Here’s a cool site to check out over coffee on a Sunday: Historic Aerials is a Google Maps-style interface where you can look up your address and walk back in time as far as they’ve got aerial photos of it. They also have topographical maps which typically go back much further. For our house, the earliest photo is from 1957 but the topo maps go all the way back to 1894.
I’ve been hunting through terabytes of historical files for a project at work for the past month, trying to dig any kind of footage or photos I can use to tell the stories of three of our biggest initiatives. I’ve got a legacy Mac Pro tower under my desk here with the majority of those files, and as I dig deeper into the folders I’ve found stuff that was hiding from me for years. I opened up one file the other day and was shocked to see the guy looking back at me:
This dates back to January 2016, when I had more hair on my head and was experimenting with a full beard. We were doing some tests for a video series so there’s about two minutes of me looking into camera while we adjusted for light and focus. In retrospect I’m glad I ditched those glasses; they were too angular for my face and accentuated my crooked nose.
Here’s a 7-minute retrospective on the USCGC Taney, a Treasury-class cutter that’s currently moored in Baltimore Harbor, and one of only two surviving ships from the attack on Pearl Harbor. This channel is run by a Brit who has an entire channel dedicated to the histories of warships, something I’ve been diving into to get my mind off the world burning around me.
I was talking with Finley last night about customizing clothing, something she’s really been into in the last couple of years, and mentioned a jean jacket I had in high school that I customized myself. At the time, most of the burnouts in school sewed a section of a concert T-shirt into the back panel of their jean jacket, or had a talented friend paint the scene on the fabric with acrylic paint: lots of Iron Maiden, Slayer, or Metallica. I was really into Frank Miller comics at that point—a series called Lone Wolf and Cub was popular and he was doing cover art for the western manga reprints. His style for these was very woodblock/pen and ink inspired, and I started researching Ukiyo-e art at the library. The usual masters were always represented, but one artist stood out to me: a late-period artist named Yoshitoshi, whose style clearly influenced Miller and who stood out among his predecessors.
I scoured the libraries in the area and found a book of his prints somewhere locally—then kept renewing it until I had to give it back. I studied all of the prints in the book and whatever I could learn from his style—at that point attempting my own crude woodblock prints with no press, basic inks, and no means of registration. One print stood out among the hundreds, and I chose this to paint on the back of my jacket: Fujiwara no Yasumasa Playing the Flute, a triptych which depicts a musician and his outlaw brother in a scene from a kabuki play. The linework, color, and use of pattern are phenomenal, and I thought it would look good on blue denim. Over a couple of evenings I painted the jacket, and I was pretty happy with the way it turned out.
As the years passed, I lost track of the jacket; I don’t remember what happened to it, but I’d love to have it back, if nothing more than to give to Finley. I bet she’d like it.
Twenty years ago, in the early days of the internet, a physics teacher with an interest in aviation history started building a list of U.S. aircraft serial numbers, matching them to the aircraft type, and researching the history and distribution of each individual plane. His list—and his name—became famous in the online aviation community as the go-to reference for what a plane was, where it was sent, and what happened to it. The list was always bare-bones: a tabbed HTML file with the barest of formatting, but he updated it frequently. I went looking for a serial number the other day and my decades-old bookmark led to a broken link; some further searching revealed Joe Baugher had passed away from cancer in 2023, and a new historian took over the list at a new URL.
I spend a lot of time listening to historical podcasts about World War 2 while I’m working, which has always been an interest of mine. New scholarship about this subject is fascinating, and there are also multiple YouTube channels dedicated to particular events, ships, and people. This video popped up in my feed recently, and it’s catnip for a ship nerd like me: an ROV was sent down to the USS Yorktown, which was sunk during the Battle of Midway, and spent 4+ hours surveying the wreck with a high-def camera, including commentary from several historians. This is the clearest footage I’ve seen yet of any of these ships, and it is incredible.
See also: the recent discovery of the USS Samuel B. Roberts, one of the main combatants of the Battle off Samar, and the deepest shipwreck surveyed by a crewed submersible.
When I was in second and third grade, my friends and I were obsessed with Smokey and the Bandit, the Dukes of Hazzard, and CHiPs. We spent all our free time drawing pictures of cars and trucks—Convoy was a big deal too, but I was too young to see it. The other day I stumbled across this drawing I did back then, and figured I’d share it here.
#80 reflects an obsession with all of the things I thought a fast car needed, although it clearly has the aerodynamics of a brick: a square coupe body sporting a giant blower on the engine, a NASCAR style window barrier (ABC’s Wide World of Sports featured a lot of stock car racing back then), side pipes, a rear brake scoop, a moonroof, louvers on the rear window, and a gigantic wing on the rear deck. And, lots of stickers in the rear window, for speed.
#53 is more sedate. A blower on the hood and side pipes hint at a juiced up motor, but this car would suffer from instability at speed with that tall, flat front grille and no spoiler. Both cars sport CB whips, which were also an obsession in the late ’70’s.
It took me a couple of minutes to realize these two cars are lined up at a dragstrip—the vertical structure at the left is the light tree, the staging crew seem happy to be working, and are professionally dressed. I suspect I drew #80 and handed the drawing to one of my friends to add #53.
I’m glad my Mom saved these glimpses of what 8-year-old Bill was thinking about back then.
This morning I was elbow-deep in the hood of the Travelall, enjoying the warm afternoon breeze and sunshine poking out from behind the clouds. I looked up and saw a car drive slowly past the house and then stop at the curb in front of the neighbors’ house. I returned to my work for a few moments and looked up to see a woman walking up the driveway. I waved and greeted her; she nervously introduced herself as one of the daughters of the doctor who owned our house, who we bought it from 22 years ago. My face broke out in a huge smile and I shook her hand, and that seemed to break the ice. We talked a bit about the tulip tree exploding in color over the driveway, and she explained that she wanted to drive by and see it bloom—her mother had planted it years ago and she couldn’t get over how big it was. I walked her up to the house to met Jen at the door, and we took her inside for a tour of the first floor.
She was very happy to see what we’d done with the house, and told us it looked great (but a lot smaller than she remembered!) We asked after her family and caught her up on some of the neighbors, and traded some stories about the house. She asked if she could bring some of her brothers and sisters back, and we told her that would be fine—as long as we had a little time to clean up first. While she talked with Jen, I ran out to the front to take the glass DR W.E. McGRATH sign from the box next to the door out and give it to her. We’ve been talking about sending it to the family for years but never got around to it, so it was great to be able to hand it off in person. We said our goodbyes out on the front lawn and I went back to work, feeling more upbeat about the day.
I stumbled upon an article on the Spartacus Educational website this morning about the JFK assassination and realized I was looking at the deepest of rabbit holes—a better organized rabbit hole than that of Wikipedia—which is saying something. There’s a ton of stuff to dig into there, on a site whose design dates back to about 2002, which is oddly comforting.
There’s always been something fascinating to me about the history of the U.S. Navy on the eve of and directly after the Pearl Harbor attack: a fleet of mostly obsolete ships manned by an understaffed and threadbare service, spread across a vast ocean in outdated facilities. As the Japanese war machine rolled quickly over European colonial holdings and then America’s bases, there was a frantic rear-guard operation to either stall for time or escape back to the mainland in any way possible. Among the horrific losses suffered in the Philippines and various tiny island holdings, there are stories of heroism and adventure. Years ago, a blurry picture of what looks like a ship lifted out of the water by either shell splashes or torpedo explosions caught my attention, and I tracked down the story.
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The image is a still from Japanese newsreel footage taken in March of 1942. The ship was actually the USS Edsall, a 4-piper destroyer laid down in 1920 at the end of the building spree following World War 1. The Edsall was one of a handful of US Navy ships still left in the Southern Pacific, shuttling men and supplies to and from the bases we had left in the area, and on the day she was sunk, she was going to the aid of the oiler USS Pecos, which had been sunk by a huge Japanese task force. The Edsall blundered into the enemy formation and immediately took evasive action. Outgunned and slower than most of the enemy ships, all the skipper could do was evade and hope for a miracle. The Edsall zigged and dodged shellfire for an hour and a half, frustrating the Japanese commander. He then ordered 26 dive bombers from his carriers to attack, one of which finally hit and immobilized the ship, and she was quickly overwhelmed and sunk by gunfire. Her fate was unknown for years until Japanese records were translated and the story became clear.
The wreck of the Edsall was finally located late last year by an Australian research vessel, and they announced the discovery today. The ship is sitting upright on the bottom in excellent shape, in 18,000 feet of water south of Christmas Island. Godspeed, and thank you for your service.