Blog Posts

AN INTERVIEW WITH MY DAD

9/4/2018

On the morning of April 6, 1992, as I was on my way out the door to go to jury duty, my stepmother Rose called from her home in Florida to tell me that my father had died peacefully during the night. My first impulse was to start packing, but Rose felt it was a good idea to postpone the memorial service until a time when we could all make arrangements to come, and I conceded she had a point. So there I stood, with my coat on, feeling slightly stunned. I wasn't sure what to do; I wasn't needed in Florida, so I just went and did my jury duty.

Later in the week, I mentioned to my sister Leslie that it felt very odd to be going about my business as usual, when what I really wanted to do was shout, "Hey, World, stop! Something's missing! Someone's gone!" Leslie replied that her response to this dilemma had been to listen again to an oral history interview I'd conducted with our father in 1979. I thought that was a wise suggestion, and over the next few days my husband Ovide and I spent our dinner hour doing the same thing.

I expected hearing my father's voice to be therapeutic because it would give me an opportunity to reflect on him and his life as I felt the need to do in the immediate aftermath of his death. It did that, but it also turned out to be therapeutic in a way I didn't anticipate: It took me back beyond those last terrible two or three years of watching the tragedy of a man with over twenty patents to his name forget how to use his computer and unable to work his answering machine and brought back a larger perspective on his life as a whole.

* * * * *

I caught my father at perhaps the ideal moment for our interview. He had had major surgery a few weeks earlier; he was now nearly recovered but not quite ready to return to work full-time. He was just shy of his 65th birthday and was considering various retirement schemes; at this crossroads in his life, he was very receptive to my proposal that we use that time to capture and preserve on tape his personal and professional history.

I had recently completed a two-year stint as editor of a grant-funded oral history project, so I not only recognized the importance of seizing the opportunity but also had a pretty good idea of how to go about conducting such an interview. I prepared a well-elaborated "interview schedule," starting with close-ended questions that were easy to answer (what was your mother's name? when were you born? etc.) so that he would be relaxed by the time I got to the tougher and more thought-provoking questions. I took along two portable tape recorders and mikes (to ensure a backup if either failed) and plenty of pre-labeled audiocassettes. When I arrived at his home, I identified a couple of comfortable chairs in his living room, where over the course of the three days I had set aside for this project, October 2, 3, and 4, we talked for more than five hours, limiting our sessions to a couple of hours apiece to avoid tiring either him or myself.

Any fears I might have had about persuading him to open up proved unfounded. Although he always professed to remember little about his childhood, over the course of the interview I was able to elicit many anecdotes I had never heard and details about his past of which I was only vaguely aware. I think that like me, he had prepared for the interview and spent some time reflecting on what made him the man he was - formative experiences, the importance of friendships and of mentors in his life, his hard-won education at highly selective institutions, his long affiliation with the Unitarians, the development of his career-building skills, and of course his family commitments. In all, we covered the entire sweep of his life, starting with his parents and their roots and ending with a retrospective on his career as he started looking forward to a new life stage. My post About My Father, as well as many other entries to this blog, draws heavily on this material.

In the half-dozen audiocassettes that resulted from this effort, my family has something more precious than anything else he could have left to us.

It was standard procedure at every interview conducted during my time with the oral history project to take a photograph of the subject. So I can hardly believe I didn't take one of my own father, but if I did, I haven't been able to find it. This photo taken in 1976, of my dad, my stepmother, myself, and my dog Goldie, is as close as I can come to how we must have looked at the time of the interview.

* * * * *

A few months after his death, when we discussed what we could do to commemorate the life of King Stodola at his memorial service, it occurred to me that the tapes might have the same healing effect on those in attendance as they had on me, that of restoring to us in some measure the man as we knew him.

From the several hours of material I'd gathered, I chose a brief segment about his proudest achievement, his participation in Project Diana. I particularly liked this excerpt because I felt it captured the pride he took in this accomplishment, his fundamental humility, his keen intelligence, his dry sense of humor - and perhaps above all, his gentleness. A transcript of this passage appears elsewhere on this site.

0 Comments

ME AND MY UKULELE

6/29/2018

5 Comments

I received a ukulele for Christmas one year and learned to play it well enough to give me pleasure and avoid annoying those around me. Compared to the other instruments I took up as a kid (or more accurately had thrust upon me) - the piano and the saxophone (for which my father paid $25 in an Asbury Park pawn shop) - my ukulele was, well, quiet. And while playing it at a virtuoso level would have taken more practice than I was ever willing to throw at it, and probably more talent than I could muster, it wasn’t that hard to tune it (G-C-E-A, with the memorable lyrics “my dog has fleas”) and to learn enough chords to make my way through a few familiar songs. “On Top of Old Smoky,” all umpty verses - even without googling I can still dredge up at least five - was my hands-down fave.

But what was a little girl in a small coastal New Jersey town doing with an exotic Hawaiian stringed instrument?

Me and my ukulele.

Luckily enough, I have a photograph of myself clutching my ukulele - slightly blurry, but clear enough to permit further research on the topic.

The ukulele is a plucked stringed instrument belonging to the lute/mandolin family. Although it is sometimes thought of as quintessentially Hawaiian, along with hula dancers in grass skirts and leis, it was actually developed in the 1880s by Portuguese immigrants who came to Hawaii from Madiera and Cape Verde, based on similar guitar-like Portuguese instruments. Its place in Hawaiian music and culture was cemented by the support of King Kalakaua, who enthusiastically promoted the instrument and made it a central part of performances at royal gatherings.

The US mainland discovered the ukulele in 1915, at the Hawaiian Pavilion of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. Being cheap, portable, and relatively easy to learn to play passably well, the uke quickly passed into the popular culture, appearing in film and becoming a mainstay of jazz, country music, and American song.

The life trajectories of two men converged to turn the ukulele into the musical phenom it was to become in the post World War II era:

The first was Arthur Godfrey, folksy host of a series of eponymous radio and then television variety shows. My Aunt Phyllis, my mother’s younger sister, always claimed to dislike Arthur Godfrey because, she said, he laughed at his own jokes, but whenever his show came on the air, she poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down to listen. We often spent several days with Aunt Phyllis and her family in Worcester MA during our summer vacations, and when “the Old Redhead” (as he called himself) came on we stopped what we were doing and joined her in her kitchen. He was famous for poking good-natured fun at his sponsors’ products. The off-script commercial I remember best was his test of the proposition that Lipton teabags could be reused for several days in a row. The second day came and went without too much comment, but by the third day his reaction was simply “blecch.” He got away with it because it was known he would not accept a sponsor whose products he didn’t personally enjoy, and because (bottom line) it sold those products.

Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts started in 1945 as a radio show. From 1948 to 1958 the show was transferred to the next big thing, TV, but continued to be simulcast on the radio. From 1949 to 1959, he also broadcast Arthur Godfrey and his Friends, also known as simply the Arthur Godfrey Show, which featured many of the Talent Scout winners including Pat Boone, Eddie Fisher, Tony Bennett, Connie Francis, Patsy Cline - and Julius LaRosa. LaRosa, in fact, triggered a downturn in Arthur Godfrey’s popularity in 1953 when Godfrey fired him on-air, without warning, for exhibiting too much independence or, as Godfrey put it, “a lack of humility.” That was not how underlings were supposed to be treated in those days, and it didn’t sit well with his fans. But during his radio days and his early years on TV, everything he touched turned to gold. He raked in millions of dollars for his bosses and as a result was probably the first media star to become truly wealthy.

It is sometimes said that apart from being an uber-genial host, Arthur Godfrey was devoid of any special talent. This isn’t strictly true; he was an accomplished ukulele player who even gave on-air ukulele lessons. “If a kid has a uke in hand,” he assured parents, “he’s not going to get into much trouble.” Too bad color TV had not yet come in; black-and-white could never do full justice to Godfrey’s shock of red hair and his colorful Hawaiian shirts as he strummed his big baritone ukulele. Through him, the ukulele found a welcome in millions of American homes.

The second contributor to the postwar ukulele craze was an Italian luthier named Mario Maccaferri, until then best known for designing the guitar played by the legendary Romani musician Django Reinhardt. Maccaferri was also a classical guitar virtuoso in his own right, perhaps in a league with Segovia, until a freak swimming accident in 1933 injured his right hand and ended his performing career forever. He continued making stringed instruments, however, and also started a business in France making high-quality reeds for woodwind instruments.

In 1939, Maccaferri fled with his family from war-torn Europe to the US, struggling to maintain his reed-making business (now christened the French American Reed Manufacturing Company) in the Bronx, despite a wartime shortage of the French cane he needed to make his product. Then a visit to the NY World Fair introduced him to a new concept - plastics! - and fired his imagination. He started experimenting with polystyrene reeds and found that indeed, they worked pretty well, especially when wooden reeds were unavailable. Endorsements from clarinetist Benny Goodman and other Big Band musicians brought him a good customer base. Emboldened by his success, he went on to found his own molding and manufacturing company, Mastro Industries, which produced cheap plastic versions of everything from clothespins to toilet seats.

Everything went well until it didn’t. Eventually, a combination of increased competition, increased demand for more upscale fixtures, and increased availability of alternative construction materials started making serious inroads, and Mastro Industries found itself on the skids.

That’s where things stood when a chance poolside encounter between Mario Maccaferri and Arthur Godfrey in a Florida hotel rocked both their worlds - and ended up putting ukuleles into the hands of millions of American kids including mine. The two men knocked back a few drinks, played a couple of impromptu duets, and bemoaned the lack of affordable mass-produce-able ukuleles. Maccaferri had long dreamed of making a plastic ukulele but lacked the capital to proceed without some promise of success. When Godfrey replied that he could sell a million of them, Maccaferri was inspired to revive his dream and redouble his efforts to finance this new venture.

Although Maccaferri’s earlier attempts to make a plastic guitar and his subsequent attempts to make a plastic violin were neither commercial nor artistic successes, it turned out that plastic was well suited to producing an instrument-quality ukulele. After extensive research, he settled on Dow Styron, which gave him the warm wood-like tone he was seeking, and strung it with nylon strings made by DuPont. He called his creation the Islander and packaged it with a pick, a tuning tool, instructions, and a songbook. It sold for $5.95.

Just like the box that appeared under our Christmas tree.

Nine million sold!

Toy plastic ukuleles like Mattel’s Uke-a-Doodle had done well, but the Islander was no toy. Arthur Godfrey, who as noted would never embrace a product he wasn’t willing to use himself, tried it and fell in love. He began promoting it on his shows and the orders poured in. In the end, more than nine million ukuleles were manufactured and sold. Godfrey never asked Maccaferri for a penny; he could well afford to indulge his own dream of making the ukulele a household item. A broad grin would undoubtedly have lit up the Old Redhead’s freckled face to see me and a dozen other student ukulele players in an onstage strum-fest during a school assembly - a scene that was probably repeated hundreds of times in school auditoriums across the nation during the heyday of the ukulele.

* * * * *

Look closely at my photo and you’ll see an odd gadget on the neck of my ukulele. At first I thought it might be a capo - basically a clamp used to shorten the strings evenly, enabling you to play in different keys using the same fingering - so you only have to learn one set of chords. (Call it a "cheater" at your peril!) But no, it was something that potentially simplified the process even further - the Chord Master, an automatic chording device invented and patented by Maccaferri that allowed you to play six basic chords with the push of a button. For an extra dollar you could get a Chord Master for your Islander, as obviously my parents did.

It all comes back! The Chord Master was supposed to be attached with two rubber bands, and I sort of recall having trouble making the darn thing stay put - probably more a commentary on my technique than on the device itself. Again stirring up some long-dormant memories, I think there was an additional reason for my Chord Master woes: The buttons are labeled D7, B7, and G on the upper row and D, A7, and E7 on the lower row - indicating that the Islander was supposed to be tuned not to G-C-E-A, as I did, but rather a whole tone higher, to A-D-F#-B. That had to be confusing to anyone who was looking for the chords you’d expect to use in the key of C.

For whatever reason, in the end I ditched the Chord Master. Instead, I mastered a handful of chords and then limited my repertoire to songs that required only those chords.

* * * * *

Tiny Tim

Predictably, imitators started cutting into Mastro’s market, and in response additional models, both larger ukes and the smaller “ukette,” proliferated in the wake of the Islander’s success. And then, with the advent of rock music, the popularity of the ukulele took a nosedive. As Arthur Godfrey had said, “If a kid has a uke in hand, he’s not going to get into much trouble.” Where’s the fun in that? Kids eager to cultivate a "bad boy" image followed their musical heroes and took up the guitar, not the ukulele. If you were inclined to write the ukulele’s obituary, you could do worse than to choose February 9, 1964 as the day it officially died, with the Beatles’ American debut on the Ed Sullivan Show (though in fact the Beatles loved the ukulele and occasionally played it onstage). Herbert “Tiny Tim” Khaury probably put the final nail in its coffin in 1968 with his popular but wildly campy falsetto rendition of “Tiptoe through the Tulips,” stripping the poor old uke of whatever shred of dignity it might once have had and masking its genuine musical versatility.

But the ukulele just won’t stay dead. It has enjoyed at least two revivals since then. The first was in the 1990s, when a new generation of instrument makers started appealing to a new generation of musicians, most of whom had forgotten Tiny Tim and maybe even the Beatles. The second is now in progress, fueled by the rise of youtube ukulele artists like Hawaii native Jake Shimabukuro, whose videos routinely go viral.

Don’t look at me, however. I haven’t played a uke since the 1950s, and my once-cherished Islander has long since disappeared into the mists of time.

5 Comments

ARMSTRONG AND THE TRIUMPH OF FM RADAR

6/8/2018

0 Comments

In 1991, just a few months before he died, my father was awarded the Armstrong medal and plaque by the Radio Club of America. Of all the accolades he received, none would have been more meaningful to him. Sadly, he was suffering from Alzheimer's Disease and beyond grasping the nature of the honor that had been bestowed on him. He hadn’t forgotten, however, that Major Edwin Howard Armstrong was one of his heroes, and he would happily discourse about the importance of Armstrong’s work to anyone who would listen.

I now wish I had listened more closely.

* * * * *

Most radio buffs are familiar with Armstrong’s turbulent career in wireless communications, during which he revolutionized the field not once but repeatedly - in the process stirring up mighty opposition from stakeholders in a new way of doing business that had little use for lone-wolf inventors like Armstrong.

His earliest work focused on improving receiver sensitivity. While still in college, he perfected the regenerative circuit, which dramatically improved radio reception by means of a positive feedback loop in the receiver, using a triode tube recently invented by Lee De Forest. Armstrong went on to invent the superheterodyne, which still further improved reception by mixing an incoming high-frequency signal with a second tunable lower-frequency signal to produce a predetermined intermediate frequency (IF) still further improved reception. The superheterodyne outperformed every previous approach including his own regenerative receiver and remains the industry standard to this day.

He then turned his attention to developing wide-band frequency modulation (FM) radio. Radios in use at the time were designed to be sensitive to the strength or amplitude of the incoming signal (that is, amplitude modulation or AM), but were also sensitive to environmental disturbances such as thunderstorms or electromagnetic waves emanating from electronic equipment. No amount of tweaking or shielding could fix this problem. Armstrong took a radically different approach, arguing that by varying the frequency instead of the amplitude of the signal to be transmitted and designing receivers accordingly, such interference could be prevented. He devoted much of the remainder of his life to demonstrating the superiority of FM.

As a wedding gift to his wife, Armstrong (shown here on their honeymoon in Palm Beach) built the world's first boombox.

Armstrong, a fearless climber, atop RCA's 115-foot north tower on the roof of the 21-story Aeolian Hall in midtown Manhattan.

Unfortunately for Armstrong, the commercial potential of the burgeoning field of wireless communication created a mercilessly competitive environment dominated by huge, well-heeled corporations. Armstrong’s genius as a radio engineer was matched only by his naivete about the realities of organizational politics (“all substance and no style,” as one biographer put it). Wildly underestimating the ability of greed and self-interest to prevail against (as he saw it) simple truth and honesty, Armstrong engaged in a long series of time-consuming, expensive, and sometimes quixotic legal battles to defend and protect his own interests.

His first such encounter was with Lee De Forest, who responded to Armstrong’s success by laying claim to the idea of regeneration, despite little evidence that he even understood how the triode tube he invented worked, let alone that he had dreamed up Armstrong’s brilliant new application for it. The ensuing litigation lasted for over a decade, with AT&T throwing its muscle behind De Forest after buying up his patents. In the end the Supreme Court, befuddled by the technical details, ruled against Armstrong, despite universal recognition among his scientific peers that regeneration was his invention and not De Forest’s.

His conflict with De Forest, personally and professionally devastating though it was, paled in comparison to that subsequently elicited by the introduction of FM technology. By essentially eliminating the static that bedeviled AM radio, FM threatened the broadcasting industry not only by obsolescing millions of dollars worth of existing radio equipment overnight but also by diverting interest, attention, and coveted frequencies away from the anticipated Next Big Thing, television.

The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) - led by David Sarnoff, formerly his friend and collaborator, now his bitter foe - was not about to take this lying down. Both fair means and foul were employed to thwart Armstrong: Lawsuits were filed and then intentionally dragged out, patents were infringed, royalties were withheld, reverse engineering was used to buttress fake claims of priority. Armstrong was forced to remove his equipment from the top of the Empire State Building, ostensibly to make room for television equipment, driving him to move his operation to Alpine NJ. Here the first FM station, W2XMN, began broadcasting in 1939 - but only after the FCC first revoked his license and then restored it but diverted FM into a new frequency band at limited power - again, supposedly to make way for TV channel 1. (Ironically the Alpine station was briefly resuscitated after radio communication from the World Trade Center came to an abrupt halt on Nine-Eleven.)

FM station W2XMN broadcast from Alpine, NJ, where Armstrong's 425 ft antenna tower dominated the Palisades landscape. It's still there!

Faced with the prospect of seemingly unending legal battles he could ill afford, Armstrong became despondent and even lashed out at his beloved wife Marion, who moved out of their home to escape further abuse. On the night of January 31, 1954, Edwin Armstrong donned his overcoat, scarf, gloves, and hat, removed the air conditioner from a window of his 13th floor apartment in Manhattan’s exclusive River House, and jumped to his death. Marion Armstrong continued to prosecute her husband’s unresolved infringement suits and ultimately triumphed, winning some $10 million in damages. Sadly, this vindication came too late to comfort or benefit Armstrong himself.

* * * * *

Far less known - perhaps because it remained highly classified for many years - is the story of Armstrong’s work on FM radar during World War II. Indeed, in Armstrong’s entry in the Dictionary of American Biography, this phase of his career is casually dismissed as “a hiatus caused by World War II.”

Politically conservative and proud of his military service in World War I, Armstrong generously extended to the US government royalty-free use of the patents he had so fiercely defended - a patriotic but costly gift. Meanwhile, in addition to his legal expenses, he was self-funding much of his research at Columbia (having declined a salary for his appointment as a full professor at Columbia in order to escape administrative duties and minimize teaching responsibilities), as well as his high-powered FM station in Alpine NJ. (His red and white antenna, all 425 feet of it, still looms over the surrounding Palisades landscape, where its affluent neighbors regard it as an eyesore.)

As his debts mounted catastrophically, his attorney, Alfred McCormack, urged him to accept government contracts for his investigations of long range radar. These contracts enabled Armstrong to hire an assistant, Robert Hull, a newly-minted Columbia graduate, and together the two set about adapting FM technology to radar.

As usual, Armstrong’s approach flew in the face of popular wisdom, which favored pulse radar - that is, bursts of extremely short waves that produced a quick response and allowed for a clear distinction among objects in their path. Armstrong instead pursued continuous-wave radar, specifically continuous-wave FM radar. Its disadvantages - mainly its relative slowness - turned out (in Armstrong’s hands) to be more than offset by the enormous increase in range it afforded, far beyond the several hundred miles achievable with pulse radar. Although World War II ended before this technology could be applied, it subsequently became the method of choice in an age when aircraft traveling at supersonic speeds required the longest possible range. Once again, Armstrong had revolutionized a field.

* * * * *

And here begins my quest to clarify the nature of Armstrong’s role in Project Diana. Starting with a standard SCR-271 early warning radar, Armstrong and Hull had transformed the equipment into a powerful transmitter and sensitive receiver. The Project Diana team modified the set still further, adding a tunable crystal to enhance sensitivity to the weak return signal. Their successful moon shot on January 10, 1946 constituted a conclusive test of Armstrong’s FM continuous-wave Doppler radar system, which provided the critical impetus needed to enable very high frequency (VHF) electromagnetic waves to penetrate the ionosphere, bounce off the moon, and be received back on earth.

As I worked on my most recent blog entry, about the famous bedspring antenna, I found myself becoming increasingly curious about whether Armstrong had directly interacted with the Project Diana team, and whether he had actually spent time with them at Camp Evans during this period. On the one hand, I had never, among all the first-person accounts I’d read by the Project Diana team, including my own oral history interview with my father, encountered any mention of face-to-face meetings or discussions with Armstrong. On the other hand, Belmar and Alpine are less than 100 miles apart, and Armstrong was highly familiar with the Marconi facility, where he and David Sarnoff in happier times had first listened to signals from his regenerative receiver.

The answers to these questions proved surprisingly elusive, even after I consulted such authoritative and comprehensive sources as Empire of the Air by Tom Lewis, Man of High Fidelity by Lawrence Lessing, The Invention that Changed the World, by Robert Buderi, and the librarians in charge of the Armstrong archives at Columbia University. Finally, with the help of Fred Carl, Director of the InfoAge Science History Learning Center, I found my way to Al Klase, who works with the New Jersey Antique Radio Club's Radio Technology Museum at InfoAge, where he maintains their Edwin Armstrong Page.

Al very kindly directed me to an audio recording made in 2005 of an interview with Renville McMann, a panelist at a celebration broadcast from Alpine of the 70th anniversary of FM radio [starting at min 7:00]. In this loving reminiscence of Armstrong, McMann describes the time he innocently suggested that Armstrong point his equipment towards the moon - and with uncharacteristic vehemence, Armstrong refused. That feat, as McMann later learned, was reserved for the Army. “Armstrong had a duplicate setup of the Camp Evans equipment at Alpine,” adds Al; indeed, “the SCR-271 radar tower, sans antenna, is still there…. So clearly, there was direct contact with the Diana team. Armstrong's narrow-band receiver was crucial to the success of the project.”

Al goes on to observe, “It's easy to assume Armstrong visited Camp Evans during the Diana era, it was only a day trip, even without modern roads, but I see no hard evidence. Dave Ossman, in his excellent radio drama version of Empire of the Air [starting at min 7:26] has Armstrong at Evans for the first experiment, but rereading [the original book version of Empire of the Air by Tom Lewis, p. 298], we could attribute this to artistic license. I, too, would like to know if he was there.”

Dear Readers, if you have any further information on this or any other question relating to Armstrong’s association with the Project Diana team, please help me flesh out the unfinished story of Edwin Howard Armstrong and Project Diana.

0 Comments

THE FAMOUS BEDSPRING ANTENNA

4/22/2018

0 Comments

My parents, never known to be particularly demonstrative, were uncharacteristically ebullient. After months of intense activity and preparation, my father and his colleagues had “shot the moon” with radar waves, and the moon had echoed back: message received. “We did it!” he exclaimed, enfolding his wife in a bear hug. “I knew you would!” my mother replied with a broad grin. She knew from long experience that if my father said something could be done, it almost certainly could.

Not everyone, however, had shared my mother’s implicit faith that Project Diana would succeed. Radar had more than demonstrated its utility during World War II in locating enemy aircraft and submarines, but - hit the moon? Earlier unsuccessful efforts had convinced many that asking radio waves to pierce the ionosphere, hit a designated object in space, and then return back through earth’s atmosphere to the point of origin was expecting too much of the technology. Indeed, the standard method for measuring the distance to the ionosphere at that time was “pulse ranging” - that is, bouncing radio waves off the reflective surface of the ionosphere and timing their return, not passing through it.

Only a group of optimistic visionaries would attempt such a feat. Only a group of engineers would have the practical know-how to accomplish it.

This effort was the brainchild of Lt Col John "Jack" DeWitt, head of the Evans Signal Laboratory at Camp Evans in Wall, NJ. Right after the Japanese surrender in September of 1945, DeWitt was assigned the task of developing radars capable of detecting missiles from the Soviet Union. Since no missiles were available for a test,
DeWitt decided the moon could serve as a stand-in - and incidentally allow him to carry out a project he had dreamed of since long before World War II. Like my mother and unlike the skeptics, he was quite confident (despite a previous failure of his own several years earlier) that it could be done, if done right.

If ever there was a monument to American ingenuity, it is surely Project Diana. The approach, as I mentioned in an earlier post, was to work rapidly and intensively, use and modify materials already on hand, and then test, test, test. “Materials already on hand” was the watchword. No attempt was made to design any of the main components for the project from scratch, and little if anything new was purchased to make it happen. The transmitter, the receiver, and the antenna all represented novel applications and redesigns of equipment they had used before.

These three elements were interdependent and had to work together as one for the project to succeed. Arguably the most critical, however, was the antenna, since the failure of previous attempts was attributable in large measure to insufficient sensitivity of the receiver antenna.

* * * * *

By the end of World War I, Army scientists at Fort Monmouth realized that the biggest threat in the next war would come from the air, and that Americans could no longer depend on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to protect and isolate them. Early detection of incoming threats was crucial if attacks on the homeland were to be avoided or minimized. Initial conceptual explorations of radar began as early as 1920. In the mid 1930s, radar research at Fort Monmouth took a more practical turn, to the point where development of a prototype of the SCR [Signal Corps Radio OR Set Complete Radio, used interchangeably]-268 was well underway.

Then, in 1938, shaken by the discovery in their midst of a Nazi spy named Guenther Gustave Maria Rumrich, a Chicago-born German whose friendly curiosity had enabled him to infiltrate the radar research program alarmingly easily, the Army decided to increase security and reduce accessibility by moving the operation from Fort Monmouth to Fort Hancock.

It was at Fort Hancock that the legendary SCR-270/271, capable of detecting bombers 150 miles away, was developed under the leadership of Dr. Harold Zahl. Among other important innovations, this system featured a common antenna for both transmitting and receiving, made possible by a gas-discharge device called a duplexer invented by Zahl. The SCR-270 was a mobile unit; the SCR-271 was a fixed, tower-mounted version that differed mainly in having an antenna with a somewhat higher resolution.

My father was recruited as a young engineer to the Army's radar research program at Fort Hancock in early 1941, in the Radio Position Finding section. He participated in the development of the SCR-270/271 radar and continued to work on modifying and improving it throughout the War. Many years later, he wrote of this radar that it was "still the Old Faithful, coming through where more modern and more advertised sets have become unavailable."

An SCR-270, with its bedspring-type reflective array antenna, ready to rock and roll.

As the nation inexorably drifted towards war, it was realized that Fort Hancock, at the tip of a peninsula surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, New York Bay, and Sandy Hook Bay, also had some shortcomings as a location for radar research. More space was needed, it was argued, and the fierce nor'easters that periodically struck the base coated the radar equipment with a film of salt that undermined performance. Its location, so favorable to defense from conventional land and sea attacks, made it vulnerable to U-boat strikes.

So the Army purchased the old Marconi site in Belmar from King’s College and rechristened it Camp Evans. Piecemeal, the radar research program was evacuated from Fort Hancock. Pearl Harbor hastened the transfer, and by 1942 the move to Camp Evans was complete.

With the acquisition of the Camp Evans site, the Signal Corps inherited a rich history of antenna development. During World War I, the Navy had assumed control of the property, and although Marconi’s famous 400-foot wireless towers were used for the dispatch of important messages - indeed, historians dubbed World War I the “wireless war” - breakthroughs in reducing radio static achieved by a resident Canadian scientist named Roy Weagant enabled replacement of these ungainly structures by safer and cheaper if more ho-hum 30-foot antennas. This news was kept under wraps until after the War; “The End of the Giant Towers,” proclaimed contemporary headlines. All of them were gone by 1925.

The arrival of the Army and the entry of the US into World War II transformed the site into a major center for radar research. In addition to newer systems (some involving testing of conceptual designs developed at the MIT Rad Lab), refinement and stepped-up production of the "Old Faithful" SCR-270/271 continued throughout the War - turning Building 37 into a veritable antenna factory as bedspring-type array antennas ranging in length from 2 to 30 feet were assembled for installation on trailers to be used in remote locations. One such SCR-270 radar provided an early warning of incoming Japanese aircraft at Pearl Harbor - though in one of history’s most egregious command and control failures, the information was initially misinterpreted by the Operator and subsequently discounted by the Commanding Officer on duty.

* * * * *

Project Diana, a name intended (among other things) to befuddle the Guenther Rumrichs of the world, introduced a whole new series of challenges beyond the reach of existing technology designed for (relatively) short-distance detection of enemy aircraft.

Early on, DeWitt decided to use as a starting point a crystal-controlled FM transmitter/receiver specially designed for the Signal Corps by Major Edwin H. Armstrong, the "father of FM radio," by modifying an SCR-271. This set had features that could address two important problems:

1) Due to the relative velocities of the earth and moon, the frequency of the returning echo differed from the transmitted signal (a phenomenon known as Doppler shift) by as much as 300Hz, a number that was constantly changing depending earth's rotation and moon's orbital path. DeWitt called on the Theoretical Studies Group for these elegant calculations, which were done by the mathematician Walter McAfee.) The Armstrong radio was capable of being fine-tuned to the exact frequency required to compensate for the Doppler shift at a given point in time.

2) Signals bounced off an object 238,000 miles from earth would take much longer to echo and be much too weak to be detected by receiving antennas then in use. As noted, this was a problem that had bedeviled previous attempts to shoot the moon. To amplify the incoming signal, it was decided to generate a much longer pulse that would be easier for the receiving antenna to detect. The Armstrong radio was one of the few existing sets capable of generating such a long pulse.

The long pulse, while solving one problem, created another, since there was no antenna on site ready to receive such a signal. To come up with a solution, DeWitt called on the Antenna Design Section at Camp Evans. Two prominent antenna specialists, one the section head, designed a novel system using a quarter-wave step-up transformers. This approach failed to work, however, even after extensive efforts to tweak the transmitter.

DeWitt then turned to his own little group of engineers, who came up with the inspired solution of positioning two SCR-271 stationary radars side-by-side to create an enormous (40x40 ft) double bedspring antenna consisting of a 8x8 array of half-wave dipoles in front of a reflector that further enhanced the 111.5 MHz signals. Who was the first to propose that approach will probably never be known, but given my father's long experience and intimate familiarity with the SCR-271, his leadership role on the team, and his general approach to problem-solving, it wouldn't surprise me if the credit belonged to him. In any event, translating the idea into reality was undoubtedly easier said than done, but engineers from the Mechanical Design Center rose to the occasion and succeeded in assembling the Diana Bedspring. (Unfortunately, engineering specifications were destroyed by the Army in 1971, so our knowledge of the design details remains sketchy.)

This whole contraption - there is no other word for it - was mounted atop a 100-ft reinforced tower in the northeast corner of Camp Evans. The heavy and ungainly antenna could not be tilted, it could only be rotated in azimuth; so moonshots could only be attempted twice a day, usually at moonrise but occasionally at moonset, during the 40-minute window open when the moon passed through the 15 degree wide beam of the antenna pattern.

Panoramic view of Camp Evans

The iconic Diana Bedspring, perhaps the most famous antenna in history, has become the unofficial symbol of Project Diana. Its picture, doctored by a photo editor who thought the moon looked too dim in the original so used 20th century “Photoshop” technology to “burn in” a picture of the sun in its place, appeared on the front pages of newspapers and on magazine covers throughout the world. Readers of this blog see it every time they open a new post. If the late David Mofensen’s dream of having Project Diana commemorated on a postage stamp is ever fulfilled (which can’t happen before 2046 because - I know, I checked - the US Postal Service will only issue such stamps in multiples of fifty years after the event), surely the Diana Bedspring will be the featured image.

* * * * *

So where is the Diana Bedspring? Perhaps it was scrapped in the mid-1950s, when the Army removed its old radar units from the site to make way for a parabolic dish antenna, a design already in widespread use by most US search radar at the end of the War. Or perhaps it was finally destroyed in the early 1990s, when the Army began to demolish the historic site in response to a Department of Defense decision to close many military bases including Camp Evans - until Fred Carl, now Director of the InfoAge Science History Center, almost literally threw his body in the path of the wrecking ball. Or perhaps it is still being stored in pieces in some forgotten location, awaiting reassembly. In any event, it is, in the wistful words of an InfoAge volunteer, “no longer available.”

The replacement antenna was a 50-foot dish created by the Signal Corps, using the frame of a captured Nazi Wurzburg Reise radar, to serve as our first satellite tracking antenna. In honor of its predecessor, it was dubbed the “Diana Dish.” In 1957, when the Soviets stole a march on the US by launching their Sputnik satellite, the Diana Dish was joined by a companion 60-foot dish named the “Space Sentry.” In 1960, control of space research was transferred to a new civilian agency, NASA, which continued the weather observation research already underway at the Diana site and proudly broadcast the first televised images of cloud movements from space.

The Diana Dish has joined the Diana Bedspring in the dustbin of history, but the Space Sentry was gifted by the Army to InfoAge, which has refurbished it for scientific and educational purposes as part of a larger effort to restore and preserve the Diana site. On January 10, 2015, a local amateur radio club celebrated the 70th anniversary of the Project Diana experiment by using the Space Sentry to make a series of Earth-Moon-Earth contacts.

The Space Sentry, just a few hundred feet from where the Diana Bedspring once stood.

* * * * *

Although the development of communications satellites has obsolesced moon bounce as a national security tool, Earth-Moon-Earth or EME has become quite popular among amateur radio operators. The object of modern EME, unlike Project Diana but like successor projects such as PAMOR, is a two-way exchange of information, in which a signal is sent from one station to another by ricocheting it off the moon; overcoming the challenges of weak signal communication is part of the fun and represents a test of skill. EME is the longest path between any two stations on earth.

To accomplish this feat, EME enthusiasts need to erect antennas that by amateur radio standards are often large enough to jangle the nerves of Property Owners’ Associations and perhaps violate the aesthetic sensibilities of their XYLs (ham-speak for ”ex young ladies” - that is, ahem, their wives). By Project Diana standards, however, most modern EME antennas are mere minikins and some are even portable.

0 Comments

DR HELEN JONES

2/3/2018

2 Comments

In the mid 1970s, I worked for two years as the Director of a grant-funded Oral History Project on Women in Medicine at the Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (formerly the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania and the last medical school in the country to go co-ed; currently part of the Drexel University College of Medicine). In that capacity, and as co-editor of a book that included several oral history interviews resulting from that project, I learned quite a bit about the history of women in medicine in the United States and the obstacles these pioneers encountered in their attempts to achieve their career goals. I am, you might say, something of an expert.

So I felt more than a little sheepish when it only recently crossed my mind that my childhood pediatrician, Dr Helen E Jones, was a part of that history; and that even being her patient, at a time when only a tiny fraction of physicians were women, was an unlikely feature of my childhood. I immediately recognized this topic as a potential blog entry. Almost as immediately, I recognized that despite my vivid visceral memories of Dr. Jones - her strawberry blonde curls, her small physique, her all-business demeanor, and of course all those injections! - I knew next to nothing about the biographical details of her life or the hardships she must have endured to obtain her credentials and establish a thriving medical practice in a small coastal New Jersey town.

Having gotten as far as I could with google and the archives of the Asbury Park Press, I consulted two main additional sources. One was my friend Sandra Chaff, Archivist-Director of the MCP Archives and Special Collections on Women and Medicine at the time I worked on the oral history project, who was fierce about finding and preserving documents, photographs, and artifacts relating to the history of women physicians. The other was a Facebook Shark River Hills nostalgia site several of whose members were also patients of Dr Jones and were generous in sharing their recollections.

I am now happy to report that with a little help from my friends (thanks, guys!), I have cobbled together at least a blogs-worth of information about the elusive Dr Jones. And I am especially happy to post it on February 3, National Women Physicians Day, celebrated on the birthday of Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to graduate from medical school in the US and a trailblazer in promoting medical education for women throughout her life.

* * * * *

Helen Elizabeth Jones was born on October 15, 1918 in Scranton, PA, the middle of three children of Horace I Jones and Norma A Johns Jones. When Helen was three, the family moved to Asbury Park, where her father taught at Asbury Park High School for many years. Her mother was a musician and teacher who ran her own private school.

After her graduation from Asbury Park High School, wishing to see more of the country, she enrolled in premedical studies at the University of Michigan. She also joined the Psychology and German clubs during her days in Ann Arbor and pursued music and dramatics as well. During her summers at the Jersey Shore she worked as an assistant at a first aid station at the beach.

In September of 1940 she enrolled in Temple University School of Medicine - one of around 10 women in a class of 104. “Gone are the carefree college days,” intoned Dr John B Roxby in his welcoming speech. “You have chosen a great but difficult path, and the travail which lies ahead is of a quantity which may defy your present imagination.” Along with the demands described by Dr Roxby, additional clouds hung on the horizon. The prospect of American entry into World War II loomed larger every day and became a reality at the end of 1941, with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill of 1943 was as unsuccessful as succeeding socialized medicine proposals but nonetheless caused uneasiness and fear of the unknown.

Skull (Temple Medical School yearbook), Dec, 1943, Helen E Jones.

Helen’s graduation photo appears in the December 1943 yearbook - possibly on an accelerated schedule to accommodate a wartime need for medical personnel. The accompanying text notes that she was known as “Jonesy” to her close friends and that her special interests were in pediatrics and obstetrics,

During the latter half of her senior year she interned at the Chestnut Hill Hospital in Philadelphia. Following graduation she interned at the Jersey City Medical Center.

At the end of 1944, she started posting notices in the Asbury Park Press that her offices at 617 7th Avenue, located in her home in Asbury Park, would open for business on January 2, 1945, with office hours 2-4 and 7-9pm, and on Sundays by appointment.

Asbury Park Press, 0ct 11 1954. This photo shows Dr Jones (center, holding baby) exactly as I remember her.

In addition to her regular pediatric practice, over the years she took on additional duties, serving on the staff of the Jersey Shore Medical Center in Neptune for nearly 30 years, as school physician in Ocean Township starting in 1957, and as pediatrician to the Asbury Park Well Baby Clinic for 20 years. She was a member of the American and New Jersey Medical Societies and the New Jersey Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Asbury Park Press, Apr 30, 1974, shortly before her retirement.

In 1974, Helen’s brother-in-law accepted a position in California and Helen decided to head west with him and her sister. "I'm worn out physically," she told the Asbury Park Press of her nearly 30 years as a pediatrician, adding that her own physician had advised her to give up her private practice. “It was impossible to retire here," she continued. "I did try to cut down, but it didn't work. Children don't get sick according to a schedule. Pediatrics is a day and night, seven days a week profession. Out in California I will be working eight hours a day, five days a week."

Dr Jagdish Bharara took over her practice in New Jersey, and Helen sold her house in Deal Park.

On May 19, 1974, Helen began her new 40-hours-a-week “day job,” which involved working with what were then described as “retarded and emotionally disturbed children” at Camarillo State Hospital. At the time she arrived, Dr Ivor Lovaas, a pioneer in the application of behavior analytic techniques to autistic children, was at the peak of his career at Camarillo State, so whether or not she worked with him directly, it is impossible that she wasn’t touched by his somewhat controversial use of both rewards and punishments to encourage language skills and reduce self-injurious behavior. It would be interesting to know what she thought of his research-oriented approach, in contrast to the treatment model that had guided her own career.

Helen Elizabeth Jones died on December 17, 1993 in El Dorado, Placerville, California, at the age of 75. Four years later Camarillo State Hospital permanently shuttered its doors.

* * * * *

One of my fellow denizens of Shark River Hills volunteered: “I remember…the shots in the butt!” Another posted this recollection: “I always went into a panic as soon as I smelled the rubbing alcohol. I broke away from her assistant once and ran around the exam room with the syringe hanging off my butt.” Except for the added fillip about the syringe, this funny-but-sad scenario exactly mirrors my own recollection of my mom and Dr Jones's assistant chasing my little sister around the room as she too made a desperate attempt to escape the dreaded needle.

Although I was too wimpy to engage in such hijinks, I had my own personal nickname for Dr. Jones that still comes more naturally to my tongue than her given name: “Fanny Jones” (yes, for the obvious reason). If you think you detect an undertone of affection in that sobriquet, you would be quite wrong. And yet she never did me any harm; indeed, she probably saved my life on more than one occasion. The only thing I can say in extenuation of my youthful animus is that I remember her as rather severe, so the pain she inflicted was not much tempered by warmth or playfulness.

No one likes having a shot, but I cannot remember this level of needle-phobia in the days when I took my own daughters to the doctor. Did we have to endure more shots in those days? I may be exaggerating but I can’t remember a visit to Dr Jones that didn’t include at least one shot. Although the number of vaccine-preventable diseases is larger today than when I was a child, combinations such as diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus didn’t come into use until 1948; the shots and their boosters were given separately. Smallpox inoculations continued to be administered (remnants of my scar are still visible) until the late 1960s and beyond, even after the disease had been eradicated worldwide. The long-awaited vaccine that finally ended the terrors of polio became available in 1955, but the orally-administered version didn’t make its appearance until 1961. So - for awhile, yet another shot.

Non-routine shots were also commonplace - for example, tetanus boosters after injuries, such as I received after a dog bite when I was ten. (Telltale marks where Dr Jones cauterized the wounds can still be seen on my chin and neck - more battle scars!)

Although the antibacterial properties of the Penicillium fungus had been recognized for decades by the time the Scottish biologist Sir Alexander Fleming succeeded in culturing and concentrating it in 1928, it wasn’t until World War II that a form stable enough to be mass produced for clinical use was developed. Overuse of this miracle drug probably began almost immediately. I became seriously ill with bronchitis and pneumonia when I was in the first grade and Dr Jones arrived at our home every morning for two whole weeks (yes, Dr Jones made house calls!), clutching her black doctor’s satchel, to give me an injection. More than my fair share - so little wonder, perhaps, that I felt traumatized by my encounters with her!

Alternatively, is it possible that shots actually hurt more back then? Just about around the time I began my career as a pediatric patient, glass syringes with interchangeable parts, already a staple of medical practice, began to be mass-produced. Not until the mid-1950s were disposable plastic syringes introduced, eliminating the problem of contamination from improper sterilization; might they also have had a smoother action that reduced the ouch-factor? Or do newer manufacturing techniques produce finer and sharper needles than were available in the 1940s? Does modern medical training focus more on minimizing or distracting from the pain of injections? Just spinning out ideas here, but descriptions by diabetics of changes in insulin injections over time lend credence to the possibility that shots are less painful now than they used to be.

* * * * *

What led my mother to choose Dr Jones? I doubt she actively sought out a woman physician, but obviously it didn’t put her off, either. My guess is that when my sister was born in late January of 1945, Dr Jones - having hung out her shingle just three weeks earlier - attended her in the hospital. Perhaps my mother was dissatisfied with her current pediatrician, or perhaps she was attracted by the prospect of joining a new and relatively uncrowded practice. Perhaps she just plain liked Dr Jones, who, despite her failure to win me over, clearly had a way with mothers. Said one grateful mom when Dr Jones retired, "She takes the time necessary to examine the child and encourage and reassure the parents…. Quite simply, she is a good doctor in the highest sense of the word."

* * * * *

Helen Jones and the choices she made were typical of women physicians of her day. Although women overall were not welcome in the medical profession, pediatrics was considered a “soft” specially and therefore better suited to women than specialties engaging in heroic treatments of “really sick” patients, or involving surgery. Moreover, women who married were taken less seriously; unlike men, they were supposed to be “married” to their profession.

By the time Helen graduated from medical school, to be sure, these patterns were starting to crack a little. As a result of World War II, women were working outside the home in larger numbers, a trend that undoubtedly helped Helen build her practice. Helen was also fortunate in having as a role model a mother who ran her own business at a high professional level. Nonetheless, Helen played it safe, opting for a “soft” specialty and remaining single. Failure was probably not an option,

This is not in any way to imply that her choice of pediatrics was simply a matter of expediency. "Medicine is demanding,” she said, “but the thing that makes it all worthwhile is seeing a child grow up well and happy…. You become close to the children and they're almost like your own." She maintained a deep conviction of the larger importance of her work: "They will be the heads of state, one way or the other. You look at a little baby and realize that everybody who comes in contact with that child is going to have an influence on the development of his personality and character.”

Devoted as she was to her profession, Helen was not completely devoid of outside interests and activities. One of my Facebook “informants,” whose cousin worked for many years as Dr Jones’s receptionist, said that Dr Jones shared her home in Deal Park with her sister and brother-in-law, which afforded some presumably welcome companionship. Her mother’s daughter, she was an accomplished musician who played piano and organ. Other hobbies included collecting stamps, with an emphasis on those featuring opera and the history musical instruments; and caring for her two Yorkshire Terrier stud dogs, one of which took a first at the Westminster Dog Show in Madison Square Garden.

Did Helen’s busy pediatric practice - stampeding kids and all - add up to a full and rewarding professional life? Did her hobbies enrich her nonworking hours? Did she miss having children of her own or did she enjoy a little calm and quiet when she returned home in the evening? Did she indulge herself in a few precious moments at the piano communing with Chopin, or did she just drop into bed exhausted? Did her second career working with special-needs children and scaling back to a 40-hour work week in an easier climate give her a new lease on life?

I wonder.

I offer this blog entry not as a love letter, exactly, but as an expression of gratitude for the medical care I was fortunate to receive as a child and as an apology for the ill will I harbored against Dr Jones for no other reason than that she always seemed to be brandishing a needle.

2 Comments

OUR PETS

1/20/2018

2 Comments

We always had pets - at least one dog and one cat, and often more. A few of them show up in the famous Stodola Christmas cards.

Goldie and Penny - a holiday handful

I am ashamed to confess to having possibly contributed to the Stodola cat census via an acquisition method that could best be described as “Look what followed me home.” Never mind that I was covered with scratches from the process of persuading a reluctant feline to “follow” me home. I suppose I may have ended up keeping one or two of these kidnapped unfortunates; most, however, were truly feral animals that were mercifully (for all concerned) released back into the woods.

* * * * *

Before I was born, my parents adopted a kitten and pup duo my mom called Nip and Tuck. I don’t really remember them, but I do know that was the last time my mother ever had a chance to name our pets. After that my father took over, and he reigned supreme till we kids were old enough to join in the name game.

None of those cute pair names like Nip and Tuck or Salt and Pepper or Whisky and Soda for him! Rather, finding something catchy to call our pets was only a starting point for the prolonged discussion by which, through some cabalistic process, we eventually arrived at their true titles. So it turned out that Perky the tabby was really Percopolis, Penny the little car-chasing spaniel was Lady Penelope Penny van Pennysworth, Laurie the goofy boxer was Laurelita von Sniffnwoof, and Goldie, our gentle giant of a yellow tom, was actually John Timothy McGoldrick.

My dad came by this practice honestly. I can’t remember a time when his own mother didn’t have a calico cat capable of prolific reproduction, and although we always knew each in this long succession of creatures as "Orrie," their collective official name was Aurora Borealis. My grandmother charged $5 for each of Orrie's kittens, claiming they were much easier to place if you sold them than if you gave them away; somehow, to my mother's eternal amazement, my grandmother succeeded in selling out every litter.

* * * * *

Sharing!

My mother always claimed not to like pets very much but anyone who watched her with them knew better. (Not that we children could believe anyone could possibly dislike the little guys. It wasn’t till I was an adult with kids of my own that I learned how much work they could be, especially dogs, even if you adored them. Guess who sheltered me from that knowledge!)

One dog-related task that I always participated in enthusiastically, however, was a regular Saturday morning session that somehow turned into a bizarre father-daughter bonding ritual. No one had ever heard of Lyme disease then - perhaps it wasn't even a recognized diagnosis yet - but living at the Jersey Shore meant lots and lots of ticks, and the ones we knew best were dog ticks. When the season started in the Spring, my father filled a glass jelly jar with kerosene and then sat on the cellar stairs with a dog between his knees, tweezers in hand and his daughter at his side, watching with abject fascination. As the season wore on, the jar would become filled, with both the athletic little black ones that had barely had a chance to latch on and the large bloated white ones that had been gorging on dog blood for days. By the end of the season my father would happily display his trophy collection to anyone unwary enough to feign an interest in the process.

* * * * *

Of course we had a succession of nameless fish and turtles, but can you call a box turtle a pet? Every summer we found a few good-sized box turtles lumbering along the roadside - easily distinguished from their surly snapping cousins by their much sweeter faces and dispositions. We kept them in a box for a few days, painting our initials on their backs and feeding them lettuce, then released them and waited to see if they would return the following year. That seldom happened - though I once found one with someone else's initials!

Other non-pets included the fireflies we kept in jars by our bedside, watching dreamily as they lit up the room after dark.

Beyond that, my many rather elaborate efforts to catch and adopt wildlife were uniformly unsuccessful. For some reason a squirrel was at the top of my wish list. No one ever explained to me that our pets were bred to be infantilized, and that wild animals could not readily be tamed; or if anyone did I didn't listen.

* * * * *

One of my all-time favorite pets was Archie the parakeet. Parakeets (or budgerigars) are small parrots living wild in the drier regions of Australia. They have been bred in captivity since the 1850s, but for some reason a parakeet craze swept the nation in the 1950s and early 1960s. Our Asbury Park Woolworth’s was literally atwitter with colorful creatures awaiting adoption - green (the wild type, like Archie), but also blue and yellow and white that had been bred for variety. I longed for a parakeet the moment I saw their comical little faces, and since in our house longing was usually the prelude to receiving, sure enough, the coveted cage awaited me on Christmas morning.

How I loved Archie!

Although we were familiar enough with marine creatures, birds had never before been part of our family menagerie, so without warning I was introduced to the mysteries of cuttlebone, sandpaper tubes to cover perches, how to hand-feed a parakeet without getting pecked, and (less alluring) the weekly cage cleaning requirement.

But what really excited me was that you could supposedly teach your parakeet to talk. Forget about canaries; I wanted my bird to converse with me, not serenade me. Unfortunately, either Archie wasn’t the brightest budgie in the flock, or more likely we weren't systematic enough to train him properly. For whatever reason, we never succeeded in turning Archie into much of a raconteur.

He did, however, have one notable verbal accomplishment. In those days when you wanted to make a telephone call, you picked up the receiver and the operator (a real human, and always a woman) said “Number, please.” Almost all our numbers began with “Asbury Park two,” the local exchange, followed by four additional digits that uniquely specified the recipient. Archie’s cage hung right over the telephone, and Archie became quite adept at saying the three little words he heard most often, “Asbury Park two.”

Sadly, Archie came to a bad end at the claws of one of our mama cats. I was devastated and insisted on wearing a black armband to school.

* * * * *

The invention of kitty litter in 1947 by a man named Edward Lowe changed cat ownership forever, in ways that went far beyond which side of the door the cat spent the night on. Before kitty litter, cats were workers who earned their keep by keeping rodents at bay; since kitty litter they have become fur babies who, if we’re lucky, curl up with us at night.

In my childhood home and I'm sure in many other homes of the late 1940s and early 1950s, however, this new invention hadn't quite caught on yet. I also don’t remember the practice of routinely neutering male cats, though females were generally spayed. Consequently, there was no such thing then as what we would now call an indoor cat, and life with a tom involved a lot of patching up.

So it was with John Timothy McGoldrick, son of one of the many Orrie's and a wondrous beast with totally contrasting outdoor and indoor personalities. Outdoors, birds feared him, and rightly so. Indoors, he drooled like a baby and happily let Archie perch on his head, purring all the while.

He did, however, have a disconcerting habit of disappearing for days at a time, and as he grew older his absences grew longer. The day my parents finally left the house on Pinewood Drive to move to Long Island, Goldie was nowhere to be found. All the neighbors were asked to watch for Goldie and notify us immediately if he turned up, but he never did.

2 Comments

CELEBRATING DIANA DAY

1/10/2018

0 Comments

Seventy-two years ago today, on January 10, 1946, a handful of scientists at Camp Evans in Belmar NJ, led by Lt Col Jack Dewitt, successfully bounced radar waves off the moon - the first Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) communication - and the world has never been the same.

My father, E. King Stodola, was the team's scientific head. It's not hard to guess why he was chosen for this role. He was an engineer with good social skills and expertise in moving target detection (in this case a very large moving target). His approach to everything, from household repairs to shooting the moon, reflected the can-do spirit that Americans brought to World War II - work rapidly and intensively, use and modify materials already on hand, and then test, test, test.

Applying this method to the challenge they now faced, the team heavily modified an SCR-271 bedspring antenna, jacked up the power, and pointed it at the rising moon. A series of radar signals was broadcast, and each time the echo was heard 2.5 seconds later, the time it takes light to reach the moon and return.

As Fred Carl, COO of the InfoAge Museum located on the former Camp Evans site, succinctly put it, "Project Diana was a pivotal event that built on World War II expertise but pointed the way to the future." The conclusive demonstration that the ionosphere could be pierced captured the world's imagination. It opened the door to space exploration and to communication with the universe beyond the earth's envelope.

On January 10, 2016, I launched this blog to celebrate Project Diana in the context of life in postwar America and in particular of my Jersey Shore childhood. My husband thought I'd run out of things to say after a half a dozen posts. Two years later I'm still going strong.

0 Comments

A HOLIDAY GIFT FROM SEARS

12/20/2017

3 Comments

Excitement reigns among nostalgia buffs: As of the 2017 holiday season, the iconic Sears Wish Book is back! Well, sort of. It’s mainly accessible online, but the retailers (subsumed by Kmart in 2005) assure us that “Sears’s best customers will also get a limited edition copy in the mail.” Mine hasn’t arrived yet - guess it would take more than a couple of stops at the Sears watch repair counter to qualify for "best customer" status.

* * * * *

Richard Warren Sears sent out the first flyer for his mail order watch and jewelry business in 1888. He soon branched out into other merchandise, and by 1894 his modest mailer had evolved into a catalog. In 1896 the catalog grew even larger and started coming out twice a year. In 1897 a color section was added. An American tradition was born.

The Sears catalog proceeded to do for mail-order shopping what amazon.com later did for online shopping. In our house, as in many others, the arrival of the Big Book was truly an event. Twice a year, an enormous tome, 2-3” thick, was stuffed into our mailbox, in plenty of time for us to order our back-to-school wardrobe, our Easter finery, and our summertime shorts and halters. My sisters and I pored over its offerings, hoping they would make us look like the models in the pictures. Our choices bookmarked, we measured our chests, waists, and hips (which in fact were all about the same circumference in those days) and traced the outlines of our feet, all in a quest for the perfect fit. Our mom meticulously filled out the order form, which often spilled over onto two or three pages, carried it out to our mailbox, and raised the red flag to alert the carrier to the presence of outgoing mail. Then, biting our nails, we awaited the arrival of our precious cargo.

My all-time favorite was a dress that had also been purchased by the beauteous Ruth Ann, a classmate with an enviable put-together look - not a strand of hair would dare try to escape from her hip-length flaxen braids. The dress featured a quilted blue vest layered over a puffy-sleeved blouse adorned with red polkadots; an enormous red bow at the neck completed the look. It was actually singularly unflattering and made me look like Howdy Doody's twin sister (nothing was ever unflattering to Ruth Ann); but I was proud to share my sartorial taste with this etherial creature and always experienced a frisson of pleasure whenever the two of us showed up wearing "our" dress on the same day.

Although the clothing and toy sections were Sears's little-girl magnets, the catalog also featured sewing machines, sporting goods, musical instruments, saddles, firearms, buggies, bicycles, baby carriages, and oh, so much more. My parents swore by Sears products. As a young adult just starting out on my own, I inherited an ancient Kenmore vacuum cleaner from my parents when they upgraded to a newer model Kenmore. Mine looked like a torpedo, and old as it was, amazingly you could still buy any replacement part you needed. My husband and I used it till we decided we could afford something with more features - disposable bags and a shape better suited to navigating stairs were the big selling points, as I recall. It may have been a mistake; we never had a more reliable vacuum cleaner.

The vacuum cleaner is long gone, but I still have my mother’s Franklin Deluxe Rotary Model sewing machine in its original red-stained wooden cabinet, along with a box full of lethal-looking attachments with names like the Multiple Slot Binder, the Five Stitch Ruffler, the Underbraider, the Edgestitcher, and the Gathering Foot. Alone in an even bigger box is the Adjusting "Famous" Buttonhole Worker. The machine itself is an early electric model with a thigh-operated lever instead of a treadle. I learned to sew on it. Again, I replaced it not because it was broken but because I wanted some fancier and more user-friendly features. I haven’t plugged it in for half-a-century - I now use it to hold my inbox - but for all I know it still works.

They just don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

* * * * *

Sometime during the fall the Christmas catalog would arrive - the unofficial start of the holiday season, the stuff dreams were made of. This special edition concentrated in one place all the holiday-related merchandise from the Big Book - wax candles for trees, cards, ornaments, stockings, and artificial trees - along with additional items deemed to have an extra measure of gift-appeal. The first edition, in 1933, included the “Miss Pigtails” doll, a battery-powered toy automobile, a Mickey Mouse watch, fruitcakes, Lionel electric trains, a five pound box of chocolates, and real live singing canaries. Yes, it of course included many toys, but even more pages were devoted to gifts for adults. In 1968, in deference to a sobriquet already in wide public use, the book was rechristened the Wish Book.

The Sears folks were well aware that their catalogs were a potential treasure trove for anthropologists. In 1943, the year I was born, the Sears News Graphic referred to it as “a mirror of our times, recording for future historians today’s desires, habits, customs, and mode of living." Producers of Broadway shows and Hollywood movies still turn to the old Sears catalogs for help with retro styles and furnishings.

The Big Book was discontinued in 1993, but Sears was slow (too slow) to introduce online shopping and its fortunes dipped. Wishbook.com was launched in 1998, but the beloved print version wasn’t retired until 2011 - only to be revived this year by popular demand. Whether it will be reissued next year remains to be seen.

* * * * *

Sears's mail order business long preceded the Sears chain of retail stores, which didn’t start opening until 1925 (oddly presaging amazon’s current expansion to brick-and-mortar retailing; been in Whole Foods lately?). There was a Sears store in Asbury Park, memorable to me because my father once “lost” me while shopping in the hardware section. I wasn’t really very lost, of course, but I was frightened enough that a kindly clerk took it upon himself to reunite me with my dad a few aisles away. (My mother never, ever lost track of her children in a store!)

I can't remember why we didn't shop in the store more. I mean, why did we order our clothes from the catalog if we could go and try them on in the store? Perhaps there was no children's clothing department? Or only a limited selection of styles and sizes? All I know is that it never occurred to us not to catalog-shop. Perhaps it's the 20th century equivalent of ordering something on amazon.com that I could easily pick up in the drugstore.

* * * * *

In 1908 Sears outdid itself and started selling prefab houses, to be put together on site by the owner - a process that clearly took "assembly required" to a whole new level. About the only precondition was that the buyer live near enough to a railroad line so that the lumber, asphalt shingles, plaster and lath (later drywall), windows, flooring, hardware, and everything else needed for the project - around 30,000 pieces in all, including 750 pounds of nails and 27 gallons of paint, enough for 3 coats on the exterior - could be delivered in boxcars. Each part was numbered and had to be matched up with the extensive instructions and blueprints that came with the kit. Sears even provided financing; heating, plumbing, and electrical systems were extra. Decorating advice was available on request.

Sears was not the only purveyor of prefab houses nor even the first, but it was the largest and most diversified. Several editions of the 1908 Modern Homes catalog were issued, ending up with a selection of more than 40 house designs, with prices ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. By the time Modern Homes came to an end there were 447 models in all, according to the Sears Archives, in different sizes and architectural styles, stratified into three lines to accommodate different budgets. Some were only offered once; other more popular models were evergreens that reappeared year after year.

After absorbing many foreclosures during the Depression (to avoid giving the impression they were abandoning their customers!), Sears discontinued financing in 1934. In 1940 the last of the Modern Homes catalogs was published, but kits continued to be sold through 1942, including designs from the 1940 issue as well as new designs that had never appeared in the catalog. By then an estimated 100,000 had been built, many of which are now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Before my recent visit to Shark River Hills, I emailed my childhood friend Bill to ask if he had any "then" photos to pair with the "now" photos I was planning to take. He responded with two photos of his family's home on South Riverside Drive, taken in 1949. His father later dug out the crawl space beneath the porch to extend the basement and enclosed the porch itself to provide more living space, so the house looks quite different today. But those changes were made after the Stodolas left Shark River Hills; these photos show the house as I remember it. Thanks, Bill!

In his narrative about the house's history, Bill also mentioned - much to my surprise - that it was one of several summer homes built in the 1930's by a developer from Sears kits shipped by rail to Belmar and then transported to Shark River Hills for assembly. Unlike his family's comfortable two-story home, said Bill, most of these houses were smaller, single-story affairs.

"That's the story I heard anyway," he added.

Unfortunately, it is not always easy to identify Sears homes. A few years after Sears stopped selling kits, all sales records were jettisoned. Some homeowners did not want it known that they lived in kit homes and destroyed the evidence. Sears offered reverse floor plans and encouraged buyers to customize - to swap out the siding material, to add a dormer - resulting in a certain lack of uniformity. Competing kit home manufacturers often copied design elements from one another, which can also contribute to confusion.

Still, there are a few markers - stamps on the lumber used for framing on houses built after 1916, shipping labels, a small circled "SR" cast into the lower corner of the bathtub in houses built during the 1930s, etc. - that can help to support or rule out a house's pedigree. Paperwork found in the home and legal documents can also provide clues, as can comparison with published house plans. And of course, unless the house was built between 1908 and 1942, it cannot be a Sears home. (See Rosemary Thornton's fascinating books on Sears houses for more help in verifying authenticity.)

Although New Jersey boasts many kit houses, I have yet to uncover any more information about the would-be Sears homes of Shark River Hills. Wouldn't it be cool to develop a Shark River Hills equivalent of this list of kit homes in my current hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan, posted by Rosemary Thornton on her blog? On the other hand, it is well to bear in mind that many family legends are simply that, legends, and more people think they own Sears houses than actually do.

Perhaps a loyal reader will step forward to elaborate on the history provided by Bill and to identify additional Sears homes that might, just might, be hidden in plain sight in Shark River Hills.

3 Comments

THE MOON ENTERS THE COLD WAR

12/7/2017

0 Comments

Pearl Harbor, whose 76th anniversary we observe today, marked the end of American isolationism - not just as a political ideology but also as the comfortable assumption that its location beyond two oceans could somehow protect the US from the rest of the world. Pearl Harbor, and the declarations of war by Hitler and Mussolini that followed shortly thereafter, thrust the US into the role of defender of liberty and democracy and leader of what later came to be called the “Free World.”

After the War ended with the Axis powers soundly defeated, the temporary alliance between the Western bloc, led by the US, and the Eastern bloc, led by the Soviet Union, became unraveled by their profound social, economic, and political differences. The result was a Cold War between these two superpowers that lasted for over forty years, sustained by the belief on both sides that only the buildup of arsenals capable of “mutually assured destruction” could keep either side from demolishing the other. It was also characterized by the development of spy technology far more advanced than anything that preceded it - technology that, to remain effective, demanded almost epic levels of secrecy by those in the know.

* * * * *

I have elsewhere referred to Project Diana as the opening salvo in the Cold War, but only recently have I come to appreciate the full truth of this statement. Although much has been made of Jack DeWitt's almost obsessive fascination with the idea of bouncing radar off the moon, it is well to remember that his actual assignment from the Pentagon was to study ways to detect and track Soviet rockets that might, drawing on expertise captured from the Germans, it was feared, be capable of reaching the US. DeWitt argued, with some justice, that since there were no such rockets currently available for testing, hitting the moon would equally well confirm that radar could penetrate the ionosphere.

Not long ago a reader kindly referred me to a recently declassified document, originally published in 1967, in which the author, Frank Eliot, asserts that the “entirely new technique” emerging directly from Project Diana - that is, using the moon to receive and reflect radio signals - offered a possible solution to the thorny problem of how to intercept Russian radar signals in an era when flights over the Soviet Union were prohibited. Although Project Diana involved monostatic transmission - that is, sending and receiving signals in the same location - a Naval Research Laboratory engineer named James Trexler figured out as early as 1948 that signals emanating from one location (e.g., in Russia) could potentially be detected via bistatic transmission to other locations (e.g., in the US) if they happened to bounce off the moon.

Thus was born the highly classified PAssive MOon Relay or PAMOR, code-named "Joe." Initial tests proved so promising that the project was intensified, at even deeper levels of secrecy. As one wag put it, “Leave it to the US Navy to weaponize the moon.”

Moon bounce via bistatic transmission. (Courtesy of Roger Shultz)

The Russians, of course, weren’t bouncing signals off the moon for the benefit of their Cold War adversaries. Indeed, most of their signals simply escaped the atmosphere and disappeared into outer space. Detecting those that did serendipitously hit the moon could only be done at certain times of day, in certain locations on earth where both the sending and receiving elements could “see” the moon at the same time; nor could the lunar terrain be too “rough” for clear reflection of signals. Antennas had to be at least 150 ft in diameter and preferably larger, and only a few were available for that purpose (e.g., those at the Grand Bahama tracking station, the Naval Research Laboratory’s Chesapeake Bay Annex, Stanford University, and Sugar Grove, West Virginia).

There were more ways for this effort to fail than to succeed, but the military got lucky - not only in having favorable antenna locations and encountering favorable lunar conditions, but also, in the case of the “Hen House”, a major anti-ballistic missile operation deep within the Soviet Union, in being able to take advantage of occasional brief practice sessions during which the Russians actually set their radar to track the moon. In the end, PAMOR proved to be an intelligence coup, continuing to yield information until the late sixties, when it was obsolesced by communications satellites.

PAMOR's success led the Naval Research Laboratory, in the mid 1950s, to commission an ambitious spinoff code-named Operation Moon Bounce, a series of experiments to test the feasibility of using the moon as a natural communications satellite. These tests were so effective in refining moonbounce technology that Operation Moon Bounce was used for several years to link Hawaii with Washington DC. Like PAMOR, Operation Moon Bounce was superseded in the late 1960s by networks of communications satellites - networks whose design profited from the experience gained during the Moon Bounce tests.

Moonbounce communication, generally referred to as Earth-Moon-Earth or EME, is now largely the province of amateur radio enthusiasts, who continue to reap the benefits of Operation Moon Bounce and ultimately of Project Diana.

* * * * *

As anyone who follows this blog regularly must be aware, the Army's reluctance to publicize Project Diana has long puzzled me. Based more on my own inferences from my father’s comments than on anything he actually said, I have generally interpreted it as retribution for Jack DeWitt's lack of complete candor about what he was doing, forcing the Army to play catch-up after the fact.

Still, this explanation has never entirely satisfied me. Why should those who left the Signal Corps (that is to say, those over whom the Army no longer maintained control) be selectively denied media attention? Why should my father, even decades later, have trouble gaining access to his own earlier work? Even granting that DeWitt was an ask-for-forgiveness-not-for-permission kind of guy working in an organization that prized discipline, it all seemed - well, a bit of an overreaction on the Army’s part.

The recently declassified article by Eliot has given me a somewhat different perspective on this issue. In short, it suggests that the Army discouraged media attention less because of what the Project Diana team did wrong and more because of what it did right.

The success of PAMOR clearly depended on the Soviets' remaining unaware that their emissions were being monitored, a consideration that makes the Army’s wish to control information that might provide clues about the extent of its capabilities more understandable. Likewise, severely restricting access to information about PAMOR and its debt to Project Diana based strictly on need-to-know provides a more plausible explanation for classifying it above my father’s level of security clearance than an arbitrary determination to curtail access to his own work, even though it did in fact have this (presumably unintended) consequence.

Did my father know about PAMOR? He obviously wouldn’t have told me if he did, but given that documents such as the Eliot article weren’t declassified until 2014, I tend to doubt it. Had he known, he might have been more philosophical about the modest notice given by the Army to Project Diana’s milestone anniversaries.

0 Comments

SHARK RIVER HILLS: A MOMENT IN TIME

11/21/2017

0 Comments

Although people have been living in what is now Shark River Hills since Precolumbian times, its modern era dates back to July 8, 1923, the day that property in this shiny new resort area went on sale. The Shark River Hills Company had actually purchased and platted the 728 acre tract several years earlier, but initial attempts at development had faltered. Now the Company had placed its renewed hopes in the capable hands of Morrisey & Walker, Realtors. The realtors quickly proceeded to live up to their reputation for aggressive marketing, splashing a large ad in the Asbury Park Press on July 7 that proclaimed Shark River Hills to be nothing less than “the LAST HIGH-GRADE DEVELOPMENT NEAR ASBURY.” Parcels could be had for as little as $95, or $10 down and $10/month.

Asbury Park Press, July 7, 1923

Promotional fan, featuring the "Shark River Hills girl"

The pitch was primarily aimed at the summer crowd, who were lured by a vision of a vacation paradise and assured that building “YOUR bungalow on YOUR lot” was a better investment than a series of summer rentals. But those who wished to make Shark River Hills their “permanent house” were welcome as well, so long as their money was green.

* * * * *

"Uppie" Updegraff (Neptune Historical Museum)

A driving force behind this sales campaign was Alice “Uppie” Updegraff, the doyenne of Jersey Shore realtors. For years she commuted from her home in Matawan to her job at Morrisey & Walker in Asbury Park, but in 1924 she decided to set an example for her potential customers by buying - not just any house, but the oldest home in Shark River Hills, built in around 1913, a charming bungalow on Riverside Drive to which a garage was later added. The house appeared in many ads for Shark River Hills property. (Later still, the house was moved to its current location on Glenmere Avenue.)

I knew Uppie from practically the day I was born and have several pictures from a photoshoot on her lawn when I was 4 1/2 months old - me with my parents, me with Uppie's cat - all with her famous house looming in the background, blurred but visible. I suspect Uppie counted my mom and dad as being among a few hundred of her closest friends. More than once I heard the story of her comment when she first saw me as a baby: “Lots of head above the ears - just like her father.” I don’t give her much credit for phrenology; but for finding a way to admire a baby and flatter the baby's father at the same time, she definitely deserved the Dale Carnegie award for knowing how to win friends and influence new parents.

Uppie's home at 645 S Riverside Drive, the first home built in Shark River Hills

"Lots of head above the ears?" Uppie's home can be seen in the background

I remember Uppie as a tiny, wizened old lady though at the time she was probably about the same age as I am now. Living with her in the bungalow were her willowy daughter Virginia - also a real estate agent - and Virginia’s husband, the splendidly mustachioed Alphonse Tonietti.

I always found Alphonse a bit of an enigma, but with the help of my friend Joyce, who has a better memory than I do for these details, and my cousin Alan, who is a better scholar than I am, I've pieced together most of his story. Alphonse was born in 1896 in Basrah (then part of the Ottoman Empire), attended the American College in Beirut, Lebanon, and arrived in the US in 1921, where he graduated from the Columbia University School of Journalism. He went on to have what seems to have been a fairly distinguished career, working as editor of the Literary Digest Magazine and serving on the staffs of the New York World-Telegram and the New York Sun.

Then, in the mid-1930s, Alphonse achieved a measure of possibly unwanted fame when he was fired by the Italian language newspaper Il Progresso, followed by a lawsuit that was widely reported in the Communist and liberal press. Amazingly, he won his case and was reinstated with seven weeks' back pay, the Court finding that he had been discharged not because (as Il Progresso claimed) he didn't write in Italian - that had never been a requirement of his position as editor of the American page - but because of his activities as Chair of Il Progresso's chapter of the New York Newspaper Guild.

By the time I knew him, he had moved on to become the owner and operator of the Holy Land Art Company in New York City, a manufacturer of religious artifacts and fabrics. He died in his office on Murray Street in June of 1958, at the age of 61. Virginia Tonietti lived on for another thirty years; she never remarried.

Two details of more than passing interest are missing here - why Alphonse abandoned his journalism career in favor of selling religious objects; and even more intriguing, how on earth he managed to meet an all-American girl from the tiny hamlet of Shark River Hills, New Jersey and persuade her, in October of 1931, to become his bride.

* * * * *

When my parents decided to give up their rental unit on Clinton Place to buy a home of their own in 1947 or 1948, Uppie and Virginia were close at hand to shepherd them through the process. The house they chose was a modest bungalow on Pinewood Drive at the corner of Hampton Court. It seemed baronial to me at the time although it is currently listed on Zillow as being 1879 square ft, a number that includes two large porches that have now been enclosed and a substantial addition. So - a not-so-big house back then. According to Zillow it was built in 1908.

But wait! Wasn’t Uppie’s house, built in around 1913, supposed to be the oldest house in Shark River Hills? Surely Zillow had gotten the date of the Stodola home wrong.

When I visited Shark River Hills this past August, I had a chance to chat with the current owner of the house, who confirmed that yes, indeed, the house was built in 1908 - that's the date shown on the deed. When I observed that the date seemed too early by several years, he told me that the daughter of the previous owner, the one who had bought the home from my parents, had informed him that the house was originally built not as a residence but as a retreat for Roman Catholic priests, on land purchased by the sister of one of the priests. In fact, he said, the house featured two small prayer rooms, one in the basement, the other a second floor enclosure barely larger than a closet that my father had used as his ham shack!

So far my efforts to track down the previous owner’s daughter or to find any corroboration of the house’s supposed history as a Catholic retreat have failed. If anyone reading this blog can provide me with information about the history of my childhood home I would be very grateful.

Pinewood Drive and Hampton Court - summertime

Pinewood Drive and Hampton Court - winter scene

* * * * *

Although Uppie and others made it their full time home, Shark River Hills remained largely a resort community for quite awhile. Relics of this history were all around when I was a child; across the street from us on Hampton Court was a log cabin (still there!) that was shuttered most of the year, and our closest neighbor was a tiny cottage only occupied during the summer months. Shark River Hills even had its own boardwalk, running from the Club House to the Tucker's Point Bridge, which had doubled the number of routes between Neptune City and Shark River Hills when it was completed in 1923.

The Shark River Hills boardwalk (Neptune Historical Museum)

Crowds gathered on the boardwalk to watch a sporting event (Neptune Historical Museum)

But the little subdivision was on the verge of a sea change. As our friend and neighbor Mary Jane Evers put it, Shark River Hills in the early 1940s was “a summer development, [with] homes not equipped for year-round living, and about three macadamed roads which the Army had done to get to their own properties in the Hills and to allow the personnel to get to work.” My parents' circle of friends were recent arrivals, just as we were, and they were all full timers.

As usual, Mary Jane had it just right, even if there’s no precise demographic term for an old-timey summer resort proceeding peaceably along its journey toward year-round development when it suddenly finds itself host to an Army base and under pressure to make itself user-friendly for a large infusion of military and associated civilian personnel. My father was part of that Camp Evans infusion, and so it happened that this oddly unique moment in the history of Shark River Hills formed the backdrop for my childhood.

The “great hurricane of 1944” demolished the old boardwalk, and no one bothered to rebuild it. The era of Shark River Hills as a summer resort had come to an end.

* * * * *

To all my loyal readers: A very happy Thanksgiving from my family to yours.

Front row: my dad, Aunt June and Uncle Syd (Dad's brother); Back row: my mom holding my sister Sherry, my sister Leslie, me, my grandparents Edwin and Beatrice Stodola

0 Comments

<<Previous

Forward>>

CINDY STODOLA POMERLEAU

I was just shy of 3 years old when the US Army successfully bounced radar waves off the moon - the opening salvo in the Space Race, the birth of radioastronomy, and the first Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) communication. I was born on the Jersey coast for the same reason as Project Diana: my father, as scientific director of the Project, was intimately involved in both events. Like Project Diana, I was named for the goddess of the moon (in my case Cynthia, the Greeks' nickname for Artemis - their version of Diana - who was born on Mt Cynthos). Project Diana is baked into my DNA.

CONNECT WITH CINDY
Facebook: @cynthia.s.pomerleau
Twitter: @Cindy_Pomerleau

EMAIL SUBSCRIPTION
Send me your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive email notifications of new posts.

TO THE MOON AND BACK

AN INTERVIEW WITH MY DAD

ME AND MY UKULELE

ARMSTRONG AND THE TRIUMPH OF FM RADAR

THE FAMOUS BEDSPRING ANTENNA

DR HELEN JONES

OUR PETS

CELEBRATING DIANA DAY

A HOLIDAY GIFT FROM SEARS

THE MOON ENTERS THE COLD WAR

SHARK RIVER HILLS: A MOMENT IN TIME

CINDY STODOLA POMERLEAU

Archives

Categories