Low Tech on the 75th Anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge

When Suzy and Kathy were over on Saturday for our monthly get-together, we talked a little bit about technology and how it has and hasn't enhanced our lives.  I mentioned Jonathan's and my analogy--arrived at separately--of the iPod as an IV--a life-support, constantly feeding us or we die or at least have terrible withdrawal pains from an interruption in the substance we're addicted to.  So, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary celebration of the GGB, here's some interesting date:

A man just a bit younger than me (he's 63),  Larry Richardson,  spent more than $4,000 to build a Golden Gate Bridge replica on the farm in Kansas that he shares with his wife.  

He could have gotten some tips on how to build it from the Internet as C.W. Nevius points out, but he says, “I’ve never used a computer.  Never turned one on in my life.  Don’t have a cell phone either.”    I should send that to Jackie, Jonathan's godmother, who refuses to use e-mail (even when she's part of the Stanford reunion committee, which referred to her as a "dinosaur"). 

Richardson’s dad, who was 75 at the beginning of the bridge replica building, helped.  They mixed 94 ½ tons of cement in wheelbarrows and wore out hoes, which they had to keep replacing.  

He couldn’t find International Orange, so he painted the bridge gold from half-pint cans of paint available in Mulvane, Kansas, which is 15 miles south of Wichita.  They bought every can of gold pain in the area and cleaned out seven or eight Ace Hardware stores.  They painted the whole bridge with a 1-inch brush because that’s all that would fit in the can!  A 150-foot-long bridge!  That's what I mean by low-tech.  Hand-made.

But now that it's build, Richardson won’t charge a toll.  He'll welcome all free of charge.  “If you are interested in the bridge, you must be an interesting person.”  (Now, that kind of supports my own philosophy that interesting people are interested people or maybe interested people are interesting.)

Richardson has never seen the real Golden Gate Bridge because he was asleep when his Army bus, carrying soldiers to a plane that would go to Vietnam for combat, crossed the bridge about 2:30 in the morning in 1968.  He woke up just in time to see a tower.  (I remember taking a bus--but not an Army bus--across the GGB to Treasure Island to get my Peace Corp medical clearing in 1969.)  That inspires a variation of the old saying:  We’ll build that bridge when we come to it…or maybe even before.

Another aside to technology was Sam Whiting’s article on artist Anandamayi Arnold’s crepe paper dresses to honor the six counties that helped fund the building of the GGB in 1937:  SF, Marin, Napa, Sonoma, Mendocino, and Del Norte.  She made the “30s retro Spanish” dresses on her grandmother’s black Singer sewing machine.  When Sam Whiting asked her for a business card, she tore off a strip of paper and wrote down her name and number.

Memorial Day and Golden Gate Bridge's 75th Anniversary

While retrieving a fourth article by Sam Whiting, I lost all of my blog!

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/05/17/PKOR1O1RUA.DTL  Dressing for the occasion--and to honor six counties that contributed to the building of GGB

As I was saying:  I woke up in a funk but soon felt wonderful because of the Sam Whiting articles I found on the Golden Gate Bridge.   He does justice to his subjects because he's witty and wise.  Here are three others:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/05/17/PKRF1O4089.DTL  on Vertigo as surreal GGB

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/05/20/PKD51O931N.DTL International Orange Commemorative Store as Art

 http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/05/20/PK0Q1NU623.DTL  More on artists and International Orange

The picture above is one I took when Bill Shoaf and I took a walk from Lincoln and Langdon to the GGB and then across it to Murray's Circle in Sausalito.  (We ate outdoors at the Fern Bar, where we had their four-course plate while looking at the GGB from a different direction.)  The path you se in this picture is a new one, and it's where Bill and I began.  This was Wednesday, May 23, right in the middle of my final exam week, when I was testing students, scoring, calculating results, and starting to get grades online.  What a nice change this walk was!  I had warned Bill that I might not be able to walk across because of my vertigo (not quite so romantic--or deadly--as Kim Novak's), but I had no trouble at all.  As you can see, it was a beautiful day, and it felt very good except for a sort of accident I had that I won't mention here.

We really hadn't planned this walk because this weekend is the big celebratory weekend; I don't think either of us thought of that at all even though we were certainly aware that his was the 75th anniversary year!  As much as I love the bridge and the city it symbolizes, I've been more excited about Stern Grove's 75th anniversary.  

But I plan to devote some of today to reading more on the bridge.

I had just one "interruption," and it's a very significant one--one I welcome.  Going into my e-mail to send a husband what I've written so far for his wife's retirement gathering, I saw a link for something on memorial day, and it's really the first link we should check out: 

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/282-98/11629-focus-immemorial-day-no-peace-for-militarized-us

 

Will Maynez and Diego Rivera Mural

I think all my grades are online, so now I can go back to the beginning of this month and catch up on things like this: The retirement of Will Maynez, campus hero, here with one of his early-morning fans--one who's seen him going around campus around 7:30 AM picking up trash.  This picture was taken by Ray Hobert, another wonderful faculty member and a photographer.

Here's a link to Jesse Hamlin's article on Will and the Diego Rivera Mural.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/05/21/DDCC1OKART.DTL

I will be back to go beyond even May 9th!

Will Maynez and Diego Rivera Mural

I see from the abduction of a teenager that reason police know that she isn't a runaway and is, in fact, dead, is that she hasn't posted on Twitter since her disappearance.  So here I am to prove that I'm still alive.  I'll start with Will, who's retired but is also very much alive.  Here's the newspaper spread about Will Maynez and the Diego Rivera Mural, a tribute to both by Jesse Hamlin, whom I got to meet at the retirement party--really nice!

Testing, One, two, three Ten tests missing times four

I had heard about a student who went ballistic and started throwing desks, tearing posters off walls, and yelling that he was going to kill everyone assembled for the final tests, but I was determined to make the test-taking as much without stress for our students as possible.  I got to the assigned testing room early and greeted them.  I wrote "Good morning, we hope" on the blackboard along with other information they would need and helped the students from the other teacher's class fill out the Admissions Ticket form and detach the part they had been instructed to detach and put in their wallet.


As usual the classroom was too small to seat the students at the proper testing distance from one another, but we encourage group work.  However,  what we didn't know was that there weren't even enough desks for them to sit too close to one another.  We were 25 desks short!

         No one among our students threw desks (there weren't enough) or threatened murder.  The other teacher Stephanie and I are the ones who did that.  Actually, we were all pretty well-behaved,  and that was good, because we had major adjustments to make.  They had given us an already crowded room with 25 too few chairs, so  Stephanie scouted around and found another classroom, and  I took 25 Scantrons and my 25 students, who’d just acclimatized,  out of Science Hall 200 and around the corner.    But soon Stephanie came to me to say she didn’t have enough Scantrons, so I called our wonderful assistant Susan, who sent some over, but we didn’t realize until after we had 10 too few reading tests that they’d counted wrong and gotten 56 instead of 66 when adding 19+22+25!  We were short 10 not only in Scantrons and reading tests but also in grammar and essay prompts!  My trunk and messages on the board were still in Science 200, as was my stapler, and Stephanie and I were trying to be both proctors and runners from room to room.  When I called for a stapler as my final "let's keep in touch' call, I thought that trekking back and forth an item at a time was just their exercise for the day, but Susan told me they were setting up for the party, so I was going to let my comps run loose.  I could see that their error was starting to annoy them and we teachers calling for more testing material were as obnoxious to them as Oliver calling for more gruel…and then Jim McKinney came to our rescue.  He says he sometimes thinks we teachers should get combat pay for all the things "up with which we put."  Here's to all "up with which  we put."  May it rest in peace someday.  Afterwards, we had the May Scholarship awarding, and my student Erika, who'd just gone through that ordeal with us, won the biggest one.  She took this picture.

For some reason, my latest posts have not "taken."  That is, they haven't appeared on my blog site.  But wonderful Geary, Tech Help, is here, so maybe I can get this functioning again.  If I can, I'll tell about the floor to ceiling bookshelves and my students' compositions as well as a very nice letter I got from a student giving all the details of what he likes about my teaching.

Altered Books

I wrote about an art exhibit, but the blog was accidentally deleted, so I'll just give the URL:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/05/04/DD8F1O7RJ1.DTL

Foie Gras Continued

Yesterday I was talking about the front-page article on restauranteers trying to defend foie gras against Proposition 2, passed in 2004 but not taking effect until this July 1, 2012.  That's the one, I think, that stipulates that animals should be able to move their heads from side to side in their cages and maybe even turn around during their days in factory farms.  It extends to forced feeding.

 I wanted to give the readers' response, too, to the article of April 29.  It can be found with this link:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/04/30/ED1C1OB569.DTL

I'm so impressed by both how caring and how articulate the readers are--one from Petaluma and one from San Francisco. 

Sheri Cardo of Petaluma writes, "The 1 percent keeps on fighting to live off the fat of the land--this time literally, in the form of foie gras."  She asks whether we should continue to torture animals "to feed the folly of those who relish the taste of cruelty?"

Steve Heilig points out that the language used in the foie gras defense is tortured too.

"To fight the voter-approved ban on foie gras, the Golden Gate Restaurnt Association--which previously fought against banning smoking in eateries and against Healthy San Francisco--calls their front group the 'Coalition for Humane and Ethical Farming Standards.'  Who was their consultant on choosing that name, George Orwell?"  Probably.  After all, when they were fighting against the ban on smoking in restaurants, they called themselves something like Citizens for Civil Rights.

Foie Gras
Sunday's SF Chronicle, April 29, 2012, had a front page story titled "Food fight:  foie gras" with a picture captioned "Foie gras appetizers at an event at La Toque in Napa that raised money to fight the upcoming statewide ban."  Some of the information in the article was fascinating.    Chefs are threatening that if they're denied the right to serve foie gras, it will go on the black market.  "Chefs throughout Califonia have been holding foie gras dinners to call attention to the upcoming ban.  (This is Prop 2, written by the Humane Society of the US,  to appear on the ballot soon.)  Foie gras is, the article explains, produced by what the French call gavage--feeding the animals through a tube up to three times a day for 21 days--which fattens their livers 10 to 12 times their normal size.  "Critics say the method is not only cruel and torturous, but unnatural."  Foie gras is banned--or at least force-feeding for foie gras is banned--in Europe (France?) as well as in Israel, where it used to be the world's #4 producer.  But it's interesting to note that the American Veterinary Medical Association hasn't taken a stand on this, and the Artisan Framers Alliance argues that "waterfowl in the wild naturally gorge themselves twice yearsy before migration."  (So why don't they just catch that waterfowl before it migrates?)  Someone named Douglas Keane, described as "a licensed dog trainer and frequent animal shelter volunteer"--refuses to serve milk-fed veal but thinks that force-fed ducks are just an example of "husbandry,...farming." 

So...in today's Chronicle there were some good responses.  I'll cite them tomorrow.