I was just informed that the Carlisle Town Band will be playing “Carlisle Indian School March” at their concert on Sunday. Several years ago, I found the sheet music for it in the National Archives. Unfortunately, Dennison Wheelock only provided a score for piano. Some years ago, I gave the sheet music to the band so their arranger could write the parts for the various band instruments. At long last the scoring has been finished and the Carlisle Town Band will be playing Wheelock’s march in a concert for the public.
Prior to this, all unmusical me was able to do was to input the piano score into MuseScore and get a synthesized piano output. You can play it by clicking on here. You may have to skip over an ad or two before it plays.
Earlier, I was able to get the Second Presbyterian Church choir to sing the Carlisle School Song, written by Pop Warner. To hear it click here.
I hope to get a recording of the fully instrumented version of Carlisle Indian School March.
Robert “Bob” Wheeler and his wife, Florence “Flo” Ridlon received the AAU Gussie Crawford Lifetime Achievement Award for their several-decades-long work in championing Jim Thorpe and getting his Olympic medals and records reinstated by the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
“The award is intended to recognize those whose efforts, both on and off the playing field, have paved the way for great change in amateur sports. First awarded in 2016, this is the seventh time the AAU Crawford Award has been given out.”
Bob is best known for his definitive biography Jim Thorpe. Dr. Ridlon received her Ph.D. in sociology from Syracuse University and has written two published works: A Black Physician’s Struggle for Civil Rights: Edward C. Mazique and A Fallen Angel: The Status Insularity of the Female Alcoholic.
It was Flo’s research in the Library of Congress that found the written copy of the 1912 Olympic Rules that had fallen behind other books on the shelf. Jim’s disqualification was disqualified by those rules, which set the challenge date as no longer than a month after the Olympics were played. Thorpe’s challenge was placed months later, making it invalid according to the rules.
Bob and Flo have worked decades in getting Thorpe’s medals and records returned and reinstated, making recognition of their work long overdue.
I heard rumors of the Jim Thorpe Memorial at Jim Thorpe, PA being refreshed. Let’s hope they’re true.
One of the things I’m occasionally asked to do is to verify that a painting was done by Lone Star Dietz or estimate what one would sell for on the open market. I am completely unable to estimate the value of Dietz’s (or anyone else’s) paintings. However, I’ve seen enough of his works to make an educated guess regarding it authenticity. Another factor in my reasoning is that the sales I’m aware of have been of relatively small amounts, so small that counterfeiting his paintings wouldn’t be a worthwhile enterprise.
Like many artists, Dietz changed the signature he used on his paintings and illustrations, so expecting his signature to always be the same is unrealistic. I was recently sent three photos of parts of a painting someone purchased relatively recently.
The first photo is of a harbor scene painted on a canvas board (included above). The artist’s signature is located in the lower right hand corner and is blown up in the third photo (at the bottom of this article). The second photo (below)is of the back of the painting. Harrison Art Center may be where Dietz bought art supplies and had paintings framed while he was assisting Pop Warner coach the Temple Owls football team. The store seems to be no longer in business.
I bought a painting titled “Vacation Land” some years ago. The work, also painted on canvas board, seems similar enough that it might have been painted by the same person. It is signed “William Dietz.” On the back below the title of the painting is “by Wm H Dietz.” His birth certificate, recorded five years after his birth, gives his name as William Henry Dietz. He signed the painting one way and put his name on the back another way. This inconsistency is not unexpected.
I stumbled across a video about Operation Thirsty Camel the other day. My first assignment in the Air Force after tech school was to the 405th Armament and Electronics Maintenance Squadron (405th A&E) at Clark AFB in The Philippines. I was trained to maintain MG-13 and MG-10 Automatic Weapons Control Systems on F-101B and F-102A aircraft, respectively because these systems were almost identical. At Clark there were two squadrons of Deuces (F-102s) and no F-101s. The MG-10 system used radar and infrared to track enemy bombers and shoot them down with the missiles and rockets kept inside the aircraft.
One of the squadrons we maintained, the 64th FIS, was relatively new to the base, arriving in 1966. When I arrived in early 1967, all of the Deuces were camouflaged but did not have the large squadron codes on their tails yet. Some of the 64th birds had unusual brackets. Oldtimers told me that the brackets were from the in-flight refueling systems that had been installed on the 64th planes to get them from Paine Field, Washington to the P.I. during operation Thirsty Camel.
Century Series fighter planes were not usually equipped for in-flight refueling, but the Vietnam War heating up necessitated getting more interceptors across the Pacific in a hurry. I was told that two planes were assigned to each tanker, a KC-135, for the flight. Fighters suck up so much fuel that one or the other of the pair was always getting refueled. The fuel usage may not have necessitated that, but it was advisable to keep as much fuel in each plane as possible in case an emergency erupted.
Follows is a link to the video about Operation Thirsty Camel. It’s hokey in places but is a fun watch. The first planes to go weren’t from the 64th. They were from a squadron that was sent to Okinawa. The 64th pilots and birds went a few months later.
Two things happened last week related (in my mind) to this post. First, American interceptors were scrambled to confront Chines and Russian planes over the Bering Sea, and second, The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming was shown on Turner Classic Movies.
First things first. A pair of intruding bombers, a Russian TU-95 Bear and a Chinese H-6 flew over the Bering Sea, close to American airspace. Three interceptors were scrambled to deter the bogies: an American F-16 and an F-35 plus a Canadian CF-18. The intruders departed without incident. In my day, a pair of F-102s from the 317th FIS at Elmendorf AFB near Anchorage, Alaska would have made the intercept as they did numerous times back then.
Second. The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming was set in 1966 on the fictitious Massachusetts island named Gloucester but was filmed in California. The story started with a Soviet (it was the height of the Cold War at that time) submarine running aground by an incompetent crew. Eventually, the Air Defense Command dispatched two interceptors to investigate. A pair of F-101Bs flew across the screen. Since this movie came out while I was in tech school for the MG-13 weapons control system that was used on that model aircraft, it was especially interesting to me. Before that, I hadn’t even seen a photo of an F-101. An odd coincidence occurred because, had it been real life, the Air Force would have sent two planes from Otis AFB in Massachusetts. Based at Otis was a squadron of F-101Bs. With the film being made in California, the nearest interceptors were the F-101Bs stationed at Hamilton AFB.
When I my tour in the Far East was up, which included TDYs to Vietnam and Thailand, I received orders for the 49th FIS at Griffiss AFB in Rome, New York. I looked forward to working on F-101s, the planes the 49th had at that time. However, during my transit from halfway around the world, the 49th’s F-101s were replaced with F-106s from Kincheloe AFB, Michigan. The F-106 started out as an F-102B but so many changes were made, including the weapons control system, I was then working on the MA-1 system, also manufactured by Hughes Aircraft. It used transistors where the MG-10/MG-13 systems used vacuum tubes, the functions were similar. I was discharged on December 26, 1969 without ever touching an F-101.
The news media are running reports that Robert Griffin III, aka RGIII, is urging fans to urge the Washington NFL franchise owners to reinstate the team’s former logo. This week he posted on X (formerly Twitter) the following message: “Dear Washington Commanders fans, this is a safe space. Would you be happy if the old logo was brought back?” The message was accompanied with his photo (above) in the old uniform. That post received 13 million views, 11 thousand replies, 2.9 thousand reposts, and 88 thousand likes.
He followed that up two days later with this question: “Would you rather Washington keep the current name or go back to the Football Team?”
The final results for the second question were 39.6% for Washington Commanders and 60.4% for the Washington Football Team. The generic name won by a 3 to 2 margin. That’s like saying a majority would rather have no name than Commanders.
The article on FanBuzz went on to include the results of a 2004 poll of 700 self-identified Native Americans of which less than 10 percent were offended by the name. Still, powerful activists were able to convince journalists and corporations that this term, which was originated by the Piankashaws in 1769 to differentiate themselves from white and Black men.
Perhaps lack of fan support will convince Commanders owners to consider a change.
Is Caitlin Clark the next Jim Thorpe or Red Grange? I’m not speaking from an athletic sense but from an economic sense. The WNBA is in a similar situation as was professional football in 1915—except they have a sugar daddy. The WNBA operates as a loss and the NBA’s largess keeps them solvent. This subsidy makes possible paying WNBA players salaries comparable to those of their college classmates who graduate with useful degrees.
In 1915 professional football wasn’t even professional. It was semi-pro. If the team turned a profit, it was divided among the players. If there was no profit, they got nothing. Players supported themselves working regular jobs, some of which were very physical. The games were played on Sunday, not because high school games were played on Friday and colleges played on Saturday. They were played on Sunday because that was the only day most players had off from the jobs that supported themselves and their families. The 40-hour work week wasn’t instituted until 1940. Before that, most worked six days a week.
When Jack Cusack, the Canton Bulldogs semi-pro team manager, offered Jim Thorpe $250 a game to play for his team, the other managers thought he would run his team into bankruptcy. Even larger sums had been paid to ringers for single games, but no player had been paid anything to rival this amount for each and every game. The result was that attendance more than doubled at Canton’s games, making both Canton and its opponents more solvent. Keep in mind that Thorpe’s last college game was played in 1912, the same year Big Jim won gold medals in both the decathlon and pentathlon at the Stockholm Olympic games. After that, he played Major League Baseball for the New York Giants and, after the 1915 season, coached the Indiana University backfield.
The next major step in solidifying professional football as a going concern occurred a decade later at the end of the college season when Illinois star Red Grange left college to turn pro for the Chicago Bears. “The Galloping Ghost”, “The Wheaton Iceman,” or “Number 77” had gained mythical status in 1924 when he scored four touchdowns in twelve minutes against mighty Michigan. The NFL had been formed five years earlier with Jim Thorpe as its nominal commissioner. The league was far from solvent up to that time. Teams came and went, including most of the founders. Things changed when Charles C. “Cash and Carry” Pyle signed Grange to a $100,000 contract.
The question now is Will Caithlin Clark elevate the WNBA as Thorpe and Grange raised pro football?
In recent years, much ink has been splashed on newsprint regarding graves of students at government or church operated off-reservation Indian schools. Not infrequently, things that happened at other schools were attributed to Carlisle Indian School without evidence to back up the claims. Some of the most egregious claims were made about schools operated by the Roman Catholic Church in Canada.
The discovery of a child’s tooth and a juvenile rib bone by a tourist and stories of elders and knowledge keepers about dead students being buried at night in the orchard of Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia led to conclusions that missing children were buried in mass graves on the site. Ground-penetrating radar was brought in to determine if the orchard was indeed a mass burial site. The study indicated that 215 possible graves were located under the ground but excavations would be needed to determine if human remains were present or not. Technicians operating the equipment indicated that tree roots, metal objects, and stones could also be detected.
Dr. Sarah Beaulieu, a modern conflict anthropologist who teaches at University of the Fraser Valley, who performed the search, revised the initial estimate of probable grave sites downward to 200 after considering previous excavation work done in the area that may have affected the results.
This discovery led to Pope Francis issuing a formal apology for the Catholic Church’s role in operating the government Indian schools and reporting by all the major media in the United States in Canada. It also led to the burning of at least 85 historic Catholic churches and the appropriation of hundreds of millions of dollars by the Canadian Federal government.
7.9 million was spent to excavate the site. It has now been reported that the excavation found no mass grave site or any human remains.
Recent news articles about the American shipbuilding industry lagging far behind China, Japan, and South Korea brought to mind my first job after finishing college. While attending college I worked as a technician at Emerson Electric designing motors for refrigerators and air conditioners. That experience helped he land a job at Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company writing FØRTAN programs for electrical engineering applications.
My major project was a voltage drop program for the USS Nimitz (CVN-68) and USS Eisenhower (CVN-69) aircraft carriers. I worked with an engineer I will call Howard, who was a little older than me but considerably more experienced. Howard was so convinced that the shipyard was wasting money that he offered to work for no salary if he could keep a small percentage of what he saved them. He viewed inefficient practices at the shipyard as shoveling money into the James River and letting it float away into the ocean. Management didn’t consider his offer seriously. From recent news reports American shipbuilders haven’t become that much more efficient than they were in the early 1970s.
Howard provided the theory and I developed a model and wrote code to implement it. As electricity travels along a wire, a portion of it is loss to resistance. The longer the wire, the greater the loss. If the loss is too great, the size of the wire must be increased. Since wires can’t grow to increase in size, they must be replaced with a wire of the same length but of a larger diameter. If a wire proved to be too short, it couldn’t be lengthened; a new one must be cut. This was where the problems lay. For an aircraft carrier, the wires that distribute electrical current throughout the ship are very large in diameter and long, sometimes as thick as a grown man’s forearm just below the elbow and as long as a football field. This is a lot of copper and copper is expensive, too expensive to be throwing into the James River.
Engineers computed the lengths and gauges (thickness) of the cables (wires) that were needed in a room reminiscent of the scenes in the movie Hidden Figures where men computed figures for NASA’s Mercury Program. Changes or errors rippled down the line causing many previous calculations to be incorrect and requiring up- and/or downstream cables to be changed. These computations took a lot of time to make and were often completed after the cables were cut. Too often cables had to be replaced with larger, more expensive ones. If that wasn’t waste enough, the replaced cables were often not used elsewhere, just scrapped.
The computer program we developed performed the computations much more quickly than could be done manually. Making corrections before cables were cut would save millions of dollars over the construction of a behemoth carrier. Howard and I considered doing the manual calculations drudgery plus Howard knew of important engineering tasks that were not being done because engineers were tied up calculating voltage drops. His hope was to free up his colleagues from this drudgery to do actual engineering. Comfortable with the existing task and fearful of the unknown, the engineers resisted the change. Human nature does not change quickly, so one would expect new inefficiencies now exist and aren’t being corrected.
The Nimitz and Eisenhower are now scheduled to be scrapped by the end of the decade. One wonders if their replacements are being built more efficiently. I suspect so but not as efficiently as those being built in China, Japan, and South Korea.
One of the artifacts Craighead House holds is a framed certificate complete with official seal and ribbon from then governor of Kentucky, John Y. Brown Jr., commissioning Jean Craighead George as a Kentucky Colonel. It was dated 9 September 1983, the 92nd year of the Commonwealth. Like Pennsylvania, Kentucky is also a commonwealth, whatever that means.
Research into Indiana’s Sagamore of the Wabash honorific found that the Bluegrass State’s Kentucky Colonel program had existed long before Indiana’s. Kentucky’s goes all the way back to its first governor, Isaac Shelby, who put his son-in-law, Charles Todd, on his staff with the title of Colonel, and not to the Civil War as many suspect. Shelby, who had fought in battles against the Indians in colonial times and against the British during the Revolutionary War, as governor raised a force of 3,500 volunteers and led them in the Battle of Thames during the War of 1812 against the British. After the war, he commissioned all who had enlisted in his regiment as Colonels. Later on, other governors commissioned Colonels to act as their protectors. They even wore uniforms and were present at most official functions.
In 1932, the chief counsel of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Charles Pettijohn, convinced then Governor Ruby Laffoon to found The Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels. He then appointed Pettijohn as the National Commanding General of the Order, a position that was responsible for the finances of the Order. Anna Bell Ward was appointed Secretary and was given the task of organizing the Order. Later on it was made a charitable organization.
The Governor and Lieutenant Governor serve as the unpaid Commander-in-Chief and Deputy Commander-in-Chief, respectively. The Order continues to this day. Commissions are for the recipients’ lifetimes but membership in the Order requires annual donations to the Good Works Program. The Order also sells memorabilia to raise money and holds a major event over the Kentucky Derby weekend each year. Active members are also expected to help out during the Annual Day of Service.
Numerous famous people, including movie actors, Presidents, and star athletes. Winston Churchill was a Kentucky Colonel. The most unusual commissioning was that of John Glenn while he was orbiting the earth in a Mercury capsule.
Someone must have considered Jean’s works important enough to nominate her commission.
Below is what was mounted on the backside of her commission.
Last week the wife of one of my grad school professors called to tell me that he had died. I won’t dwell here on the tremendous loss his demise is to me but will explore something new I learned. This Indiana University professor was a leader in his field for decades and received many honors, one of which may sound unusual. He was made a Sagamore of the Wabash, the state’s highest civilian honor, by the Governor of Indiana. Unfamiliar with this name, I looked up its meaning. As defined by Merriam-Webster, a sagamore is a subordinate Algonquin chief or sachem. In practice, a sagamore was a person the head chief relied on for advice due to his experience and wisdom. My old professor definitely was a source of wisdom and he didn’t hold a high political office. The Wabash part is self-explanatory to anyone familiar with the geography of Indiana or is aware of songs about that river, including the popular song recorded by The Mills Brothers among others, “On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away,” which was established as the Indiana State Song by the Indiana Code in 1913. But how did this honorific come into being?
Indiana Governor Ralph Gates (1945-1949) was about to attend a tri-state conference with officials of Ohio and Kentucky in Cincinnati when he was informed that the governor of Kentucky was planning on naming him a Kentucky Colonel, the Bluegrass State’s highest honor. Something had to be done because Indiana had no such honor. The Life and Times of Little Turtle, First Sagamore of the Wabash provided more details on the honorific’s conception: “In 1946 Indiana governor Ralph F. Gates created the Council of the Sagamores of the Wabash in response to a suggestion made by Samuel R. Harrell, who had been named a Kentucky Colonel and felt that Indiana needed a similar reciprocal honorary organization. Kurt Pantzer joined with Harrell in devising the details.” Business executive (and World War I pilot) Samuel R. Harrell and attorney Kurt Pantzer were both good Hoosiers, Wabash College alums, and friends of Governor Gates. Harrell suggested “Honorary Citizen of Indiana” for the name of the award. Attorney General James Emmert proposed “Hoosier Schoolmaster.” Patzer’s idea “‘Sagamore of the Wabash’ was deemed to be more deeply steeped in the history of Indiana.”
Governor Gates made Simeon S. Willis, Governor of Kentucky, the first Sagamore of the Wabash and Ohio Senator Robert Taft the second. Kentucky wags suggested that Willis’s naming the Indiana governor a “Kentucky Colonel” as “a long step forward toward getting Indiana cooks to stop putting sugar in cornbread.”
After reading up on this topic I recalled that Jean Craighead George had been named a “Kentucky Colonel.” More on that next time.
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