Saturday, Fogeyisms will take you to visit SAUDER VILLAGE near Archbold in northwest Ohio.  If you've never been there, this destination needs to be on your bucket list.  It is the Williamsburg of our state.  You can do a visit in a day but two would be more desirable.

That's lady friend Sue (above) reading literature on one of several barns on display in the recreated village while enactor Carolyn regales visitors with tales of an 1835 schoolhouse.  The hickory stick in her hand did what those sticks were known for in those days--long gone.

But Carolyn also told us how a thin tree trunk leaning just so, like the stick she is holding, was used to prop up the school's slightly leaning, wood chimney which would inevitably catch fire.  When that happened, the larger boys in the class would run around back and kick the tree trunk down (below) which would allow the burning chimney to topple harmlessly into the schoolyard, thus avoiding burning the school down.

Sauder Village is history personified.  Do yourself a favor and take a peek some day soon.  We're certainly glad we did.

As we wound down our snow birding experience in Florida back in April we published the story:

'CUSTOMER "SERVICE" AT CENTURY LINK

Now there's a quaint concept'

...and invited you to stay tuned.  Here's how that played out:

The folks at this, Mansfield's latest version of a telephone company, refused to fix the problem they created by turning off my DSL internet service rather than putting it on vacation status during our Florida winter vacation as they had agreed to do.

We did everything short of filing a formal complaint with the state's public utility authorities, all to no avail.

We then fired Century Link.  Period.

Not only was our DSL internet service gone due to their incompetence, we terminated their local phone service too.

My Verizon cell phone is taking up that telephone slack quite nicely.

I also tested a gadget Verizon calls a Jetpack (above).  It is about the size of a small cell phone and captures the local phone signal with its own, discrete telephone number.  It shows a fairly consistent two bars of signal strength at my rural home in heavily wooded hills.  Some of you may know this as an internet Hotspot.

It was a little ragged at first with repeated disconnects but now, with more than a month's experience it is performing quite nicely.  Mostly it flashes a green signal indicating 4G service but occasionally drops back to 3G strength.  I do not notice any difference in performance and regard it as quite similar to my DSL performance experience.

While I run it mostly on its own AC power adapter it does have an internal battery and seems like it may run easily between an hour and two hours and recharges in a reasonable period of time.

When I made the change I already was paying for cell phone service from Verizon in addition to local phone service from Century Link (about $50 monthly) and their DSL internet service (about $25 monthly).  Now, I am paying Verizon (about $50 monthly) for their Jetpack, internet service and saving the $25 monthly I was paying for DSL.

Another big advantage to this set-up is the Jetpack is portable service.  It will travel with me to Florida, or anywhere else Verizon has service, and eliminate the cost--and often inconvenience--of securing internet service in my travels.

Yet another advantage is Verizon has a local, Bellville office with superlative customer service AND we have a good connection with a Verizon shop in Vero Beach, recently purchased by folks from Utica, OH.

We announce "Go Bucks" whenever we enter that store and promptly are rewarded with an O-H-I-O cheer.

In the process of this transition we also successfully tested an Alltel gadget that plugs into a USB port on the laptop.  It performed nicely because my home is conveniently located between two of their rural towers.

We stayed with Verizon because we had three consecutive failures with Alltel's customer service while we were in the process of trying to become their customer.

I shuddered to think what might happen once we signed a formal agreement with that outfit.



   

   

BOOK REPORT-- 

Russia; A 1,000 Year Chronicle...by Martin Sixsmith

Sixsmith, long-time BBC Moscow correspondent, shows how Russia's complex identity has been forged over a millenium.  From the adoption of the Cyrillic alphabet in the 10th century through the Mongol conquest of their land in 1240 through the tsars and the Tartars then the revolution of 1917 that ended the monarchy and brought Lenin and the Bolsheviks and Communism to power.  That autocracy continued through Stalin then stagnated through several successors until recent history brought Gorbachev and Yeltsin and a brief experiment toward freedom via glasnost then a skirmish with capitalism which failed miserably to be replaced with the beginnings of another wave of autocracy under Putin.  500 pages that will make you thankful for the location of your birth in the US of A.

STUDEBAKERS--

and more Studebakers

The day our Studebaker story appeared on the blog we attended the 2012 Hemmings Motor News GREAT RACE which rolled through Mansfield on its clockwise circumnavigation of the Great Lakes from Traverse City, Michigan to the finish line in Dearborn.

The route went north across the Mackinaw Bridge then east through Sudbury, Barrie, and Ottawa, Ontario Canada before plunging south across the St. Lawrence River into New York.  The course passed through Watertown and Buffalo, NY and proceeded through Warren, OH into Mansfield on its way to the finish line at the Henry Ford Museum in the Detroit suburb.

Mansfield's stop was reported to be the first-ever lunch stop planned in one of these races, allowing local folks a close-up peek at these marvelous, vintage machines.

One of those 100 cars originally entered was the 1916 Studebaker (above) where it's two man crew of driver and navigator were dismounting for their one-hour food stop.  Entrants engage in a timed, controlled speed, endurance competition over scenic public highways.

Teams navigate through 4 to 7 timed checkpoints each day where their times are compared against a perfectly driven route.  Each second off the perfect time--early or late--count against the teams with the division winners having the lowest score.

While enjoying the sight of #10 Studebaker it was easy to see where the aerodynamically pointed trunks of their passenger cars of the 1950s came from.

When the Studebaker car company was facing challenging times in the early 1960s their designers came up with the Avanti (below).  Because of production problems and stiff competition from GM's Corvette production of the Avanti ended when Studebaker closed in December 1963.

Dealers then had 2,500 Avanti's in stock and only 1,600 had been sold since its introduction.

This particular car was not participating in the race; evidently belonging to one of several folks we saw sporting Studebaker club-type shirts and hats.  It was parked on S. Main St., near Crowe's Shoes.

THE STUDEBAKER AUTOMOBILE--

and it's birth in Ashland County, more or less

Square dancing friend and professional appraiser from Ashland County, Russ Matz, recently pointed out a small stone memorial with a brass marker along US 250 about a mile east of I-71 and explained it was a tribute to the Studebaker automobile manufacturing family.

He went on to regale us with local stories about Studebaker testing an early engine in one of their prototypes which achieved a speed of 100 mph on a hill leading up to the site of the marker.   That engine was said to be from a shop at their nearby homesite.

Local anecdote, he said, also has it the memorial site is the smallest state park in Ohio.

Studebaker was a prominent auto manufacturer through the 1940s and ‘50s but ceased production with their last auto being built March 16, 1966 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.  In fact, their history goes back into the 1800s where they built wagons for the country’s migration westward.

Matz’s enthusiastic description aroused our curiosity, then, the very next day on a trip to Newark, Sue and I noticed a Studebaker automobile on a classic car lot in Vanatta, south of Utica—where we stopped to do the attached photos.

It also turns out Sue has childhood memories of hauling her family’s derelict Studebaker to a local junk yard while I also remember fondly a neighboring family and their always new and shiny Studebakers during my high school days.

With those events and our combined memories, pursuit of this story was launched.

It quickly turned out there appears to be more legend than fact surrounding the Ashland area memorial.

No history of the Studebaker car company that I reviewed even mentioned Ashland as part of their automobile’s development or production past.

There is no Ohio Historical Marker commemorating the site.

There is no mention of this site being an Ohio State Park on the Ohio Department of Natural Resources web page.

We did find John Studebaker moved to Ashland County with his family from near Gettysburg in 1835 and built a home at the site of the memorial.  The family left there in 1850 and three of his sons wound up in northern Indiana where they started a blacksmith shop.

They were highly successful in selling wagons to the army during the Civil War and their business exploits grew into the Studebaker automobile company.

So, they were gone from Ashland County for some 50 years before the “horseless carriage” came into existence which pretty much eliminates the possibility of automobile engines being tested on a hill leading to their Ashland home.

Regarding the property on which the memorial is located we found a 15 by 20 foot piece of property from the Studebaker homestead was deeded to the Studebaker auto company in 1926 for placement of the monument that is there today.

When the Studebaker company failed that tiny parcel of land was then deeded in 1966 to the Ashland County Historical Society which pretty much trumps the locally popular legend of the site being the state’s smallest park.

The question of the memorial site being too close to the highway was resolved--in the site's favor--when Ashland ODOT's public information officer Christine Myers joined us in our research.

We revealed our findings to Russ and he smiled, knowingly.  With a salute to his sense of humor I left that meeting wishing the local legends were true.

___________________________
The car in the above photos is a 1962 Studebaker Hawk, Gran-Turismo.  It had an asking price of $7,900.  The light green car in the left rear of the lead photo is a very un-adorned Studebaker Lark.  Can you find lady friend Sue in any of the photos?  Fogeyisms tips our hat to ODOT's Christine Myers, folks at the Ashland Library research desk and the Ashland County Historical Society for their courteous and professional assistance on this story.

MEMORIAL TO THE STUDEBAKER FAMILY--


Traffic whizzes westward along US 250 in Ashland County rarely noticing this small memorial on the homestead of the Studebaker family; some of whom went on to eventually found the Studebaker Automobile Company.  Fogeyisms found local legend may exceed the facts surrounding this memorial.  Please stop by Saturday as we sort this all out.

MUSINGS--
of a geriatric adolescent, of course

I ordered those four, 15 oz, liquid-filled, freezable mugs (lower left) from the Elder-Beerman Company and they arrived packaged as if they were a priceless commodity. 

The mugs retailed at about $2.50 each.

The corrugated box was about 2,940 cubic inches and the individually wrapped mugs were nestled in technologically advanced packaging that would have made a purchasing agent in somebody’s monarchy proud.

I wondered if the packaging was worth more than the product.

With my usual hypothesis that things today are done with noticeable mediocrity, this was antithetical.

I also was amused when I imagined the suits in Beerman’s PR department in their continuing quest to be considered at the top of the “green” heap of environmental friendliness while the boys in shipping were working just as hard to prove that wasn’t so with this packaging extravagance.

Ain’t life somethin’.