Showing posts with label Rensselaer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rensselaer. Show all posts

Sunday, December 18, 2011

Unidentified Flying Objects Revisited



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An ABC News headline reports: A UFO Hovers Over Russians Protesting Vladimir Putin.

Here is the link to the news report with its story, a photo, and a short video.

Such poppycock! But that's our network news for you.

On that same subject, but on a more serious note (I think) I came across a book about UFOs that can be read online. I have only just begun to read it, but I thought I would first reveal its existence for perusal by anyone interested in the subject of Unidentified Flying Objects. You know... in case I find myself growing weary of the subject or become skeptical after further reading in the book. I often do that.

The cover of the book reads:

Report On Unidentified Flying Objects by Edward J. Ruppelt former head of the United States Air Force Project Blue Book Investigating Flying Saucers




Throughout my long lifetime, from 1939 till the present day, I have three times seen a UFO, not necessarily objects of extraterrestrial origin, but certainly in the sense of each being an Unidentified Flying Object.



The first time I saw a UFO was while walking in the late afternoon along the banks of the Iroquois River in Rensselaer, Indiana with my father, my youngest brother, and my cousin Russell. One of those three (don't remember which one) called out, "Hey! Look up there!"

When I did so, I saw a brilliant object that looked about the size of a basketball or big balloon floating East to West along the river. It appeared to be roughly fifty feet in the air, just drifting lazily along with sparks shooting out from it and what seemed to be burning bits of fiery stuff (burning paper?) floating down from it.

Strangely enough, we never thought much of anything special about it. I don't remember ever mentioning it to anyone, nor do I remember any of the others ever speaking about it either.

But it most definitely was an Unidentified Flying Object.

The second time I spotted a UFO was in that same town, where I was employed at the time as an Electric Power Company midnight shift Plant Operator. During those long lonely nights, to get away from the incessant pounding roar of the Diesel Generators and the acrid fuel fumes, I would walk outside for a few moments and breathe in some fresh air in the dark silence of the night. The stars in the sky always drew my gaze upward.

One night while I was out viewing the vast panorama I saw an object that seemed to be about the size of the average star but was a lot brighter and was moving fast from West to East on a trajectory along the inside of the sky's star-filled dome.

I watched it travel along its path all the way across the sky until it reached the far end of its flight and seemed to disappear behind the trees and buildings that hid the far Eastern horizon.

That was in the late 1970s and forever after that I suspected that it had been one of the Earth's communication satellites shooting across the sky in its calculated orbit.

But I'll never know.

My third and last sighting (so far) was, again in Rensselaer, just after a violent thunderstorm. I was walking toward the downtown area when I saw above the flagpole atop the County Courthouse a huge round ball of bright light among the dark clouds. It seemed to be hovering high above the flagpole. Believe it or not, I had my camera with me and snapped a trio of pictures. And all three of them developed nicely.

Well... I took the pictures to the local daily newspaper, the Rensselaer Republican, and told the reporter my story. The next day one of the pictures and my story appeared on the front page. Of course, the caption under the picture was: "UFO sighted above courthouse? No, just a curious weather phenomenon generated by yesterday's storm."

Those are the stories of my three personal encounters with UFOs.

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"Of course it is possible that UFO's really do contain aliens as many people believe, and the Government is hushing it up."
--Professor Stephen Hawking

"We must insist upon full access to disks recovered. For instance, in the LA case the Army grabbed it and would not let us have it for cursory examination."
--J Edgar Hoover

"I don't laugh at people any more when they say they've seen UFOs. I've seen one myself!"
--President Jimmy Carter (1976)

"I looked out the window and saw this white light. It was zigzagging around. I went up to the pilot and said, Have you ever seen anything like that? He was shocked and he said, "Nope." And I said to him: "Let's follow it!" We followed it for several minutes. It was a bright white light. We followed it to Bakersfield, and all of a sudden to our utter amazement it went straight up into the heavens. When I got off the plane I told Nancy all about it."
--President Ronald Reagen

"I'm not at liberty to discuss the governments knowledge of extraterrestrial UFOs at this time. I am still personally being briefed on the subject!"
--President Richard M. Nixon

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Rensselaer, IN - My Hometown



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Little Cousin Jasper
By James Whitcomb Riley


Little Cousin Jasper, he
Don't live in this town, like me -
He lives 'way to Rensselaer,
An' ist comes to visit here.

He says 'at our court-house square
Ain't nigh big as theirn is there!-
He says there town's big as four
Er five towns like this, an' more!

He says ef his folks moved here
He'd cry to leave Rensselaer
'Cause they's prairie ther, an' Lakes,
An' wile-ducks an' rattlesnakes!

Yes, 'n' Jasper he says they
Got a brass band there, an' play
On it, an' march up an down
An' all over round the town!

Wisht our town ain't like it is! -
Wisht it's ist as big as his!
Wisht 'at his folks they'd move here,
An we'd move to Rensselaer!
__________

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Must A Title Be Appropriate To Content?


Mandatory Flu shots are being considered in a county in Utah. Fox News has been reporting on this for the last few days. As I see it, this is just another indicator of America's tendency toward socialism, to blindly allow the government to control all aspects of everyday life.

But I don't want to get myself all worked up about that. Not at this time, anyway. I have too many pressing projects in the works right now.

. . .

The AWAD word for today is cozen.

cozen (KUHZ-uhn)
verb tr.: To trick or deceive.

The origin of the word is not certain. It is perhaps from French cousiner, in the sense of one claiming to be a cousin to derive a benefit from the relationship. According to another theory, it is derived from obsolete Italian cozzonare, from Italian cozzone (horse trader), from Latin cocio (dealer). The word cousin is also slang for someone gullible.

. . .

Currently I am working on a short-story for the Halloween story-writing contest sponsored by Writers, the finished submission to be entered before the last week of this month.

And I am frantically preparing my rough outline for a complete novel I'll be writing as a part of the NaNoWriMo competition, to be started on November 1 and ending the last day of that month. At least 50,000 (unedited) words in a month. That's quite a challenge.


It is perfectly okay to write garbage
. . . as long as you edit brilliantly.
--C. J. Cherryh

. . .

Rensselaer Adventures reports some light frost for October 5 and the blog has some photos of this year's OctoberFest 2010 in my old hometown of Rensselaer, IN. There are probably few readers who will find that of interest, but that's okay. I do. The Ritz Theater sign in the pictures brings back memories of my early years in Rensselaer (1939 - 1980) even though the Ritz back then was located around the corner and down the block on Washington Street. What is now the Ritz was then the Palace Theater.

Times they are a'changin'.


"Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there."
-Will Rogers

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Sunday, January 24, 2010

Surreal Is As Surreal Does


The Wondrous Jots & Tittles I Have Seen,
Glimpsed As Through A Darkened Pane,
Reveal A World That Might Have Been,
Snapshots Of A Higher Happier Plane.

The perpetrator of the above was me, Gene Chambers. I alone am responsible for it. If anyone should be ashamed of having created such a curious piece of work, it is I, and I alone.


Oh WOW!

Just now, I saw out my window a flock of brightly colored parakeets. They appeared before my eyes as if they'd blossomed forth from some other dimension, 8 or 10 of them, hopping around in the grass, no kidding, out on my front lawn, a blue one, two green & yellow ones, and several darker-feathered ones.

The birds arrived in a flash and left in a flash. I had only a brief but delightful glimpse of them.

Oh WOW!



What exactly is sensation?

Is it related to an epiphany?

I should think not.

The former is only a flash, a glimpse of a potential idea or concept, lacking the concreteness produced by weighty
pondering and yet somehow excitingly memorable: a sudden stab of inspired feeling.

The latter is a seemingly instantaneous conclusion drawn from extended subconscious musings upon the former.

Or so it seems to me.





Jocular Jots and Titillating Tittles? Oh yes. Oh yes, indeed.

I found an old picture of the church I joined and attended in the early and mid-1950s. Being a member of the town's recognized in-group (doctors, lawyers, educators) seemed at the time a judicious and wise decision.

And there was a ping-pong table in a back room.



First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)

Rensselaer, Indiana


The minister was Joe Fitch. Most of the more pious members of the church called him Reverend Fitch, but I called him Joe. He didn't seem to mind. Not only was he my pastor, he was the father of a saucy young girl (a school classmate) that I admired from afar. And he was at one point (during my teenage hoodlum years) an understanding and lenient probation officer.





On a completely different note . . .

While searching for appropriate pictures to insert into this posting, I happened upon one of West Washington Street (the main drag) taken in Rensselaer back in 1910. There seems to be an electric light hanging from a wire above the intersection. Could be a traffic signal. Did they have traffic lights back then?


Notice the pounded-dirt surface of the road.



Speaking of roads . . .

The Road Not Taken
by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.


"The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost.


Looking back I now can see that I did that too; instead of the brightly lighted path I took the shadowed weed-grown road, the crooked, twisted secluded way, that winding back-road that is most often shunned. Because it seemed the right one, the only one, the one created surely just for me.

And from time's penultimate perspective I can see that, indeed, it has made all the difference.


Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Era Of Coal: Bins, Buckets, And Shovels


The picture below was featured in Rensselaer Adventures Jan. 19, 2010 with its owner writing about how coal is still being used at St. Joseph's College, located on the south side of Rensselaer, Indiana.


According to the author, SJC still uses coal in its power plant, which does not produce any electricity but which does produce the heat and hot water that the campus uses.


I can remember the days when I was a raggedy little urchin living at the intersection of Angelica and Melville in Rensselaer back in the 1940s. We had a "coal-bin" in our basement with big chunks of coal that we used to have to break up with a hammer and then carry the little chips and nuggets over in a "coal-bucket" to feed the small iron stove that heated the water for our bathroom and kitchen.

Our old coal bucket looked like this one.


Pretty heavy load for an eight-year-old.

Sometimes in the winter the ashes would accumulate, block the draft, and the fire would go out. And it was my job to get the ashes scooped out, the stove filled back up, lit, and roaring hot again.

I would have to go down there in the cold basement, break up one of the big chunks of coal, carry it over to the stove, lift the top lid, and fill the stove about half-full of coal and a bunch of dried-up old corncobs from the pile out in the back yard and a few sticks of kindling wood. Then I'd pour a tiny bit of coal-oil on all that and then light a page of news-print with one of the big kitchen matches and get the dang-blasted thing started up to burning again.

I scooped out the ashes with
a shovel like this one:


Scooping out those powdery ashes was the worst part of the chore. They would come spilling out the bottom grate and rise up in a white dusty cloud around my head, getting in my eyes and my nose and my mouth.

No matter how careful I was, the ashes always managed to find their way in my mouth and I'd swallow some, and then I'd cough and choke and spit until I could finally breathe again.

That was more than sixty years ago and when I think about it I can still taste those gosh-darned ashes.


My dad used to tell of the old days just after the end of The Great Depression when he got a job scooping coal into the boilers that provided steam to heat the County Jail, Courthouse, and Hospital. He was paid a dollar for each 12-hour night. And was overjoyed to have the job.

He also spoke of The Great Depression when he was young and his family could not afford to feed him. He would get up in the middle of the night in the Fall to walk several miles to a certain farm, arriving at daybreak. The farm's owner had agreed to furnish Dad's breakfast in return for his harnessing up the teams of horses and mules that the hired-hands would be using for the day's harvesting.

Dad would then walk back to town to search for and gather up of stray chucks of coal along the Monon railroad tracks that had spilled from the coal-carrying cars of passing trains of the good old Monon Railroad Line


That coal and scrounged scraps of wood and corncobs from piles at nearby farms was what they used to heat their rented home. Sometimes he would trade some of the pieces of coal for an apple or a potato.

A while after that was when, he became employed by the county to scoop coal into the boilers that provided steam to heat the Jasper County Jail, Courthouse, and Hospital. He was paid a dollar for each 12-hour night. But I already mentioned that.

Jasper County Hospital (circa 1950)



Jasper County Courthouse




My Dad, Jesse William Chambers
Born in Rensselaer in January of
1906 and died there in May 1975.
Courthouse Custodian 30+ years.


People will not look forward to posterity
who never look backward to their ancestors.
--Edmund Burke