Street Numbers Freeze History

 

In Lancaster County, the roads from Lancaster City to the outer boroughs radiate in every direction, a hub and spoke system like the German countryside many residents came from two centuries ago.  To the north is the Lititz Pike, the road to Lititz. To the west is Harrisburg Pike, the road through Mount Joy and Elizabethtown. Between them is the road to Manheim, the Manheim Pike. 

 

To the east is the road to New Holland that passes through CDP (Census-Designated Place) of Leola.  I ride the New Holland Pike because it is very flat and has a wide shoulder.  On one of my recent rides, I noticed that the numbers on houses and businesses in Leola switch from West to East at a place almost a mile east of what I would have thought was the center of Leola.

Coming from Lancaster, the street numbers count down from Rutter's Store at 370 W. Main Street to a house at 2 W. Main. Then the numbers go from the Post Office at 10 E Main St. to a home at 509 E. Main St. where the numbers switch to West Main Street in New Holland. The name NewHolland Pike is used on the road from the Lancaster City line to the edge of Leola.

What surprised me was that the numbers in Leola switch from East to West Main Street at Maple Avenue. That location is well past what looks like the center of Leola: the two traffic lights where PA Route 772 intersects with PA 23. 

It turns out that the numbers switch from East to West near the location of the former Glenola Train Station that connected Leola with Lancaster more than a century ago. The Leacock Township Building is also near the place where the numbers switch. So even though the busiest part of Leola is east of the intersection of Main and Maple, the building numbers preserve the history of the time when the train station was the center of Leola.

Five miles east in New Holland, the numbers count down to the center of the borough, but differently. The numbers count down on West Main Street until 101 at the intersection with Roberts Avenue. Then on the east side of the intersection the numbers count up from 104. There are no numbers below 100 on either East or West Main Street in New Holland. But the numbers on the North-South roads, like Roberts Avenue, drop to double or single digits as they approach Main Street. 

Another oddity is that the center of New Holland is all on East Main Street. It's mostly residential on West Main Street with scattered businesses along the road. The central business area starts immediately on East Main Street.  

Road numbering in cities can be logical, but not necessarily.  I grew up in the Boston area, a city with no grid at its center. In Manhattan, the east-west street numbers are at zero at Fifth Avenue and increase to the edges of the long, thin island. But the avenues have numbers that simply increase from south to north. There is no way to to know where 101, 365 or 565 Fifth Avenue is except by memory.   They are the Zara store, the CUNY Graduate Center and the Adidas Flagship Store. 

     

Benetton and the End of Communism and Cigarette Ads

 

At the beginning of the 1980s, the winning cars in Formula 1 racing were billboards for cigarettes and oil companies.  The Marlboro McLaren, John Players Special Lotus, the Gitanes Ligier, dominated the winners circle in Formula 1. 

Then in 1986, Luciano Benetton, a maker of Italian knitwear, bought a team and went to win a driver's title and two manufacturer's championships. 

Benetton also brought his clothing business to communist countries beginning with Hungary in the mid-1980s.  I read about Benetton and the decentralized clothing empire he created. His knitwear was made by women working as independent suppliers. Benetton would decide on the colors at the last minute and be sure his knitwear was in the color of the season.  

I was a fan of the Benetton team for the decade and a half they raced--1986 to 2001.  Benetton surprised the racing world. They were the first clothing maker to sponsor a Formula 1 team and they were a success from the first year: Gerhard Berger won the Mexican Grand Prix in a Benetton the first year the team was in operation. 

Benetton was the first team for Michael Schumacher, one of the greatest driver's of all time.  With success the team sought more sponsorship becoming billboards first for Camel and then for Japanese cigarette maker, Mild Seven.  The team won the driver's title and two manufacturer's titles in 1994 and 1995, but by 1996 Schumacher was at Ferrari and the team was in decline. Renault became the title sponsor for the last two years of Benetton ownership: 2000 and 2001. 

Cigarettes no longer sponsor the cars. The leading sponsors in 2023 are car makers Mercedes, Alfa Romeo, Aston Martin and Ferrari along with Red Bull and Alpha Tauri sports drinks. 

The posters above are in the upstairs hallway of my home along with a print of 1992 World Champion Nigel Mansell in a Williams Renault.  Nigel is the name of my youngest son. But Benetton is still my favorite team.

Pissing Contest: Real and Metaphorical

Between birth and enlisting in the U.S. Air Force, I had two addresses. Both in the town of Stoneham nine miles north of Boston. The first was 48 Hancock Street. The second was 41 Oak Street. My parents lived in the house at 41 Oak Street from 1957 until my mother sold the house in the 1990s more than a decade after my Dad passed away.

My first friend in the "new" neighborhood on Oak Street was a boy named Bobby. He lived two houses away at the corner of Oak Street and Victoria Lane. We were friends, and like most boys fighting is part of friendship.  

Many times in my life I have had metaphorical pissing contests with other kids, co-workers, and soldiers. But only once did I have an actual pissing contest.  Soon after we moved to Oak Street, Bobby and I were playing and something went wrong. Whatever the cause, Bobby and I did not have the side-by-side competition of who can piss farthest, longest, highest. 

We turned and faced each other for a battle of who could make the other smell worse. We both won, or lost, depending on how it was judged.   

Although my memory of my childhood is very limited, I have some memory of Bobby and I standing next to the tall hedges that separated his yard from the Bishop's house (Mr. and Mrs. Bishop, not a church official) and emptying our bladders toward each other.  

Our mothers were displeased at our need for a change of clothes. We were friends for years after, so the actual pissing contest was not fatal to our friendship. In later life, I found having a metaphorical pissing contest could end a relationship.  Best to avoid both.  

Nothing Ever Dies: Re-Reading a Haunting Book About War and it's Aftermath

I am re-reading the book Nothing Ever Dies because I first enlisted during the war in Vietnam 51 years ago and this book holds a mirror to my service during that war and all the wars I served in and during over the fifty years that followed. 

The notes below are thoughts from reading the first chapters.

Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War by Viet Thanh Nguyen 

The opening chapter, “Just Memory” begins: “This is a book on war, memory, and identity. It proceeds from the idea that all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” 

Nguyen then tells us the war known as the Vietnam War in America is American War in Vietnam. This identity crisis is central to the war as perceived by those who lived through and after it in Vietnam and neighboring countries. 

It is one of the truisms of history that the winners write the history. But in the modern world history gets written by everyone with the means to tell their story. America was the clear loser of the wars in Southeast Asia from the mid 1960s to 1975. But America names the war and controls much of the narrative because America is the biggest producer of movies, books and other forms of bringing story to the world: all published in English. 

The stories from Vietnam can never have the distribution of American narrative, especially stories in the Vietnamese language. Language itself is a tool in the hands of those who want to shape war as it happens. Russia is “liberating” Russian-speaking citizens in Ukraine. 

The sovereign country of Ukraine is a territory when defined by Russia. Those who are with Russia, like the Christian Nationalist propagandist Tucker Carlson, sided so openly with Russia that his shows were a regular part of Russian state news programming. 

The people of Ukraine describe what happened as an invasion. They describe war crimes committed by Russia. They want freedom. They want peace. They have a compelling message, but Russia is bigger. Someday, the war will end and the two narratives will compete in the world of ideas. 

Before the opening chapter is a short prologue. The first sentence of the Prologue: “I was born in Vietnam but made in America. I count myself among those Vietnamese dismayed by America’s deeds but tempted to believe in its words.” Like so many Americans who lived during the war, I “mistake Vietnam with the war named in its honor.” 

When I enlisted in 1972 near the end of the Vietnam War, I signed up for the education that I did not care about when I graduated just the previous spring. But education, career, learning beckoned after several months of loading trucks and looking at the men beside me doing the same thing I was as at triple my age. 

For me the war meant a chance to get away from home, from the small world of Stoneham to a world I could not imagine. I had not been south of Erie, Pennsylvania, west of Cleveland, Ohio, or ever flown on an airplane. I cannot remember any dread in connection with the Vietnam War. It was a route to freedom. 

The war I saw on TV news was no different than the war movies and serial dramas, showing endless American heroism and victory. The world looks so different now. I served in the military four times, each time getting out I was sure I was done. Then three times, I re-enlisted. During those four enlistments, I served in or during four different wars. 

Until 24 February 2022, I thought I served during three losses, one win. Now the one win, the Cold War, needs an asterisk. The peace we thought would follow the end of the Soviet empire cracked immediately in the Balkans and broke in Ukraine. We watched as oligarchy followed empire in Russia. 

Beginning in 2014 and with open fury in 2022, The Empire Struck Back. 

Reading Nothing Ever Dies it was clear from the first pages that more than four wars shaped the psyche of the kid who so happily signed up in 1972. My Dad was a veteran of World War II. For good and ill, those were the best years of his life—it was clear every time he told and retold his stories from the war. 

My uncle Jack served in the Air Force from 1958 to 1978. He had three full tours flying over southeast Asia in a tanker plane then and F4 Phantom II fighter plane. To say I worshipped them shows how shallow my actual religious practice has been in my life. My regard for them in uniform had none of the skepticism I always felt toward God Himself. Which means in addition to the wars I was in or around, I was haunted by wars before I was alive, wars that happened between my last two enlistments (The Gulf War, Grenada, Somalia, The Balkans) and the wars that formed the backbone of the history of America, Europe, and Israel. 

Nguyen says, “…the most important reason for Americans to remember what they call the Vietnam War, the fact that it was one conflict in a long line of horrific wars that came before it and after it. The war’s identity—and, indeed, any war’s identity—cannot be extricated from the identity of war itself. … because war is not just about the shooting but about the people who make the bullets and deliver the bullets and, perhaps most importantly, pay for the bullets, the distracted citizenry complicit in what [Martin Luther] King calls the “brutal solidarity” of white brother and black.”

The Spark in the Machine: A fascinating book about the science behind acupuncture

 

I am more than halfway through reading The Spark in the Machine: How the Science of Acupuncture Explains the Mysteries of Western Medicine. A good friend is in a graduate medical program learning to be an acupuncturist. When she talked about the electrical basis of how acupuncture works, I became interested. 

The book describes how acupuncture works in the spaces between organs and even cells inside the body and uses tiny charges to promote healings. Right away I found myself more interested than I expected.  The beginning of the book talks a lot about fascia, the tissue that wraps around organs in the body and divides different zones of the body.  Fascia is made from cartilage which also makes up bone and ligaments.  

The author says cartilage is a semiconductor. It can carry a charge along its triple helix structure, but like many crystal structures, it can also generate micro charges when bent or compressed.  

When DNA does its many jobs in our bodies, the signals move up and down the double helix.  Charge carries information among genes. So it made sense that cartilage could carry and generate charges.  Also, a crystal that can generate electricity when compressed can be moved when a charge is applied.  I am looking forward to seeing how this effect works in acupuncture.

I have not yet had acupuncture, but the book is opening some fascinating views of the body and how it works.  

At one point the author was talking about how tough fascia is. In my mind I went to my worst injuries from missile explosions and high-speed crashes and thought, 'Fascia kept my insides inside!'

If you are interested in acupuncture and how it works. This book is really good.

Three Score and Ten: Second Life Begins This Year

In the first Canto of the Divine Comedy Dante Aligheri tells us he is 35 years old because he is "In the middle of life's journey."  Life's journey is three score and ten years, seventy years, which I will reach and pass in ten days.

Dante never reached three score and ten. He died in 1321 in exile from his beloved Florence at the age of 56. The belief that 70 years is the lifespan of a human being is a quote from the Book of Psalms, 90:10  

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

Seventy is a major life milestone, so it has me thinking about what I will do with the next decade. 

The previous seven years have been "the best of times and the worst of times" of my life.  Living has been wonderful. My family is healthy, I have been healthy except for a few smashed bones, but the major illusions of life got crushed since 2015.  

It seems crazy in retrospect, but I really, really believed America was getting better.  All of my life from 1964 (The Civil Rights Act) to 2015 (Gay Marriage) more people got more rights and more freedom than ever before.  The Jim Crow South became illegal in 1964. By the 1970s women had many more rights, including the the right to choose their own health care options.  

In 2004 George W. Bush won re-election with a dirty, Karl-Rove-run campaign against gay rights.  By 2015, gay marriage was legal across America.  I not only believed more people would get more rights, but I thought the racist rednecks would die out.  A Black man was elected President in 2008!  

But in 2016, it was clear that the gains of women, Blacks, gay people and other minorities were fragile.  The rednecks I thought were going to fade away were cheering their flaccid hero at hate-filled rallies across America. The hater-in-chief promptly put neo-Nazis in the White House.  Every action by Trump from then to now is to reverse freedom and end democracy. His fake Christian base loves and supports him and will give up all of their freedom for the white "Christian" nationalist nation he wants to rule as king.

Which leads me to my goals for the future.  

• Preserve democracy in the US and abroad--in Ukraine and Taiwan particularly as the front lines of democracy in Europe and Asia.
• To support candidates and protesters here and abroad who want to preserve democracy and fight tyranny.
• To do what I can to keep Israel from falling into illiberal democracy or outright religious tyranny.
• To fight for women's rights and gay rights and minority rights alongside those who are attacked Republicans who want to reverse all rights--except for themselves.
• To enjoy the wonderful life I have that allows me to see friends in America and around the world and support what they are doing.  

Three Score and Ten is just the beginning.

Men and Women Under 23 are 80% of the US Military: Many Do Great Things, Some Screw Up

Me at 23: The Oldest I Ever Felt*

The news is full of the 21-year-old airman Jack Teixeira, the intelligence specialist who is behind the most recent major leak of classified information.  Many of the comments I have heard question how someone so young can get access to so much classified information.  As if his age was the problem.

In all of military history, young people, much younger people than Teixeira, have had enormous life and death responsibilities. As a former sergeant and leader in the Army, I believe the problem in this case was supervisory. I have friends who are leaders in hospitals, museums, and in small and corporate businesses. Anyone hiring people with access to sensitive information check the social media profiles of their prospective and current employees.  Teixeira's leaders failed him; he is still guilty of treason. 

Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress Bomber

In World War II, the Eight Air Force, the bomber command, lost more men than the Marines lost in the entire war in the Pacific. The men in the bombers that flew over German territory had a 50% chance of being alive at the end of 25 missions. That 50/50 chance of being alive is how the Army Air Force set 25 as the number of missions for bomber crews.

Each plane had six enlisted men and four officers. The average age of the enlisted men was 19. The four officers averaged 22 years of age, led by the pilot who was a first lieutenant or captain either side of 25 years old. Whatever age these men began their 25 missions, half of them would be killed, wounded, or captured before they had another birthday.  

Each of the ten men in the crew had life-and-death responsibility for the rest of the crew and for other airmen in the planes in their squadron. Most of them were the around the same age as Teixeira when they flew. Half of them were the same age as Teixeira when they died.  

The military puts great responsibility in the hands of men and women who are 21 years old. They should review security procedures, but the military has to trust young people.

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*By the time I was 21 years old, I was blinded in a missile explosion and recovering my eyesight. The next year I went to armor training and was a tank commander before my 23rd birthday.  

A few months after my 23rd birthday, I was in Colorado packing to go to the East-West border in Germany with 1st Battalion-70th Armor. I read a story in the "Army Times" newspaper that said 80 percent of the Army was less than 23 years old. In 1976 I thought, 'I am older than dirt. Most of the Army is younger than me.'   

Even now as I approach my 70th birthday, that day in September 1976 was the oldest I ever felt.