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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 2, 1989)
Thursday, February 2,1989 The Battalion Page 13 rs Historical photograph of Marines raising flag at I wo Jima not posed es for about n 'I cap that kj ‘n brought^ :ie back of | Ik. descendi v * n S Jon. J a and has ir the circuiij . a safe delivered d of them: j eir chart-tof tried andtri* ued well Starting of s on Me," an first hit, “Ro icentrated n st two album yan shined o- Be My ' Tico Tone nd. The (AP) — It’s been over 40 years since the appearance of the famous picture of Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima, and for many of those years, the photographer, Joe Rosen thal, was beset by the rumor that the shot was posed. For the record, the picture was not posed. Here is the real story: Rosenthal, then a 33-year-old photographer covering the Pacific [heater for the Associated Press, took the picture in 1945 on top of Mount Suribachi, shortly after U.S. Marines had captured the peak dur ing the battle for Iwo Jima. The picture helped raise morale among the war-weary Americans. It won a Pulitzer Prize and later be came the model for the Iwo Jima Memorial in Virginia. However, the flag in Rosenthal’s picture was not the first one raised on Suribachi that day. An earlier flag-raising was re corded by Staff Sgt. Louis R. Low ery, a Marine photographer for whom Rosenthal had nothing but praise. A Prayer” an came backfa .ired “Wantec ;ing version i l the hour an im break an :ior did it ..It wassii oil show, tit (I referring irotherhood' un. Theaudi e their heron is Messina,tb Concerts w with Stout ras obviotish he entrance it ea. He I reap the ben >wd of 17,( ■e the show rson 1 spottei i a 14-year r, who was ars when : stub. Ab back onto tit ithout it. Tkt id waited unti umpled up >cket under . Then, fatht ir seats, to les er in titution, cnu able emotioia rg to murder the street months is they’re l but dead gives runaw e to sleep the harsh fc ed to. They ling and mei available oung adults idependent, Iso offers ei hurches. iects that and you ovenant Hou* • IRVINGTON, Ky. (AP) — Dick Frymire’s renowned rooster Ted disgraced himself on na tional television when he pre dicted Cincinnati to win the Su per Bowl. But he’s not quitting and should have his picks for top 10 TV shows ready soon. “I tell everybody that Ted is the most famous unfried chicken in the world today,” says Frymire, who has a regional radio show telling yarns about Ted and of fering folklore and advice on ev erything from getting rid of roaches and squirrels to calming a crying baby. For the TV picks, Frymire will put the names of about 50 shows in front of Ted and place a kernel of corn in front of each sign. The first grain of corn Ted eats will be his choice of the No. 1 show, with picks up to 10. Maybe that’ll work out better than his Superbowl prediction, which was made on national tele vision, on CBS’ “Sunday Morn ing.” It all started in 1984 when Fry mire put his pet into a pen shaded with two old campaign posters, one of Ronald Reagan and the other of Walter Mondale. He set out some numbers and corn kernels, and asked Ted how many states Mondale would carry in the election. Ted ate the kernel in front of the number “ 1 “I’m the biggest Democrat that ever was,” Frymire said. “And I thought, ‘The chicken’s gone Re publican on me for sure.’ ” Since then, Ted has predicted winners of basketball games, the Kentucky Derby and three Super Bowl games. iths and itter, nder des pleas f monetary House or elps runaway Ritter wri$ the way j^ 1 at nice maw nice. Butgo^- ) them shouk • CHICAGO (AP) — After 18 years of catering to jet-setting so cialites, the exclusive Faces disco theque on the Rush Street night life strip near downtown has gone out with a bang. Owner George Shales threw a last-look party for the club’s 16,000 card-carrying members Friday night, and invited the pub lic. Jim Kurianowicz, 42, who worked as a bartender there, la mented changes he said helped lead to the closing of Faces. “When it opened, Rush Street was like Vegas,” Kurianowicz said. “Now, the landmarks are gone. It’s all executives, high-rises and yuppies.” Customers during the early days became lifetime members for $50, when video monitors flashed scenes from “Charlie’s Angels,” and the singles crowd rocked to quadrophonic sound. “I used to come here when I was a bachelor. I knew all the dances then, the hustle, the bump. I was pretty good,” said Logan Dugaw, of suburban La- Grange. He’s now 45, and has five children. • POWHATAN, Ark. (AP) — They only had a week to do it, but an army of offspring was enough to build a new house for 86-year- old Evan Smith, replacing his fire-damaged homestead. His old house burned Jan. 7. He moved in with a daughter, Patricia Smith, but yearned for a place of his own, she said. So his son, Jerry Smith, who is in the construction business in jPiedmont, S.C., proposed using is dad’s insurance proceeds to ibuild a new house during his one- eek vacation. I personally didn’t think we could do it, but we did,” Ms. liable in n# be order' 3. to CovenaJI ^ ^ ^ ^ hie and can Smith sa j f ] Saturday from this ise lexas.P northeastern Arkansas town of Station, H 011 49 residents. ^ I “With all of us together, we :ion about 1 ' have the ability,” Terry Smith to become |f said 2231. “He was hours ahead of me on top of the mountain, when it was much more dangerous,” Rosenthal re called. When Rosenthal finally made it to the top of Suribachi, he saw another Marine carrying a much larger 'flag, a bigger Stars and Stripes that could be seen from much farther away. When the Marines raised this larger flag, Rosenthal almost didn’t get the shot. “I was playing gentleman with a Marine motion picture cameraman, making sure I didn’t get in his way. He, incidentally, got the only motion picture film of that flag-raising. I had time for just one quick grab shot of the actual flag-raising,” Rosenthal recalled. Rosenthal then took a second pic ture of some Marines guying down the flagpole with rope. For his third picture, when “there must have been 50 or so on top of the mountain,” he called to the Marines and asked them to gather around in front of the flag. “I said something to them, like, ‘Come on, this is a historic mo ment,’ to get them to do something.” The Marines posed with their ri fles raised in a victory salute and Rosenthal took the shot. Years later, when I talked to Rose nthal about the picture, he was ex tremely modest. “It was the men in the picture who deserve the credit, not the photogra pher, who just happened to be lucky enough to be there to shoot it,” he said. He went on at length to praise the efforts of Lowery and the Marine motion picture cameraman who-had also been on the scene. When he went up Suribachi, Rosenthal was carrying a stripped- down Speed Graphic and three film packs containing 12 exposures each. That’s 36 pictures, the equivalent of one roll for a modern 35mm cam era. Today’s photojournalist on a com parable assignment would probably shoot many rolls of film, but the combat photographer of Rosenthal’s day had to make his shots count. “There were so many pictures to be taken that, during that battle, you could point your camera almost any where and get pictures,” Rosenthal recalled. Later, when Rosenthal finally left the mountain, he bundled his film and caption material for shipment to Guam, where the film was proc essed. AP picture editor Jack Bodkin picked the flag-raising shot and ca bled it back to New York for distri bution around the world by the AP wirephoto network. When Rosenthal got a message from New York congratulating him on his picture, he didn’t know which of the three Iwo Jima shots he was being congratulated for! At the time, he thought it was the more animated third shot of the Ma rines gathered around the flag wav ing their rifles, so when a colleague asked if he had set the shot up, Rose nthal said yes. It was not until much later that Rosenthal discovered it was the grab shot of the actual flag-raising — not the posed shot — that everyone was so excited about. Although the true story has been told many times, the rumor persists. Author remembers old inventor, tells of modesty and generosity NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — He was the first person in the United States to bend iron for practical use and to turn animal hides into patent leather. His locomotives were the first to pull trains up steep hills. He pro duced the country’s earliest daguer reotype camera. He developed a hy brid strawberry. Few people recall Seth Boyden or his 19th-century contributions. Yet he was regarded as a genius in his time, and Thomas Edison hailed him as one of America’s greatest in ventors. James Drummond, a Westfield, N.J., High School history teacher writing a book on Boyden, says the inventor’s humility was partly to blame for his anonymity. “He did not really materially take on the trappings that were so impor tant in the Victorian period,” says Drummond. “I think people just set him aside as a nonentity because of that.” Charles Dzuba, a metallurgic en gineer in Maplewood, came across a Boyden footnote while testing iron four years ago. He has studied him ever since. He even honored him last November with a lecture and slide show on the 200th anniversary of his birth. Dzuba has learned that the street where his laboratory sits, Boyden Avenue, was named for the inven tor. So was Boyden Hall at Rutgers University’s Newark campus, and Boyden Street, Boyden Terrace and the Seth Boyden Projects, all in New ark. A statue of Boyden, in leather apron standing by an anvil, has stood in Newark’s Washington Park for nearly 100 years. It is the first statue dedicated to the working man in the United States, according to Drummond. “I just found more and more about this man and got to admire him,” Dzuba says. “He was a great humanitarian. He gave away every thing that he invented or improved upon.” “He is the Ford of Newark, in ef fect,” says Drummond. “The whole economy of Newark in the 19th cen tury ultimately revolved around his inventions — patent leather, steel making, silverplating.” Boyden was the working man’s in ventor, constantly trying to improve the tools and machines of his day. Born in 1788 in Foxboro, Mass., he showed early skill as„a craftsman, fashioning watches and an air rifle as a teenager. Boyden’s father and grandfather, both Minutemen dur ing the Revolutionary War, operated a forge and machine shop. Both were tinkerers, and they noticed Seth’s skills at an early age, Drum mond says. Boyden improved upon a leather splitting machine his father built and headed for Newark in 1815, aware of that city’s reputation as a leather center. His machine helped free mil lions of feet of leather for use in shoes, harnesses and book covers. Four years later, Boyden coated leather with varnish, oven-baked it and dried the last coat in the sun. He called it patent leather, devised a way to mass-produce it and turned his attentions to making malleable cast iron, a shapeable iron known only in Europe. At the time, iron had to be heated frequently to be beaten into the de sired shape, a process that made it less durable, Dzuba says. Boyden found the secret on July 4, 1826, developing a two-step heat treatment method for iron ores that made them soft and pliable. Guns miths, locksmiths, blacksmiths and coachmakers were among those who benefited from his seven years of work. In the 1830s, Boyden revolution ized the freight and commuter rail road business by putting a straight axle he developed onto steam en gines so they could travel steep in clines. At age 67, he retired to Maple wood and a house donated by grate ful industrialists. Turning his inter est to botany, he experimented in his garden. He used ice to concoct an ar tificial winter that was crucial to strawberry development and came up with a larger, sweeter version of the fruit. Boyden died in 1870. Thomas Ed ison, honoring him in 1926 at the Newark statue said: “He was one of America’s greatest inventors. ... His many great and practical inventions have been the basis for great industries which give employment to millions of people.” Fine landscape cameras made to capture clean, sharp images MARION, Mass. (AP) — With their brass knobs and mahogany cases the cameras look like a display from a 19th century industrial show. And the simple shop where they are made could be the basement of a woodworking enthusiast. But Ron Wisner considers his company a cutting-edge outfit which supplies equipment to commercial and landscape photographers. Wisner spends his days with a dozen employees turning out the Wisner Technical Field camera, which folds to fit into a wooden briefcase and unfolds into a machine used to capture the finest of photo graphic details. From Big Macs to Big Sur, Wisner cameras provide the clarity needed by advertisers and demanded by landscape photographers. Unlike standard 35mm cameras, a field camera with flexible accordion-like bellows can focus simultaneously on objects near and far. And the neg atives produced by the big cameras are up to 50 times larger. According to Wisner, an increas ing number of photographers are turning to large-format bellows cam- “The amateur photographer looking for a good fine-arts image is becoming disenchanted with the 35mm because no matter what kinds of bells and whistles you put on there, your negative js still the size of a postage stamp,” says Wisner, presi dent of Wisner Classic Manufactur ing Co. in this southeastern Massa chusetts town. Even so, the large format camera is a small part of the American mar ket — only about 5,000 cameras sold per year. Wisner says he has one American competitor and about a half-dozen foreign makers, and only he knows his share of the market. Wisner, 33, started making cam eras in 1983, and reviews indicate he won’t go out of business for a lack of reputation. Writes View Camera Magazine: “... The only criticism leveled at this camera is that it is so beautifully made and the finish work is so well done that it might better be placed on the fireplace mantel as a piece of sculpture.” From AJ. Buhl, a photographer in St. Cloud, Minn.: “The Technical Field deserves a gold medal.... Every part fits precisely Every movement is smooth and precise.” The materials are a pleasure to the eye and hand: Fine mahogany, brass knobs turned and polished on the premises and bellows made of ul tra-thin kid leather lined with black silk. Quality doesn’t come cheap. Wisner’s smallest field camera goes for $1,395. There’s a six-month wait. One recent month, a single mega project dominated production: A $14,000 jumbo camera commis sioned by the University of Nevada- Las Vegas for a save-the-desert pro ject. The camera is to take dramatic landscape photographs that univer sity officials hope will convince the public that fragile environments such as Death Valley and the Mojave Desert must be protected from de velopers. The camera is the size of a large television set. Its focus knobs are the size of golf balls. Wisner insists it re mains “portable,” able to be folded into a package of under 50 pounds. A 35mm turns out a negative about 1 Vi inches square. Wisner’s smallest field camera produces a 4- by-5 inch negative or 20 square inches. The University of Nevada camera will have a negative 20 by 24 inches, or 480 square inches. “As far as we know it is the largest portable camera currently in pro duction,” Wisner says. Large negatives allow photogra phers to make prints without enlarg ing, which can distort the sharpness of an image. “It allows a clarity that cannot be achieved any other way,” says Gary Adams, a Nevada-based landscape photographer who is curator of the photography collection at the uni versity’s Museum of Natural His tory. y4GGIEH@I< ‘Q7 ‘QQ ©llfMAil Or 00 AiillLI TEXAS A&M UNIVER Antique-train enthusiast changes faceless store into train depot replica CHRISTIANA, Pa. (AP) — You can’t catch a ride to nearby Paradise or ship freight from Christiana’s new train station, but you can clean your clothes, wash your car and buy a refrigerator. What looks like a turn-of-the- century depot is a newly remod eled building which houses the Christiana Laundry and Car Wash and the Lanchester Appli ance store, all owned by Glenn Kendig. “I love trains. I’m a real train buff,” Kendig says. “So I decided to make the building look like an old train station. I was able to blend my hobby and my busi ness.” The building has a wide roof overhang, which would have pro tected rail passengers from the el ements as they waited for the next arrival. Wrought iron and wood plank benches are located under the roof. The structure has exposed solid-beam roof supports and a brick half-wall capped with mor tar. Incandescent bulbs covered with large porcelain shades light the building’s exterior. There’s also a big bay window which would have allowed pas sengers in the station to see in coming trains. Kendig even in stalled a ticket window, which he plans to use for seasonal store dis plays and occasional displays of railroad and train artifacts. “The trend today is to cover ev erything, hide it behind alumi num and stucco. But that also hides the design,” Kendig says. “We left everything exposed so you can see the architectural de tails, and tried to make it a little fancy. We’re proud of the build ing ... It looks authentic.” Originally a blacksmith’s shop, the building had been expanded several times and had no distin guishing characteristics. “Before, it was pretty much just a regular commercial build ing,” Kendig says. “We think we’ve given it a distinctive ar chitectural style.” Inside the structure it’s clear the train station theme is for ap pearances only. The 8,600 square feet contain a major appliance business and a coin-operated laundry and dry-cleaner. At the rear is a four-bay self-service and automatic car wash. Kendig is familiar with the building. More than two decades ago, he mopped floors and pumped gas at what was then a combination gas station-laundry- car wash. He bought the building in 1975. Kendig’s interest in trains and railroads commands most o. his spare time. His collection of “O-gauge” toy trains, mostly Lionel, numbers in the hundreds. Each year, he fires up a big pot-bellied stove and ar ranges a display of three running trains inside the former station’s freight room. Kendig’s real passion, though, is for full-size trains. He’s on the board of directors of the Lancas ter chapter of the National Rail road Historical Society and is a charter member of the Friends of the Railroad Museum in Stras- burg. HOUSTON LIVESTOCK SHOW & ] SXLOJ Dj SToT FEBRUARY 16-MARCH S, 1989 1989 Performance Times: Saturday Matinees —11 a m.; Sunday, Feb. 26 matinee—1 p.m.; Sunday, Feb. 19, and Sunday, March 5 — 4 p.m. performances only. All evening performances are 7:45 p.m. PRESENTED BY Bud Light & Channel Two The Judds February 19 Twilight 4 p.m. performance Crystal Gayle February 20 Kenny Rogers February 21 Cheap Trick February 22 Bruce Hornsby & The Range February 23 Larry Gatlin & The Gatlin Brothers February 24 Ricky Skaggs Little Joe y La Familia February 25 Matinee Charley Pride February 25 Evening K.T. Oslin Ricky Van Shelton February 26 Matinee Reba McEntire February 26 Evening PRESENTED BY Miller Lite & Chy^nel 11 Ge^bv^utrait Feoruary 27 Luther Vandross February 28 Merle Haggard George Jones March 1 Highway 101 Steve Wariner March 2 Chicago March 3 The Oak Ridge Boys March 4 Matinee PRESENTED BY Chevy First Team Barbara Mandrell March 4 Evening PRESENTED BY SNICKERS" Bar Alabama March 5 Twilight 4 p.m. performance Dodge the traffic with Coors Light Rodeo METRO Express from Meyerland and Gulfgate malls. Available for all Friday, Saturday and Sunday performances, plus the Monday, Feb. 27 performance. FARE IS ONLY $1 PER RIDER, ROUND-TRIP. TICKETS ARE NOW ON SALE AT THE FOLLOWING LOCATIONS: TICKETRON OUTLETS: Dillard’s in the Post Oak Mall and the Texas A&M University MSC Box Office. To charge tickets by phone toll-free statewide, call Rainbow Ticketmaster at 1-800-992-8000 or Ticketron at 1-800-284-5780 (outside the 713 area code) toll-free statewide. For tickets by mail, write: Ticket Director, RO. Box 20070, Houston, Texas 77225-0070. Rodeo ticket prices range from $4 to $10 and include admission to the Livestock Show. ALL NET PROCEEDS BENEFIT YOUTH & SUPPORT EDUCATION The 88 Video Aggielands Are Now \ fR\ ■Aiiv. S! T Y Available! If you’ve already purchased one you can pick yours up in the English Annex, bring your I.D. If you haven’t purchased one yet, there are a limited amount available for sale. If you purchased an 88 Aggieland the Video costs $30. plus $2.25 tax If you have not purchased an Aggieland the video costs $45. plus $3.37 tax