Sunday, October 26, 2008

The magical insanity of the natural born lineman...

Robert P. Palermo sends some stories; here is one on October 26:

"1:23 pm, Sunday:
"It's Sunday, the day after the memorial service for Rick that I just attended. I received the news about Rick from my sister Patricia, who still lives in the Girard, Ohio Area and the feeling of the loss of a old great friend had overwhelmed me. For the following week I could do nothing but recount the many years of insanity that Rick and I had shared together and from those times I wanted to share the experiences of those days with Ricks other friends.

"Jim Johnston and I are two of Rick's oldest friends and while over the years our paths had taken us away from each other there were many special and magical times that we shared. I had met Rick thru another mutual friend John Biviano who had asked me to provide a ride for Rick to some high school function. Since in those days I did not drive, my sister was good enough to provide chauffeur services on my behalf. After meeting Rick and spending some time with him I knew that we were going to be friends. Rick had a way of living life with a certain kind of zest and devil may care attitude that was very attractive.

"Rick got me to join up with the Radio Crew in high school which consisted of Jim, John and Rick. The original geek squad as Jim has pointed out in his blog. ( If we knew there was going to be some money in this we would have stuck together. I guess it was case that we were ahead of our time.) The radio crew was responsible for setting up all the PA equipment for the schools for special events, and especially setting up and running the phones between the pressbox and the field for the coaches during the Niles football games. Those duties extended to away games where we brought along our own equipment and set up the vital communications between the pressbox coaches and the field coaches. High school football was rather vicious in those days and phones provided by the other schools during away games many times were tapped by those schools trying to listen in . We took our jobs very seriously and ran our own lines down to the field from the pressbox. Many times this required some ambitious climbing and dangling from precarious positions to get the lines strung and that job fell to Rick who was a natural born lineman.

"It was interesting that I was brought into this group as I knew nothing about electronics or wiring or anything even remotely connected to this field. I had grown up working in my fathers garage learning about cars and things mechanical. However the guys were willing to teach , and I was willing to learn. Jim was the brilliant one and had the unique ability to design almost anything electronic and explain the theory about how things would work. I barely understood some of the words he was using let alone understanding what in the world he said.

"It was Rick who would take Jim's explanations and break it down so that I could understand (something around Sesame Street level) After awhile I could honestly say I understood about 10% of what was being said. My forte' as it were was things mechanical having been blessed with the natural understanding of these things from my father who was a natural born mechanical engineer. Over time my talents and Rick's ended up complimenting each other and the result was some pretty incredible stories over the next 10 years. It is my most fervent desire to post as many of these stories as I can here so that others can share in the experiences that we once lived. Stay Tuned, there's a lot more to come. "
Sincerely, Robert P. Palermo

Also read Practical Joke Part 1
Also read Rick and DPB Incident
Also read Rick's First Laser Light Show
Also read Rick Going Fast, Going Far
Also read The Eclipse

5 comments:

  1. 10-27 1:57 AM Monday

    I was glad to see that Rick had not lost his off beat sense of humor in playing practical jokes. I believe that April 1st was created for people like Rick.
    Rick was one year ahead of me in high school and loved to break ..er, bend the rules as it were around the school. Since being in the Radio Crew gave us license to get out of any study hall to work on things for the school and basically gave us free reign to travel over to the stadium to escape close scrutiny, we were "free" to do things that other could not.
    One of my teachers, Ronald Posey taught geometry and was also an assistant coach for the football team. Mr. Posey was a strict disciplinarian and ran his classes with the proverbial iron fist. The usual foolishness that transpired in other classes was absolutely missing in his classroom. Of course this made him a "target of opportunity" as far as Rick was concerned when April 1 rolled around. . All we needed was a plan and my willingness to bring it off.
    Rick had rigged up a telephone with a battery and ringer inside a briefcase with a switch I could activate that was mounted outside the case. Inside the case was a portable tape recorder and a file folder filled with photographs.
    At the begining of class and before Mr. Posey could start, I rang the bell inside the briefcase thus stopping any and all further movements on his or the classes part. All eyes were upon me and what I would do next. I pulled the briefcase to the top of my desk while all the time keeping the phone inside ringing. I opened the case and pulled out the phone and started to "acknowledge" the instructions that were supposedly being provided. I nodded in accepting my task and acknowledged the "caller" with phrases like "Yes Sir." and "I understand Sir." I kept this pretense up for a few moments milking it for all it was worth. I put the phone back and pulled out the tape recorder and file of photographs and went up to the front of the class and put the recorder and file in front of Mr.Posey on his desk and hit the play button.
    Out of the tape recorder came the music from the Mission Impossible theme and then Rick's voice followed in what was a strikingly good imitation of the MI recorder voice that Mr. Phelps would receive his instructions for his MI team.
    Rick's opening narrative started with "Good morning Mr. Posey, Your mission whether you decide to accept it...or not...(laughter broke out from the class at this point) is to infiltrate a small militia group headed up by this man, Freedrick Von Stride. (inside the folder was a photo of one of the other assistant coaches that Ron was close friends with along with photos of the football team and other photos that Rick had cobbled together to fit the narrative story he had concocted. The narrative went on for another minute or so explaining all the things to be accomplished during the mission with the following ending. "As usual your car will self destruct in two minutes. Good luck Mr Posey." Everyone including Mr. Posey were literally splitting their sides in laughter over this prank. Mr. Posey, when he finally regained his composure said that was great especially that last part about his car. So, when I said to him "Yea you should see your car" he just about broke his neck to get to the window to see what happened. While this was going on Rick had taken a piece of black cardboard that covered the front windshield of Ron's car and had written the word BOOM in big bold white letters across it. The prank was complete.

    Sincerely,
    Robert P. Palermo

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  2. October 28, 2008
    Rick and DPB Incident.

    Long before computers and the internet were household words there was the U.S. Mail when you needed information from a source. Since long distance phone service was expensive, a young man in high school with limited funds had to rely on the mail to get books and catalogs.
    Having been a voracious reader especially in things scientific, I was fascinated by many of the ads in the back of Popular Science. I had started a campaign to send off for catalogs and information from most of the ads in the magazine. Catalogs and plans for model rockets, to blueprints for a jet turbine engine that you could build at home (they failed to mention that you needed a machine shop to do this one) to chemical supply places and of course plans and formulas on how to make your own fireworks.
    It was of course this last one that held the most fascination for me as at the time I really thought I wanted to be a chemist. I was fascinated by chemical reactions and had a very extensive chemistry set that my parents had bought me for Christmas. So off I sent for a set of formulas to make your own firecrackers and pyrotechnics. When the plans came I poured over the different formulas and started my quest to find sources of the necessary ingredients. I went around to various stores that carried some supplies for science projects but none had the necessary chemicals in the right form for my purpose. Imagine that!

    I ended up showing Rick the various formulas and we started to look over the options. There were several firecracker formulas that required several different chemicals to make and information on how to make stars and spinners that could be added to the mix for special effects. There were also two formulas for making Detonating Powder. The first was simply called Detonating Powder A which was a more complex formula than the second formula which was called (you guessed it) Detonating Powder B or DPB for short that while simpler was the more unstable over time of the two compounds. This was a simple binary formula consisting of two chemicals that when mixed together in the proper portions would create a nice simple explosive. Rick thought this was great and proceeded to obtain the necessary chemicals from the high school chem lab. Of course I don’t believe the chem teacher just handed over the necessary chemicals but that’s another story in itself. Rick at this time had an infatuation with locks and more specifically in how to open locks. He made his own lock picks and figured out how to open combination locks by having taken so many of them apart. Picking the locks on students lockers was mere child’s play with the lockers standard lock for Rick. The more complex the lock the more Rick rose to the challenge to open those locks, and when a student had a lock that Rick couldn’t figure out how to open I just brought in a pair of bolt cutters in a gym bag and while Rick would be the lookout I would liberate the lock from the locker so Rick could study it more closely. So it should come as no surprise that Rick knew how to get past barriers that blocked his way. A talent I’m sure that would serve him well through out his life. ( or land him in jail. At times I was never really sure which it would be.)
    After Rick had obtained the two necessary chemicals to make DPB, he gave me some to try. I took the chemicals home and went upstairs to my bedroom to start mixing some of the chemicals together. I had chosen to make what I thought was a small charge (about the equivalent of 4 thimbles worth)
    It was during the mixing process that I was thinking about what would happen if this stuff went off while I was mixing it and I turned my head away from the mix just before the explosion went off.
    The sound was quite deafening and my ears were ringing and I was in shock over what had happened. The room was filled with smoke and the top of a maple dresser that I was using as a work space was now on fire form the burning chemicals and I had blown a hole thru the top of the dresser.
    My mother appeared in the doorway and I turned to tell her it was alright and everything was fine. For some strange reason she did not believe me. I guess this was due to the fact that my hand was dripping blood all over the place. Kinda hard to make a convincing argument with that going on. My father had run in from the garage which at that time was behind the house with my bedroom window overlooking the garage. He had heard the explosion and seen the smoke and had come in with a fire extinguisher to put out my dresser that was on fire.
    I was taken to the local doctors office that also functioned as a clinic and had two pieces of shrapnel removed from my left hand and had the tears in my hand stitched. The shrapnel had slightly damaged some nerves in my hand and to this day if I touch the areas that were stitched I can feel a tingling sensation that runs up thru one of my fingers.
    The next day as I showed up in school with my hand bandaged up I met up with Rick who had asked the obvious question. After recounting the tale of what had happened, one would think that such an experience would serve to dissuade anyone from attempting such a thing again and you would be wrong as you truly did not know Rick.
    Not to be deterred by a little thing like having your best friend just about blown up, Rick, being forever the scientist and adventurer figured there had to be someway we could still use DPB.
    After a while Rick had devised a way for us to safely mix and use DPB. The method was to mix no more than a thimble full amount at a time and to put the two chemicals into a plastic sandwich bag with each chemical placed away from each other into the corners of the bag. Rick would then lightly inflate the bag with his breath and close the bag. Rick would then mix the two chemicals together by gently tilting the bag back and forth until the chemicals were mixed. Rick reasoned that if the compound did go off it would be small and in mid air and thus the chances for injury would be greatly lessened. Rick would then open the bag and put a small amount of sand or gravel for weight and then the bag could be tossed and it would detonate on impact. This worked out so well that this now became the standard for mixing DPB.
    Rick had great fun with DPB using it for all sorts of things and it gave a very satisfying explosion when it went off. ( about on par with the old style M80's and Cherry Bombs that were rapidly becoming illegal everywhere in our area. Rick would also take DPB and set it out on the road of a busy highway and we would sit back and guess which car would hit it and set it off; sounding for all intents like a tire that had blown out. People would either slowdown or stop to see what had happened.
    DPB had given us a lot of fun that we both enjoyed.
    Then one summer during my families annual camping trip to Port Clinton near Sandusky Ohio, I had convinced my parents to take Rick along. It was the 4th of July holiday and of course fireworks were part of the fun. We had camped at a private campground that bordered Lake Erie. The campground had a narrow peninsula that extended several hundred feet into the water. It was a natural area to use for fishing and to launch boats.
    My father had parked the camper about 30-40 feet from the edge of the water and the waters edge was covered with fairly large rock formations.
    Rick had brought a supply of the chemicals needed to make a lot of DPB charges with him. He stored the main supply in his bags inside the car which was a station wagon that we would camp out in at night.
    Rick had started into photography at this time and was getting used to taking his camera with him just about everywhere. He also discovered that 35MM screw top aluminum film canisters made ideal storage containers for the two chemicals used in the making of DPB. With a supply of plastic
    sandwich bags we were set for several days of explosive good times. Rick and I had walked all around the campsite and had set off a few DPB
    charges over the water where the explosive sound was somewhat attenuated by the impact on the water but the resultant water geyser of about 8-10 feet was quite satisfying. As the night descended on us my brother in law and his friends started setting off some fireworks. Rick looked at the weak display of the fireworks and looked at me and said “We can do better than that!” Rick had gotten very adept at mixing DPB in the dark as most of the time our charges were set off at night. It was really quite simple to know which chemical was which without having to open the containers to see which chemical was which. The one chemical was like talcum powder in that it was very fine and smooth and made almost no noise when you shook the container. The other sounded much like salt inside the aluminum can and had a very distinctive sound. Since the one chemical ( “the soft one”) was used less in volume than the salt sounding one, Rick would have to replenish the one more often than the other. Rick had gone back to the car and had replenished the “salt sounding” chemical
    earlier and was getting ready to do another DPB charge to show off. He unscrewed the cap off of the “soft sounding” one as that was the one you put into the bag first and much to his surprise the canister was empty. I said it couldn’t be as there was almost a half a can left. He said it couldn’t be the other one because he pulled it up and shook it next to his head and you could hear the very distinctive “salt shaker sound”. It was dark and I couldn’t see real well so I said “Give me that.” and took the canister into the camper where there was some light so I could figure out what was going on. I went into the camper and unscrewed the lid on the “salt shaker” sounding canister and to my frozen horror I was staring at a full 35MM can of perfectly mixed DPB powder.
    Rick and I have often discussed the events of what had happened next and to this day I can give no satisfactory explanation for what transpired. I seemed to have lost all control over my actions. I felt a force moving thru me that made me do its bidding. My mother was in the camper not more than three feet away and I did not panic but knew we were in grave danger. Without another thought I felt myself move in a way that was as unfamiliar to me as anything I had ever done before or since. I made a 180 degree turn inside the camper and while doing that I spun the cap back onto the film canister in one fluid motion. I took three strides. The first had put me out the door and onto the small step attached to the camper. The next two strides had me moving away from the camper and my right hand was holding the canister like a hand grenade and swinging backward, also in one non stop fluid motion while I was moving forward. Rick had seen me come out of the camper and saw I was going to throw the canister and had moved to stop me by reaching out and screaming "NO” but the distance was too great between us and I was moving. The canister had left my hand in a long high arc that carried it out over the heads of my brother in law and his friends that were near the waters edge. The canister cleared the rocks and impacted on the water. The explosion was devastating and the water geyser went up a good 40 feet or more and then... it was over.
    At this point Rick was totally dumbfounded about what had just transpired. I came out of whatever force that had taken control of me at that moment (I still maintain to this day that my guardian angel was there and protected us all.) And I took Rick aside back to the car to explain what had happened. We came to the conclusion that when Rick had gone back to refill the canister he had done it in the dark and had refilled the “salt” sounding chemical right on top of the” soft” sounding chemical and that when he shook the canister by his head he had mixed the two chemical together at that point. We both decided then and there to “cool it” with the chemical explosives for the remainder of the trip.
    Needless to say I sort of lost my enthusiasm for DPB after that but Rick continued on for a while with its use. Among the formulas that I had obtained was a formula for a contact explosive that Rick and James had exploited for several pranks. The advantage of the contact explosive was that it was a wet compound that was stable until it dried and then would go off when touched. It was loud and far less deadly than DPB and they used it with great success in a variety of different ways around the school. Most notably was books , light switches, and the occasional locker that may have needed some attention. After awhile, Rick moved away from chemical explosives and we moved into a new way of producing loud explosive noises by building gas cannons, but that is another story.

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  3. October 31, 2008

    Rick’s First Laser Light Show.

    I thought I would jump ahead a bit and talk about the first laser light show that Rick and I had put on at the planetarium. It’s funny how one can recall very specific details of an event but for the life of me I can’t tell you what the date was when it happened. Anyway, Rick had been working at the planetarium and the office at the front of the planetarium had become a regular train station for all the people associated with the planetarium either officially or unofficially. I met Rick there on a regular basis between classes and could almost always find somebody hanging around to discuss the current going ons of the place. (I apologize in advance if I misspell anyone’s name) A young gifted artist by the name of Kuznier was a regular who produced some of the best artwork I had ever seen with fantastic renderings of planets, and outer space landscapes and drawings of famous scientific people that were truly breathtaking in their realism. Rick’s art skills were good but even he greatly admired Kuznier’s skill. Numerous conversations flowed from within that room and while I can’t tell you exactly when the idea came from Rick to do a laser light show I can say the idea was his envisionment.
    Rick showed us what could be done with the laser and the visual effects and the lightning generator and such and said we could do a show. Rick wanted to do the show to music and that’s where Wayne Bonsik and I entered into the picture. Wayne was another geek with a background in physics and electrical engineering and had been working at WYSU FM operating the equipment there. I was deep into high end audio equipment at that point spending all my money in the pursuit of the “Absolute Sound”.

    At the time the speakers behind the dome of the planetarium.. well you know ...sucked. The PA system wasn’t any better. Wayne had a keen interest in speakers and I had gotten a high quality raw driver and Wayne had devised a Thiele aligned vented box for voice use and Rick had built the box and mounted it just below the domes edge in the center at the front of the planetarium. This cured the PA system problems but did nothing for the music side of the equation. Since the university wasn’t prone to throwing a lot of money our way for projects, Rick had asked me if I could come up with something. I agreed to bring in my speakers from home which I had just bought earlier. They were special. A pair of ESS Air Motion Transformers 1A’s that cost me over 800.00 for the pair. A lot of money in the 70’s. I brought them in and we hooked them up and they sounded terrible. The large metal dome of the planetarium wasn’t exactly conducive to great sound. The acoustics were terrible. We tried different positions but it wasn’t working out. The planetarium in those days had two heating registers that were along the wall at the entrance near the doors. Wayne suggested getting the speakers off the floor and putting them on the registers. Like magic the speakers had come to life. The speakers acoustically coupled with the corners of the room and the bottom end was great and the Heils fired right over the audience with their lightning fast speed. We were in business.
    The only other problem was that we didn’t have enough power to really drive the speakers to give the impact we really wanted. My amps were good enough for home use but not really enough for the space within the planetarium. I corrected this problem by going to one of my high end stereo shops and talking Leonard (of Leonard’s Stereo Shop) into loaning us a 200 watt RMS per channel Marantz amp that was a beast in exchange for an advertising plug before each show. Now we were cooking. Wayne had made up a tape with music for the show with selections that he and Rick had worked out for the show. The planetarium had a nice Teac 3340 4 channel tape deck (the only decent piece of audio equipment in the place) and Wayne had worked his editing magic with the opening narrative and the music. The rest was up to Rick to fit the show to the music and special effects.

    Wayne had chosen some very light classical music that played softly as people came into the planetarium before the show. With the lights low like going into a theater, the mood and setting was perfect. As the lights lowered for the beginning of the show the taped narrative began and then WOW. Rick and Wayne had chosen to launch the show off with the laser doing its dance on the dome in perfect time to ELO’s Fire on High. The sound and the effect were spectacular. At certain key moments in the music the laser would stop in time with the music and the effect was like the laser was alive. After the spectacular opening the music moved to a softer and easy going sound and the rain started. In this case the rain started literally as Rick decided to add some realism to the display by positioning us along the edges of the planetarium with water pistols and we squirted water at a high descending arc onto the audience to have them “feel” the rain. A truly great effect.
    At another point when the storm had reached its full fury Rick had arranged for us to discharge Co2 fire extinguishers over the heads of the audience. The result was the roar of the storm and the planetarium had suddenly gotten a lot cooler.
    The show was a huge success and the Jambar had written it up as one of the great events on campus as a definite must see. The only problem we had, or I should say that Rick had, was in suddenly explaining to the university why all the Co2 fire extinguishers in Ward Beecher were empty. Since the show was so successful we had used up a lot of Co2 bottles. At first Rick solved the problem by swapping out empty bottles for full ones but eventually got the dept. to pay for the refills as we were afraid that if a real fire broke out it could present a problem if the extinguishers were empty. The show ran for several times to a packed house and was truly a tour de force in its presentation.

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  4. Robert P. Palermo sent this story November 3, 2008 in his continuing series:

    Going Fast, Going Far

    After the memorial service, I had talked briefly with Rob Landis from NASA about Rick. Rob asked me if I was one of the students who had flown with Rick. I started to laugh as I told him: “Well, yes, I had, but we never left the ground and we didn’t do it in an airplane.”

    Rick and I had a passion for driving, as a lot of young men do but the difference was while others may have merely driven fast on occasion Rick and I did it as a way of life. Rick and I were involved in more than our shares of close calls at high speed. Rick and I pushed many a car we had driven to the limit and in some cases beyond as we both had wrecked cars in some pretty serious accidents along the way. None of that slowed us down as it just fueled our desire to understand why the accidents had happened in the first place.

    When Rick and I started driving (him one year earlier), we both had started when the speed limit on the freeway was 70 mph. So of course driving at 80-85 was the norm for us with the occasional push to over a hundred on some select stretches. Later I had gotten a Pontiac with a high output motor that would run to 135 mph and on more than one occasion I had blistered the roadways around Youngstown at over 115 mph. Rick had gotten himself his dream car: a Shelby Cobra GT 350 that he absolutely loved. This car was ideal, as Rick loved the handling and speed the Cobra had provided. Over time Rick had taught me some things about cornering and slides and reverse 180 degree spins (you backed up in reverse at 45-50 mph, cut the wheel hard, slid the car around, drop it in drive and you would come out of the slide going in the opposite direction at just about the same speed you went into the slide). But I had done more sustained high speed driving than Rick, and taught him all about speed perception when traveling over 110 miles per hour and the changes necessary in timing when performing high speed maneuvers. Then the first oil crisis hit and gas went from 26.9 cents a gallon to almost (gasp) a dollar per gallon. And while that wasn’t bad enough the speed limit was dropped to 55 miles per hour, a veritable snail’s pace for us. We took out some of our frustration by going to the local drag strips not to race, but to do photography work. I was heavily into following the drag racing circuit and Rick and I headed out to the old Ohio airport that was converted over for racing use.

    I knew the promoter so he agreed to let Rick and I into the events in exchange for some coverage in the newspaper, since Rick was doing some work for the Daily Times. The promoter ran two tracks, the one in Ohio, which was a 1/4 mile strip, and the 1/8 mile strip in Sharon, PA known as the Sunset Strip. I had met many of drag racing legends there and Rick had taken a lot of great photos of the drivers and cars including some very special pictures of “Grumpy Bill Jenkins” behind the grill at the race track concession stand in his racing outfit wearing a chefs cap and flipping burgers. Rick also covered Bob Pleso a motorcycle daredevil that was doing motorcycle jumps over cars without benefit of a landing ramp. Bob was doing the first and only Ramp to Ground jumps in the country. Rick had managed to get the pictures published in the Sunday Vindicator. Rick had covered Pleso’s career very closely until Bob had a fatal accident in performing his motorcycle routine.

    The years at YSU were good ones, but Rick and I were both working and trying to go to school at the same time. Rick had started in 1971 and I started a year later in ‘72. Going to school part time and working wasn’t exactly conducive to getting a degree. Rick was in electrical engineering and I was working on a degree in Criminal Justice (yes, I am aware of the irony) but the problem was we were both getting a bit burned out after 5-6 years. As with many of the things we had done together, Rick and I were in his basement bedroom concocting yet another idea in the wee hours of the morning. Rick was a bit of a night owl and I often stopped by after work to sit and talk.

    Rick and I needed a break and we needed some kind of counseling on what to do about school. Unfortunately the only person whose judgment we would rely on at that time was in John Brennan who was a professor in the bio dept with his office in the basement of Ward Beecher. John and I got to be close friends when I mistakenly had taken an 8:00 AM course of his for modern man and bio. I was working at the Dollar Savings and Trust in downtown Youngstown as a data processing control clerk who worked from 6:00 PM until about 2:00 AM Monday thru Friday processing the banks transactions. So a 8:00 class wasn’t the best choice. I often showed up at John’s class half-asleep and John would invite me down to his office after class and buy me a wonderful cup of Servomatic coffee from the snack bar. John was a special kind of guy and I have no doubt that he was a powerful influence on my life and Rick’s. John took a special interest in students who were having problems and offered much in the way of sage advice and counseling about anything and everything and not just about school. Rick met John and the rest they say is history.

    What was unfortunate about only having John to talk to about our problems was the fact that John was now in Grand Forks, North Dakota at the University of North Dakota doing his thesis work on his Doctorate. So Rick figured the best thing to do was to go see John in person... you know, a road trip. Thanksgiving holiday was coming up so we planned it for then. Rick calls John and John says to Rick “You should see how beautiful it is here,” and Rick says: “Funny you should mention that,” and Rick fills him in on the trip and John says “Great.”

    Not to let a little thing like 1200 plus miles, a 55 mph speed limit and 4 days to pull this off would ever stop Rick. No sir, not our Rick. Rick said we could do it if we “Gumballed” the trip. Right at this time one of our most favorite and influential movies had been out. The Gumball Rally. This movie starred Michael Sarazin and The late great Raul Julia (Kiss of the Spider Woman, Moon Over Parador, and of course his stellar role as Gomez in the Adams Family.) The movie was based on the true life Cannonball Baker Memorial Sea to Shining Sea Road Rally Run. An event that was held several times over the years for an unofficial race from New York to California in the best possible time. A 3000 plus mile journey with the record being somewhere around 33 hours. What made the movie especially good was the fact that although it was a comedy it was more factually based than the Cannonball Run as done by Burt Reynolds. The director had gotten permission to film the vehicles actually at full speed through several states and had built a special film truck to run over 100 plus miles per hour to film it all. The realism was great. Rick and I had seen it together and then a little contest broke out between us to see who could see it the most times before it left the area. Rick saw it 13 times and I saw it 17 times.

    As with most things, I let Rick do most of the planning as he was good at the details. We would rent a car and set it up with a radar detector, a CB radio and a pair of binoculars for the co-pilot ... er, I mean driver. I arranged to call off of work for a couple of days and Rick picked me up outside the bank Tuesday (actually early Wed. morning) and we took off. Rick had picked up the rental, wired in the CB and radar detector, and packed the car with our bags so we could take off right from Youngstown. Rick had the entire trip mapped out and he drove the first leg. Rick wound the car up to about 85 and we were off. The car ran for about 4 hours before needing fuel. So that’s how we drove. 4 on and 4 off. I got the leg that took us around Chicago at sometime around 4:00 AM which was great. Rick navigated and I drove pushing the car for all it was worth which was about 95 mph. We entered the outskirts of Chicago and looped around and past it in 20 minutes. It was nice not having any traffic to contend with at that hour. That was my first exposure to sodium vapor lights and their odd yellow gold hue. I was very glad to be out of that and back under the cover of darkness.

    Then, another curious thing happened with the CB Radio. After clearing Chicago, the normal chatter and noise on the CB had subsided and channel 19 was used only for accurate bear reports. Rick and I were amazed that the people were so careful about the use of channel 19 and it greatly enhanced our ability to run flat out. No cop could move or do anything without everyone on the CB keeping track of it. The final leg of the trip was the run from Fargo to Grand Forks. A straight road that did not curve for 60 miles, it seemed to be ruler straight. The land was flat as far as the eye could see and Rick commented on the fact that you could actually see the curvature of the earth at distance.

    16 hours and 20 minutes from the time we left Youngstown, we were driving thru the town of Grand Forks. Over 1200 miles and for those of you trying to do the math, our average speed for the entire trip including stops was around 78 mph. Grand Forks was a quaint town and laid out in a straight line. We drove from one end of town to the other at normal speed and that took all of about 3 minutes. We found John’s house that he was renting for his stay, and unwound for a while and then crashed for the night.

    The next day, John had arranged for us to have Thanksgiving dinner with him, his wife, and two friends from the university, Chris and Jim. They lived on a big farm just across the border in Minnesota. So we drove off and had a great home cooked meal and talked about everything. Rick and I were surprised at the way the farmhouse was set up. Inside the house was huge amounts of firewood and the shelves were packed with canned jars filled with all sorts of things from the farm. Apparently, the winter storms can get so bad there with all the lake effect snow, and the huge drifts blowing across the open land that it’s not unusual to get buried under 50-60 inches of snow and you literally can’t go anywhere until the spring thaw. Chris said she had her knitting and such to keep her busy and Jim had his books and the chore of taking care of the farm animals during the winter. The next day we spent touring the university and talking to John at length about school. The one thing that struck us was when we went to the library on campus, was the large number of students working on their schoolwork the day after a major holiday. As John explained, these very serious students wanted their degrees to move on. This university was not a commuter campus like YSU and the atmosphere of learning was very different. It made an impact on both of us and gave us a lot to think about on the trip back.

    We thanked John for the stay and took off in the morning. The trip back was somewhat slower than the trip in as we hit some severe weather that slowed us down. However there was one stretch for a couple of hundred miles that a big rig was moving at better than 85 miles per hour and I was driving. I decided to draft the rig at about 15 feet behind him. The sustained run behind the rig resulted in something that Rick found fascinating and that was fuel consumption. The gas gauge hardly moved during the run. The truck blocking the wind and us in the draft cut the resistance down by a huge amount. At one point since we were both getting pretty tired, I was sleeping, Rick was driving, and he blew past a cop who pulled us over. We were out in the middle of nowhere and the cop wanted us to pay a bond for the ticket to let us go. Rick explained that we had no money, as we were just a couple of poor college students trying to get home. After the long sob story the cop gave Rick a warning and let us go as he would have had to haul the two us back like 30 or 40 miles to the nearest town to post bail and it was cold out. So we got spared the ticket and made it home. Time from when we left? 24 hours on the road to get back. I never thought that I would ever make a trip like that one again and felt it was a once in a lifetime trip. So it came as a complete surprise when Rick said we were going to do it again except this time we were going 1600 miles instead of 1200 miles to go to Winnipeg, Canada in February of 1979 to see the last visible total solar eclipse that would be visible from the northern hemisphere until 2017. But that is yet again another story.

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  5. Robert P. Palermo sent this November 18, 2008 in the last of his series (he sez, although we hope for others...)
    The Eclipse.
    The trip to Winnipeg, Canada was a memorable one as truly a unique experience.
    This time the trip consisted of four intrepid adventurers. Rick, Tim Kuziner, Dennis Straight and I would make the 1600 mile trek by car. Kuz asked to be excluded from driving chores as he didn’t feel comfortable driving at higher than normal speeds that we would be traveling to reach our destination. Dennis on the other hand was a kindred spirit and had good high speed driving skills so the driving was split 3 ways. To view the eclipse and to experience totality it was required to travel north to reach the sun’s path where you could see the total eclipse. If we tried to view it from the Youngstown area we would have only seen a partial eclipse. The swath of area was at the edge of the United States cutting thru the upper most part of North Dakota with the middle of the swath running right thru Winnipeg. During the drive as we were heading toward the Canadian border at night we were in an area that was devoid of any influencing lights from towns or cities. Rick was absolutely enthralled with the winter sky and the shear amount of stars that were visible. At one point we stopped to admire the night sky. I actually had a hard time trying to pick out some of the constellations as there were so many stars visible. Rick pointed out the constellations giving me the points of reference I needed to see the constellations. I had never seen so many stars as I had that night and I have never again seen the sky so clearly as that night. The night sky was truly breathtaking. As we continued on and started to close in on the border one could see a glow off in the distance that was Winnipeg. All Rick could think about was the level of light pollution messing up the night sky. I’m sure some of you may have heard him rant about this issue.

    I think the trip up took about 21 hours with the three of us driving and the first thing I noticed was when we got there was how cold it was. Yes, Winnipeg in February. Something that everyone should experience at least once... I don’t do cold well. I have a genetic iron deficiency that doesn’t help with cold weather. So, the first thing we look for is a store that sells thermal underwear. Having procured some additional insulation we set off for the room that we had rented. The one remarkable thing about Winnipeg was the relative cleanliness of everything including the snow. The snow doesn’t get black and dirty from the plowing because they only plow the snow enough to drive on and seem to use only cinders as the snow was just an off brown color instead of the black mess that we usually see here in the states. Rick and I loved to drive in the snow when you got just enough snow on the roads to make them fun. What can I say? We were nuts.

    We had arrived early enough before the eclipse to take in some of the local culture and that included a trip to the museum located in Winnipeg. The museum was great as upon entering you are greeted by a representative that tells you about points of interest inside the museum. Inside the main entryway on the walls were some paintings from local artists including this one huge painting that must have been around 15-20 feet tall of raindrops. The painting was for all intents and purposes pretty unremarkable when looking at it from a distance. The real beauty of the painting became clear when the guide told us to stand very close facing the painting and look up. The effect is that it’s raining upon you.

    The highlight of the museum trip was that local craftsman had built a complete three-masted schooner inside the museum and was 100% authentic in its reproduction. Completely built by hand, the level of craftsmanship was incredible. It was amazing to think that people would travel across the ocean in such a boat as the size wasn’t as big as one would expect. We were told that this boat was the size used by Christopher Columbus in his travel to the New World. I don’t think I would have made it on that voyage.

    Afterwards we returned to the room and Rick and Kuz started watching the television for weather reports and information on the eclipse which was a big event for the area. Much to the horror of everyone was the fact that it looked like Winnipeg was going to be clouded over during the eclipse. Not exactly the news we were looking for after having traveled 1600 miles to see the event. Rick studied the maps and news to find us a spot where it wouldn’t be clouded over. It looked like our best bet was to head south toward the U.S. border to clear the cloud cover and still be within the band of the suns path that we could see totality. So we packed up and drove off a couple of hundred miles toward the border. I know I slept most of that portion of the trip as when it was getting close to totality we stopped literally out in the middle of nowhere. All I could see was farmers’ fields as far as the eye could see. We unloaded all the equipment including the Celestron telescope from the planetarium. Rick, Kuz, and Dennis set up all the equipment while I started photographing the guys setting up the equipment in the middle of some farmer’s wheat field. I was getting deep into photography at that point thanks to You Know Who. Rick was absolutely obsessed with photography. He once told me that you were truly a photographer when you saw someone drowning and you took a picture of it first before getting help. He also really loved the fact that the university had a Hasselblad camera system that he used on more than one occasion (actually I think he adopted it because he used it so much.) Rick really loved the camera but couldn’t afford it as it was terribly expensive. However, he was always fond of reminding me that he knew where there were three of them for free if we could just get to the moon to get them. Just think. The ultimate road trip. If Rick could have found a way there is no doubt that we would have gone.

    The event of the eclipse came upon us and it was truly a sight and experience to behold. I continued to take photos of the guys through it all stopping long enough to take in totality and look thru the telescope during the partial phases and that was as breathtaking as anything I had ever done. I resumed the picture taking only to find that the temperature had dropped enough during totality that the shutter on the camera had frozen and I could not take anymore pictures until I had gotten the camera warmed back up. I don’t recall even being bothered by the cold at that moment. When the event was over and we packed up and headed home. Truly a great moment and the last great road trip that Rick and I had taken together. It wasn’t long after that I finally graduated from YSU and had entered the working world which had taken me away from Rick and the university. I had thought of Rick often thru the years after I moved away and always thought that we would hook up again for some misadventure or something. It was hard to realize that nearly 30 years had passed between us and one truly wonders where the time has gone.

    I have covered all the most important stories ( I have some short ones) that I could think of from that time and regret the fact that Rick and I didn’t get to hook up again always thinking that it would happen down the road later. Unfortunately life doesn’t always go the way you think it should and I’m sure Rick would have agreed with that. Anyway...it’s time to say goodbye to a good friend...

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