It’s time to get out ….
It’s time to get out and watch spring arrive. The couple days of record breaking, or near record breaking temperatures, has got spring started with a bang. It was amazing the other day to see so many trees starting to bud out and the countryside turning green.
I almost like it better than fall with so many different shades of green as the leaves appear. At least I know we don’t have six months of winter heading our way.
The Amish have started plowing and and another sure sign of spring is to see some kids running around barefoot.
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Driving around town Tuesday morning brought back memories of an incident that happened back in 1951, the year I was drafted. I entered the Army on March 8, and was kind of glad to be leaving home. We had just had two bad snowstorms that had kind of stopped travel for a couple of days.
Two days I spent riding the train to Fort Lewis, Washington, where we got our uniforms, lots of shots and had some tests. Then it was back on the train again for some place called Camp Stoneman which is just outside of Oakland, California.
The weather was nice and the grass was green and things looked beautiful. Then by late May the grass started turning brown. We would not see any rain again until November.
Along in June or July the camp fire department made an effort to burn anything that looked burnable. They told us if our wooden barracks would catch on fire, it would be minutes and it would be gone.
So Monday night the Loyal Fire Department went around and burned the dead grass in places that could be a problem if it did catch on fire.
For a few days we’ll have to look at some black spots, but with the rain and the warm temperatures it should turn green pretty quickly.
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The story is now out about Tiger Woods. He had been driving 87 miles per hour on a road with a 45 mile an hour speed limit when he had his latest accident. I never knew some cars have little black boxes like airplanes to record everything that is going on.
It was just about the same time I was reading the court news in the TRG and wondered to myself if that isn’t the case here in Clark County as well.
Seems there were 14 drivers who were fined and had their license suspended for a couple of weeks for exceeding the speed limit by a large amount. At least over 20 miles an hour faster than the limit. Then another 35 drivers just paid a fine for speeding. Actually, when I think of it, there are a lot more that could be picked up.
I sometimes wonder why Marathon County doesn’t do more policing on Highway 13 going into Marshfield. Once you get to the portion where it divides into a three lane highway, loads of people will pass you before you reach Mann Road, where the speed limit drops to 45.
It is amazing how often someone will pass me and yet when we get to the light at McMillan they are just sitting there waiting for the light to change.
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Last week I wrote about the cars that had their gas tank fill pipe located behind the rear license plate. This week’s “can you remember when” was a picture of a television and had only three stations and went off the air at midnight. You’d wake up in the middle of the night, the television was off and buzzing and you were mad at yourself for not going to bed earlier. That got me to thinking a bit further back. Back to the day we got our first radio. This was even long before we got electricity. I wasn’t very old but I remember Dad bringing in a tall tamarack tree. That was dug into the ground next to the house. An antenna wire was then hung from it to the windmill and also strung into the house where it was connected to the radio.
The radio operated off a six volt car battery along with a couple of other smaller batteries. The only one that really counted was the car battery because it would run low. We didn’t have a charger at home so it meant running the battery to town to have it charged up. That might mean a day or so. Meanwhile you had no radio. Which meant you couldn’t hear the latest Jack Armstong, the all American Boy or anything else.
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One of the magazines that makes it into my home is the Reader’s Digest. I don’t read every story, but one in the April issue really upset me a bit. It was about Warroad, Minnesota, The Warroad Pioneer newspaper.
It had been published for 121 years and then one day it just died away. Sad to say it is the story of many small town newspapers. Warroad is no small town with a population of 1,800, but on one side is Lake of the Woods and that far north, probably not a large farming area.
The publisher had some real concerns. She wondered who would print the obituaries of the people in town who died. Or tell the stories of the high school athletic events, or take pictures of the homecoming activities. On a more serious side, who would uncover some questionable acts of the school board involving the open meeting law.
It has been an ongoing thing for many years. Over 50 years ago we found ourselves in somewhat of the same situation. We somewhat solved the problem with the TRG.
But it takes manpower to cover the meetings and events. So be sure to support the businesses who do advertise and thank them for it.
