Something New

I ran across some new software and you might want to check it out for yourself. It's called Personal Historian ( http://www.rootsmagic.com/personalhist.htm ) I have had it for a few days now, using up some of the free 30 days in the trial version. It's actually a full version, with all of the bells and whistles...but it shuts down after 30 days. This is so much better than trying to evaluate software when they only give you "crippleware" to try.

And since it lets you import from MS Office, anything you already have written can be added quite easily. Plus, images...although I didn't notice if it allows sound files? (But why not? It's the same process.)

Jill Spicer

As I was walking today, I thought about my cousin Jill and the fact that we have lost touch with her altogether. That's a shame. She is our only cousin and it would be wonderful if we could find her again. The last information that I heard about her was that she had divorced and was living in Key West, Florida. There was some mention of the Hemingway Museum and the Salvation Army? I have done Google searches and tried a few e-mails. The Hemingway musuem reported that they hadn't known any employees with the name of Jill...and I don't know her last name anymore. Did she keep her married name or has she reverted to using Jill Spicer?

Perhaps...she might be found by way of this blog? People do searches all kinds of reasons and maybe someone else is looking for "Spicer's". I will use an old trick here and include her name half a dozen times at the bottom of this message, but I will keep the text small and use white for the text color...you will hardly notice it, but some search engines will spot the text and record it.

jill spicer jill spicer jill spicer jill spicer jill spicer jill spicer jill spicer jill spicer

Lake Tahoe Memories III

Saturday night movies at the theatre in Meeks Bay. Saturday night movies in the theatre at Chambers Lodge…very fancy! Swimming in Lake Tahoe during a thunder and lightning storm. The water turned an intense blue color. Stories of the bear that wrecked one of the cabins at Cedar Shadows, exiting right through a wall in the kitchen. Eating dinner at the Swedish restaurant in Tahoe City. Large windows in the restaurant to see the lake, the forest and also to see the crowd at nearby “Fanny Bridge”. Displaying our own fannies as we looked over the side of the bridge and were shocked (each time!) by the size of the fish we saw there. 4-wheeling up to Grant Lake in Joe’s old Willy’s, the one with a U.S Postal Service sign in the back window.

On the trip to and from Lake Tahoe.
Stopping alongside a stream near the little town of Independence and Nana cooling her feet in the water. Stopping at Schatz (sp?) Bakery in Bishop, and then stopping again at the Sierra Bakery in Bridgeport where mom would buy sheepherder’s bread for a picnic along the shores of the Bridgeport Reservoir. And stopping at various gas stations where we would beg Dad to buy us a Coke. The Coke was usually swimming in a frigid bath of ice water and you would hold the bottle by the top and propel it along a metal maze until it came to the latch that required a dime to open it. Old restaurants out in the middle of nowhere, actually the Mojave Desert. Screen doors and fans to cool the restaurant. Canvas water bags that hung from the hood ornament and were important for the long climbs up into the Sierra’s. The long grade from Bishop up to Crowley Lake and the water wagon for overheated cars, courtesy of “Tom’s Place” and located halfway up the grade. Driving by Mono Lake, which held water in those days. Lots of water! Seeing a house floating in Mono Lake; the victim of an avalanche. Stopping to look at the Mono County Courthouse for the umpteenth time!

Lake Tahoe Memories II

Lake Tahoe Memories II
Joe and Francis Gardner were the owners of Tahoma’s Cedar Shadows resort. I’m not sure of the exact tie to our family, but I believe Joe and dad had gone to high school together.

I remember five cabins that made up the grandly named “resort”; the office cabin for Joe and Francis, a 2 bedroom cabin, a two story cabin with 4 bedrooms, and two others with 2 bedrooms as well. It should be noted that these resort cabins were built for summer occupancy only and even during a summer night, a fire was sometimes needed in the stone fireplaces. They were all furnished with, shall we say…comfortable furniture? The cabins were all situated about 50 feet away from each other and there were chairs and lounges outside to use when enjoying a quiet time in the shade of the forest.

Joe and Francis were great hosts, and I remember one summer when Francis stopped by our cabin and told me that she was going to cure me of my asthma attacks. Right that afternoon! I’d had asthma since I was 3 or 4 years old and although I was pretty much reconciled to the fact, the thought of being free from asthma seemed like a pretty neat idea! Until she told me how she was going to do it. She was going to stand me up against one of the tall cedars near the cabin, and with my back to the tree, she was going to stretch out lock of my hair and then use her axe to cut the hair off my head and embed it in the trunk of the tree. She explained that this would remove my asthma and give it to the tree. I stood still, very still and very nervous as she held the axe in one hand and my hair in the other. She muttered some magic words, then she swung the axe and I closed my eyes. I felt a sudden ripping pain and heard the axe hit the tree, just above my head. The pain was caused by a dull axe simply pulling the hair out, not cutting it cleanly as advertised.

No, the “cure” didn’t work and the next year, Francis wanted to try it again, but I came up with some excuse not to. I wonder if my hair still resides in the trunk of that tree? About 30’ up now?

Lake Tahoe Memories

Lake Tahoe Memories (1)
This begins a collection (in no particular order) of some of my Lake Tahoe memories.

Trips to Obexer’s Marina in Homewood, where we would walk out on the long pier and look at the beautiful Garwood and Chris Craft speedboats that were tied up and waiting for someone to rent them and go for a ride. They were expensive, but once in awhile, if Dad had been lucky at the Northshore casinos, we would be treated to an hours worth of excitement. There is no sound quite like the deep burbling of the speedboats exhaust as it idled while we climbed aboard. Once we were all safely in our assigned seats, we would slowly drift away from the pier until Dad thought it was safe to accelerate. Then there was a deepening roar and we would all be pressed back into the seats as the bow of the boat lifted into the air and we flew across the once still waters.

We would usually head north so that we could pass by Henry J. Kaiser’s estate, pretending for a moment that we might just drop in on our “good friend”, Henry…you know, share a few laughs, and maybe have lunch with him?

And as we passed the point where the Kaiser pier jutted out, I would remember the story of the postman. Local legend said that the postman was rowing from that point, on his way to Homewood, when a sudden storm came up, swamping the boat and drowning him. And…it was said that when the water was exceptionally clear, you could look down and see the postman, still sitting at the oars, with the mail sack between his knees. (OK, I know…why would the postman deliver mail in a boat? Especially since the road went right by the Kaiser estate.)

New Orleans Memories

I guess this qualifies as a proper subject for this blog. It's a memory of mine and I'm part of the family.

In 1957, my friend Mike Buffett and I decided to go to New Orleans. As it turned out, deciding to go and actually doing it were two different things. And here's how this all came about. Mike had an older brother; Richard Buffett and he was an artist. A fine artist in fact, painting portraits for a living. Richard was a very "cool" guy and Mike and I were fascinated by the stories he told us of his time spent living in New Orleans and painting the portraits of jazz musicians from the "Storyville" area of New Orleans. Musicians like George Lewis and Alcide "Slow Drag" Pavageau. He had their portraits hanging on the walls of his little Hermosa Beach bungalow. The floor in the living room of the house had a beautiful Turkish rug painted on it...(I told you he was "cool".) Since Mike played the clarinet, he was very much interested in the jazz scene in Hermosa Beach and we spent a lot of time hanging around the front door of the Lighthouse jazz club where Howard Rumsey and the Light House All-Stars played. But Richard's stories convinced us that the "real" jazz was to be found New Orleans. And you didn't need to be 21 to go in a bar and listen to jazz in the state of Louisiana.

Our plan was simple; we were going to buy a vehicle that we could live in (campers hadn't been invented yet) and work our way across the United States, stopping to work whenever we ran out of money. Once we reached New Orleans, Mike would use his musical skills to get a job in a jazz band and since I had skills as a dishwasher...success was just around the corner!

We found the perfect vehicle, a 1947 Divco, last used as an Orowheat Bread truck. We bought it for $500 and then sold the bread racks for $100. Then we remodeled the truck, painting the interior an odd, but free, shade of orange. Then a friend's parents blessed us with their old front room furniture. We really wanted beds, but gladly accepted two chairs and sofa, plus one coffee table.

It was about this time that I decided that I should tell my parent's of our plans. Somehow, I had to explain this large truck sitting in the driveway. Strange...but neither one was wild about the idea, and my father was quite emphatic in his denial of approval.

It took a few weeks of friction before it really sunk in that our trip was never going to happen. And that was when we decided to make the truck into a mobile "Party House"! And it served in that capacity for about a year or more...