There's A Mouse in the Garage

I wonder if Americans realize the important of their garage? To many people the garage is a place to store junk, a place out of sight and out of mind. Something no longer worthy to be in their living space is relegated to a space where the objects don’t have to be viewed on a day-to-day basis.

 My garage has too much stuff but from October to June, it has enough open space for my car. On cold fall and winter mornings, it’s relatively warm, dry and I can commute to my train station for the short ride to Manhattan. The rest of the year I am lazy so my car sits outside and the garage becomes a collector of stuff. Right now I am moving enough stuff around so that one of my sailboat can be moved in and car garage becomes “dry dock.”

But returning to the idea of the American importance of the garage, I present you with this thought. The most amazing things have come out of American garages. Music, for instance, rock and roll specifically. Frank Sinatra did not start out crooning in his garage although he did do his share of summer pool parties, a practice he continued nearly just before becoming a national and then international sensation. Some rock and roll bands start in garages and then move on to pool parties, private parties, roller rinks, bowling allies, and some make it to the rounds of summer fetes, and small town park gazebos. Where would popular music be without the garage band? Think no Buddy Holly, no Bruce Springsteen, Beach Boys, Credence Clearwater Revival and many others too numerous to name here. Rock and roll is American’s gift to the world, a truly unique idea along with America’s invention of jazz.

American garages supplied the world with an aspect of entertainment. I guess it is also fitting that garages are an offshoot of America’s romance and adulation of the automobile. Apparently we were affluent to the point of building structures for our cars. With the wide open spaces of a developing land, we made sure there was enough space for a house and garage. Worldwide, some people are lucky enough to have a roof over their heads and here people don’t appreciate how well-off they are, having a separate structure to house their car, let alone extraneous stuff.

The garage is a place where you can work on your car while it’s raining or snowing. Few people, percentage wise, use a garage to work on their cars. Pop the hood and you’ll notice the engine has been augmented by a confusing tangle of wires and hoses far beyond the simple VW bug, popular in the 60s—fuel injection systems, anti-pollution devises, and power drake fluid tanks. Henry Ford, or rather Charles Duryea, would be astounded by today’s machines.

As if music and the automobile were not the most important and amazing things to come out of a garage, also remember that two teenagers started out conquering the world from the garage: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. There are those detractors who explain, with tinges of extreme envy in their voice, that they borrowed ideas from other people. Agreed. But they synthesized ideas that worked far beyond the individual parts but offering us a more complete whole. You can disparage Apple and Microsoft, but as garage start-ups, they need to be admired, embraced and imitated or used for inspiration.

Personally, my grandfather, Clarence Bowers started building car batteries in his garage. He became universally recognized for his innovations in the early, developmental years of batteries. Eventually, East Penn Manufacturing Company—known as “Deka”—became the largest independent battery manufacturer in the world, and it, too, started in a small abandoned place, in this case a creamery. The idea of starting in a garage inspired Delight Breidegam to use what was at hand, a creamery. He was helped by my grandfather in those formative days. Without Bowers Battery, there might not have been a Deka.

Delight's Deka Creamery

Labor Day in America marks an end to the “mythical” summer. People return from their summer vacations, children go back to school if they aren't already there by now, and the fall cycle of activities start. Once your children are grown up a wonderful thing happens—summer extends to the end of September. Some of the nicest weather is in September in this latitude of North America.
This Labor Day weekend I did probably one of the most iconic of American labors—I painted an antique (built in the 1850s) barn the color red. Think about it—I painted an American barn, barn red. Does it get any more American than that? 
Maybe it is in my blood. The Pennsylvania Dutch built barns to last but more than sturdy structures they were the anchor of their prosperity. As the initial surge of English farmers moved west after depleting a farm's soil, the Germans followed behind, picking up homesteads at rock bottom prices. The first thing they did was build a barn to house their livestock because the livestock was precious to them and vital to their success. The barn was sacred to them. The garage is the modern day barn.

For people who work in garages on their personal project, the heat or cold is immaterial. Great ideas come from there and always will.  Think about this—somewhere in America some kid in a garage is tinkering with the next generation of a detached cursor button—a “mouse.” That may not have been unusual—to have a mouse in a garage—but it may have been the most important mouse.

Treating A Photo

           I am reminded about the famous caution to physicians “First, do no harm.” This is precisely what I am trying to accomplish in this basketball history book, Running With The Greyhounds.

       Examining the photos and finding them well-below the quality I was looking (and hoping) for, I have selected certain pictures I am calling “the money shots.”

       For example, for photos of Hurricane Sandy, the money shot would be the wild mouse roller coaster standing in the surf. I took that shot February 2, 90 days after the storm, ona beautiful, crisp day when police wouldn't let you on the beach and I had only limited access from side streets just off the boardwalk, actually where the boardwalk used to be.

                             The Shore post-Sandy money shot.

       In this book, the money shot is the all-time scoring leader, Jim Lacy. In 1949, he lead the nation in scoring, 2,199 points. He was the first person to break 2,000 points and remember he did it in a time when there were no 3-point shots and freshmen were not allowed to play varsity basketball.

Original photo - cropped - annoying swirls

I have an excellent shot of him scoring against Seton Hall. That particular game was memorable because Loyola and Lacy snapped Seton Hall’s 28-game winning streak. Imagine—a national power gets wrecked by a school of about 600 students. Loyola had a habit in those days beating the big boys—Georgetown, Navy, Villanova, Maryland, La Salle, St. Joe’s,  American U, and Yale, among others.

The money shot, in this case, was photographed through a cellophane covering and there are these light swirls running through it. The author went to the home of 88-year-old Lacy Friday and secured the original. Otherwise I’d be forced to run it. But I was about to pull a sleight-of-hand but running it smaller and using a posterized backdrop of the same photo only running it off-centered. It will be a full size picture, running opposite the chapter opening page. The book is 8-1/2 x 11.

   "Posterized - black changed to dark green

                     Combined photos.

    I am posting the photos separately and then combined. The author promised to get me one without the swirls and I will swap it out.

  I think you will agree that I have done no harm.

A Picture Worth A Thousand Words

I got my first look at the “antique” photos that will run in the basketball book. I admit, they came out much better than I expected but a little bit worse than I was hoping. They came out…muddy…and flat. The strange thing is that they are still cool pictures. Okay, most of them are cool.

 

This is a book about the basketball era from about 1908 to 1981. It covers how basketball was invented in 1891 and how my alma mater was involved locally in Baltimore from the very beginning but the narrative of the book really picks up when the first teams were getting off the ground and that was during the ought years.

Probably the best photo, of the old timey ones, is a spooky, deserted-looking gym from the original college site on Calvert Street. The strangest aspect of the photo is that basketball was played in that gym and there are nine posts in the middle of the floor. When you are using a pommel horse, rings, and free weights or parallel bars, posts in the middle of the floor don’t bother anyone. But devise a game where people are running willy-nilly and passing a ball around and suddenly a post in your immediate path takes on new significance. I am running it as the inside front cover.

 

 

 

Using this picture to kick off the book has several nice effects. First, it’s arresting. Second, if someone isn’t shocked, they are in disbelief. Third, it might pull them into the book. About the picture quality: It’s not good. It’s fuzzy in a sort of Titanic-under-the-water-with green-corrosion look. I guess the photo is poor enough to be intriguing, especially since I am running it in a sepia tone. I am super-imposing some other old timey pictures against the gym picture, used as a backdrop.

But in trying to wind up the book, now that the editing is mostly out of the way, it’s going to be decision time and the decision is going to be whether the subject matter and its placement is enough to overcome marginal quality. The writing more or less parallels the pictures. The saving grace is that the material is so different and basketball-interesting that the photos will not be National Geographic crystal clear won’t be an impediment to enjoying the book.

In most cases the picture will be worth at least a thousand words and in some cases considerably more.

 

 

 

 

Learning To Juggle

I’ve always admired the performer who can take three rubber balls and juggle them with ease, keeping one ball in the air at all times. The trick can be learned and practice can take you to the next level and eventually to juggling chainsaws.

I am one of those people who can do many different things, some of them quite well, a select few expertly. In real life, I think the degree to which you can juggle successfully translates directly into your satisfaction quotient and your anxiety level.

 There are times in my writing life when there are just too many balls in the air. The expert juggler starts with three balls and then keeps adding balls until he has a collection in the air. Somehow, through practice and having a knack, he is able to track all those balls without one hitting the floor.

I remember when I was writing one thing, tossing one ball in the air. Like the little kid with a baseball glove (okay, some call it a mitt) and a ball, waiting for a friend to show up to play catch,  killing time, tossing a ball straight up and then waiting for it to come down, catching it different ways.

 Now I sometimes feel like that same kid with a glove and, like the scene in Braveheart, a thousand archers are launching arrows into the air. I’m down range trying to catch as many as I can without being stuck.

 

Normally I’m carefree about doing several things at one time. Generally this is when there are no deadlines, I’m enjoying all the different stuff I’m doing, and there is time for normal, everyday pursuits. I recognize now, that I get anxious when one or more projects gets dragged out, sometimes with no firm end in sight, and new ideas and projects present themselves and I know that I either will not get to them for months or I realize I might not get to them for…years.

 

I am at the bitter end of finishing a basketball history book. I made the bad decision of offering to edit this manuscript, thinking it wouldn’t take that much time. Wrong. I basically re-wrote the book, in the process cutting 233,000 words back to 207,000 words. I probably chopped out 50,000 words and then put 25,000 new words back in. The editing is done but now I’m also doing the book production.

 

A word about photos: There are nearly 250 photographs in this book that now, upon closer inspection, are not all usable because they weren’t scanned. People generally don’t understand photos and printing. So many pictures are taken with cell phones now that people think just because they use a high pixel count that they can digitally print in a book. I have seen fantastic, sharp cell phone shots with less than 72 dpi resolution.

 

What the heck is resolution? 72 dpi means that the photo is made up of 72 dots per inch. To send that sort of photo across the web is fine and the quality will be detailed and viewable. But, to use in an ebook or to print digitally, it can be a problem. The standard dpi for digital presses is 300 dpi. Many of the photos in this basketball book are of the 72 and 150 variety. I am waiting for a sample printing of a set of low resolution photos and holding my breath. If they work, I can finish this thing by Labor Day.

 

If not, then either a lot of the shots will get cut out or run in a sepia tone to make them look “old timey.” This book might get done by late September or early October. Adding to the problem is that the source of the photos is in Baltimore which is nearly five hours down the road. And if that isn’t enough, the author who has to approve all this, returns to England the last week of this month (August).

 That’s one project—but it’s the one that’s killing me. At the same time I am rewriting my novel, trying to incorporate the changes requested by an interested agent. Meanwhile, another agent has asked to see the manuscript—wants to read the whole thing in September when she starts at a new agency. Naturally, I want to finish making make the first agent’s edits since they make the book so much stronger and I wouldn’t dream of handing in my last attempt to this new agent. The good news, or silver lining in this case, is that people sometimes try for years and are unsuccessful getting an agent to read even the first few pages. I have multiple agents reading full manuscripts so I’ve been blessed.

 

The science publisher who is interested in two different books about the missing moon rocks and a book I pitched about cosmic impacts has been very gracious and patient. I told them how I was swamped and committed to my novel and they said not to worry, they and the moon weren’t going anywhere. Just hand them in when I’ve gotten them written. Meanwhile, they want me in their database—that’s a good sign.

 

The other balls in the air are: a rock and roll thriller set in China, a historical fiction about George Washington’s real life secret agent during the revolution set in my town, historic Ringwood, New Jersey, finishing my Springsteen ebook [95% done], and an ebook memoir of my involvement during high school working on the Apollo program during the Space Race. I am also wondering when my primary novel gets published if they would immediately be asking about the sequel. I’ve given some thought to a sequel but, right now, I’m afraid to throw one more ball into the air.