July 18, 2013

Yearbooks.

So when I feel the need to lose myself in my non-technology-related, but still entirely geeky hobby of my collection of school clocks made by The Standard Electric Time Company, I look at old yearbooks on classmates.com. I mentioned this activity in a blog entry a couple of months ago and this trend is continuing on hot summer nights when my brain is a little too tired to write code.

My have a methodical way of finding old yearbooks to look at; I think of one of the longer roadways in New York State and then using Google Maps, I search each town along the selected roadway to see if there is a corresponding school district. I then see if there are yearbooks available and go to one of the early years, but with a minimum year of 1950. The yearbooks before 1950 are kind of hard to come by and are rather sparse in content; I blame this approach on World War II. Once I determine that the school in question was kind of art-decoish in its design, I look through the pages of these old yearbooks and look for clocks in the background of the hundreds of photos of smiling young (and well groomed) people. I’ll probably find one or two photos with a clock for every dozen yearbooks I look at. 99% of the time the clock just happens to be in the background, but once in a while a school will show a really good shot of a clock as a symbol of the passage of time or something, like this photo of the original master clock from the elementary school I attended, courtesy of the 1952 yearbook (from when it was a K-12 school).

pulaski-master-clock

That clock was found in the main office of the school up until the mid 1950s and I never knew what it looked like until I found that picture in the yearbook. Geek satisfaction.

It’s interesting to see that each school had its own character with the design of their yearbooks. Even though different students planned and coordinated the yearbook for each school year, there is often a strong similarity in the style and content of the photos from year to year. I think it’s because the school probably used the same photography studio or photographer year after year. I’ve also noticed that many schools of that era had grand staircases that were featured prominently in yearbooks, though only one or two that I’ve observed were as ornate as the staircase that was found in my elementary school.

Since I basically pick random schools in the Empire State to look at, once in a great while I might recognize someone as I’m scanning through the pages looking for a clock in the background. For example, one of my elementary school teachers graduated from Lockport High School in 1969 and I just happened to catch a glance of their name as I electronically flipping through the pages. That was kind of cool.

I still haven’t found another school that had the same style clocks that got me interested in collecting these things to begin with, but I’ve seen several close cousins. Maybe the clock from the elementary school in my collection is now officially a one-of-a-kind (since the others were all replaced).

That’d be kind of neat.

Heat.

I always find it humorous that when you drive through Syracuse on the New York State Thruway, you see a snowplow parked in a maintenance yard that says: “Welcome to Central New York — 115-inches Annual Snowfall”, or something like that.

It’s almost 100º degrees today, but then again, it’s mid July.

When it’s January I’m looking forward to the heat. When it’s July I’m looking forward to the cold. If I had to choose one or the other, I’d like long days with cooler temperatures. It’s easier for me to warm up than it is to cool down.

I keep hearing mentions of Global Warming but I remember summer days like this way back in the 80s, so while I think this is a warm spell, I don’t think it’s overly unusual for this time of year. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think the climate is changing, because I really think it is, but I don’t think this part of the world is experiencing anything wildly abnormal at the moment. If it’s like this in September then I’ll start to wonder.

I get concerned when people leave their animals in the car in this weather. I haven’t seen anyone doing that today, but a few weeks ago I saw a dog in a car with the windows open only about 1/4 of the way down and I was concerned for the dog. He seemed like he was OK but I didn’t know how long he would be there. If I saw an animal in serious distress I don’t know if I would be able refrain from breaking the window and helping them out. The one bad thing about a pet has to be the reliance on the human. Sometimes the human isn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier.

A horse and buggy just walked by the parked Jeep.


The buggy was loaded up with boxes of tomatoes from the local market. The Amish man driving the buggy parallel parked the horse and buggy so he could go into the nearby Burger King. He didn’t get anything for the horse but the horse didn’t seem to mind.

I bet it’s hard to pull a buggy in this heat.