Recently in Autobiography Category

A lot of the details of my high school days are just a hazy blur, but one thing I can say with absolute certainty: when I graduated in 1967 the very concept of same sex marriage would have been met with total derision by virtually everyone in the country.

How the world can change in forty short years.

Back then, the word "homosexual" was never uttered on television, "gay" was still a synonym for "happy", and a guy could enjoy show tunes without having his guy-ness called into question.

Heck, back then most people could truthfully (if not strictly accurately) say that they didn't even know anyone who was gay.

(Just for some additional context, recall that Loving v. Virginia, which finally declared race-based restrictions on marriage were unconstitutional, was decided on June 12, 1967.)

I think the first time I encountered the word "gay" applied to homosexuals was in a controversial article in Life magazine from sometime in the mid-60's. The only thing I remember now from that article is its claim that gays liked to wear sneakers and sweaters, and the only reason I remember that is because it became a running gag among some of my crowd. Whenever we saw someone in sneakers we'd make a comment.

But then in the late 60's and early 70's a gay activist movement began to gain some traction. Before long, gay characters began appearing occasionally in television shows, most notably on a famous episode of "All in the Family", where Archie Bunker learned that one of his drinking buddies was gay.

Somewhere around then, psychiatrists decided that homosexuality was not a disease after all, but a normal aspect of humanity's sexual behavior.

Oh, there were some kinks in the road as gays became more visible in society, such as when a third rate singer tried to revive her career by starting a campaign to "Save the Children" from the gay down in Florida.

But by the very early 80's it seemed that gay people were well on their way to achieving great gains in civil rights.

That's when AIDS entered our national consciousness. Since it was initially considered a gay disease ("gay plague" was one of its earliest nicknames), AIDS probably set back the gay rights movement by at least ten years.

But a funny thing happened. As more and more gay people "came out", many folks discovered that not only did they in fact know someone who was gay, but gays weren't as threatening as they had once thought.

Probably the single largest factor determining whether someone is for or against gay rights is whether they know someone who is gay or if there is a gay person in their family. (For example, take the Cheney family. Please.)

The second largest factor is age; the younger one is, the more likely one is to support gay rights.

Anyway, some time in the mid-90's the idea of same sex marriage began to make its way slowly into the public discourse.

And now the idea doesn't seem very strange to large segments of the population. Overall, the country seems to be about equally divided on the issue, and there are even a handful of states where it has a slim majority in favor of it.

In 1966 Kander and Ebb's musical "Cabaret" opened on Broadway. Set in Germany during the period that the Nazis were coming into power, one of its songs was performed by a German woman and her Jewish fiancé:

How the world can change
It can change like that
Due to one little word
"Married".

How the world can change. Indeed.

In 1993 as our parents' 50th wedding anniversary approached, my sister Donna and I decided to throw them a surprise celebration.

Working long distance, I in Philadelphia and she in Dover, PA, we made arrangements for a hall in Wernersville, PA. Well, actually Jane and Allen (our aunt and uncle) found the hall and were helpful in so many ways.

Although we planned for months and had a guest list of over 40, somehow our parents never caught on. They were really surprised, as you can see in the video.

In fact, for years afterward they kept marveling at how we kept it from them.

Reed and Lou recorded a lot of the event on their camcorders, and in 2003 I took their raw videos and edited them into a 15 minute presentation. Which is embedded here.

The video is in two parts, to meet Youtube's 10 minute limit.

In 2003 our parents insisted they didn't want another party, so we took them to New York, New York to see The Producers and the Bernadette Peters version of Gypsy. By then I had my own digital camcorder, but I wasn't very adept at using it. Consequently, although I shot more than Reed and Lou did, I had much less usable footage.

So the resulting video is much shorter.

BTW, one of the fun things about watching these videos together is seeing how much their grandson (and my nephew) Kevin grew in the intervening years.

Having recently reconnected with a bunch of folks from my high school class (Hi, Norman! Hey, Gary! What's up, Jill? How's it going, Dennis?), I went back to the old yearbooks and realized just how much I've forgotten about those days.

As luck would have it, I have some audio recordings from those days: a performance that we put on at the local community theatre, a bunch of phone calls, etc. So I scanned in the photos from our yearbook, grabbed a few clips from those old recordings, and combined them with music by one of my favorite composers, and the result is this little video.

A prelude that takes a quick journey back through the last 42 years, followed by a nostalgic look at the days when it was Our Time. Probably of interest mainly to Eastern Lebanon County High School's Class of 1967.

That UPS package is taking quite a circuitous route. Delivery has been rescheduled for Friday the thirteenth. Hmmm...

Over the weekend I ordered a pizza cutter from Amazon.com.

With two day shipping it should reach me today, and when I first checked with UPS's tracking service, things looked promising.

It shipped on Monday from Lexington, KY. Normally packages go from there to Harrisburg, PA, and then on to Philadelphia the following day. Two days, even without getting the Second Day Air rate.

But today I checked again, and the package is following a very unconventional route.

Buffalo?!? WTF?

The latest version of iPhoto includes face recognition technology, so I've been going over all the photos in my library to tag all the people.

And I came upon this photo:

That's my mother standing on the far left; then there's her father (i.e., my grandfather), my father, and her brother, my uncle Pepper (I can never remember why he was called Pepper).

Seated is my aunt Jane and I presume it's my uncle Allen snapping the photo; I mean, where else could he be? Next to Jane is an unknown girl holding Debbie, who is Jane and Allen's super-obedient dog. Debbie is a very famous dog in our extended family and probably deserves a blog entry all her own sometime.

The other seated woman is my grandmother who has her arm around her youngest son, Reed, who is technically my uncle, even though he's only two years older than I am. Which also makes him my mother's brother. Sometime I have to write about the nasty trick he played on me while we were out sledding.

Anyway, that's me standing and holding what appears to be a bottle of Coke.

The picture was taken in the living room of our house on the farm. Notice the high ceiling; that house was built in the mid-nineteenth century.

Also, notice the doorway on the right, and how it's decorated with Christmas cards. Remember Christmas cards? I mean, back in the day we used to send and receive a boatload of Christmas cards each year.

Oh, and hanging on the wall is a portrait of me as a baby. Shortly after I was born, while my uncle Neal was stationed in Okinawa (he was still in Okinawa at the time of this photo; I had never met him to this point), my mother sent him a photo of me; Neal had a local artist turn it into an oil painting on cloth. That painting became an ever-present fixture of our living room; I believe my mother still has it.

But what I find really exciting about this photo is what you see in the foreground: my model train set. That had been my Christmas present that year, and I almost didn't get it. You see, on Christmas Eve I had a hard time sleeping, probably due to a combination of anticipation of what the morrow would bring and the fact that the family party was still going on downstairs and they were making an awful racket.

So I came paddling down the stairs. The stairway had a door at the bottom that led into the kitchen. Opening the door, I could see into the living room, where there was a large plywood sheet being propped up by a couple of sawhorses with my father and several of my uncles standing around it. They all looked very surprised.

Without missing a beat they told me that Santa had been there to deliver my present, but when he heard me coming down he had to run away. If I wanted him to return, I had better get back to bed ASAP!

Needless to say I did as I was told.

That Lionel train set became a holiday staple for the next few years.

The other item of interest in the photo is what you can't see; on the reverse side of the actual photo is the date, February 1953. That was presumably the date the photos were developed, making the actual date of this picture probably the last week of December 1952. Meaning I was about three and a half years old.

And that helps me to date another important event in my life, the day I got my arm caught in the washing machine wringer. I remember that we moved to the farm shortly after that harrowing experience, so this photo not only documents our first Christmas on the farm, but it also lets me definitively date the arm-in-wringer incident to shortly before my third birthday.

That wringer story deserves a post of its own. One of these days...

Meanwhile, I'm still trying to figure out who that unknown girl in the photo is.

I recently updated my Facebook pic, and several people have commented on it. In particular, my nephew seems to have been amused. I can't imagine why.

Some have thought that it reveals that I'm a Phillies fan.

Actually, the cap used to belong to Wally Backman, who played for the Phils for a couple seasons in the early 90's.

It was probably in 1991 on Fan Appreciation Day when I heard my seat number called out. A few minutes later a woman in the Phils organization brought me the Wally Backman cap.

It's been sitting on a shelf ever since, until I took it out the other day for a lark.

Meanwhile, Wally Backman has had his share of ups and downs.

I was on the Penn State campus the day of Betsy Aardsma's fatal stabbing, in fact, I had been in the stacks earlier that day.

Aardsma was in a narrow row of shelves that now houses bound foreign-language periodicals when she was set upon, according to the locations given in police reports.

She was stabbed once in the chest and grabbed a shelf, sending a row of books cascading down. Some students overheard the noise and found Aardsma on the floor.

They tried to help and initially thought she had fainted. She was wearing a red sweater and red dress on which blood did not show, but she bled into her lungs and died in the library.

So I've long been interested in the case but had assumed that no one was actively pursuing it after nearly 40 years.

That assumption was wrong:

Trooper Kent Bernier inherited the Aardsma case with another state police trooper two years ago, after the previous investigators retired. [...]

"We're just looking at it differently and trying to do different things that haven't been done yet," Bernier said.

Their search for new angles on the old slaying includes modern forensics testing unavailable to the 1969 investigators.

"It's possible now that DNA might be a big breakthrough for us," said Bernier.

He would not give specifics on what was to be tested.

Read the full story of Betsy Aardsma's murder case.

There is even a web site: whokilledbetsy.com

The previous post reminded me of an incident that happened over 20 years ago.

In those days I was working in a place called the Defense Personnel Support Center (or DPSC) in the Subsistence directorate, which was responsible for supplying our warfighters with (what else?) their food. This involved everything from fresh fruits and vegetables to something known as MREs.

That stands for "Meal, Ready-to-Eat", which probably sets a record for fitting three lies into four words. The military had recently replaced its traditional canned rations with MREs, and a problem had developed.

There was no way to track the original ingredients from the supplier to the finished end item, so when a problem was discovered, an entire supply of end items had to be recalled, rather than just those items which had come from the offending source.

A co-worker (call him "Joe") developed a tracking system (written in dBase III) for deployment at the manufacturers' plants, and I pitched in with some utilities to add a few capabilities that dBase lacked. We tested as thoroughly as we could, and then sent it off the the contractors.

But there was a problem: when the contractors tried to run the program, it crashed their PCs.

This was in the days of DOS (remember DOS?), and to make a long story short it turned out there was a nasty bug in my code that caused my program to overwrite a part of memory that rightfully belonged to DOS.

Why hadn't we noticed the problem? As it happened, the area of memory that it overwrote was called the Environment, which was used to store (what else?) environment strings. On all of our PCs, we had the Environment filled up with all sort of assorted strings, so when my program invaded that area, there was no problem because the Environment space was large enough to handle the invasion.

But the PCs at the contractor's plants didn't use the Environment at all, so when that area of memory was overwritten, it crashed their systems.

Fixing the program was easy, but it would take several days to get the fix out to the contractors, so we gave them a temporary workaround:

We suggested that they add a string to their Environment when they started up their PCs. I don't remember exactly what we suggested, but it was something like "SET DPSC=A_FINE_BUNCH_OF_FELLOWS".

Thursday during the late afternoon rush, there were probably eleven people muttering under their breath, as they made their way home; they could have left at least an hour earlier, if only that one juror hadn't been so stubborn.

That's speculation, of course, and wouldn't be admissible as evidence in a court, but it is true that one lone juror did extend the deliberation period by at least an hour.

I was that juror.