Category Archives: Politics

Book Review: War Diaries by Volodymyr Gurtovy

My friend Volodymyr “Wlad” Gurtovy, US7IGN, has published a book about his experiences living in Kyiv, Ukraine, in the middle of a war. Wlad, like me, is an attorney, and lived a middle-class existence similar to mine, until Russia invaded eastern Ukraine in 2014. He and his family then relocated to Kyiv, but with Russia’s 2022 invasion, he was once again in the middle of the war. His wife and teen son and daughter evacuated to Poland, where they were able to find an apartment, thanks in part to the generosity of friends in America and elsewhere.

He remained behind, partly because he was prohibited by law from leaving, but mostly because he felt the need to stay behind and defend his native land.

The most compelling part of his book is his account of the mundane details of life in the middle of a war. Wlad lives in a fifth-floor apartment building in the middle of a city of 2.8 million (prewar population). Some days, the supermarkets are open, and some days they are not. The mail continues to go through, but some days, it’s too dangerous to go to the post office to pick it up.  Power, water, and heat are sometimes turned on, but they’re often unavailable. When he needed dental work, he was surprised to find the dental office near his home open, staffed by dental students.  There are even a few accounts of his visits to court on behalf of some pro bono client.  To me, the descriptions of how he navigates this dystopia are fascinating, especially since his life prior to the war wasn’t too different from mine.  Many who follow this blog have an interest in emergency preparedness, and I’m sure they will also find this book compelling.

Of course, since Wlad is a ham, radio is a main character in the story. He gets much of his information from the broadcast radio, and one of his main roles has become that of radio repairman so that others can remain in touch when their radio has problems. He also recounts listening in directly to Russian pilots and both Russian and Ukrainian troops.

As the title suggests, it’s written in chronological format, and you’ll have a hard time putting it down, wondering what’s going to happen the next day.

The book is available at Amazon, as a paperback, hard cover, or Kindle.

If you feel moved to provide additional assistance to Wlad’s family, please see our crowdfunding campaign to help with their needs at GoFundMe or GiveSendGo.

 



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1947 Radio Listings

1947May26RadioListingsSeventy-five years ago tonight in Washington, here were your choices for radio entertainment. Prime-time offerings included Lum ‘n Abner and the Lone Ranger, as well as news commentary from Elmer Davis.  And Benny Goodman appeared on the Victor Borge show.

For those wanting to dig deeper into current events, you could tune in at 8:05 to Senator John L. McClellan and Martin Popper of the National Lawyers Guild discussing whether the communist party should be outlawed. If that was no good, at 8:15, you could tune the dial to Rep. Gerald W. Landis talking about pending labor legislation.

The listings appeared in the Washington Evening Star, May 26, 1947.



1962 Kids’ Table

1962MarPMtableUnless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve noticed that inflation is once again a thing, and prices of just about everything are skyrocketing. But the kids shouldn’t suffer just because politicians can’t get their act together. And if the kids need a nice table, then you can provide them with one at zero cost.

You simply find a cardboard box of sufficient size. (Before you take it, make sure there’s not another victim of the economy living in it.) With a sharp knife (perhaps the Opinel pocketknife we previously reviewed), you simply cut away everything that doesn’t look like a table, as shown in the self-explanatory illustration.

Your parents and grandparents had a lot of interesting stories about how they had fun during the Great Depression, and now your kids will be able to do the same thing. This idea is from the March 1962 issue of Popular Mechanics.



1941 Homemade Toys

1941OctToy1Chances are, the hot new toy that you planned on buying Junior for Christmas is stranded somewhere in a flotilla of container ships off the coast of Long Beach. Maybe they’ll break the logjam before Christmas, but as our Secretary of Transportation had to admit, we probably shouldn’t count on it.

But despite the official concessions of gloom, there’s no reason why ineptitude needs to spoil Christmas. If you get to work now, you can make toys that are far superior to the unobtainium Chinese imports. And for the younger children on your Christmas list, you can’t go wrong with these colorful animals from the October 1941 issue of Popular Science.

All you need is a band saw or jig saw, and a single piece of 3/4 inch plywood 12 by 24 inches. The plywood might be more expensive than usual this year, but it’s probably sourced in North America, and you shouldn’t have much trouble tracking it down. If you don’t already have the saw, keep in mind that they’re also waiting off the coast of California, so you’ll want to get that right away before everyone else gets the same idea.

1941OctToy3Complete plans are found on page 178 of the magazine, which you can read at this link. Instructions are also given for the bases and storage box, as shown below.  The pattern for cutting the animals is shown at left (click on the small image for the complete full-size version).  You simply trace the design onto a piece of 1/2 inch graph paper and use that to cut.  When you’re done, the animals should be painted in bright colors, and the magazine reminds readers to “be sure to use nonpoisonous, washable, enamel” paint.

When finished, the set will keep youngsters happily occupied for many hours. As the magazine points out, the toy teaches how to discriminate between colors, recognize the various animals, develop creative instinct, and rewards the child with a sense of accomplishment, all factors recognized as essential to proper development. Chances are, the Chinese toy doesn’t have all of these advantages.1941OctToy2

 



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1961 Speed Mail

1961AprPESixty years ago, the U.S. Post Office tried something that Popular Electronics, in its April 1961 issue, called “Electronic Speed Mail.” The official name for the service was just “Speed Mail,” but it was an early hybrid of electronic mail (or more accurately, facsimile) and snail mail.

The Post Office Department envisioned having centers in 71 cities strategically located across the country. To write a letter that would be delivered the same day, a sender would write the letter on a special form provided by the post office, taking care to write only within the lines. The form was likened to the special “V-Mail” form of World War II, with which letters were microfilmed stateside and delivered to Army Post Offices where they were printed and delivered, or vice versa. In this case, the message form was sealed and deposited into the mails. At the local post office, it was fed in, still sealed, to a facsimile machine. The machine opened the mail, scanned it, and placed it into a sealed container. After the operator was sure that the message had been properly sent, the batch of message forms was destroyed.

The scanned message was then sent via the Echo 1 satellite to the closest post office to the recipient. There, the message was printed and sealed into a window envelope with only the recipient’s address and return address showing. Again, the entire process took place without human eyes seeing the message.

An example of the message blank is shown below. This one bears a message sent from Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield to Vice President Nixon, late in 1960. (Even though the message was sent crosstown in Washington, it was relayed via Chicago to demonstrate the service’s capabilities.)

When the Kennedy Administration took office, newly appointed Postmaster General J. Edward Day (best known for the creation of the ZIP code) was less enamored with the system, and no further efforts were made to promote it. The Western Union Mailgram service (“the impact of a telegram at a fraction of the cost”) was introduced nine years later in 1970, and allowed rapid mail service. Messages were sent by Western Union to the nearest post office, where they were printed and delivered the same day received.



1941 Inagural

1941InnaguralParade1941Innagural2Eighty years ago today, NBC Radio covered the third inagural of FDR with the help of a 25 watt FM transmitter. During the parade, receivers atop the Washington Monument and the dome of the Capitol. The pickup at the Washington Monument is pictured here, and clearly features a National HRO receiver not unlike the model we previously showed.

This item appeared in the January 27, 1941, issue of Broadcasting, which also carried the item at left detailing the work of radio amateurs from the Washington Radio Club. The hams handled 509 pieces of traffic for Red Cross first aid teams with battery-powered 2-1/2 meter radios.



1920 Voting Machine

1920NovPSA hundred years ago, on November 2, 1920, this gentleman was casting his vote, for either Warren G. Harding or James M. Cox in the 1920 Presidential Election. (I suppose he might have been voting for Eugene Victor Debs, but he doesn’t look like a socialist.)

Whoever he voted for, he cast his vote on a lever-type voting machine, probably manufactured by the U.S. Standard Voting Machine Company. These were commonly in use for many decades thereafter, and when I first voted in 1979, it was in a machine that looked almost like this one. The voter pulled a lever to close the curtain, which unlocked the voting levers. When the voter is finished he (or she, since this was the first election after the ratification of the 19th Amendment) opened the curtain, which caused a counter at the back of the machine to increment for the candidate selected. When the polls closed, the election official unlocked the back of the machine (which locked the levers on the other side) and looked at the count for each candidate.

The picture appeared on the cover of Popular Science, November 1920, and the accompanying article proclaimed that the machines would insure an honest election. The article detailed all of the nefarious things someone could do with paper ballots, and proclaimed that “the machine is honest, and its honesty is fully protected from those who would destroy it.”



The USPS Delivers!

MailTest1We take unwarranted criticism of the U.S. Postal Service very seriously around here. As we reported previously, the Post Office stood ready to serve the nation even after a nuclear war, and during COVID-19 the men and women of the USPS have acted heroically to ensure that the mail goes through. Even when rioters burnt down two post offices in Minneapolis, the Postal Service quickly regrouped to make sure that its customers would continue to receive mail with minimal interruption.

Recently, for political reasons, the USPS has come under intense criticism, the gist of which being that they can’t do anything right. They were allegedly in the process of ripping out all of their sorting machines, and even removing mailboxes. The particular conspiracy theory was that without these sorting machines, they would be unable to deliver millions of ballots. This didn’t make much sense to us, since most ballots in a given locality would all be addressed to the same city or county election office, and wouldn’t require much sorting, by machine or otherwise.

And allegedly, the removal of mailboxes was to prevent voters from sending their ballots. The theory was that a voter would go to a spot where there used to be a mailbox, would see that the mailbox was gone, and then give up in despair. For the theory to work, the voter would have to be too dumb to look for another mailbox, take it to the nearest post office (where they would find a mailbox in the parking lot), give it to their friendly letter carrier, or just take it to the election office themselves. In short, as conspiracy theories go, it wasn’t very plausible, but a lot of people seemed to subscribe to it.

So as an experiment, I decided to test the United States Postal Service. I asked for volunteers on Facebook and NextDoor. I had them send me their address, and I mailed them an honest-to-goodness piece of snail mail. I had ten volunteers, and I asked them to inform me when they received the letter. I mailed the letters from three different locations. Some I mailed from a blue mailbox in front of a local strip mall (one of the boxes that was allegedly being torn out). Some I mailed from the drive-up mailbox in front of my local post office. And some I placed in my own mailbox, and the friendly letter carrier picked them up with the mail.

A small sampling of my letters is shown above. All ten were delivered in a timely fashion. Most of the transit times included a Sunday, but I included it. All ten of the letters were delivered in four days or less. Crosstown letters were delivered in either one or two days (the two day period included a Sunday). I tracked the average speed of each letter (measured by road miles from the center of the two ZIP codes). The slowest traveled an average speed of 0.16 miles per hour (845 feet per hour). That sounds slow, but keep in mind that I dropped it in a box in the afternoon, and there’s no way it could have arrived any earlier than the next day.

The fastest letter got from Minnesota to Maine at an average speed of 19.6 miles per hour. Remember, this included a Sunday, when it presumably didn’t travel at all. It was undoubtedly in multiple trucks during its trip. In my humble opinion, travelling at that speed for a mere 55 cents is an amazing bargain. Letters to Texas and Washington got similar excellent service. The full results are shown in the table below.

All of my letters were addressed by hand, and as my elementary school teachers would attest, my penmanship isn’t the greatest.  But the post office managed to sort them.  And all of the letters I saw had bar codes printed on them.  These would have been printed on the envelopes by an automatic sorting machine, and they are designed to be read by other automatic sorting machines.  These, of course, are the automatic sorting machines that the USPS allegedly ripped out and put on the scrap heap.  But somehow, my letters all made it through one or more of these allegedly non-existent machines.

In short, the criticism of the USPS is unfounded. As they have done throughout the pandemic, as they have done despite civil unrest, they continue to serve their country proudly.

If you’re wondering about the design on some of the envelopes, I copied the design from a 1944 patriotic cover. (You can see that cover and read more about it at this link.)  Just like they do today, during the war, the Post Office Department made sure that they mail went through. I’m sure there were detractors back then, but someone decided to print up some special envelopes to thank their letter carrier for heroic service.

We ought to do the same today.  If you haven’t done so recently, thank your letter carrier for his or her hard work.  And for the workers behind the scenes, you can invest 55 cents and mail them a thank you card.  Just address it to “Postmaster” and your city, state, and ZIP code.  I’m sure it will get pinned up to the employee bulletin board.  They’ve worked hard to serve you, and they deserve your thanks.

MailTest2



Making Use of Outdoor Spaces for Learning

During the current public health emergency, it is important that to the extent humanly possible, everyone should maintain social distancing from everyone other than their own household.  Therefore, most traditional live educational activities cannot be done safely at this time.

I’m not a doctor, but to me the evidence seems obvious that in most cases, the main problem is indoor gatherings.  This New York Times article, for example, discusses the issue, and this WebMD article, discusses the possible role that building air conditioning systems might play in the spread of COVID-19.  Being outdoors does not completely eliminate the possibility of the spread of coronavirus.  But it seems like common sense that it’s a lot safer being outside than being inside a building with other people.  The CDC’s recommendation is that “in many areas, people can visit parks, trails, and open spaces as a way to relieve stress, get some fresh air, and stay active.”

I believe that the use of outdoor spaces is an excellent way to re-start many activities that have been put on hold. For example, I believe that schools should seriously consider the use of outdoor spaces for classrooms. You can read more about that idea at the website of
Green Schoolyards America.  This New York Times article shows how outdoor learning spaces were used by schools during earlier public health emergencies.

Unfortunately, even though some students thrive with distance learning, not all of them do. Whether it’s because of their family situation, a poor internet connection, or just because it’s not their learning style, many students are falling behind both socially and educationally due to the lack of in-person schooling. The use of outdoor spaces can provide these students with a safe place for their education to continue and help stop a new achievement gap.

Similarly, the CDC recommends that communities of faith should consider holding their services outdoors.

I believe the outdoors is a suitable venue for many in-person activities that have otherwise been put on hold.  After months of being isolated, it can be refreshing to see colleagues in person, even if they’re behind a mask and six feet away.

Since I’m in the business of presenting educational programs (namely, continuing legal education programs for attorneys), I decided to take the initiative and see whether my programs could be done outside, so I went ahead and scheduled one in a nearby city park.   I wanted to start with a small group, so I advertised by e-mail to only about 20 attorneys who live in the general area.  The response rate was actually higher than usual, and three attorneys sent an RSVP that they would be attending.  Since I wanted the initial group to be small, I didn’t advertise any further.

I asked all of the attendees to either bring their own chair, or plan to sit on the ground.  The program was paperless.  Ordinarily, I would print the course materials, and there would be a sign-in sheet.  Instead, the course materials were downloaded from the web, and I took attendance at the beginning of the program.  In the course description, I outlined the physical distancing guidelines.

There were a few bugs (including a few literal ones), but overall, I don’t see why larger events can’t be done outside.   The weather was perfect.  It was a sunny day, but as you can see from the photo above, we were able to sit in the shade.  Obviously, this won’t work as well in January in Minnesota, but for much of the year, the weather is suitable.  I announced that this program was going to take place rain or shine, and I don’t think rain would have been much of an issue, if attendees simply brought an umbrella or raincoat.

I did learn a few lessons:

  • Face masks make it harder for people to hear.  I started the program wearing a mask, and I asked whether it made it difficult for them to hear me, and they said that it did.  Since I was standing more than 20 feet away, we decided that it would be best for me to speak without a mask.
  • If we had a larger crowd, it would have been advisable to have a sound system.  In an indoor setting, I can easily speak to 20 or 30 people without a PA system.  But outdoors, my voice doesn’t carry as well, particularly when airplanes fly over or trucks drive by.   Also, if any of the speakers are wearing a mask, the sound system is even more important.
  • Some planning does need to be done for seating.  One attendee didn’t bring a chair and instead sat on the ground.  Apparently, there were enough ants in the park that he had to stand up after 45 minutes.

The outdoor air is not a magic bullet that kills germs.  However, it seems to me that an outdoor location is much safer than corresponding indoor spaces.  At this time, it ‘s probably not safe to go back to business as usual with respect to things such as education and business.  But it seems to me that creative use of outdoor spaces will bring us much closer to normal than we would be able to do with virtual gatherings alone.

In education, for example, some kids simply require in-person instruction.  Some of them thrive learning online, and that’s great.  But I think even occasional in-person sessions might make a huge difference for some kids.  If it’s too risky for them to have their math or English class in a traditional classroom, then it seems to me that educators should at least consider the idea of having those classes outside.

For distance learning, technology is required.  But for outdoor learning, very little technology is necessary.  As my experience shows, a small public address system would be useful.  But other than that, little more than chairs, desks, and a blackboard are required.  If there’s a video to be watched, then the students can watch it at home.  But it seems to me that many kids need some attention where things can be explained in person, so that the teacher has in-person feedback of whether they’re being understood.  That doesn’t require a building–it merely requires a space, and in most cases, an outdoor space will serve the purpose.

I’ll be doing future programs outdoors, and it seems to me that many activities that are normally done indoors, such as meeting with clients, can be safely conducted outdoors.  As the weather gets cooler, being outdoors will be less suitable.  Therefore, some of my future programs will be in a drive-in format where participants can listen on their car radios.



The Class of ’20

23June1920Shown here is the Class of ’20 (1920, that is) who graduated from the Furness School of Philadelphia on this day a hundred years ago, June 22, 1920. These girls are performing the “Welcome to Summer” dance as part of the commencement exercises, and this picture appeared in the next day’s issue of the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger.

Since the school was a junior high at the time, these were probably eighth graders, probably born in about 1906. Their older brothers very well might have gone to war, and we hope that most of them came back to attend the graduation.

A few years after this picture was taken, their families probably got their first radio. They were 23 years old when the stock market crashed, and they lived through the depression as young adults. Then, another war came. They were a little too old to go to war, and most of their children were too young. All of them, boys and girls, undoubtedly fought on the Homefront.

When they were in their 40s, they saw their first television, and probably bought one soon thereafter. They worked hard and retired with more wealth than their parents. A handful of them bought a computer and sent e-mails to their grandchildren. A few of them lived to see 9/11 on their television screen.

Welcome to Summer, Class of ’20.

A few weeks ago, I recorded this message to the Class of 2020: