Memoir

Those Gnarly Duntemann Brothers

A woman contacted me recently who is evidently a fourth cousin; we have a set of great-great-great grandparents in common. She sent me a scan of an old undated photo and told me that the second man from the left was her great-great grandfather, Frederick Duntemann 1846-1927. She thought that one or more of the other men were Frederick’s brothers. What did I know?

Not much. But it’s an interesting sort of detective work, this family resemblances stuff. I do know that my great-great grandfather Heinrich Duntemann 1843-1892 had four brothers, all of whom long survived him, who died of an infection from a farm injury at 48. I have photos of two of his brothers, William Duntemann 1849-1921 (left) and Hermann Duntemann 1859-1933. (right). William’s photo was taken when he was in his sixties, as best I know. Hermann’s was taken when he was 26. If I had to guess, I’d say that the leftmost man in the group photo was William, and the rightmost was Hermann. The remaining man may have been Louis Duntemann 1851-1928. I can’t tell, as I’ve never seen a photo and know very little about him.

Well, they certainly look like brothers to me, and in fact far left and third from left could almost be twins. The guy on the right seems like a shoo-in for an older version of Hermann. That said, I’m not sure how fair it is to say: “This is a photo of the four surviving Duntemann brothers, circa 1920.” Hermann left no descendants, but at least a hundred people descend from the other three brothers. If I say that that’s what it is, all those people will likely take my word for it. (I’m the de facto family history expert, simply because I know a little and everybody else knows nothing.) It would be great to have such a photo of the four brothers, and maybe I do. But I think I have to be real damned careful about saying so. Uncritical acceptance of expert opinions is dangerous, when the experts know only a little more than everybody else but still want the prestige of expertise.

So I will lead by example: These guys may just possibly have a greater-than-zero chance of perhaps being your great-great (and perhaps greater) grandfathers. It is impossible to know. We might wish it were otherwise, but wishin’ don’t make it so.

Las Vegas Quarters

May 26th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

I got a Las Vegas quarter in change the other day. This is a term I use for certain coins (generally quarters but occasionally nickels) that (after spending decades ricocheting from one slot machine to another) have a distinctive beat-to-hell appearance that can’t be mistaken for anything else. Las Vegas quarters don’t wear smooth and shiny like quarters that people use to buy burgers at McDonald’s. They’re full of dents and nicks and more matte than polished. They also look like they were dug up in some Roman ruins in Gaul after a century or three of service.

Vegas fired its quarters back in the late 90s, when computerized slotless slot machines began replacing electromechanical slot machines with a vengeance. They’re now gradually filtering out into general circulation. This is the second I’ve seen this year, after never getting one outside the city itself prior to that.

I never entered a Las Vegas casino before my first trip to Comdex in 1985, and I remember that the metallic racket of quarters being spit into stainless-steel pans at the Continental Hotel and Casino was continuous and never stopped for even a second. The psychological effect was intentional and obvious: People weren’t just winning now and then. People were winning constantly. And the quarters paid the price.

By the time Carol and I took a short trip to Las Vegas a few years ago, the coin machines were gone. The racket of interacting metal objects had been replaced by a continuous cacophony of crude digital jingles, a sort of MIDI hell that I found a lot harder to take than the now-vanished quarter clatter.

I have a little dish of odd coins that I’ve gotten in change over the years (mostly foreign ones and American coins with weird damage) and my 1977 Vegas quarter will join them. Such quarters are tokens (literally) of a piece of technology that slipped away when nobody was looking, and a hundred years from now, I wonder if someone will pick up such a quarter and think, “My God, what happened to that poor thing!”

Scheherazade Live

May 23rd, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

Carol and I cruised out to Manitou Springs last night to pick up our friends David Beers and Terry Blair, and we all went downtown to the Pikes Peak Center to take in the Colorado Springs Philharmonic‘s last concert of the season. On the program were Wagner’s Prelude from Die Meistersinger, Mozart’s Symphony #40, and Rimsky Korsakov’s Scheherazade. It had been way too long since we’d heard live music of any kind, and it was about damned time.

I was familiar with all three pieces, though I doubt I’ve listened to any least scrap of Die Meistersinger since Dr. Raymond Wilding-White‘s courses in college. Opera isn’t a big thing with me, and Wagner never takes ten minutes when fifty will do. Mozart? What can I say? Reliable and familiar, and great stuff when you want a graceful background for good conversation. But Scheherazade, wow. Conductor Lawrence Leighton Smith gave it all he got, and it was one of the most amazing classical performances I’d ever experienced.

It’s a stunning piece to begin with, an interweaving of a dozen or so Russian-ish themes with enormous energy and a loose program following the old tale of the 1001 Arabian Nights. Smith and the orchestra put their backs into it, and I found myself sitting on the edge of my seat in concentration. It was one of the few live performances I can recall which was better than the recordings in my own collection. I know the piece very well, and I found myself waiting anxiously to see how well they would do a particular passage. In every single case, it was well indeed–and by the end of the concert (it was the final item) I was exhausted. The temptation to treat music as background for other activities is strong, but when you’re paying thirty bucks for the seat, you pay attention. That may be the biggest single upside to live music heard in concert: It’s you and the music, nose to nose. We forget that at our peril.

Scheherazade and I have an interesting history. When I was 7 we got a very early stereo record player, and not long after that, my mother started bringing home a classical LP every month from the local A&P food store in Edison Park. (The remarkably durable independent Happy Foods is in the building now, and has been since the 70s.) I don’t precisely recall the deal, but I think they were a dollar if you bought ten dollars’ worth of food. My mother played the records a lot, hoping to instill a love of classical music in Gretchen and myself. It worked, at least until the first sparks of the British Invasion (not the Beatles–Chad & Jeremy) drew me to pop music in 1963. However, by that time I had heard six or eight well-known classical pieces dozens of times, including Scheherazade. I assumed at first that Rimsky & Korsakov were a duet of some kind, but hell, I was 8. (I’m not sure I even knew that there were detailed jacket notes inside the cardboard sleeves until I was well into my teens.)

The Colorado Springs Philharmonic concerts begin with an optional half-hour lecture given by the conductor, asssisted by the concertmaster and sometimes other members of the orchestra. Smith is a good presenter, and explained how the Great Russians took simple Russian folk music and made it into orchestral battleships like Scheherezade. He spoke of The Five, and reminded me of something that I’ve never entirely understood: Why don’t we ever heard the music of Cesar Cui and Mily Balakirev? I went through the classical side of my CD case and didn’t find a single piece by either composer, peppered as it is by Borodin, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and several other famous Russians. Their contribution may have been organizational (Balakirev did a lot to point them in the right direction and keep them all focused) but I’ll have to go looking for some of their work.

Hearing Scheherazade, Night on Bald Mountain, the William Tell Overture, and the several other pieces in the grocery store music collection made the back of my 8-year-old head just go wild with images and crazy ideas. It may not be far from the truth that classical music pushed me over the edge into writing fiction. Even today, when I need to crack a plot problem, I stick an upbeat classical CD into the player and crank it up loud. Eight times out of ten, the plot problem is toast, and the story continues. Music is good that way. I need to do more of it.

The Dollar That Didn’t Like Hawaii

Apr 8th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

Life is full of little weirdnesses, and here’s yet another: Shortly before we left for Hawaii last month, my lucky dollar turned up missing. That’s the very one at left, though it’s shinier and more worn now than it was when I first mentioned it (and took the photo) in 2006. I’ve had the dollar in my pocket pretty much continuously since Aunt Kathleen died in mid-1999. She received it from my Uncle Louie at some point, and it came to me upon her death. Keeping the dollar in my pocket isn’t about luck, but about remembering both my godmother and a peculiar man who faithfully looked after his baby sister (my mother) after my dad died, and who believed in me when almost no one else did.

It’s hard to misplace something that big, but one day I just reached into my pocket for some small change and noticed that it wasn’t there. I then did a furious ten-minute tour of all the most likely spots: The sofa, the sectional, my reading chair, the 4Runner, behind the pants press. Nothing. Two days later we boarded the plane, and by then I pretty much assumed it had fallen out while I was sitting in a chair at Carol’s doctor’s office or somewhere else irretrievable, and was gone forever. I was bummed. (Hawaii helped ease the pain.)

Back at the end of March, only a few days after we got home from Hawaii, Carol and I had the carpet cleaners in for the first time since 2007. We spent an hour putting scooter disks under the legs of the smaller furniture pieces to get them out of the carpeted areas. Something caught my eye as I shoved Carol’s nightstand toward the bedroom door. There on the carpet, pretty much dead-centered in the space where the nightstand had been, was the dollar.

WTF? I tried to imagine a scenario in which the dollar would pass from my pants pocket to underneath Carol’s nightstand, without convincing success. Ever so rarely often I dump my pockets on the bed while I change pants, and somehow, the dollar must have migrated from the bed to the floor when I wasn’t looking, and rolled unerringly into shadow. You’d think I would notice. But I didn’t.

I put it back in my pocket. Carol and I both laughed, because we knew the rest of the story: Aunt Kathleen was not an adventurous person, not the least little bit. She’d had exactly three street addresses in her whole 78-year life, all within a few blocks of Chicago’s Devon Avenue. She’d been to California with her family when she was a 13-year-old girl. (Boris Karloff is signing her autograph book in this photo.) She took another trip with her parents in 1953, when she was 33, this time to…Hawaii. The trip must have been difficult, or for some other reason freaked her out, because as best we know, she never left the greater Chicago area again, ever.

As she said many times, she just didn’t like traveling. Or maybe Hawaii had made a bad impression. Hard to tell. But for all the talk you hear about the velocity of money, Aunt Kathleen’s dollar preferred to sit out our Hawaii trip and went to great lengths to do so. And once Hawaii was no longer a threat, it showed up again, promptly.

Crazy world, ain’t it?

Odd Lots

Mar 6th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

Never fear; I’ll return to the pulps discussion shortly. I’m way behind on a lot of projects right now.
One of the few things I remember about the old 40s Flash Gordon serials (which played incessantly on Saturday morning TV in Chicago circa 1960) are the Rock Men, who could blend into the rocks to escape giant lizards with poison breath. They talked weirdly, and eventually we figured out that they were talking backwards, but none of us had a tape recorder in 1960 to reverse it and see what they were actually saying. Finally, somebody has done it.
Popular Science has posted the entire 137-year run of its back-issue archives on the Web via Google Books, and you can read it all for free. The whole mags have been posted, including the advertisements. Maybe this time I can find one of those weird ads for the Rosicrucians.
Gizmodo is beginning a series on Microsoft’s Courier project, which is starting to look more like the ebook reader I’ve always wanted.
A link on the Make Blog concerning the Vacuum Tube Radio Hat (which I’ve seen before, on Wikipedia, with schematic) led me to Retro Thing, which has just eaten a goodly portion of my morning. Be warned.
BTW, the model in the Radio Hat cover story above is Hope Lange at age 15.
I had plum fergot about Boeing’s X-37 spaceplane (and this is probably just what the Air Force wanted) but it will apparently be launched on April 19. Don’t get too excited; it’s a robot and won’t carry humans. (Of course it won’t. It can’t. Impossible. They said so. The subject is closed. How ’bout those Blackhawks?)
I’ve seen this time and again among the Pack here, but I never knew it had a name: The Nose of Peace. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
Be careful how you talk in front of very small children, even (or especially) girls. (Thanks to Mary Lynn Jonson for the link.)
I have no idea what to think about this: A site that creates techno music from…Web sites. Read the algorithm description under “About.”

Odd Lots

Feb 19th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

No comments yet

Today’s Odd Lots is a rare (nay, to this date unique) all-video edition. I dislike TV sufficiently so that that’s a contrarian act all by itself.
To begin: We used to make five-stick “popsicle bombs” on the fourth-grade playground, and compete to see whose bombs would toss sticks the farthest. (I actually devised a 4-stick bomb, but nobody seemed impressed. The technology has clearly advanced since 1961.) Anyway: Here’s a linearly detonating, 2,250-stick popsicle bomb, and it is indeed a thing of beauty.
While we’re blowing things up, consider this unfortunate attempt to demolish what appears to be an apartment building molded of solid concrete. They should feel fortunate that the building had not been erected on even a mild slope, or it would simply have rolled down the hill until it struck something bigger and denser than it was. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
I guess if you’re going to blow a demolition, do it this way. Then you either buy more dynamite, or advertise it as a tourist attraction.
And this may be the most amazing video clip I’ve seen in years: An Atlas booster breaking the sound barrier at just about the altitude where ice crystals responsible for sundogs form. Watch what happens to the sundog! (Thanks to Mary Lynn Johnson for the link.)
Admittedly this is a hybrid, but don’t miss the video if you’re a train freak. That double-stacked consist is 18,000 feet long, propelled by what is essentially a local-area network of nine computer-controlled diesel-electric locomotives distributed evenly among the cars and operated by one guy in the cab of the lead engine. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)

Victoria Duntemann’s Home-Made Beef Barley Soup

Jan 16th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

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My mother was not a fantastic cook (as the youngest of eight kids, her older sisters did all the cooking and hence all the learning) but certain things she did very well. One of these was beef barley soup, and in her honor I made a pot of it today, according to her recipe as I best remember it, with only minor tweaks. My sister Gretchen pitched in on the remembering, reminding me that mother used tomato soup instead of diced tomatoes, but having imbibed a little too much of it in the early ’60s, I cannot abide tomato soup.

So here’s the recipe. It works, though it makes a lot, and in dinner-party portions probably serves 10 or 12. Carol and I will feast on it for a day or two and then freeze the rest.

1 pound stew meat
32 oz beef stock or broth
6 cups water
1 cup pearled barley
1 large onion
1 can (14.5 oz) diced tomatoes
2 large carrots
3 large stalks celery
2 tblsp salt

Cut the beef up into small chunks, suitable for spooning. Mix beef chunks in a bowl with flour to coat all pieces. Melt a little butter in the bottom of a suitably large pot and brown the beef. Once the beef is browned, add in the broth, the water, the salt, and the barley. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 15 or 20 minutes to give the barley a good head start.

Add the vegetables. Simmer for another 45 minutes to an hour, or until the barley gets soft enough for you. (If you need to shorten the cooking time, use quick-cook barley, throw everything together at the beginning, and cook for only half an hour or forty minutes.) If you like pepper (we don’t, not that much) grind a little in.

Note that I prefer “hearty” soup, which means you can stand a spoon up in it. The recipe sounds like it calls for a lot of liquid, but barley is half-sponge, and when you’re done you’ll have something about 40% of the way from soup to stew. For thinner soup, add water or cut back a little on the barley. Nothing critical about the recipe; more meat would work, and you can leave out the onion if that’s an issue.

And there you have it. We ate simply but well when I was a kid. The evidence is in the pot.

A Tree For the Ages

Jan 14th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

Not everything gets done on time, but at our house, at least, most things come in at or under budget. Carol and I budgeted an afternoon to take down and pack all of our Christmas decorations, and that’s about what it took. We’re certainly not on time (I had planned to be done a week ago) but a buzzing swarm of minor irritations got in the way, and it wasn’t until suppertime yesterday that the tree came down–and that only after everything else in the line of decorations was gathered in from the eight corners of the house and repacked in six cozy Rubbermaid totes.

And boy, what a tree that was! We put it up on December 10, which means it was on duty for almost five weeks. It had dropped some needles on the floor, but nothing I’d call a torrent, and when we got to picking ornaments off the tree’s high precincts, we discovered something else: The tree had been growing. On the very highest branches, there were new pale-green needles emerging from the branch tips. Those had certainly not been there when we brought it home back in December. This is not a trick we’ve observed in any other tree we’ve had in 33 years of marriage, nor with our respective families prior to that. We’re not sure how we managed it, but we’re going to buy our tree at the same lot next year and hope we get lucky again.

We broke only one glass ornament this year, and it wasn’t one of the old ones. It was perhaps ten years old, the sort of worked-glass item you see artists making in real time with a blowtorch at home and garden shows, out of thin glass rod. When Carol touched it to take it down from the tree, it literally flew apart in her hands. (There were internal stresses involved, as we vacuumed up fragments six feet away.)

A lot of our ornaments were inherited from Carol’s family, especially after we sold her mom’s house in 2006. Many are old, some extremely old, judging by the fragile cardboard boxes that had held them on store shelves decades ago and still serve in 2010, taped and patched though they may be. What I found remarkable was a price tag on the box shown above, from the venerable (and now extinct) Weiboldt’s department store in Chicago. The tag reads two for fifteen cents.

Wow.

Maybe it was a clearance sale price for the day after Christmas. I don’t know. I can’t remember the last time I bought anything enduring for less than ten cents. (Hamfest junkmongering doesn’t count, though the junk certainly does endure.) Even the Hi-Flier kites I flew in 1962 cost me a dime. This may take us back to the early 1950s, and possibly to the late 1940s. Carol’s parents were married in 1947. We wonder if this box could be among the ornaments they bought for their first Christmas together.

I snipped off the branch tip shown in the photo at the top of this entry, and put it in a glass of water, just to see what happens. The tree is now out in the garage and will go to Rocky Top in the next day or so. The decorations and the Lionel trains are back in the Harry Potter closet downstairs. I gave Carol a hug while we moved the furniture back into its accustomed places. Christmas is over, but there’s still a little sparkle in the air, and I’m dealing well with the ordinary gloom of winter.

Mission accomplished.

A Videophone Christmas

Dec 26th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

A day late, perhaps, but no less sincerely, let me wish everyone who reads this a good and blessed Christmas, from here on the snowy side of Cheyenne Mountain. We had a day so cold, clear, and crisp that I was walking around the house carefully, lest it shatter. This was our year to stay in Colorado for the holiday season. (Next year, as is our custom, we’ll be in Chicago.) Two thirds of the country had a white Christmas, which is great unless you happen to be traveling while the whitening is going on. Ducked that bullet, whew.

We’ve had our tree for a week or so now, and it may rank as the best Christmas tree we’ve ever scored. Tall by our historical standards at about 7′, it’s also a balsam, a breed of tree I don’t think we’ve ever had in 33 years of marriage. I’ve been a little leery of them since I was five or six and broke out in a rash on my hands when my mother allowed me to place some ornaments on the tree. Somewhere we have a photo of me hanging ornaments with my winter mittens on, and although history is silent on the point, I have to wonder if some of my poor mother’s ornaments didn’t survive the adventure.

No rash this time–I guess one can grow out of such things–and the tree is not so full as to make finding places for ornaments a challenge, nor so sparse as to look like Charley Brown’s poor twig from the Peanuts TV special. It’s taking water and is not yet losing needles. Dash pulled a stuffed Saguaro cactus ornament off the tree and tried to remove its stuffing, but we caught him before he got too far. Jack has been spotted licking the colored light bulbs when they’re off, but apart from that there’s been no tree mischief.

There was some stress on Tuesday night when Carol’s mom fell at her home outside Chicago and was taken to the hospital. She didn’t break anything, fortunately, but had to spend Christmas in a hospital bed. To cheer her up I put an SX270 system on the coffee table by the Christmas tree and set up a Skype video call with my nephew Brian. The hospital has Wi-Fi in the rooms, and Brian set his new laptop up on Delores’s bed tray. So by virtue of my Phillips ToUCam and Brian’s built-in Webcam, she could see us, the dogs, and the Christmas tree. Delores was delighted, and it’s a technique to keep in mind if you find yourself in such a situation. Skype is very good with detecting and autoconfiguring Webcams, and there was no fussing involved. I plugged in the ToUCam, made the call, and video happened. It’s not exactly a flying car, but it’s definitely one of those odd Sixties dreams fulfilled, mostly when nobody was looking.

We also called my sister and Bill on Bill’s laptop, and sang the ABCs song with Katie. Katie looked puzzled, but Julie just beamed. In another couple of years this sort of thing will be second nature to them.

This was a very good year for Lionel trains: I finally bought a modern steam locomotive to run around the tree, and boggled a little to find myself searching underneath the brand-new 4-6-0 MTH Camelback loco (above) for its volume control. It has a built-in electronic sound effects system that plays real steam locomotive sounds, a bell, water-pump thumps, and other racket at deafening volume. Jack backed around the tree as I slowly ran it along the tracks, yapping furiously at it until he got bored. Pete Albrecht unexpectedly sent me a rare artifact indeed: An original Lionel 275W ZW dual-control transformer (right) that was probably made in the midlate 1950s. It works great, and can control two independent track sections and two independent sets of accessories.

Christmas for us really isn’t about gifts (and I confess to being a little tired of Santa Claus supersaturation this year) but once again, my spouse knows me well, and bought me an electric blue summer robe to replace my old terrycloth robe that’s been falling to pieces for the last ten years. She also presented me with my recent books wantlist: The Long Summer and Fish On Friday, both histories by Brian Fagan, and two popular treatments of decision psychology: Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, and Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. Fagan is the author of The Little Ice Age, and The Long Summer is his followup about the warm period that followed the end of the last ice age.

I bought Carol her fondest wish: A universal TV system remote that allows you to program whatever sequence of steps is required to turn everything on and then pop the drawer for a DVD, all with a single button press. (She’s justifiably weary of having a fruit-bowl full of diverse, incompatible, button-riddled remotes on the coffee table.) It’s a Logitech Harmony One, and I guess now I have to figure out how to program it. Hey, I know assembly; how hard can it be?

Our friends Jim and Marcia came by for Christmas dinner at 2. We had a spiral ham, Yukon Gold mashed potatoes, spinach salad, home-made apple-pecan bread from Jimi Henton, steamed asparagus, and Carol’s signature spiced squash soup with cranraisins floating in it. I opened a Campus Oaks Old Vine Zinfandel 2007, and we had hot spiced cider as well as some Colorado honey mead that Jim brought. We stayed at the table for almost six hours, solving the world’s problems and designing the odd universe, and overall considered it an excellent Christmas Day indeed.

Nor is it over. Carol and I celebrate Christmas for at least a week, so for us it’s really only beginning. If this is your season (whatever you may call it) to celebrate all that is good in the world, hold that thought–there’s no reason at all to stay there for one day only and call it done!