The Volkswagen Disposal Yard of Moab, Utah

Dear Readers, I found another Volkswagen disposal (junk) yard. This one is in Moab, Utah, off Spanish Valley Drive. The official address is Tom Tom Foreign Car Parts and Service at 1809 E. Mill Creek Drive, Moab, UT. An energetic Tom Arnold ran an active recycling business for Volkswagen collectors, but he passed away some time ago, and now his collection of 200 or 300 bodies sits in his lot. Tom considered this his man cave, according to a 2009 article in Moab Happenings. A lady I met in Moab knew his son and secured permission for me to walk around and take photographs (small towns are great because usually someone knows the right person to contact about almost anything).

TomTom's VW Museum, watch cat on patrol

Needless to say, there is a lot of inventory here - buses, Beetles of various ages, Karmann Ghias, and Squarebacks.

I was concerned, was there a watch dog? No, even better: there were watch cats. These two were on perpetual rodent control and cuddle duty.

This was the Volkswagen Type 3, known as the Squareback in the US market. These were handy little station wagons with much more interior room than the Beetle. I had a 1965 model in college. When camping, I could sleep in the back at an angle or straight front and back with the hatch open. You can't do that in most of the absurd modern crossover/SUV play trucklets that the suburban "adventure" set drives to the mall. With the rear engine over the drive wheels, that Squareback could go up muddy logging roads or snowy passes in the Cascades.

There are at least a hundred Beetles in Tom's lot. I did not see any older split rear window models, but some may have been present somewhere. At least here in Utah, rust is not a problem.

This is a 1949 Type 1 split-window model, from Wikipedia Commons (public domain). These are collectors' items now.

The Karmann Ghia was based on the mechanical underpinning of the Type 1. These were nice little sports cars.

Tom had organized his inventory neatly. Volkswagens had such a long production life, you could fit parts from various years into a car you were restoring. The Type I (Beetle) was in production from 1945 to 2003. According to Wikipedia, "With 21,529,464 produced, the Beetle is the longest-running and most-manufactured car of a single platform ever made."

But if you wanted some chassis parts, air cleaners, mufflers, etc., that may have been more of a challenge.

My other article about a VW disposal yard is from Raymond, Mississippi. I need to return to see if it has changed.

These are digital images from a Fuji X-E1 digital camera. One day I should return with film.

UPDATE OCT. 2019: Many of the Volkswagens are still there, but the yard looks cleaner and the brush has been trimmed. Click this link to see the 2019 photographs.

From the archives: New York City in 1942

I recently looked through some family boxes of photographs and found a steel Kodak film can with tightly rolled film. It was a short roll of nitrate film, possibly untouched since it was developed in 1942. It recorded one of my dad's trips to Washington and New York City.

This is one of the Elevated (El) Lines, somewhere in Lower Manhattan.

The monumental building with a statue on top is the Municipal Building at 1 Centre Street in Lower Manhattan. Built between 1907 and 1914, it houses City of New York offices. It may have been the inspiration for the Stalin-era Seven Sisters office buildings in Moscow. Warsaw also has one of these somber buildings, "donated" by Marshal Stalin to the supposedly-grateful people of occupied Poland. The tall building on the right is the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse at 40 Centre Street. It was originally known as the Foley Square Courthouse but was renamed in 2001 to honor Mr. Marshall.

The elegant Art Deco Cities Service Building, now known as 70 Pine Street, is 67 stories or 952 feet tall. It was built in 1931-32 by the Cities Service Company (oil and gas).

George Washington presides over the monumental stairs at the US Treasury building. This is now the Federal Hall National Memorial at 26 Wall Street. General Washington took his first Oath of Office here, and the building at one time housed the Congress, Supreme Court, and executive offices of the United States government.

Trinity Church is at 75 Broadway and can be seen at the end of Wall Street. This is the third Trinity Church on the site. Construction began in 1839 and it was completed in 1846.

Slightly off the topic: this is Memorial Continental Hall, owned & operated by the Daughters of the American Revolution, in Washington, DC.

To the best of my knowledge, this roll of film dates to early 1942, but my dad's notes are incomplete. The camera was an American-made Perfex, from the Candid Camera Corporation of Chicago. It may have been equipped with a Wollensak lens. I scanned the Nitrate film frames with a Plustek 7600i 35mm film scanner using SilverFast Ai software. The negatives have scratches, but unfortunately the infrared iSRD function does not work with real black and white film. Consider that despite the flaws, there is still data on this film that can be extracted 64 years later. Will our digital files last that long? (Answer, dream away.)

This is a 1996 Kodachrome photograph of the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse.  I was on the roof of an office building occupied by the State of New York's Department of State at 270 Broadway. This file came from a Kodak Photo CD, which was an early attempt to provide a convenient way to show photographs on a television set. A film laboratory developed the film and then scanned the frames onto a CD. The user could insert the CD into a small player, somewhat like a VCR player. The scans technically should have been excellent, but my experience was mixed. Some contractors did distinctly mediocre work. Now, it is difficult to find a software package to open the proprietary Kodak format and correctly decode the colors.

The Mississippi Delta 17: Country stores in Louise and Holly Bluff

After a long break, let us return to the Mississippi Delta, which is full of interesting little towns and remnants of an older era. Routes 149 and 16 take you through the southern Delta, past small towns, catfish ponds, and the Delta National Forest, ending in Rolling Fork (which will be the subject of a future article).

The town of Louise is pretty quiet but looks reasonably prosperous. There is a silo and an auto body shop on the main road.

South of Louise on Rte. 16, at the corner of Nixon Road, is a an old store. It was locked up, but the material (stuff) inside looked reasonably fresh, so maybe someone is using it as a storage building.

The Miller Mart Store at Tom Miller Road offers Budweiser.

Further south, another farm store at Bayland Road was closed. Notice the square front or facade.

Hwy 16 makes a right angle bend to the west as it enters Holly Bluff, with Sally's Ole Lake Gro at the bend. The Royal Crown Cola cooler was empty, so I suspect Sally has moved on.

Railroad Ave. crosses Rte 16, with this Hegman Farm, Inc., store at the corner.

Across the street was a traditional square brick store, unused now.

We will continue our tour of the Delta in future posts. Some of the photographs above were taken with Kodak BW400CN film in a Leica rangefinder camera  and 35mm f/2.0 Summicron lens (click the photos to enlarge and check if there is grain). The others were from a Fuji X-E1 digital camera with RAW files converted to monochrome using PhotoNinja software.

Mount Holly Mansion - After the Fire

Mount Holly, on the pleasant shore of Lake Washington, in Foote, Mississippi, is one of those impossibly grand mansions of which many examples were built in the 1800s in various parts of the Mississippi Delta. The 30-room Mount Holly was completed in 1856 of brick with 2-ft-thick walls. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. In the 1990s or early 2000s, it had been used as a bed-and-breakfast, but had sat empty for many years. As usual, ownership was unclear. And, as so often tragically happens to neglected buildings, the mansion suffered a disastrous fire on June 17, 2015. I have not yet read an account of who was responsible, but the forlorn walls sit upright in their misery.

I took these photographs in December of 2015. There was no sign of any restoration or activity at all. What happens next? For some pre-fire photographs, please see my April 2011 blog post and read the interesting comments. Preservation Mississippi had an excellent 2010 article on Mount Holly.

Photographs taken with Kodak BW400CN film in a Leica M2 rangefinder camera. The BW400CN is sharp and fine-grain, but does not have the look of traditional silver negative films. I scanned the negatives with a Plustek 7600i scanner using Silverfast software and resized the files with ACDSee Pro 2.5 software.

Another Rural Gymnasium: Edwards, Mississippi

On January 26, 2016, Suzassippi wrote about Rural Gymnasiums in the Preservation Mississippi blog. Here is another example to add to the list.

This gymnasium is at the corner of Magnolia Street and old US 80 in the town of Edwards. From what I can tell, the building has been closed for years, but it has been secured. All doors were locked.

I was not familiar with the National Youth Administration. The Mississippi department of Archives and History has a web page with photographs of NYA projects. They were lucky to complete this building in 1941 because once the World War II started, much civilian construction was interrupted or cancelled. According  to Preservation Mississippi, the gymnasium was designed by architect James Manly Spain in the Art Moderne style.

Photographs taken with Kodak BW400CN film in a Leica M2 rangefinder camera and 50mm f/2.0 Summicron lens. I scanned the negatives with a Plustek 7600i scanner using Silverfast Ai software and resized with ACDSee Pro.

Update May 31, 2016: The interesting blog, Preservation Mississippi wrote a more detailed description of the gymnasium.

Forgotten Drafting and Engineering Equipment

Recently I retired from a technical job at a laboratory. Cleaning out my desk and file cabinet drawers was a walk down memory lane as I put rulers, protractors, graded pencils, and other old tools in a cardboard box. We recently hired many new MS. and Ph.D. students. They are all sharp and incredibly energetic (unlike me), but we old-timers have noted that all they have ever used in their work is computer equipment. I was surprised that many had never used India ink pens or other drafting equipment. Some were amazed that we used to contour seafloor bathymetry and draw maps by hand. We even plotted the depth measurements on the maps by hand. 

This blog usually deals with urban decay, so let's expand it to engineering decay.

These are slide rules, which are manual computing devices. Logarithmic scales are engraved on plastic or aluminum. The scales can be slid back and forth relative to one another to multiply, divide, and calculate trigonometric functions. The yellow unit is a log/log Pickett, made in USA from aluminum. I bought it in high school (yes, I am that ancient). The problem with aluminum is you needed to lubricate the slide to prevent binding, and still it was jerky to move. The best slide rules were bamboo base with plastic covering because the bamboo slid smoothly along the grain with no need for a lubricant. Mahogany was second best. 

This is an Aristo from Germany, made of plastic, complete with a box, metric ruler, and a sheet with many conversions. My dad bought this around 1960 but rarely used it.

The books that accompanied slide rules were full of examples on how to use the scales - many quite challenging. Users of slide rules needed to learn how to place the decimal point and how many decimal places were valid in a calculation. I learned how to use a slide rule from Isaac Asimov's An Easy Introduction to the Slide Rule, still available from Amazon. Many recent technical types just punch numbers into an electronic calculator and write down the numbers that appear, without thinking about the accuracy. That is why you often see invalid conversions such as "the distance was 1 mile or 1.60934 km". Well, no, the best you can say in this example is 2 km (but most would accept 1.6 km).

At the top is a primitive form of slide rule, a metric conversion device. As I recall, Gerald Ford wanted us to convert to totally metric units by the end of the 1970s, but it did not fully happen. The ruler at the bottom is for reading distances directly from maps, with scales of 1" = 1000' or 1" = 2000'.

These are triangular rulers with various units. Some of the US Standard rulers had scales with 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60 units/foot (as compared to the 12 units/foot, or inches, that are common on casual rulers). The scales were used to measure dimensions directly from engineering drawings or maps.

This is a Nestler's Schola compass set, used to draw circles of various diameters with ink or pencil. I rarely see compass sets here, but in Switzerland last summer, I saw that many bookstores had such sets. Swiss students may still learn traditional geometry with manual tools. The rods on the lower right are ink nibs. The tip was dipped into a bottle of India ink, which remained between the steel tips by capillary action.

The spring-tip pens were messy, so most draftspersons after World War II used technical pens, such as these Rapidografs. They were available with various width tips and made a precise line. They were messy, too, and needed to be cleaned with distilled water to keep the tips from gumming up. For use with plotting machines, you could buy Rapidografs with tungsten or jeweled tips, intended to not wear out when drawing on abrasive drafting film. I still use a Rotring 0.18 mm pen to write on photographic film negatives.

The aluminum device is an eraser guide (for precise erasing, what else?).

These are lettering guides, each one for a specific width technical pen.

The protractors are for measuring angle in degrees from engineering drawings or maps. But in the new computerized world, I think few people use protractors any more.

Finally, we have a fountain pen, in this example, the famous Parker 75 Sterling Cicelé from 1964. I have always used a fountain pen but find less and less opportunity to write with one because most contemporary paper is unsuitable and the ink bleeds. Luxury fountain pens have enjoyed a revival (similar to top-end mechanical watches), and some pens sell for $ thousands. 

As you write and push down on the paper, the tip flexes and ink flows along the two halves to the tip, which is a combination of metals such as ruthenium, tungsten and rhenium. Traditionally, the best nibs were 18-karat-gold because the soft metal flexes and gently flows over the paper. Steel and lower grades of gold were scratchy, but now specialty steels may have solved that problem.

This has been a short survey of some of the contents in my desk. There were many other drafting tools in use before the 1980s such as Leroy Lettering Sets, pantographs, rub-on letters and textures, and pencils of various hardness. Will an archaeologist 100 years from  now know how they were used? (Will a college graduate 2 years from now know how they were used?).