Beatie's Blog

Contaminated meats

2011-04-17T14:46:00.000-07:00

The latest flap concerning the prevalence of bacteria in grocery store meats is surprising to me because this has always been the case. Thus the routine advice on cooking shows to" wash your hands, working surfaces and implements very regularly."

What is disturbing to me is the prevalence of drug-resistant bacteria. Which suggests to me that the FDA should prohibit the routine feeding of antibiotics to farm animals, chicken, pigs, cows, etc., on the basis that they are operating millions of unlicensed laboratories for the development of drug-resistant bacteria.

FY2012 Budget Considerations (correction)

2011-04-10T14:44:00.001-07:00

When I was a young man there was at least as much attention paid to sinking funds as there was to loan amortization. (How much do I need to save each year for the next five years so that I can buy a car?) Why cannot local, state, and federal governments practice that sort of conservatism?

Enough of that introduction. I have just completed an exercise addressing the elimination of the federal debt. I made the following, simplifying, assumptions:

Interest on the national debt to remain fixed at 3% for the duration of the analysis.
Start FY2012 with a national debt of $15,000,000,000,000.
FY2012 budget to have a surplus that will result in the elimination of the federal debt in 25 years.
The only change in the government expenditures will be the reduction of the cost of debt service.
There will be no change in government revenues from the FY2012 budget.

Question: What is the dollar amount of the FY2012 surplus required to eliminate the debt in 25 years?

The answer is $600,000,000,000, i.e. $0.6 trillion.

I will not be around in 25 years (at least I hope not) but unless the idiots in Washington are talking about something in this neighborhood I think we should dump the whole lot!

Defensible Space

2011-03-20T23:51:00.000-07:00

The other day I was browsing through the many photos that I have on my hard drive. I ran across several photos that suggested this blog post. It may not be of interest to most of you, but I am sure that it will interest one of my regular readers, Eric, a retired fire chief.

In the early 1990’s Evelyn and I purchased a five-acre plot in the mountains of southern Oregon: 5,000 feet elevation, 23 miles from the nearest grocery store or gasoline station, and 10 miles from the nearest mail delivery. We designed and built an 8,500 square-foot home. The home had a very large south-facing deck overlooking many pine and fir trees, Howard Prairie Lake, and the top of Mount Shasta.

It turned out that this property was in a “Fire Protection Class 10” area. That is, the only outfit who might respond to a fire was the forest service, and their job was to protect the forest and not structures. Only one outfit offered homeowners insurance.

There is not much an individual can do in the event of a forest fire. (We did have sprinklers on the roof, 1,700 gallons of water storage, and a diesel generator to run the pumps.) So the real leverage involved the creation and maintenance of a “defensible space” surrounding the structures. That is, removing all of the ground and ladder fuel for at least 100 feet (300 feet is better).

So, in the spring, after the snow had melted, I gathered all of the dead branches that had fallen to the ground and stacked them in clearings between the trees. (I think that “among” is more grammatically correct than “between”, but it just does not sound right.) Then, pole saw in hand, sometimes augmented with an extension ladder, I walked around under the trees and cut off all of the dead or broken branches, as well as any limbs that brushed my head as I walked by.

Then I covered each pile with black plastic, weighing down each corner of the plastic with rocks. After the first snow fall it was a simple matter of wiping the snow off a small area of the plastic, tearing a small hole in the plastic, and pouring a small amount of a mixture of gasoline and diesel oil into the brush pile. Dropping a match into the hole started the process of burning most of the brush. Usually there was left a few smoldering pieces around the periphery, which, upon raking them into the center, completed the burning process. (Now that is an awkward sentence that I do not intend to rewrite.)

And people ask me what kept me busy during the summers other than cutting, splitting, and stacking fire wood for the winter months.

And you, who teases me about my Ticonderoga #2, yes, I did draft this with a #2 pencil. Not a Ticonderoga, though.

Daisy, Sweet Pea, and Fluffy

2011-03-16T09:58:00.000-07:00

Today I should like to introduce three new animal friends: Daisy, Sweet Pea, and Fluffy.

There is an interesting story leading to our introduction to these new friends. A few days ago we received a telephone call from our regular dog sitter, Melinda. She had received a distress call from one of our neighbors, Bill. (Bill is not a "next-door" neighbor. His place is a bit over two miles from our place. But since most of that distance is open desert, he qualifies as a neighbor.)

Bill's wife is in the hospital and will be for some time. The details of why she is in the hospital are interesting but unimportant to this tale. Bill is a truck driver for Walmart. He had been away from work for several weeks and had to return. He needed someone to look after his two dogs on a daily basis, but could not afford Malinda's regular fees. Melinda knows us as dog lovers and that we lived relatively close to Bill. Thus her call to us.

We met with Bill and discovered that he also had a cat in addition to the two dogs. We learned all about his wife's medical issues and his idea of what looking after his dogs entailed. Our idea was much more extensive than was Bill's.

Bill's working schedule involves going to Apple Valley and living in his RV for six days and returning home for two days, for an eight-day cycle.

We impressed upon Bill that this was obviously a long-term situation and urged him to line up a number of volunteers. We agreed to take the first six-day shift and could not commit beyond that other than to be on call for emergency back up, other commitments permitting. Today is the last day of this first shift. Bill expects to arrive home about 10:00 tonight.

Evelyn has fallen in love with Daisy and Sweet Pea. I need to be careful that we do not end up with two more dogs to add to the four we already have!

Thermodynamics and Politics

2011-02-19T09:13:00.000-08:00

Today I shall stray from my ramblings about my childhood memories and discuss a comment recently made by Ben Bernanke. But first let me introduce you to the the laws of thermodynamics as defined by the Readers Digest years ago.

1st Law: Things are pretty bad.
2nd Law: Things are going to get worse before they get better.
3rd Law: Who said they are going to get better.

Bernanke's comment was something to the effect that the job situation was not going to get better any time soon and could get a bit worse before it got better. That sounds very much like the first two laws of thermodynamics in a single statement. What he failed to do was to follow up with the third law. In my opinion the evolution to the third law is inevitable unless we get rid of the politicians in Washington and put in some real business men and women.

While I don't much care for Donald Trump as a person, his ideas for improving the job situation make a lot more sense than the gutless utterances of the folks now in Washington. It's too bad that we cannot have a national referendum to recall all of the elected folks in Washington and start over.

Brooder House

2010-12-21T10:58:00.000-08:00

The need to raise chickens to replace culled hens required a substantial facility. As I noted in an earlier post, when my grandfather was operating the ranch his foreman was a retired ships carpenter. It was he who was largely responsible for the construction of the brooder house.

The building was about twenty feet wide by two hundred and twenty feet long. It was built on a gradual slope so that the upper one hundred feet was about three feet higher than the lower one hundred and twenty feet. The upper section was divided into five brooder rooms, each about twenty feet square. The first portion of the lower section was a twenty foot square feed room. About which, more later. The remainder of the lower section was divided in the same manner as the upper section.

There was an ingenious trolley, hung from an overhead rail in each of the upper and lower sections. Each trolley allowed one to load the car with chicken feed and roll it the full length of the building, thus saving a great deal of physical effort. When not engaged in chores, Jerry and I would ride on the trolleys, just for fun.

Each of the twenty brooder rooms contained a gas-fired brooder stove and roosts for the chicks when they became old enough to roost. The roosts were hinged against the back wall and could be lowered when it came time to teach the chicks to roost. When the chicks were old enough to roost the brooder stove was turned off and could be raised via ropes and pulleys to allow easy access throughout the room. The floors were covered with wood shavings. The rooms were divided by swinging doors to allow easy passage for the trolleys.

It was necessary to teach the chicks to roost. Initially at night when it came time for the chicks to roost they had to be herded onto the roosts. Otherwise they would pile up in a corner and some would smother. Jerry and I found out about this possibility the hard way. One night we were late and we lost a couple of dozen chicks. That resulted in a sound belting.

Each of the brooder rooms had access to a small, fenced yard where the chicks were allowed to scratch; starting about the time they were taught to roost.

The feed room contained one-hundred pound sacks of various components of feed for the chicks. The proportions of each component changed as the chicks aged. The feed was mixed in a wooden box that was about four feet wide by six feet long. The box was about two feet off the floor to minimize stooping.

The mixed feed was loaded onto the trolleys in special containers. The containers were made from square five-gallon cans with the tops removed and a 2x2 wooden handle attached to the inside of a top edge. The form factor made it easy to scoop the feed from the mixing box and allowed compact loading onto the trolleys.

Another element of the feed room was a half-barrel. One of the by-products of our small dairy operation (more about that in a later post) was several gallons of skim milk every day. The skim milk was mixed with rolled oats in the half-barrel and allowed to ferment for a couple of days. It was then mixed with the chick feed.

Life on a Chicken Ranch

2010-12-14T19:31:00.000-08:00

(My grandmother would never think of living on a chicken farm, it had to be a chicken ranch. It was just like she lived on Magnolia Heights, not Magnolia Avenue.)

There are a number of activities associated with life on a chicken ranch. Daily activities included feeding the chickens, gathering eggs (twice a day), cleaning and sorting eggs, and routine repairs and maintenance. Weekly chores included cleaning out the chicken manure under the roosts where the chickens slept (every Saturday) and scrubbing out the watering troughs.

Infrequent activities included replacing nest linings with wood shavings or rice hulls, driving the 1935 GMC flatbed with sideboards to the local lumber yard to pick up a load of shavings. (Today, about every five years, I request competitive quotations for auto insurance on the web. None of the insurance sites will allow an age of first license less than sixteen. In fact, I got my first license when I was fourteen. That allowed me to drive to town to pick up shavings as well as chickenfeed.) Occasionally there was a load of oyster shells to be dumped in the chicken yards. I do not recall the source of the oyster shells.

Chicken are not productive layers for more than about two or three years. So periodically the flock was culled and marginally productive hens were shipped off to slaughter. This required the regular replacement by raising chickens from day-old chicks. One of the steps in raising laying hens is vaccination. I do not recall what diseases the vaccinations were addressing, but there were two.

As I recall noting in an earlier posting, my grandfather was from Denmark. Therefore we did not vaccinate the chickens, we “waxinatted” them. My father, my brother, and I set some sort of record, vaccinating more than twice the number of chickens in one day than did a professional veterinarian crew of five.

As a sideline activity to egg production my brother and I raised five thousand broilers from day-old chicks. When they were ready for market we butchered them and sold them from the ranch for twenty-nine cents a pound. That was during WWII so at today’s dollar that was equivalent to about twenty-nine dollars a pound. We did not require ration stamps. I still know how to dismember a bird in short order.

Cordwood

2010-11-12T08:57:00.000-08:00

As I think I mentioned in an earlier post my father owned a one-hundred acre parcel next to my Uncle Bob’s place in Oregon. The property was mostly covered with second growth Douglas fir. A very large pile of sawdust was the only reminder of a long-gone sawmill. There was a small spring that fed an elongated marshy area. Along this marshy area grew a stand of live oaks. Because this stand was surrounded by tall Douglas fir trees, the oak trees tended to grow very tall and slender, reaching for the sunlight. It was from this stand of oak trees that the family gathered firewood for their fireplaces and kitchen stoves.

(I pause in this narrative to explain the concept of cordwood. A cord is a stack of firewood four feet wide by four feet high by eight feet long. Cordwood is pieces of firewood four feet long. Cordwood was typically delivered to a wood shed or a basement where it was bucked into fireplace or stove lengths. It was then split and allowed to dry before burning. A rick is half a cord.)

Using two-man crosscut saws and axes the trees were felled and trimmed. (Remember this was before chainsaws.) To cut the oak logs into four foot lengths Uncle Bob had a buzz-saw with a blade about two feet in diameter. This saw was powered by Uncle Bob’s one-lung diesel tractor using a wide belt drive.

In addition to providing cordwood to family members, some of the wood was sold to folks in Oregon City. Aware as I am of the current price of firewood it is difficult for me to believe my memory, but I recall that cordwood was delivered to town for four dollars a cord.

My Cow S**t Cousin

2010-11-06T08:27:00.000-07:00

I have mentioned George Ward previously. (His mother’s brother was married to my grandmother’s sister.) George was a graduate of Lowell High School in San Francisco. He spent some time as a roustabout in the oilfields near Bakersfield before becoming a dentist in San Francisco.

George had a country home in Camp Meeker where his parents lived and George spent his weekends. George had his place fenced with eleven-foot high fences to keep the deer out of his rose garden. He had started with an eight-foot fence but that did not do the job.

The handle “Cow S**t Cousin” came about in an interesting way. As noted above George had a rose garden. He was very fond of his roses. So when he expressed an interest in getting some chicken manure to fertilize his roses, I rose to the occasion. At the time I was driving a large Dodge pickup. The family was friendly with neighbors by our old chicken ranch. These neighbors had not had chickens for some time and had plenty of well-rotted chicken manure in some of their old chicken houses. Over the period of several years I hauled a number of pickup loads of chicken manure to George’s roses. Thus “Cow S**t Cousin” because “Chicken S**t Cousin” just didn’t sound right.

It is interesting to note that although George professed to be an atheist (His comment about the chicken manure: “…more precious than the blood of Christ”.) his best friend was a Catholic priest to whom he left his estate.

George was a great story teller. He had a particular fondness for bawdy limericks. Remind me sometime and I can repeat some of them for you.

Cover Boy

2010-11-04T13:48:00.000-07:00

When my parents purchased my grandfather’s chicken ranch there came with it a Jersey milk cow named Shiny. Shiny had a crumpled horn that she knew how to use. On more than one occasion she boosted my brother and me over the fence with it.

At one time my father promised me that I could have the next calf from our small herd of milk cows. On Easter Sunday in 1947 Shiny gave birth to beautiful twin Jersey calves. Appropriately or not we named them Mary and Magdalene.

Somehow a reporter from Country Gentleman magazine heard about the birth of the twin calves. The reporter showed up with a photographer. Some months later, there on the cover of the magazine, was a picture of me in my knit cap (it was freezing cold) with the twin calves.

Maggie lived a short, tragic life, a bit too gruesome to relate here. Mary became a fine, productive milk cow.

Painting and Bee Keeping

2010-10-18T10:36:00.000-07:00

After WWII a great deal of war surplus material was sold for ridiculously low prices. My father bought many five gallon cans of paint, mostly army drab, to paint the chicken houses. The hired hands painted the chicken houses every few year using a gasoline powered sprayer.

The paint cans came in sturdy oak boxes. Some boxes were one-can boxes and the others were two-can boxes. The one-can boxes were just the right size and shape for bee hives.

In addition to rats under the chicken houses there were, on occasion, bees. I fashioned a couple of bee hives out of paint boxes. The hives were on 2x2 legs. I placed the legs in tin cans filled with water to keep the ants from invading the hives and destroying them. I then captured two swarms of bees and introduced them to the new hives. I extracted honey for a couple of years before I grew tired of the effort.

I must have been stung at least a few times, but I do not recall having been stung.

In retrospect it seems that I was something like Henry Ford. He used the wood from the crates in which his transmissions arrived for floorboards in his automobiles.

More Ranch Dogs

2010-10-15T07:01:00.000-07:00

When we moved onto the chicken ranch Teddy was already an old dog. It was only a couple of years before he passed away. To fill the void, two dogs wandered in and we adopted them. They were very young and obviously litter mates. We named them Buckskin and Beaver. (Some of you readers are too young to remember the radio program Red Rider, or was it Ryder?) Appropriately enough, Buckskin was buckskin colored. Beaver was much darker.

These two dogs were not nearly as good as Teddy at catching rats. In fact they were no good at all.

Early in his career with us Beaver started to chase chickens. On a chicken ranch that can be a fatal activity. I tied an old dead chicken around this neck and he had to drag it around for a whole week. After that I do not think he even looked at another chicken.

Beaver had the bad habit of chasing cars and trucks. On at least two occasions he caught one. As a consequence his right hip was smashed and his right hind leg did not function. That, however, did not stop him from chasing cars and trucks. It just slowed him down so he did not catch any more.

Another dog wandered in a year of so after the arrival of Buckskin and Beaver. Of course, we adopted him. He was a beautiful black lab. We named him Amonasro. (You may recall that my parents were aspiring opera singers.)

I do not recall any more interesting stories about the dogs other than they followed Jerry and me around the ranch and, without a whole lot of coaching, refrained from chasing the sheep that kept the grass and weeds trimmed in the lanes among the chicken houses.

Teddy and Bounty Hunting

2010-10-09T16:19:00.000-07:00

When my parents bought my grandfather’s chicken ranch, Teddy (as in Teddy Roosevelt), a rat terrier, came along with it. Among Teddy’s talents was the ability to climb an eight-foot chicken-wire fence in pursuit of cats. I never saw Teddy catch a cat.

My father posted bounties: $0.01/mouse, $0.10/gopher or mole, and $1.00/rat. It was relatively easy to catch mice. My brother, Jerry, and I would take Teddy with us into the hay loft. There we moved hay bales and the mice would scurry about. Teddy, Jerry, and I would each catch our share of mice.

Catching gophers and moles was not quite so easy. Teddy did not seem to be interested. We caught a few using traps. Rarely, when a particularly pesky gopher invaded our vegetable garden I stood guard with my 12 gauge shotgun. When the gopher pushed out a mound of dirt and stuck his head out I would blast away. Of course this left very little evidence with which to claim the bounty.

Rat catching, on the other hand, was a mixed bag. We did catch a few with traps. The gold mines were under the chicken houses, of which there were over thirty. Under a typical chicken house there was a vertical clearance between the ground and the floor joists of twelve to eighteen inches. Teddy, Jerry, and I crawled on our stomachs, Teddy digging down the length of a rat burrow. There was always at least one rat burrow under every chicken house. Upon reaching a nest, an adult rat would run out and Teddy promptly caught it. (Remember, Teddy was a rat terrier.) Jerry and I would then gather up as many as a dozen baby rats. It only took a couple of such episodes for our father to amend the terms of the bounty: $1.00/adult rat, $0.10/baby rat.

I am not certain now whether the primary motivation for the efforts was the monetary reward or only the “thrill of the hunt”. Maybe I should pay more attention to why I say and do the things that I do?

More Oregon Stuff

2010-10-04T17:37:00.000-07:00

To make sense of this story you will have to remember that my brother and I were kids from Southern California (Riverside) at the times our family spent summer vacations in Oregon.

Uncle Bob had several acres across the road from our grandparents’ house that he was preparing to convert to a berry patch. All of the big Douglas fir trees had been harvested. What remained was to blast the stumps, clear out all of the brush, and plow. This process was taking several years, leaving time for seedling fir trees to grow. To me and my brother this was magical. Just look at all of those Christmas trees!

And what does one do with Christmas trees? One decorates them! So we went to the barn and got a sack needle and sack twine. (You know, the stuff one uses to sew closed burlap sacks filled with grain.) We then gathered red rose hips from the many wild roses growing among the stumps and Christmas trees. Using the sack needle and twine we made a lot of rose hip strings. These we draped over a bunch of the Christmas trees.

I guess that Toys-Я-Us would never have made it back then with so many simple, low-cost (i.e. free) play things available for kids who used their imagination.

Water Witching

2010-09-30T16:25:00.000-07:00

My Uncle Chas (Charles Fountain Beatie, II) had a small piece of wooded land on the headwaters of Beaver Creek. The place was at the end of a dead-end lane, just beyond the Carus Cemetery. It was not far from my grandparents’ home.

During one of our summer visits to Oregon we camped at Uncle Chas’ place rather than staying in the house with my grandparents and Uncle Jack and Aunt Ada.

One evening our family was joined around the campfire by uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents. The lively discussion turned to the subject of water witching. My father decided to demonstrate how the process worked. He cut and trimmed a forked willow branch. The cut stem was about a foot long and the two forks were about a foot and a half long, each. By grasping the ends of the two forks it was possible to cause the stem end to point downward by bringing the fork ends close together.

So, grasping the two ends, my father began to whoop and holler and prance around like a mad man. Shortly he tripped on a root. As he began to fall he brought his hands together, causing the stem end to point straight down. And father fell face downward in the headwaters of Beaver Creek. Thus proving that, in at least some cases and situations, water witching does work!

The Death Penalty

2010-09-26T09:41:00.000-07:00

The past couple of days there have been news reports of two long-delayed executions. That, and the fact that I have been called for jury duty next week, has lead me to contemplate the issues surrounding the death penalty.

Being somewhat old-fashioned and analytic, I tend to address these sorts of questions with the use of a Ben Franklin balance sheet, thusly:

Attributes of the Death Penalty

Positive:

Recidivism rate is zero.
Some crimes are so heinous that they demand the death penalty.

Negative:

Some innocent individuals are convicted.
Typically it takes many years to carry out the sentence - "Justice delayed is justice denied."
The many, many appeals cost the tax payers a lot of money.
The cost of incarceration of a death-row inmate is a lot more than for a "lifer".

I could go on, but these, I think, are the major points. My conclusion after weighing these aspects of the death penalty:

Philosophically I am very much in favor of the death penalty, BUT
Unless we can return to the days of the old west and carry out the sentence within thirty days there is no practical value to imposing the death sentence.

Grey Diggers and Crawdads

2010-09-25T07:03:00.000-07:00

In an earlier post I told you that my Uncle Bob had a filbert orchard. Along one side of the orchard was a stand of Douglas fir trees. As the filberts began to ripen all of the trees next to the Douglas fir stand were being stripped of nuts. It was ground squirrels, grey diggers my grandfather called them, crossing over the line to raid the nuts.

Uncle Bob had an old .22 rifle. That rifle must have been fired over a million times. There was almost no rifling left. However it was just fine for shooting grey diggers. On several occasions I sat, watching the no-man’s land between the forest and the orchard. I shot a number of raiding grey diggers. When I tired of the sport I hung a dead squirrel on the barbed-wire fence.

After a few days I wrapped a burlap sack around an old barrel hoop to form a net. I tied the dead squirrel to the center of the net. By now the dead squirrel was very “ripe”. Cousin Suzie, my brother, and I took this assembly to the next door neighbor’s crawdad pond where we lowered the baited net into the water.

A few minutes later we retrieved the net and collected some large crawdads that had come to feast. Within an hour or so we would have a sizable collection of crawdads.

Sometimes, but not always, we filled a large, copper washtub with water and put it on Aunt Alta’s wood-burning kitchen stove to heat. When the water was boiling we tossed in the crawdads after rinsing them off with fresh water. When the crawdads were nice and pink we proceeded to eat them.

Usually, however, we would feed the crawdads to the hogs. The hogs seemed to relish crawdads, shells and all.

Swimming and Fishing in the Molalla River

2010-09-20T07:48:00.000-07:00

It was about a mile and a half from my grandparents’ house on Carus Road to highway 213, and another three and a half miles to the Molalla River. There was a large swimming hole on the river under the highway bridge. There was a raft anchored in the middle of the river. On occasion, when we were not committed to tromping hay or picking raspberries or blackcaps (black raspberries whose juice is used for inspection stamping on meat), the kids would walk to the river to go swimming. At first we tried to hitch-hike, but stopped trying after a sheriff’s deputy scolded us.

On one incident I took along a length of fishing line with a fly attached thereto. Upon reaching the raft in the middle of the river I paused and attached the fishing line to my big toe. After about five minutes swimming with the fishing line attached, I hooked a six-inch cutthroat trout. My memory is fuzzy, but I think that I released the fish back into the water.

Hay

2010-09-17T10:13:00.000-07:00

Before bailing became prevalent, processing hay was a labor-intensive activity. Here are my memories involving the hay field beside my grandparents’ home in Oregon.

When the hay was ready for harvesting my Uncle Bob hitched the horses to the mower and mowed down the hay. Then he hitched the horses to a rake and raked the hay into rows. The hay was left that way to dry out. (Without proper drying there was a danger of spontaneous combustion when the hay was stored in the barn. A lot of barns were burned down that way.) A few days later a second pass with the rake turned the hay over, allowing for complete drying.

When the drying was complete the manual labor began. The horses were hitched to the hay wagon and they pulled the wagon to the hay field. While my father, Uncle Bob, and Uncle Jack pitched the hay into the wagon with pitch forks, Cousin Susie, my brother, and I tromped the hay down to compact it in the wagon. All the while Uncle Bob was issuing verbal orders to the horses to keep them moving the wagon to facilitate the loading process.

When the wagon was full it was off to the barn. I remember the barn as being huge with a very large hay loft. At one end of the barn was a large door above the hay loft. The top of the door was shaped like an inverted “V” to match the shape of the roof. The door was hinged along the bottom and was raised and lowered using ropes and pulleys. At the very top of the door opening was a large wooden boom that projected out from the barn about six feet. It was under that boom that the hay wagon was parked.

Attached under the boom, and running the full length of the barn was a trolley track. On that track was a rolling carriage to which was attached a large, two-tined fork. I do not recall all of the technical details but somehow the carriage, with fork attached, was positioned over the hay wagon. The fork was then released from the carriage and lowered rapidly, using ropes and pulleys, into the load of hay. When the fork was firmly embedded in the hay, two “fingers”, one from each time, were activated to hold the hay onto the fork.

While all of this was going on the horses were unhitched from the wagon and taken to the other end of the barn. There they were hitched to a very long rope. This rope ran all the way through the barn, through pulleys, and down to the fork in the hay. When all was ready the horses pulled on the rope, causing the fork, loaded with hay, to rise up to the carriage. When the loaded fork reached the carriage, the carriage was released from its position at the end of the boom and began to move down the trolley track into the barn. When the fork load of hay was over the spot where Uncle Bob wanted it, he pulled a cord that released the “fingers” and the hay dropped.

If we (the kids) had done a good job of compacting the hay in the wagon the entire wagon load went into the loft with the first try. As I said, it was a large fork.

This process was repeated until all of the hay had been transferred to the hay loft.

More about Granddad Beatie

2010-09-15T10:16:00.000-07:00

From 1906 through 1910 granddad was sheriff of Clackamas County, Oregon. His father-in-law, John Myers, my great-grandfather, had preceded him in that office from 1868 until 1870. Granddad was elected judge in Clackamas County in 1910. (More information is available on the web site “Sheriffs of Clackamas County.”)

Granddad participated in the Alaskan gold rush from 1897 to 1898. The story is that he and his partner had gathered a goodly stash of gold. They were preparing to pack up and leave before the winter set in when granddad fell through the ice in the Yukon. Upon seeing this, the partner took the opportunity to pick up the gold, set fire to the cabin, and high-tail it out of there.

The story goes on that granddad managed to get out of the river by freezing his mittens to the ice and pulling himself out.

When granddad returned home to Oregon he was said to have fifty dollars more than when he left for Alaska. That money, supposedly, was won from the ship’s purser at poker.

More Ramblings

2010-09-13T09:18:00.000-07:00

The last few weeks I have been gathering the various writings that I have produced in the past to create a very personal booklet. In the process I was reminded of a number of small, but interesting events and activities of my childhood. Here is but one of them:

More Memories of Summers in Oregon

Sometime in the late 1800's it was determined that my grandfather, Robert Breckenridge Beatie, had to have his left eye removed. I thought that it was because of cancer, but my brother, the orthopedic surgeon, said that is was something else.

In any case, as I heard the story, granddad was handed a quart of 100-proof whiskey and ordered to drink it. All of it. When he was finished, they (whoever "they" was) told him to sit down in a straight-back chair and not to blink. At which time "they" proceeded to remove his left eye.

Granddad had a glass eye that he kept in a shot glass on the window sill above the kitchen sink. I never saw him wearing the glass eye. He always wore glasses with a smoked lens over his empty eye socket.

The Arrival of Sebastian

2010-09-03T11:36:00.000-07:00

What!! Another Boston???

After nearly a year’s hiatus for knee-replacement surgery, Evelyn returned to volunteering at the Coachella Valley animal shelter. No sooner had she arrived than one of her “spies” told us about a young Boston terrier stray that had just been picked up. The two of us immediately went to look at him. He was very skinny, and also very friendly. What the heck? What’s yet another Boston?

So we have adopted Sebastian. The vet gave him a clean bill of health. We are feeding twice a day until he puts on some weight. Then we will back off to once a day, in sync with the other dogs.

Sebastian and Lil Maya play almost continuously, except when they are napping. All four of the dogs are still jockeying for ranking. At any given time any one of them seems to be top dog. Very interesting!

With the arrival of Sebastian we decided that four dogs were too many to share our bed. So now the dogs sleep in their crates and we have our bed to ourselves. Now Evelyn can put on the new sheets that she was reluctant to use with dogs sharing the bed.

Remembering telephones

2010-07-17T12:35:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, hearing Regis and Kelly discussing the telephones of their youth, I recalled the telephone we had when I was a lad. Our telephone was a wooden box, attached to the wall. There was a crank on the side of the box for alerting the operator or calling others on our party line. Our telephone number was 44F22. The "22" meant our ring was two long rings and two short rings. We had a neighbor whose number was 44F05 with five short rings. About two or three times each week there would be a series of five short rings at 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning. This was the neighbor's contact in San Francisco reporting on the price of chickens at the auction house. It would have been a lot less intrusive had the internet or cell phones been available then.

Dogs

2009-12-14T13:49:00.000-08:00

First a brief apology for the large time gap in my blog postings. My computer had a major failure and I had to reformat my hard drive. In the process all of my contact information was lost: telephone numbers, mailing and e-mail addresses,… I am still in the process of recovering.

Here is the posting on which I was working before the computer meltdown:

Well, folks, you have already been introduced to Alexander, Chico, and Lil Maya . Today I want to introduce you to Gina Lee. Gina Lee’s “parents”, Sharon and Richard, have just moved from New York City to San Diego. Evelyn and I dog sat Gina Lee for a couple of months until Sharon and Richard picked her up last week.

Gina Lee is black with a small white blaze on her chest. She is a pug on both ends, head and tail, and something else in the middle.

Having four dogs in the house is something of a circus. Gina Lee and Lil Maya love to play tug of war with Lil Maya’s rope toy. The two also spar with gentle nips. During these bouts Chico tries to join in but doesn’t quite know how. So he resorts to trying to hump Lil Maya. These attempts are not well received. Alex tends to hang back, apparently not wanting any part of the activity. However, when Lil Maya is not engaged with Gina Lee she will chase Alex all around the house and when she catches up will chew on Alex’s ears and neck.

On occasion it got a bit crowded in bed with all four dogs wanting to sleep with us. I guess you can tell that we are dog lovers.

And here is the latest update:

Evelyn and I will spend Christmas day with Sharon and Richard in their new apartment in San Diego. We will bring Gina Lee home with us for a week or so. Sharon and Richard are catching the red-eye to San Marten Christmas night to spend a week with Richard’s parents.

Our Move to the Chicken Ranch

2009-10-03T19:25:00.000-07:00

In June of 1943 my mother, brother, and I moved from Santa Rosa to join my father on the chicken ranch in Petaluma. (Actually it was about six miles outside of Petaluma.) With forty thousand laying hens producing over twenty-two cases of eggs every day it was a relatively large chicken ranch for the day. Today one would have to have a million or so laying hens to be called “relatively large”.

I do not recall much about the time between June and September. In September Jerry and I enrolled in Cinnabar School. Cinnabar was a three-classroom school, only two of which rooms were in use. I do not recall the name of the teacher in charge of the first through third grades. The principal, Miss Anderson, was in charge of the fourth through sixth grades. (Incidentally, Cinnabar is now a theatre, hosting small plays.) The school was a relatively short, two or three-mile walk from the ranch.

Not too long after starting school, all of the students were given a tuberculosis skin test. I tested positive. After several weeks of intensive X-ray and fluoroscopic exams I was “incarcerated” in the Oak Knoll Tuberculosis Sanitarium in Santa Rosa. From October 31, 1943 until May 1, 1944 I was confined to a bed, not allowed to get up and walk ten feet to the bathroom. For six months I had to suffer through bed pans, urinals, and sponge baths.

During this time my attending physician, Dr. Quinn, subjected me to countless X-ray and fluoroscopic exams. I was always transported from my bed in a wheelchair.

My room had originally been a nurse’s room. My roommate was Douglas Atkinson. Doug had suffered from tuberculosis of the bone and was undergoing a series of bone graphs – removing a section of bone from his “good” leg and grafting it into his infected leg. He was in a cast from his chest to his ankles so he could not have walked to the bathroom had they let him.

For those of you too young to remember, WWII was raging during this period. My mother, in her mothering way, sent me news and comic strip clippings on a weekly basis. I don’t think that I ever thanked her enough for her thoughtfulness.

Upon release from the sanitarium I was confined to “house arrest” for six more months. At the time my mother was a part-time librarian at the Petaluma Public Library. (She had graduated from U.C. Berkeley with a degree in library science.) She brought home books and I read them – at the rate of one or two books a day. I do not recall all of the books but I do know that I read all of the works of Zane Grey and Raphael Sabatini.

The only formal schooling I recall from this year-long adventure was studying U.S. geography with a series of maps. I guess it did not stick very well. Now I could not draw a decent map of the United States.

When I have the inspiration to dig further into my history I shall bring you another episode in the life of Robert Niel Beatie.

Mel's Passing

2009-09-29T07:16:00.001-07:00

This is a sad time for me. Yesterday I got the message that my friend, Mel Salvat, had passed away. While Mel could be a monumental pain in the ass at times, he had a great love for animals and wrote engaging stories. I invite you to read them on his blog at http://melsal80.blogspot.com.

Our move to Northern California

2009-09-27T08:09:00.000-07:00

Well, fans, here is a continuation of my childhood memories.

Just about my last memories of my childhood in Southern California were (are? I’m not quite sure of the grammar.) about Pearl Harbor Day. The family was visiting with the Prindles (Sp?) in Gardena. We had been to the beach that day. I recall being upset because their son had “stolen” my name: Robert Neal vs Robert Niel. And I vaguely recall Roosevelt’s “…a day that will live in infamy” radio address.

While I do not recall having been consulted or even being offered an explanation, the decision was made to relocate to Northern California in 1942, specifically to Santa Rosa. I can only assume that the reason was for my mother to be closer to her aging parents in Petaluma. My father gave up his teaching position at Riverside Junior College and took a similar position at Santa Rosa Junior College.

I recall very little about our home in Santa Rosa other than it was on a corner lot at 642 Dexter Avenue. It had a two-car garage behind the house, facing on the side street.

Speaking of the garage reminds me that over the Thanksgiving school recess my father drove to Oregon to visit with his family. While there he harvested a trailer load of Douglas fir Christmas trees from his 100 acre parcel. He towed the trailer home to sell the trees out of the garage. Incidentally he hid a box of apples under the trees to get by the agricultural inspection station.

The garage also reminds me of my first bicycle. My father bought it for me for $2.00.

My brother, Jerry, and I walked the few short blocks to school. We typically took a short cut through an apricot orchard. There was a small clearing inside the orchard that was planted with what we thought were green onions. So we helped ourselves and ate several samples. It turns out they were garlic and we reeked of garlic for some time.

Our departure from Santa Rosa comes with an interesting story. As I have noted, my father was teaching at the junior college. In early spring of 1943 he flunked the first five members of the basketball team in his Spanish class. The president of the college called him into the office and explained that “We don’t do that around here.” My father’s response was that students who do F work in his classes got F grades. He was not going to change the grades. The president’s response was “In that case we will be missing you around here next year.” To which my father responded “In that case you will be missing me a lot sooner than that.” He went to his office, packed his things and left.

Jerry and I finished the school term in our Santa Rosa school before joining our father on the chicken ranch in Petaluma that my parents had purchased from my maternal grandparents.

An interesting technical note: the electrical power frequency in Riverside was fifty cycles per second while the frequency in Santa Rosa was sixty cycles. So we had to get new clocks to keep accurate time.

I shall have to spend some time organizing my memories of life on the chicken ranch. There is so much to tell. (You have already heard about Woodrow.) More to come.

Introducing Lil Maya

2009-09-07T12:59:00.000-07:00

Although Riley and I became good friends in her old age, she was always Mama’s dog. Alexander was a cute puppy but he grew up to be a bit aloof. And while Chico has always been a needy, cuddly dog, he clearly has adopted me. So, Evelyn wanted a “her dog” to replace Riley. As a volunteer at the local animal shelter Evelyn let it be known that she really wanted to adopt a girl Boston.
On April 1 of this year we heard through the grapevine that a very pregnant girl Boston had been picked up and was up for adoption. We hurried down to the shelter and immediately fell in love with the little girl. We rushed through the adoption and took Lil Maya to a dog sitter after having her checked out by our vet. We were going to Mexico the next day to spend a week with our daughter in Cabo San Lucas.
While we thoroughly enjoyed our visit with our daughter and her family in Mexico, we were anxious about Lil Maya and were on the phone several times a day to check on her status. On April 6 Maya began delivering puppies. In all she had seven puppies. Unfortunately none of the five boys survived. They were much too big for Lil Maya’s delivery system. So when we returned home from Mexico we picked up Lil Maya and two puppies: Sasha and Meesha. (If I can manage the mechanics there will be a picture of Lil Maya nursing them, somewhere around here.)
Lil Maya is obviously a purebred Boston. She had a microchip that never was registered. We have since registered her with AKC. She also had been running loose for some time because she was terribly emaciated. She weighed in at twelve pound, very pregnant, when we first had her checked out by the vet. Her spine stood out like the knuckles on your hand, only more so. Lil Maya’s age was estimated at three years, so we have adopted April 1, 2006 as her official birthday.
After eight weeks of nursing the two remaining pups we had her checked out again by the vet. She weighed in at seventeen pounds this time. Just shows how much underweight she was when we got her.
My daughter’s two children have now adopted Sasha and Meesha and are doing a great job of caring for and training them. So they are still in the family.
You may wonder how Lil Maya interacts with Alexander and Chico. She an Alex have become very close. Lil Maya insists on play fighting with Alex, biting him (very gently) on the neck and front legs. They sometimes race lickety split around the house and yard. Chico for the most part just stands aside, out of the way. On occasion he participates in a quiet “licking” party with Alexander and Lil Maya. Alexander and Lil Maya love to play in the water. Chico avoids it.
Lil Maya has a distinctive white streak on her right ear. Evelyn says that she has an “I didn’t do it, Mama” expression. I agree.
So life goes on with Alexander, Chico, and Lil Maya in our Thousand Palms household.

My Mother’s Family

2009-09-01T15:12:00.000-07:00

I shall return to my family’s move to Northern California at a later date. At the request of my sister-in-law, Linda, I shall take a slight detour and recount my recollections of my mother’s family. I apologize for the lack of dates, but I remember very few.

My maternal grandfather, Niels Nielsen, was born in southern Denmark. The story was that it was a part of the country that was German as often as it was Danish, and my grandfather left to avoid conscription into the Kaiser’s army. He entered the U. S. through Ellis Island. He made his way to San Francisco and, as I have mentioned in an earlier post, he owned and operated a drayage business there. Niels married my grandmother, Eunice Caltoft. Eunice was born somewhere in Sonoma County, California, of Danish parents.

My aunt Catherine was born in 1902, I think. My mother, Irma Marie, was born in 1904.

After the 1906 earthquake, Niels and family moved to Petaluma, California. There Niels bought and operated the bottling works for several years. After disposing of the bottling works, my grandfather purchased a forty-acre chicken ranch just outside of town on Magnolia Avenue.

Carl Westerberg, a retired ships carpenter, was the ranch foreman. He and his wife lived in a small house on the property. His crew consisted of two single men, typically parolees from San Quentin prison.

My grandfather was a member of and an officer of the Poultry Producers of Central California. This was a marketing cooperative selling eggs under the trademark “Nulaid”.

My grandmother was a founding member of the “Magnolia Heights Social Club” or some similar name with “Magnolia Heights” a prominent part of the name. The ladies from up and down Magnolia Avenue would gather at one or another of the ladies homes on a regular basis for tea and/or coffee. Like so many Danes, my grandmother was an excellent cook – especially pies, cakes, and cookies. So you can imagine the goodies that accompanied the tea and coffee. My grandmother had a rather large quilting frame and on occasion had a house full of ladies for a quilting bee.

Grandma and Granddad moved into a modest house at 506 Melvin Street in 1942, or about then. Aunt Catherine and her husband, Herbert Mikkelsen, moved onto the ranch and ran the operation for a short period of time before my parents bought the property.

In town, my grandfather continued to drive his Buick. He repeatedly scraped the right side of the car backing out of the garage.

Granddad died of a massive stroke. He had been standing on the back porch at 506 Melvin Street when he jerked violently backwards and fell about ten feet onto his back on the gravel driveway. I was there when it happened.

Aunt Catherine was my mother’s only sibling. She married Herbert and had two sons: Stanley Willis and Jon Keith. Jon is nineteen years younger than Stanley. When Aunt Catherine and family left the ranch they moved to Ferndale, California, where Herbert ran a sporting goods store.

The only extended family of which I am aware was several of Granddad’s brothers/cousins living in Hollister, California.

There were a number of people related by marriage, the exact connection of most I do not remember.

My Great Uncle Louis-in-law, Louis Lausten, whom I have mentioned earlier, was my grandmother’s brother-in-law. Louis sister, Cina (?), was married to Ted Ward, an Englishman. Ted and Cina had two children, George and Helen, neither of whom ever married. George was a very expensive dentist in San Francisco. He was a next-door neighbor of George Burns. I shall probably have something further to write about George Ward at a later date.

Somehow related were two Lausten brothers, Caltoft and Leonard. At one time Caltoft was an executive at American Can Company. I seem to recall that the two of them lived in Burlingame, California or close thereby.

Returning to Aunt Catherine’s family, the last I heard, Stanley was living in Eureka, California. I believe he has three sons, the oldest of whom is named Todd. I do not recall the other’s names. I lost track of Jon years ago.

And so you have been subjected to yet another rambling of an old man.

Healthcare Reform

2009-08-31T13:07:00.000-07:00

I interrupt my reminiscences to address the issue of healthcare reform. Putting aside my displeasure at the inability of our congresses and administrations to effect any change over fifty years of deliberations, the nation is not having an honest debate. We have been and are dancing around the question: “Should every resident, or citizen, of the United States have access to the latest and greatest of medical care?” If one only considers the altruistic and politically expedient aspects, the answer is clearly “Yes.” However one must consider the fiscal consequences. If, having considered the fiscal issues and arrive at the same answer, and I do not think that is the right answer personally, then taxes must be increased substantially. If taxes are not increased overtly, then the most insidious of taxes, inflation, will take care of the problem.

A great many people seem to think that universal health insurance will fix the problem. Health insurance does nothing to reduce the total cost of health care delivery. On the contrary the administrative cost of insurance management and associated profits only add to the overall bucket of costs associated with health care delivery. (One potential exception is the cost reduction associated with preventative care, should the incentives influence more individuals to take care of medical issues before they become extreme.)

Why should I have the right to a heart transplant any more so than I have the right to an eight-thousand square foot mansion on a beach with expensive cars in the five-car garage? I should and do have the right for either one if I can afford it.

On a constructive note, I think that the major efforts should be to reduce the total cost of health care delivery. After all, these costs are paid for in only two ways: by the healthcare recipients and taxes. No, insurance does not pay for any of these costs, it adds to the overall cost. I like to take a thermodynamic view of healthcare delivery costs. Draw a boundary around all of the costs:
• Hospital buildings
• Bedpans
• IV kits
• Doctors, nurses, dentists, etc pay
• Hospital administrative costs
• Insurance company administrative costs
• Insurance company profits,
• Etc. (and there are many etc's)

These costs are paid for by healthcare recipients (deductibles, co-pays, insurance premiums) and by taxes (federal, state, and local.) The only way to reduce the amount to be paid is to reduce the costs within the thermodynamic boundary described above. So let us argue less about how all of these costs are to be paid for and focus on reducing the total cost.

Memories of My Early Childhood

2009-08-26T04:36:00.000-07:00

First Memories

In April or May of 1935 I recall standing in the dining room of a small house at 4200 Ramona Drive, Riverside, California while my parents were negotiating the purchase of that house. My recollection is that my mother was very fat. It turns out that she was pregnant with my brother, Jerome Caltoft (Jerry), who was born on May 30, 1935.

4200 Ramona Drive

4200 Ramona Drive was a two-bedroom, one-bath house. Facing the house from the street there was a driveway along the left side leading to a one-car garage. I remember at one time my father, who was an avid gardener, had a row of poinsettias along the side of the garage. One winter night there was a hard freeze. All of the poinsettia foliage that was not directly under the eaves was burnt black by the frost.

On occasion a young man would show up on the back stoop looking for any kind of work in exchange for a meal. Although I was very young I do remember the Great Depression. In order to make ends meet, my father sold his blood for $20.00 a pint. He was O-negative blood type. Once, in an emergency, he was called upon to “donate” twice in one day.

In those days many people still had ice boxes, rather than refrigerators. The ice man would drive down the street every few days delivering large blocks of ice.

Ramona Drive ended in an orange grove. There was a large vacant lot just before the orange grove. Shortly before time to harvest the oranges a large pile of wooden orange crates appeared in the vacant lot. The youngsters in the neighborhood took advantage of the opportunity to create elaborate forts using the orange crates. This brings to mind the favorite “toy” that our father brought to Jerry and me: a pickle barrel. That fifty-cent purchase became, in turn, a submarine, a tank, a castle, or anything that a young child’s imagination could concoct.

Every afternoon Jerry and I were supposed to take a nap. One day we decided to sneak out and go play with the neighbor kids. So, I opened the window and, in the process of climbing out, knocked the screen from the window. While I held the screen, Jerry followed me out of the window. It turns out there was a sharp metal flashing around the edges of the screen. Jerry landed on the corner of the flashing and opened a very large tear in his leg. We did not want to alert our parents to our situation so we took a large quantity of adhesive tape and tried to put his leg back together. Needless to say that did not work.

The Petersons lived next door. Mrs. Peterson was a piano teacher. My parents decided that I should learn to play the piano (both parents were aspiring opera singers.) My recollection is that I spent a great deal more time reading comic books at the Petersons than I spent at the piano.

As I have mentioned, my parents were aspiring opera singers. Their voice coach, Norman Spohr(?), had a story about another of his pupils. He said that he once told her that “I am playing on the white keys and I am playing on the black keys and you are singing in the cracks!”

I went to kindergarten and grammar school a few blocks away. There were no school busses at that time so we all walked to school. There were interesting thing along the way to school; among them was a potato chip factory. We would occasionally pause on the way home from school to watch the owner cooking potato chips on a large griddle, and, if we were lucky we were treated to a few samples.

Between the potato chip factory and the school lay an old “China Town”. There was a single street with very narrow, two-story buildings on either side. Only one or two of these buildings had any occupants. One day, one such occupant invited us to come in to see some “firecrackers”. Nothing like a case of dynamite sticks to kick up the adrenalin.

Summers in Petaluma and Oregon

My father was a language instructor at the local community college so we all had long summer vacations. Typically we would drive from Riverside to Petaluma where we would spend a week or two with my maternal grandparents on their chicken ranch. We did not stay longer because, I am sure, while my father was a true-blue Democrat; my grandfather was a right-wing Republican.

From Petaluma we would drive to my paternal grandparents’ place outside of Oregon City. Sometimes we would stop at Castle Crags State Park and camp for the night before continuing on to Oregon.

My grandparents lived in a house that my father had built for them, along with my father’s least favorite brother, John Myers Beatie (Uncle Jack) and Uncle Jack’s wife, Ada. There was about forty acres associated with the house. My Uncle Bob (Robert Hood Beatie) raised hay on the land not occupied by the house and truck garden. Uncle Bob had about one hundred acres across the street where he raised strawberries, black raspberries, and filberts. Next to Uncle Bob’s place my father had one hundred acres of timber and live-oak trees.

Move to Northern California

…more to follow.