The Original Old Farts Club

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Not me. I got a spindle rebuilt, the underside of the deck primed, and the rest of the day involves BEER!
I just picked and paper-bagged all the mangoes on my tree. Beat up, I am. But I got the picker and the extender saw and the ladder put away.

Will check our "control" sample on Friday. Putting mangoes in paper bags contains the ethylene they give off. The concentration of this gas speeds up ripening.

I lost the entire yield of my other tree** because I did not check the bags for two weeks. YUCK!

**it is on a two-month different schedule of fruiting
 
You still got the ring of the potty 'round your hiney, youngster.

I bet you never saw a wooden-spoke wheel truck (chain drive) drive by your house.
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Or an Army Air Force biplane fly over you.
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Or even a C-119 flying boxcar lumbering toward Mitchell Field.
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All of these went by when Himself was young... (*sigh*)
Oh Gawd. I just did some arithmetic. If you take my birth date and go equally forward and backward from that date...

...You are in 1857. James Buchanan was president. (3 years prior to Lincoln getting in)

The Panic of 1857 -- ALL BANKS closed and did not open until Dec. 12 of that year.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

EEK. EEK. Could this be the matching year on the newer side of 1940?

The Civil War was four years in the future... <-- Double EEK EEK.
 
Guess who this is?

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Oh Gawd. I just did some arithmetic. If you take my birth date and go equally forward and backward from that date...

...You are in 1857. James Buchanan was president. (3 years prior to Lincoln getting in)

The Panic of 1857 -- ALL BANKS closed and did not open until Dec. 12 of that year.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

EEK. EEK. Could this be the matching year on the newer side of 1940?

The Civil War was four years in the future... <-- Double EEK EEK.
Mine would be 1889 i guess. Im 67 and was born in 1956. Grover Clevl;and was President 67yrs before i was born.
6th October » American inventor Thomas Edison shows his first film e.g motion picture.
23rd November » The first jukebox goes into operation at the Palais Royale Saloon in San Francisco.
 
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Cessna 152 ... Piper Cub
Piper Cub. Awright... now we are going waayy back. My first attempt at learning to fly took place in 1959. In a J-3.

The plane had no fuel gauge. It had a coat hanger on a float. TINS. It had no radio; you tilted your wings back and forth to get a green hand-held light from the tower.

To start the sucker, you pumped the primer thingy until a tad of gas ran down the instrument panel... <-- TINS. You turned the magneto switch on and the guy outside spun the prop. When the guy spins the prop, you have your feet in the gouged-out wooden floor by the pedals (holding the brakes on).

The student sits in the back seat. Always. Forever. Even if he buys the fargin plane and flies solo. The J3 front seat is for Instructors. You can graduate to the front seat if you have your license and a passenger. Your passenger can go in the back. The fargin thing just will not fly with a single person sitting in the front. It's a center of gravity thing with a plane made of balsa wood and women's used stockings.

The door (hah!) is closed with a little barrel bolt that will vibrate out while you fly. No biggie.

My first flight was sorta... horrible. The instructor asked me how high up we were. I guessed a thousand feet. We were 300 feet up. Jeez. When we got up to 1000 feet, we did "the effects of unusual attitudes in flight" <-- I will always remember that.

As we were tootling along, the instructor stressed what was normal/level flight for a J3: "One inch of dirt over the nose, one foot of air under each wing."

Sounds simple, right? Yeah. Three feet of air under one wing, a foot of air over the nose... Stupid plane would NOT fly straight and level. Until the instructor took over.

We allowed the plane to fly tilted to one side. The plane was falling sideways in a horrible goosey manner. We did Dutch Rolls <-- If you do not know what they are, consider yourself blessed.

Then -- We. Did. A. Stall. My dinky little seat belt popped open. The side "door" was open. The stick (no steering wheel) was disconnected from anything.

Ooohh-KAY. Then we did some more Dutch Rolls. I suddenly had to call dinosaurs. I leaned out the nonexistent door and barfed downwind.

And now, Gentle Reader, we come to the physics of it all. A lovely vacuum forms behind your head when you stick it out of an airplane. Nature abhors a vacuum, so the grug comes back to give your face a totally even coat.

And I had to wash the airplane. I asked if any other students got sick.

His answer: "You took a lot longer than most, but -- every effing one."
 
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An old High School classmate has gotten lots of the Class Of '58 together again. We all share life stories. A couple of us have Pilot's Licenses. So I shared this one:

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When I was learning how to fly to get my Pilot’s License, my instructor was Bill (Crash) Craddock. The SOB was merciless.

One of the things you have to do as a baby birdie is sit in your Spam Can (Cessna 152) and suddenly pull back on the yoke to make the plane climb a hill too steep for it. It is a godawful feeling to sense the plane struggling and about to fail at flying… and then – suddenly!! – the bottom drops out, and you fall exactly as fast as you would if you fell out of the plane. Only you are still in the plane which is not flying anymore. It is a brick. And the controls -- unlike a car -- NOTHING works. No steering (feels totally disconnected/broken off), no braking... Loose stuff inside the plane is floating all around you, inclucing ashes from the ashtray...

Since it was my very first try, I turned loose of the controls when they all disappeared, and told Crash, “Your plane.”

He had said this was perfectly OK and would expect it the first time. So he took over.

Oh, dear. I smelled brimstone and I swear his eyes went red. He held that Spam Can yoke so the plane continued to hurtle vertically straight down.

There is a NEVER-EXCEED speed limit on a Cessna 152. It is 149MPH. There is a red peg on the airspeed indicator that prevents the needle from going past that. This speed is far in excess of the aircraft’s maximum structural cruising speed. The needle was absolutely jammed against the NEVER-EXCEED SPEED peg and we were still going straight down. If you do a little research, you will see that the manufacturer says that a "baby's sigh" could make the plane come apart at or after 149 MPH.

That’s when he pulled back – felt like several g’s – and we came out of the dive.

He got enough speed without the plane coming apart to absolutely LOOP the Cessna with me in it!! This is the equivalent of ski jumping a Mini-Cooper.
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Wow. I love it. I would love to one day learn how to fly. But for now I would to ride shotgun with you. ❤️
 

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