A Tale of Two Ships

USS Olympia (C-6) was a protected cruiser in the United States Navy during the Spanish-American War. She is most notable for being the flagship of Commodore George Dewey at the Battle of Manila Bay. The cruiser continued in service throughout World War I and was decommissioned in 1922. Olympia is a museum ship at the Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

However, the old USS Olympia, which many say is the single most significant historic Naval vessel in existence, is in tough shape. Despite $5 million worth of restoration work since 1996, water leaks through the ships rotting hull and deck. The necessary repairs to restore and stabilize the ship are pegged at about $13 million. The ship hasn’t been in dry dock since 1945. It needs a lot of work.

The ship hosts some 45,000 visitors a year, but the bridge deck and pilot house are closed to the public during inclement weather.

Seaport museum officials are looking at options for the ship, including a major fundraising drive to restore it. But the ship’s future is uncertain at best.


SS United States is a passenger liner built in 1952 for the United States Lines and designed to recapture the trans-Atlantic speed record from the British and serve as a possible troop carrier. Built at a cost of $78 million, the ship remains the largest ocean liner built entirely in the United States, the fastest ocean liner to cross the Atlantic in either direction, and it remains current holder of the Blue Riband, given to the passenger liner crossing the Atlantic Ocean in regular service with the record highest speed.


Today the United States is docked on the Philadelphia waterfront slowly deteriorating day after day. The ship is fenced off and no one is allowed to visit it but you can see interior pictures (here).

It was reported in March 2010 that scrapping bids for the ship are being collected. Norwegian Cruise Lines, in a press release, noted that there are large costs associated with keeping United States afloat in her current state—around $800,000 a year—and that the company was actively seeking a "suitable buyer".

A buyer that will scrap the ship and turn it into razor blades.

SS United States website

Time waits for no man.

Proud Parent and New Pet

While I was in the Florida Keys, it rained a couple days so making the best of it, I stopped into the Turtle Hospital in Marathon to look at the sea turtles.

The Turtle Hospital was opened in 1986 with four main goals: 1) rehabilitate injured sea turtles and return them to the wild, 2) educate the public through outreach programs to local schools, 3) conduct and assist with research which aids the sea turtles, and 4) work toward environmental legislation which makes the beaches and water safe and clean for sea turtles.

Its a big job.

The Turtle Hospital has a large Rehabilitation Facility within an easy walk of the Hospital. The chain link enclosure is covered in shade cloth for the comfort of both volunteers and turtles. They have a large 100,000 gallon salt water pool (formerly the swimming pool for motel guests) and 19 individual tanks ranging in size from 150 to 800 gallons each. There are some nice pictures (here).

You can see some of the patients swimming in the "rehab" pool on a webcam (here!).


It's both sad and reaffirming to see - sick or injured sea turles - swimming around and around and around - hopefully many of them will recover and be released back into the wild.

If you are interested in supporting this effort - there is an on-line store where you can purchase membership, books, clothing, jewelry and other interesting Sea Turtle-related things (here)

I've been doing a bit of "pay it forward" ever since Christmas time - when I was literally made totally speechless by someone's unexpected act of kindness. So, in continuing with this - I've adopted a turtle.

I had a few choices - and you can see them (here) After reading each of their histories and visiting with them in the rehab facility, I picked a Green Sea Turtle by the name of April - who is nearly blind after loosing her right eye to fibropapilloma tumors while only having shadow vision in the left eye.

"Fibropapilloma looks like large warts with a "cauliflower" texture that grow on all the soft tissue areas of a sea turtle, including the eyes and mouth, it can also grow through the carapace and plastron. Unfortunately in some cases the growths or tumors, as they are also called, can grow internally on the lungs, kidneys, liver and intestines."

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My dad, who is doing quite well these days, walks every day when the weather cooperates, in the Washington Crossing Park "run" by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission with a group of a dozen "dog walkers".

One of the walked doggies is brand new -


Meet Frankie the German Shepard Poopy!

My parents are getting (yet) another dog this weekend and will be picking up one of Frankie's siblings. I'm sure I'll have some pictures (and maybe they'll have picked a name too) for you next week.

Woof!

Here and There

The past few days have been rather crazy - first my car has some heater-related problems which haven't been solved yet - and then I get word that my Grandfather and Step-Grandmother were in the hospital - all the while I was enroute to my Parent's place "down the shore" in order to perform some spring cleaning work.

I wasn't sure I was coming or going or even where to, half the time.

My Grandfather had some blood transfusions as his red blood cell count had dropped to alarmingly low-levels and is expected to come home today - but my Step-Grandmother is in the intensive care unit with fluid in the lungs and massive disorientation (I've not heard yet what they think caused any of this).

I went down to the shore feeling a bit unsettled - but figured I might was well "do something" - and the weather was glorious. I took three walks - one to the southern-most end of Long Beach Island, New Jersey where - believe it or not - a big crowd of the hardy folks (fools?) were surfing.


This is the view from "South Beach" - the skyline is Atlantic City - about 12 miles further down the coast, nearly hidden in the massive sparkle the sun is putting on the surf.


Spring cleaning down the shore often involves shoveling and sweeping windblown sand from every nook and cranny. I also bundled up all the remaining trash, rinsed out the cans, raked up the lawn, smoothed out the pebble-stone hardscaping, trimmed some butterfly bushes, dug up some yucca bushes my dad insists are "weeds", and in general just tidied things up and puttered about.

I then took another walk to enjoy the sun - this time into the historic district - looking for a house that was once a store owned and operated by the father of a man that was a neighbor.

The neighbor was the town of Beach Haven's mail-carrier for many years and he was a very nice white-haired man that always had a smile for me and my younger brothers when we were growing up. He retired back in the mid-1980s and told me a story about his father who had a grocery store "over by the Engleside Hotel".

Apparently his father owned the house the mailman lived in - and in the summers, rented it to vacationers for some extra money while the mailman and his family lived over the grocery store. The family closed the store in 1963 when the mailman's father retired (or died - I don't remember which).

I decided to find the old grocery store. The only problem was the Old Engleside Hotel that the mailman spoke of, was torn down in 1943! So I walked to the bookstore and found a book with the town's history in it and learned the address of the old hotel. With the street address in my head and my camera in my hand I walked up and down about 20 blocks just looking at things.


...and then I found it. The building really doesn't look promising doesn't it? But wait, under the decrepit porch roof I noticed something -


The old grocery store's windows were intact!


I suddenly remembered seeing grocery store "stuff" like an old cash register and brass scale through these windows when I walked to Sunday School with my Grandmother back in the late 1960's.


I couldn't see through the windows this past weekend - but I was left wondering what, if anything, might remain of the grocery store behind the front door?

PBS and Ex-Planet Pluto

Early this morning, in the week hours of darkness, I was unable to sleep and decided watching a show on PBS might have some sleep-inducing ability. Well, as it turned out, I found myself fascinated by the show... It was a discussion centered on the ex-planet Pluto and why it should (or shouldn't) be considered a planet. I found that discussion to be hair-splitting and nearly fell asleep - but then they got into how Pluto was discovered and why it was considered a planet in the first place...

Around the year 1900, American astronomer Percival Lowell, among others, made calculations of where a ninth planet (Planet X) might be.

The search for this planet was inspired by the fact that the discovery of the eighth planet, Neptune, did not completely account for the irregularities in the orbit of the seventh planet, Uranus and in fact, observations of Neptune itself showed it did not orbit as expected.

Between 1905 and his death in 1916, Lowell and his colleagues made telescopic sweeps of the area where the "undiscovered" planet was thought to be, but they were unable to find it.

Over a decade later, Lowell’s successors at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, installed a new telescope and appointed young astronomer Clyde W. Tombaugh to continue the search.

Tombaugh painstakingly photographed the sky and compared pictures taken several days apart, looking for moving objects. On February 18, 1930, he found something that had moved against the background stars, compared with the plates he had taken on January 21, 23, and 29. The announcement of the discovery of "Planet X" was made on March 13, 1930.


Since the ninth planet moves farthest from the light of the sun and farther into the darkness of the space between the stars, it was named Pluto (whose name happens to begin with the initials of Percival Lowell), after the Roman god of the underworld, lord of the dead, and giver of wealth.

The naming of Pluto is a story by itself. A few months after its discovery, the planet was officially named Pluto which was originally suggested by Venetia Burney, an 11-year-old schoolgirl in Oxford, England.

But... Pluto wasn't not a well-received name because....

"Pluto Water" was a very successful trademark for a strongly laxative natural water product which was very popular in the United States. The water's high native content of mineral salts generally made it effective within one hour of ingestion, a fact the company played up in their promotional literature.


Pluto Water was bottled in French Lick, Indiana. It was advertised "America's Laxative" with the slogan "When Nature Won't, PLUTO Will". The bottle and many advertisements featured an image of the devil.


The location of the spring was originally known as the French Lick Springs Hotel, a grand resort that catered to those who came to partake of the advertised healing properties of the town's sulfur springs. The first hotel was opened in 1845 by William A. Bowles and was an immediate success. The original hotel burned in 1897, but the resort was rebuilt on an even grander scale by new owner Thomas Taggart, mayor of Indianapolis and chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Taggart convinced the Monon Railroad to build a spur directly to the hotel grounds with daily passenger service to Chicago. The rich and famous were guests during the heyday of the resort, including Franklin D. Roosevelt (who announced his candidacy for president at the 1931 National Governors' Conference there), Ronald Reagan and numerous others.

The spring water known as Pluto Water was bottled at a plant across the street from the hotel for use on the property and for commercial distribution.

I finally fell asleep thinking about French Lick, and a couple people I knew that lived there. John Jopete Anderson and Larry Bird.

I suppose both John and Larry were always "regular" and somehow, I think ol' Jopete would have loved to have a bottle of Pluto Water hanging around - if only to look at the label from time to time.