Posted on 04/29/2003 6:10:50 PM PDT by mhking
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By ERIC FRY
JUNEAU EMPIRE © 2003
Touch anything, just walk past anything in Dick and Peggie Garrison's Highland Avenue home, and it's likely to move if it isn't in motion already.
Dick Garrison, a musician and former businessman and movie sound man, is fascinated by electronics and mechanics.
"He was born that way and will probably die that way," said Peggie, who still retains a lilt in her voice from her native Ireland. "We have push-button drapes and a push-button fireplace."
Stay long enough with the hospitable Garrisons and you'll see little toy cars spinning around a plastic plate on the kitchen table (there's a big magnet built into the table), hear a toy monkey chatter or watch home-made lightning cause unplugged fluorescent bulbs to glow (don't even ask).
"This is an electronic nuthouse," Garrison, 79, said. "Everything is radio-controlled."
Well, not everything. Just ask, and Garrison will pick up his trombone, turn on his music system and play along with the jazz - the floor-to-ceiling speaker reverberating and emanating colored lights.
Garrison, who came to Juneau from Seattle in 1941 with the Army Signal Corps, helped install a faster IBM teletype communication system here and in Adak. At that time, the only contact with the outside world was through teletype - typewriters that receive radio signals.
About 6,000 people lived in Juneau in 1941. Another 25,000 to 30,000 troops were camped in the Mendenhall Valley, then mostly farmland, Garrison said.
Garrison, a music graduate of the University of Washington, played the trombone five nights a week at the USO dance hall, once rehearsing with the little-known Debbie Reynolds and Brenda Lee.
In college, he thought he might make a career out of music. "But boy it's good I didn't, because I would have starved," he said, thinking of the competition. He was, however, one of the original musicians in the Juneau Symphony and played in nightclubs here.
"See these two trombones there?" Garrison said in a recent interview. "I tell people I play in stereo."
Garrison was born a tinkerer. While in Adak in the Aleutians, he cashed in on his talents by fixing several hundred watches from the Third Fleet. It paid for his first house in Juneau, he said.
Garrison has owned a number of businesses here, including a music shop.
As a sideline, "I bought a whole bunch of jukeboxes, and I put them in 11 cathouses," at a time when prostitution was legal in Alaska. "Sometimes they had a customer, and I had to go in the back door."
Garrison also owned a furniture store, bars, apartments and land. He retired at age 44 and hasn't had a problem with boredom. He and Peggie travel on cruise ships, so they can dance in ballroom contests.
Dick and Peggie have been married for 42 years.
"He was a patient, I was a nurse," Peggie said. "And we met and got married and lived happily ever after like a cheap melodrama."
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he served as a sound man for Chuck Keen, a local businessman and filmmaker. Keen and Garrison sometimes hosted in Juneau the stars they worked with, such as Tab Hunter and Cesar Romero. They worked with John Wayne on a documentary about communism.
Garrison said he didn't make money working with Keen, "but I tell everybody I got a million-dollar education and experience I wouldn't trade for all the tea in China."
Garrison has two workshops on the ground floor of his house. One is a small room lined with tools and materials. About 170 boxes are marked with items such as "ballast transformers" and "pressure relief valves." There are drawers of jewelry parts. A thousand clock hands fill a cigar box. Eight tape dispensers are lined up on a metal chest of drawers. Jars are nailed by their lids to the door frame.
"How'd you like to take inventory here? In this place here I can do anything. I never have to go to a hardware store or electric store," he said.
The other work room holds the toy robots, clocks and half-million-volt Tesla coil lightning machine. "Something you very seldom see," he said, perhaps unnecessarily.
Turned on, the machine emits little, crackling lightning bolts, and a nearby row of unplugged fluorescent bulbs lights up.
Walk into one of the garages and mechanical, caged birds sing, colored globes twirl and a red laser light draws ropes on the wall. It's all triggered by a motion detector.
Garrison said he has two patents - for a blinking flashlight and an oyster knife - from which he's never made a nickel.
It's not that the light from the flashlight's bulb blinked - what's the use of that? It was the body of the flashlight that blinked, so you could find it in the dark.
Eric Fry can be reached at efry@juneauempire.com.
I'd have to go dig out one of my books, but if I recall correctly, it seems that HAARP is based on his ideas. Now, to clarify that.... Forget the name, but some guy when filing for a patent relating to aural technology and HAARP like apparatus, had to share his patent with Tesla, because Tesla had already been there!! And this guys diagrams were very simialr if I remember right.
Tesla was way advanced for his time.
Anti-Gravity: fact or fiction?
which incorporate some of Tesla's theories and designs.
OH!!!! I am sooooooo glad you mentined this! I had read about this plaque and wondered if it were still there somewhere, but didn't know where to look. Sounds like it has been completely forgotten and left to be overtaken by foliage.
Too bad we couldn't get somebody local to go and spruce it up!
At the teacher's web site, one of his former students had gone on a vacation somewhere, (Wisconsin?) and they noticed a street sign with Tesla's name mispelled. Telsa. The contacted the city and the city said, "so". The kids started a writing campaign and eventually the city replaced the sign with one that was properly spelled!!
Activism. Start em' early!!!! lol
By chance, my son reported this as I picked him up from school. So, I promptly went in, let her know, that she'd better not ever do that again, to my, or any child, again.
The previous year, his teacher refused to let him use the restroom, and kept telling him to 'hold it'. He asked at least 3 times. He eventually wet his pants. This dip called to tell me my son had a 'little accident' at school. When I found out what it was, I was furious!
All of these are actually optical illusions and psychology. The article mentions the "larger, steeper" hill that dwarfs Spook Hill but it is that larger and steeper hill just beyond that obscures the fact that Spook Hill is actually still climbing although it looks like it is going downhill. Judicious (or sometimes, accidental) placement of false plumb lines such as telephone poles or fence posts at consistent angles that are mistaken for straight up-and-down, add to the illusion.
Right on! Poor Tesla got screwed quite a bit.
WOW! Great pic. Thanks!
Indeed it is. I wish that I could read more about some of his secret stuff. He was an amazing man. Strange but amazing.
"I guess I'm just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws." --S. J. Perelman
Thanks to Anders Mad Scientist Page
Oh how I miss the smell of ozone. That sucker could have fixed the ozone hole in no time with the O3 that it cranked out. The glass glowed purple.
From everything I can find on the internet, just about everything bad that happened to Tesla was self-inflicted. He was right about AC power distribution and Edison was wrong, but Edison was right about so many other things. Tesla ended up making a fortune with George Westinghouse, but he lost it when he used all his money to open a lab for coming up with a way to distribute electric power via radio. An idea that didn't match the technology of the time. Had he decided to transmit information via radio, no doubt he would have been more famous than Marconi.
Tesla also attracted investment from J.P. Morgan who at the time probably had more money than the US government. Tesla squandered the investment. Tesla could have had the Noble Prize but he said he didn't want it. All sorts of fortunate things happened to the man, but he never should have put all his eggs in one basket, especially considering his knack for scaring away investors and making enemies of other inventors. Tesla was a brilliant man whose talent for inventing things was only surpassed by his ability to screw himself. There was no conspiracy against him, and there is no mystery about what he did.
I think Tesla got everything he wanted out of life, playing the mad genius, goofing on people with his mind control claims, and playing the perpetual victim. His psychological motivation for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory may have been guilt over the death of his brother when he was a young boy.
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