Posted on 07/15/2013 4:27:10 PM PDT by az1roadrunner
Alliance, Nebraska
Newspaper Jobs
Right after getting my bachelor’s degree a friend of mine found a job for me in beautiful Alliance, Nebraska. It was selling advertising for the local newspaper, which basically revolved around walking around town and talking the local merchants into buying advertising in the newspaper.
Alliance was at that time, a pretty boring town. Most of the railroad workers spent their waking spare time in one of the bars, like “Wonderbar” or “The Iron Horse”. There was also a combination bowling alley, strip joint bar. You just walked through a door from the bowling alley and then you were in a strip joint. It was great fun for the entire family.
The kids spent their time cruising up and down the main street in town, Box Butte Avenue in their cars. This was called “Cruising the Butte” and involved going up north to 12th Street, pulling a u-turn and then going back down to 1st Street and turning around again to get back up to 12th street.
Walking around the town visiting store owners was actually kind of fun. I always had a camera ready for action and remember well the time I passed the law offices of Metz and Metz Lawyers. At one point they went all the way down to Scottsbluff to get a sign made and it was a beautiful sign. Solid brass, with a relief carving that said, “Metz and Metz, Laywers”. The sign stayed up for about a week.
Then there was the city manager who decided he needed to have a lake named after him, so he created a park in the north end of town and dug a significant hole in the ground and began filling it with water from the city water supply. Understand that Alliance is just west of that famous cattle growing area known as the Sand Hills. There is also a large aquifer under that area known as the Ogallala Aquifer.
Well, the lake was filled and all things were fine until two days later when it became apparent that all of the water had drained out. Mr. Lang, the city manager wouldn’t stand to have his lake be nothing more than just a mud hole so city workers once again pumped water out of the city’s water supply to fill the lake. Two days later it had all drained out.
Determined not to have his legacy lake not just be a mud hole, Mr. Lang had them fill the lake again using exactly the same method. Two days later, it was dry. Somebody with a brain pointed out that the soil was sucking up the water and that they needed to line the lake with some type of impervious material like clay. Once this was done the lake finally held water and all things were good. They even installed ducks.
One of the most impressive things about being in Alliance was that you had two or three television stations broadcasting from either Scottsbluff or beautiful Hay Springs. The family that owned the Hay Springs station was the Duhammel family and so they got the call letters for the station directly from their name. KDUH.
That station was a low budget affair. They had one employee on the camera, the same employee doing the news and the same employee doing the weather. None of these employees was actually good looking. Watching it was a real learning experience on how not to run a television station. The single employee would sometimes drop the microphone and not take the time to pick it up. That’s when it sounded like he was broadcasting from inside the crapper. You would also see segments where the weather was being explained but the camera hadn’t been adjusted to show the weatherman, so all you would see was the weather map with this guy’s arm coming in from the side pointing out various fronts and such on the map. It was great fun watching KDUH. It leant new meaning to the word duh.
The local a.m. radio station is KCOW.
One of the truly wonderful moments that occurred when I was in Alliance was the day I received a ping pong ball in the mail. It had a stamp on it, my address at the little pink house and to this day I have no idea who sent it. I doubt you could mail a ping pong ball today. Well, maybe if you put it in a package.
Ah, western Nebraska, The Good Life, dry, desolate and nothing to spend your bucks on except hobbies and hot cars. (There ain’t no wild women around here.)
Or, as my buddy Jeff once put it, “Alliance, softball, cruising the Butte, sitting out on the front porch and much much more.
So, I had noticed something on the drive up to Alliance, along the side of highway two was this busted up bunch of concrete things. I had no idea what they were, but they obviously at one time had some purpose and if you are bored in Alliance, well, why not drive out of town and take some photographs?
Sunrise and sunset are always good times for photos, so I went out to these ruins and took this one.
Well, it was in color and that presents a problem if you are working at a newspaper that doesn’t have a color capability, so I just now use it as a background photo for my laptop.
I had a little side hobby going on with night photography in black and white, which really pissed off the newspaper’s photographer because he figured that only his pictures should be printed in the newspaper. Even so, I went out to this place again after sunset in order to take a photograph of it at night. It’s the kind of thing you do when you are bored.
A friend of mine, Ray and I went out to this place and set the camera up on a tripod, loaded with black and white film and then I walked around with a flashlight while Ray held a tin pot over the open camera lens to keep it from exposing my flashlight journey.
I fired off the flash a few times and came up with this photograph:
An old editor at the newspaper realized what I had taken the photograph of and wrote a caption to the photo. Basically, during World War One, the nation was looking for fertilizer and discovered potash in the lakes in Nebraska’s Sandhill region. So they came up with this plant to reduce the waters of a lake to get the potash out and what you are seeing in the photo is a structure that held an elevated railway, (in the foreground) and a second structure which held a metallic ball that the lake water was put in. This was then fired up and boiled to reduce out the potash.
By the time the Second World War had come around the country had found a much better source of potash in Florida and there wasn’t much use for the stuff in the Nebraska Sandhills but there was a need for metal and so they tore the thing apart and made it into this crazy concrete monument.
------------------------------------------
I stopped working as an advertising sales representative for the local newspaper in early February when the publisher cut back our sales commissions rate to near zero. (The news writers had discovered that we were making more money than they were and went on offense.) I had an offer from a local bank to go to work there to eventually become the guy running the computer department. The bank had a bunch of post cards, the photograph on which featured a helicopter flying above the roof.
There was a landing pad up there but to the best of my knowledge no helicopter ever had used it. And, at least the town had some stop lights.
The president of the bank had a great affection for kites and on one occasion we went up to the roof of the bank and were flying kites off of the roof. It was great, right up until the cop drove up and told us to reel them in. Something about power lines and such. That was the end of that.
Even so, if you like kites, well, there are some amazing ones out there. I’ve still got three of them, including one that looks like a space shuttle.
__________________
An Airplane Crashed Into My House
The Alliance National Bank had a kind of unusual tradition. In the morning at about eight o’clock when the coffee was ready, almost everyone who worked there would come up to a large meeting room on the second floor of the bank. For some odd reason the men sat at one end of the meeting room while the women sat at the other end. We didn’t hear the conversations of the other sex.
So one fine Monday morning all of us guys sat down for coffee and started talking about the weekend’s activities. Nobody had anything exceptional to say until Rick divulged, “An airplane crashed into my house.”
“What? I just drove by there this morning and I didn’t see any damage.” I said.
Rick began explaining what had actually happened. It turned out that there was some fellow over at the park who was flying a remote control airplane. The plane had gotten over a hill and the line of sight control capability was lost. The airplane then proceeded to fly Into Rick’s house. It hit the chimney and knocked out a couple of bricks.
Rick went up to the roof of his house to see what had happened and eventually the fellow who owned the plane came by and asked for it back. Rick gave it to him and the guy just left, he didn’t ask about any damages, he just walked off with his plane. So Rick ended up spending his weekend up on the roof putting mortar and bricks back in his chimney.
I looked over at my friend who was a summer intern at the bank and then back to Rick and said, “It sounds like you need some kind of air defense system.”
My friend was pretty quick to pick up on stupid thoughts that I was having and said, “Yeah, I think some kind of radar would be appropriate. You know, one of those little radar installations you can put in your front lawn.”
I raised my hands up into the air and began rotating them back and forth in approximately a 45 degree angle. I said, “I think you can get that down at Radio Shack.”
“Yeah, Radio Shack has that kind of stuff.” My friend agreed.
“So now we’ve solved the detection problem. The next problem is what to do about the incoming aircraft. We can probably link the radar system to a bank of Estes rockets. We could remove the wooden nose cone, drill it out and replace it with an explosive warhead. These would all be housed in a box that could tilt up and down and right and left to track with the radar system. Then, when you have incoming, the system would fire off a volley of explosive Estes rockets.”
“You know,” my friend said, “We could probably put this together in just a week or two. That would save you from the problem you have of attacking aircraft.”
Unfortunately, Rick didn’t seem to think that this was necessary, so we never installed the system. Bit Stuck
I must admit that I always wasn’t the best friend of the NCR computer repairmen who came to visit the bank. One day my friend and I sat down and wrote a very devious program. NCR at the time had very cryptic error messages, so we took advantage of it.
We wrote a program with similar but nonexistent cryptic error messages and then ran it in front of one of the NCR repairmen. I told him, “Every time I run this program I get these error messages.” Then I ran it for him. On the screen came the following messages…
“Bit stuck at location F0044 CX. Attempting internal repair.”
Then the computer would count by ones to 100,000. The next message was, “Internal repair impossible, substituting bit 008742X.”
Then the computer would display what appeared to be a normal running program called “bitsub”. After counting to 100,000 the program would display the following, “bit substitution successful, remaining bits available for substitution 000001.”
The NCR computer repairman was furiously going through his manuals looking for these nonexistent error codes. After a certain amount of time he realized that he didn’t have them in his manual. His next resort was to call Dayton Ohio, NCR headquarters. At that point I figured that it would be cruel and unusual punishment to let him go on, so I stopped him and told him it was just a joke.
You have to understand that this was in the day before the personal computer became a significant reality. About all we had was the Tandy TRS 80 and the Apple II. So we were taking full advantage of the fact that you could make these computers do some very weird things. My friend was inspired, probably by this incident to do the following. He wrote a computer program for a coworker.
“I wrote a quick program to give one of the girls here at work a thrill. She starts up the computer last Friday and puts in the date and time just like normal, then the computer says (her name is Mary, we call her Mare): ‘MY TRANSISTORS THROB FOR YOU MARE.’
Needless to say she goes wild and laughs and brings everyone in to show it to them and after everyone has had a good laugh, she gets down to business and types in the name of the program that she’s going to run, hits return and the computer comes back and says ‘OOOOO, YOU DO THAT SOOOO GOOD MARE… A BIT LOWER AND TO THE RIGHT THIS TIME…’
Now she’s stunned. She hits return again and this time the computer goes, ‘OH, OH, OHHHH OH SH_T OH &%^ OH F___.’ Whereupon the screen clears and then promptly fills back up again with ‘AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGG!!!’
Mare is afraid to touch the keyboard now. Thankfully I planned ahead. After an appropriate pause, the computer asks for a smoke. ‘GOT A SMOKE, MARE?’
Unbelieving, she answers yes, whereupon the computer promises to call her sometime and finally starts up the program she typed in.”
Hey Darks? This isn’t a zot thread nor an opus, but it is fun, and despite violating all the rulz, it might, just might, make a good home for the Undead Thread.
Muchly we enjoyed this greatly.
Thx for posting this. A good writer can make the mundane riveting. Humblegunner will be pissed. But I liked your post.
Doesn't seem to be excerpted. Why would I object?
Awesomesauce!
Loved the Bit Stuck section.
Not that I would ever do that myself.
we did security violation replicas of the HP3000 security message and freaked out students. and also the perenial “i got your ....” so what ever they type in you echo back. only at school tho. But at one place i worked i had access to the employee records so i wrote a program to give me the internal office locations of all the single women under 35 sorted desc by salary. My buddy met his wife by using the list. I guess i invented computer dating. I think it was 1987.
Thanks, good stuff and a fun read!
I don’t know... I don’t know all the rules. Just figured you might be.
Mostly it’s folks excerpting their own blogs in order to milk Free Republic for hits that I object to.
Although I do reserve the right to find other things objectionable as well. ;-)
Ha ha!
Oops, looks like I missed on that one,...
LOL, but could you withstand the invasion of the undead thread?
String of Events
This kind of thing doesn’t happen very often. Two friends of mine and I went to a movie called “Deliverance” in the early 1970s. In this movie an unfortunate character is forced to squeal like a pig.
My two friends and I worked at a local grocery store and one day shortly after having seen this movie the delivery truck showed up and we began unloading it. The driver of this truck had the misfortune of looking almost identical to the character in the film.
So, as we are out stocking the shelves, putting up the Welch’s grape jelly, the Duncan Hines cake mix and such, about every ten minutes one of us three would let out a pig squeal. “Reeee”. We were having quite a good time at this, laughing and stocking the shelves. When we got done, the store manager let us out the front door and we all started squealing like pigs.
Then one of us noticed a cop standing on the corner across the street and said, “Guys, that cop thinks we are calling him a pig.” (This was a standard in the protests of the 1960’s.) My friend was exactly correct in his assessment. So, we quieted down and walked down to the local tavern to get our after work traditional drink of an RC Cola.
As we were sitting there, enjoying our colas, every few minutes one of us would get up and go look out the window. The cop had crossed the street and was standing on the corner of the courthouse sidewalk. After a while, he moved back into the bushes next to the courthouse and was standing there waiting for us.
We didn’t know exactly what to do about this, we discussed some possibilities, none of which were well received. Then one of my buddies stands up and says, “I know what to do.” But he wouldn’t tell us what that was. He walked to the back of the bar and picked up the phone. We followed him not knowing what he had in mind.
He began talking, “Yeah, I wanted to give you a call to tell you that there is a suspicious looking guy digging around in the bushes on the northeast corner of the courthouse. (Pause) Oh, I’m just a concerned citizen.” He had just called the cops on the cop.
We all went to the front of the bar and looked out the window to see what would be the consequences of our friend’s call. About five minutes later a police car swung around the corner, the lights came on, followed by the spotlight shining on the cop in the bushes. We thought this was hilarious and went out of the bar to our jalopies and took off.
I can tell you that that particular cop would now pull us over for any minor infraction he could make up, one of which I had to defend myself against in that very same courthouse.
Epic!
Love your story! If you did that today your house would be SWATTED, and drugs would be found!
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