Bricks, turned

kw: reminiscences, reading

When I was quite little and learning to sound out words, one day I came across a brick sidewalk. A few of the bricks had a word on them. One looked like this:

I sounded it out: "Simons". Great!

I knew a kid whose family was named Simons. Were they in the brick business?

Before long, I came across the next brick with a word on it. It looked different:

I sounded it out: "Snowis". I knew "snow" but this was new.

I wondered if the brick company was named "Simons and Snowis", and decided to look up "Snowis" in the phone book at home.

I turned around to go home, and saw the second brick, and was astonished to see that now it read "Simons"! Feeling a bit odd, I went to the other brick, the one I saw first. Now it said "Snowis".

Finally I realized that they all said just "Simons". It was just which way you came at them.

Some years later I learned about symmetry, and how some words and other objects look the same when rotated. In 1961 I figured out that it was a year with a rotational number, and that the next one would be 6009. That was also the year that I saw a sign that can be rotated half a turn, and reads the same:

NOW NO
SWIMS
ON MON

(Seen at a swimming pool near my home.) These are related to palindromes (Such as "Able was I ere I saw Elba"), but I don't know a term for them.

When they were a penny

kw: reminiscences, history, post cards

A friend directed me to the GenWeb Penny Post Card Archives, where I snagged a couple of images from my own past.

I spent half of my formative years in a suburb of Salt Lake City, Utah. We visited the Capitol Building once.

Even earlier, I was born in Pasadena, California, and we lived in the area until I was about six. My wife and my brother and I visited the old City Hall just a couple of years ago. Still as beautiful as ever.

I remember penny post cards, but vaguely. I also remember when a regular letter was two cents, but about the time we moved to SLC the price went to three cents.

Arcadia in my mind

kw: travel, reminiscences

When I plan a trip, I "visit" prospective motels via Google Street View. "Driving" down a street and "looking" every which way in Street View gives me an idea what a neighborhood is like. The property may look fine, but the neighborhood makes the difference.

This is a Travelodge in Pasadena at which I've stayed before; I like it pretty well. It is one of three in eastern Pasadena that I've used. Since they are all of similar quality, each time I go I choose by price.

I am gradually losing all my reasons to visit Pasadena. Once, all my family lived in the Pasadena-Arcadia area. Dad was the last to move, to Portland last summer. My niece will soon graduate from Occidental College, a half hour or less to the southwest, so if I don't stay in South Pasadena, I'll probably resort to this Travelodge again…for one last time.

Looking east toward Arcadia after clipping that image, I realized I was looking at an area near a place I used to live. When my parents first moved back from Ohio to California in 1967, we lived at this house in Arcadia. I lived with them there two years; they were there several years longer.

I can only recognize the house by its location. A later resident has walled in part of the front yard, hiding the front of the house. The driveway doesn't seem as steep as it did forty years ago, when I used to back my VW Bug down it, nearly always banging the bumper on the street.

That driveway used to go beside the house, to a garage behind, where Dad and I rebuilt the VW's engine, and my brother took two junked Subarus and produced one running car. None of the houses has a driveway that goes 'round back now. Everyone has added either a side garage or a bedroom. One neighbor even dug out the driveway to street level.

This was the house in which I learned to sleep through cacophony. A family hobby is antique clocks, many gathered while we lived in the Midwest. About twenty or more mantel clocks were kept running in a special set of shelves. By midnight every night, their chiming, along with the cuckooing of at least two cuckoo clocks, fairly rattled the walls. Several were Westminster chimes, with their sixteen-beat tune preceding the twelve sonorous Bongs. One was a Wellington, which has twice the melody!

I retain half a dozen antique clocks, but I keep only one of them in "bonging" trim. My family is less tolerant of midnight music than I.

Memory Lane by Lake Erie

kw: the past, nostalgia, reminiscences

This is a scene about six blocks from the house I lived in my 9th grade year, in Lakewood, Ohio. It is Clifton & Belle, looking north toward Lakewood Park. This is as close as Google Street View currently comes to the house.

Lakewood Park is the locus of most of my fond memories of Lakewood. When I started 10th grade, I found that the new high school was dominated by youth gangs, with which I was soon in deep trouble, just for refusing to join one. Fortunately, we moved by November, to Sandusky, which move I credit with saving my life.

At Lakewood park I was on the park swim team and learned lifeguarding skills. In the winter, they filled a bermed area with water to freeze, and we all skated there. Skating on any part of nearby Lake Erie was too hazardous, because the lake is in constant motion, being shallow, and the ice breaks unpredictably. Only one person has survived an attempt to walk from Point Pelee, Ontario to Cleveland.

This zoomed-out view of the Street View image shows the controls. It is much clearer and easier to use than Street View was just a couple months ago. The navigation arrows that let you "drive" down a street don't show here, because they fade out of view if you just sit quietly for a moment. A cool feature. Move the mouse, and they appear again.

I can get an overhead view of the nearby house, but I'll wait for a street-level image, whenever the Google folks get around to it.

Memory lane on Hillside Lane

kw: musings, reminiscences

Today Google released a ton of new street-level imagery in their Google Maps application. It doubles the total coverage, and multiplies by eight or so the number of cities that have been significantly or fully imaged. They have spiffed up their interface, also, making the images easier to use.

This is the house I was living in fifty years ago. I lived here, on Hillside Lane in Salt Lake City, Utah, for five years prior to 1961, when we moved to Ohio. These were very formative years for me. My brothers and I won prizes in a couple of parades, we climbed all over the Wasatch Mountains that overshadow the area, we sat in cherry trees with an orchard owner's kids and ate ourselves silly every Summer, and we tied bedsheets to wagons and "sailed" up the street whenever there was a strong south wind. They were pretty good years. The orchard is gone now, all built over.

Our house was one of the first in the neighborhood, so we played in the brushy vacant lots, and sometimes in the partly-built houses on weekends. I was 13 when we moved away, and had just finished 8th grade, so my high school years were all in Ohio.

I looked, but the streets I lived on in Ohio haven't been visited by a Google photo-van yet. I'll look at them whenever they get added.