specialized in real estate and his holdings included the Bartlett-Heard Land and Cattle Company south of Phoenix, where he raised prize cattle, alfalfa, citrus trees, and cotton. Heard was actively involved in the political and economic decisions affecting water rights and who would control and manage the rivers that delivered this scarce resource."

The Heards' estate, Casa Blanca, built in 1903, was where the Heard Museum was built in 1928. The Heards collected Indian artifacts from Indian art dealers, trading posts, and items from their trips abroad such as Hawaii and Egypt.

TO BE CONTINUED

 

The Mining Museum in Nederland, Colorado

On a dry but hot Colorado June day, we drove to Nederland, one of Boulder County’s mountain jewels, past the Barker Meadow Reservoir with its deep blue waters.

The winding road carved between rock peaks and the Boulder Creek eventually took us to the tiny hamlet of less than 1,500 inhabitants. I could only imagine how cold, slippery, and right down impassable the road must be at times in wintertime. 

We were on a quest to visit the Mining Museum and the century-old carousel with its beautiful figures carved by hand by a Vietnam veteran. 

The one room museum had displays inside and out, rusting in the elements, a close-up look at the lives and history of the miners who lived, worked, and died in this area. Opened by the Nederland Area Historical Society, the museum was purchased by the county in the fall of 2012.

The hard rock mining days in Boulder County during the 19^th and the early 20^th centuries were brought home by the huge boulders lining the modern highway, at times perched seemingly precarious above our heads, cutting through the mountains. 

Boulder County’s history for the first 75 years was tied to mining, the leading industry in a barely populated area. The first gold strike in 1859 on Gold Hill brought more explorers and more discoveries of gold and silver. The boom-and-bust cycles of mining through the early 20^th century opened newly discovered strikes, followed by abandonment when the ores were exhausted. It took one ton of rock and back breaking work to deliver one ounce of pure gold. 

Prospectors, working under unimaginably harsh conditions, would take their ore to the assay office whose employees would determine if individual prospectors “struck it rich.” Using heat and chemicals to test the ore, the assayer would deliver the good or the bad news to the prospector about the percentage of precious minerals found in the miner’s rock finds. These miners had migrated to the Wild West to become part of the 19^th century hard rock mining boom. 

Museum Archives photo

Among the rusting equipment sitting inside and outside the building, one can see one of the few surviving Panama Canal steam shovels. Miners used tools like helmets with lamps, bells, trams, and rare mining claim maps to find their “gold.” But the real gold crown jewel was the steam-powered shovel, one of the largest in the world at the time. It scooped tons of dirt while helping canal workers in Panama to build bridges, roads, and drains close to the waterway.

The museum displays blacksmithing tools, maps and documents, ore samples, hand, and pneumatic drills, mine trams, maps, and documents from the 1860s to the present.

The Mining Museum is home to a 1923 Bucyrus 50-B steam shovel whose epic move was chronicled on The History Channel's Mega Movers. Of the 25 steam shovels that helped build the Panama Canal, only this one survives, and it is fully operational, weighing at 130,000 pounds and rated at 75 tons. The 1923 Bucyrus Model 50-B was returned to California, then Denver, and finally was donated to the town of Nederland in 2005. The rest were scrapped for metal in Panama.

According to historical records, 534 Bucyrus and Bucyrus-Erie 50-B shovels were built between 1923 and 1939. “They were among the largest tracked steam shovels in the world at that time. Until 1932, most were steam powered and moved on railroad tracks. In 1923, crawler tracks were added to the 50-B model, creating the first heavy duty, 360-degree rotation mobile shovels.”

The shovel was donated by Steve and Laurel Higgins to the Nederland Mining Museum on October 21, 2005. “This national treasure links a historic engineering achievement, the industrial revolution of the United States, local history of Colorado mining, and good old fashioned hard work by two brothers trying to achieve the American dream. Today it is one of the largest operating shovels in the United States.” Nederland Area Historical Society (nederlandmuseums.org)

Transported to Rollinsville by Roy and Russell Durand, this amazing steam shovel was used at the Lump Gulch Placer, six miles south of Nederland, until 1978.

Hard rock mining is extremely difficult. The rock was blasted with dynamite, the smaller pieces shoveled into buckets and carts, hauled out of the mine, then processed by a mill, ground into a powder, then chemicals were used to separate the valuable ore, usually gold and silver, from the waste rock, and then smelted into bars. These chemicals were poisonous for the environment. One troy ounce of gold was usually extracted from a ton of rock.

The miners used single- or double-jacking methods, holding a steel drill in one hand and a hammer in the other. After each strike, “the miner turned the drill a quarter turn to reposition the cutting edge.” In competitions, a miner could swing a hammer 90 times a minute, that is how strong they were. In double-jacking, one miner would hold and turn the drill and the other swung the hammer.

According to the Mining Museum, the following ores were mined/found in Boulder County:

-          Galena (lead ore)

-          Chalcopyrite (copper ore)

-          Lepidolite (lithium ore)

-          Barite (barium ore)

-          Petzite/Coloradoite/Hessite (gold/mercury/silver ore)

-          Mica

-          Sphalerite (zinc ore)

-          Gold (old ore)

-          Molybdenite (molybdenum ore)

Tungsten (“heavy stone” in Swedish), a rare metal with the highest melting point of all metallic elements, was mined in Nederland, at the time considered the tungsten capital of the world in the early 1900s. Tungsten is used for lightbulbs, TV tubes, steel alloys; tungsten carbide is used in drill bits, high-speed cutting tools, and mining equipment. 

WWI required a lot of tungsten which raised its price from $5 per unit to $105 and the town of Tungsten grew to 3,000 people in a sparsely populated area, and it became the richest town of its size in Colorado. According to the archives, “peak production in 1916 generated $4 million in revenue. Barker Dam had been built to provide power to the mills.  The end of WWI put a stop to the tungsten mining.”

Gold mining in the area took place from the mid-1800s to mid -1900s. Clear Creek was dredged with Eleanor #1 and Eleanor #2 on the historic Arapahoe Bar between 1904 and 1907 by the National Dredging Company (led by Herman J. Reiling); it was environmentally disastrous as the dredges left behind ruined fertile bottom soils forever.  The dredges scooped the rich soil from the riverbed and sifted out the “flour gold.” The “flour gold” was too fine for the technology of that time to be able to recover all gold from the soil of Arapahoe Bar. Golden, Colorado farmers refused to sell any more land to the company.

Silver was found with gold, copper, lead, or zinc and was a major operation in the Mines. But the market crashed in 1893 and the silver boom ended. Silver is used for jewelry, electronics, silverware, photography, finance, and investment.

The assay office took the miner’s rock finds to determine how much precious gold and silver were mixed in with other metals. The entire process, described by the museum archives, was quite complicated:

-          Crushing (the rock was pulverized like salt; a “chipmunk crusher” transformed the rock to pea-size, then a muller ground it to rock flour)

-          Splitting (separated the sample with a riffle splitter)

-          Weighing (a precision balance weighed exactly 29.167 grams of the sample)

-          Firing (the sample was poured and melted at 2000 degrees into a ceramic cup called a “crucible” to create certain chemical reactions, i.e., lead fuses with gold and silver)

-          Pouring into a mold (the lead dropped at the tip of the mold and the “slag” sat on top; the mold looked like a cornbread baking tray)

-          Cupellation (the lead button was put into a “cupel,” a small cup made of bone ash, and heated; during heating, the molten lead oxidized back to litharge and was absorbed by the bone ash; a small bead of molten gold and silver were left)

-          Parting (silver was dissolved using nitric acid, and only gold was left)

-          Final weighing (gold was weighed and converted into ounces per ton, thus determining the value of the ore find)

Miners spent most of their days underground, away from precious sunlight, and it was essential that they had good lighting in the tunnels. They used oil wick cap lamps, carbide lamps (invented in 1900, they burned acetylene gas produced by mixing water and calcium carbide), candlesticks, safety lamps, and electric lights. Safety lamps, invented in 1815 in England, reduced gas explosions. The electric lights were the safest. Thomas Edison invented a battery-powered electric light in 1914 which gave the miners 12 hours of lighting and could be recharged at the end of each shift.

Driving by the closed mines, one wonders what became of the families whose livelihoods depended on such hard and dangerous labor, devoid of sunlight, with fathers and sons toiling underground like moles to extract metals from the rocks. We could never genuinely appreciate the sacrifice these men made to provide society with metals like tungsten, silver, and gold.

 

Of Walls, Separation, and Sovereignty

Building the Wall
Photo: Wikipedia

Berlin Wall (Berliner Mauer) was a tall concrete barrier built to divide the city of Berlin into the western sector and the eastern sector controlled by the Soviets. Construction of the wall began on August 13, 1961 by the German Democratic Republic (GDR) authorities in order to cut off by land all of West Berlin from East Germany. The communists called the wall the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart (Antifaschistischer Schutzwall). The name was reminiscent of ANTIFA pretending to be fighting fascists while engaging in fascistic behavior.

Highly effective, the wall included weaponized guard towers. Wide areas called “death strips” had anti-vehicle trenches, beds of nails, and other devices that were supposedly installed to protect the innocent German population from fascist elements that were colluding to prevent the building of the socialist state called Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), a state ruled by force, fear, and coercion.



Iron Curtain border
Photo: Wikipedia Commons

The Berlin Wall was meant to keep people in, prisoners to the Stasi police and to the Soviet communists. Stasi, an abbreviation of the official name, Ministerium für Staatsicherheit (Ministry for State Security), was the secret police of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and one of the most hated and feared institutions of the communist government.

As the communists went underground to reorganize in order to emerge later in a more powerful form, the infamous Berlin Wall, a symbol of communist oppression, started coming down on November 9, 1989.

The Iron Curtain, a term coined following the end of WWII, during the dark period of communist oppression, was an actual barbed wire strip of land which separated the free European nations of the west from the communist-enslaved nations of the east, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, USSR, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania, and Romania.

On the western side of the Berlin Wall was Checkpoint Charlie manned by three western nations. Many citizens of the communist –enslaved nations attempted to flee across this wall and a few actually made it while others died trying. In remembrance of the daring escapes of those who attempted the impossible and lived to talk about it, a museum was organized in Berlin.

Checkpoint Charlie Museum holds many interesting artifacts used by East Berliners and citizens from other communist countries in their attempt to escape to freedom, such as a car bullet-proofed with concrete and another retrofitted to hold passengers inside car seats. Another museum display holds a small home-made airplane.

The infamous sign, “Halt hier, Zonengrenze,” (stop here, border zone) is a reminder that border walls are effective to protect and preserve a country’s sovereignty despite the weak arguments coming from Democrats who refuse to fund the border wall that would protect our southern border from criminal invasion and drug cartels.

In 1984 a Prague university engineering student from communist Czechoslovakia, was one of those millions oppressed under communism who dreamed to escape to freedom. Ivo Zdarsky was studying aerospace engineering and knew how to build his own homemade airplane.

To an old hand glider, he attached three wheels and a seat, a two-stroke engine salvaged from a car, and a home-made propeller. He tested his plane one night in an eastward direction. Even though he flew low to avoid detection by radar, when he landed, he was arrested by the Czechoslovakian police that was waiting for him in the field. And, to make matters worse, his plane was confiscated.

At the station, Zdarsky explained that his aircraft was a school project and pointed out that no one trying to escape to the west would be crazy enough to fly east towards the Soviet Union. Sure enough, the police believed him, let him go, but they kept his home-made aircraft.

Zdarsky, unable to find more parts to build another plane and desperate for time, returned to the police station and offered them a cash bribe for his plane. As was often the case, officials were bribed all the time for the right price under communism. Allegedly, the police never thought a college student would pose any danger to the national security of a communist nation, so they agreed.

On August 4, 1984, at 3 a.m., Zdarsky flew his plane into the night and landed one hour later at Vienna’s International Airport. Curiously, nobody saw Zdarsky land his “flying lawnmower.” He parked his “3-wheeled craft with a basket-like seat outside an Austrian Airlines hangar used for DC-9 jets and sat there until airport employees spotted him.”

Ivo spoke fluent English and asked to emigrate to the United States or Australia. The 24-year old was granted political asylum after several hours of questioning. He was then taken to the Vienna refugee center in Traiskirchen near the airport.

Zdarsky eventually immigrated to the United States and formed his own company, building airplane propellers.

A Visit to Ca'D'Zan and to the Ringling Brothers Museum

Ca'D'Zan Photo: Ileana Johnson Oct. 2015

On a beautiful October day, we finally experienced Ca’D’Zan, the House of John, the 1920s Venetian Gothic palace on Sarasota Bay, home of John and Mable Ringling, their Museum of Art, and the beautiful gardens decorated with replicas of Italian statues. Located in Sarasota, Florida, the property was bequeathed to the state of Florida in 1936.

In 1927, John Ringling moved the winter quarters of the Ringling show from Bridgeport, Connecticut, to Sarasota County where it remained for over 60 years. The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus now rehearses their new show in Tampa.

P.T. Barnum (1810-1891) chose Bridgeport, Connecticut, as his home where he built three mansions, Iranistan, Waldemere, and Marina. Iranistan was modeled after George IV’s Royal Pavilion in Brighton, England, with furniture made expressly for every room. It burned to the ground in 1857 during renovations.  Waldemere (1868) was a Victorian-style structure overlooking the Long Island Sound in which he lived for 20 years, surrounded by treasures collected from around the world.  He built Marina next to Waldemere three years before his death.

P.T. Barnum built a highly successful circus that grossed $400,000 in its first year and was proclaimed in 1872 “The Greatest Show on Earth.” He partnered in 1888 with James A. Bailey to form the Barnum and Bailey Circus.

Ca'D'Zan courtyard Photo: Ileana Johnson Oct. 2015

 

This visit was a fascinating incursion into the secrets of the circus of long time ago. There is a starry-eyed child in each of us who loved the circus growing up and remembered with fondness the big top acrobats, elephants, tigers, the daredevils, the tight rope performers, and perhaps clowns. People have fantasized about running away with the circus, to see the world through their lifestyle, and some did.

Calliope Photo: Ileana Johnson Oct. 2015

The circus dates back to the period of 2000-1750 B.C. in many cultures, showcasing unusual skills and abilities of the human body.  Jugglers appear on the wall of a 4000-year old Egyptian tomb.

Traveling groups and later troubadours brought with them music, poetry, jugglers, news, acrobats, dancing bears, trained dogs, the strange wonders of the world, and exciting shows from outside of their small world.

Country fairs in the 16^th century England and the 18^th century Commedia dell’Arte in Italy with its Harlequin dressed in multi-colored patched costumes would set the stage for the modern circus (1750-1840).

“In 1768, a retired British cavalry officer, Phillip Astley (1742-1814) joined together feats of horsemanship with acrobatics, balancing, juggling, and comic acts and the modern circus was born.” Astley performed in London at the Royal Amphitheater of the Arts where shows were lit by three great chandeliers with five hundred candles. (Museum Archives)

The father of modern clowning is Joseph Grimaldi (1778-1837). Born in London, Grimaldi gave clowns the nickname of “Joey.” His character, “Clown,” was a mischievous and malevolent trickster.

Isaac Van Amburgh (1808-1865), a New Yorker, was the greatest animal trainer of his day.  He entered a cage of lions and tigers dressed as a Roman gladiator and was said to have been the first man who put his head in a lion’s mouth.

Circus wagon Photo: Ileana Johnson Oct. 2015

The period of 1870-1938 is considered the Golden Age of the American Circus. It reached the greatest size under a tent and it capitalized on the Union Pacific Railroad and Central Pacific Railroad to move faster across the country.

Traveling up to 15,000 miles and performing in 150 towns, the show needed 1,300 workers and artists, 800 animals, equipment, human food for 3,900 meals a day and grain, meat, and vegetables for all the animals in the menagerie.

At the turn of the 20^th century, there was a Circus Day in every town, an annual tradition that often closed schools and factories to allow everyone to enjoy a few moments of escape from the everyday drudgery.

The excited crowds were treated to the sights, sounds, and smells of the circus, with the whistle of the calliope, the ticket sellers, concession booths with popcorn, hot dogs, cotton candy, soft serve ice cream and soda, pennants, dolls, live lizards to wear on your sleeve, and the colorful wagons with whimsical drawings of animals and fantastic characters.

Sword swallowers, Fire Proof Man, the Human Pin Cushion, dancers, Tiny Town performers lured the public to purchase tickets. For just a few cents, tickets were sold to side shows called “ballyhoo.”

Entrance to the Ringling property Photo: Ileana Johnson Oct. 2015

 

The circus was the first place where many Americans saw animals from other continents. The menagerie had elephants, lions, zebras, hippopotami, giraffes, orangutans, macaws, kangaroos, and polar bears. The cage wagons were beautifully and intricately carved with decorative figures and scrollwork. Panels would cover the bars to protect animals during travel.

Goliath, the giant sea elephant, weighing in a three and a quarter tons, was the main attraction, traveling in his specially-built water tank and consuming 150 pounds of fish per day.  P.T. Barnum had an elephant called “Jumbo,” who was 10 feet 10 inches tall. Zebras were occasionally seen in circuses but were much harder to train than horses. Asian elephants have been part of Ringling Bros. for 141 years.

Clyde Beatty worked with large cats, lions and tigers. He “styled” them and trained them to do certain tricks but, as he said often, one can never tame them completely.

The domesticated animals such as dogs and cats were usually adopted from the pound. Horses and other hooved animals had their own blacksmiths. Four hundred baggage horses pulled wagons and heavy canvas and helped raise and tear down the tents.

The centerpiece of the circus was the Big Top. Raised in less than four hours, with six center poles, 74 quarter poles, 122 sidewall poles, 550 stakes, and 26,000 yards of canvas, the centerpiece of the circus was ready to enchant thousands of spectators each day.

 “In 1926 the program for each Ringling show lasted two and a half hours, without intermission, and included more than 800 artists performing in 22 displays.” The show ran concurrently in the three rings, on the four stages, around the hippodrome track or in the air above the rings. Seating could accommodate 15,000 people but, if all seats were sold, straw was spread in the front to make extra room for children in the “straw house.” (Museum Archives)

Museum of Art courtyard Photo: Ileana Johnson Oct. 2015

 

The performers spent their time before and between performances in the backyard and in their own tents. The more famous the star, the more amenities from home they commanded.

The circus was set up on empty lots adjacent to train stations and, on Circus Day, most towns doubled their population. More than 150 wagons had to fit on flatcars and it was the trainmaster’s duty to use the space properly. Before the show ended, the Flying Squadron was already on its way to the next stop where the circus was to perform. The logistics was so intricate that even the military watched them closely to copy their complex organizational skills.

Agile acrobats, fearless flyers, tumblers, foot jugglers, Russian bar acrobats, trick cyclers and teeterboard pushed the boundaries of athletic ability, timing, execution, spectacular charisma, and skill. Lillian Leitzel performed a record 249 one-arm “planges” high above the center ring before she fell to her death in 1931 in Copenhagen.

Italian statuary in the museum gardens Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015

 

Nik Wallenda, seventh generation member of the famous Wallenda family, set the Guinness world record in 2008 for the longest distance and greatest height ever traveled by bicycle on a high wire.  His achievements include:  walking across the Allegheny River in 2009, walking over Niagara Falls in 2012 and in 2013, and crossing the Colorado River Gorge near the Grand Canyon on a two-inch steel cable, 1,500 feet above the river.

The leotard is named after Jules Leotard, the first to perform the flying trapeze. Brian was the first human arrow to launch from a self-made crossbow. In the 1920s Con Colleano was famous for his dancing and forward somersaults on the wire.

Hugo Zacchini, the Human Cannonball, flew more than 200 feet from a cannon. It is one of the most dangerous stunts at the circus. Daredevils use weighted projectiles to test their equipment before performance.

An empty lot was magically transformed in a few hours into a wonderland of color and spectacular showmanship, but, as soon as it arrived, it disappeared with all its clowns, props, tents, trapeze artists, and animals, and the lot became vacant once again.

The famous clown Irvin Feld (1918-1984) founded in 1968 the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College to preserve the art of clowning. A year later, Reggie Montgomery (1948-2002), the first black clown, graduated from said college. Michael “Coco” Poliakovs (1923-2009) helped create in 1963 the famous fast food mascot, Ronald McDonald. Pinto Colvig made his television debut in 1948 as “Bozo the Clown.”  Emmett Kelly’s “Weary Willie” character became the mascot for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1956. Otto Griebling (1896-1972) and Emmett Kelly (1899-1979) portrayed hobo characters, surviving the difficulties faced by many Americans in the Great Depression. (Museum Archives)

Clowns could be scary to some, but their circus characters exaggerated the quirks and foibles of everyday people, a grandma, a country bumpkin, a rube, a policeman, a hobo, or a tramp/wanderer. More than 1300 clown graduated from the RBBB “Clown College.”

Interestingly, “electric light appeared in a circus big top in 1879, the same year Thomas Edison developed his incandescent bulb.”

Parallel with the circus, the “Wild West” shows traveled the country and the world, re-enacting daring rescues, heroic battles, Native American dances, and runaway stagecoaches. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, Pawnee Bill, and The Miller Bros. 101 Ranch fascinated audiences far and wide. These shows were uniquely American, romanticizing life on the Western Frontier based on James Fenimore Cooper’s five novels and the real life hunter and scout William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody. The stereotyped life in these shows was later picked up by the motion picture industry.

Howard Tibbals Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015 from Museum Archives

 

Howard Tibbals created the most accurate replica of the canvas city called the Howard Bros. Circus, modeled after the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus. He used historic photographs and measurements from existing equipment. The 3,800 square foot model depicts the American tented circus from the 1919-1938 period of the Golden Age.

Section of Tibbals' miniature Photo: Ileana Johnson Oct. 2015

 

Howard Tibbals began work in 1956 on his Howard Bros. Circus model in the basement of his Tennessee home, using photographs he had collected.  In 1958, Tibbals met Harold Dunn, a skilled model builder whose miniature circus was displayed around the country. Tibbals built his miniature circus working at least 20 hours weekly for fifty years. He continued to add elements to his masterpiece even after the completion of the installation in 2005.

The Howard Bros. Circus miniature made its premiere in 1982 at the World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee. Howard Tibbals began the installation of his miniature in November 2004 in the Circus Museum’s Tibbals Learning Center and it took him over a year to finish his labor of love.

Cirque du Soleil, founded in 1984 in Quebec, the Big Apple Circus, founded in 1977, and Kenneth Feld’s Ringling Circus empire, delight audiences with masterpiece extravaganzas. The circus is still very much part of the American pop culture to this day, with performances under tents, in arenas, and in theaters.  As long as there are children who are dazzled by the magic, the lights, the costumes, the pageantry, and the breathtaking aerial acrobatics, the circus will live on.

 

 

Valuable Lessons at the National Museum of American History

I am always amazed how much I can learn from a museum trip if I really pay attention. The throngs of young Americans within are too hurried, carefully herded, and happy-to-be-out-of-school noisy to really learn from the exhibits. There is certainly no time to compare the items on display and the museum’s stories behind them to the “facts” taught in school in American History classes.

The National Museum of American History, located in the Kenneth E. Behring Center, is “devoted to the scientific, cultural, social, technological, and political development of the United States.” The 3 million artifacts of American history and culture occupy floors which house the famous Star-Spangled Banner, the flag that inspired our national anthem, Washington’s uniform, Thomas Jefferson’s lap desk, and other war, political, and cultural memorabilia.

http://americanhistory.si.edu/

I found my 1950 teal stove and oven in the museum. My kids always told me how outdated my kitchen was but I loved this stove that had cooked meals for 55 years for two families and was still operational when I replaced it in 2008 with a modern version. The European in me did not want to discard something that was built to last, all chrome and stainless steel.

Our love affair with travel and on the go eating and drinking was expressed in the vast collection of disposable containers and lids, “lids on the go.”

My first typewriters on which I learned dactylography were in the museum – the Remington manual and the IBM Selectric. I really thought I had arrived when our Dean bought several IBM Selectric typewriters with the approval of the communist party, and we were allowed to learn how to use them in a lab in my first year of college.

I found Grandma’s beautiful turn of the century pedal operated Singer sewing machine. She has created and sewn, without the benefit of a pattern, many wedding gowns, dresses, and suits on this machine – she was the village seamstress, a highly sought-after profession.

Julia Child’s kitchen was on full display with all the utensils, countertops, pots and pans, and dishes that the famous chef had used during her lifetime of television cooking, teaching generations of American women the fine art of French cuisine.

Few knew that Julia Child was also an American spy, hired in the summer of 1942 at OSS, the intelligence agency created by President Franklin Roosevelt as the first centralized U.S. intelligence operation. After initial clerical work, Julia worked directly for OSS Director William Donovan. It was a time when we truly spied on enemies like the Nazis and the communists, not patriotic Americans.

The records of 24,000 former OSS employees had been declassified including Julia Child, John Hemingway, son of Ernest Hemingway, Kermit Roosevelt, son of President Theodore Roosevelt, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, major league catcher Moe Berg, actor Sterling Hayden, and Miles Copeland, father of Stewart Copeland, drummer for the band The Police. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/26186498/ns/us_news-security/t/julia-child-cooked-double-life-spy/

The main entrance of the museum displayed temporarily a beautiful red and blue Conestoga Wagon, a white tarp-covered wagon that helped settlers survive by carrying goods over the Allegheny Mountains to the western frontier and then return to Philadelphia and Baltimore laden with agricultural products. These wagons were truly the “commercial life blood of the nation” until the 1850s.

A section of the museum was dedicated to gowns worn by various First Ladies. The piece de resistance was in the center - a very expensive and opulent inaugural ball gown worn by the current First Lady.

Taxidermed heroes on display included the decorated Stubby the dog who sniffed out mustard gas during WWI, Cher Ami, a carrier pigeon who flew missions and was wounded in WWI, and Winchester, General Philip Sheridan’s horse during the Civil War. General Sheridan had the horse stuffed and mounted when he died in 1878. Rienzi carried General Sheridan from Winchester, Virginia, to the battlefield of Cedar Creek. The General awakened his troops to repel a Confederate attack. Rienzi was renamed Winchester in memory of this victorious battle.

I was surprised to find that illegal voting and Reconquista were promoted back in the early 1970. A poster in Spanish said, “SIGAMOS LA CAUSA! Registrese Para Votar,” “FOLLOW THE CAUSE! Register to Vote.” In the middle of the poster, in smaller letters, the very racist phrase appears, “Viva la Raza,” “Long Live the Race.”

Illegal aliens want to break our voting laws by screaming discrimination and racism yet Mexico requires a voter ID card to show proof of citizenship in order to be allowed to vote. Democrats support La Raza’s effort since most illegals vote Democrat, strong believers in big government as a source of success and wellbeing.

Even the very liberal European Union requires proof of citizenship for voting. Yet our Supreme Court has struck down in a 7-2 decision the Arizona law that required proof of citizenship to vote. The federal government is no longer interested in enforcing immigration laws or checking if voters are American citizens. The traditional separation of powers is gone; everything is rubber-stamped according to the decisions of the federal bureaucratic elite in power.

An interesting document dated March 1, 1929, The Ohio Schoolmasters Club, quoted a British observer of Education in the U.S., “The American Schoolmaster will soon be as extinct as the American Bison.” This statement did not miss its mark by much since education is run now by the progressive Department of Education; the schoolmaster is just a head and the mastery involves the progressive platform.

The percentage of male teachers in the U.S. of that time showed an interesting down-spiraling trend - perhaps men were busy fighting wars.

1880 …. 43%
1890 …. 35%
1900 …. 30%
1910 …. 21%
1920 …. 14%
1921 …. 11%
1930 …. ??

ABC News reported in 2008 that the number of male teachers “keeps shrinking, citing reasons such as parent bias, fear of abuse allegations, and low pay. http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Parenting/story?id=6070282&page=1#.UcML8YzD_mI

The current female-dominated trend in the teaching profession explains the obvious; most of the socialist indoctrination that occurs in public schools has been and is done by female teachers and by progressives who write textbooks that alter historical fact, promoting their version of revisionist history.

The most favorite section of the museum with male visitors was “The Price of Freedom – Americans at War.” World War II massive war materiel overwhelmed the Axis enemies, and it would certainly have made the industrial military complex proud today. But the war was a just one then, and America, with the help of its allies, restored freedom to the entire European continent.

-         324,000 aircraft

-         88,000 tanks

-         8,800 warships

-         5,600 merchant ships

-         224,000 pieces of artillery

-         2,382,000 trucks

-         79,000 landing craft

-         2,600,000 machine guns

-         15,000,000 guns

-         20,800,000 helmets

-         41,000,000,000 rounds of ammunition (Numbers from the 1995 Oxford Companion to World War II and The 1993 World War II Databook)

From the Cold War section of the museum, a chunk of the Berlin Wall, the Wall of Shame, bears witness to the evil tyranny of communism. This wall was built in 1961 to separate the Communist section of East Berlin from the free West Berlin section. For ninety-six miles within the city, “concrete slabs, wire-mesh fences, barbed wire, trenches, dog runs, watchtowers, and searchlights” separated brutal oppression from freedom.

On November 9, 1989, eager German family members who wanted to be reunited with their loved ones, climbed the wall and started to chisel and hammer chunks out of the wall. It was so strongly built, only bulldozers could take it down, a symbol of the heavily entrenched and cemented communism.

President Reagan’s words in 1987 became prophetic, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” By 1991 the Soviet Union had broken up into independent nations, the “evil empire” was no more. However, the ideology of the evil empire, communism, is very much alive. With its oppressive iron curtain, it has morphed into the hearts and minds of very young Europeans yearning for the promised utopia, and the disease has spread across the ocean.

The Spotsylvania Tree Stump was a remnant of a stately oak tree shading a meadow outside Spotsylvania Court House, Virginia, and witness to a bloody battle between 1,200 Confederates of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and 5,000 Union troops from the Second Corps of the Army of the Potomac.  The peaceful meadow became known twenty-four hours later as the Bloody Angle. The same bullets that killed 2,000 combatants of this Civil War battle reduced the majestic oak to a twenty-two inch stump.

A special dark room was dedicated to a huge American flag, 30 by 34 feet, which was raised over Baltimore’s Fort McHenry on September 14, 1814 and inspired Francis Scott Key to write “The Star-Spangled Banner.” 

Made of wool bunting with cotton stars  by Mary Pickersgill of Baltimore (a professional flag maker) in the summer of 1813, the famous flag has 15 stars and 15 stripes, the official U.S. flag from 1795-1818, It was originally 30 by 42 feet – one star and other pieces were cut out as “patriotic keepsakes” in the 1800s. Mary was helped by four teenagers, her daughter, two nieces, and an African American indentured servant, who stitched together the “broad stripes and bright stars.”

Our flag today is often disrespected by being sold as door mats, underwear, shoes, hats, t-shirts; worse yet, Americans and enemies alike burn our flag to show hatred and contempt for America. Soldiers who have fought to preserve our flag and freedom must be turning in their blood-soaked graves.

The song that became our national anthem in 1931 by Congressional decree was sung at all public ceremonies since Francis Scott Key wrote the words to fit the melody of “To Anacreon in Heaven,” an 18^th century British song. It raised the spirits of our nation during the War of 1812 and during the Civil War, gaining more popularity each year. Today many performers alter and dishonor the anthem in the name of misguided artistic expression.

Leaving the museum, I found at 601 Pennsylvania Avenue, a plaque which claims to be the spot where in 1814 “The Star Spangled Banner” was first sung in public.

As an economist and teacher, my favorite parts of the museum were those dedicated to technology and currency.

Various steam engines, locomotives, tractors, motorized wagons, first cars, electric cars, buses, boats, station wagons, delivery trucks, elevators, gas pumps, electric pumps, and other motorized items described our technological history in motion.

An original Pennsylvania Turnpike plaza sign described our first long distance superhighway which opened on October 1, 1940 stretching 160 miles from Carlisle to Irwin.

The 1904 Columbia Runabout was the “bestselling car in the United States in 1900 and the first to exceed 1,000 sales.” The Runabout pictured was driven by John Oscar Skinner, superintendent of the Columbia Hospital for Women in Washington, D.C. until 1932. Wealthy urbanites bought electric cars because battery maintenance was complicated, recharging a battery was not possible in the rural areas, electric rates were high, and mileage between recharges was very low.

The electric car was revived in the 1990s by the California zero-emissions initiative and specs have improved somewhat. Electricity rates are still high, electricity is still produced with coal (49%), batteries are better, mileage between recharges is still low, the 6 recharge stations at the mall in Crystal City are always empty, and very expensive models brick themselves when they run out of charge and must be re-tooled at the factory for the whopping price of $40,000.

Route 66, dubbed the “People’s Highway,” affected American lives in many ways. Route 66, commissioned in 1926, was fully paved by late 1930s. It ran from Chicago to Los Angeles. John Steinbeck called it the “Mother Road” in the Grapes of Wrath because it allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants affected by the Great Depression to travel to California seeking jobs and a better life. Route 66 gained so much fame, way beyond its utility as a trucking route. It became a road of hope and of starting over, hoping for a better, more successful life, running away from past troubles.

Americans used roads in the 1920-1940s to migrate to new places of employment, to earn a living on the road as salesmen, or by the side of the road running businesses, and to travel for pleasure, seeing the highway as a symbol of independence and freedom. The government built the highways but it was taxpayers who funded them, it was private businesses and entrepreneurs who made it possible as well by building gas stations, garages, and making tires and other car parts. 

How easy will it be to pluck Americans from their beloved roads in order to satisfy the environmentalist agenda of sustainability, giving back paved roads to wildlife habitat, and regressing life to a time when humans could only go in their immediate surrounding area?

The road toll in human life began to mount. In 1913 more than 4,000 people died in car accidents. In the 1930s 30,000 people died in car related accidents. It was assumed that people’s behavior caused accidents and a massive campaign began, driven by safety advocates involving engineering, enforcement, and education – educating drivers and pedestrians, designing safer roads, and manufacturing safer automobiles. As we are driven into smaller and smaller cars such as the Smart Car, the environmentalist EPA agenda of saving the environment from car-made pollution is definitely more important than saving human lives.

Not surprising, the museum promotes the existence of scientifically not proven man-made global warming. “Since the 1960s, smog, greenhouse gases, global warming, and strained gas supplies have prompted a new look at electric cars.” There is certainly an abundance of gas in many discovered oil-shale reserves. The problem is that the EPA and the administration refuse to give permits for new drilling and the XL pipeline to bring gas from Canada. There are too many crony-capitalists who carry gasoline by rail who stand to be hurt financially by the approval of the XL pipeline.

An array of Watt-hour meters on display from the 1890s by Thomson, Sangamo, Westinghouse, and Stanley, still operational, measured the amount of electrical energy consumed. Cheap and reliable, valued now at as little as $2, traditional meters are being  replaced by their very expensive new cousin, the Smart Meter, sold for around $150, so smart that the digital readout fries in the intense sun after three years, requiring another expensive replacement. The Environmentalist agenda requires and demands the Smart Meters and the interconnected smart grid, a sitting duck to solar flares, cyber-attacks, and spying by government, individual hackers, and companies who pay for “consumer data mining.”

The last interesting section of the National Museum of American History was the money exhibit. Kings and queens have put their images with messages of patriotism, prosperity, and power on coins and paper money. The Shilling (Mary and Phillip II of Spain, 1955), the Ruble (Catherine II, 1762), Byzantine Empire Solidus (Constantine VI and Irene, 780), England 5 pounds (Queen Victoria, 1887), Egypt 80 Drachms (Cleopatra VII, 51-30 BC) are such examples.

Colonists circulated and accepted foreign coins, some reluctantly, such as the Rosa Americana Penny from England (1723). The England Shilling (1676) and Farthing (1614-1625), Peru’s 8 Reales (1756) and 8 Escudos (1699), Brazil’s 12,800 Reis (1730), Mexico’s 2 Escudos (1714), Mexico’s 2 Reales (1621-1665), Mexico Real (1540), France 2 Louis D’or (1710) were examples of foreign coins circulated by colonists.

Because precious metals were not readily available to colonists, the first coins struck in English North America (1607-1765) used silver from the melting down of foreign coins and inscribing them NE (New England) with its minting origin in Massachusetts – the Shilling (1652), the Oak Tree Shilling (1660-1667), the Willow Tree Shilling (1653-1660), and the Pine Tree Shilling (1667-1674).

Colonists also bartered and used local money such as wampum shells, ten-penny nails, and tobacco. Different cultures and areas used strange artifacts as money. Malaysia used the Kedah “Rooster” in the18^th century. The Chinese Turkistan used Brick Tea Money in the 19^th century. Russia used Blue Glass Trade Beads in the 19^th century. Belgian Congo used Katanga Cross about 1900. Pismo Beach, California used Clamshell scrips worth a dollar in 1933. During the Great Depression in 1933, some communities only circulated the clamshell which was worth one dollar.

The gold rush of 1825-1875 in the southeast (Carolinas and Georgia), California in 1848, and across the west furnished private minters with the raw material to make the first coins. The government eventually took over. Gold coins of one, twenty, and fifty dollars appeared.

After so many robberies, killings over gold, and the shaving of coin edges for gold dust, miners realized that paper money was safer. Images of the wild-west appeared on the first paper money. Private banks printed their own money to serve the surrounding community.

The very first federal twenty-dollar coin minted in 1849, known as the double eagle, is considered to be the most historically significant. In early 1933, 400,000 double eagles were minted. When America went off the gold standard, all but twenty coins survived the ordered melting. Of the 18,000 five-dollar gold pieces produced in 1822 by the Mint, all but three were melted down.

Today’s dollar, the “world’s reserve currency” and “petrodollar,” is not backed by anything anymore, not even the full “faith and credit” in our government. The Fed keeps printing/creating $85 billion each month until such time that the Chairman of the Reserve Board decides that the unemployment rate has magically hit 6.5 percent. There is Santa Claus for the very rich and the 47 percent “poor” who pay no taxes. For the rest of us, there is the IRS Scrooge.

I can honestly say that I learned more from artifacts in one day at the National Museum of American History than I was taught an entire semester of American (revisionist) History class in college.