The Pocomoke Public Eye

Sunday, September 15, 2024

Time Machine: 100 years ago this week in Pocomoke's newspaper; 1834, 1942, 1957, 1923, 2003, 1990.

September, 1834

Boston Post

October, 1942

Afro American (Baltimore)

July, 1957

Salisbury Times

*October 1923

Baltimore Sun

(Pocomoke Public Eye- We are now more than 50 years beyond that imagined future time. Anyone want to venture speculation on life 50 years from now?)

So, the Baltimore Sun predicted that the petroleum supply would be exhausted by 1973 but most families will invest in a good car? I'm sure the good cars will be propelled by the hot air that is so typical of the twaddle emanating from the Sun editorial department.

Your friend,
Slim

*February, 2003

Salisbury Daily Times

*December, 1990

Baltimore Sun

tkforppe@yahoo.com

Saturday, September 14, 2024

Recollections from generations past (Elmer A. Brittingham -10)

Interview Transcript

Interviewer: Did you ride the train much? Other than riding to Ocean City?

Elmer: Oh, not much. Oh, yes, days we did, because if we went anywhere, that

was the only way to go. Sometimes we would go to Washington to baseball

games. But the times we went to Philadelphia, we had boys that played on an

athletic team from this area, we went by automobile. I remember going once

to Washington, going to the Smithsonian. We went by train. We went, I don’t

know, we’d go up to Wilmington. And then you don’t have to go around.

Interviewer: Do you remember Red Hills? Near Snow Hill?

Elmer: Oh, yeah. That was an old place to summer. Like a resort. Not a resort,

but like a beach with a hill high above it, wooded. And the beach was fairly

nice. It was, best I can remember, south of Public Landing. We never went

there too much, but I knew it was there.

Interviewer: What kind of legends and superstitions did they have? Like about

the woods? And the river?

Elmer: I’m not much on superstitions. I can’t help you much on that.

Interviewer: Well, did you hear about them?

Elmer: Yeah, perhaps, but not being of a superstitious nature, I probably don’t

remember too many. I really can’t help you much with that one.

Interviewer: I’ve heard that the river, the Pocomoke River, gets one person a

year. And the next year it’ll take 2.

Elmer: Yeah, it gets many if they can’t swim well, I’ll tell you that.

Interviewer: The hangings. Did you ever go to one?

Elmer: I never went to one. They did have public hangings. The one case, this

Italian person who came as a laborer on a farm. The family took him in, and I

don’t remember who he killed, somebody in the family, two of them, I think,

but they hung him. And my older brother, you know, he didn’t see it, but he

heard about it. And this house we lived in…I was 7 years old..on 3rd Street.

And so he had me stand on a chair and he took the cord off the curtain and

wrapped it around my neck, tied it to the rod, and then pulled the chair out

from under me. I suppose I got red in the face. I don’t remember it, but I

heard them talk about it a lot of times.

Interviewer: Before they hung somebody, I heard they would drive him

through town and then take him out somewhere…

Elmer: I don’t remember that. But this time, I didn’t see it, but they took him

from the jail, after he was tried, to the scene of the murder. It was a farm with

woods right along side, that’s all. It was like some people went for the

excitement, but the really good people didn’t go for those things.

Interviewer: (audio not clear)…some of your high class people wouldn’t be

seen there?

Elmer: That’s right. Of course, all the drunks and the bums went. Usually.

Interviewer: What kind of music did you have then?

Elmer: Well, we came into the jazz age, so to speak. They had a glee club in

the school. I never played in it, but my sister did. I got a banjo mandolin and

played that like a mandolin. Then I had a (audio not clear) and I took a few

lessons. And taught my sister to play. And she caught on quite well and

continued to play. But, I never stayed with it long enough. I liked it alright, but

the Scotsman I took lessons from, he charged me for every lesson, I

should’ve been prompted by it, but I guess I didn’t have the knack for it.

Interviewer: Were there any big storms that happened around Pocomoke?

Elmer: Not really. Yeah, we had places at time where the hurricanes struck.

The place down here by Accomac. It was many years ago. I did see it,

afterwards. It was about half a mile and 100 yards wide. Cleaned out like

every tree, everything.

Interviewer: Like a tornado?

Elmer: Yeah, a tornado. I said hurricane, but it was a tornado. Yeah, but

nothing really big. There were no houses there, but everybody could see

what it had done.

Interviewer: What about the Farmers’ Day. Or Foresters’ Day? Do you

remember that?

Elmer: Oh, at Public Landing? They had a day every summer for the farmers. I

don’t know. We didn’t go to that after we moved to town much. But they did

have it and they still have it. Most of the time, now, I think different families

gather up around at Milbourne Landing for Farmers’ Day…(audio not clear)

Now they got it down to families.

Interviewer: Do you remember Klej Grange?

Elmer: Yeah.

Interviewer: Did you ever go out there?

Elmer: Yeah, but I can’t tell you too much about, I just know that they made

plans to expand it, to build it up on a higher level and hope one time have a

canal go through onto the bay, but it didn’t materialize. But I’m not up on it.

Interviewer: You didn’t know anybody from there?

Elmer: Yeah, there was a woman who worked in the Salisbury State library

who was involved for a while, but I can’t tell you her name or anything.

The details have sort of left be because (audio not clear). But I did know

about it. It's where Mark Pilchard lives now, the man who is in the legislature.

--End--

(This series continues next Saturday with recollections from Mrs. Flossie Douglas who began teaching in Worcester County in 1926.)

Friday, September 13, 2024

Far Out!

(futurism.com)

It's incredible that it still has fuel left.

NASA engineers have pulled off an incredible feat: switching the agency's ancient Voyager 1 probe — the farthest human-made object in existence — to a different set of thrusters.

The feat, heavily complicated by the record 15.3 billion miles of outer space separating the probe from ground control, took weeks of careful planning.

Some of the 46-year-old spacecraft's thrusters started getting gunked up with silicon dioxide, the apparent result of a rubber diaphragm breaking down inside its fuel tank. The material reduced the thrusters' efficiency, forcing NASA to come up with a workaround.

Their solution: reactivate a different set of thrusters to keep it going.

The feat, successfully completed in late August, gives Voyager 1 yet another lease on life. The probe has been on life support for quite some time now — but it's still not giving up.

Voyager 1 has three sets of thrusters, which were designed to help it perform several planetary flybys. However, now that it's on a straight path away from the solar system, "its thruster needs are simpler, and either thruster branch can be used to point the spacecraft at Earth," according to NASA.

It's not the first time engineers have had to switch to a different set of thrusters. Both in 2002 and 2018, teams swapped the probe to a different branch due to similar material buildup.

The team's latest move was to swap to an attitude propulsion thruster branch, which had already been partially clogged, but to a lesser degree.

Complicating matters are power supply and temperature issues. Having "turned off all non-essential onboard systems, including some heaters" to conserve power, both Voyager 1 and its twin Voyager 2 have grown colder.

Consequently, engineers had to warm up the thrusters before bringing them back online to avoid any damage. However, turning on the heater could put too much stress on the spacecraft's dwindling power supplies.

Fortunately, the team confirmed on August 27 that their final plan — turning off one of the main heaters to free up power for the thruster heaters — had worked, allowing Voyager 1 to keep edging into interstellar space.

"All the decisions we will have to make going forward are going to require a lot more analysis and caution than they once did," said Voyager's project manager Suzanne Dodd in a statement.

Nobody knows how long Voyager 1 will hold on. The spacecraft has more than exceeded expectations, having fulfilled its original mission to explore Jupiter, Saturn, and Saturn's largest moon, Titan, decades ago.

But NASA remains optimistic.

"My motto for a long time was 50 years or bust," astronomer Stamatios Krimigis, who has worked on the Voyager 1 mission since the 1970s, told NPR in March, "but we're sort of approaching that."