A Writer’s Tool Bag Before the Internet…

Because of the miracle of the World Wide Web a writer now has at his or her fingertips pretty much the accumulated knowledge, wisdom, lore, and artistic production of human kind as long as he/she can figure out the right search term in Google.  This has made writing a regular blog like mine immeasurably easier.  I can do at least a cursory research of any topic and generally put together an entry that can fool most people into believing that I know what I am talking about in a few hours.

It was not always so.  Not so many years ago any article of average blog post length was the equivalent of a semi-major college paper and required sometimes days of research both at home and in libraries and the production of copious notes.  For a lone wolf writer without a research department at his or her beck and call and without copy editors the kind of daily production I now attempt would be impossible.

Let’s revisit those quaint times.  We will begin with resources kept at hand, preferably within arm’s reach of the writer’s trusty manual typewriter—that’s a whole other story.  Here are some of the basics upon which I relied.

·         Dictionary.  I used my mother’s old blue-bound Webster’s Complete Collegiate Dictionary for years until it literally fell apart.  I replaced it with a fat red paper back with tiny print—The Miriam-Webster Dictionary.  Both invaluable tools, but you often need to actually know how to spell something to successfully look it up—a draw back for a writer who never met a spelling test he couldn’t flunk.  Roget’s Thesaurus was a must to avoid using the same word in a sentence two or three times.

 

·         Stylebook.   A must for any writer, I dabbled in the AP  stylebook, the standard of newspaper journalists, but generally followed an old friend from college—The Elements of Style by William Skunk and E. B. White, the now dated Bible  of more formal writing.  Despite the scorn of modernists it has firmly anchored me to such requirements as the Oxford comma and two spaces after a period ending a sentence.  However for narrative writing, both factual and fiction and of course poetry, I untethered my ship from any style anchor in the service effect.

·         Almanac.  These amazing versatile single volumes were a cornucopia of statistical, geographic, historical, biographical, and odd-ball assorted facts.  There were options available, but I preferred The World Almanac and Book of Facts which I purchased annually even when the $5.00 or so cover price for the paperback at the drug store seemed like an enormous sacrifice.  It also contained several nice, shiny pages of color plates including The Flags of the World and the United States, and a basic Atlas.  Each new edition also included noted obituaries and longer articles selected by the mysterious whim of the editors.

·         Encyclopedia.  A must-have, but a forbidding expense unless you were willing to settle on a twenty to thirty year outdated version offered at a garage sale for about a penny a pound.  Door to Door salesmen were still pitching the World Book, Book of Knowledge, and even the gold standard Encyclopedia Britannica on monthly payments that would stretch into the next millennia.  I had to settle on the basic but serviceable Funk and Wagnall’s Encyclopedia which I bought one volume a week as a premium offer at Dominic’s Supermarket in Chicago.  I also swallowed hard and subscribed to its Annuals which I kept getting for ten years or so to more or less keep the set current.  Anything I need greater detail on required a library visit to the temple of the Britannica.

·         Atlas.  I had an enormous National Geographic World Atlas with that publication’s elegant and detailed maps and which included maps of the solar system and universe.  A treat for the eyes, but unwieldy.  I also had a more manageable Funk and Wagnall’s atlas from Dominic’s and for a time a relief globe of the world I had in high school.  The trouble with atlases and globes is, alas, that in the turbulent modern world geographic boundaries, place names, countries, and empires change continually.

·         Bible.  Even if you are not writing specifically about religion, the Good Book was an essential reference and a key to much history, philosophy, and literary references.  There were even then numerous available translations, but then—and even now—I stubbornly used the King James Version of the Bible with the Words of Our Lord in Red Letters.  This is a choice mocked by biblical scholars who regard it an unreliable second or third hand translation from the original Hebrew and Aramaic to Greek and Latin.  But it is the edition I grew up on and as a poet I admire its majestic passages and cadences.  So many modern translations grate on the ears.

 

·         American History.  I needed a fairly comprehensive single volume U.S. history source.  Perhaps I would have been better served with James and Mary Beard’s New Basic History of the United States, but I chose The Oxford History of the American People by Samuel Eliot Morison published in 1965.  Morison was a Boston Unitarian most noted as a Naval historian, but his book took into good account religious, cultural, artistic, and technical aspects of American history as well as the usual parade of Great Men, politics, and wars.  Later Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States provided a much needed bottom up view of history and took into account the real lives of ordinary people.

·   Telephone directories.  Modern life was impossible without them and they were magically delivered to your door annually.  In Chicago there were two enormous tomes—the White Pages and the H.H. Donnelly Yellow Pages.

·         Miscellaneous.  The Book of Lists By David Wallechinsky, Irving Wallace, and Amy Wallace was both a fun discovery and turned out to be a goldmine of trivia and obscurity—right up my alley.

·         Wish I had.  The reference I did not have and most wish I did was Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.  Oh, what countless hours of searching that might have saved me.

A writer also had to be versed in current affairs and periodicals were they key.

·         Newspapers.  I was always at newspaper junkie.  Back in the day I regularly got both Field newspapers—the Chicago Sun-Times in the morning and the Daily News, home of Mike Royko and famous for its worldwide pool of correspondents.  Alas, the News folded, Royko moved to the Sun-Times which also had Roger Ebert, Bill Mauldin, and a descent selection of op-ed columnists.  But when we moved to Crystal Lake more than thirty years ago I switched to the Chicago Tribune which offered reliable home delivery, despite its odious editorial policy.  Since then both papers have suffered deep cuts to reporters and editorial staffs, but the Sun-Times has been reduced to a mostly pitiful shell.  For local coverage out here in the boonies, our local daily, now known as the Northwest Herald provided essential community coverage despite various deficiencies.  But few suburban areas in this country still have the luxury of a daily paper.

I had been reading Time  regularly since at least 1963 when it crowned Richard J. Daley as the  Mayor of the City that Works.

 

·         Magazines.  A newsweekly was a must.  I had been subscribing to Time since high school.  Henry Luce was a reactionary but you could be well informed if you kept in mind built in bias.  Time was still considered the most comprehensive alternative to the more liberal Newsweek or even more conservative U.S. News and World Report. I read Time weekly for so many years that my regular readers might notice the influence of some of its somewhat peculiar style in my own writing.  This is not a point of pride.  For more left leaning news and analysis I sporadically subscribed to The Progressive, The Nation, and In These Times often depending on deals offered by Publisher’s Clearing House so that my wife could enter the sweepstakes with a clear conscience.  In the same way I sometimes received childhood treasure The National Geographic and handsome hard-bound American Heritage.

If none of these resources proved fruitful it was off to the Library.  In Chicago sometimes the old branch library at Fullerton and Sheffield by the L would suffice before it was torn down to make room for DePaul tennis courts.  But often if meant a trip the glorious and inspiring old Main Library at Michigan and Madison where working in the elegant main reading room was a pleasure.  Later, however, it meant a trip to the dismal and depressing warehouse where the stacks were moved and kept for years before the Harold Washington Library finally opened.  That sucked the joy out of the trip. 

The magnificent old Chicago Main Public Library, a treat to visit for research, has long been stripped of its stacks and is now the Cultural Center.  Another loss was the huge news stand that stretched down Madison from the corner of Michigan to the side entrance of the building.  There you could find a newspaper from every important city in the world  with in a day or so of publication as well as a comprehensive selection of U.S. periodicals.

In Crystal Lake it most often meant a 45 minute walk each way to the library.  Nice folks and a very well informed Reference Desk.  It meant combing the endless drawers of the card catalog with a slip of paper and a stub of a pencil in hand to note my discoveries then searching the shelves for them.  Of course scanning the shelves often tuned up unexpected discoveries and I often went home with unintended books.  Often older or more obscure books were unavailable locally, but I could often get them after a few days wait through the state-wide inter library loan system.  I remember finally getting a copy of the first volume of Henry Adams’s The History of the United States in the Jefferson and Madison Administrations in just such a way.

Of course sometimes even greater depth was required.  But access to university and specialized libraries was often difficult or impossible without academic credentials, verifiable employment with a recognized publication, or sponsorship by an established scholar.  All mostly insurmountable hurdles for an independent scribe without a degree or pedigree.  Even if permission could be obtained it usually involved travel to the institution.  That was tough when I sometimes barely had bus fare.

Locating an out of print books without haunting used bookstores was a real challenged particularly in specialized areas like labor history.  The book was likely out there someplace, but damned if you could find it.  After the Industrial Workers of the World ran out of copies it took me 15 years to run down a copy of the book I co-authored—The IWW—Its First 70 Years: 1905-1975.  Copies were out there languishing on the shelves of obscure radical book shops and used bookstores from San Francisco to Timbuktu but I had no way of knowing where. 

Of course, all of that was then, the very quaint then dimly remembered by a grizzled few.  Tomorrow thanks to the blessing of the gods, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and Bill Gates I will compose and post a blog entry probably without getting off my ass in a tenth the time the same piece would have required if I had researched and written in back in the Stone Age.  So it goes. 

Once Upon a Time Before the Internet…

Note: Thanks to the stellar service of ATT, cursed be their corporate person hood, internet service at the World Wide Headquarters of Heretic, Rebel, a Thing to Flout has been down a week.  Allegedly a repair technician will arrive to solve the problem late Tuesday afternoon.  But as I type this, I am still bereft of modern communications and research capacity.

Because of the miracle of the World Wide Web a writer now has at his or her fingertips pretty much the accumulated knowledge, wisdom, lore, and artistic production of human kind as long as he/she can figure out the right search term in Google.  This has made writing a regular blog immeasurably easier.  I can do at least a cursory research of any topic and generally put together an entry that can fool most people into believing that I know what I am talking about in a few hours.

It was not always so.  Not so many years ago any article of average blog post length was the equivalent of a semi-major college paper and require some times days of research in both at home and in libraries and the production of copious notes.  For a lone wolf writer without a research department at his or her beck and call and without copy editors the kind of daily production I now attempt would be impossible.

Let’s revisit those quaint times.  We will begin with resources kept at hand, preferably within arm’s reach of the writer’s trusty manual typewriter—that’s a whole other story.  Here are some of the basics upon which I relied.

·       Dictionary.  I used my mother’s old blue-bound Webster’s Complete Collegiate Dictionary for years until it literally fell apart.  I replaced it with a fat red paper back with tiny print—The Miriam-Webster Dictionary.  Both invaluable tools, but you often need to actually know how to spell something to successfully look it up—a draw back for a writer who never met a spelling test he couldn’t flunk.  Roget’s Thesaurus was a must to avoid using the same word in a sentence two or three times.

·       Style book.   A must for any writer, I dabbled in the AP  stylebook, the standard of newspaper journalists, but generally followed an old friend from college—The Elements of Style by William Skunk and E. B. White, the now dated Bible  of more formal writing.  However for narrative writing, both factual and fiction and of course poetry, I untethered by ship from any style anchor in the service effect.  Despite the scorn of modernists it has firmly anchored me to such requirements as the Oxford comma and two spaces after a period ending a sentence. 

·       Almanac.  These amazing versatile single volumes were a cornucopia of statistical, geographic, historical, biographical, and odd-ball assorted facts.  There were options available, but I preferred The World Almanac and Book of Facts which I purchased annually even when the $5.00 or so cover price for the paperback at the drug store seemed like an enormous sacrifice.  It also contained several nice, shiny pages of color plates including The Flags of the World and the United States, and a basic Atlas.  Each new edition also include noted obituaries and longer articles selected by the mysterious whim of the editors

·       Encyclopedia.  A must-have, but a forbidding expense unless you were willing to settle on a twenty to thirty year outdated version on sale at a garage sale for about a penny a pound.  Door to Door salesmen were still pitching the World Book, Book of Knowledge, and even the gold standard Encyclopedia Britannica on monthly payments that would stretch into the next millennia.  I settle on the basic but serviceable Funk and Wagnall’s Encyclopedia which I bought one volume a week as a premium offer at Dominic’s Supermarket in Chicago.  I also swallowed hard and subscribed to its Annuals which I kept getting for ten years or so to more or less keep the set current.  Anything I need greater detail on required a library visit to the temple of the Britannica.

·       Atlas.  I had an enormous National Geographic World Atlas with that publication’s elegant and detailed maps and which included maps of the solar system and universe.  A treat for the eyes, but unwieldy.  I also had a more manageable Funk and Wagnall’s atlas from Dominic’s and for a time a relief globe of the world I had in high school.  The trouble with atlases and globes is, alas, that in the turbulent modern world geographic boundaries, place names, countries, and empires change continually.

·       Bible.  Even if you are not writing specifically about religion, the Good Book was an essential reference and a key to much history, philosophy, and literary references.  There were even then numerous available translations, but then—and even now—I stubbornly used the King James Version of the Bible with the Words of Our Lord in Red Letters.  This is a choice mocked by biblical scholars who regard it an unreliable second or third hand translation from the original Hebrew and Aramaic to Greek and Latin.  But it is the edition I grew up on and as a poet I genially admire its majestic passages and cadences.  So many modern translations grate on the ears.

·       American History.  I needed a fairly comprehensive single volume U.S. history source.  Perhaps I would have been better served with James and Mary Beard’s New Basic History of the United States, but I chose The Oxford History of the American People by Samuel Eliot Morison published in 1965.  Morison was a Boston Unitarian most noted as a Naval historian, but his book took into good account religious, cultural, artistic, and technical aspects of American history as well as the usual parade of Great Men, politics, and Wars.  Later Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States provided a much needed bottom up view of history and took into account the real lives of ordinary people.

·       Telephone directories.  Modern life was impossible without them and they were magically delivered to your door annually.  In Chicago there were two enormous tomes—the White Pages and the H.H. Donnelly Yellow Pages.

·       Miscellaneous.  The Book of Lists By David Wallechinsky, Irving Wallace, and Amy Wallace was both a fun discovery and turned out to be a goldmine of trivia and obscurity—right up my alley.

·       Wish I had.  The reference I did not have and most wish I did was Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.  Oh, what countless hours of searching that might have saved me.

A writer also had to be versed in current affairs and periodicals were they key.

·       Newspapers.  I was always at newspaper junkie.  Back in the day I regularly got both Field newspapers—the Chicago Sun-Times in the morning and the Daily News, home of Mike Royko and famous for its worldwide pool of correspondents.  Alas, the News folded, Royko moved to the Sun-Times which also had Roger Ebert, Bill Mauldin, and a descent selection of op-ed columnists.  But when we moved to Crystal Lake more than thirty years ago I switched to the Chicago Tribune which offered reliable home delivery, despite its odious editorial policy.  Since then both papers have suffered deep cuts to reporters and editorial staffs, but the Sun-Times has been reduced to a mostly pitiful shell.  For local coverage out here in the boonies, our local daily, now known as the Northwest Herald provided essential community coverage despite various deficiencies.  But few sub-urban areas in this country still have the luxury of a daily paper.

I had been reading Time  regularly since at least 1963 when it crowned Richard J. Daley as the  Mayor of the City that Works.

·       Magazines.  A newsweekly was a must.  I had been subscribing to Time since high school.  Henry Luce was a reactionary you could be well informed if you kept in mind built in bias.  Time was still considered the most comprehensive alternative to the more liberal Newsweek or even more conservative U.S. News and World Report. I read Time weekly for so many years that my regular readers might notice the influence of some of its somewhat peculiar style in my own writing.  This is not a point of pride.  For more left leaning news and analysis I sporadically subscribed to The Progressive, The Nation, and In These Times often depending on deals offered by Publisher’s Clearing House so that my wife could enter the sweepstakes with a clear conscience.  In the same way I sometimes received childhood treasure The National Geographic and handsome hard-bound American Heritage.

If none of these resources proved fruitful it was off to the Library.  In Chicago sometimes the old branch library at Fullerton and Sheffield by the L would suffice before it was torn down to make room for DePaul tennis courts.  But often if meant a trip the glorious and inspiring old Main Library at Michigan and Madison where working in the elegant main reading room was a pleasure.  Later, however, it meant a trip to the dismal and depressing warehouse where the stacks were moved and kept for years before the Harold Washington Library finally opened.  That sucked the joy out of the trip. 

The magnificent old Chicago Main Public Library, a treat to visit for research, has long been stripped of its stacks and is now the Cultural Center.  Another loss was the huge news stand that stretched down Madison from the corner of Michigan to the side entrance of the building.  There you could find a newspaper from every important city in the world  with in a day or so of publication as well as a comprehensive selection of U.S. periodicals.

In Crystal Lake it most often meant a 45 minute walk each way to the library.  Nice folks and a very well informed Reference Desk.  It meant combing the endless drawers of the card catalog with a slip of paper and a stub of a pencil in hand to note my discoveries then searching the shelves for them.  Of course scanning the shelves often tuned up unexpected discoveries and I often went home with unintended books.  Often older or more obscure books were unavailable locally, but I could often get them after a few days wait through the state-wide inter library loan system.  I remember finally getting a copy of the first volume of Henry Adams’s The History of the United States in the Jefferson and Madison Administrations in just such a way.

Of course sometimes even greater depth was required.  But access to university and specialized libraries was often difficult or impossible without academic credentials, verifiable employment with a recognized publication, or sponsorship by an established scholar.  All mostly insurmountable hurdles for an independent scribe without a degree or pedigree.  Even if permission could be obtained it usually involved travel to the institution.  That was tough when I sometimes barely had bus fare.

Locating an out of print book without haunting used bookstores was a real challenged particularly in specialized areas like labor history.  The book was likely out there someplace, but damned if you could find it.  After the Industrial Workers of the World ran out of copies it took me 15 years to run down a copy of the book I co-authored—The IWW—Its First 70 Years: 1905-1975.  Copies were out there languishing on the shelves of obscure radical book shops and used bookstores from San Francisco to Timbuktu but damned if I could find them.

Of course, all of that was then, the very quaint then dimly remembered by a grizzled few.  Tomorrow thanks to the blessing of the gods Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Bill Gates and the mercy of ATT I will compose and post a blog entry probably without getting off my ass in a tenth the time the same piece would have required if I had researched and written in back in the Stone Age.  So it goes.

Blowing Up Blubber

Screen shot of whale removal explosion from 1970.

Early in November 1970, a 45-foot long, 8 ton sperm whale beached itself near Florence on the central Oregon Coast.  This turned out to be fatal for the unfortunate whale which, which, based on its size—about half the length of a full grown bull, was likely an adolescent female.

Sperm whales were still being actively hunted by several countries, most notably the Japanese, Soviets, and Norwegians though their numbers had been reduced to the point where the species was threatened.  Although the United States was largely out of the business, its fleets of whalers had roamed the globe from New England ports from the late 18th Century to the early mid-20th Century and had taken the biggest toll on the population of the world’s largest toothed predator.  The waxy substance known as spermaceti which is encased in a large compartment comprising most of the animal’s large, boxy head produced oils which were the most commonly used lamp fuels in North America and Northern Europe up until the development of kerosene.  It was also a fine lubricant for industrial machinery.  Bi-products including parts of the skeleton provided the tough but flexible whale bone required in ladies’ corsets and ambergris, a waste product from the digestive system, is still used as a fixative in perfumes.

The great American whale fleets—think Moby Dick, Captain Ahab, and the Pequod—generated great fortunes.  But when progress—and petroleum—replaced prime market for whale oil and ladies’ undergarments became all about the latex and wire, there was no profit left and American turned to other occupations.  The Japanese pioneered in new uses for whale carcasses, including as pet food, and developed modern factory ships to process the kill and were thus still in the business.

Not to be confused with Moby Dick...

Various whale species, including the great krill sifting Humpbacks and Blues as well as more diminutive Minkes were a common sight in the waters off of the Pacific Northwest.  But sperm whales were an uncommon sight.  So uncommon that despite the beached animal’s distinctive blunt block head, it was commonly reported that the animal on the sands at Florence was a Gray Whale.

Beaching of whale species was not unknown, although it was then far less common than it is today when various factors—infections and destruction of hearing by underwater explosives and Navy sonar technology—is suspected.  But this sperm whale carcass, which quickly began to emit a tangy aroma, was much bigger than anyone called upon had ever had to deal with.  The authority in charge, due to a quirk in the Oregon law at the time which classified the state’s beaches as public highways, was the Oregon Highway Division evidently because it had the heavy equipment and manpower to deal with damage and beach erosion after heavy storms.  Unfortunately it did not have expertise in this kind of mortuary disposal.

Evidently someone at the Highway Division consulted someone at the Navy.  The concern was that if the carcass was buried on the beach under the sands, it could become exposed again by surf erosion and that it was too big to haul away without being cut into pieces.  Nobody seemed to have the stomach to do that.  So the Navy, which had a hammer and saw all problems as nails, cheerfully suggested blowing the damn thing up and letting scavenging birds take care of the pieces.  Unfortunately, they provided no suggestions on just how to do it.

That job fell to career civil engineer George Thornton, who got the job because the chief district engineer was conveniently away on a hunting trip.  Although Thornton may have been a whizz at designing ramps, widening lanes, and overseeing heavy equipment, he had little experience with explosives—and none at all with explosives and tons of soft tissue.  Before carrying out his job he blithely told Portland TV newsman Paul Linnman that he wasn't exactly sure how much dynamite would be needed.

Finally he figured that 20 cases of dynamite—half a ton—of explosives would do the trick and blow the whale away like a boulder that had rolled onto a highway in an earthquake.  Sand was scooped out under the body and the dynamite shoved underneath.

By chance among the growing crowd gathering to watch the unusual operations was Walter Umenhofer, a veteran with experience in blowing things up with the Corps of Engineers.  He just happened to be in the area scouting the location for a new manufacturing facility for his employer.  Umenhofer was aghast by what he was seeing.  He hastily advised Thornton that he was using far too much dynamite—ten strategically placed sticks would do the job.  Thornton was not open to unsolicited advice.  He proceeded as planned.

KATU-TV cameraman, covering the operation with Linnman, was set up to capture the blast.

And it was one hell of a blast.  The explosion threw huge chunks of whale flesh over 800 feet away, raining down on buildings, businesses, autos, and an actual State highway that separated the beach from the town.  One huge chunk fell on Umenhofer’s almost new Oldsmobile 98 which he had recently bought at a dealer’s Whale of a Sale.  Despite being built like a Sherman tank, the shiny new Olds was crushed.

Yet only part of the whale was actually removed—the part directly over the explosives, which also dug a deep hole in the sand underneath it.  Most of the carcass remained on the beach.  Worse, the scavenger birds counted on to devour the leftovers were frightened away by the blast and did not quickly return.

Linnman filed a pun-filled report with his Portland station, “land-lubber newsmen became land-blubber newsmen ... for the blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds.”  The report was aired locally that night and was a one-day local sensation, soon faded from memory.

Highway Division workers had to come in and bury the bulky remains anyway, pretty much where they laid—and of course had to assist the local populace clean up the shreds and chunks of rotting flesh on their property.

....or Willie the Singing Whale.

Thornton maintained that the operation had been “largely successful in meeting its objectives."  He was promoted within a few months and served out a distinguished career until retiring from the Highway Division’s successor, the Oregon Department of Transportation.  He would be plagued by questions about the operation the rest of his career and steadfastly stood by his assessment of his own success.

Someone at the Division, however, must have learned something.  A few years later in 1979 and not far away a whole pod of 40 sperm whales beached themselves and the Department burned and buried the remains in the sand.

Within a few years the exploding whale had become something of an urban legend of suspect reliability.  Then almost 20 years later on of May 20, 1990 humor columnist Dave Barry in his popular nationally syndicated Miami Herald column claimed to be in possession of footage of an explosion.  Without mentioning that it had occurred decades earlier he wrote, “Here at the [Exploding Animal Research] Institute we watch it often, especially at parties.”  An excerpt from the longer article ran in many newspapers as The Far Side Comes to Life in Oregon—a reference to the popular comic panel by Gary Larson.

The Highway Department was deluged with calls, many of which were from outraged animal lovers who were convinced the dastards had blown up a still living whale.  And although they gradually tapered off, they never disappeared.

However a story this good has legs.  The original TV story, or clips from it, became a sensation on the Internet circulated by a web site called explodingwhale.com which features all sorts of coverage of exploding whales—usually blown up by expanding gasses in their rotting corpses.  YouTube spread it further.  At one point it was reported to be the most watched local TV news story in history and had racked up over 350 million hits world-wide.

And every time an anniversary rolls around or some asshole with a cheeky blog like Heretic, Rebel, a Thing to Flout files a story, the folks at Oregon DOT are deluged anew with calls and the long retired Thornton has to fend off new generations of reporters.