I wrote this blog some time ago, before my fair homeland of Southern California exploded in flames.  Although I live on a coastal plain far from the burning hills and valleys, the sky miles away is filled with visible “pyrocumulus” clouds of smoke that resemble nuclear blasts. Nearly 200 square miles have burned. The only good thing, if a good thing can be found:   the “devil winds,” the hellish Santa Anas aren’t blowing.  The hell would become Armageddon  if that were so.

My hubby spent his professional career chasing this kind of wildfire. He’s retired now, but I remember those panic-stricken days glued to the TV set, not knowing exactly where in the state he was, or how long he’d be there. Or worse, if I’d ever seen him again.  In fact, when we were dating, if I got stood up it wasn’t personal. I’d turn on the TV and sure enough, there was a wildfire somewhere, and he was out in the thick of it. Tragically, a pal of his died in a firestorm on Monday. He  remembers “cutting line” –removing stubborn brush and growth in a path around something to save it –with Ted on the same winding, treacherous mountain  ridgeline where Ted, a fire captain, died.

Right now, let’s bombard heaven for the safety of the men and women fighting these infernos, for the folks having to evacuate and leave behind most of what they hold dear, and for the precious wildlife and domesticated animals, so terrified and displaced. We made a donation today to the SPCA to help feed the sweet animals they have sheltered.

Now, on a happier note, throughout those 34 years as a firefighter, my hubby received a ton of unique fire-related gifts from family and friends.  He’s got a crystal liquor decanter shaped like a fire hydrant, reproduction antique cast-iron toy engines, a framed collage of all his cloth patches,…and a whole caboodle of “fire marks.” 

Fire mark? Whazzat?

The fire mark, a cast iron plaque about a foot large, originated in England long ago. British fire insurance companies used these plaques to identify properties they’d insured because each company had its own fire brigade. A private firefighting team would put out a fire only when it saw its employer’s mark on a property! Yikes. 

Not here in America! Volunteer fire companies existed here long before the fire insurance companies.  In fact, groups of volunteer firefighters in many large cities organized their own insurance companies, most of which issued fire marks. However, the “badge,” was never necessary for firefighting purposes.  Firemen put out your fire no matter what. The fire mark was simply an advertising tool.

In 1736, Benjamin Franklin founded the Union Fire Company, America’s first volunteer fire company, in Philadelphia, and in 1752, his insurance company was the first to issue a fire mark. Six of the company’s  twelve directors had every inducement to reduce fire loss—they were volunteer firefighters as well as mutual policy holders. The fire mark identified properties that would be financial losses for them, and saving those properties became a high priority.  

However, no volunteer company refused to protect a burning home or business that didn’t  display a fire mark. In fact, volunteer fire companies raced each other to be “first water” on a fire. Competition among companies was fierce, rivalry intense. It was huge to be first at a fire.

 But researcher Robert M. Shea has found rumors starting in the 20^th century that claimed volunteer fire companies let structures burn if there were no fire mark. Not true! In 1929, the Franklin Fire Insurance Company in its 100^th anniversary history stated that in Philadelphia’s early years, all fire companies would respond, but only the company whose “badge” was displayed on the structure would fight the flames.  A 1938 article by W. Emmert Swigart stated that  “If no insurance fire mark was seen, the free-lancers [volunteers] would often declare a false alarm and calmly walk away from the scene, much to the chagrin of the uninsured owner of the burning building.” Not true!

No sources exist, no records, no newspaper accounts or most of all, no public outrage, indicate that volunteer fire companies ignored their firefighting duties unless the property had a fire mark. Like with most anything, a snippet of falsehood often seems more intriguing than the truth, and I myself believed the stories for years until I researched this blog.  It does appear true, however, that some fire marks indicated an insurance company that paid rewards up to five dollars to the first engine company that arrived to a fire with its equipment in good working order.

Fire marks in America were definitely not required for firefighting. Their main purpose was a sign that the property was insured in addition to good advertising for the insurance company. One insurance company took to heart Benjamin Franklin’s theory that trees attract lightning and voted not to insure houses with trees in front of them. Its mark was, appropriately, a tree.

Indeed, the fire mark was one of the longest ad campaigns in America. The use of fire marks reached its peak from 1850 to 1870 as a result of the westward expansion of established companies in the East, and the smaller new companies of the Midwest..

The heyday of the “badge” was over by the 1890’s, By then, the era of modern firefighting, with full-time trained men and high- power steam engines had begun.. And of course, printed advertising material for an insurance company was cheaper and easier to dispense than the heavy cast-iron “badges.” 

However, the Baltimore Equitable Society still issues fire marks to keep the tradition alive and well.               

So how about  you? Is “fire mark” a new term for you today, or have you seen ‘em before?  Anyone ever visited a fire station?  Ridden in or on a fire truck? Any other “fire-y” tales to share?   

Click on cover to order

Last weekend I lost my favorite wristwatch.  I’d noticed earlier that the band was beginning to show signs of wear and had planned to take care of it ‘soon’, but like most other things in my life these days, I put it off until it was too late.  I do have other watches, several in fact.  I collect ones that reflect different aspects of my mood and personality.  I have one with a dragonfly on it and one that is for ‘dress up’ occasions and one that is very bold and colorful for when I’m in a fun mood.  But, while this particular watch was not an especially showy or expensive piece, it did have a lot of sentimental value and was the one I wore most often.  My mom gave it to me as a Christmas gift about eighteen years ago and I have treasured it ever since.

As luck would have it, I was about 300 miles from my home when I discovered my watch had gone missing.  Since I’m lost as a goose without a watch, I immediately rushed out to the nearest department store and picked up a replacement.  And because this has become such an indispensible accessory for me, it got me to wondering about just when folks started wearing timepieces on their wrist.  I did a bit of research and it turns out that, historically speaking, wristwatches have not been in general use for all that long.

While there are some examples as early as 1500, and Queen Elizabeth I was supposedly given one as a special gift, they were few and far between and were specially commissioned pieces most often for royalty until the mid to late nineteenth century.

Even then men still clung to their pocket watches, viewing wristlets, as they were called at that time, as a feminine and somewhat faddish adornment.  In fact, men were quoted as saying they would  “sooner wear a skirt as wear a wristwatch”.

The established watch making community was partly to blame for this.  They looked down on them as inferior timepieces.  Because of their size, few believed they could achieve an acceptable level of accuracy and the vast majority of those being produced were made as decorative pieces with delicate fixed wire or chain link bracelets.

That began to change when soldiers discovered how useful wristwatches could be in battle situations.  Military men found pocket watches difficult to handle while engaged in physical combat and began to fit them into makeshift leather straps to wear on their wrists. Not only did this leave their hands free for other things, but being able to check the time at a glance instead of having to dig through pockets gave soldiers a strategic advantage over those less well equipped, especially when synchronization of activities was critical.  

Officers in the South African Boer war (1899-1902) were among the first to use wristwatches extensively and the veterans were not afraid to sing their praises both during and after.  By World War I, the military not only encouraged the use of wristwatches but began to demand them for the soldiers. 

By the 1920s, wristwatches had become the most popular type of personal timepiece among both men and women.  Rolex is credited with creating the first water resistant watch, a model of which was worn in 1927 by a female channel swimmer.  Both Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh wore wristwatches for their celebrated transatlantic flights.  Today, wristwatches have become as much a symbol of status and style as a utilitarian instrument to tell time.

As for my own lost wristwatch, I still cling to the hope that I’ll find it wedged down in some nook or cranny in my car or purse or some such.  In the meantime, I’ll use one of the others I own.

So what about you?  Do you select your watch(es) for their function, or do you look for one that reflects something of your style and personality?

And just a quick note – To celebrate my very first day at Wildflower junction as an official filly I’d like to give away a signed copy of my March release, The Hand-Me-Down Family (or one of my backlist if you prefer).  I’ll be drawing a name of one poster sometime Monday evening.

Howdy! When the fillies invited me a few weeks ago to toss my name into the Stetson as a permanent blogger at Wildflower Junction, I tingled with joy and nerves both. There I was, asked to join a stable of award-winning authors who inspire me, whose books I read and treasure. At a site that recently got its millionth hit and, on a daily basis, reaches hundreds of viewers. 

Writers and readers and cowgirls, oh my. Then came the decision on what to post first. Oh, I’ve done some guest blogs at the Junction that were well received. So I reckoned I had to devise some topic to eclipse those. 

Should I feature locales near my Southern California homestead where Western movies are filmed and totally evoke the inner cowboy in anybody who drives by on a busy freeway?  Here’s Rocky Peak, one of my favorite places.

Should I orate on the marvelous coincidence that both Pam Crooks and I have daughters with the same name getting married imminently? Share a sneak preview of The Dress? Nope. Had to nix that. Top Secret. The groom has been ordered to check out this blog today.  

Preview my book Marrying Minda that will be released in a few weeks?

Then of course, there’s always my toddling grandson about whom I can emote endlessly. And who I believe has romance cover-model potential in about twenty years.

Ah I can handle all of that later on. For when the clouds parted, I realized what my inaugural Filly post should be about. 

Chocolate!

My mainstay, my dear love. The ruin of my waistline, hips, thighs and every pound of flesh in every direction. And how to tie my vice, my guilty pleasure, into a Western blog?

The Mason Jar.     

Said jar was actually invented as the first canning jar in 1858 by John Landis  Mason. However, it was Frenchman Francois Nicolas Appert, a pickler, brewer, chef and distiller who established the principles of preserving food in hermetically-sealed glass containers in 1810. 

In 1858, John Mason developed a shoulder-seal jar with a zinc screw-cap. Check the name and date on the yellow jar. Ten years later, he inroduced a top rubber seal above the threads and under a glass lid.

So why do most Mason jars come marked with the name Ball? 

Let me digress. I have an antique Mason jar of my very own, the blue jar shown below. It’s been displayed in each one of my domiciles starting with my college dormitory. Why? Well, during my years of higher education in Nebraska, I often spent weekend with my roommate Bel at her family farm in Fairbury. My overly-protective father had allowed me to leave my California home because it was a church college and You’ll Be Safe There.

 Oh I loved those long leisurely weekends. I loved farm life so much I stumbled downstairs one morning about ten o’clock stating I’d love to marry a farmer. Her dad, who had been up for five hours, had just come inside for his quick mid-morning coffee. I still hear his shouts of laughter as his wife started on cooking her second big meal of the day before I’d even wiped the sleep dust from my eyes. 

These darling folks happily sent me exploring the farmstead to acquire souvenirs to take home. Old rusty tractor gears decorate my patio to this day. And I found my Mason jar all by myself in their old-fashioned  disused wash house. It’s one of the ten things I’d save if a tornado was coming. Well, make that an earthquake.

My treasured Mason jar displays the name Ball and the date  1906. Because John Mason’s patent expired in 1879 , the name changed. When the market opened for competition in 1884, the Ball brothers swooped in and started a manufacturing company in New York State. However, three years later, Ball Brothers Glass Manufacturing Company moved to Indiana.

In 1909, the first Ball Blue Book was published, full of tips on home canning. I am certain my gramma and mom used this book. You see, my brother found ancient Mason jars of canned peaches a few years ago when we started cleaning out mom’s old garage. We reckoned they were left from the Cold War years when you expected a nuclear blast and had to store up indestructible food to survive it.

But for the Balls, it wasn’t all about the jar.  Frank, Edmund, George, Lucius and William Ball endowed a small college in Muncie that later became Ball State University. Even more impressive, their company did not lay off a single worker during the Great Depression!

After 88 years as a family business, the company went public in 1972, and the Ball mason jar celebrates its 125h birthday this year. Through August 23, the exhibit Can It! 125 Years of the Ball Jar is going on at Minnetrista Cultural Center in Muncie. Details at minnetrista.net 

All right now. Lesson over. Can’t help it. I am a former teacher. But what does all this have to go with chocolate?

SAND ART BROWNIES!                                 

They’re easy to make and lovely to look at. Layers of cocoa, brown sugar, chocolate chips and other goodies in a Mason jar make this a gift to remember.

I’ve made these jars for all my neighbors at Christmas, and it’s a sweet homemade gift for first-day-of school, a thank-you or hostess gift. Cover the lid with red and white gingham cover tied with a blue bow and you’ve got a perfect treat for a Fourth of July BBQ.This recipe makes one gift jar using a wide-mouth quart Mason jar.  Cover the top with a circle of gingham and tie with a pretty ribbon. And don’t forget to attach the directions.

For 1 jar:

2/3 t. salt
1 1/8 c. flour, divided
1/3 c. cocoa powder
2/3 c. brown sugar
2/3 c. sugar
1/2 c. chocolate chips
1/2 c. white chocolate chips
1/2 c. walnuts or pecans

Instructions:

In  a clean, dry canning jar, layer the ingredients as follows:

2/3 t. salt
5/8 c. flour
1/3 c. cocoa powder
1/2 c. flour
2/3 c. brown sugar
2/3 c. sugar
1/2 c. chocolate chips
1/2 c. white chocolate chips
1/2 c. walnuts

Close jar, add fabric circle and attach the following directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease one 9×9 baking pan.

2. Pour the contents of the jar into a large bowl and mix well.

3. Stir in 1 teaspoon vanilla, 2/3 cup vegetable oil and 3 eggs. Beat until just combined.

4. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake at 350 degrees for 20 to 25 minutes. Cool and enjoy! Or if you’re like me, eat warm. Hot, even.

Now, the big questions of the day:

1. Have you ever canned anything using a Mason jar?  (I myself am terrified of the process. I never married a farmer and am fairly helpless in the kitchen.)

2. What is your favorite way to eat chocolate? 

Thanks for stopping by today. To celebrate my first day at Wildflower Junction as an official filly,  I’ll be drawing the name of one poster to receive a pretty pressed wildflower bookmark! 

(Sincere thanks to  Country Living magazine, May 2009, Canning Pantry,  and Minnetrista for the fun facts.)

I finished a book yesterday! It’s a June Harlequin Historical for next year, and it’s tentatively titled Her Make-Believe Husband. I almost blogged about breweries in the 1800s, part of the research for my book, but then I decided to share how I celebrated last night. I bought five beachfront properties, a couple of mega casinos, fifty chain guns, a couple of getaway cruisers, and then I wiretapped the cops and robbed a couple of five-star hotels, putting them out of business. What a night.

I’m talking about a game, of course. Remember your first computer? If you can really stretch way back, you might remember when Apple came up with a few games on floppy disks and they were revolutionary! Schools even used Oregon Trail for the elementary kids.

And your first real computer, remember how it came with solitaire and minesweeper? Land o‘mercy, who could have anticipated the games that were to follow, and even online games?

I used to play hearts. And an occasional game of spider solitaire. And one of my computers came with a really addicting game where you lined up matching rocks to make them disappear – sort of like Bejeweled, but I liked it better. I was never able to find that game again. I do play Bejeweled occasionally.

I’m not a big game player, but I do go through periods where I play something to unstress, and it’s most often late at night. I didn’t realize until I asked around, but Facebook has a lot of game applications, like Poker, Risk and others. I have a friend who is addicted to Fashion Solitaire. Most of the kids I know play some type of online game, like Tunetowns, Millsbury, and of course the online pets.

I was never really HOOKED until my daughter talked me into trying a My Space application called Mafia Wars. Oh, my goodness. It didn’t take me long to climb the ranks in the mob. Once you join, you need members for your mafia, and there are all kinds of people out there whacking each other with tommy guns and crow bars and robbing each other’s convenience stores who are more than willing to join your mafia.

You start out as a street thug and earn your way up by doing jobs and fighting other gangs. You buy property and getaway vehicles and earn loot in heists. I own more bulletproof vests and body armor than I will ever use in a lifetime.  And, of course, you snuff the occasional bad guy. And every once in a while when someone beats the tar out of you, you add him to the hit list. Revenge is sweet.

There are other My Space applications, and my family has tried a lot of them, but this is our favorite. We played Fashion Wars for a while—too girly—and right now we’re also playing Pirates.

Do you have a secret—or not so secret—obsession with a game? Which ones test your skills? Do you play a few hands of solitaire before you go to bed? How about Word games like Scrabble?

If you confess a passion for a game today, I’ll add you to a drawing for an advance copy of my June book, The Preacher’s Wife. Come on, spill it!

Now, you’ll have to excuse me. I have an illegal poker game to run.

Oh, and if you play Mafia Wars, come find me. I’m Bad Bama.

Before the Civil War, most businesses were small with only a few dozen employees, and a clerk was most often a young fellow starting out in a business by keeping records and transcribing letters. The 1870s and 1880s brought the growth of corporations and trusts and employment for tens of thousands of workers. Management and labor divisions were created, and paperwork flourished. None of my research showed this, but I couldn’t help wondering if the growth in record keeping was also partly due to the influx of former slaves suddenly being on payrolls.

The idea behind the typewriter applied Johann Gutenberg’s concept of movable type developed for the printing press to a machine for individual use. Descriptions of such mechanical writing machines date as far back as the early eighteenth century. In 1714, a patent something like a typewriter was granted to a man named Henry Mill in England, but no example of Mills’ invention survives.

In 1829, William Burt from Detroit, Michigan patented his typographer which had characters arranged on a rotating frame. However, Burt’s machine, and many of those that followed it, were cumbersome, hard to use, unreliable and often took longer to produce a letter than writing it by hand.

The typewriter began at Kleinsteuber’s Machine Shop in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1868. A local publisher-politician-philosopher named Christopher Latham Sholes and his fellow workers spent hours tinkering on a machine to automatically number the pages in books. Someone suggested a similar device to print the entire alphabet. An article from Scientific American was passed around and a machine that printed the alphabet resulted. It even had the QWERTY keyboard we still use today. The prototype was eventually sent to Washington as the required Patent Model.

Sholes licensed his patent to famous gun maker Remington & Sons of Ilion, New York. In 1874, the Remington Model 1, the first commercial typewriter, was placed on the market. No more than 5,000 were sold, but the invention founded a worldwide industry and brought mechanization to time-consuming office work. The original still exists, locked in a vault at the Smithsonian. Probably a couple hundred or so survived time, and those are valued from $1000 for a black model to $5000 for an ornately decorated model on a treadle stand.

Remington and his sons were already in the sewing machine business, as well, and in fact the early typewriter models with stands look like sewing machines with the same iron scrollwork. The Remington type writing machine was first displayed to the public at the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876 along with Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, Heinz Ketchup, the Wallace-Farmer Electric Dynamo, precursor to the electric light, and Hires Root Beer.

The Franklin Typewriter was a make popular around the turn of the century. Its type bars stood erect at the front of the machine and swung down to the platen. Its radical semi-circular keyboard characterized this down strike machine. Many survive today.

Other models were created and patented over the years, some which struck the back of the paper to print. Some had two complete sets of letters – uppercase and lowercase. Funny that double-keyboard promoters thought it was confusing to have to press two keys when you wanted capitals. The Smith family of Smith Premier later became Smith-Corona. It was the longest-lived name in the typewriter business.

After this practical invention became widely available, typing became a more specialized skill, requiring training other than that of a company manager moving through the ranks. New positions developed in the forms of stenographers, file clerks and typists, and the jobs were quickly seen as women’s work. In 1881 the Young Women’s Christian Association (YMCA) offered typing training.

Based on Sholes’ mechanical typewriter, the first electric typewriter was built by Thomas Alva Edison in the United States in 1872, but the widespread use of electric typewriters was not common until the 1950s. The electronic typewriter, a typewriter with an electronic “memory” capable of storing text, first appeared in 1978.

So there’s everything you always wanted to know about typewriters, but didn’t think to ask. I always enjoy learning that something I thought was a more recent discovery had actually been around for far longer.

Milestones:

1714 The first patent for a ‘writing machine’ was given to Henry Mill of England

1829 William Burt of the US patented his typographer machine

1868 Christopher Sholes, Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soule patent type writing machine

1872 Thomas Alva Edison builds first electric typewriter

1873 Remington & Sons mass produces the Sholes & Glidden typewriter

1978 Olivetti Company and the Casio Company develop electronic typewriter

I did my first writing on a Smith-Corona portable. When I think back on the changes I make by using White Out – what a nightmare. But it was easier than writing by hand, and the finished pages were far easier to read. When I got an IBM Selectric, I thought I had hit the big time. No more White Out because it had an eraser tape! Whoo hoo! We didn’t realize that those were the dinosaurs of the inventions to come, did we? Hey, they were better than anything we’d known previously.

Author and friend Victoria Alexander collects old typewriters, and she has some really awesome specimens in her office. Will anyone else admit to having written or typed letters on a standard typewriter? Do you remember the strikers getting crossed when you went too fast?

I have a rule for myself here on Petticoats and Pistols.  All western all the time.  I’m breaking it this week.  Well, kinda. 

Like every other writer probably, I’ve thought more than once about doing a time travel romance.  I even wrote a proposal twenty years ago with two other authors.  It was going to be a joint project–a collection of novellas–based on the premise that a magical, mysterious, legendary carousel sends the heroines and/or heroes through time to see great loves that are themselves worthy of legends.  My contribution was to be, of course, a western.

Alas, no publisher at the time was interested. And then came along Jude Deveraux’s “Knight in Shining Armor,” and I put away the thought forever. Who could compete with that?

But through the years, the idea still pricked at me, mainly, I think, because I wanted to take a 19^th century cowboy from, say, 1866, and set him firmly in the then 20^st century. I wanted to see his awe, his wonder, his ability to cope in a world he could never contemplate in his wildest dreams.

I watched in wonder myself as we progressed from black and white TV to today’s HD interactive television, from typewriters to wireless computers, from huge radios to the tiny E-Pods, from the first telephones of the mid 1900′s to today’s “do everything” cell phones.

Since technology accelerates with every advance, I’ve wondered for the last forty years what would come next. I’m rarely disappointed.

Except for the flying car. I haven’t been able to understand why no one had developed a flying car. After all, the Jetsons managed to produce one. And who can forget Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. For decades, I’ve been lusting for a helicopter bicycle or flying car.

I’ve often thought about looking upward and watching all these people fly by, rather than clogging the roads, and I wonder exactly how traffic would be controlled. There obviously are not lanes in the sky.

I was about to give up, though. I’d been waiting for decades, all to no avail.

The technology of personal flying motor vehicles seem to defy innovation.

And then, by golly, I heard a snippet on a cable news show. The fantasy of spy novels and science fiction films is at last becoming reality with several vehciles which can turn from car to aircraft.

Off to the internet to do some research, and the results are fascinating. People have been actively trying to develop a flying car since the 18^th century when one would-be inventor attempted to develop a gliding horse cart. Obviously it did not succeed. There is no footnote on what happened to the horse or cart. There are nearly 80 patents on file at the United States Patent and Trademark office for various kinds of flying cars. Some have actually flown. Most have not. And all have come up short of reaching the goal of mass-produced flying cars.

Until, maybe, now.

After a century of unfulfilled promises, flying cars my fill the skies in the next few decades. There are still obstacles to overcome, including receiving approval from te FAA, but the cars are close to being produced.

Here’s several of them:

The TerrafuglaTransition is, according to the Times Online, the ultimate off-roader and is coming to an airstrip near you. The Transition is a two-seater plane that at the touch of a button converts into a road-legal car. It is scheduled to hit the showrooms by next year.

“It’s a like a little transformer,” says Carl Dietrich, the Terrafugia boss. “This is the first real integrated design where the wings fold up automatically and all the parts are in one vehicle.” It has one simple folding wing, and that means the Transition takes just 15 seconds to switch between flying and driving.

The company president promises that the plane will be quicker than cars for intercity commuting, fit into a normal garage, and even run on plain old premium unleaded. You drive to a runway and take off.

It has taken orders for 40 vehicles and plans to begin delivery in 2010.

Price tag: $194,000.

And then there’s my favorite, the Skycar, which being developed by Paul Moller. It’s a four-seat vehicle powered by eight rotary engines that are housed inside four metal housings called nacelles, on the side of the vehicle. There are two engines in each nacelle so that if one of the engines in one of the nacelles fails, the other engine can sustain flight.

The plane will be completely controlled by computers using GPS satellites, which the company calls a fly by wire system. In case of an accident, the vehicle will release a parachute and airbags, internally and externally, to cushion the impact of the crash. The big advantage to the Transition, though, is it takes off and lands vertically.

Price tag: $1,000,000 initially but it’s expected to come down to as low as $60,000 once it begins to be mass produced.

And finally there’s the SkyRiderX2R being developed by MACRO in Huntsville.

This aero car will also be able to take off and land vertically. Sky Rider incorporates the interior design of a two-seat sports car with the mobility of a helicopter or airplane. The company said it is also developing 5 and 7 seat models that should fit in most two-car garages. The navigation system here would also be controlled almost entirely by GPS satellites and cellular services. What’s even better, though, its fuel mileage is comparable to that of a medium sized car and can use gasoline, diesel, alcohol, kerosene and propane. You can always stop at a bar if you run out of gas.

No price tag here or availability found.

There are others, but these seem to be ahead of the pack. So now I know that in my lifetime – hopefully – I can look up and see all those flying vehicles I’ve been imagining for four decades. Maybe I’ll even own one.

I wonder what those cowboys would think if they were transported in time and saw flying stagecoaches that land vertically and drive down that fourteen-lane freeway.

For photos and more information on flying cars, go to:

http://auto.howstuffworks.com//flying-car.htm

First of all, please take a moment to thank me, Mary Connealy, for NOT using a bunch of the pictures I found. So icky. I stumbled upon lobotomies while doing research for…… what? I can’t remember? If they were still doing lobotomies, they would totally be coming for me. Ick.

We talk about all things western here but there have been some great posts on historical medicine, like this one from Kate Bridges on the contents of a Surgeon’s Bag. Though lobotomies are outside the historical western era, it’s just one of those things. I start doing research and one step leads me far afield. Here are some facts, some so horrific that I just immediate thought of our loyal P & P readers. (Poor babies!)

Lobotomies were used in the 20th century to treat a wide range of severe mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, clinical depression, and various anxiety disorders, as well as people who were considered a nuisance by demonstrating behavior characterized as, for example, “moodiness” or “youthful defiance”. After the introduction of the antipsychotic drug Thorazine, lobotomies fell out of common use and the procedure has since been characterized “as one of the most barbaric mistakes ever perpetrated by mainstream medicine”

In 1890, psychiatrist Gottlieb Burckhardt removed pieces of the frontal lobes of six patients.

Psychosurgery was not publicly attempted again until 1910, when Estonian neurosurgeon Ludvig Puusepp operated on a few patients.

Then, in 1935, Portuguese physician and neurologist António Egas Moniz pioneered a surgery he called prefrontal leucotomy. The procedure involved drilling holes in the patient’s head and destroying tissue in the frontal lobes by injecting alcohol. He later changed technique, using a surgical instrument called a leucotome that cut brain tissue with a retractable wire loop. Moniz was given the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1949 for this work

This is where it gets REALLY ICKY! On Jan. 17, 1946, a psychiatrist named Walter Freeman launched a radical new era in the treatment of mental illness in this country. On that day, he performed the first-ever transorbital or “ice-pick” lobotomy in his Washington, D.C., office. Freeman believed that mental illness was related to overactive emotions, and that by cutting the brain he cut away these feelings.

Freeman, equal parts physician and showman, became a barnstorming crusader for the procedure. Before his death in 1972, he performed transorbital lobotomies on some 2,500 patients in 23 states.

 Walter Freeman believed that this surgery would be unavailable to the patients who needed it most: those that lived in state mental hospitals with no operating rooms, no surgeons, no anesthesia, and very little money. Freeman wanted to simplify the procedure so that it could be carried out by psychiatrists in mental asylums, which housed roughly 600,000 American inpatients at the time They’d advertise that Freeman was going to be in the area and put lobotomies on sale and do many of them in one day.

The Freeman-Watts prefrontal lobotomy still required drilling holes in the scalp, so surgery had to be performed in an operating room by trained neurosurgeons.

Freeman decided to access the frontal lobes through the eye sockets, instead of through drilled holes in the scalp. In 1945, he took an icepick from his own kitchen and began to test the new surgical technique on cadavers. (if you can stomach it, go to Google Images and type in Lobotomy. Yikes!) A hammer or mallet was then used to drive the ice pick through the thin layer of bone and into the brain. This new form of psychosurgery was intended for use in state mental hospitals that often did not have the facilities for anesthesia, so Freeman suggested using electroconvulsive (that means they’d zap the patient with a bolt of electricity to knock them out-I believe thanks are in order) therapy to render the patient unconscious.

By the mid-1940s, Freeman was touring the country performing dozens of ice-pick lobotomies each day. Sometimes, for kicks, he’d operate left-handed. This is a picture of Freeman, he often had reporters watch the process and welcomed spectators of any kind.

At Cherokee State Hospital in Iowa, he accidentally killed a patient when he stepped back to take a photo during the surgery and allowed the ice pick to sink deep into the patient’s midbrain. Oops! My Bad!

As Freeman conducted more lobotomies, he advertised his dramatic results, promoting his technique as a 10-minute medical marvel. Nearly all his procedures included press coverage and before-and-after photo ops. In 1952, he made headlines by performing 25 lobotomies in a single day. His staff timed him as he tried to set speed records for performing the lobotomies. Freeman soon enjoyed celebrity.

Freeman performed his final lobotomy on Helen Mortensen.  It’s her third lobotomy by him.  She died from a brain hemorrhage following the procedure.  Freeman was banned from operating again.

Between 1939 and 1951, over 18,000 lobotomies were performed in the US, and many more in other countries.  It was often used on convicts, and in Japan it was recommended for use on “difficult” children. 

There have been a few famous cases over the years.  For example, Rosemary Kennedy, sister to John, Robert, and Edward Kennedy, was given a lobotomy when her father complained to doctors about the mildly retarded girl’s embarrassing new interest in boys.  Her father never informed the rest of the family about what he had done.  She lived out her life in a Wisconsin institution and died January 7, 2005, at the age of 86.  Her sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, founded the Special Olympics in her honor in 1968.

Concerns about lobotomy steadily grew. (You THINK?!) By the early 1970s the practice had generally ceased. About time.

I know what you’re all thinking.

You can’t HANDLE the lobotomy–think Jack Nickolsen in A Few Good Men, NOT Jack in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest where he was given a lobotomy. And now that I’ve shared this with you, if you want to buy my books still… (I’ll understand if you’re afraid-there are no lobotomies in my book, I promise) …click on the books below and it’ll take you to Amazon. Even if you’ve had a lobotomy you can handle that!!!!!!!!!!!!

There are still many people living today who had lobotomies. One guy, Howard Dully (ironic name, huh? Dull?) wrote a book about his and got pretty famous for talking about his lobotomy, given at the request of his step-mother when he was twelve.  Okay, a couple of things.

1) If you’ve had a twelve year old, you can sympathize.

2) Hello wicked Stepmother

3) If the guy could write a book, how badly was he really hurt, c’mon!

Anyone ever heard of this? Know anyone who had one? (And no, I don’t want any ex-husband jokes here-unless they’re really funny)

So, how much of the weird medical science they’re doing today will be banned in a few years. And yes, I do include Michael Jackson in that question.

In a waiting room recently, I took my cell phone in my hand, not to annoy the other patrons but to re-live some fun moments. I checked through my saved pictures — my hubby and me at the Angels/Sox game at Fenway, Charlene Sands and me drooling at a Tim McGraw concert, a bazillion pix of our year old grandson — and I enjoyed everything all over again.

When I got my Kodak Instamatic for a graduation present sometime last century, I thought I was on the top of Everest. With its Magicubes, it was so state-of-the-art. In my wildest dream then, I never imagined a future where I could take pictures with a phone….and email them to a computer! Or use a digi-cam where I can delete all of my faux pas in a flash and where everything’s got a date for instant record keeping. Or scan a horde of old photos for publication on the Internet for you to see.

I wanted to share today some of the gorgeous antique photographs that inspire me. But beforehand, I’m going to make you suffer through a brief history of photography through 1900. After all, I am a retired schoolteacher and lecturing’s a hard habit to break.

Cameras existed long before J.N. Niepce produced the first permanent image, a heliograph, in 1826 – an exposure that took 8 hours with a camera obscrua! This was an image of an outside scene formed by a simple lens and sunlight shining through a small hole into a darkened room. (Camera obscura means “darkened room.”)

In 1837, his partner, Louis Daguerre, began to produce images on silver iodide-coated copper plates that took 30 minutes to develop with warmed mercury. Two years later, Fox Talbot introduced the negative from which many positive images could be produced. But paper negatives didn’t produce the detailed images of the daguerreotype. In 1841, he patented his “calotype” negative/positive process with its 5 minute exposure time.

London sculptor Frederick Scott Archer never patented his 1851 wet plate collodion process, where he spread a mixture of nitrated cotton dissolved in ether and alcohol on sheets of glass. The result: the 10-second exposure “tintype.” Much cheaper than the daguerreotype, the tintype brought photography to everyday people. The name probably comes from the tin shears or scissors needed to cut the small pictures (about 2″ x 3″), rather than the metal plates on which they were reproduced.

In 1861, Scottish physicist James Clerk-Maxwell came up with the color-separation method by using green, red, or blue filters when taking black and white photographs. And during the Civil War, Mathew Brady and his staff exposed 7,000 negatives while covering the war!

British physician Richard Leach Maddox developed the dry plate process in 1871, using an emulsion of gelatin, the protein in animal bones, and silver bromide on dry plates. (Gelatin is still used today.) Exposure time: 1/25th of a second!

When he was 24 in 1880, George Eastman set up his Eastman Dry Plate Company in Rochester, NY. By 1888, the general public had access to a simplified camera, thanks both to his “Kodak Number 1″ model and his mass developing/processing service. A year later, Eastman produced the first transparent roll film. This was a vast improvement over the 20-foot roll of paper in the “Number 1″ that produced 100 two-and-a-half inch circular pictures.

The next year, 1889, Thomas Edison improved the Kodak roll film to 35mm and put the perforations down each side. This became the international standard for motion picture film. Briton Eadweard Muybridge, who had changed his name from the unexciting Edward Muggridge, is credited as the “father of the motion picture” for his 1877 time-stop sequence photos of Leland Stanford’s galloping horse. He didn’t copyright his images, though, and lost a lawsuit against Stanford when he published them. Yes, that’s the same guy who named a university for his son. (Mr. Muybridge and his “flying horse” play a brief but adorable part in a work of mine that likely won’t ever emerge from my hard drive. But oh I had fun writing it!)

In 1880, the first half-tone photo appeared in a newspaper, and ten years later, Eastman introduced the Kodak Brownie box camera.

Okay, now the lesson is over. Last year, my mom moved to a beautiful retirement apartment, leaving my brother Paul and me to shovel out her old house. While the process that he and I have nicknamed The Upheaval has its ups and downs, one “Up” is the treasure trove of antique photos I’ve found. Going through them is like nirvana.

This tintype of my great-grandfather shows him handsome enough to star in his own romance novel. Agreed? Even more interesting is the tintype in the same studio of an unidentified woman. It’s not his only sister. And it definitely isn’t great-grandma. An old girlfriend? No one knows. But Great-Grandpa was happily wed for almost 55 years to my darling great-grandma.

Look at that face. How could he not? One can almost forgive her for weighing only 98 pounds the day she gave birth to her eighth child. (I did not inherit those genes, by the way.)

But, I do think Tintype Woman deserves a story of her own. Especially since I borrowed Great-Grandma’s name for a character in my first book.

The next photo touches me deeply. One of my great-grandparents’ seven sons passed away as an infant, little Paul. In the nineteenth century, it was common to photograph the dead children, but my ancestors fortunately passed on that tradition and only depicted his catafalque. I just can’t help being teary-eyed just looking at it; I think this could evoke a powerful scene in a future book.

Well, their second son was my grandfather, a prim and proper minister. It seems his profession gets short shrift in romance novels because of, ahem, the love scenes. Truth to tell, the hero of my Eadweard Muybridge tale is just such a preacherman. But I think Grandpa’s a dashing hero anyway. I just imagine him on the way to woo his beloved (my grandma), as proud of that buggy and his horse Babe as any fictional hero with his Stetson and stallion.

After seminary in St. Louis, he took a call to Union City, Oklahoma, which evokes every pioneer town I’ve ever dreamed up myself, or read about. How about you?

But now’s when things get interesting and I get to let my imagination run wild. A whole ton of the old photos aren’t labeled with any specific details. Grandpa and Grandma lived in a parsonage, so no one knows who belonged to this homestead. All that’s written on the back is: “A bird’s eye view of the place taken last spring. Oklahoma.” So without a who, exactly where, or when, I can people this homestead with whomever I want.

How about these twins? Boy or girl? Children of both genders in the late 1800′s dressed quite similarly until little boys turned six or so.

Very poignant is the picture of “Raymond and children.” No relatives alive today remember them. No last name. No date. No hometown. Where is Mrs. “Raymond?” Did she die birthing one of the kids? Was he heartbroken? What futures, what loves, what adventures did those little kids have? Did they have a stepmother later on? Was she wicked? Since I don’t know for sure, I’ll just give them a good stepmom in some future tale. I might even let Raymond find love again.

Now, your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to help me develop a story about the woman in this photo. All I know about her is the photography studio’s label, “Sedalia, Missouri.” Look into her eyes and tell me the story you see there when you comment today. In three sentences or so, give her a name, a goal. Conflicts and motivations. A future worthy of a romance novel heroine including of course, a hot hero. My family members will pick the “story line” they like best and that writer will receive a copy of my latest release, Midnight Bride, and a pair of sterling-silver cowboy hat earrings.

So get creative. Who is the pretty lady? Where does she live? On what journey would you like her to go? And most important of all, who will be the love of her life?

This past weekend I had a writer friend fly into town to speak to our local writing group and she had heck getting here because of the FAA grounding of thousands of planes. It left travelers stranded and scurrying to get alternate flights. Her experience made me think of travel back through the years. None of it has been easy or fun - with the exception of the Star Trek method of beaming people from one location to another. Now that would be my idea of travel! If only it were possible. But as irritating as today’s travel is, it was far worse in the past. None was easy or fun, but that didn’t keep people from packing what they could carry and starting out. Seems we’ve always been a determined lot.

Travel in the west was especially uncomfortable, dirty, and sometimes required considerable strength and fortitude to get to destinations. Imagine conditions when bathing was hard to come by. But the pioneers and settlers had little choice if they needed to get somewhere.

Stagecoaches: Normally they traveled a trotting pace of 6-7 mph if the roads weren’t washed out or blocked by fallen trees or boulders. If the stage got stuck, the passengers were required to get out and help push. Some coaches had two bench seats and others had three. There was very little room inside. The passenger’s knees touched the other person sitting across from them. And I pity the man who had long legs! Also, some coaches had seats up on top with the luggage in the fresh air. Stage stops were about every 30-40 miles apart. There, the horses (or mules) were changed for fresh ones. It was dusty and hot. Passengers were sometimes, but not always, furnished linen dusters to wear over their clothing to keep off some of the dust or rain. Not ideal by any means.

Horses: Averaged 7 mph going at a trot if they weren’t loaded down too much. They could ideally carry a 140-190 pound man, his 30-40 pound saddle, a bedroll, canteen, and a rifle. That was a full load. Horse and rider could usually make 50 miles a day without too much exertion and that included stopping to let the horse rest several times. If the cowboy was going to be too long on the trail, he brought a pack mule to tote his food, cooking utensils, extra clothing and such. A horse wasn’t built to carry all that plus the rider. Too much weight caused sores on the horse’s back or bruised its kidneys. The caring cowboy took excellent care of his mount, for without the animal, he was walking. And a cowboy never walked anyplace where he could ride.

Wagon: A wagon could make ten to twelve miles a day if the animal pulling it was rested and in good health and the road in fairly good shape. Of course, that didn’t include mountainous regions. Ten to twelve miles a day translated to around 4 mph with plenty of rest stops. Most wagons were generally pulled by mules because they were heartier and they saved a man’s horse.

Trains: The normal speed for steam engine locomotives was about 25-30 mph in 1864. Early on, the best they could get was 15 mph. Trains had to stop approx. every 30 miles to take on water and coal so it took forever and a day to get anywhere. In summertime when the windows were down, the traveler got covered from head to foot with thick soot and smoke. Sometimes cinders flew in and caused burns. Again, long dusters kept their clothing in fairly good shape but they were hot. I guess it depended on how desperate you were to try to keep clean. Sometimes women wrapped their hair with a kind of close-fitting cap. In wintertime, passengers near the potbellied stove roasted while those at the other end of the car froze. Toilets, if they had them, were no more than a curtained off chamber pot. Imagine how embarrassing that would be! The only good thing was the train stations. Passengers could get off, use the facilities, and eat a meal. I’m sure they took full advantage of those depots!

The next time you’re grumbling about having to stand in a long check-in line at the airport, have your flight canceled, or riding in your air-conditioned car with its soft upholstery and get stuck in traffic, don’t complain. We have it so much better than our ancestors it’s not even funny. Just take a minute to appreciate what you have and remember that nothing will ever be perfect – except if we learn how Scottie beamed people from one place to another!

Are you the adventurous kind who would like to go back in time and take a journey? If so, which method of travel would you prefer? Or do you mind the endless airport screenings and cancellations? How about getting stuck in traffic, do you gripe and fume or just accept and make the most of it? I’m curious.

First let me preface this by saying: Everything is all right NOW! 

But—I read an article in RWR magazine a while back about how you cannot miss out on MySpace if you want to promote your work. Well, I’m on MySpace and all 759 of my close personal friends are no doubt reading Petticoat Ranch right this second.The page is up and running now, but it wasn’t always so easy.

RWR didn’t tell me the dark side of MySpace—and no, I’m not talking about the vampires who have their own pages. That is the subject of another column. Far darker than the blood-sucking living dead is me trying to create my own page. I’ve spent, oh, I’m sure it just seems like a decade trying to figure out MySpace.Finally, my 17-year-old daughter Katy took pity on me and showed me how to invite people to be my friends and how to—forgive me—pimp my page. Where do kids come up with these things?

And why do they have the nerve to say them to their mothers?! 

Anyway, I invited a bunch of people to be my friends. It felt kind of, well, nervy, you might say; like a bad high school party you go to and everyone gives you the “Who invited you?” look. But Katy pep-talked me into it, so I did it.Then after all the invites went out, I tried to, umm, you know to my page and—forgive me again—somehow ended up with a stripper as my background picture.

She was not there when I selected from among the 1,000,000 background choices. And sure, they can’t show you everything on the background, but c’mon! You’d think they’d include it if there was a stripper!! And she was moving—there were shots of her wearing less and less. It was very high-tech in a triple-X kind of way. Did I mention I did this after I invited all these friends? Excellent. Nice surprise if they come and check things out, huh? I invite you to MySpace and a stripper opens the door. Just the impression I want to make!So, of course, on the very day someone might actually agree to be my friend—“hello 38 Double D.”
 
And the only way I could get rid of g-string girl was to get rid of everything, including a bunch of scary-looking lines of code.  Think “Nightmare on Elm Street” with a computer monitor. 

 I don’t even really know what code means, except it’s numbers and symbols and letters that mean nothing to me. I hated to erase it because once it’s gone, there’s no getting it back—not with my computer skills. But either the code went or the stripper stayed and honestly, there was just no chance the clothing challenged girl could stay, what with my friends coming over soon, so I had to delete it all.

So, I lost the stripper and everything else too, except my book cover and a blurb about the book, and of course this nice, growing list of friends. Did you know I’m now friends with Tim McGraw? Yeah, right! Me and Tim! BFFs.  

I now have many friends, most of whom I have stolen from other author acquaintances’ sites and, well, I’m worried. I mean, honestly, do my friends love me for myself? I think not. I’m guessing I’m not going on Tim McGraw’s Christmas card list. And how badly can we abuse the word friend, huh? And why, oh why, did Faith Hill dye her hair brunette—what was she thinking?

So that’s my adventure into cyberspace. If you want to invite me to be your friend (and you’re not afraid), I’m completely open to it (http://www.myspace.com/petticoatranch). Just remember the more I drag you inside my head the more you’re going to need a GPS tracking system so when you call for help—and believe me, you will—the police can find you and save you. And just one more point: I wouldn’t be able to help you run the GPS tracker so you’d be on your own there, too. 

Next up? Facebook. If I survive, I’ll report back.

So how are you with technology? Ever accidentally logged onto some site you were afraid would make Homeland Security kick down your door? And what about research? Authors are always looking for a way to kill someone in a fresh and entertaining way…good luck running for President and not having the, “Seventy-five Fastest Acting Poison’s” website show up in the opposition research. Or the fact that you’ve checked out, “Severing A Human Head” from the library…six times.

Tell me about you and technology. The wonder…and the terror!