Memories . . .

Not all memories are great, but for the most part, it seems we remember

the “good memories” more than other memories. (Or even the good things about bad events.)

I don’t know if that is true or not, but I’ll go with it as that is what I think I do.

In thinking about memories, I sure enjoy any eight-year-old boy (or girl) talking about “years ago” that were “the good old days.”

What brought up this subject of memory was a reflection I read in a newspaper comparing the coronavirus of 2020 and 2021 with the poliovirus of the 1950s.

I remember well the polio epidemic during the 1950s as I spent a couple of weeks in the Mary Lanning hospital because of it. I was one of three people I knew of from Lawrence that experienced the same sickness. (The word ‘pandemic’ wasn’t invented yet, I guess.)

I had not connected COVID-19 with polio before I read the article, and they are not the same sickness. However, the effect on society in general is similar and I was grateful for the newspaper putting the story together.

I was born at a very young age I guess, and my memory isn’t great because of that. However, I’ll pass along a couple of memories that I can laugh at now . . . even though they were not funny at the time.

* Polio affected my leg muscles and my eye sight. I remember coming home from a “Donkey Softball Game” that was played in Lawrence (How many people even know what that is?) I asked my older siblings why they had two circles at each base and two donkeys running the bases at the same time and other silly questions. (I had ‘double-vision’, resulting I guess from the polio.) The next morning I was in the Hastings hospital.

* I was not home, but I guess a day or two after I went to the hospital, the Nuckolls County sheriff showed up at our home. My parents were not home and the sheriff told one of my older sisters he had to put a “Quarantine” sign up on the house because I had polio. I guess he did so, but another sister who was soon to be a nursing student quickly tore the sign down saying it was not necessary, that scientists had already concluded polio could not be spread to anyone coming into the home.

My roommate for part of the time at Mary Lanning was Ernie Snell. He was quite a bit older, but at least a connection to home. Two things I remember from the hospital were:

* the daily ‘shots’ of penicillin. I guess I feared the cold alcohol wipes more than the shots themselves. *

“Hot Packs” – super heated towels put on my leg muscles. (This continued long after I got home and was accompanied by a ‘rub-down’ of the muscles by an older brother, until he returned to college.)

A O

My second major ‘memory’ moment of last week came when a friend sent me a reminder of our days in the U. S. Air Force, back in the late 1960s, early 1970s.

The year 2020 was the 60th anniversary of a governmental-military unit

called The “National Reconnaissance Office.” (NRO).

Hidden deep in the administration of the military and civilian organizations of the U. S. government was a unit called the “Air Force Special Projects Production Facility,” (AFSPPF for short.)

A person could not find us on any organizational chart and we joked that: “we were the unit that didn’t exist.”

The AFSPPF worked with a film bucket recovery squadron and was a critical component of the National Reconnaissance Program related to all

Film Return Satellites, including Corona, Gambit and Hexagon. The AFSPPF was dedicated to providing R and D, mission analysis and image production for all the film return satellites during the 1960s and early 1970s.

One of the more humorous memories of this experience for me came years after I was out of the service and attending several reunions of our unit. Because we realized what a ‘rare’ experience we had, we wanted to put that experience down for history.

One of the first things we did was to ask the Air Force for the information they had on our unit.

We were actually surprised when we were told: “they did not have any records that our unit ever existed.”

We proceeded to write the book without the help of the Air Force and it

is now printed and at the Air Force Museum at Dayton, Ohio.

Memories . . . what would we do without them ? ? ?

A O

Everyone will remember the weather of February 2021. The extreme cold and the length of the cold spell.

People in Texas will most likely remember it longer than many of us. They went without “power” for quite a time, and many things froze.

The experts will be debating just how such a thing could happen. From

what I’ve seen so far, however, is Texas gets approximately 25 percent of its power from the wind. When building the wind towers and started using them, they reduced the number of gas powered generators that were no longer usable in February of 2021.

When the wind towers “froze” and could not be used . . . Texans were missing 25 percent of their generation of electricity.

Consider the following:

Oil is burned to heat homes as well as being necessary to create electricity from coal, gas and, obviously, oil power plants. Oil is used to create the gasoline for our autos and trucks.

But oil and gas are also cracked (heated under pressure to high temperatures and mixed with chemicals and catalysts) in cracker plants to create the plastic that is used in our everyday lives. The plastic that is used to manufacture wind turbines. The polyester that is used to make clothes. The coatings that protect electrical wiring.

The list is endless.

The US thrives on oil and gas, and necessarily must continue to thrive for many years after solar and wind and geothermal and hydro farms are significantly improved.