Tuesday

                        Musings and History

Quote of the day:

“Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.”

                                 Benjamin Franklin

Here is another event that proves I am here for a reason:

When I was in the USAF I was based at Greenville, Mississippi. This base was closed and donated to the city of Greenville who turned it into an industrial park. While there as most of us in our youth believe, I thought I was 10 feet tall and bullet-proof. Greenville is on the Mississippi and has docks and piers along with some pretty rough bars. My friend Tim Rushbrook from West Virginia and I decided to go into one of them and just see what it was all about. We had not been there very long when a very drunk guy began walking around the room asking everyone if they wanted to fight. He was pointing his finger in everybody's face a yelling. A guy sitting at the next table said “I hope he don't do that with me.” Guess what, he did. The guy sitting down pulled out a revolver and shot the drunk point blank in his right shoulder. He could have easily killed him but showed some mercy.  It was so close that the drunks shirt briefly caught on fire. The drunk hit the floor and the rest of us stampeded out the door, including the shooter, before the cops came. If the drunk had been armed it would have been the OK corral with me in the middle. God works in mysterious ways.

Here is a colorful individual from the old American west:

                          Judge Roy Bean

One of the most colorful characters in the history of the American west dies. It was Judge Roy Bean of Langtry, Texas. He was the self proclaimed “Law West of the Pecos.” Bean was born somewhere in Kentucky in the 1820’s. In 1847 he and his brother Sam left home and went to Mexico and lived a rogue’s life until he got into an argument with another man and ended up killing him. This forced Bean out of Mexico and he ended up in San Diego. As usual, Bean got into a fight in a bar and ended up killing anther man so he had to skedaddle out of there and ended up in Los Angeles. He got into a fight with a Mexican General over a woman and shot and killed the General. The General had a lot of friends and they took Bean to the closest tree and strung him up. The woman who he had the fight over ran to his rescue and cut him down in the nick of time. He carried the scars from that rope for the rest of his life. Bean decided that California just ain’t the place to be and he moved out into the wilds of New Mexico and Texas. For about 16 years he was a prosperous and legitimate business man in San Antonio. In 1882 he moved to southwest Texas and built his famous bar “Jersey Lily”. Eventually he founded the town of Langtry, Texas named after the actress Lily Langtry as was his bar. Bean became a justice of the peace in Langtry and was famous for dispensing justice using common sense rather that the letter of the law. He once fined a dead man for carrying a concealed weapon. But on the down side when a man shot a Chinese rail worker, Bean let him go saying that he could find no law against shooting a “Chinaman”. Bean fell ill and died in November of 1903, just 10 months before the real Lily Langtry came by for a visit to his famous saloon.

              This Date in History March 28

1979 On this date began a comedy of errors resulted the worst nuclear accident in United States history at the recently built Reactor #2 at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant. This particular power plant was built on an island in the middle the Susquehanna River about 10 miles from the Pennsylvania capitol of Harrisburg. There was a slight over pressure in the reactor and a pressure relief valve opened as it was supposed to, the only problem was that it failed to close back and cooling water began to escape. The emergency relief pumps began to operate automatically as they were suppose to. If the plant operators had let this safety system work as designed, nothing would have happened. But the newly trained plant workers could not figure out what the hell was going on. With the cooling water leaking out onto the floor of the containment building the reactor core temperature began to rise. For reasons known only to the plant operators, they chose to shut down the emergency relief pumps. There is no need for me to tell you what happened to the core temperature. Pennsylvania Governor Thornburgh was between a rock and a hard place. After being appraised of the situation, he had to so something but he did not want to cause a panic. He sent out a notice that everyone with a 10 mile radius of Three Mile Island to stay indoors. Then the next day he advised that pregnant women should evacuate. Then word leaked out that radioactive steam had escaped and a small amount of radioactive water had leaked into the Susquehanna River. All of this was true but it was not that much of a risk but a panic began and over 100,000 people near the plant evacuated. By now the core had reached a temperature of 4,000 degrees which is within 1,000 degrees of a complete meltdown. Eventually experts from Metropolitan Energy and the reactor designer (Babcock and Wilcox) arrived and figured out what the problem was and the emergency pumps were restarted and the core temperature began to fall. In an attempt to lessen the panic, United States President Jimmy Carter went to the plant. Carter was a Naval Academy trained nuclear engineer and had dealt with damaged cores in the past probably in a nuclear submarine. But he was not there to offer expertise but to restore the confidence of the population. Everyone thought the problem had been solved but two days later a hydrogen bubble was discovered in the top of the containment building and there had been a small explosion but the containment building held. It was determined that the hydrogen bubble was not a threat. By the way, it was an explosion of a hydrogen bubble that destroyed the Russian power plant at Chernobyl but the Russians did not use containment buildings. The core had been damaged in reactor # 2 making it useless. During the crises, reactor # 1 had been shut down also. Reactor # 1 was not restarted until 1985 and reactor # 2 was sealed. Since this emergency the building of not one nuclear power plant has begun in the United States. There have been reports that those that stayed those few days after the initial accident have an increased incidence of leukemia and other cancers but it is not a proven statistic. There was one of the plant operators that put on a safe suit and went into the floor of the containment building where the water was about 18 inches deep trying to find out what the problem was. He had with him a flask of test water that began to effervesce like carbonated water very soon after he arrived. He saw this and got the hell out of there, and I don’t blame him. A lot of lessons were learned during this experience. That is the only upside I can find to this whole scenario.

Died today:

1957 US writer Christopher Morley. He said “A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging wildly while the train passes by.”

1984 US educator Benjamin Mays. He said “Isn’t it a calamity that we died with unfulfilled dreams, but it is even a bigger calamity not to dream.” Ben was a wise individual.

                Thanks for listening  I can hardly wait until tomorrow