11/27/10
Where do you live now? san fernando
How many years were you in the desert? visitor
Are you willing to help with pictures? none
Are you willing to help with stories? none
Comments:
Is Two Sisters (Two Sisters Plus One?) still there?
Matt
11/25/10
Where do you live now? Carmichael, California
How many years were you in the desert? 1951 to 1994 off and on
Are you willing to help with pictures? still looking
Are you willing to help with stories? try and stop me
Comments:
Kilgore Trout was a charecter in Kurt Vonnegut's novels who had all kinds of interesting story ideas that were never adequetely realized because of his limited writing talent. That's pretty much me except my talents at writing fiction are so poor I don't choose to inflict my efforts on others. You will perhaps instead indulge my notion that you could make a really good movie or tv situation comedy about China Lake and environs around 1970. We had the Manson family doing its grocery shopping in Ridgecrest. Mad scientists, the Navy, Indians, crazy prospectors, we could use a Hollywood desert with big sand dunes and circling vultures etc. Some real life stuff like China Lake's work on making it rain on the Ho Chi Minh trail so the North Vietnamese supply trucks would be stuck in the mud could go in there. McHale's Navy would always have a Japanese air raid when things slowed down China Lake the comedy could have missiles going off course and blowing up the captains house or whatever as a comparable plot device. Anyone who can actually write fiction has my blessings to take a swing at it.
Back in the early 70s my friend Bruce Amos had a job running av equipment at Mike Lab. A group of his classmates got to see various films that were lying around. There was The Man From Lox a film designed to encourage military people to be careful with liquid oxygen with a combination of low humor and color pictures of third degree burns. There was also an amusing piece about a young engineering student who was plied with liquor and then assisted in signing up to work on the base. It followed him through the various adventures that led to his fleeing the base. Pretty good stuff!
I used to enjoy stories from the old timers about the terminating winds. The idea was that they'd blow for a few weeks and half the base would be down at personel terminating their employment. My mom described coming in after a weekend trip and finding a line of dust along the bottom of closed windows. There was also the joke about how China Lake operated on the three shift system. One was working, one was at personel signing up to work, and the third was at personel quitting.
After my parents moved to Ridgecrest I had some reason to pull out a built in drawer in the bathroom and I found that it was labeled as a crate of machine gun bullets. The older buildings in Ridgecrest had a high percentage of material salvaged or stolen from the base. Then of course if you were a kid there was a good chance your dad would bring interesting stuff home from work. No names will be named and the statute of limitations is involved here, but sometimes it wasn't really safe stuff. A couple of my dad's former high school students managed to blow themselves up that way. I'd never seen my dad cry before and boy did it get to him.
Tom Lehrer who is a very funny writer of comic songs has one called "The Wild west Is Where I want To Be" about his experiences at Los Alamos. Since my musical talents are even more limited than my talents writing fiction I hope someone out there will do something similar for China Lake someday.
I hope Terry Kokazinski won't mind if I mangle his name, but he had a great post about an article in Life Magazine about China Lake in 1947. He got a copy on ebay or something for $20, but if you're at a college library with back issues you can just photocopy it. Over the years there have been things about China Lake in the press. There were some good artles about China Lake in Aviation Week & space Technology a few months ago for instance.
I had a short stretch working at an alleged gold mine headquartered appropriately enough at the Robber's Roost Cafe. Mark twain said "A mine is a hole in the ground owned by a liar down which you throw money." That was pretty much what was going on there. Glenn Roquemore who was another Burroughs class of 70 graduate and became a distinguished geologist and I believe is now a college president told me that about half of the holes in the ground you see out in the desert were just dug as a prop for a mining swindle with no thought of their being any actual gold. I suppose I should have thought I was helping preserve our western heritage, but since I was probably the person least able to claim I didn't know what was going on I went to the cops.
My graduate studies in geology began with the graduate advisor at UCSB getting all excited about where I came from. It turned out that he loved evaporite minerals and his idea of heaven would have been living in Trona. Now is Trona the town named for trona the mineral or vice versa? My mineralogy wasn't bad by the way, but I first learned that trona was an evaporite mineral when I took the geology Graduate Record Exam. The first question was What is trona? Since they didn't include the place where you were born I figured an evaporite mineral had to be the right answer. The next four or five questions found me clueless, but that good omen at the start kept me going and on my way to a good score.
My father used to ask his students at Burroughs where they were born and about half the time the answer was Trona. That was because a popular obstetrician was on the outs with the Ridgecrest hospital so his patients gave birth in the Trona hospital or because it was a windy road with a few bumps in a car on the way over there.
For those who are geolgically inclined, how long will it be before the valley has a pretty good earthquake? There are a number of faults that could produce a pretty good shake nearby. The strongest earthquake in California's recorded history was probably the 1873 Lone Pine Earthquake on the Sierra frontal fault. The section of that fault west of Ridgecrest didn't break then so that's something to look forward to.
When the Navy was starting the Coso geothermal project there were concerns by the local Indians that it might negatively impact the Coso Hot Springs which had religious significance to them. I believe a document was signed along the lines of how as long as the rivers will flow and the grass will grow the Great White Father In Washington promises that the sacred bubbling mud pots will not suffer any disturbance. Not too long after the plant went online the area started having mud volcanoes, a modest amount of geysering and previously solid areas became dangerous to traverse since you could suddenly find youself hip deep in boiling mud. Just another broken treaty if you know what I mean.
That all got mixed up with the fuss about groundwater in the Indian Wells Valley. The way that developed strikes me as being quite a lot like the attempts to say that global warming isn't a problem. Really fascinating stuff if you like geology.
I'm trying to raise the money to go to a four night star party run by Melbourne amateur astronomers near Ballarat, Australia. When I found out about the event I imediately registered the fact that there was a Ballarat near the valley. Like Randsberg and Johannesberg it was named for a famous gold strike on another continent. The Yellow aster mine actually produced an impressive amount of gold, but nothing compared to its South African namesake.
At some point in my early grade school years we had a lesson about the local Indians in prehistoric times. Sort of like Dumb Old Dick and Jane except the parents were Indians who lived as hunters and gatherers. I particularly liked the one where the girl was frightened by a rattle snake, but dad saved the day by clubbing it and mom cooked it for dinner. Does anyone else recall that locally produced bit of social studies?
Anyway it was cerainly a different time and place. As I think about it in as much as getting ready to fight World War III was a popular activity back then there must be a fair collection of people who grew up at places like Los Alamos and similar facilities run by our allies and enemies. Is there a Russian equivalent to China Lake in Kazakstan? I know there are big Commonwealth test ranges in Australia. So little time and so much trivia to learn.
11/25/10
Where do you live now? Carmichael, California
How many years were you in the desert? 1951 to 1994 off and on
Are you willing to help with pictures? still looking
Are you willing to help with stories? I already have with a few.
Comments:
Bob Hope did a USO show at China Lake in the early 50s. They had a raffle, but they only gave out single tickets. My mom who was a secretary at Burroughs at the time gave hers to her boss so he could take his wife. I tracked down the article on the show in the files of the Rocketeer, but I always wanted to hear from someone who attended the show. They'd be getting on in years, but it would be interesting to hear from anyone who was there.
During the first war in the Persian Gulf they'd often run pictures of cruise missiles slamming into targets and more often than not you could recognize the mountains around China Lake in the background. Similarly today if you pay attention to the background in car commercials you can often recognize the distinctive skyline of the Sierra Nevada west of the Inyokern Airport where many of them are filmed. It's also interesting how much of the scenery around Ridgecrest looks so much like news clips of the fuss in Afghanistan.
When I was going to Burroughs in the late 60s we had at least four teachers who had been in the Peace Corps. My German teacher for three years Jill Rindelaub was a volunteer in Afghanistan. For years I was thinking that it would be interesting to talk to her about whether anything she saw in the early 60s gave her any insight into all the trouble there since. I recently did an internet search and from the web site of a Mankato, Minnesota high school it looks like she died. Too bad! She and Marcia Kornmann who was my German teacher my senior year and Mr. Kirk my junior high German teacher were great teachers despite my considerable ability to not learn a lot of German through laziness and lack of focus.
By the way how many high schools out in the middle of nowhere offered Russian, Latin, German, French, and Spanish? As I stumble through life in my detrminedly monolingual way I still think it was a great thing.
In my first post I mentioned how Aldous Huxley author of Brave New World, pioneer in psychedelics, and member of a great family of English academics and writers visited China Lake around 1953. Here's a bit of his description of the experience from the 1974 biography by Sybille Bedford:
...of twelve thousand inhabitants, mostly P.H.D's, entirely airconditioned , in the middle of the most howling of wildernesses. The whole directed exclusively to the production of bigger and better rockets. It was the most frightening exhibition of scientific and highly organized insanity I have ever seen. One vaguely thought that the human race was determined to destroy itself. After visiting the China Lake research station, one feels quite certain of it. And the whole world is fairly crawling with physicists working three shifts a day ad majorem Diaboli gloriam.
Perhaps not a balanced view of my childhood home, but certainly a colorful perspective on same. My mother found that in the wonderful base library and shared it with me. I thought that possibly Huxley got a VIP tour and I diligently searched for reports on it in the Rocketeer files without success. I believe he just came up for the air show and open house and formed his opinions without an escort of China Lake scientists.
Those who lived near Mirror Lake may be familiar with fairy shrimp. The idea that the little critters could lay eggs that could survive for years awaiting enough rain to set up shop always fascinated me. I was amused that Tom Wolfe in his book about the Mercury astronauts "The Right Stuff" put in a good word for our fairy shrimp's cousins down at Edwards. When I went to college I found a master's thesis on their reproductive strategies which I found quite entertaining.
About 15 years I saw a thing on the news about Air Force people who had manned ICBM bases ready to vaporize parts of the USSR having a friendly get together with folks in Russia who had stood ready to vaporize us. I wonder if the Russians had communities that were similar to China Lake and if it might be possible to arrange a similar get together. Maybe there's a similar web page to High Desert Memories in Russian out there somewhere. Would it be possible to reach out and contact people who shared similar experiences on the other side of the Iron Curtin. I think I'll give it a try.
Around 1970 ABC news had a one hour special about how the Indian Wells Valley was the drug abuse capital of the Universe. Some of my dad's relatives in Michigan saw it and were surprised and mildly concerned. Eric Haseltine was returning in a fatigued state from a science final at Berkeley and found watching it to be a mildly surreal experience. Since most of the people I saw on the streets then and later seemed to be likely to be able to pass a field sobriety test I always felt it wasn't ABC's finest hour, but again we all have our different perspectives.
I knew various geologists who did field work out around the Indian Wells Valley and they would always sing the praises of John's Pizza. I personally always felt that the valley's restraurants especially the Chinese places like Mei Wah compared quite well with what you could find in a large and sophisticated metropolis.
For a number of years my family lived across the street from Mirror Lake so we had a great view of the fireworks shows from our front yard. With volunteer help from the explosive ordinance folks who normally worked on more lethal stuff we got a very impressive show.
A couple of days ago my cat Marvin was startled by a loud car backfire. Marvin never lived in the valley and sadly the cats who slept through sonic booms and huge explosions off in the distance lived out their long lives and couldn't tell Marvin to ignore silly humans making loud noises.
So there's so much to the mosaic that is and was the Indian Wells Valley experience. We all have our own perspectives. Mostly it was a lot of interesting and friendly (if often mildly flawed) people living in an unusual place in unusual times.
11/15/10
Where do you live now? Sacramento county, CA
How many years were you in the desert? 8+
Are you willing to help with pictures? Alas, don't have any
Are you willing to help with stories? As I can think of them
Comments:
Was, just this morning, relating some items about the designer/founder of High Desert Memories, Pat Jones, BHS 1956, to a maternal cousin from Moansterevin, IRE. Wanted to check back in and see if much has changed since the site was passed on the history buff's in Ridgecrest, CA ..
| Anita Szabo & Glen Barnes | Email |
11/11/10
Where do you live now? Lake Elsinore CA
How many years were you in the desert? We just purchased 31 acres there in Kennedy Meadows
Are you willing to help with pictures? yup
Are you willing to help with stories? yup
Comments:
We have been looking for land to build our retirement home off grid and found this area a decade ago, Love everything about it and can't wait to retire and enjoy our golden years there. As we build our off grid home we are posting it on our site www.Offgridngreen.com and hoping to build a website that others can share there Off Grid n Green ideas.
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