Bench Grass is a blog about the history of technology by the former student of a student of Lynn White. The main focus is a month-by-month retrospective series, covering the technology news, broadly construed, of seventy years ago, framed by fictional narrators. The author is Erik Lund, an "independent scholar" in Vancouver, British Columbia. Last post will be 24 July 2039.
I leave this for you so that you will know that I haven't been wasting my time while enjoying your hospitality. Besides, I don't really know the rules about what an air stewardess can carry along or not. (Although, yes, this is a thin excuse for calling this a finished letter. They do carry overnight bags, which are a lot bigger than a rice paper manuscript!)
So by the time you read this, I will be landing in San Francisco, and exploiting my fake identity to pass through Customs without anyone the wiser. I'd be more dramatic if this weren't your plan; Yours and Wong Lee's. Hopefully, the next stage goes as well, and we have a fait accompli to present to the College Man. Otherwise, Wong Lee will have to go to war for our honour, and I will return across the border at the usual place on Thursday. Since my plans for next year will then all be thrown aside, I retract every unkind thing I said about anyone and everyone when I first heard the suggestion, and humbly throw myself on your mercy. Please do secure me a late entrance into the University of British Columbia School of Law.
In this sixty-eighth year of the reign of our sovereign majesty,Queen Elizabeth II, she has been honoured by a warship carrying her name.
Also, your humble correspondent has agreed to work a fifth day this week to address my employer's ongoing, critical labour shortage, prior to working another three straight next week so that I can have my days off together. Under the agreement imposed by the Special Officer last December, I am working 9 1/2-hour, four day weeks as some measure of compensation for the theft of my paid accumulated time off benefit under said award, thus the additional overtime commitment, and a physically gruelling, if otherwise none-too stressful work week which has left me unable to complete a postblogging installment. And also entirely unable to understand how the management of a professionally run, national corporation thinks it appropriate to alienate its labour force in a chronic, endemic labour shortage. The best excuses I can come up with involve some kind of combination of fiscal exigencies and institutional blind spots.
a month left to my undergraduate career, but not even really that! My undergraduate thesis --the one that I am turning in for grades-- is already in hand. I will receive it back for final revision next week, and, since I have no final exams scheduled for April, it is all over but the relaxing. Perhaps on the thought that my mighty mind will go to rot and ruin before I reach law school, I have even been invited to some graduate seminars! Ordinarily, I would be honoured but . . . But, firstly, wine and cheese gratis. Second, the Philosophy Department is hosting some Big Names from back east preparatory to the appearance on our shores of the one and only Wittgenstein, of which --Well, if you're not a philosopher, don't ask, because I cannot speak. Ha! Joke!
Sorry. Perhaps one glass too many. So the thought was that the Big Name might, science being close to technology (I know, I was as surprised as you to hear it!), like to comment on the notes an enterprising Junior College lad took at a Heidegger seminar in Berlin last month (he was being there! Ahem. Definitely one glass too many) where the Great Man, who is definitely not a Nazi, launched a new "research programme" in technology. German philosophers have "research," you see. When they're not being not-Nazis.
The upshot is that the Big Name has hardly any idea of who this Heidegger fellow is, disapproves of what he did know, and hardly stayed awake through our enthusiastic graduate student's report. The young man was visibly crushed (though he didn't help his case by showing off in the question and answer session), and it was all anticlimactic leading into Wittgenstein, for whom the vogue would seem to have passed, anyway.
Excuse me. In that rush of words, I may have managed to avoid mentioning why I actually have a serious interest in what philosophy has to say about technology, since I am not very happy with what patent law says about it. Yes, disappointment ensued, but progress. Maybe.
So, as to what my thesis doesn't say. I'm tolerably sure that Horace Stevens was killed on the train that took the Stanford hockey team up to Oregon in February 1912. Mr. V., of all people, who knows murderers, maybe, and murder mystery writers for sure, said I should ignore the athletes and coaches, who would have been isolated in an excursion car. Boosters and journalists were your guys. And who should be among them but Russell Pegler, apparently distantly related to same, and the journalist who covered the unidentified corpse-in-a-trunk story for the Examiner --and who provided the tips that led the investigation to focus on the demi-monde. Why would he do sports?
Wong Lee didn't even hesitate. "Blackmail, of course. Stupid blackmail. So there will be cheques." And current cheques, too, since Pegler is still alive at 90, and someone still cares enough to try to kill me. (Twice, says Wong Lee, who found a bomb under the Lincoln the other day. Unfortunately, it's the only thing holding on the exhaust manifold, so we have to leave it there and we start the car by hot-wiring now. Kidding! Slightly.) That's where being able to ask Pete Giannini for a favour comes in handy. Story made too-late short, Pegler receives a quarterly stipend from Union Oil, or, previous to 1945, Consolidated Engineering, or, previous to 1937, the Union Aircraft Corporation. It won't stand up in court, especially because I think it might be slightly illegal to ask the chairman of the bank to look at confidential bank records for you, but Pegler's services in the ain't-saying-anything department are being retained by Junior, presumably for his Dad.
Heaven knows I don't want to cross the man again, and I'm not exactly boiling over with zeal unrequited for justice for the murder of Horace Stevens, who does not seem to have been very nice. I'm just at a loss to think of a way of persuading the Boy Genius of it before some Tong assassin gets lucky.
I've been fascinated by Vice-Admiral (E) Sir John Kingcome (1890--1950) since I first encountered him in the Proceedings of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers article summarised by Engineering in the 26 February 1949 number. Part of that is the fact that his title is "Engineer-Vice Admiral of the Fleet." I'm just plain partial to that neat old English wordsmithing.
Part of that has to do with the local connection with Kingcome Inlet, and my youthful interest in Lisa Halliday, of the town of that name. I bring this up because I find that this post is just better if I dive into my earliest, callow youth; not so much because of Lisa as because, a little later in 1982, when I arrived at UBC, I fell into the company of the UBC Wargamers, much to the detriment of my first year grades, and had various profound and difficult naval matters explained to me in an extremely glib way by the participants in that club's then-thriving naval miniatures set. To the extent that they still wargame, they've been playing rail games for years now, but, back in the day, they collected naval miniatures and crawled around the tables at the old Student Union Building of a Sunday, blowing upMontanawith Kitakami.
Pursuant to this fascinating diversion, someone explained to me that British warships of WWII sucked because they lacked "locked train double reduction geared turbines" that would have allowed them to use "high pressure steam." This was consequent to some generalised failure of British science and engineering which had lost the Empire, doomed the Royal Navy, and occasioned Margaret Thatcher. (One could not be so optimistic as to hope that Thatcher would fix this, but any damage she did to British society would be fit punishment for a country that allowed Two Cultures to get in the way of the Social Role of Science. Notice that this is four years before the publication of Correlli Barnett's Audit of War, which took this argument up to varsity. I think by this time I'd already read a biography of Admiral of the Fleet Sir John Fisher, and been introduced to the Fisher Scheme, the controversy over which, culminating in the 1923 cancellation, further overdetermined the end of British engineering culture. (Also, Jutland's in there, somehow.)
It's interesting to come back to this, thirty years on, to see how things came to this pass, with a little distance.
If you're wondering why a sale of 30,000 tons of Argentinian linseed is hanging fire in the winter of 1949, it is because linseed oil is a drying oil. That means that it dries out to form a hard, water impermeable film. If impregnated with molecules of base metals such as lead, a batch of drying oil will be even more susceptible to creating this durable, protective surface. Moreover, it will take on the colour of these molecules, which is often quite bright, as in the example of this street from Capetown, South Africa, which is the second Google Images search return for "brightly painted houses" this Saturday afternoon.
You will be glad to know that I have my law school acceptances (and rejections, who shall all suffer my wrath!!!) before me. These include Stanford, frankly my first choice for family reasons, so considering that I have been deemed not to be Ivy League girl material, as see above, the choice is settled. I gather that there is even a little money set aside for worthy girls by the Women's Club, and I am both quite worthy, if I do not say so myself, and partial to money.
But I did say that I had all my choice, and you will know, of course, that I did not apply to the University of Chicago, but there is their acceptance letter on my desk, brought to me by --oh, but I cannot say, except to express my happiness that I did not see his temper when I told him that I could not return to Chicago as long as Mom is being that way about Reggie. He, I think, vaguely, understands. Uncle Henry, of all people, had him by to chat about it! I'm not entirely sure I want Uncle Henry in my corner in personal matters, but you can't deny that he is good at getting his way!
On the subject of the senior thesis, the most mysterious aspect of the Horace Stevens case is that he actually got on the train for Portland, and yet there was no commotion when he didn't get off. The usual understanding is that he got off along the way, but if that's his body . . . Well. So there's the question of who might have dealt with him on the train, and with an athletic trunk as a clue, I looked at what we know about that train, which is a surprising amount, since it was carrying the Golden Bears ice hockey team and a number of boosters, and there are some articles in the Daily.
Thank you so much for putting Mr. Sutter on the case! It turns out that this was a particular bit of research for which he was well suited. Not as a distinguished member of the California bar, as you would think, but as a man. It turns out that the archives were withholding a file because they thought it would give me the vapours or something.
Just to review, I've been trying to find out why Horace Stevens didn't show up for Binger Hermann's trial in Portland in January of 1910. It's a bit of a puzzler, and for three years I thought I was going to ask either Stevens or his family, but I couldn't find the man! It seems hard to believe that he just disappeared, but last year, after one too many detective movies, I finally decided to look at the obvious other avenue --"Unidentified corpses of 1910." It was a pretty long shot, but Mr. V. has some friends who write detective novels, which is just as good as actually being a detective, if you ask me. They disabused me of the idea of some desperado shooting Stevens on the train to Portland and heaving the body out of the windows. Dramatic, I know, but reading the biographies of the men of the Land Scandal puts you in the way of thinking of these things. Anyway, it turns out that it's harder than it seems, and the body usually ends up on the tracks, attracting attention. Better, I was told, to pack a big, empty trunk.
Bodies showing up in trunks, you say? Well, yes. Specifically, in Los Angeles, in early February. Said trunk was weighted with some dumb-bell plates and wrapped in a terrycloth Turkish bath towel, and thrown in Buena Vista Lake, but floated to the surface. a Los Angeles detective took charge (I'm not sure why, since the body was turned over to state troopers out of Bakersfield) and proceeded to generate a thick, thick file by going around every boxing gym in Los Angeles looking for the man's supposed homosexual lover, on the basis of a violent murder in a fit of jealous rage, etc, etc. The file included many pictures of a decayed, naked male body, since the detective had to prove a violent death, and there was evidence of a beating and death by asphyxiation. Hence the womanly vapours.
Since I requested the file the week before the attempted "hit," and was, in fact, there to see it, not knowing that the clerks were going to claim that it had been lost, it'll do as a movie-plot explanation that I was ordered rubbed-out because it is a vital clue. Well, it or one of the other 132 files in the fasicle, but this is the biggest and most interesting one, so there's that.
(Who else is surprised to hear a moderate Republican attributing defeat in 1948 to the party refusing to repudiate conspiracy theorists who claimed that "Roosevelt bombed Pearl Harbour"?
