Wednesday, November 23, 2011

A Day in Amish Country, Tennessee

!±8± A Day in Amish Country, Tennessee

With a day off on an unusually warm Good Friday and nothing to do, I packed my camera bag and drove off to Etheridge, Tennessee, a large Amish settlement in the middle of absolutely nowhere. My intentions were somewhat sacrilegious, as I intended to get some great shots of Amish children at play and the grownups at leisure during their Holiday. What I found was completely opposite of what I had expected.

I drove for what seemed hours off a back road of the Interstate just outside of Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. Surrounded by fields of yellow canola sprouts, the latest trend for agricultural Tennessee, I finally sited the familiar horse and buggy crossing sign to let me know that I was on the right track to locating the settlement. I turned off one country road only to go down another, winding through miles of fields dotted with random dilapidated red barns. The roads became tapered and less fitted for modern locomotives as I wound through the fields. After about an hour, I drove through mounds of horse patties and found myself in the middle of Amish country. A cow with a bell roped around his her neck stared me in the face from her stance in the middle of the road. Parking my car to not offend the livestock, I decided to walk and stretch my legs.

Along the street, I came across quiet clusters of Early American two-story style homes, with wide porches and stoops. Every house was painted white with silver tin roofs and unadorned windows. There wasn't a chair on any porch or a flower to be seen in the gardens. The only apparent decorations were clotheslines full of drying clothes across the porches. Rows of gourds were strung high from the rooftops to every barn, like strings of party lights, except the gourds were for the purpose of drying and re-selling. Each house had a well pump dug as close to the front door as possible. Random man powered farm equipment rested in the front yards, abandoned by the working hands for Holiday. But most important, not a person was seen anywhere. I had drove miles to come across an Amish ghost town!

Without the prospects of photographing people, I settled on the next best thing, the farms. To the left of the first cluster of houses, there was a large red barn in pristine condition, very unlike our "English" dilapidated barns commonly found in any part of Tennessee. Turning the corner to the entrance dirt road, I spotted my first opportunity. A new colt with his stout mother, apparently a well fed work horse, which was spending her happy day in the sun licking her new colt. The colt was so new it wobbled on unsure legs that seemed much too long to support his trunk. What was even better; at the end of the road, a closed sign was hung over the hand drawn horse and tack shop sign, directly in line with the shot I planned to take. Unusual signs such as this one add great character to photographs.

The first rounds of shooting was interrupted with an abrupt "Hey you!" coming from someplace near the barn. I looked around for the caller but no avail. Next I heard "No pictures, please!" from the barn. Like a surrendered soldier, I laid out my camera on the ground before me and held up my hands to indicate that I was unarmed. What would happen next is probably beyond the Amish code of conduct.

An elder Amish man, whose name not mentioned for protected privacy, with an unkempt beard, dark slacks with matching suspenders, and a plain light blue colored shirt appeared from behind the barn door like ghost of the past. He quickly informed me of my choice of actions in a thick accent. Referring to me as an "English," he told me either I can take up my camera and be escorted from the grounds or put it away and be shown around. I immediately agreed on the latter and was told I'd be picked up 'round my car. While a horse was being tied to a black buggy, I put my camera bag away and climbed into the cramped buggy moments later.

The first thing to notice while in this buggy was the hard seat. Next is the horse smell that one could only imagine how much worse it could get on a hundred degree day. Especially while wearing such hot and heavy clothing. But listening to the clopity-clop of the horses trot along the dirt roads at ten miles an hour down an absolutely picturesque valley, without an electric pole in sight, one could also imagine the tranquil lure of this lifestyle. I was out to understand it. About halfway down the road, opposite of where I had started, a car slowly drove past. The horse that led our buggy spooked and bucked against the reins, and for one second I began to think that maybe this wasn't such a great idea. The Amish man seemed to have things under control and talked the horse back into calm.

On the way down the road, he explained to me that the settlement came from Ohio in the early nineteen-forties, and was Swartzentruber Amish, and older sect of Amish that perhaps held on to traditions more tightly than others. It was started out of just four families and now the community held two hundred adults. Without the help of an outside court council or police force, the Amish man explained to me that there were six different deacons over so many families within the community, or church, in which the people went to with any sort of problem or dispute. The deacon, from what I came to understand, kept the people of the community in order, from the kinds of hats worn to the color of dresses made. How can you tell a deacon who was over the community? The brim of his straw hat is slightly larger than the standard worn by all male members of the community.

Along the way, a small bare foot girl of about six years old walked into the street from one of the bare white houses. Eyeing me suspiciously from beneath her bonnet, I asked about the children. There were a total of six school houses, narrow buildings with four windows on the sides and one square door in the front over a three step stoop. Kids went to school just several months out of the year, and only completed eight grades. Teachers were appointed from within the community to teach the basics of reading, mathematics, and writing. After the eighth grade, the children went to work on the farms. There was no reading of novels, no philosophy, no arts, and no playing with plastic toys. If a child was lucky, they had a faceless doll made from rags. All kids walked to school when it was in session.

The Amish man told me his two boys; one eight and the other ten ran the family's saw mill. Young boys worked for neighboring English farms or doing roof work and carpentry. They kept a whopping twenty-five percent of what they brought home while the rest went to the family. I wondered if this was the same as child exploiting, but didn't find it appropriate to ask. Oh, and that coming of age tradition of Rumspringa that we so often hear about, is not practiced by older sects of the Amish such as this community.

Kids are kept close to home. So close, that even after marriage, it is normal for the daughters family to build an adjoining house to her father's house to help get the new family started and vice versa. New son in- laws are often new workers of her family's farm. And adjoining means just that, a large two story white country house connected directly to the parent's house by a covered wooden porch.

All of the house structures look exactly the same, white, two-story, one water pump beside the porch, no curtains, and a tin roof. Only the narrow covered porch connecting another house indicated that the particular family inside had an older daughter that married. Some of the houses had a bell that would be rung every afternoon for dinner. Anything that promoted leisure seemed to be left out and forgotten about. However, when asked, the Amish man told me it is common for them to shop at Wal-Mart for bed mattresses, tie them to the roofs of their buggies, and cart them home. Wal-Mart had a trough to accommodate Amish horses. I wondered why the Amish wouldn't be allowed modern technology, yet Wal-Mart was ok? It seemed a grave contradictory.

Somewhere, a bell rang across the fields. This was the hour of visitation, the Amish man explained to me. Church was held at a relative's house that evening and the young people were able to make visitations. Each Sunday, church services were hosted at a different house. But church would be held that evening for Good Friday. It was easy to tell which house church would be at, wooden planks would be stacked high on the porch for people to sit on. All at once, young men in small two wheeled black buggies led by the best looking bred horses that I ever saw raced down the streets as fast as they could go, eager to get were they were headed to. Some had young women passengers, presumably wives or sisters, wearing round sixties sunglasses, a hint of the modern world we occupied. The Amish appeared very into family life and community, but only if you were Amish. None of them acknowledged my presence. Just as fast as they came around, the community turned into the previous ghost town I drove into as the dust kicked up from road settled.

We rounded a bend that took me back to my car, indicating that the Amish man had enough of my touring his life. I wanted to know one more thing before I would exit his buggy and enter back into the twentieth century, why did they decide to wear their hair, and beards, and hats and dresses in such a manner? The answer I got, it was what their father's have done before them. No one really knew how such a tradition was set previously. Or maybe, the community has been taught to never question things.

It was a good trip into the past, but I was glad to rejoin the twentieth century of cars, good books, and times of leisure to enjoy them.


A Day in Amish Country, Tennessee

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Monday, November 14, 2011

Gray Squirrel kills abode finch (no sound)

Video of a gray squirrel killing a house finch. I found the carcass under the feeder. When I went back to review the archived video from my web cam I was shocked by what I saw. This was behavior I had never seen before. [July 2, 2009 - 2:56 pm]

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Thursday, November 3, 2011

Robert Ripley, the Believe it Or Not! Icon, Created His First Believe it Or Not! Cartoon in 1918

!±8± Robert Ripley, the Believe it Or Not! Icon, Created His First Believe it Or Not! Cartoon in 1918

Robert Ripley's life was an unbelievable adventure. For 35 years he explored the uncanny and witnessed the amazing. His Believe It or Not! cartoon teemed with incredible - but proven - phenomena every day. Called a liar more often than any man who ever lived, Ripley never failed to establish the truth of every assertion. He was a world traveler who visited more than 200 countries seeing places few people had even heard of, from the tombs of the Ming Emperors in China, to a town called Hell in Norway!

Ripley was an artist, a reporter, an explorer, and a collector. The stories he gathered, illustrated by Ripley himself, would later appear in his popular newspaper cartoon feature Believe It or Not! Today the venerable cartoons are still enjoyed by millions of readers worldwide.

Wherever Ripley went, he searched for the odd and the unusual. In his quest, he documented the customs and beliefs of many ancient and exotic modern civilizations. Whenever possible he brought home artifacts from his journeys, which today form the heart of the greatest collection of oddities ever assembled. Today these artifacts can be seen in Ripley's Believe It or Not! museums around the world. Every year millions of people visit these museums to take part in an adventure, one in which they experience first hand the incredible world of Robert Ripley!

The Ripley story begins on Christmas Day 1890 when Robert Leroy Ripley was born in Santa Rosa, Calif. A talented, self-taught artist, Ripley sold his first drawing to Life magazine when he was only 18. Ripley was also a natural athlete, and his first love was baseball. He played semi-pro ball for several years, but his dream of pitching in the Big Leagues was shattered when he broke his arm during a New York Giants spring training game. After the accident, Ripley was forced to take his art more serious; his hobby would become his occupation and his life work. He worked first for newspapers in San Francisco but left for the bright lights of New York City during the winter of 1912.

The Birth of an American Axiom
On a slow day in December 1918, while working as a sports cartoonist for the New York Globe, Ripley created his first collection of odd facts and feats. The sketches, based on unusual athletic achievements, were initially entitled "Champs and Chumps," but after much deliberation, Ripley changed the title to Believe It or Not! The cartoon was an enormous instant success. The rest is history and the phrase Believe It or Not! is used by just about everyone - just about every day.

Starting in 1914 with a trip to Belgium and France, travel became Ripley's lifelong obsession. During his career he visited 201 countries, circumnavigating the globe twice, and traveling a total distance equal to 18 complete trips around the world.
In 1922-23 he traveled to the Orient, crossing through Japan, China, Malaysia, the Philippines and India. He wrote about what he saw and experienced, and his "diary" was published back home in syndicated daily installments.

Ripley felt particularly drawn to China. He found Chinese culture to be fascinating, and he adopted many Chinese customs. For most of his life he preferred to entertain dressed in Chinese robes and he typically served his guests elaborate Chinese feasts. At one point early in his career he signed his name "Rip Li" and later in his life he acquired an authentic Chinese junk, which he used as his pleasure craft and it became his home away from home.

Ripley was nicknamed "the Modern Marco Polo" by the Duke of Windsor and his travels took him to the four corners of the world. On one trip alone, he crossed two continents and covered 24,000 miles - 15,000 miles by air, 8,000 miles by ship and more than 1,000 miles by camel, donkey and horse!

70 Years of Book Publishing
Ripley's early cartoons, a collection of oddities found on his journeys, were first published in book form by Simon & Schuster in 1929. Believe It or Not! by Ripley, sold more than 500,000 copies and was on the bestseller list for months; it would stay in print for nearly 40 years. Today, if all the Believe It or Not! books ever published - well over 100 titles - were stacked one upon another, the total number of books sold would be more than 300 times as tall as New York City's Empire State Building!

In 1929, after signing on as a syndicated cartoonist with King Features, part of the William Randolph Hearst newspaper empire, Ripley's salary rocketed from ,000 to 0,000 a year. A legend was born and Ripley would soon become the first cartoonist to make a million dollars a year.

At the height of his popularity, the Believe It or Not! feature was carried in more than 360 newspapers around the world, was translated into 17 different languages and had a daily readership of 80 million people!

The response from his readers, many demanding proof of his unbelievable statements, was equally incredible. One cartoon alone, published in 1927, in which Ripley stated that Charles Lindbergh was not the first man to cross the Atlantic by plane, drew 170,000 letters! This cartoon made Ripley so famous that postmen forwarded his mail even without a full address. Envelopes simply addressed, "To Rip" or "To the World's Biggest Liar" were all delivered. One man even sent a letter written in a microscopic code that could only be deciphered with a magnifying glass. The bizarre forms of addresses and the sheer volume of mail was enough for the U. S. Postmaster General to issue a decree in 1930: "...mail to Ripley would not be delivered if the address was incomplete or indecipherable." The law had little effect, however; "Rip-o-mania" was sweeping the world.

A Ripley contest to find unbelievable stories that ran in more than 100 newspapers for two weeks in 1932 drew 1,750,000 entries. A decade later, a contest dedicated to the war effort brought in 19,712,213 responses! A survey conducted in 1936 found that Ripley's cartoons were the most popular feature in any paper and had a greater readership than even front-page news. Ripley himself was voted the most popular man in America, above movie stars, sports figures and even President Roosevelt.

Three linguistic experts and a dozen researchers worked with painstaking precision to verify every unbelievable fact. His huge collection of artifacts, most of which are still in Ripley's Believe It or Not! museums across the world, was assembled when he began bringing items back from his extensive travels just to prove the authenticity of his bizarre and outlandish claims.

Ripley's fans included the rich, the poor, the famous and people of all ages. His most famous fan, however, was a man who made it his life's mission to try and prove Ripley a liar! Wayne Harbour, a postal worker of Bedford, Iowa, was an intrepid letter writer. For 26 years he wrote letters to people featured in the Believe It or Not! cartoon attempting to find factual errors. Believe it or not he wrote more than 22,000 letters, but never received a single reply that contradicted one of Ripley's statements! Upon his death, Harbour's widow donated his vast collection of correspondence - more than 80 cartons - to the Ripley archives. Today Harbour's life work has been preserved and can be seen in Ripley museums around the world.

Another famous Ripley fan, who would later settle in Ripley's hometown of Santa Rosa, Calif., was the late Charles Schulz, creator of Charlie Brown and the "Peanuts" cartoons. Charles Schulz's first ever-published drawing, a sketch of a certain dog that would later become famous as "Snoopy," appeared in the Believe It or Not! cartoon panel of Feb. 22, 1937.

The Broadcasting Pioneer
During the 1930s and 40s Ripley's stories of the odd and unusual entered millions of living rooms across America via radio. Ripley pioneered "on-location" broadcasts from the strangest locales and performed many "firsts" in the history of radio. He was the first person to broadcast from ship to shore, the first to broadcast from Australia to America, and the first to broadcast around the world simultaneously using a corps of translators. He interviewed a handler of poisonous snakes from a snake pit in Florida and a daredevil skydiver in Georgia while falling 12,000 feet before opening his parachute. He went behind Niagara Falls and to the bottom of a shark tank.

He went underground in the Carlsbad Caverns, down the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, and he even dragged his staff and equipment to the North Pole! He interviewed accident survivors, baseball legends, politicians, and on one Christmas Eve he even interviewed a man named Santa Claus and a woman named Merry Christmas!

In 1938 on perhaps his most memorable show, he described for his listeners the dramatic, live performance of one Kuda Bux, an Indian firewalker. A 20-foot ditch was dug in a parking lot outside Radio City in New York and filled with fiery coals. Twenty-four hours later with the temperature inside the pit at 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, Kuda Bux walked across the pit not once, but twice! When examined by Ripley and a team of doctors it was found that Bux had absolutely no injuries.

During other broadcasts Ripley recalled his adventures in exotic lands and the curious people he encountered. His radio show, which started as a weekly show but at times was aired nightly, was one of the most popular radio shows of all time and was on the air for 14 consecutive years (1930-1944).

World War II changed the world of radio and ushered in the age of television. Ripley, always a risk-taking pioneer, was up to the challenges of the exciting new medium. In 1948 he created a television pilot based on one of his most popular radio shows, the story of Grimaldi the melancholy clown. The pilot was a great success and led in 1949 to Ripley being given one of the very first regularly scheduled weekly television series.

The show featured Ripley interviewing celebrities and subjects of Believe It or Not! cartoons. It also showed him drawing his cartoons and discussing his favorite unusual artifacts. Some segments were filmed in his palatial BION Island mansion and others were filmed in his downtown Manhattan studio apartment. The grind of a weekly TV show soon took its toll, however, and Ripley had a heart attack on air during Episode 13. He died in a hospital three days later. Ironically his last broadcast concerned the origins of the military death song "Taps."

The show continued after his death with guest MCs for two full seasons. Believe It or Not! has returned to television in three different formats since, including the latest incarnation beginning in January 2000 starring Dean Cain and Kelly Packard, a series that ran for four seasons and produced 88 different episodes.

Ripley the Collector
Ripley was married briefly early in his career to a Ziegfeld Follies girl, but by the 1930s he was living up to his reputation as America's most eligible bachelor, a man about town who thrived on activity and relished all things strange. His personality in many ways was as unusual as the stories and objects he collected.

A colleague once said that "the most curious object in the [Ripley] collection is probably Mr. Ripley himself." He drew his cartoon every day between 7 a.m. and 11 a.m. - often drawing it upside down! He dressed in mismatching bright colors and patterns (his best friend Bugs Baer once described his wardrobe as looking like a paint factory had exploded in his closet), wore bow ties and two-toned spat shoes.

Ripley was a contradiction. He collected cars, but never learned to drive and though he regularly used complicated sound and recording equipment for his broadcasts, associates noted that he was afraid to use the telephone for fear he would be electrocuted! He was a non-swimmer, but he lived on an island and had an odd assortment of boats, including dugout canoes from Panama, a gondola from Venice and an authentic Chinese junk, that he named Mon Lei.

His museum-like homes, one in Florida and two in New York, were filled with artifacts he brought back from his travels. At his palatial 34 room BION (Believe It or Not!) Island home in Mamaroneck, New York, there were hundreds of Chinese statues and wall hangings, Indian totem poles, a huge collection of beer steins, weapons of torture from Germany, colossus Oriental bronze guardian statues, a 20-foot pet python and even Cyclops, his beloved one-eyed dog.

The 1930s and 40s were the Golden Age of Ripley. The phrases "Believe It or Not!" and "That's one for Rip" had become a part of everyday speech. In small towns and big cities across North America people filled movie theaters and vaudeville halls to hear his lectures and to see his films. Starting in 1931, Ripley created 23 of the earliest sound movie shorts for Vitaphone Pictures, later owned by RKO.

Virtually self-educated, he was the author of three best selling books, the holder of three honorary PhD titles from esteemed colleges, and a millionaire to boot! The shy young man born of poor farmers in a small town in California had become a celebrated public figure - a rock star of his era.

In 1933 nearly two million people visited Ripley's first "Odditorium" at the World's Fair in Chicago. Inside the museum were dozens of Ripley's famous cartoons and hundreds of strange artifacts from every corner of the globe, like human bone outfits from Tibet, medieval chastity belts from Europe, and the featured exhibit, an amazing life-size self-portrait of Japanese artist Hananuma Masakichi who created his own image for his fiancée after learning he was ill with tuberculosis. The sculpture, consisting of hundreds of tiny interlocking pieces of wood so skillfully dovetailed and joined as to avoid detection, is anatomically correct down to the smallest detail and includes the artist's own hair and fingernails.

Amongst the rarest curiosities in the collection of unbelievable artifacts was a pair of shrunken heads from Ecuador, one of which Ripley received in the mail with a note saying:

"Please take good care of this. I think it is one of my relatives!"

What was once a common practice amongst the Jivaro Indians of Ecuador, the shrinking of human heads was a ritual that had been handed down from one generation to another. The heads of slain enemies were valued as war trophies and symbols of bravery. When a fighter killed his enemy, the victim's head was cut off. The skin was then peeled away from the skull and hot stones and sand were poured into the cavity. The head was sewn shut and boiled in herbs until it shrunk to the size of a fist. It was then smoked over an open fire to darken and harden it while ceremonial dances, songs, and feasts were performed-often for as long as three days.

In addition to artifacts, the first odditorium also featured a wide assortment of the strangest live performers ever gathered under one roof, characters like Alfred Langevin who could blow up balloons with his eyes, Joe Laurello, "the Human Owl," who could twist his head 180 degrees, and Sam Simpson who could put a baseball in his mouth and sing at the same time!

The first "odditorium" was such a success that throughout the 1930s traveling trailer shows would appear in Detroit, St. Louis and Washington D.C. and permanent shows would be the hits of world's fairs and expositions at San Diego, Dallas, Cleveland, San Francisco and ultimately on Broadway in New York City in 1939. The first permanent Ripley museum opened in St. Augustine, Fla. in 1950, a year after Ripley died.

When he died, thousands lined the streets of New York to watch as his body was sent by rail back to his native California. But Ripley's legacy is still alive and well today in newspapers, books, museums, TV shows, film, on the web AND in one of the most popular and oft repeated phrases in the English language: Believe It or Not!


Robert Ripley, the Believe it Or Not! Icon, Created His First Believe it Or Not! Cartoon in 1918

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