Evil Elf

Evil Elf

I guess you always meet some of the most memorable characters in your college days. But Dick Saltzman was a cut above even by those standards.

Where is he going with that?
Note Evil look on his face

My family was still living in South Florida when my Filipino roommate Donnie had to drop out of school. Donnie's love Annette was a fiery Roman nosed little Italian hand grenade with a sweet disposition and the temper of a Tasmanian devil. I can only imagine that if she was as hot in bed as she was when angry the fireworks must have been amazing. While Donnie was pretty laid back and he and Annette probably complimented each other well, apparently college did not provide enough education to keep her fertility in check...or maybe it was that they both had been raised as Catholics. At any rate she became...with child...and there was no question that Donnie was not an honorable man and did love her...so he dropped out to marry her and, unfortunately, I quickly lost track of both them.

But Donnie's strong sense of honor also resulted in his commitment to get a new roommate for me. My memory on the timing is a bit fuzzy, but at first I think it might have been Gene Blackwood, who also was from the same area around Cape Canaveral as Donnie, but then through an ad a graduate student from New York appeared...or were Dick and Gene there at the same time? God...you would think I'd recall all of this, right? It was, in the words of the protagonist in one of Tom Robbins novels...altogether too vivid, but alas the fog of time has dulled things a bit in my synapses.

At any rate, I showed up after a summer break to find a 64 Corvette convertible, a ratty single axle trailer, and what I viewed as a weird and uninteresting two wheeled conveyance in the yard,

Yeah, You've seen this before
But this time look at the Vette...
and that ugly trailer
But where's the bike?

and a 27 year old grad school student ensconced in the front bedroom. Somehow I think this was the Fall of 1967, but at any rate just before I met Marcia. Again, things are a bit fuzzy (no, not because of illicit substances...yet), and I do recall also another grad student who at some point occupied the back bedroom with the queen sized bed (and was there an en suite bath?)...who was there only during the week. This became important later.

So I guess maybe Dick and I were supposed to share that front bedroom with its twin beds. I gotta say I doubt I was happy about this as this guy looked like some perverted derelict..the cover of the Jethro Tull album “Aqualung” comes to mind. Actually...he was more of a degenerate than that.

Dick was actually employed as an engineer, though his job sounded totally deadening to me...designing landing gear for Grumman Aircraft in Bethpage, Long Island, New York...oddly and coincidentally a town very near to where Sherri grew up in Elmont. It sounded utterly dull.

Grumman had sent Dick to Gainesville to get his Masters in Engineering, though what possessed them to choose UF is still, 50 years later, beyond my comprehension. While the Engineering school at the University is better than decent, it's not like there are not equal schools in New York...ones where the company might not have to pay a living allowance, and where they certainly would not be absorbing out-of-state tuition fees.

On the other hand these were the heady days of the Space Program as well as Vietnam, and Grumman was heavily involved in both. Among other things they were the designers and builders of the Lunar Module...and though I never asked him exactly what landing gear he worked on, for all I know it might have been for this spindly, wonderful craft.

Dick and I hit it off quickly and rather well. He had a sharp wit...but I could, in those days, stay right with him...and our discussions were technical and wide ranging. He paid me a real compliment in the middle of a chat about nuclear physics, of all things. He broke off in the middle of the chat and allowed as how he was amazed that, lacking a deep technical background, I was able to quickly grasp very technical subjects, no matter how complex. I have thought about that comment many times over the decades, and realize how deeply that skill contributed to my business success. I think my first real boss, Frank Nichols at the First National Bank of Miami, was Dick's successor in grasping this, which led to his interest in giving me a start in the computer industry.

Dick acquired a kitten...a purebred Siamese he tongue-in-cheek named Deja Vu...though I never did figure out the joke. Maybe just that it was French? Or was it another of his notorious double entendres?

The most glaring example of the latter was aimed at a sweet young lady who was visiting the girls who lived in the next door unit of our fourplex. Though I never did meet the occupants of the other two units...maybe the far side of the building was just too distant to be of interest?...the girls next door were really cute. I guess I was too much of a self-conscious nerd to ever have the idea of asking one of them out cross my stupid little brain.

But I do recall that one owned the first BMW car I'd ever seen...a 1600 which was pretty rare in America.

Wikipedia Photo of 1600
Note what looks like 60s Stingray behind it

The three girls and a friend were visiting with us...I seem to recall alcohol being involved, when their guest asked Dick for a ride home. As I recall, none of these young things were over the age of 20...which made Richard qualify as a “dirty old man” by comparison.

What the young thing said was “Would you drive me home?” I have no idea if she had the hots for the elf, though I somehow can't picture that, or if she was just too inebriated to give things much thought.

“Sure,” Dick replied, looking at me with his cockeyed grin, “Bend over.”

He wasn't the neatest of roommates, and was too cheap to buy kitty litter for Deja Vu. Instead he tore up strips of newspaper to line the litter box which, as you can imagine, absorbed little of the odor and was totally useless unless changed daily. And, of course, the box lived in the bedroom we shared. It came to a head one day when I threatened to dump the box on his bed if he didn't clean it. Obviously I wasn't thinking straight as my bed was less than three feet away in the same room.

Once Marcia and I started dating, after sensitively easing this young freshman virgin into a very willing start at exploring a deeper physicality (I was, after all, a big man on campus senior by then), we were like two rabbits in heat...which once included stupidly and insensitively romping in the back bedroom on the other grad student's bed while he was away for the weekend. Of course he found out and penalized me, appropriately so, by refusing to pay his share of the rent that month.

I guess I was “blinded by the light.”

But Dick found our intensity amusing. He once insisted that, one day, rather than having sex, I would instead express a preference for being alone and doing something like taking a pistol and going with a friend down to the dump to slug rats.

Yeah, right? Certainly not at 27. “What is WRONG with you?” I asked. Oh...did I mention he had been married and was divorced? No, huh?

I had my second, civilized Austin Healey Sprite by the time I met Dick. In fact you have already seen this picture of my toy and his beast alongside the apartment. (pic) I didn't really know a lot about Corvettes, but did think they were pretty sexy looking. When Dick said I would likely drive it more than him as he preferred “the bike” I figured he was nuts, but was not about to complain. He was not exactly “into” the sports car idea.

“What makes it a 'sports car,'” he asked. “You can hardly fit a set of golf clubs in it.” God, what a tool. He was 25 years ahead of the first SUV, which is what he really would have wanted.

So here's this lovely shape, with 300hp, that he has no clue how to use. Lemmee at it. His Vette was bought with fuel economy in mind, so it had a 3.08 rear end ratio, the highest available that year, and best I recall it was an automatic. Thus the slowest accelerating 64 Vette....

The thing was a frickin' rocket ship compared to my Sprite, which you timed from 0-60 with a calendar.

Dick “conned” me into a deal where he would give me the car for a day if I would wash it for him. This became virtually an every weekend ritual. Wash Friday morning/play for hours after.

In fact, my first date with Marcia involved the Vette.

It came about like this.

I had known a really pretty black haired angel in high school named Betty Goldstein. She and her older brother Jack were by far the top of the status and beauty heap of north Dade County in 1963. So when I learned Betty was in school in Gainesville I somehow overcame my nerdy self-consciousness and decided to ask her out.

But when I reached Jennings Hall, the girl's dorm where I learned she lived, something got screwed up, and the voice which answered the pay phone on the floor quickly and obviously did not belong to Betty. Instead I was talking to Bettte Goldenstein, who also knew something was wrong as she always went by her middle name, Marcia, and not Bette.

“What the hell,” I thought, and asked her to lunch. Dick advised me to “go Dutch” if she turned out to be a dog, or pay for her lunch if she was OK. He also loaned me the Vette for the date. What a guy.

I was really impressed with myself, and decided to equally impress everyone else by doing a handbrake turn to park the car in front of the dorm. This is an old trick where you grab the handle 9which only a few cars have anymore, by the way) as you floor the throttle and spin the wheel, enabling the car to do a 180 degree turn in about its own length.

The Dorm mother was less impressed with this than either me or Marcia, who turned out to be tall, not anorexic by any means, and with legs that seemed to be perhaps nine feet long. As she slid those miin-skirted gambe into the seat of the Vette I had already decided that lunch at Jerry's (a sort of local version of Frisch's Big Boy) was on me.

One Saturday night I borrowed the Vette to take it out on the newly completed I75 and “see what it would do.” What it did was about buck 30...but even at my rudimentary level of driving knowledge I noted that that pretty front end wanted to make it an airplane at that speed. I could virtually spin the steering wheel from lock to lock and the car would continue in a straight line. As I also realized that even its metallic brakes (drums) would not slow the car down substantially without a parachute and an anchor I lost my nerve and backed off.

When I relayed this to Dick he got a funny look on his face.

“You do realize it has bald tires,” he asked rhetorically.

Oh. Therein began my discipline about walking around an unfamiliar car before driving it.

Then there was that two wheeled toy...which turned out to be a Suzuki X6 “Hustler” motorcyle. 250Cc, two stroke with a built in oil pump (no manual mixing of gas and oil), drum brakes (twin leading shoe front), electric start, and a six speed transmission...I believe the first on any street bike.

“So what,” I thought, unimpressed. I went out a couple of times as a passenger with Dick. I had not been on two wheels since high school, and it took some time before I stopped really screwing things up by leaning opposite to Dick in turns. While it was...ok...any 250 with two people up is not exactly Corvette quick.

Then one day Dick renegotiated our deal. There's that cockeyed grin again.

“Clean the Corvette,” he offered, “and you can take the bike out for a ride by yourself.”

I was not exactly thrilled, but decided to humor him. I should note that, in those simpler days, Florida did not have a separate cycle license, and you needed nothing but bravado and cajones to ride. So I tooled the thing sedately out past the edge of town, onto an empty county road in the middle of empty Alachua County. Whereupon I thought I'd see what the fuss was about.

I stopped the bike, put it in first, cranked the throttle, and popped the clutch.

Holyyyyyy Shiiiiiit! The beast shot out from under me, leaving my ass hanging off the rear end of the seat. I hit red line in the first three gears so fast that I was shifting as fast as I could move my hands and feet. 60 came quicker than the Corvette, and the “toy” did not show any signs of anemia until I was doing 100...whereupon I thought about its flexible flyer frame and those drum brakes.

Took awhile to get things moderated. Took a lot longer after stopping to get my right leg from shaking so hard I was afraid I was going to drop it.

After returning home I looked up the specs on it: 0-30 in 1.3 seconds, 0-60 in 6 flat, and a top just over that 100 I had hit...out of a two stroke with all of five or so moving parts!

If I were single and still willing to ride, and wanted to have only one bike, one of these would still be in my garage. I have never ridden or driven anything which equalled that rush for the first few seconds. 

Not the fastest
Not the quikest by today's standards
But an amazing machine

Maybe that evil elf Saltzman wasn't crazy after all. 

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

I've known for ages there was something missing from this film title (I never saw the movie)...boats! Over the decades of my fascination with machinery I had observed that many of the “car people” (makes a weird mental picture of some sort of Transformer beastie, doesn't it?) are often also interested in at least one other of these...sometimes more than one. The only link is that they are all means of transportation... but so is a horse, and the only car guy I knew who was also into, as Ernie used to say, a means of transportation you had to put gas into even if it wasn't going anywhere, was Mike Cotsworth. But then Mike had two daughters, and we all know what that means in regards to horses.

I have always been interested in all four (not that I don't like horses..but they are BIG animals that intimidate me...and they know that), and though my direct history and contact with cars is long, my involvement with trains is even longer. In fairness, I have never driven nor wrenched on a real train, though I have ridden on many, including a number of steam powered rides...Railtown 1890 while it was still the Sierra Railroad, Roaring Camp and Big Trees, The California Western “skunk” line, The Sacramento Northern, etc. The actual CW “skunk” was a gasoline powered railcar, so named because you could smell it coming long before you could see it...but we rode behind a restored steamer...a 2-8-0 or 2-8-2 best I recall. If you don't know what those numbers mean, rather than taking up space here I'll just suggest looking them up on Wikipedia.

CWRR 2-8-2
This type was first built for Japan
and thus is nicknamed a "Mikado"

What I have done is modeling in miniature trains and train lines...and I started when I was about ten, though my first “train set” came when I was four.

We were Jewish, and I was born in an era in which Jews did not at all recognize or celebrate some min-version of Christmas...no “Hanukah Bushes” or eight days of gifts giving. Yet for some strange reason, this one year we did have a tree, under which Mom and Dad had placed a Marx steam loco with a couple of cars, a caboose, and enough track to make a loop. My sister got a “Howdie Doody” marionette. Yuch.

Not very realistic...but a start

Marx trains were a cheap alternative for people who could not afford Lionel. They were stamped tin with minimal attention to detail and non-working couplers. I don't remember doing much with the set, but on the other hand I still had it after we moved from NY to Florida.

Maybe it was Greer Ganong's HO “layout” which inspired me? This kid was older than me and as strange as his name...but then I was a pretty precocious and odd duck myself so we were attracted to each other. His “layout” was a loop of track, perhaps with a couple of sidings, on a green painted plywood table. But at least the engine and cars looked like the real things.

HO layouts can look quite real

I grabbed my bike, somehow got Dad to buy a piece of plywood, and toddled off to Orange Blossom Hobbies to trade in some of my stuff and get some more correctly scaled Lionel gear. I then nailed down a loop of track and two sidings and had my first rail “empire.”

But O scale, though “only” 1/48 actual size, takes up a lot of room, and it is impossible to build what I had in mind on 32 square feet. Hell, I'd have needed our entire apartment. So railroading got mothballed...for almost a decade.

I really don't know why I picked it up again, but just after I started dating Marcia I built a shelf switching layout in HO in my apartment in Gainesville. This was on three modules which could be “knocked down” for easy movement. This pre-dated what is now a standardized and documented way to build a modular layout, but it served its purpose. I “scratch built” my own structures for it as I had no funds for buying commercial kits, and used parakeet cage pet store gravel to ballast the rails. I was attracted by model building at a young age, and also was interested in the movements required to switch railcars from one area to another. I have little patience for puzzles in general, but for some reason this type appealed to me.

But the world was complex and, with Vietnam and grad school looming, the hobby went dormant again until after I was married, whereupon the new smaller N scale came on the scene. HO stood for “Half O”...and was 1/87 actual size. This made building a very basic layout in a space as small as a sheet of plywood possible, and allowed for some decent modeling and diorama-like techniques to be applied as well as some semi-realistic operation, but it was pretty minimal. But cut that size in half yet again (N is 1/160 actual size) and you could build a real empire in the same footprint.

A "huge" 2-6-6-2 Articulated C&O steamer
The real one is over 140 feet long...scaled in the length of a pencil!

The problem was that miniaturization manufacturing in 1970 was not up to the task in terms of reliability and durability of the mechanisms and motors. Though I built a pretty extensive little world I could not make it run well or reliably, so when we moved from Florida I sold the entire setup to a colleague at work, and once again was out of the hobby, though I did bring my HO stuff with me when we left for Las Vegas, where I cobbled together a basic layout, which could swing up out of the way into a case on the wall when not in use...or was that layout after we came to California? At any rate, I was in and out a number of times but until sometime around 1975 could not be considered a “serious” modeler.

One of the people who worked for me got me “back on the rails.” We were browsing around a bookstore on a lunch break when I stumbled on a nice picture book about modeling he convinced me to buy. From there it was off to the races, first with an overly ambitious N scale layout around the walls of our garage in San Carlos, and then a much more modest “liftup” operated from a central pit which lived inside a spare bedroom for much better temperature and dust control.

By the 1980s N scale was vastly improved mechanically and ran very well. I kept this layout and moved it into a dedicated room here in our retirement place, never expecting anything more ambitious.

And then Ernie died. As I said, there is an affinity among car guys for other hobbies which seem common to the group...modeling, boats, planes, radio controlled craft of one type or another, and trains of all sizes. For example, Sherri and I were standing in line at one Railfair celebration at the Railroad Museum in Old Sacramento when I noticed a few vintage racers in line ahead of me, staring in wonder at a display of large scale custom built steam locomotives. I joined them, also staggered by hand built locomotives and the hundreds to thousands of hours of work it took to machine things like wheels and gears for them. One of the guys muttered under his breath...”and they think we're crazy.”

It was Gary Winiger who put Ernie and me together in terms of N scale modeling. Gary had learned that Ernie and I both had layouts, though Ernie's took up an entire bedroom and he had vastly more running equipment and locomotives than me, including a number of expensive and rare solid brass units. He was also, as I am not, a master craftsman.

Ernie was a big guy...one of his hands could cover both of mine, but he had eyesight that was well beyond 20/20, and those big hands were very steady. He had a heart condition as a child and since he could not play with other kids, had kept busy building plastic model kits, many of which are now on display in my shop, and then moving into scratch built and high quality kits when he started into model railroading. In fact, learning I was “into trains” got him back to working on his own neglected layout, where he constructed a beautiful, scaled down version of a cannery, now gone, which graced the street he lived on in Cupertino.

He quickly decided that it was a great idea to will his stuff to me. I was flattered, but I never expected to have to deal with it as soon as I did. Ernie got sick over one New Years and within a week succumbed to pancreatitis. He was not yet 65.Though the loss was over a decade ago it is something I never will quite get over. He was that much of a force in my life.

I did not care for Ernie's track setup, but decided to tear his layout and my own apart and build a new, vastly expanded line, which would showcase his building skills. Among other things, he had scratch built all the stations on the old Yosemite Valley Railroad, and these became passenger and freight terminals on my newly designed “Sierra Northern, “ the third layout I built using that name.

The lSNRR resides in a dedicated room, occupying eight by 12 feet, with tracks around the walls and a central peninsula...on three different levels. Ernie had so much track, switches, and running gear that, could I figure out how, I could at last build something which looked and ran like a real railroad, moving cars from point to point among towns loosely patterned after the real Sierra Railroad. In order to do access the levels there is an elevator which lifts trains from one to the other.

I have been working on this system for almost 15 years. No layout is ever “finished” but all the tracks except for one yard are in, all towns on the main level are landscaped to some level, and the main interchange yard is also done.

Part of the main interchange yard at Riverbank
SP SD9 switcher waiting for work
Santa Fe Observation car at station
"Cut" of boxcars in foreground
Power poles mark boundary between "upper" arrival/departure tracks and "lower" classification ans storage yard
Note Ernie's scratch built replica of the YVRR Merced Station

 This is where the Sierra Northern terminates and joins the world via the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific, which then continue to the lower level through the “farm town” of Manteca, and on to the unfinished yard at “San Francisco.”

Going the other way, the Sierra Northern starts from the interchange at Riverbank, climbs to Jamestown, which is a main industrial hub, with a branch to the third level terminal at Angels Camp. This top level also contains a logging spur at Camp 16 and a mining spur at New Melones. The main line continues from Jamestown through Sonora to its terminal with its lumber processing facilities at Tuolomne, which represents the real railroad's link to the facilities at Standard, outside Sonora.

This is a complex and large layout crammed into very little space. Over 100 freight cars are active on it and a purchased piece of software is used to generate and route cars between industries which I built or installed to justify those movements. There are also over 100 manual and electrically controlled track switches, and Ernie's excess rolling stock and engines, many no longer operable, are in a custom display case he built that overlooks the layout...it is six feet long with multiple display tracks on five or six shelves.

There is more than enough to do and build to keep me happily occupied for the rest of my life. Now about that boat...but that's another story.

"Girasole"
The Italian word for "sunflower"
It litreally means "follow the sun"

Scenes along the Sierra Northern "Empire": 

Part of the "lower" yard at Riverbank

Below is the engine facility at Riverbank:

Six stall roundhouse is seen beyond the turntable

Jamestown is a major interchange with the Angels mining and logging branch as well as having significant industry of its own:

Another of Ernies scratch built YVRR stations...this one in use at Jamestown

A view of the central part of Jamestown. The buildings are kits done by Ernie:

The west end of Jamestown.

And the east end of town:

Main line between Jamestown at top, and Sonora at bottom

This is Sonora, east of Jamestown on the SNRR main line. Not shown are the oil transfer companies on the east side of town which are the main industries:

Below are views of the end of line at Tuolomne with its facility for processing logs into lumber:

Log dump and Pond

Ernie's Scratch Bulit Sawmill
Note the incredible detail
The roof is removable to show the saws and tables