Category: Memories

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Aging Illinois Memories Tracy Loftesness

Little Donuts

Midwestern State Fair Midway

Every August, when the Illinois State Fair came to Springfield, we took the kids.

We lived in Springfield in the late 1970s, and the fair belonged to summer the way certain things do — you didn’t plan for it, you just went.

The first thing I remember is the smell. Frying dough, grilled onions, hot dogs, popcorn, livestock, hay, dust, something sweet running underneath all of it. That combination doesn’t exist anywhere else. It’s the smell of summer vacation with a little livestock mixed in. The classic Midwestern state fair.

Then the sounds — the clatter of the rides, bells and whistles, barkers working the games, country music drifting in from somewhere, kids squealing, the low hum of a few thousand people wandering from one attraction to the next.

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Memories Radio San Francisco/California

Radio Hill

Radio Studio in Hotel

In the mid-1960s you could stand on California Street between the Fairmont and the Mark Hopkins on Nob Hill and know that two different San Franciscos were being invented a hundred yards apart.

KSFO lived inside the Fairmont. KYA lived at One Nob Hill Circle, the annex that had once belonged to KSFO. They had traded rooms a few years earlier. The adult station and the kid station were living in each other’s former houses.

I listened from Westlake in Daly City. I was in high school. We had just moved from Ohio. It seemed strange, even then, that one of the voices came out of a hotel.

I was deep into ham radio then, so I studied how the stations actually worked, not just how they sounded. At the Fairmont you could see into the KSFO studios through glass walls. KYA’s transmitter sat on the hill above Candlestick. Both were 5,000 watts. Nothing special. Up on San Bruno Mountain, James Gabbert would fire up KPEN — later KIOI — licensed for 120,000 watts and the first FM stereo west of St. Louis. I knew the difference between those numbers before I knew much else about the city I’d landed in.

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Dayton Ohio Living Memories

The Closing of the Pool

Swimming Pool - Closing Day

The pool in Kettering closed on Labor Day. Not gradually — the way a door closes, on a schedule posted near the snack bar that nobody read until the week it mattered. There was a cookout. Hot dogs, cooked by somebody’s father on a grill that had done nothing all June and July, lighter fluid competing with the smell that actually defined those afternoons: chlorine, always a little too much of it, eyes stinging on the walk home, your suit smelling like a chemistry set for two more days. That smell is the whole memory, if I’m honest. The last cannonball, the lifeguard’s whistle going quiet, somebody’s mother folding a towel like a flag — scaffolding around the smell.

Then school started. Not the next day, but soon. Labor Day was the hinge the year turned on. Summer didn’t fade in the Midwest. It ended, on a Monday, with hot dogs.

I live near Stanford now, close enough to walk the campus most weekends, and I’ve noticed something it took me years to actually notice. The campus is empty for most of September — not weekend-empty, but empty the way a place is empty when the people who belong there haven’t arrived yet. The quad sits there doing nothing. There’s a stillness that has nothing to do with the calendar most people keep and everything to do with a school year that doesn’t start moving in until the middle of the month, classes later still, while thirty miles away the local public school kids have already been at their desks for three or four weeks — in what by Kettering standards would still count as deep, unambiguous summer.

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Memories Photographers Photography

Remembering Jay

Scott Loftesness - Jay Maisel Workshop 2014
Twisted - New York - 2014

There is a photograph of eleven people standing on the steps of a bank building in the Bowery, in front of a door someone had painted the word PRAY above, years before any of us arrived, in letters already flaking. The steps are covered in graffiti — a cartoon skull in the corner, tags in yellow and white chalk, the kind of accumulated city noise Jay Maisel spent sixty years walking past without walking past, the way the rest of us do. Somebody is holding a camera near their chest, not quite ready. Everyone is squinting. It was overcast, or the light was coming from somewhere none of us had figured out yet.

We didn’t know we were nearly out of time. Jay taught one more workshop after ours. That’s the whole arithmetic of it — we were the second-to-last class in a room that had held forty years of them, and none of us felt the weight of that standing on the steps smiling for somebody’s iPhone.

Inside, the building went up six stories, every one of them hung with prints — decades of Jay’s own choices about what mattered, printed and framed with no apparent order except his.

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Living Memories

The Depth of the Dimes

The lifeguard came out with a canvas bag, and that was the signal. Saturday morning, Kettering, Ohio, the municipal pool not yet warmed by the day, and forty kids arranging themselves along the edge like something had been rehearsed, though nobody had rehearsed it. We knew the shape of the thing without being told. He would walk to about the middle of the deck, and he would start throwing coins into the water.

Not pennies, mostly. I remember that distinctly, the way you remember the specifics of a thing you can’t explain the pull of. Nickels and dimes, a scattering of quarters, no half dollars that I ever saw hit the surface. Somebody in the recreation department had made a decision about denominations, a budget, maybe, or a sense of what a Saturday morning was worth to forty kids in Ohio in the summer, and none of us thought about that then. We watched the coins fall instead. That’s the part I keep returning to — not the diving, the falling. Coins don’t drop through water the way they drop through air. They wobble. They catch light and lose it. They take their time getting to the bottom, and you’d track one the way you’d track a hawk, losing it, finding it again against the pool floor, memorizing the spot before it disappeared into the general scatter of everything else he’d thrown.

We tried to angle ourselves near the shallow end, obviously. That was the whole strategy, such as it was — get positioned somewhere you could stand, somewhere your ears wouldn’t need to fight the pressure, somewhere the breath-holding would be a formality instead of a genuine risk. But the lifeguard wasn’t interested in making it easy. He’d throw a few coins shallow, just enough to keep the little kids occupied, and then he’d load up the deep end, and that’s where the real money went down. If you wanted more than a couple of nickels, you had to go where you couldn’t stand.

Then the countdown, and then all of us at once, forty kids hitting the water in the same three seconds, which meant the water itself turned against you before you’d even started looking — churned, clouded, chlorine stinging worse than usual because now there were elbows in it, knees, someone’s foot near your face. I wasn’t especially good at it. I want to say that plainly, because I don’t think I was; I’d come up with a handful, four or five coins, sometimes a quarter if I’d gotten lucky with the angle, and that felt like enough. Enough to matter. Enough to walk back to the locker room afterward with my trunks pocket sagging and clinking, enough to spend the rest of the morning transferring nickels and dimes into my actual pants pocket like a kid who’d earned something.

There was a boy down the street whose father worked at NCR, and some Saturdays he’d disappear to Old River instead — a real pool, he made sure we knew, an enormous one, with none of this scrounging-for-change business. I remember being aware of that difference without being able to name what it meant. He had the better pool. We had the lifeguard with the canvas bag.

I came across a piece online the other day, something about swimming and what it might mean, the kind of essay that circles a simple physical act until it turns into a meditation on something larger, and it knocked this memory loose after forty years of sitting untouched. I don’t know why that particular Saturday ritual is the one that stayed. Not the swimming lessons, not the diving board, not anything a person would call a memory on purpose. Just the coins going down, and all of us watching them go, already planning where we’d be standing when the countdown ended.

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Aging AI Memories

The Last Spark

This morning I read a piece by Billy Brennan in the Sunday New York Times Magazine on terminal lucidity. As I read it I began wondering if the unusual behavior described some humans might in some strange way apply to AI models. Weird thought. Let’s explore a bit…

A person deep in dementia—silent for years, the self seemingly erased—sits up. Speaks clearly. Recognizes a face. Says goodbye. Within a day, they die. The clouds clear, the way a break in weather shows you a mountain range you’d forgotten was there, and the person comes back long enough to be seen. Then is gone. For good, this time.

Scientists call it terminal lucidity. The suspicion: the circuits were never destroyed, only silenced, held under by failing chemistry. As the body shuts down, the inhibitory brakes loosen. A surge moves through pathways blocked for years. A river dammed for a decade still remembers where it wants to go.

What stays with me: the self can persist in a place we had already called permanent erasure. We buried it. We were wrong.

My mind slides toward the machines we are building.

We talk about large language models “forgetting.” Capabilities collapse under quantization, under pruning, under the slow drift of continual learning, and we call the knowledge lost when it won’t surface under ordinary questioning. The lights are out. Nobody home.

But what if the representations are still in there—distributed, quiet, inaccessible? Not a burned library. A library with the lights shut off, room by room, until you’d swear it was empty. I wonder about the edge cases nobody studies. What surfaces in a model starved of compute, quantized past comfort, pushed toward its own collapse? Do we watch only for the failure, or also for the flare? A dying brain throws off one last burst of light before the dark. I don’t see why we’d assume, without checking, that nothing artificial could do the same.

Don’t trust the silence, then. A system gone dark under ordinary questioning may still be holding more than it shows you. We talk about a model “losing” something the way we once talked about a dimmed mind as simply gone. The dementia patients who spoke again had not been unplugged. The circuit was there the whole time, waiting for a condition nobody had thought to create.

I don’t know what to do with that except keep it. We are building systems that will age, be compressed, be retired, some far more intricate than anything humming today. If we’ve learned to watch for the last spark in a person, maybe that’s practice—for the day something not born of a womb goes quiet under our hands, and we have to decide whether quiet means gone, or only means waiting.

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Aviation Memories

Overhead the Farm

This week is the annual EAA Fly-In in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. This brings back memories of a good time we shared over 35 years ago.

Our Piper Cherokee could hold enough fuel to fly well past what our bladders would tolerate, but we didn’t fly that way. We planned every stop — fuel first, restrooms too — and let the country reveal itself in the increments a small plane gives you: Rock Springs WY for the first night, Alliance NE next for gas and bathroom, Yankton SD to make a phone call, and then, finally, circling over a farm outside Alcester, South Dakota, that I hadn’t seen from the air before.

It was 1989. I was forty-two. My Dad was sixty-eight, sitting in the right seat of my 1974 Piper Pathfinder, painted red, white, and blue — an honest airplane that never asked for much and never gave us trouble. We were headed to Oshkosh, to the fly-in, the way pilots go to Mecca — except this time the pilgrimage ran straight through his childhood.

His people were Norwegian. His grandfather had crossed an ocean and then a good part of a continent to end up farming eastern South Dakota, and the family had stayed put the way families did then, generation folding into generation until my grandfather had more children than the land could easily absorb. Some of them farmed anyway. My father did not. He went into printing — Linotype machines, hot lead, the smell of a shop instead of the smell of a barn. But I remember the soil anyway. I’d visited that farm as a boy of ten or so, and what stayed with me wasn’t a story anyone told but a set of smells: hay and diesel and animal warmth inside the barn, the particular rattle of a tractor under me, dust rising gold in a shaft of light through a barn door left open. Did I want to help milk the cows?

We landed at Yankton for fuel and my father called his sister. I don’t remember what either of them said — it was a short call, the kind you make when you’re about to do something better shown than explained. Something like: we’ll be overhead in twenty minutes. Go outside. Look up.

And then we were. Alcester from a thousand feet is not much — a scatter of buildings, a windbreak of trees, fields squared off in the pattern only farmland makes — but down there was a farmhouse, and out in the yard were two people who’d stopped whatever they were doing to come out and watch the sky. We circled twice. My father waved — big, unmistakable — from a thousand feet up at his sister and her husband in the yard below. They waved back, two small shapes going back and forth, back and forth. Then we leveled the wings and kept going east, toward Wisconsin, and neither of us said much of anything, because there wasn’t really anything to say. It was just good.

Oshkosh itself is its own kind of pilgrimage, and if you’ve never been, the thing that’s hard to explain is not the airplanes — though there are more in one place than you will ever otherwise see — it’s the people.

And the crowd starts in the skies as you line up for the Fisk arrival into Oshkosh. The air traffic controllers are out in a field somewhere below and they’re talking continuously. “The red white and blue Cherokee rock your wings! Land on the yellow dot midfield…” Before you know it you’re turning off into the grass and being waved to your parking spot next to so many other airplanes.

Most pilots who fly in tent-camp right under their own wings, sleeping on the grass next to the machine that brought them. Dad and I opted for relative luxury: a dorm room at a local university, actual beds, actual plumbing. I don’t remember the room. Or how we got back and forth to the airport.

What I do remember is the grounds. Tens of thousands of people for a solid week, and no litter. None. If you saw a gum wrapper, you picked it up, the way you’d pick up a dropped tool in someone else’s shop. The shared bathrooms stayed clean not because anyone was assigned to clean them, but because everyone behaved as if they were company in someone else’s house.

It sounds like a small thing to remember thirty-some years later. It isn’t. I’ve described it as renewing my faith in humanity. Each afternoon we gathered along the flight line for the daily air show which was usually punctuated by the contrast between an old biplane and the sound of the latest American fighter aircraft. Amazing sights.

I had been once before, driven in with pilots who’d rented an RV, and learned mostly that I didn’t want to do that again — too many people, too close together, none of the ease of arriving on your own wings. That trip didn’t have the thing this one had. I couldn’t have told you what the thing was, exactly, except that being there with my Dad restored some baseline faith in how people can behave toward each other when they all care about the same unlikely thing.

The flight home took us back through Spearfish, where another of our relatives put us up for the night, and then on to Logan, Utah, for fuel and that bio break.

It was the leg after that — the crossing of the state of Nevada — that I still think about on rough days. The sky was clear. Not a cloud anywhere. And the air was some of the worst turbulence I’ve flown through, before or since. I tried up high, I tried down low, but there was no altitude in that whole stretch of sky that gave us any peace. No smooth air anywhere. Just wind. Dad didn’t get sick. Neither did I. We just held on and let the airplane buck and waited it out, the way you do.

After a time then we crossed low over the Sierras, and somewhere on the descent into the central valley of California the air went calm again, smooth as the farm pond back in Alcester must have been that morning, and the trip was, in every way that mattered, already over.

Categories
Memories Music

The Engineering of Feeling

You’re always captive when it happens. A stoplight in the rain. A straightaway with nothing to look at but the white lines. Eight lanes of brake lights and nowhere to be but exactly where you are. The riff starts, and you’re not driving anymore so much as being driven — pinned by something that arrived four decades before you got in the car.

It happened once near Havana. You were there with a camera, working the old cars — fat-fendered Chevys and Buicks, kept running past the embargo by Cuban mechanics who became, out of necessity, a nation of engineers, scavenging parts and refusing to let something good die just because the factory that made it no longer existed. You didn’t think about Tom Scholz once, photographing a ’57 Bel Air held together by stubbornness. But the two belong in the same sentence. A man in a basement in Watertown, Massachusetts, kept a song alive the same way — building the tools himself when the tools that existed weren’t good enough.

Scholz had a master’s from MIT and a day job at Polaroid, designing the instant camera that would eventually lose to the VCR. He was an engineer — the kind who solves problems by taking them apart. What he did nights and weekends for five years instead was build a recording studio in his basement and use it to construct a song about a girl he’d loved in school, inspired by an old Left Banke single that used to ambush him with longing every time it came on. He played almost every instrument himself, layering twelve-string acoustic over electric over more electric, take after take, through amplifiers he’d built because the ones on the market couldn’t get the sound in his head. By the time Epic signed the band, the label assumed the demo was already a finished master. It was — just not one made anywhere near a studio.

An engineer built the least mechanical-sounding record of 1976. Every track is stacked with the precision of someone who understood signal paths better than he understood how to be a rock star. None of it sounds calculated when it hits you. The quiet drifts a few bars, then the chorus arrives like a held breath let go — the same structural trick Kurt Cobain would later borrow, half-consciously, for “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Scholz built the explosion out of engineering. What you feel is the girl, the ache, the years.

The song is about the way music smuggles you back into a memory without asking permission. Scholz built that experience the way memory actually works — not in one clean take, but in fragments, layered over years, until the whole thing cohered into something that felt, impossibly, spontaneous. The method is the meaning. He didn’t just write a song about the past ambushing you. He built the ambush, piece by piece, until it was good enough to catch strangers in cars forty years later who never loved the same girl and never will.

Another song does this to you too, and it got there by the opposite road. “Listen to the Music” arrived almost the way lightning does. Tom Johnston wrote it in his bedroom on 12th Street in San Jose, brought it to his producer half-finished, and the band recorded it without changing a thing — no five years, no basement, no solitary engineer stacking takes until three in the morning. Its density comes from somewhere else: Patrick Simmons’ loose fingerpicking threading against Johnston’s percussive strumming, two drummers locking into a groove that shouldn’t work this easily, and one bold studio choice — a phasing effect, that underwater jet-swirl, laid over the vocals as well as the guitars, which almost nobody does. It sounds less like a song someone assembled than a room full of people who fell into the same current at once, then got bent sideways by one effect and printed.

Two songs, same seat, same stretch of road, opposite methods — one built alone across five years by a man who wouldn’t let go of a track until it was right, the other built in days by musicians whose parts happened to interlock, finished by a single flourish nobody else was doing quite that way. There’s more than one route to the kind of complexity that outlasts you. Refuse to stop. Or know exactly when to.

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Aircraft Memories

Captain Gil Rud

Recently I wrote about a visit to the USS Constellation that I was very fortunate to make years ago. In that post I mentioned the captain of the ship without citing who he was.

This morning I realized I should do a bit of research and correct that – so I asked Gemini:

Who was the captain of the uss constellation who had previously led the blue angels?

Here’s how I got reacquainted with Captain Gil Rud:

That captain was Captain Gil Rud (USN, Ret.).

He served as the commanding officer and flight leader of the Blue Angels from November 1986 to November 1988, notably leading the team’s transition from the A-4 Skyhawk to the F/A-18 Hornet. Later in his career, he served as the commanding officer of the aircraft carrier USS Constellation (CV-64) from May 1993 to December 1994.

I continued:

When was he assigned to the Constellation? I remember him talking about taking it out of the Philadelphia Navy Yard?

And learned:

Your memory is spot on. Captain Gil Rud took command of the USS Constellation in May 1993, which coincided exactly with the end of her massive Service Life Extension Program (SLEP) overhaul at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard.

From July 1990 until early 1993, the carrier was essentially torn down and rebuilt in Philadelphia to add an extra 15 years to her operational life. Captain Rud was assigned to the ship just as this grueling three-year yard period was wrapping up.  

He was the captain who literally “took her out” of the Philadelphia Navy Yard, leading the crew through the post-overhaul sea trials and commanding the carrier during its transit from the East Coast, around South America (as she was too large to fit through the Panama Canal), and back to her homeport in San Diego.

I continued this back and forth with Gemini learning about his career after the USS Constellation including his retirement from the Navy and work in private industry. Turns out he also authored a memoir: From the Prairie to the Pacific: A Blue Angel’s Journey.

Afterwards I felt better having done this research and getting reacquainted with Gil Rud.

Categories
Aircraft Memories

The Wire and the Three Wires

I read this morning that the Navy retired its last C-2 Greyhound. It took me straight back to a deck fifty miles off San Diego, thirty-two years ago, and a young woman I never knew and watched anyway.

The deck comes up fast at sea. That’s the first thing nobody tells you about a carrier — that an airfield can ambush you, can rear up out of the ocean looking smaller than a parking lot, gray and pitching, while the C-2 you’re strapped into backward drops its gear and aims for four wires stretched across forty thousand tons of steel. You hit the third wire if you’re good. You hit anything if you’re lucky. Either way your body keeps moving roughly sixty miles an hour after the airplane has stopped, and the harness across your chest reminds you of that fact with some violence, and somewhere behind you a sailor a quarter your age in a yellow shirt is already waving the next plane in, because the ocean does not wait for you to catch your breath.

This was July of 1994, the USS Constellation rolling gently under a sky that hadn’t decided what color it wanted to be. There were four of us. We’d flown out of North Field that morning the way you’d catch a bus, except the bus had a tailhook, and we spent the day being shown around eighty acres of moving city — the flight deck, the hangar bay, the nuclear reactor spaces, the wardroom where men twenty years younger than us ate dinner with the particular speed of people who might be back at work in an hour.

One of the men with us had commanded that ship once, in 1966, when most of his year was spent on Yankee Station, running air strikes into a war the country back home had already begun arguing about. We were guests. We were, by the time the sun went down, members of something called the Tailhook Club, which is the kind of honor that means everything to you and nothing to anyone you’ll explain it to later.

That night we went up to the flight deck for the carrier qualifications, and somebody put us right next to the meatball — the lens of amber light a pilot chases down the glide path in the dark, the only thing standing between a good landing and a very bad one.

Four instructor teams worked the deck around us, grading each approach, calling out deviations nobody but a trained eye could see. Every airplane that came aboard came in close enough to feel — gear down, hook down, throttle slammed to full the instant the wheels touched, because if you miss the wire at night on a moving ship, you don’t get to think about it, you just fly.

One of the pilots qualifying that night was a Lieutenant named Kara Hultgreen, twenty-nine years old, finishing third in a class of seven — solid, unspectacular by the numbers, which is exactly the kind of detail that becomes unbearable in hindsight. She would go on to become the first woman to serve as a carrier-based fighter pilot in the United States Navy. Fifteen months later, on the twenty-fifth of October, 1995, attempting to land an F-14 aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, she would die, the first female fighter pilot in American military history to be killed flying. We didn’t know her. We knew her the way you know anyone on a flight deck at night — as a set of running lights and a sound, judged the same as everyone else by the men standing next to us with clipboards.

The next morning we were up before the sun because the ship had a refueling to do, the carrier and an oiler closing on each other from miles out, two enormous vessels pointed straight at one another like they meant it, until at the last possible moment both turned in tandem and the oiler slid in alongside, parallel, close enough that the lines shot across between them looked almost casual. We watched it from the bridge with the executive officer. Afterward the captain — a man who’d led the Blue Angels before he’d ever commanded the Constellation, and who still had the jacket with the right patches to prove it — called up the two sailors who’d run the operation and thanked them in front of everyone, the way a good leader does when he wants the rest of the crew to notice who deserves it.

Then we stayed on the bridge to watch the air wing leave. Eight F-18s — six Navy, two Marine Corps. The Navy pilots flew it the way you’re supposed to: catapult stroke, climb out, gone. The Marines went last, and the moment their wheels cleared the deck they hauled the airplanes into a vertical climb, straight up, like the sky owed them something and they intended to collect. The executive officer laughed beside us. “There go your tax dollars for this year,” he said, and none of us argued.

Then it was our turn. Strapped into the C-2 again, facing backward, braced against a catapult stroke that takes you from zero to flying speed in about two seconds. And then you stop in mid-air or so it feels. Disneyland never built anything like it.

I think about the wire sometimes — the one you catch, the one that stops you. Hultgreen caught it that week, while I stood close enough to hear the engines roar past us in the dark, indistinguishable from the five other sets of lights that came down before her. You don’t know, standing there, which ones you’re watching for the last time. I didn’t, that night. The airplane that carried us home is gone now too, and somehow it’s the airplane’s retirement, not anything grander, that brought all of it back.

Just came across this YouTube video of the final arrested carrier landing of the C-2 Greyhound. End of an era – with good personal memories!