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Badlands National Park, South Dakota, August 23, 2007

This image is in the following video, which can also be accessed here.

(This is the most recent of over 12,000 posts on my civil war blog, Daily Observations from The Civil War.)

1st Connecticut Battery, near Fredericksburg, Va., May 2, 1863.

Photograph by Andrew J. Russell.

Library of Congress image.

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Image before cropping and digital enhancement (click on images for larger version)

Upper Mesa Falls, Henrys Fork of the Snake River, Idaho – September 16, 2007.

This image is in the following video, which can also be accessed here.

Tower of Babel, Arches National Park, September 22, 2011

This image is in the following video, which can also be accessed here.

Hope of Finding Boy Alive Faint

(By Associated Press)
Eureka, Calif., Jan. 29– Nearly 200 men searched the desolate mountain wilderness 25 miles east of here today in the faint hope of finding a two-year old boy alive after two bitter-cold nights.
Robert McGaughey Jr., disappeared at 9 a.m. Saturday.
The area is part of the Trinity national forest and one of the wildest sections of California.  The mountain lion is the chief predatory animal.

A longer version of the story says, “A search party tramped through the rugged country in a fruitless hunt yesterday.” It also said, “… McGaughey’s ranchers (illegible) ..er child about the same age … two years ago at their cabin … Bald mountain country.

Boy Found in Wilds

Eureka, Calif., (AP) – Two-year-old Robert McGaughey, Jr., was found alive today in the desolate Bald mountain country 25 miles east of here after being lost for more than 50 hours.

So why is this story of interest to us?

Earlier this week, I found part the longer version of this story in very brittle newspaper fragments on the underside of 1×12 roughcut  pine roof decking while doing some renovations.  The older part of our home was moved here at some point from down in the valley.

I hoped that this fragment of newspaper or one of the others might give a clue about the minimum age of the house.

My first internet searches were associated with a different fragment that talked about a Lieutenant Cruz being sentenced.  Other words in the fragment included revolt, Cedillo, Potosi state and Cardenas.  From that little bit, I found information a failed revolt by a governor of one of the states in Mexico: “In 1938 President Cárdenas crushed the last significant regional revolt, which was led by Saturnino Cedillo in San Luis Potosi.” That fragment, then, was from some time after 1938, since it talked about the sentencing of a participant in the revolt.

The lost child fragment was the subject of my second search attempt.

The first article,at the top of the page and on the right, is from the Benton Harbor News Palladium of Monday, January 29, 1940. (Click on images to view larger versions.)

The article telling of the boy being found alive is from the January 1, 1940 Daily Iowan.

So, now we know our house was very likely built some time before 1940.

But why would newspaper be put on the underside of roof decking?

On a hunch, I searched for temperature information for our area for the month of January.  It turns out that the mean January temperature was 12 to 15°F colder in 1940 than most of the other years on record.  In fact, it was the second coldest January for this area on record.

My conjecture is that whoever lived in this house that year was trying to to seal drafts.  The house wasn’t insulated.  We had the first insulation blown in to the walls and the attic in the early 1980s after a brutally cold winter – and that winter’s mean temperature was several degrees above that of 1940.

All of this information was accessed from home, sitting in a part of our house that was down in town during the Great Depression – and probably built before the hard times came.

Pretty cool, hmmm?

Spring has been so different from last year.  Last year was warmer and drier than normal, with vegetation greening and blooming  very early and, after that, rolling right into drought conditions for remainder of the growing season, which is very long in Arkansas.  This year has been much cooler than normal, with plants a month or so behind last year.

This video combines images from both years.  Without explanation, one might assume that it was all from the same year.  The video segments are all from late March 2012.  Interspersed with those segments I’ve included still images – enhanced with digital pan and zoom to simulate motion – from late April 2013. (link to video on YouTube)

In the spring and summer of 1973, I was a student in Idaho at the Naval Nuclear Power Training Unit, attending the last of three schools before getting assigned to sea duty.

I had volunteered for submarine duty and, luckily, had been assigned for training to S5G, the latest of 3 Navy plants that had been built in the Idaho desert.  S1W had been the test prototype for the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear powered submarine, and A1W had been the same for the Enterprise, the first nuclear powered aircraft carrier.  S1W first achieved criticality in 1953, A1W in 1958.  Since the original engineering crew for the Nautilus had trained in Idaho on S1W as it neared completion and started operating, after the original testing was completed, it was natural that the prototypes were subsequently used for training future navy nuclear enlisted operators and officers .  Today, though, the former prototype test facilities have been decommissioned with their training role taken over by moored submarines with fully operational reactors, yet these modern facilities are known today as prototypes as a result of the several decades long training role of their predecessors.

S5G (Submarine, 5th submarine reactor, designed and built by General Electric) was designed to test early undersea stealth concepts.  The cold war was  intensifying.  The ocean floors had been laid with listening devices for detecting submarines of adversaries. The art of sonar detection coupled with the talents of skilled sonar men became so refined that individual boats could be identified by their unique sound signature. A mission of the S5G prototype was to reduce and, where possible, eliminate noise.

Previous US reactor designs required pumps to circulate reactor coolant through the reactor to the steam generators and back.  Though isolated by sound absorbing mounts, the pumps were a significant source of noise that could potentially be be detected. S5G utilized a design that, at lower power, circulated water through the reactor coolant system without pumps, using the  principle that warm fluid rises and colder fluid drops – a concept called natural circulation. To ensure that the concept and design was viable under conditions that would be experienced at sea, S5G was built inside a segment of a submarine hull in a basin that could be flooded with water.  During testing, test operators used equipment to make the hull rock back and forth. USS Narwhal was the first boat equipped with a reactor that could operate in natural circulation mode.  Modern fleet ballistic missile submarines utilize reactors  capable of operating at a significant fraction of full power utilizing natural circulation.

Proving the Principle, Chapter 10, has a description of the training program and some of how it was developed.  It’s not entirely accurate for the time period when I was there, but it’s close enough.

Rickover’s ideas about the training of nuclear plant operators were controversial within the Navy. He wanted to train a new type of naval officer, unfettered by what Rickover saw as the useless traditions embedded in regular Navy training. On the basis that assuring safety aboard ship required that all ship personnel be able to evaluate potential hazards, Rickover had his way. He established a system of nuclear training schools, and the desert prototype was an essential part of it. Rickover super­vised the preparation of textbooks and ordered that no examinations contain multiple-choice or true-false questions. Tests required essays, definitions, state­ments of fact, or calculations. Homework was required, and since it often involved classified material, trainees had to do it on the premises, not at home.

The controlling philosophy was self-responsibility. Rickover rejected simu­lations in favor of real reactors. “You have to train people to react to the real situation at all times. But if they are trained with a simulator, they tend to expect there will be no consequences,” he said. Rickover didn’t want to train the wrong instincts by using a machine that could not mimic a real nuclear power plant under real-time conditions, including casualties. Computers capable of doing this were not available at the time. Cross-training also was important. Electricians should know mechanical systems, for example. Trainees came to the desert after six months of theoretical instruction from a specialty school elsewhere in the sys­tem. In Idaho a trainee began by pick­ing up—or trying to—a “triple-hernia­-sized” crate of operating manuals, instructions, and schematics.

Using the books and seeking the instructors he needed, the trainee traced every system, component by compo­nent. Enlisted men, no less than offi­cers, learned and used technically accurate vocabulary, no nicknames or shortcuts. Common language tended to level everyone; it wasn’t unusual for a petty officer 3rd class to be instructing an officer. Due to the prevailing Idaho practice—at least in the early years—of wearing civilian clothes, visiting Navy brass from the regular Navy were in for new experiences. An admiral once toured the S1W prototype and then stayed for lunch with his guides. Later he learned who the men were. “Enlisted men! I thought they were college physi­cists!”

When he felt competent in a system, the trainee sought an instructor to examine him and sign his checklist. Mastery gradually produced a long list of signatures. The trainee then stood watch at one of the operating stations in the hull. At first, he was paired with a more experienced mate, but then he himself was in charge. Learn one sta­tion, move to the next. The trainees started the reactor plant, took it up to full power, maneuvered, shut it down, repaired it, maintained it. Although the nuclear program attracted the top two percent of the Navy’s enlistees, some men wiped out, usually because of a failure of self-initiative, not academic insufficiency. There were few second chances. The story is told that one hot summer day, a few sailors took a refreshing but forbidden dip in a cool­ing-water pond on their way home. Caught, they were dismissed.

The period of wearing civvies at work ended before I got there, so I never did get to hob nob with any admirals or other officer types.  I did have the opportunity once several years later, after I had gone back to Idaho as a prototype instructor, to direct some very senior regular Navy officers in starting a steam driven pump.  I think it was part of a program to give non-nuclear officers some orientation on nuclear power operation.

Students in this program were required to work 8 hour training shifts each day of their 7 day shift rotation.  On weekdays, they had to work an additional 4 hours for study.  Because of the long distance from town (~60 miles) and the long work hours, students were prohibited from driving and had to ride the buses.  Students who got into academic trouble were assigned an addition 4 hours on weekdays and had to stay at the site.  A building on site had barracks-like bunking facilities.  I only had to stay out there a couple of times.

Oh, and I was almost one of those guys mentioned above that wiped out.  I had failed a comprehensive written exam, but passed the retake.  Then I failed my oral board.  At that time you could fail the written or the oral, but not both.  Continuing in the program required recommendations from staff personnel and authorization or denial came from Washington.  If authorized to continue, the retake oral board had to be passed.  I took the oral on the last day the class was on site.  The car and moving trailer was packed.  I had orders to a submarine out of New London, Connecticut, if I passed.  If I didn’t, we didn’t know where we would be going.

I passed.

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