Pat Calkins remembered briefly on St. Patrick's Day

Pat Calkins, my best friend in junior high and high school, would have turned 70 on January 20th of this year if he'd lived that long. He died in 2016. I wanted to post a remembrance of him then, but couldn't find the photo from the Pioneer Inn of him in front of the painting of the Sirens. He helped with the restoration of the Pioneer Inn in 2001. St. Patrick's Day seems like a good time to post something, so here are a couple of things:

This letterhead stationery is from Jim and Pat's record shop they owned when they were in high school, at the beginning of the 1970s.

Pat's main career during his life time was as a carpenter and builder, mainly in Fayetteville.

Present Stereo Set-up

 

I repaired my 50 year old Advent speakers last year, replacing the "foam" ring on each woofer and replacing the old tweeters with new ones. Also used soap and water to clean the speaker grilles and let them dry in the sun for a day. The speakers sound great! Some of my albums are shown on the right, the rest are on the left out of sight. Crosby Stills and Nash is on top of the right speaker, and King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King is framed and hanging on the wall. (Both albums were released in 1969. My King Crimson  copy is a bit scratched in places, so I also have the CD.) I bought this copy of the CS&N album recently at Been Around Records (it's in very good shape), but I bought my original copy in 1970, when I bought it and In the Court of the Crimson King as a new member of the Atlantic Record Club. The CD in front of the Technics record player and the Nakamichi cassette deck is Miles Davis Volume One. A Sony receiver, my only non-vintage piece of stereo equipment, is on the lowest shelf. The open book on the TV tray is vintage also: An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications, Volume I, third edition, revised printing, June 1970, by William Feller (1906-1970).

100-year old barn at the farm

 

The sky above the barn. A modern sky, due to the jet contrails.

The place where the barn is most deteriorated after approximately 100 years.

The place where the barn is least deteriorated--the tin roof and rafters.

Looking westward in the hayloft with its now-warped floor.

Eastward view. It was about 4:45 pm when I took all these photos.

Dried up cow dung mixed with dirt on the ground floor.

East side of barn, ground level.

West side of the barn at loft level. 

I didn't realize it until I began writing this that I took these photos on my grandfather's birthday, February 7. (He was born in 1898 and died in 1973.)  This barn and a bigger one (now gone) and the milking barn (a one-story rectangular brick building) were built for my grandfather's dairy farm.  He was Walter Trulock Jr., and his father, Walter Sr., owned the farm, which was strictly a cotton farm until my grandfather started the dairy business. My dad, Walter III, was born in 1921 and grew up on the farm. Later--34 years later--he moved back to the farm from Washington DC, bringing me, my older brother, and our mother back with him. So I grew up, until I was nine-and-a-half, on the farm also, and played in this barn as a kid. We lived in the remodeled milking barn from 1955 until 1964. It's still in use as a home, and is in good shape, but is owned by another family. The farm itself, with a little less acreage, is still owned by my family (three of my brothers and me). No cotton is grown on it currently, just soybeans, rice, and corn, and occasionally winter wheat.

The front of the remodeled dairy barn house on a foggy-ish day in June 2009. The barn and its surrounding field are out of view behind the house, but the edge of the bigger barn, torn down in 2010 or 2011 at the request of Floreen Chadick, who lived in the house at the time and whose descendants still own it but don't live in it, is visible on the left.

During the time my family lived in this house, my father occasionally would say I was "the strong, silent type," when I was introduced to people and didn't have much to say. He didn't know that I occasionally went out to this bigger barn and threw clumps of hay down to the ground from the hayloft to attract the cows. While they were munching on hay below me and as I was throwing more down to them, I shouted to them, and as I recall it was a bit of lightweight verbal abuse about them being dumb and not paying attention when I was talking. "Hey you! Yeah, you! Wbat are you lookin' at?" Etc, etc.

Some photos from Lahaina, Maui, August 2008

I flew from Austin to Maui on August 9, 2008, and stayed in the area of Lahaina that was destroyed by fire on August 8th and 9th this year. I'm posting some photos here that I didn't use in my earlier posts. The first is of the inside of the Lahaina public library, which was next door to the Pioneer Inn (across Papelekane St.), both of which were between Front Street and the harbor/sea wall in the banyan tree area.

The old part of Lahaina was mainly residential and didn't have a lot of  overnight accommodations for the tourists who came to the shops, bars, and restaurants. In fact, the Pioneer Inn, with 34 rooms, was the  only hotel  in that immediate area, which is a designated Historic District. An 18-room B&B called The Plantation Inn also didn't survive the fire, but a large, not-too-fancy hotel nearby called the Lahaina Shores Beach Resort did survive the fire. There are bigger, fancier hotels on other parts of Maui, of course. Here's another Pioneer Inn site: Pioneer Inn History.

This is the old prison wall, just a few blocks away from Front Street, in a residential area:

A non-flash photo of the view outside the windows in the little room I stayed in at the hostel near the prison wall area that my friend Pat Calkins was the manager of during 2008, followed by a skewed-angle photo of the same view, sort of, with one of the Hawaiian shirts Pat gave me hanging next to my little sleeping loft.  The old historic part of Lahaina is (was) not at all upscale. The little bell tower outside the window is (was) on a small Catholic church:

The front (or maybe the back) of the Pioneer Inn, built in 1901. Pat was hired in 1999 by the guy who leased the hotel to help with the restoration of the Inn for the 100th Anniversary in 2001. (The guy had a son who lived in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where Pat lived prior to 1999. It was through the son that Pat heard about the job to help with the restoration.)

A corner of the Pioneer Inn is visible on the left, and a storefront with upstairs bar/restaurant along Front Street is on the right:

The big banyan tree is in the background with one of its apparent offspring in the foreground. The Pioneer Inn is (was) located on the right of this area. The building behind the tree is (was) the Old Lahaina Courthouse:

Current reports say the 150-year-old banyan tree may have survived the fire, which I guess means its roots may have survived to eventually produce another tree.

Beginning of my journal of the trip. Other journal entries posted Aug. 11, 13, and 15, 2013. (try the Flipcard setting after clicking on blog archive and then 2013).

Photos added Sept 3, 2023:

Another photo I took of the banyan tree,

Van that was parked near where I stayed in Lahaina. People who lived in this area were not wealthy.

Cooking sugar cane in 2008. Steam, not smoke, is coming out of the stacks. The last of the sugar mills closed in 2016.

Maui mountains near Lahaina.

This door led to some of the rooms in the cheaply-constructed hostel-type accommodations I stayed in. Notice there's not a door handle on the door. Typical.

My supermoon photo (not super)

 August 1 supermoon over Auto Zone, to be compared with previous moon over Auto Zone photo. I saw the supermoon rise north of Pine Bluff, with a clear eastern horizon, near the Arkanasas River, and tried to take a photo but without a telephoto lens, so it was just a dot of a moon in an otherwise almost totally black photo. At least the mosquitos had barely even come out at the time, 8:50 pm or so. So I came on back in town and thought about just going back to the same place I took a moon photo the night before, after a friend called  and said I should go out and look at the moon. I wasn't even aware then of the coming supermoon.

Behind me and my truck, visible in the sideview mirror, is Underwater Seafood, a good and fairly new restaurant. This was about 9:10 pm, Auto Zone sign had just been turned off.

Rising moon over Auto Zone in Pine Bluff

Rising moon above Auto Zone, 8:25 pm, Monday July 31, 2023, 15th Avenue and Main Street, Pine Bluff.

Mini-blind glyphs

 

In Shadows and in Sunlight

Taken on Sunday, July 30, 2023, at 5:16 pm in my dining room. Leaves on a small tree outside the window caused the late afternoon sunlight to produce these patterns that look like petroglyphs. There are two other dining room windows on the west side, but they're covered by my green chalkboard.