40 Years Ago
Week of November 17, 1983
Buying Firewood
Can Be Confusing
Comparing prices is particularly difficult since wood can be sold by the cord, short or face cord, truckloads of all sizes, or weight. Be sure you have a clear understanding with the seller, preferably in writing, of the amount of wood being sold.
Firewood is normally purchased by the cord or by a fraction of a cord (a requirement in some states). A “standard cord” is a stack eight feet long, four feet high and four feet wide. A “face cord” or “short cord” is a stack eight feet long, four feet high, and one to two feet wide.
The measurement units include the air space between the sticks. Thus the amount of solid wood depends on whether the sticks are straight or crooked, round or split, and large or small in diameter. The variation is considerable as a standard cord may contain from 60 to 100 cubic feet of solid wood.
Firewood is sometimes sold by the load or by weight. A pick-up truck with a bed four feet wide, 19 inches deep and eight feet long will hold one 16-inch face cord. A dump truck may hold up to four standard cords. A large pulpwood truck with a wood rack will hold from six to nine standard cords.
50 Years Ago
Week of November 15, 1973
Mountains
Formed Long Ago
Whose Woods Are These . . .
(A Weekly column of Wilderness Lore by The Woodlands and Whitewater Institute Staff, Spruce Knob Mountain)
Where did our Appalachian Mountains come from? How were they formed.
Take a handkerchief from your pocket and flatten it out on a table so that it is square in front of you. Now slide the bottom right hand corner of the handkerchief toward the center. Rows of folds arise in the cloth. This is how our Appalachian Mountains were formed.
One hundred eighty million years ago the eastern half of the United States was flat. Then a tremendous pressure came from the southeast pushing in on the coast of the U. S. just as you did on the corner of the handkerchief.
Mountains wrinkled up. These mountains were very tall. They stood more than five times as high as they are today—higher even than Mt. Everest. Erosion from water, wind and earthquakes occurred over the following millions of years wearing down the mountains.
However, at least once since the first dramatic upheaval of 180 million years ago, the Appalachian Mountains have been shaken and thrust up again. So our mountains of today are the combined result of a big, early upthrust, followed by erosion, and then a later, smaller upthrust, and finally much more erosion.
The Appalachian Mountains extend for 1,200 miles from Newfoundland in Canada to central Alabama. Geologists divide this system into three parts: the northern section, from Newfoundland to the Hudson River in New York state, the central section, (the area we are in) from the Hudson River to the Kanawha River here in West Virginia, and the southern section from the Kanawha River to central America.
Mount Mitchell in North Carolina is the highest point in the Appalachians at 6,684 feet. It is 1,822 feet higher than Spruce Knob, the highest point in West Virginia, the place from where we write this weekly column.
DAHMER
Practically every farmhouse 40 years ago had a rooster, or often several. The rooster is often reported to as the farmer’s clock, especially in the morning when time to get up. My mother, Estella Dahmer, had this saying about a rooster. “Crowing when the rooster went to bed he would rise with a wet head.” Crowing before midnight was looked upon as a bad omen. My father, John Dahmer, who never depended upon an alarm clock when teaching school, had this to say, “When the rooster crowed the first time in the morning, it was too early to get up. But when crowing the second or especially the third time, better get up or be late for school.” When a hen would crow, she would get the ax, for it was thought she foretold of a bad tragedy that would occur in the family.
Electricity came to the Dahmer community in the year of 1948. Whenever the lights were turned on at night it would confuse the old rooster so that he would crow at any hour. Now we do not have a rooster on the farm and I do not throw unlucky eggs across the house anymore.
Week of November 22, 1973
Practically Speaking
By Elizabeth Williams
Monongahela Power
Home Economics Consultant
Wise use of cooking appliances can add up to substantial savings in the family budget. The oven portion of the range can usually operate much more efficiently than we give it an opportunity.
Before turning on the oven for roasting or baking, arrange the oven racks to accommodate the baking pans or utensils that you’re going to use. It’s not only easier to do when the oven is cool, but more economical. When using both baking racks, arrange pans on the bottom shelf so they’re not directly under those on the top rack. For proper circulation of heat, pans should not touch each other or the sides of the oven.
Allow about 10 minutes to pre-heat the oven. It’s a waste of fuel to pre-heat it too long before you’re ready to start baking. When the indicator light goes off, the oven has reached the desired temperature. For some casseroles and oven meals it’s not necessary to pre-heat the oven.
Plan to use the oven efficiently. Use extra space for other baked dishes. Make more economical use of the oven by cooking complete meals instead of one food item. Potatoes and other vegetables and some desserts will cook right along with a main dish casserole or meat.
For faster and more economical baking, try not to peek. Each time you open the oven door, you can lose 25 to 75 degrees of heat. Food takes longer to bake and the heat loss can cause unsatisfactory browning or even baking failures.
Batteries May Run
Man’s Future World
Armed with fresh batteries, man may yet rule the world.
This idea comes to mind after a look at what’s being called “the revolution in packaged power,” or the success in building better batteries—more powerful, longer lasting, and smaller, if not always cheaper.
The battery builders of America are charged up over tomorrow. They predict:
- By the 1980s, hundreds of thousands of small battery-powered passenger cars each year replacing gasoline guzzlers on city streets.
- In the next four or five years, about one-fourth of all new wrist watches run by button-size batteries.
Electric power stored in portable batteries—a discovery that may date to before Christ—has already made itself indispensable in modern life.
Man is now ready to conquer life’s chores with battery-powered hair dryers, tooth brushes, fishing lures and cold drink stirrers.
Tiny batteries energize surgically implanted pacemakers to steady heartbeats, keep pocket-size beacons flashing to pinpoint downed fliers and tune in the world for the deaf with hidden-inside-the-ear hearing aids.
Basically, a battery is merely a device generating electricity from chemical action. The earliest ones—the wet cell type—were heavy, and could be dangerous, spilling corrosive acid. That’s why car batteries once were strapped to running boards or slung underneath.
Military and aerospace equipment requires miniaturized dry cell batteries for new integrated circuits, drawing only low currents. Today’s cordless electric gadgets are safer than their plug-in counterparts. Household current is about 117 volts, but batteries put out about five to 15 volts—well below the 25-volt level considered dangerous.
Cars use lead-acid batteries—43 million went into used cars last year, and 11 million into new cars—costing about $25 each. Lead-acid batteries arrived in 1912 with the invention of the electric starter, soon to end the harvest of broken arms reaped by the hand crank.
Among those working and hoping for an electric car are lead-acid battery makers.
A run-down battery could be replaced in a few minutes at a neighborhood service station, they say, or recharged at home with household current and a converter.
Archeologists say they have found electroplated materials 4,000 years old near old Baghdad, and 2,000-year-old batteries-pots with iron rods, copper sheeting, and signs of acid corrosion.
Science usually credits Italy’s Alessandro Volta with inventing the first primitive batteries about 1800, but shudders at his method of testing them. He touched the wires to his eyelids and judged the power of the weak currents by the flash appearing before his eyes.
60 Years Ago
Week of November 21, 1963
100 YEARS AGO
By LON K. SAVAGE
Editor’s Note—The following is one of a series of articles on the Civil War. Each weekly installment covers events which occurred exactly 100 years ago.
Lincoln Delivers
Gettysburg Address
As an historic battle shaped up at Chattanooga, Tenn., 100 years ago this week, the governors of the northern states staged what was to become an historic ceremony.
The ceremony was called for November 19 on the battlefield of Gettysburg, Pa., scene of the mighty slaughter of the preceding July, when Gen. George Gordon Meade’s Federal army turned back Gen. Robert E. Lee’s invasion of the North. Edward Everett, the former Massachusetts governor, United States senator, secretary of state, minister to Great Britain and president of Harvard University, was to be the speaker. President Abraham Lincoln was to give brief remarks dedicating a cemetery for those who had fallen in the battle.
Lincoln worked on his Gettysburg address in Washington as the day approached. On November 18, he took a special founder train to Gettysburg and worked on his speech in one of the cars. At Gettysburg, swollen with thousands of visitors, he may have worked on it in his hotel.
Next morning, after a procession to the battlefield, Lincoln mounted the speaker’s stand, and the ceremony opened. Everett made his speech—a speech that lasted two hours and then disappeared from history.
Then Lincoln stood, put on his glasses and pulled the papers of his manuscript from his pocket. It took less than three minutes for him to say these immortal words (taken from the final revision):
“Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth up this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation—or any nation so conceived and so dedicated—can long endure.
“We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting place of those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
“But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or to detract.
“The world will little note nor long remember what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here.
“It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us; that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Next week: The battle of Chattanooga.
70 Years Ago
Week of November 19, 1953
The Simpleton
And
The Crook
Once upon a time, and by ancestorial birth, two men inherited a nice flock of sheep which according to law were to be equally divided between the two men. The one was a Simpleton and the other was a Crook.
In the flock of sheep was a nice, tame, pet sheep which the Simpleton admired and loved very much. It was agreed between the two to make an equal division. The Crook said, “You divide the sheep and give me the first choice.” “No,” said the Simpleton. “I want you to divide the sheep and give me the first choice.” “All right,” and he did so.
He put all the best sheep into the first pen, then the rest into the second pen, including the one which the Simpleton loved so well. An equal number was in each pen. “Now choose the flock of sheep you like the best,” said the Crook.
The Simpleton looked and looked for some time at the two flocks of sheep. Then he said, “If you call this an equal division, I will choose the flock of the best sheep and let my beloved sheep remain in the hands of the one who made the equal division.” —John Dahmer.
