Category: Ken’s Ramblings

Florida season colors changes are subtle

Only after you’ve been living in Florida for a number of years can you detect the subtle color changes when the seasons flop over.

Fall is when you see your first Canadian license tag. Illinois tags show up at the end of fall. The start of winter is marked by the first North Carolina license. When the Georgia tags are parked at the Early Bird Specials, you KNOW that the wooly worms have extra thick coats.

Reverse the process in the spring

Long about June it’s safe to go to the beach without spotting furry Canadians in Speedos. (We’re talking about the men.)

I miss the Midwest colors

We go back home to Missouri about this time every year so we can celebrate my Mother’s Birthday Season. This has the side benefit of letting me ride some hills and for us to see colorful trees.

I envy the view off St. Louis Bro Mark’s front porch

At times like this, I think how nice it would be to look out your window and see the fall colors and feel temperatures that don’t leave you melted in a puddle of sweat.

Of course, the other side of the equation is when Bro Mark walks out on his porch and sees that the sidewalk and driveway are covered with sleet, freezing rain and / or snow.

Pictures from Missouri and Alabama

The top picture was shot near Cape Girardeau on what we call The Uncle Gus Route after a relative who owned the house in the background.

The strange-looking object is a tree trunk rotated sideways. It was late in the day and the slow shutter speed imparted some blur to it. I have to sell it as art, otherwise it would just be another blurry mistake.

The red bushes are at the turnoff to the Coon Dog Graveyard in rural Alabama.

 

I’m going out on a limb to say there won’t be much biking content in this.

When we moved into our house in 1976, one of the things we liked was that it had two mango trees, a key lime tree, two avocado trees, and grapefruit, tangelo and tangerine trees in the yard. A huge coconut palm was in the middle of the side yard and three or four were in front of the house.

Lethal Yellowing killed off the coconut palms

Lethal Yellowing wiped out most of Palm Beach County’s signature coconut palms by 1980. The one in the middle of the picture was replaced by a swimming pool in 1979 after it died.

The key lime tree burned out three blenders

The key lime that is just out of the picture on the right burned out three blenders making key lime daiquiris for photo staff parties. It finally gave up the ghost, but not before its seeds spawned new trees all over Florida. A daughter tree in our front yard was wiped out by the 2004-05 hurricane seasons, but we had a third generation tree producing by that time.

In 2005, the state was cutting down every citrus tree within 1,900 feet of any tree infected with citrus canker, a disease that is harmless to humans, but which causes fruit to be unattractive for sale. Our tree was marked for cutting, but I stalled the process until the hurricanes spread canker so widely that the state abandoned their cutting campaign.

Citrus trees have a life of about 30 years

I read somewhere that citrus trees have an effective life of about 30 years, so all but our third-generation lime have died off. The mango trees are about twice as big around as when we moved in.

Hurricane winds are fatal to big trees

Trees with big canopies of leaves carry a huge wind load in tropical storms. Even if their tap roots are deep enough to keep them from pushing over, huge branches can break off and the trunks can split.

About six or eight years ago, we had our mango trees trimmed by a professional arborist, Kelley’s Tree Service in Lake Worth. The key is to remove all of the small lateral branches while leaving the major tree structure intact. We think that contributed to the survival of our mangoes when others in town blew down. (It’s the tall tree in the middle of the picture.)

It was time for another trim

We kept our fingers crossed through the peak of hurricane season this year because both trees were full of mangoes and we didn’t want to lose any. (A mango for you folks who’ve never had them is sort of like a peach, but larger, with smoother texture inside. They’re great fresh and equally good frozen. Foodie friend Jan Norris has more info.)

The good folks from Kelley’s Tree service spent half a day trimming back the excess canopy and setting us up for another six or eight years.

Note: these folks know what they’re doing. They’re not the hatrackers that show up knocking at your door with a ladder and a chainsaw.

We’re not done dealing with trees

I was on a pizza run when a heavy rainstorm moved through. When I got back, Wife Lila said that she had heard a sound like firecrackers going off and the UPS had kicked in briefly. I was more interested in chowing down than investigating.

Just about the time we were finishing up the pizza, we heard someone saying, “Hello? Hello?”

Power lines down

It was a firefighter following up on a report of power lines down. We walked out in the yard and discovered that a tree in our yard had snapped off in the rain squall and had fallen across the neighbor’s power lines feeding a small rental cottage.

There was no indication that there was anything wrong with the tree, so it must have been a freak gust of wind that caught it and snapped it off.

Once the power company confirmed that the lines were dead, Neighbor Bob and I made short work of the tree with my chain saw.

I hope that’s the last tree I muck with for some time.

 

My kids grew up listening to folks songs. The first thing Grandson Malcolm got was a batch of mix CDs that were labled Songs That Every Steinhoff Child Should Know the Lyrics To.

No collection like that would be complete without half a dozen or more songs by Peter, Paul and Mary. That’s why I was sorry to hear that Mary Travers lost her fight with cancer Sept. 16, 2009.

Sometimes too sweet

As the years went by, I found their work to be a bit saccharine when compared to other singers.

They make Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right sound pretty. It wasn’t until I discovered Bob Dylan’s version that I appreciated the off-hand way Bob kinda shrugs his shoulders as he dismisses a relationship gone sour because “I gave her my heart, but she wanted my soul.”

I photographed them at Ohio University in 1968

They were on the tail end of the Hootenanny Era before the protest music took over. Joan Baez is claimed to have said that a Hootenanny was to folk singing what a jam session was to jazz.

They put on a high-energy show

They had the unniversity audience, singing, clapping and dancing in the aisles. From the moment they walked onto the stage until the last encore was over, they gave the audience its money’s worth.

Despite liking Dylan’s version of Don’t Think Twice better, PP&M is the group I think of when I hear If I Had a Hammer and Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

I just took a ride in a magical time machine

It’s incredible how music has the ability to instantly transport you back in time. I just heard Leaving on a Jet Plane and flashed back to the 21-year-old photographer cruising the hills of Southeastern Ohio in an old green Plymouth Satellite looking for the next day’s wild art. That song was playing on the car’s AM radio when I shot Peace in the Valley, a scenic that was one of the most popular photographs The Athens Messenger ever ran.

What REALLY impressed me about Peter, Paul and Mary

At this stage of my career, I hadn’t covered that many big acts, so it’s very possible I was more awed than I would be 10 or 15 years later.

Something that really struck me, though, was how they treated their fans after they walked off the stage. They stayed signing autographs and talking with students until the only ones left were the student and local press.

Mary looked like a coed

Mary, who was born in 1936, was in her early 30s when I shot these pictures, but she looks more like a coed in the sweater she donned after her performance to mingle with the crowd.

I didn’t realize it until I read her obit that she was a backup singer for Pete Seeger when he did Talking Union.

The group broke up in 1970, about the time Peter Yarrow spent three months in jail for taking “improper liberties” with a 14-year-old groupie. (President Carter later granted him clemency.)

They got back together in 1978, toured extensively and were inducted into the Vocal Hall of Fame in 1999.

Clarence Page, future celebrity

I didn’t know it at the time, but I captured two celebrities in this picture. Peter Yarrow is being interviewed by Ohio University Post reporter Clarence Page.

Page went to work for The Chicago Tribune in 1969. In 1989 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. It seems like you can’t turn on a political talk show these days without seeing a much rounder-faced Clarence Page on the screen.

 

When I made my northbound turnaround at the Palm Beach Inlet tonight, the park was closed, but I noticed this sign. I have to admit that I didn’t read it closely until I saw the last line: REWARD…$1,000.

That brought to mind a story, like so many things do. Back in the early 70s, I did a piece on a Palm Beach County motorcycle cop who had the reputation of writing more speeding tickets than any other cop in the county.

Palm Beach County’s most prolific ticket writer

He was a character and a half. He’s dead now, but I’ll still just call him John to protect the not-so-innocent.

One day, while a rookie policeman in the Palm Beach Police Department, John spotted Fifi the Poodle be-bopping down the middle of the road. (I don’t know if Fifi the Poodle was the real name, that’s just what John called him/her.)

John didn’t want Fifi to get run over or to cause an accident, so he took Fifi into custody and incarcerated him/her in the back of his squad car while he figured out what to do with the offender.

BOLO Fifi

About that time, a BOLO (Be On Lookout) broadcast for Fifi came over the car radio. John advised that he had the subject in custody and would release him/her to the owner.

The owner was so happy to get Fifi back that he made John take a $100 reward, back in the days when a hundred bucks was Big Money.

After John went back to the station and told the other officers what had happened, Fifi would “disappear” every couple of weeks only to be recovered minutes after the BOLO was dispatched. The owner, of course, couldn’t figure out how that dog managed to escape, but he was only too happy to reward the officers of what he had to say was the most conscientious police department in the country. Not every department would take a missing dog report so seriously.

They don’t make cops like John anymore. That’s why George the Cat is still at large.