Open THIS box and remove the turnovers from the package and bake as directed. (These cannot be improved upon without much fanfare and mess! I know, I’ve tried!)
Step 3
When the turnovers have finished baking and are cooling, prepare a simple drizzle icing. I use powdered sugar (start with a cup and experiment) and a teaspoon of water at a time–mixing well before adding more water. (If you use too much water, the icing will just run off the turnovers and be wasted.) If the icing does get too runny, add a little more powdered sugar. When you get the consistency you desire, drizzle it over the turnovers. Enjoy!
Variations:
“Work smarter, not harder.”
Scrooge McDuck
BON APPETIT!!
***I will be away for a few days and Filly will be in and out. See you soon!***
Dangling from the ceiling of a California firehouse is a bulb that’s burned for 989,000 hours – nearly 113 years. Since its first installation in 1901, it has rarely been turned off, has outlived every firefighter from the era, and has been proclaimed the “Eternal Light” by General Electric experts and physicists around the world.
Tracing the origins of the bulb — known as the Centennial Light — raises questions as to whether it is a miracle of physics, or a sign that new bulbs are weaker. Its longevity still remains a mystery.
A Brief History of the Light Bulb
Thomas Edison worked on improving carbon filaments. By 1880, through the utilization of a higher vacuum and the development of an entire integrated system of electric lighting, he improved his bulb’s life to 1,200 hours and began producing the invention at a rate of 130,000 bulbs per year.
In the midst of this innovation, the man who would build the world’s longest-lasting light bulb was born.
The Shelby Electric Company
Adolphe Chaillet
Adolphe Chaillet was bred to make exceptional light bulbs. Born in 1867, Chaillet was constantly exposed to the burgeoning light industry in Paris, France. By age 11, he began accompanying his father, a Swedish immigrant and owner of a small light bulb company, to work. He learned quickly, garnered an interest in physics, and went on to graduate from both German and French science academies. In 1896, after spending some time designing filaments at a large German energy company, Chaillet moved to the United States.
Chaillet briefly worked for General Electric, then, riding on his prestige as a genius electrician, secured $100,000 (about $2.75 million in 2014 dollars) from investors and opened his own light bulb factory, Shelby Electric Company. While his advancements in filament technology were well-known, Chaillet still had to prove to the American public that his bulbs were the brightest and longest-lasting. In a risky maneuver, he staged a “forced life” test before the public: The leading light bulbs on the market were placed side-by-side with his, and burned at a gradually increased voltage. An 1897 volume of Western Electrician recounts what happened next:
Chaillet’s original patent:
“Lamp after lamp of various makes burned out and exploded until the laboratory was lighted alone by the Shelby lamp — not one of the Shelby lamps having been visibly injured by the extreme severity of this conclusive test.”
Shelby claimed that its bulbs lasted 30% longer and burned 20% brighter than any other lamp in the world. The company experienced explosive success: According to Western Electrician, they had “received so many orders by the first of March [1897], that it was necessary to begin running nights and to increase the size of the factory.” By the end of the year, output doubled from 2,000 to 4,000 lamps per day, and “the difference in favor of Shelby lamps was so apparent that no doubt was left in the minds of even the most skeptical.”
Over the next decade, Shelby continued to roll out new products, but as the light bulb market expanded and new technologies emerged (tungsten filaments), the company found itself unable to make the massive monetary investment required to compete. In 1914, they were bought out by General Electric and Shelby bulbs were discontinued.
The Centennial Light
Seventy-five years later, in 1972, a fire marshall in Livermore, California informed a local paper of an oddity: A naked, Shelby light bulb hanging from the ceiling of his station had been burning continuously for decades. The bulb had long been a legend in the firehouse, but nobody knew for certain how long it had been burning, or where it came from. Mike Dunstan, a young reporter with the Tri-Valley Herald, began to investigate — and what he found was truly spectacular.
Tracing the bulb’s origins through dozens of oral narratives and written histories, Dunstan determined it had been purchased by Dennis Bernal of the Livermore Power and Water Co. (the city’s first power company) sometime in the late 1890s, then donated to the city’s fire department in 1901, when Bernal sold the company. As only 3% of American homes were lit by electricity at the time, the Shelby bulb was a hot commodity.
In its early life, the bulb, known as the “Centennial Light,” was moved around several times: It hung in a hose cart for a few months, then, after a brief stint in a garage and City Hall, it was secured at Livermore’s fire station. “It was left on 24 hours-a-day to break up the darkness so the volunteers could find their way,” then-Fire Chief Jack Baird told Dunstan. “It’s part of another era in the city’s past [and] it’s served its purpose well.”
Though Baird acknowledged that it had once been turned off for “about a week when President Roosevelt’s WPA people remodeled the fire house back in the 30s,” Guinness World Records confirmed that the hand-blown 30-watt bulb, at 71 years old, was “the oldest burning bulb in the world.” A slew of press followed, which saw it featured in Ripley’s Believe it or Not, and on major news networks.
Aside from the 1930s fire house remodel, the bulb has only lost power a few times — most notably in 1976, when it was moved to Livermore’s new Station #6. Accompanied by a “full police and fire truck escort,” the bulb arrived with a large crowd eager to see it regain power, but, as recalled by Deputy Fire Chief Tom Brandall, “there was a little scare:”
“We got to new location and the city electrician installed the light bulb and made connection. It took about 22-23 min, and [the bulb] didn’t come back on. The crowd gasped. The city electrician grabbed the switch and jiggled it; it went on!”
Once settled, the bulb was placed under video surveillance to ensure it was alive at all hours; in subsequent years, a live “Bulb Cam” was put online. At one point, the bulb’s groupies (9,000 followers on FB) received another scare when it lost light.
At first it was suspected that the light had finally met its demise, but after nine and half hours, it was discovered that the bulb’s uninterrupted power supply had failed; once the power supply was bypassed, the bulb’s light returned. The 113-year-old bulb had outlived its power supply, just as it had outlived three surveillance cameras.
Today, the bulb still shines, though, as one retired fire volunteer once said, “it don’t give much light” (only about 4 watts). Owning a frail piece of history comes with great responsibility: Livermore firefighters treat the little bulb like a porcelain doll. “Nobody wants that darn bulb to go out on their watch,” once said former fire chief Stewart Gary. “If that thing goes out while I’m still chief it will be a career’s worth of bad luck.”
“They Don’t Make ‘Em Like They Used To”
Everyone from Mythbusters to NPR has speculated on the reasons for the Shelby bulb’s longevity. The answer, in short, is that it remains a mystery – Chaillet’s patent left much of his process unexplained.
In 2007, Annapolis physics professor Debora M. Katz purchased an old Shelby bulb of the same vintage and make as the Centennial Light and conducted a series of experiments on it to determine its differentiation from modern bulbs. She reported her findings:
“I found the width of the filament. I compared it to the width of a modern bulb’s filament. It turns out that a modern bulb’s filament is a coil, of about 0.08 mm diameter, made up of a coiled wire about 0.01 mm thick. I didn’t know that until I looked under a microscope. The width of the Shelby bulb’s 100-year-old filament is about the same as the width of the coiled modern bulb’s filament, 0.08 mm.”
The Lightbulb Cartel
Light bulb companies like Shelby once prided themselves on longevity – so much so, that the durability of their products was the central focus of marketing campaigns. But by the mid-1920s, business attitudes began to shift, and a new rhetoric prevailed: “A product that refuses to wear out is a tragedy of business.” This line of thought, termed “planned obsolescence,” endorsed intentionally shortening a product’s lifespan to entice swifter replacement.
In 1924, Osram, Philips, General Electric, and other major electric companies met and formed the Phoebus Cartel under the public guise that they were cooperating to standardize light bulbs. Instead, they purportedly began to engage in planned obsolescence. To achieve this the companies agreed to limit the life expectancy of light bulbs at 1,000 hours, less than Edison’s bulbs had achieved (1,200 hrs) decades before; any company that produced a bulb exceeding 1,000 hours in life would be fined.
Until disbanding during World War II, the cartel supposedly halted research, preventing the advancement of the longer-lasting light bulb for nearly twenty years.
Whether or not planned obsolescence is still on the agenda of light bulb manufacturers today is highly debatable, and there exists no definitive proof. In any case, incandescent bulbs are being phased out worldwide: Since Brazil and Venezuela began the trend in 2005, many countries have followed suit (European Union, Switzerland, and Australia in 2009; Argentina and Russia in 2012; the United States, Canada, Mexico, Malaysia, and South Korea in 2014).
As more efficient technologies have surfaced (halogen, LED, compact fluorescent lights, magnetic induction lights), the old filament-based bulbs have become a relic of the past. But perched up in the white ceiling of Livermore’s Station #6, the granddaddy of old-school bulbs is as relevant as ever, and refuses to bite the dust.
Let’s talk about being inspired. Young Jim Bishop in 1959, at the ripe old age of 15, paid four hundred and fifty dollars for a two and a half acre parcel of land enclosed on three sides by the majestic San Isabel National Forest in southern Colorado. It was money saved from mowing lawns, throwing newspapers, and working with his father Willard in the family ornamental iron works. Jim had dropped out of high school that year over an argument from his English teacher who yelled at him “You’ll never amount to anything Jim Bishop!” Ever since he was a boy, Jim was powerfully drawn up towards the mountains visible to the west from Pueblo, and having found a small 2-1/2 acre parcel one weekend on a bicycle journey with some friends, convinced his parents to buy it for him with his money.
So Willard and ma Polly signed for the land deal which Jim wasn’t even old enough to do himself, and the family now had a heavily forested two and a half acres at 9000 feet. Jim and his dad spent the next ten summers camping out on the land and doing the groundwork for a family cabin on the site. Setting the stage for what was to come, Jim soon learned that he really enjoyed swinging an axe and wielding a shovel or pick in building their clearing with a drive up to it, which is now the court-yard between the family cabin and the castle itself with it’s driveway.
It was in 1967 that Jim and Phoebe got married, a union they still enjoy to this day, and in 1969 at the age of twenty-five, Jim decided it was time to start building a cabin in the mountains they so loved. Since rocks were plentiful, everywhere, and free, he chose to start building a one room stone cottage…
NOTE: Stock photo – The Bishop cabin had windows on all sides and big double doors in front. When they left the door open, the hummers would sometimes fly in – the hummers got so familiar with them that when they wanted to leave and the door was closed, the would hover in front of the door until they opened it for them. They also had chairs that were tree stumps, with the seat hollowed out.
Snow doesn’t melt completely at 9000 feet usually until the middle of May, sometimes even into June, so the summer building season is a short one. Jim started building his cabin, and after a while Jim and Willard started trading off two week stints, one at the shop running the business and one up the mountain working on the family cabin. This lasted until the late spring of 1971, when the problem of getting running water into the cabin arose. Willard suggesting putting in a large metal tank that he had salvaged from a welding job to be a gravity fed cistern. Jim thought it’d be functional, and construction began on the water tank. It is a 40 foot metal cylinder which Willard surrounded with stonework.
Jim continued to build his cottage, and the walls grew. Throughout the summer, family friends, a couple local ranchers, and even some family members commented that it looked like they were building a castle! “Hey Jim! That looks like a turret or something!” “What are you building, a castle?!”
Jim heard that enough times that by the time late spring 1972 rolled around, his imagination had been stirred something fierce, and Mr. Jim Bishop started telling friends and family that he was in fact going to be building a castle! When Willard first heard this, he stated as a matter of fact that castles tended to be pretty huge and that he wasn’t going to have anything to do with it! “That’s just too much work!” Jim kept right on building, and the construction that began as a one room stone cottage with an Eiffel Tower shaped fireplace gave birth to this country’s, and maybe even the world’s, largest one man project – The Bishop Castle.
It Just Keeps On Growing! As the castle grew, so did word of the guy up in the mountains who was pursuing the American Dream – to be King of your own Castle! People came to visit more and more often, and Jim would often be asked if he wanted help building his castle. For the first eight years, the answer was always Sure! And in those eight years, not a single person ever kept their word and showed up to help. In a fit of cynical frustration, Jim vowed that “By God, I’ve gotten this far by myself. If you’re going to do something right, do it yourself!” So like the castle itself, the idea of the castle being a one man project was born in the process of the doing and was not an original intention or a childhood dream like many people think. And he kept building. And building. And the Bishop Castle grew…
Other Discoveries Along the Way
Many of the features of the Bishop Castle were discovered intuitively or stumbled upon as the building unfolded. In the process of the castle building, Jim discovered that he also really enjoyed building his body too. He even set up an old army wall tent in the clearing, where he would workout with weights for a couple of hours in the evenings after having built with stone and mortar all day! As he became increasingly involved in the weight lifting regime physically, he also discovered that realm of mind where his principles in building could also be applied to his life – balance in everything! This became an ideal he strove for in this proving of himself, through his stonework, his body, and in his mind. It was through this approach that Jim soon realized that he would find himself completely visualizing what he could build next and how it would all fit together on such a large scale.
There are no plans, blueprints or drawings other than the one Jim did to illustrate his book “Castle Building from my point of view”. The more Jim experienced how certain features lined up or fell into place is when he started suspecting that maybe something “more” was going on, that maybe it was the Creator of All Things working through him in this magnificent endeavor that seemed to have a spirit of it’s own. Jim started describing the Bishop Castle as “Built by One Man with the Help of God.” There’s really no other way to explain it!. And it kept growing…
Feats of Strength
In order to pursue the totality of what he could visualize, Jim employed anything and everything that was available to him. He had apprenticed and then mastered with his father in the family’s Bishop Ornamental Iron shop welding and scroll bending and learning how things fit together for most of his life. Jim did everything – hauling rock from the state highway ditches, felling timber and then milling it into lumber, building railroad ties into forms for his arches, (he’s used the same form over and over), building scaffolding as he went. He hand dug holes up to 12 feet deep for the foundations, mixed all his own mortar, carried it, usually up, to wherever he was working, created and rigged complex systems of pulleys and come-alongs to hoist such things as tree trunks for the floor supports, and, stone by stone, his dreams were being made manifest. Jim handles each and every stone in the castle on average of SIX TIMES before it rests in it’s final configuration in this massive re-organizing of the scattered granite in the Rocky Mountains into the form of the Bishop Castle.
Structural Ornaments
The beginning of the square tower on the south side of the main keep saw the first massive use of ironwork in the construction. Up until then Jim had incorporated his ironwork as window frames, stairs, and the purely ornamental. Now his use of iron and steel became structural, with a core frame for the tower starting from it’s foundations. The rock work formed around this base and created such strength that Jim had no fear contemplating the heights that the tower might one day climb to. Wooden forms soon gave way to ornamental iron forms in the arches of the second floor, some of the most incredible examples of precision geometry found in the castle. And the most magnificent feature of all, the inner roof support trusses and the main central arch which are so detailed, yet so massively functional that they boggle the mind. Everywhere one looks something will boggle the mind, such as the fact that the hand railing going up the S.W. corner, named Roy’s Tower, with all of it’s bizarre twists and turns, was hammered cold into it’s highly custom shape!
Perhaps the water cistern is contained inside of this tower.
The Dream Defined
Over the years as the castle grew, more and more people heard about this phenomenon up in the mountains and began showing up in increasing numbers. Friends told Jim that he should be making some money off what was becoming an attraction! Jim felt differently though – he hated it when he was a kid and couldn’t go to the zoo or the ballpark because admission for the whole family was too high for a bunch of working class folks. Since the original idea for a castle came from people visiting the property, Jim figured that if people were welcomed onto the property FOR FREE then he could put out a donation box and people could put in there what they felt comfortable putting in there. The honor system would be the financier! This increased Jim’s feeling of the castle truly being a place of American Freedom. He felt like he worked hard enough down in Pueblo to support the family that he would build as much as the visitors provided for. This has frustrated him at times over the years, wanting to build larger items such as an elevator and not having the funds to do so, but he feels so strongly about the dream being kept intact that he’s even written into legal documents that the Bishop Castle will always remain free as long as it stands. This belief in America being a Free Country made up of Free Persons has fueled his passions in building the castle to represent the American Dream in an undeniably tangible and awe inspiring form!
Enter The Dragon
In the mid 1980’s, a friend of Jim’s was driving a truck full of discarded stainless steel warming plates from the Pueblo County Hospital to the landfill. He decided that Jim could probably put this motherload of expensive stainless steel to better use than the dump could, so dropped it off at the Bishop Ornamental Iron Shop instead. Jim spent the winter building a chimney out of the steel, riveting thousands of hammered “scales” that he had cut out of the plates together around a steel frame. The dragon was completed in the spring and Jim hauled it up the mountain to tackle the daunting task of raising and installing this incredible sculpture to where it rests today, perched off of the front of the Grand Ballroom eighty feet in the air! Later came the addition of a burner from a hot air balloon (that was donated!) which Jim put in the back of the dragons throat, making it a true Fire Breathing Dragon!
Unimaginable Heights Reached
Jim is often told that he must not be afraid of heights! The way he figures it, he began at the bedrock base of the earth and has been gradually building up, so gradual that as the height grew, he was as comfortable with it as with being on the ground. Jim’s experience with the castle has been so intimate, (he’s held EVERY SINGLE STONE IN THERE ON AN AVERAGE OF SIX TIMES), that he’s grown stone by stone as well and doesn’t mind the heights at all. In 1994 Jim reached a point with the square Andreatta tower, named after the family that donated the old school bells that hang in it, where he felt satisfied that it was high enough. That didn’t last long, as in 1995 he built and installed a thirty foot tall steel steeple on top of the masonry, taking the total height to roughly 160 feet! That’s about the size of a 16 story building! Jim has remained satisfied with the overall height of his castle to the present, though he’s recently been threatening to build one of the corner outer wall towers to 250 feet because a local zoning official told him he couldn’t build over 25 and he just added a zero.
Ballroom inside Castle
As It Stands
Today’s visitors to the Bishop Castle will find an impressively monumental statue in stone and iron that cries loud testament to the beauty and glory of not only having a dream, but sticking with your dream no matter what. Most importantly, that if you do believe in yourself and strive to maintain that belief, anything can happen! Three full stories of interior rooms complete with a Grand Ballroom, soaring towers and bridges with vistas of a hundred miles, and a Fire-Breathing Dragon make the Bishop Castle quite the unforgettable experience! Visitors are always welcome FREE of charge, and the castle itself is always OPEN. Please respect this trust and honor while visiting!
Octopuses are marine creatures that have an excellent sense of touch, powerful, beak-like jaws and venomous saliva. Their suckers have receptors that enable an octopus to taste what it is touching. They are predators, and they typically kill their prey by dropping down on them and enclosing it with their arms. The prey is then pulled into their beaks and broken up. An octopus’s beak resembles a parrot’s beak.
Octopus beak
An octopus has three hearts, two of which pumps blood to the gills and the third heart circulates blood to rest of the body. Their blood is actually blue, mainly because of the presence of hemocyanin – a copper-based protein in its blood cells instead of an iron based system like we have. An octopus can squeeze itself into ridiculously small cracks and crevices because it has a soft body and lacks an internal skeleton.
The size of octopuses usually vary, normally ranging from 12 to 36 inches in length. According to National Geographic, the giant Pacific octopuses, which are found throughout the Pacific Ocean, weigh between 50 kg to 272 kg and measure over 30 feet long.
Octopuses are known to be masters of disguise in which they can easily change colors in 3-tenths of a second. It is one of their distinct features as it eludes predators easily. This talent is so impressive that they can instantly change colors accurately to that of their surroundings–including texture–hiding in plain sight to help catch prey off guard.
PEEK-A-BOO
Because they have such a large brain, octopuses are a highly intelligent marine species. They also have a well-developed central nervous system and 500 million neurons found in their arms, allowing for touch, taste, and gripping its prey. 75% of the octopus’ neurons are located on its arms and each arm can do something on its own at the same time. When one of their arms is severed, it will actually regenerate itself.
Octopuses have a very short life span. Some species live only for six months; however the giant octopus can live as long as five or six years. According to some research, octopuses mate and then die in a few months. They are an egg-laying species, and a female octopus can lay 200,000 to 400,000 eggs at a time and will guard the eggs without eating until they hatch. The female octopuses die through cellular suicide soon after the eggs are hatched.
Octopus eggs
When an octopus is relatively hungry, everything is on the menu, and they will even eat their fellow octopus. Furthermore, scientists and researchers have also witnessed female octopuses eating their mating partner once breeding is done. However, male octopuses have learned how to avoid getting killed once copulation is done– including mating within arm’s reach to avoid getting eaten by the larger female and sometimes sacrificing one of its limbs just to get away as it will just soon regenerate.
All octopuses are venomous but evidence shows that the animal does not make the venom by itself. It is produced by symbiotic bacteria instead. The blue-ringed octopus is the most venomous to humans and they are fatal. It is estimated that a single drop of tetrodotoxin is enough to kill about 27 people in a matter of minutes.
This is why I don’t go in water!!!
Octopuses are fast swimmers, but they usually prefer to crawl rather than swim. While swimming, the systemic heart becomes inactive and stops delivering blood to its organs and makes them exhausted very soon. They can, however, crawl on land…which is why I avoid the beach!
I was unable to find a picture by itself of the current church/school but you can see it in the opening picture in this video. Overhead view of the current church, with the school I attended on the right; I was baptized in this church in 1953 and was confirmed in April 1967. The entire wing on the left and the parking lot was added after I left the area.
In the year 1865, a group of members of the Evangelical Lutheran St. Paul congregation at Ixonia, WI gathered together with the desire to raise their cildren near a church and school. This caused them to consider emigration. Pastor Hoeckendorf, the minister of this congregation, at that time had relatives who lived near West Point, NE. So they got the idea to send scouts into this area. They wanted some trustworthy people to check everything out right there on location.
The info in this post was taken from this booklet.
They entrusted this important matter to “Father” Braasch, “Father” Wagner, and John Gensmer. These men departed for NE and, since the area surrounding West Point was already more or less settled and the whole group couldn’t possibly also settle there, they ventured further north over the wild plains of Nebraska until they came to the area which is now Norfolk.
They found that the land was fertile, the water drinkable, and wood was also found on the North Fork and the Elkhorn rivers. Very pleased with their finding, they joyfully returned to Ixonia and delivered the good news.
Pic from internet
On May 23, 1866, it was time for the old pioneers to leave their homes and strike out toward their new destination. It was a difficult time since many heartrending goodbyes were required – parents to their children, children to their parents, brothers and sisters parted, relatives and friends shook hands for the last time. The long journey was made in “prairie schooners” pulled by horses and oxen. In 3 caravans, 53 wagons moved through the uncultivated terrain, accompanied by cattle and sheep. Along the way, they encountered great difficulties, such as crossing rivers without bridges and maneuvering through swamps. Some days they had to stop to wash clothes and bake bread and on Sundays, they observed regular church services, which were led by Father Braasch, the leader of the whole train.
Around the 12th of July 1866, the members of the new German Settlement arrived in close proximity to the present-day Norfolk. After the land was measured and raffled off, everybody moved onto their allotted properties from 17-20 July.
Note: You may need to enlarge the pic to see – on the left just over half-way down, you will see the name “William Duhring.” (My brother inherited the farm and now his children have inherited it from him – Chris gets the land in order to keep it in the Deering name, ‘Nette gets the house.) That was my birth grandfather, Arnold Deering’s Father (Grandpa changed the spelling of his last name in order to appear less German, probably due to WWII, I expect). If you look up further towards the center, close to the river, you will see the name “Martin Raasch,” my adopted great-great-grandfather.
I’m not sure when this picture was taken – clearly not in 2007 – but these were the 4 remaining founders still alive at that time. August Raasch, my adopted great-grandfather, was the first postmaster in Norfolk. He was wounded at Gettysburg and carried shrapnel in his back until he died; in later years, he was basically an invalid but with 12 children (mostly boys), he had plenty of help on the farm.
Of course, it took time to build homes and barns so, in the meantime, they either built one-room log cabins or sod houses.
The first services of this new settlement took place in a shed on the North Fork of the Elkhorn River. Shrubs and branches covered the roof to provide shade and the dirt floor was covered with hay. For the rest of that first summer, they held church services in this shed. I don’t know when the first real church, a log building 24 X 30, was built – there was no altar or chancel and the benches consisted of boards which were laid on wooden blocks. Occasionally the boards would fall over when the people rose during the service. This church was used until the year 1878; in 1876, the congregation had bought 12 acres from Pastor Hoekendorf for $120.
The first parsonage was built in 1878 and at the April meeting that year, the congregation decided to build a new church. The new one would be 36 X 50 and cost approximately $1,405. The number of school children increased significantly so the congregation found it necessary to hire a regular teacher and build a school house. Since they already had a teacher, a house for him was also required, which was constructed in 1884.
Although the church building was finished, the interior was bare – no chancel, altar, benches or organ. Father Braasch made the initial contribution when he paid for an altar and chancel for the church, providing an example for the wealthy people among the members. The congregation bought the benches and, in 1884, they acquired a pipe organ (the organ still remains in the current church, as you will see in the interior picture). Since the church did not have enough seating for the attendants and the school also needed another classroom, the congregation voted unamimously to build a new church. During a meeting on January 21, 1907, the decision was made to build a brick building.
Architect Stitt created the plans and specifications for the beautiful building, which was designed in the gothic style of the 13th century. The cost of the building and interior came to about $24K. The cornerstone was laid in August of 1907 and the dedication took place on May 3, 1908. The old church was remodeled to serve for school functions and weekly catechism.
In July 1916, it had been 50 years since the founding fathers of our congregation arrived on these grassy plains. Since the congregation did not want to let this day pass without an expression of gratitude to God, they decided to celebrate their 50th anniversary on July 16, 1916. For this event, they had the interior of the church painted – the finished work is a credit to the master, Mr. Art Reiman of Milwaukee, and is a perfect work of art.
At the end of the 1st row is my birth grandmother, Marie Deering (she loved Hitler, btw); in the 2nd row, you will see my grandfather, Arnold, as well as Ernest Raasch, my adopted grandfather.
Esther Raasch was my adopted grandmother – Ernest died around the time I was born. He was a Nebraska State Senator. My birth mother lived with them for a period of time while she was in HS – she and my adopted Mom were close friends.
Since it was ratified in 1913, we have been losing states’ rights over time and it is getting faster. Today we see the abuses of the federal government destroying the powers of the state at an alarming rate.
The 17th Amendment must go if we are ever to rein in the abuses of the federal government. The good news is that we do not need a Constitutional amendment to do that. Here’s why…
Article V of the US Constitution spells out the process for amending the Constitution. The last line of Article V seems prophetic in that it spells out that the 17th Amendment could not happen unless 100% of the states agreed. That line reads, “and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.”
What this clearly means is that no State (as an entity – that is why it is capitalized) can have its representation in Congress taken from it without consent. Taking that representation away from the state as an entity and placing it with the people of that state clearly takes away any representation in the US Senate for the states. Therefore, it was not passed by all states so some (a total of 12) did not consent.
Some might argue that the 36 that did ratify it would be bound by it. This would violate equal representation, therefore could not stand.
As with all governments, it becomes necessary, from time to time, to reacquaint ourselves with its basic mechanics of operation. The Founding Fathers gave posterity a written constitution to aid in this process. When there are doubts as to its meaning, one must study its original intent to discern proper application, for “the intent of the Lawgiver is the Law.”
Current events in this nation have provoked citizens and scholars to perform this assessment — to “retrace our steps” — in yet another area: the principle of federalism. Simply defined, federalism is ‘a system that combines States retaining sovereignty within a certain sphere with a central body possessing sovereignty within another sphere, and a third sphere where concurrent jurisdiction (exists].’
After years of silence on the matter, a resurgence of interest in federalism became evident. President Reagan’s “New Federalism,” “The Federalist Society,” and a report on federalism issued by the Domestic Policy Council were just some of the manifestations of this increasing concern.
The reason for the current interest is that America is reaping the fruit of centralized government. Contrary to the Founding Fathers’ original vision of separate spheres of jurisdiction between the people, the states, and national government, our current system is now dominated by the national government.
The United States Constitution, as drafted by the Founding Fathers, clearly enumerated the limited powers of the national government. All other powers were reserved to the states or the people. The 10th Amendment affirms this noting: ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.’
The separate spheres of jurisdiction of the national and state governments have gradually been eroded. The national government has increasingly usurped the reserved power of both the people and the states. It has been documented that:’States, once the hub of political activity and the very source of our political tradition, have been reduced — in significant part — to administrative units of the national government ….’
As a result of this erosion process, both the national government and the state governments are crippled in their effectiveness. The national government, having taken on too much power, is unable to properly administer all the areas it has arrogated unto itself. On the other hand, the state governments are impotent in legislating and executing the will of the people because they are subject to unpredictable subjugation by the national government.
Our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, proclaims as self evident the proposition that “all men are … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” and that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.” When state governments so instituted become impotent, then it is their right and duty to reacquire the appropriate power in order to fulfill the purpose for which they were originally established.
My father, a good and loving man, passed away 8 years ago. It was a miserable week in early March, so services, even limited ones for the immediate family, couldn’t be held. Instead his cremation urn was installed in the mausoleum space without fanfare, with the expectation of a small service in a month or two as weather permitted. Those services never happened. Instead my mother, a woman I love dearly, and I had an obnoxious fight. We hadn’t spoken to one another again until last summer at my future daughter-in-law’s wedding shower.
In those 8 years, a lot had happened but we quickly caught up with each other’s lives. Our apologies were as quick as they were brief, without a glance backward as to why they were necessary in the first place. Forgive, forget, move on.
My mother was one of 15 children and growing up in that environment instilled in her a need to save everything–someone might be able to use it! was her motto. Her tiny cape cod home was bursting at the seams with things she was holding onto–some things still new in their boxes. When she began to use a walker, all those extra things in her rooms were becoming trip hazards and she asked my help in sorting out and clearing out the mess.
The mess comprises 3 floors! The basement, my father’s workshop, is off limits to me. My mother insists that all the tools (woodworking tools) belong to my younger brother–a man who has never shown any interest in wood working at all. (Unlike me, who with the help of my father, built a dry sink 40 years ago and i still have it!) But I digress. Mom cannot travel up or down stairs anymore, so she doesn’t know that the tools have rusted and because my brother never used them in 8 years are practically worthless at this point. Sigh
We spent the weekend, opening boxes and plastic bins filled with all sorts of bizarre gadgets and “As Seen on TV” items…LOL. Laughing at the absurdity of each item, we determined who might best make use of it and made piles–some for grandchildren, some for her sisters.
After I helped her clean out drawers and cabinets in the spare room, I labeled the piles and called everyone on her list of recipients–come claim your items within a week or they would be in the trash!
Since we were making some real progress, we treated ourselves to a break. We sat at the table to rest and regroup when my mom pulled a box out from under the table where she sat. “Here,” she said, “I want you to have this.” I opened the box to find my father’s Bible, the one he carried with him to school when he was young, the one he had his whole life. I swallowed hard and asked if she didn’t want to keep it…but she said she knew how much it meant to me.
The tears streamed down my face as mom and I talked about my dad’s last days. What she faced alone with him, beside him to the end. I don’t know how she endured. She told me she couldn’t go through his wallet for 2 years after he passed, but now she felt she could start to pass his things along and she especially wanted me to have this.
It’s old and weathered but holding it made me feel so close to my father again. I promised my mother my husband and I will visit again next month to help sort out and clean another room and she’s happy about that. She reminded me she has 2 more rooms on the main floor–then we have to clean the upstairs and the attic! There’s undoubtedly more of my father’s things to be found and dispersed, but my father’s Bible will remain with me until I pass it to my son.
Search the web, and you’re sure to read that America’s first bathtub was installed in 1842—December 20, to be exact. It would be nice if such a mercurial vessel had so neat a beginning—even H.L. Mencken, the newspaperman who concocted this hoax as an uplifting wartime news story, would agree. What is true is that no accessory embodies the metamorphosis of bathing equipment (from moveable furniture to plumbed-in-place fixtures) or helps define the use and look of a bathroom in any era as much as the bathtub.
Antebellum Scrubs
Before indoor plumbing, bathtubs—like chamber pots and washbowls—were moveable accessories: large but relatively light containers that bathers pulled out of storage for temporary use. The typical mid-19th-century bathtub was a product of the tinsmith’s craft, a shell of sheet copper or zinc.
“Late 1800’s Zinc and Cast Iron Bath Tub With Oak Trim”
In progressive houses equipped with early water-heating devices, a large bathtub might be site-made of sheet lead and anchored in a coffin-like wooden box.
Later, there were ingenious (though ultimately impractical) hideaway alternatives, like the portable canvas tub (similar to a pot-bellied cot), or the Mosely folding bath tub—an armoire-like contraption with a hinged door that pulled down like a Murphy bed to reveal a bathing saucer.
The Mosely Folding Bath Tub pulled down like a Murphy bed.
However, for decades, the bathtub most Americans knew best was the one available in a 1909 hardware catalog:a tinware plunge bath with wood-covered bottom painted in Japan green (a type of pre-1940 enamel paint).
As running water became more common in the latter 19th century, bathtubs became more prevalent and less portable. Though copper was still used for wood-enclosed tubs as late as the 1910s, it more commonly appeared as a liner for steel-cased tubs, rimmed in oak or cherry, that stood on bronzed iron legs.
This wood-encased period galvanized tin tub is in Astoria, Oregon’s 1885 Flavel House museum.
Cast iron—the all-purpose material of the Victorian era—had been poured into sinks and lavatories since the late 1850s, and by 1867 the famous J.L. Mott Iron Works was finding a ferrous niche in the bathtub market as well.
However, the big catch with all of these conveniences was corrosion. Copper and zinc discolored readily around water and soap, and the seams of sheet metal were hard to keep clean at all. Iron and steel, of course, rusted eventually, even under the most meticulous coat of paint.
Glaze Crusades
A china-like glaze seemed to be the ideal, obvious solution, but producing a vitreous skin on an object the scale of a tub was not so simple. Though cast iron sinks were porcelain enameled, iron bathtubs were a far more complex shape, and when filled with hot water, they could expand more than the coating, risking delamination.
In the 1850s, British artisans cracked the tub-coating code by taking a different tack: all-ceramic tubs with a glazed surface. Because the tubs were both fragile and heavy, they were iffy for export, but the idea found a market on English shores, and by the 1890s, solid porcelain tubs were being fired up by manufacturers like Trenton Potteries.
An ordinary-style tub—sloped at the head, flat and plumbed at the foot—was the most common, and affordable, early porcelain model.
The solid porcelain tub scratched many itches. Besides satisfying the need for a seamless, smooth, washable surface that wouldn’t rust, it provided a continuous, roll-over edge around the perimeter of the basin. Indeed, one of the subtle attractions of the porcelain tub was its sensuous, smooth curves and zaftig proportions. Whether it stood on bulbous ceramic legs or muscular sides that ran to the floor (thereby eliminating unsanitary hidden spaces), the porcelain tub was a study in robust modeling. Ads from the 1910s asked, “Why shouldn’t the bathtub be part of the architecture of the house?”
Seemingly the ultra-modern bathing, solid porcelain had its downside. For one thing, such tubs were dauntingly heavy and equally pricey. In 1909, prices ran from $180 for a 4 1/2′-long model to $255 for a massive 6 1/2-footer—this at a time when a steel-cased footed tub could be had for around $25. Plus, some bathers felt the pottery mass absorbed too much heat from the water, making it expensive to use.
High-Tech Tubs
Drawbacks aside, the solid porcelain tub remained the Cadillac of the bath industry into the 1920s and the hallmark of a high-end bathroom. Indeed, before 1910, bathrooms in and of themselves were often status symbols. In an era when houses with running water and waste piping were new and modern, a single bathroom with lavatory, flushing toilet, and fixed tub was a sign of progressive thinking and an essential step in the march toward better hygiene. What’s more, the bathrooms of the wealthy were not so much places of daily cleanup and dressing, but therapeutic laboratories akin to personal spas. The shower we now associate with a daily spritz was frequently a stand-alone cage of multiple sprays designed for skin or kidney stimulation, while tubs were dispersed around the room for soaking one or more parts of the body.
Roman tubs with nearly vertical, sloping round ends were thought to look more balanced and elegant in bathrooms, and usually came with faucets mounted on a long side.
As multiple-fixture, high-tech bathrooms started to evaporate after World War I (along with the large houses that made them possible), the new paradigm for up-to-date ablution became the porcelain-enameled, cast-iron, footed tub—the ubiquitous clawfoot type still at work for thousands of bathers today.
The Cast-Iron Tub
The J.L. Mott Iron Works was among the first to solve the porcelain-on-iron puzzle in the late 1880s with better techniques for preparing the iron and firing the coating, and when production improvements reduced costs in the 1920s, the cast-iron tub soon took over the bathroom. The typical tub style was the ordinary, a round-bottomed trough with a sloping head and a vertical foot holding water inlets and outlets. The other common style was the Roman, with flat sides and bottom, and identical (nearly vertical) sloping, rounded ends.
Antique Cast Iron Tub
Fancy, upscale lavatories could include both a sitz (at left) and foot bath (at right) to complement the bathtub and state-of-the-art ribcage shower, per a 1912 Standard Sanitary catalog.
The Built-In Tub
For a new century increasingly on the alert for germs, the only thing better than a tiled-in recess tub was one shipped this way straight from the factory. Casting one-piece tubs with a rim that extended down to the floor in an apron wasn’t easy, but by 1911, the Kohler Company, followed swiftly by its competitors, introduced the built-in tub—still a bathroom standard today. Made with one enclosed side (or one side and an end), the built-in tub was not only efficient in its own right, but as a 5′-long model that spanned the walls of the typical 5′ square bathroom, it became the cornerstone of the modern, functional Jazz Age bathroom trinity: wall-hung lavatory, water closet, and tub-and-shower combo.
Color Craze
Like Henry Ford, who promised auto buyers any color they wanted so long as it was black, sanitary ware manufacturers were at first color-blind to anything but white. White was not only the color of sanitation, making it easy to spot grime and therefore clean, it was also the optimal color to produce reliably from item to item.
Just like with the auto industry, however, all that began to change in the late 1920s. Once the bathroom reached a plateau as an efficient, hygienic cleansing hospital, it began to be viewed as a vehicle for design and household beauty, and around 1929, color came into the bathroom in a big way.
This inviting bathroom suite, featuring tan vitrolite walls and colorful Spring Green fixtures—including a separate, petite dental sink—appeared in a 1939 Kohler brochure.
Pigmenting the vitreous finish in fixtures—at first in light pastels, then in deeper hues like royal blue, Ming green, and Chinese red—brought color to the bathroom in solid swaths far more dramatic and permanent than any paint or tile.
Always key bathroom players by dint of their sheer size and function, bathtubs became ever more pivotal when they moved away from white. As color put a design spin on fixtures in the 1930s and ’40s, they began to look—once again—like furniture, with lavatories resembling tables and toilets approximating chairs. In this light, tubs might stand in for beds, especially when detailed with the rectangular outlines popular in the Art Moderne era and in velvety colors of rich maroon or black. It was a long way from the tin tub that had been hauled out of a closet only a generation or two before.
On the 20th of April, 1902, Marie and Pierre Curie successfully isolated a brand new element: radium, after years of hard work. At the time, it was believed that this new material might have all kinds of beneficial properties. So radium was swiftly incorporated into many products, ranging from makeup to ceramics to health tonics and jewelry. What wasn’t understood at this time was that radium was, in fact, quite deadly. A year before the publishing of her book “Radioactivity,” Marie died. Before her death, she had become aware of the great perils of radiation, which is also what took her life.
By the time Marie died, radium had taken the globe by storm. Radiation was something that wasn’t well understood at the time but had positive associations. It was branded under names such as “cure for the living dead” and “perpetual sushine. And perpetual is exactly what it turned out to be!
As the world descended into World War One, another use for radium came to the forefront: when infused into paint, it would make that paint glow in the dark. This made it an ideal material for coating watch faces, control panels, and instrument dials. Radium provided much-needed illumination for soldiers in the field without relying on other bulky equipment. From 1917 the demand for radium-coated dials skyrocketed, which was good news for the United States Radium Corporation. The company had been in the business of extracting and processing uranium for a few years. Now it expanded to mixing and applying radium-infused paint, a substance which they called“undark.”
Women using radium paint on alarm clock at a factory in 1932 | Picture Credits: Daily Herald Archive
It was no surprise that many local people were employed as dial painters. The dial painters would be supplied with radium paint and freshly stamped dials and had to use paintbrushes to strategically apply radium to the dial parts that needed to glow. Precision was required, so workers were instructed to lick the tips of their brushes in between each application to bring the bristles to a fine point.
For precision, the girls would soften the brush between their lips, thereby ingesting radium in the process | Photo Credits: Nontoxic Prints
The United States Radium Corporation workers had access to radium for free. They used it to paint their teeth and nails to give them a pleasant glow before heading out to dances in the evenings. Years passed. Hundreds of thousands of dials were painted and shipped out. The war eventually came to an end, much to the relief of the general population. But all was not well for the ex-workers of the United States Radium Corporation.
The original site of the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation in Orange, NJ Richard Harbus
Slowly, one by one, dial painters were falling ill. As the 1910s became the 1920s, hundreds of women who had worked as dial painters started noticing pain in their teeth and jaws. Many were having to visit their dentists regularly and were losing teeth with every visit. They were constantly exhausted, and in some cases, it was found that their jawbones were riddled with holes, reduced to a brittle hollow honeycomb. Despite this alarming wave of sickness, few were able to persuade anyone to take their ailments seriously. These female workers came to be known as the ‘Radium Girls.’
Radium Jaw, a certain sign of death in victims | Photo Credits: All That Is Interesting
When 22-year-old Molly Maggia passed away after experiencing years of pain in her jaw and teeth, her condition was described as syphilis. The complaints of many other women were glossed over with the same explanation, despite symptoms that pointed towards something more sinister. It was 1925 before any of the workers came to understand the devastating effect radium had on their bodies.
The 19-year-old woman started working at the Radium Luminous Materials Corp. in Orange, NJ, in 1917, and at first reveled in her job. It was lucrative — plus painting glow-in-the-dark radium on soldiers’ wristwatch faces meant she and her young female co-workers were helping in the war effort.
Grace Fryerhad once been a dial painter. Now her body was quite literally falling apart. The bones of her spine crumbled and required a metal brace. Tumors and abscesses sprouted in her jaw, and she was in constant pain. The radium she had ingested while working had riddled her with cancer and weakened her bones. It would soon end her life.
Furious, Grace and four of her colleagues moved to sue their ex-employer. For two years, however, no lawyer would take them seriously, despite their steadily worsening conditions. In 1928, the suit was finally filed. By this time, the demand for radium was declining, as people woke up to the dangers of radiation. Sales of radium-infused products fell further when newspapers around the world printed details of Grace’s story.
Grace Fryer, the first victim to take the radium industry to court | Photo Credits: Buzzfeed
The Radium Girls weren’t just sick; they were literally radioactive. The body of Mollie Maggia was exhumed in 1927 in the hope that her bones would give the remaining victims the evidence they needed to win their cases. Reportedly, when her coffin was lifted off the ground, her body glowed because of radiation. It wasn’t entirely surprising, considering her bones were found to be highly radioactive.
By the end of 1928, the case had been settled in favor of the female workers. They were awarded some compensation, although it was only a fraction of what they had initially demanded. Their medical bills were covered, and they were able to live out their final days with some measure of dignity. Many more suits followed from workers not just at the United States Radium Corporation but at several companies that had handled radium in the years after its discovery. Workers came to testify on their death beds. While Grace Fryer and her colleagues are remembered for leading the fight against injustice, there were thousands of more workers whose fates varied enormously.
Bedside Hearings of radium girls were common since they were too ill to come to the court. | Photo Credits: RSNA
Though many of the radium girls suffered greatly and died before their time, their deaths were not in vain. Many of these victims volunteered for tests and medical examinations, allowing us to understand for the first time how radiation affects the human body. This persuaded scientists to take extraordinary precautions in later experiments with nuclear weapons, potentially saving thousands of lives.
In addition to this enormous service to later generations, the case pushed forward by the radium girls was the first incident in which an employer was forced to take responsibility for the health and safety of its employees. This was a revolutionary concept in 1928.
The sacrifice and courage of the Radium Girls deserve to be applauded. Their case led to the introduction of life-saving regulations for workers all over the world and the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in the United States. The fearless champions continue to shine through history.
Few if any residents in Orange, NJ today know the history of the former plant site. Quietly tucked into a tree-lined residential neighborhood, it has been renamed High & Alden Street Park and features a playground — perhaps a fitting tribute to the young lives lost.
“I think it’s a good idea they [made it a park],’’ resident Robin Laurent, 40, recently told The Post after learning of its past. “It’s good for the people in the neighborhood and the people of Orange.’’
Sew Colorful 