Stuff I Love #2: IBM Electric Clock

      It was a focal point in the school rooms of my youth. Spare and perfect and beautiful, from its sans-serif numbers, to the little black hash marks denoting the minutes, to that red second hand, which somehow pulled it all together. This was the top-of-the-line electric wall clock for decades, and all other brands were something less. Which leads us to the iconic "IBM," the name attached, not to some complex computer mainframe, but a simple electric motor pushing hands around a face, the most basic analog display. 
     Actually, not so simple—not just an individual clock plugged into a wall, but part of a complex master/slave timekeeping system where the individual clocks were controlled by a central timepiece, a coordination particularly essential in schools, where you couldn't have dozens of different classrooms beginning and ending at dozens of slightly differing times, all based on the varying time kept in each room. 
     If it seems odd to have an IBM clock, and it does, that's because we're swayed by recent history, "recent" meaning over the past 60 years. The business was founded in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, changing its name to the International Business Machines Corporation in 1924. Long before IBM dreamed of digital computers, it was selling factory timecard devices and clock systems, along with commercial scales, tabulators, plus meat and cheese slicers. 
      This particular clock was manufactured by the IBM Time Equipment Division, and was shipped, according to its serial number, in January, 1957, to the grey trapezoidal barge of the Chicago Sun-Times Building at 401 N. Wabash, which was about to open. It did its job without fail for 47 years. Then just before the building was torn down, in 2004, I had the foresight to rescue this clock from the fourth floor lunchroom. I had looked at it for 17 years, decided that we had a bond, and nobody else seemed to want it anyway.
     If you just have to have one, with no condemned newspaper building at hand to plunder, Schoolhouse Electric created a reproduction that you can buy for $235. Though it runs on a single C battery, which seems a flaw -- mine plugs into the wall, and I imagine that changing that battery would become a chore. You can buy the originals on eBay, probably for less, depending on the condition.  Some look pretty beat up. 
     Mine is fairly pristine.   It keeps nearly-perfect time. I have it hanging at eye level, just beyond my computer—which of course also would tell me the time,with utterly accurate atomic clock precision. But it just isn't the same. The IBM clock has a certain seriousness to it. This is a NORAD clock, the clock you would expect at the command center deep within Cheyenne Mountain, many of them in a row, set to various times around the globe: New York, London, Paris, Moscow, Tokyo. A Cold War clock. Yet, alongside its dignity, and its manifestation of the relentlessness and importance of time, the IBM clock is not without an element of joy, the release it promised long ago to all those youthful faces that looked up at it during tough long division classes. The escape that's coming, if only you do your work and wait. Now, of course, older, we'd hold it back more than we'd urge it forward, though we can do neither. Tempus fugit, as the Romans said. No stopping that. So we might as well watch time flee in as pure and aesthetic a form as possible.

Stuff I love #1: J. Edwards gloves

 
Last month's special fiction week was well-received, so I thought I'd dedicate another week this month to another specific theme, and exceptional objects came to mind. So this week I am calling, "Stuff I love," beginning with these sturdy gloves, made in Chicago.

     Coincidence is a powerful motivator.
     For instance. 
     I would never have bought expensive industrial gloves—lineworkers short cuff gloves, to be exact—to garden in. I'm too practical, and it might look strange.
     But a 2007 New Yorker article about the Great Wall of China contained this description of David Spindler, a 6-foot-7 American who was hiking the wall: 
      "In the mountains he wore a red-checked wool hunting shirt, a floppy white Tilley safari hat, high-end La Sportiva mountaineering boots, and large elk-leather gloves designed for utility-line workers by J. Edwards of Chicago."
     J. Edwards? Never heard of it. I jotted down the name, gingerly, because —and here's where coincidence came in—the side of my left index finger, from the tip to the first joint, was still numb and a deep purple-black, as it had been for the previous 10 days, the result of an infection caused by a weed prickle that pierced the cheap, coming-apart-at-the-seams cowhide glove I was using at the time to work in the yard.

     A few pages later, the article mentioned the gloves again: "elk-leather line-worker gloves from J. Edwards of Chicago." 

     This cried out for investigation.

     "We're the best known name worldwide supplying gloves for the guys you see stringing power lines,'' said Kevin Deady, president of Edwards Glove and also the guy who answers the phone ("We're a small company," he explained).

    Why do linemen need special gloves?

      "You're climbing poles, you're climbing towers; if you've ever tried to climb a steel tower, they're galvanized," he said "If you try to go up there without a pair of gloves, you're going to rip your hands up."

    And elk skin?

    "Deer or cow doesn't get as thick," he said. "These are really thick gloves, 1.6 to 2.0 millimeters. And our elk are not your farm-raised elk; they're shot, in Colorado."

    I told him about my encounter with the malignant weed.

    "Hand protection is important, as important as eye protection or hearing protection."

    Deady graduated from the University of Illinois and got into safety equipment for power companies. He also owns Kunz Glove, and bought Edwards in 2003. Both were at 339 N. Oakley, and recently moved six blocks, to 1532 W. Fullerton, where 44 employees turn out the gloves. 

    "Made in America -- 24,000 dozen gloves last year," he said, six years ago. "We ship all over the world. To Korea. We had an order go out to New Zealand today." I checked in with him last week—sales have dipped a little, to 23,000, which is not bad in this economy, particularly for high-end gloves.

     The gloves don't normally sell retail, but in 2007 I prevailed on Deady to sell me a pair, a bargain at $31, when you consider the $80 in doctor and hospital co-payments required to make sure that my fingertip wasn't about to fall off.

   "They actually make a great gardening glove," he said, adding, unable to leave well enough alone. "Although you're really overkilling it. These are a pair of gloves you'll have for the rest of your life."

     Unless I lose them, I thought.

     "Unless," he said, reading my mind, "you lose them."

     I'm happy to report that I haven't lost them. At first, when I put them on, it was all I could do not to spread my fingers and hold my arms straight out over my head, wiggling my fingers and waving at the world. I still glance about, to see if the neighbors are pausing at their yard tasks and passing drivers slowing in the cars, thinking, "Whoa. Check out that guy's gloves."
     Soft. Sturdy. And by now nicely broken in. Recently, emboldened by their mightiness, I used them to arrange logs on a roaring fire a bit too vigorously, and they dried out. But it was nothing a dousing of neatsfoot oil couldn't fix. In fact, they are better than ever. One seam started to open up at the wrist, but I took some heavy white thread and sewed it back tight, my tongue working the corner of my mouth as I pushed the big needle through. I wouldn't have done that for just any gloves. These aren't gloves you throw out, these are gloves you pass on. 

    With these gloves, I usually don't have to dig weeds with a tool, I can just grab them and slowly pull. That's something worth noting about weeds—I've found, the pricklier they are, the shallower their roots, the easier it is to pull them out. I imagine that's because few things in nature yank at spiky weeds. They don't need deep roots. Which also struck me as a phenomenon that might transfer to people, too. Prickly = shallow. Something to keep in mind.
    Oh, and one more thing. When I talked to Kevin Deady last week (he has a good memory. "You haven't lost them, have you?" he asked, after six years) he said while he was grateful for the original column —he has it framed in his office—it did lead to an annoyance: many, many people calling, wanting to buy the gloves. 
    And that's a bad thing? I asked.
    "No," he said. "But they would talk for half an hour." Half an hour is a long time to spend selling a pair of gloves, even expensive gloves. So if you feel compelled to phone J. Edwards and buy a pair of gloves, that's fine, and I recommend you do so. But please keep the jawboning to a minimum. Just order your gloves, get off the line and let the man go about his business. He has important work to do. 

Spare shirt

    Where is the line between preparation and excess of caution? A matter of opinion, no doubt—a jack in your trunk is essential, one of those emergency hammers to break your window should you find your car submerged in a pond, perhaps a bit too far. The prudent office worker keeps some antacids in a drawer; an escape rope, however, seems more an expression of inner fear, and the money used to buy it might have been better spent on the helping professions.  
    Sometime in the hazy past, years ago, I hung a spare shirt on the back of my office door. So long ago, I can't even speculate why. I don't think I brought it down intentionally, as a precaution, against the day when it came in handy. I brought it down for some other purpose, long forgotten, didn't need it, and decided to keep it there until I did.
     And the years went by. 
     It gave the place the air of professionalism. I thought of Nixon, sweating through his shirts, of businessmen at the highest levels changing in their hotel suites for their next high stakes appearance. I never needed a fresh shirt but, by God, if I ever did, I had one, right there and ready, just like Ronald Reagan.  It lent my cluttered newspaperman's office a certain executive feel. At least in my own whimsy.  
     For a long time. Lately, however, the shirt seemed to reproach me. The shirt was a lie. I never needed it. I am not an executive. I would never need it.  The shirt just stared dolefully at me, unnecessary, superfluous, symbolizing an excess of caution, its arms akimbo, questioning me. I thought of taking it home where at least it might be useful someday.
     Then a few Thursdays ago, reclining in my chair, reading the computer while taking a hearty sip of Starbucks black coffee, a generous gulp of joe slipped from between the loose lid and the cup lip and splatted itself on the front of my yellow Oxford shirt. Not a few discrete drops either. It looked like someone had taken a turkey baster of java and squeezed it against my chest.  Hard. I jumped up, alarmed, and my eyes locked on that spare shirt. Aha. My view of the shirt shifted, my appreciation of it magnified. I  stripped the drenched shirt, cast it aside, and put the new one on, momentarily wondering what people passing my office would think ("Steinberg has gone around the bend--he was changing clothes at the office. Must be trouble at home.") Smiling, congratulating myself for my foresight, if that's what it was. Some people are ready for all exigencies, they have life figured out and, at the moment, I was one of those people.

Setting the scope on a Jackal bow

    What is an authentic person? And why does someone who lives in the woods, drives a rusty blue Chevy pickup truck with various pro gun decals, a half dozen empty beer cans rattling around in the back and a "NO WOLVES" bumper sticker, someone who works as a jack-of-all-trades, seem more real than, oh for instance, someone who lives in the suburbs, drives a silver Honda Odyssey van, and writes stories for a living?
    Friday I stopped by the house of Moonshine Mike Guzek in Ontonagon, Michigan—he works as the handyman for my pal Rick, and in general has the lay of the land here. We had the pleasure of sitting in his garage/woodshop, talking about stuff. I don't talk about "stuff" much, especially the stuff Moonshine Mike, 73, talks about — bow hunting, wood chopping (that's his winter's worth of maple firewood above, stacked by his girlfriend Susan who, alas, I did not meet), women, chainsaws, the unexpected connection between the two (later in the day, trying to start a chainsaw that took a long time to get going, he'd say, "I knew a girl like that") property sales, and various other UP topics.  He told me a story about hunting a deer with a buddy's crossbow in snow (much better to hunt them in the winter, when you don't have to worry about refrigerating the results), shooting it through the heart, a shot that — he later learned, dressing the deer — cracked the fifth rib, cut through the deer's heart, then through the fifth rib on the other side, and out. I wish I could replicate his description of the blood in against the snow, but I would not do him justice.
     Mike was quite excited about his new Barnett Jackal crossbow—a bad shoulder makes drawing a composite bow tough— and let me test it out while we calibrated the scope. You pull the bowstring back using a rope with two handles on it, and while it took all my strength, I could just do it. Firing was easy after that, and I got quite good at it. I don't know if I could shoot a deer—probably not—but a big yellow foam cube target is another matter. The arrows travel at over 300 feet per second, and after pulling back the string, the hardest part was pulling the "Headhunter" brand arrows out of the target.
     Mike is a craftsman—he built the cabins on my buddy's place here, and is a reminder that artistry comes in a variety of forms, and that skill and refinement is not always obvious. Maybe that is why he seems more real—because the ability to butcher a moose seems more of a genuine life skill than the ability to, oh, polish a sentence.  There was also an unapologetic quality to him. His pickup had a sticker that showed a wolf, howling at the moon, in a rifle crosshairs, that said: "HUNT HARD, SHOOT STRAIGHT, KILL CLEAN, APOLOGIZE TO NO ONE." That seems like a life philosophy, and as a person who is always explaining, nearly apologizing, I told myself: don't do that so much.
     Our skills sets do not overlap, but I still appreciated his wisdom, and though he was initially puzzled, by my repeatedly turning down a beer (later, when we cut down some trees that were threatening a barn, he saw me and said, "Where's your beer?!" with alarm, as if I couldn't breathe without it, and only then remembered. I of course apologized—old habits die hard—and he said, "No, it's a good thing.") I even suspect he enjoyed talking with me, or at least appreciated my help setting the Jackal's scope, three green dots which skewed up and to the right, at first, but seemed dead on and true by the time we were done with it.

   

Gone to the UP

     "So how does any man keep straight with himself," Nelson Algren asks, in The Man with the Golden Arm, " if he has no one with whom to be straight?" Once a year, I go to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, to a small town on the shores of Lake Superior called Ontonagon, where I hang out with my colleague, the great sports columnist Rick Telander, and an assorted motley of his pals. We are straight with each other, and talk philosophy, believe it or not, and life, and swim in the very cold water, and look at the stars, and eat very well, and smoke cigars, and have an awful lot of fun. I'm there right now. So this will be by necessity brief. 

     When Rick first asked me to go, to spend a long weekend with a bunch of guys—an ex-football player, a TV sports reporter, a couple of former Army Rangers— I almost said no. It sounded like a blow-out, and I've given up that kind of thing. Besides, would I really fit in with that group? But he said trust me, it'll be fine, and I decided to set aside my reservations, believe him and go, because I knew what would happen if I stayed home, and I always try to err on the side of trying something new. And it was fine. More than fine. Great. I'm so glad I did; I made new friends, had many interesting conversations, and saw a part of America that is pristine and proud and very, very beautiful. You can't join us, but you can try new things, even if means an eight hour drive due north to find out if you made the right call or not. Because you never know. Something worthwhile can be waiting. 

There are no New Years, only new days

     The seasons cycle, winter to spring to summer to fall, without a beginning or an end. So we humans, who very definitely begin and end, like to pretend that years end too, just like us, to chop them up, insert pauses, like rests in music, to allow us to catch our breath, gather our energies, and start playing again, renewed.
     Thus Jews pause Thursday to welcome in 5774, a year many would be hard pressed to specify at any other season. And three months and three weeks later, the rest of the world -- and most Jews too -- welcome in the standard new year, this time 2014.  The first, ushered in with apples and honey, the second with champagne, hors d'oeuvres, and frantic, bad television programs.
      And what do we wish for, at these special times, during these self-imposed changes in the calendar? The Jews seem interested in praising God—I just came from evening services. Much praising of God. One hopes He's pleased. And the secular New Year involves pledges to improve ourselves, to lose weight, start exercising, be better people, that people we haven't been the past year, and probably won't be the next year, or ever. Still, we try.
      Strange ventures, both. And nothing you can't do all through the year, if you so desire—both the praising and the resolving. Always a good idea, thanks and effort. Which makes one wonder, not why we do it so much now, but why so little the rest of the year? Why do we need the artificial change from one digit to the next, to prompt us to piety, to prod us to be self-improvement, to realize that we are not as appreciative of all that we have, not as much as we should be, or that we are not trying to be the people we'd like ourselves to be. So maybe the lesson of the New Year is to try to make every day a little more like it. To try not to concentrate so much of our hopes on a decimal change, and instead realize that while there is really no such thing as a New Year—it's just the Same Old Year dressed up in our imaginings—there is very definitely a new day, a multitude of new days. Arriving, in fact, every single day—odd how that works out— and each can be as important as we care to make it. So Happy New Year, Happy New Day.
   

The best time to plant a tree

     A Russian proverb says that, during a man's life, he should: have a son, write a book and plant a tree. And had you asked me, when I first heard the proverb, before I had done any of those things, to arrange these life goals in order of difficulty, from easiest to hardest, I would have instantly replied, 1) tree; 2) son; 3) book. 
      But now that I've raised two sons, published seven books and planted, well, a good number of trees, I can tell you that while books take a long time and require much steady plodding—ditto for raising sons—both tasks, though difficult, collaborative, long term efforts, are achievable through persistence and enterprise. 
       This tree-planting business, however, is really tough.  
       You have to know what you're doing with trees, and while I've only been planting them for 13 years, since I've moved to the leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook, let's say my success-to-failure ratio is not good, far worse than with books or, thank God, sons. 
       There is an awful randomness to planting trees. It is, frankly, a crapshoot.  I planted two apple trees, one next to the other, tended them the same, I thought. One lived and thrived and is giving us bushels of apples. The other died almost immediately. Ditto for a pair of accolade elms—one took, one didn't. Three cherry trees planted, three cherry trees withered—wet soil, I finally decided—as did a pin oak  I had great hopes for. The pin oak had been a sturdy sapling, tall as I am. Kindling in three months. But a white pine, planted as a slender knee-high seedling not far from where the pin oak would have been, is going gangbusters. Some trees I coddle and they die, and others get abused and live; a red bud that I moved a few years after planting, which is hard on trees, survived the shock and is doing great.
     Of course, "doing great" is relative. The most successful tree I've planted, a dozen years ago to replace a tree blown apart by lightning, is a cimmaron ash. It's growing a yard a year, now taller than the house itself, lovely full, symmetrical, oval shaped crown, and, of course, almost certainly doomed, thanks to the emerald ash borer, which hasn't gotten to yet, perhaps because I've spent much more money on anti-ash borer treatments than I spent on the tree itself,, like holy oil religiously poured around the tree's base, uttering incantations. 
     Or perhaps it's dumb luck. I truly wish the borers would get me, first, drill directly into my heart, because it'll kill me anyway if that Chinese pestilence takes my tree down. Just bad luck. Of all the trees I had to plant, I had to plant an ash. Which is why I am interested in a Chicago Botanic Garden study of which trees will best survive the coming global warming catastrophe. Bad enough to grow old. Worse to grow old in a climate gone mad. Worse still to grow old in a climate gone mad and see all the trees you planted as a youth die. (You can learn about a Chicago Botanic Garden study by clicking here. If you read it, bear in mind that the last tree I planted was a ginkgo biloba. So sometimes I catch a break).
     Why care about trees? (Or books, or sons, for that matter?) I don't think it should be due to any Slavic yearnings toward immortality. That's what those three proverbial Slavic bucket list boxes to check off are all about — sons, books, trees — all propagating your name, leaving your mark, a notch on eternity. But even the oldest trees die, eventually. I have a 150-year-old sugar maple in the front yard that is as close to senile as a tree can be. Any day now I expect it to crack in two. Books as well, have their moment and are swept away, and better not to even think about sons. The truth is, permanence is not found in the oldest tree, just a drawn out moment, a protracted fleetingness. The faint scratch marks of books, trees and, yes, sons, will be effaced quite soon after you're not around, if you're lucky.   
     Far better to forget about eternity and concentrate on now. Value things for their own sake—the books for their ideas and writing, the sons for their personalities, the trees for their beauty, all passing, but all still here at the moment, which is the important thing. Better to abandon the Russian proverb and make up our own Buddhist proverb. "In a man's life, he should overcome vain hopes of permanence." That sounds like a better plan, so long as it doesn't keep you from planting trees too, perhaps bearing in mind the equally apt Chinese proverb: the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago; the second best time to plant a tree is today.