USS Shangri-La (CV-38) Newsletter. May 6, 1945 Vol1 No.11

 

During the 1980s I worked with a man originally from Ohio  who had served with the US Navy in the Pacific during WW2 on aircraft carriers. He knew I was interested in his experiences and one day he gave me some newsletters from the ship he had served on. I saw them as a window into the past and put them away carefully. Looking at them again years later, they show the same homey qualities as a small town newspaper, with a little world news, some local news and some human interest and cartoons. Just the thing for a group of guys a long way from home.

 

 The USS Shangri-La was an Essex class Carrier launched on 24 February 1944. Her first tour of duty started January 17 1945 when she set sail for Hawaii via the Panana Canal and on April 25 her aircraft launched their first strike against the Japanese. The ship saw action till the end of the war, and was modernized with angled deck in the early fifties. She continued to serve till decommissioned on 30 July 1971. The ship was sold for scrap in 1988. Full story at Wikipedia.
Her sister ship the USS Intrepid is preserved in NYC as a museum.

5 Million Pontiacs

 Jan Norbye Jim Dunne, Pontiac, The Postwar Years, Motorbooks International 1979

Pontiac built its 5 millionth car on June 18 1954. I wonder where that fancy Star Chief Custom Catalina two-door hardtop ended up.

The 30 millionth Pontiac was built on Oct 29 1991 and the event has its own Facebook page.

Vacuum cleaners suck!

John R. Crossland & J.M. Parrish.  The Treasury of Modern Marvels.  
London:  Collins Clear Type Press, 193?.

The Ill-Starred R-101

John G. Fuller.  The Airmen Who Would Not Die.  (Berkley, 1979, 1980).

According to Fuller's book, the cause of the airship's crash was finally revealed when a psychic contacted the spirits of the airmen who had died in the disaster.  No less an aviation authority than Charles H. Gibbs-Smith wrote a note endorsing Fuller's findings and their unusual source.  Pretty spooky, eh kids?

Unappealing Advertising Department.

Cycle Magazine April 1965

Large grim guy in white leathers, paddling an struggling underpowered 50 cc street bike through the forest...
 No wonder we don't remember the Rex motorcycle.

One of my vices is vises: Columbian

Lots of proud owners of these vises on the net, but not a lot of info on the company. I'm not sure if Columbian Vise and Mfg is the same company as the Columbian Hardware Co. which made various tools like clamps, anvils and vises but it seems likely as they were both based in Cleveland. Today Columbian is part of the WMH tool group (Walter Meier Holdings) which includes Jet, Powermatic, Performax, Wilton, Turtle Wax and more.

Update from the Duke;

"In 1970, Ken-Tool became one of the original members of the Cooper Tool Group, along with Crescent hand tools, Weller soldering guns and Lufkin tape measures and rules. In 1971 Ken-Tool began selling these products to the automotive aftermarket as Cooper's only aftermarket distribution arm. As Cooper Industries continued its acquisition activities, the companies it bought were less and less oriented to the automotive aftermarket, and so in the early seventies, the decision was made to sell Ken-Tool. The company was put on the market, and in April 1974, sold to Warren Tool Corporation in Warren, Ohio, a small, privately-owned manufacturer of vises, clamps and heavy striking tools. Under Warren Tool, Ken-Tool quickly dropped the product lines from Cooper and replaced them with those of its new sister divisions, Columbian vises, Warren striking tools, and Hargrave clamps."
(http://www.kentool.com/kentool_history.html)

I'm assuming that WMH probably bought out Warren?

Update February 19, 2015:  see Wilton History.  According to this official history page, Wilton acquired the Warren Tool Group in the late 1990's. This included the Columbian Vice Company. WMH acquired Wilton in 2002.  In 2014, the Wilton brand was sold to Tenex Capital Management of New York City, changing the name to JPW Industries.
Attached is a photo of a Columbian clamp I picked up recently.  Note how nicely made the butterfly end on the clamp screw is!  Also, a photo of a Columbian pipe-vise in my possession.

Flail Threshing Machine

Standard American Encyclopedia. Chicago:  Consolidated Book Publishers, Inc., 1939.

Loads of fun, and good exercise too!  Think "Threshing to the Oldies!"

American Workers and Their Work, 1920's: Two Poems

A not-so-subtle way to expose teenagers in the 1920's to the industrial work ethic.  From William H. Elson, Christine M. Keck & Mary H. Burris.   Junior High School Literature, Book Two.  Revised Edition.  (Chicago:  Scott, Foresman & Co., 1920, 1928).

The book introduced me to the writings of Herschel S. Hall (1874-1921) in a piece called "Pete of the Steel Mills" that was originally published in Scribner's Magazine in 1919.  It's a very evocative short story of someone who gets a job working in an open-earth steel mill of the time, apparently based on Hall's first-hand knowledge of this kind of work:

"This tapping a 'heat' is a magnificent and startling sight to the newcomer.  I stood fascinated when I beheld it the first time.  A lake of seventy-five or eighty tons of sun-white steel, bursting out of furnace bounds and rushing through the runner, a raging river, is a terrifying spectacle.  The eye aches as it watches it; the body shrinks away from the burning heat it throws far out on all sides; the imagination runs riot as the seething flood roils and boils in the ladle." 

Herschel wrote a novel titled Steel Preferred, a Horatio Alger type story set in a steel mill.  It was adapted for the silver screen as a 1925 silent movie starting Vera Reynolds and William Boyd.  I expect it would be worth watching just for the period industrial operations in the background.

Blacksmith Supplies; Sears Roebuck, 1904

Amal Concentric Carburetor- stripped!

Complete with very obsolete part prices