Jim Stone Archives

March 31, 2015March 31, 2015

Charter or AT&T for Internet?

You’re going to get this shot of Jim Stone (Central T-shirt all excited about something on the paper he’s holding) at what looks like a pep rally because I was too busy today to come up with something better. Jim never had a lot of pep and I don’t recognize many people in the background, so I have no clue what the event was.

The main reason I’m behind is that I spent the afternoon talking to Internet service providers.

Internet dilemma

Mother has had AT&T DSL for some time now. When I started spending more time in Cape, I told her I’d pay the difference between a promotional price for AT&T’s “Elite” level and the basic service she had before. “Elite” allegedly gives you 6 MBS down and about 512K up. After the promotion expired, the price went to $46 a month and is slated to go to $52. They offered me another promo plan, but it will expire in six months, so I don’t want to consider it.

I’m used to Comcast Business in West Palm Beach where I get 100 down and 20 up, so AT&T “Elite” feels like dial-up.

How about Charter?

Charter is offering a 12-month promotional price comparable for what we’re paying for AT&T, but they claim to deliver 60 MBS down. The extra speed sure would be nice. I’m still going to be dealing with an expiring promotion in a year, but a lot can happen in that time.

A lot of you folks like in the Cape area. Talk me out of Charter. Thanks in advance for the advice.

Bundling, by the way, is not an option. I want to keep her AT&T landline for redundancy and reliability. We dropped cable for an antenna in the attic and streaming video. All I’m looking for is a straight Internet package.

March 1, 2015November 7, 2016

Battle of the Angels

I’ve been going through a box of old and fading photographs. Most of them are forgettable, but there were two shots that just happened to have been taken in the same general area, and they have in them someone I haven’t seen in the mirror in many years.

The character on the right is me. I think the shadow on the left might be Jim Stone, but there’s also a chance the silhouette might belong to Steve Folsom. Bill Hampton’s name was stamped on the back of the print, so I’m going to guess what happened.

The object dangling from my left hand is the power cord to a Honeywell Strobonar 65D strobe. I probably unhooked the flash, handed the camera to Bill and said, “Why don’t you try shooting a silhouette of us?”

We’re in the hallway leading to the west parking lot. The music department is down the steps, and a ticket booth is the little outcropping on the left. There was also a phone booth down there, on the far side of the ticket booth, I’m pretty sure. (More about the phone booth in a minute.)

Pretending to buy a ticket

I don’t know why I was pretending to buy a ticket from these women. I also don’t know who they are, so I can’t apologize to them for not washing the print long enough to keep fingerprints and brown spots from showing up.

Confession of a no longer young man

I mentioned the phone booth earlier. I debated telling this story because it shows a little bit about how the teenage boy’s mind works, and it’s not always pretty.

I was standing at a discreet distance from the booth waiting for the person inside it to finish a call. When the door opened, a cute girl that I knew only slightly because she had dated a buddy stepped out, visibly distraught.

I asked if something was the matter, and she jumped into my arms and held on like a drowning person clutching a life preserver. I don’t remember the details, but I think she said she had just gotten some bad news about a family member. As I was trying to come up with something comforting to say, I felt some claws grab into my left shoulder and heard my Evil Angel whispering in my ear, “She’s vulnerable. She is REALLY vulnerable. You could take advantage of that.”

Oh, no, here come the Good Angel

Before I could react to that advice, there was a flutter of wings on my Good Angel landed on the other shoulder. “That would be wrong, and you know it,” he whispered in my ear. “Your Mother taught you better than that.”

I extracted myself from the young woman’s grasp, we chatted for a few minutes while she calmed down, she declined my offer of a ride home, and she walked up these steps and down the hallway. I don’t know that I ever talked to her again.

Just as I was congratulating myself for doing The Right Thing, I heard my Good Angel say to the Bad Angel, “You know, you’re right. She looks pretty darned good from this side, too.”

Funny how things like that will pop into your head when you walk the halls of your old high school. (You have to admit the old building has really been well maintained. I think the walls and floors are shinier now than they were in 1965.)

September 3, 2014April 29, 2021

OU Party Time

I’ve been working late at the Athens County Historical Society and Museum office. Athens, Ohio, is the home of Ohio University, once known as a top-ranked party school. (If it’s been down-graded, I’d hate to see what the top 10 looks like.)

There are several bars to the left of me; there’s a bar across the street from me, and there’s a bar and a rental house with a kazillion people in it on the right side.

The female voices that echo off the surrounding buildings are hitting frequencies that I thought only dogs could hear (and just short of that which would break glass). I haven’t heard the equivalent of the male voices since a camping trip on Fisheating Creek during alligator mating season. It’s not even the music that is earsplitting. It’s the cacophony of voices. (Click on the photos to make them larger.)

Words don’t do it justice

I shot the Saturday night video when I was getting ready to pull out of the parking lot about one in the morning. It’ll give you an idea what Court Street sounded like. I sent the video to CHS Buddy Jim Stone, who had been in town dropping Son Oliver off for class earlier.

His reaction: “Gee. Oliver said they were having movie night in their new apartment with perhaps a few games of chess.”

Party in progress

When I drove down Court Street, Athens’ main North-South drag late Sunday afternoon, I spotted the party in the first photo two doors down from the office. I couldn’t resist.

When I walked up, there was a guy with a cellphone camera taking a picture of a couple of his friends. “Would you like to get in the photo?” is always a good icebreaker. The next thing I knew, half the party crowded into the photo.

Got an internship?

A kid came up to me and said, “I saw you flipping cameras back and forth. Are you a pro?” I handed him a business card and told him what I do now.

He wanted to know if I took on interns. I said that I was a Florida guy writing about MO in the middle ’60s and Ohio in the late ’60s, so I didn’t know how well he’d fit in.

“Are you a nark?”

The next guy asked, “Are you a nark?”

The last time that question was raised, I told him, was in about 1974. I was at a big group of partying young folks about to be chased out by the sheriff when I saw a guy pointing at me and asking his buddy, “Think he’s a nark?”

“You gotta be kidding,” his buddy observed. “He’s too straight-looking to be a nark.”

“I love Athens”

Another kid said he was from Detroit and “loved Athens.”

“If you are somewhere and mention that you went to school in Athens, it’s like you have a bond.”

Curator Jessica and I had talked about that. Athens’ uptown shopping area, bars and restaurants are adjacent to campus and everything is within walking distance, so a lot of students don’t have cars. It’s also a relatively isolated area not close to any major population centers. A lot of students come from places like Cleveland and Akron that are too far away for a casual weekend commute, so they hang out in town and grow close to it.

That’s a lot different from Cape, where the SEMO campus is nowhere near the shopping areas and St. Louis is an easy two-hour drive. The university and town treat each other with benign neglect.

What’s with the pointing thing?

So, what’s with the pointing gesture thing that shows up in so many pictures. It’s something I’ve not run into before.

Monday morning, I showed up at a local diner for breakfast. There was a blonde at the table across from me who must have been one of those who attended a Sunday night party because I could see her eyeballs throbbing all the way across the room. I think if a server had dropped a tray of plates behind her, her head would have exploded.

Interestingly enough, the streets were quiet and almost deserted Monday night. I guess even OU students can stand only such much partying.

June 24, 2014June 24, 2014

Arthur Mattingly Brought History to Life

When Jim Stone headed off to Ohio University, he and I would trade audio tapes instead of letters. It’s almost painful to listen to the two of us half a century later, but I was playing part of one the other day and heard myself describing my history prof: “He’s talking when he walks into the room, and he’s still talking when the bell rings and people are walking out.”

That was Arthur Mattingly, one of the best profs I had at SEMO or Ohio University.

Founded historic preservation program with Dr. Nickell

The Missourian had a story in 2006 saying that Dr. Mattingly and Dr. Frank Nickell were being recognized for founding SEMO’s historic preservation program 25 years earlier. A 1973 article he wrote does the best job I’ve ever read in explaining the value of historic preservation and how “old” doesn’t always translate into valuable.

Taught history in present tense

One of the things I liked about him was that he delighted in debunking all those myths about history that we had been taught from grade school on. His accounts of battles were told in the present tense. He didn’t dwell on dates and troop movements, he made you feel like the enemy was going to come up over that rise any minute.

He, John C. Bierk, and Fred Goodwin are three SEMO profs I remember well.

Things are going to slow down here

I got a call from a perky and squealing Curator Jessica this morning. A grant we had applied for to put on a week-long workshop in Athens, Ohio, in August was approved. Since I really hadn’t expected it to get funded, I drug my feet on preparing for it.

I have to pull together an update for my Smelterville project by July, figure out what I’m going to do convince a bunch of amateur photographers that shooting pictures today with history in mind is fun, and knock off my Last Generation project for an Immigration Conference in Altenburg in October.

To get everything done, I’m going to have to throw some babies out of the lifeboat. I can’t give up food, sleep and afternoon naps, so it’ll be blog posts that go splash. I may plug in re-runs so you don’t forget about me.

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