T. Buckingham Thomas

In 1950 the population of my future home town, Richwood, Ohio, was 1,866. Everyone deserved to get their name into the local newspaper.

On October 5 of that year, the weekly Richwood Gazette reported that “the Girl Scouts held their meeting at the Richwood High School building with their leaders, Jack Van Buskirk and Mrs. Louise Mueck, in charge.” The story didn't mention any resolutions adopted at the meeting, but it did manage to name 16 of the Scouts. All had administrative duties, described by the same already-used phrase.

“The president, Phyllis Phelps, was in charge. Plans were made for a Hallowe'en party.”

Five girls were listed as “in charge of” decorating, six (including Miss Phelps) “in charge of” invitations, and five “in charge of” favors. It must have been a highly-charged festivity, 75 years ago tonight.

The next week's Gazette reported on a couple of other get-togethers, naming six attendees at the meeting of the Thrifty Stitchers' Club plus seven at the meeting of the Friendship Circle of the Past Noble Grands.

That's not a misprint. A “past noble grand” is someone who has served a term as the Noble Grand (or leader) of her Rebekah Lodge, the auxiliary of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows (a service-oriented fraternal organization that originated in England). In the nearby hamlet of Essex, the shell of the former IOOF hall still stands.

The doctors in my neighborhood have passed their pet dinosaur through some sort of mysterious X-ray device, thereby rendering him even scarier to any passing Halloween trick-or-treaters. Boo!

UPDATE: In 2025, Americans are spending a record $13.1 billion on Halloween, including $4.2 billion for decorations.

Giant human skeletons are climbing out of their graves outside several homes in my neighborhood, as depicted in this composite photo. One of these scary corpses emerges from my neighbor's yard a mere 20 feet outside my bedroom window, and another is across the street.

I fear that if I were to enter one of these homes, I'd stumble into a pit in the floor.

Oh, that reminds me. About 46 years ago in Washington, Pennsylvania, we arranged our TV-3 studio so that account executive Lee Rizor could record an introduction to some scary filmed feature that we were about to cablecast.

Rather than the holiday furnishings shown here, in front of the “window” we merely set up two chairs with spooky lighting. I remained just off-camera alternately pulling and releasing a hidden thread.

In the armchair sat a somber Lee. In the rocking chair sat a silent invisible spirit.

Lee never acknowledged the ghost, but the viewers could tell something was there because the chair slowly rocked back and forth during the entire segment.

For a quarter of a century, from 1982 to 2007, my specialty of preparing live television graphics frequently took me to faraway sports events. Almost all of them were in the United States or Canada, but I also crossed the Atlantic to London. Other assignments took me across the Pacific to Hawaii and to Tokyo and to Seoul.

Around September of 1990, a typical week might find me working inside three different mobile units in three different cities and visiting airports on as many as five different days.

For example, consider NBC's coverage of the Summer Olympics. In 1988 I personally spent a month in South Korea as part of the graphics team. In 1996 the Games were in the more easily reached Atlanta, but the graphics were not added on site; they came from NBC's New York headquarters.

Although I reduced my travel and finally retired in 2020, Pittsburgh's chapter of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers still sends me its quarterly Local 5 News & Views. In this fall's edition, business agent Jim Ryan describes some of the changes.

“In Centennial, Colorado, the Mountain Media Center has emerged as a massive hub of broadcast activity. What once required dozens of technicians traveling to stadiums and arenas is increasingly being centralized into a single location. Control rooms, replay stations, graphics, audio, playout, and other operations that used to happen on-site are now possible from Denver. Companies are establishing operations at MMC, signaling that this shift is the new direction of the industry.

“Closer to home, COSM's C360 facility in Cranberry Township is building the capture systems that make this consolidation possible. Their miniature wide-angle cameras — installed in pylons, hockey nets, corner walls, and even inside race cars — are able to replace multiple staffed cameras with a single embedded unit. Producers can create multiple angles and instant replays remotely, with little need for the number of operators once stationed at every venue.”

As a labor official, Jim's job is to boost union membership. “We cannot wait until the jobs are gone or degraded. The time to organize is now. If you have information about new facilities or technologies changing the way media is produced, reach out to the Local today.”

At first my home page was updated with maybe three new articles per month. Then in 2007 I switched to the present “blog” format, posting maybe three times per week.

Other folks online seem to have more to say. Mark Evanier has contributed 3.6 posts a day during his own 25 years of blogging. And during a recent weekend, Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wisc) averaged 128 posts a day on X. That's one tweet for every seven minutes of awakeness.

You've noticed that I often rerun items that I first posted ten years before. I also write for the future. For example, I learned an odd fact about the city where I went to graduate school, Syracuse, New York, so I wrote it up around September 17. But I didn't post it. It involves Irish pride, so I made a note to add it to this website six months later, on St. Patrick's Day.

Why do I persist in updating this blog? I'm not trying to be an “influencer.” As Robert J. Elisberg explained, “I write it for a range of reasons, but at the top of the list is it helps me vent and keep my head from exploding, and also I like passing along information that I think might be interesting or fun to others. Nowhere on that list of reasons, as is obvious, is Do this to expand my annual income.” And as “Caitlin Z” remarked, “I will never get follower-induced poster's madness because I don't care if anyone follows me or not. I'm posting for me. If y'all wanna hang out, that's cool too.” Plus, it's fun.

Memorial Field behind my old high school in Richwood, Ohio, has been empty for decades, following the construction of a new football stadium near the new school building. Now a similar fate has befallen another small town.

Back in 1940, five miles up the river from where I live today, Freeport High School began playing football behind the school building on a gridiron squeezed onto a baseball outfield. (Richwood lost to Big Walnut 30-6 on a similar layout in Sunbury, Ohio, in 1962. Our visitors’ bench was on the edge of the dirt infield.)

In 1980, I first televised a game from Freeport with our crew from TV-3. We parked behind the school and carried our single camera up to the white-roofed pressbox. I stayed in the truck with the recorders and graphics generator.

Like the fans, we had a slightly obstructed view. The center-field light standard is in front of the stands. This tower was usually occupied, halfway up, by a man on a platform filming the game for the coaches. His silhouette floated in front of the action on our TV screen.

The photo above was taken by Jason Bridge for Trib Total Media last Friday night, as James Swartz Memorial Stadium hosted its final regular-season home game. The school has buildt a new modern campus three miles outside town, and that’s where the Freeport Yellowjackets will play next year. Time marches on.

Could it be the “call time” for reporting to a TV broadcast? No, I've been retired for five years. Was it a mis-abbreviation of Colossians chapter 8 verse 15? No, there's no such chapter in the Bible.

I racked my brain all week, but I was stumped. On the indicated day I sat by my phone from 8:00 to 8:30, AM and PM, and the phone never rang. My apologies if I missed an appointment with you.

Then at the Burger King drive-through, I ordered a Whopper Junior but forgot to tell them to hold the tomato. Having parked and placed the sandwich on my lap, I unwrapped it and delicately removed the tomato, placing it on an unused portion of the wrapper. Then it disappeared.

I couldn't see the slice anywhere, despite a thorough search of the cockpit. Somehow, I didn't hear it slide off the wrapper. Ten minutes later I thought I heard it slide, but I still couldn't locate the missing slab of ~~vegetable~~ fruit. Maybe one day I'll smell it.

Big trucks have a low ratio of power to weight, so they tend to slow down when they have to climb a long hill. Highway engineers often add an extra lane on the right for slower traffic.

The heaviest trucks turn on their flashers. By the time they near the end of their arduous climb, they’ve slowed below 40 mph. Then their special lane goes away!

Typically that extra lane extends only from A to B on this diagram. That’s all that is necessary, right? The uphill part of the road?

But at B, the trucks are moving almost at their slowest. That’s the worst possible place to force them to pull out in front of the high-speed regular traffic.

Wouldn’t it be safer to extend their lane well past the top of the hill, to C, to give the truckers a chance to get back up to speed before they have to merge?

   Here's a little song I wrote.
   You might want to sing it note for note.
   “Don't worry;
   Be happy.”

Many cockatiels do sing the whistling part, note for note. They even include the ornamentation like appoggiaturas and trills. How can you teach a bird to do this? One expert recommends playing a recording for three hours every day.

Online, I find numerous video clips of these performances. Click the photo to hear one.

McFerrin's a capella version, with Robin Williams included in the video, reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and brought him worldwide recognition.

   In every life we have some trouble.
   But when you worry, you make it double.
   Don't worry;
   Be happy!

At the Navy's 250th anniversary celebration last week, Donald Trump reassured sailors whose pay was currently on hold. Many military families live paycheck to paycheck, with the mid-month pay due today, but the government is shut down. “Don't worry about it,” he said. “Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Do not worry about it. It's all coming!”

And it apparently is coming. To fund those payments, at least for this month, the Pentagon has identified about $8 billion that can be repurposed from the last fiscal year. The funds had been intended for research and development, which I guess we don't want anyway because research only leads to facts. (Some facts might be inconvenient if revealed.) Certain military-focused banks can deposit paychecks up to two days early, so some troops started to see the deposits in their accounts yesterday.

OCTOBER 13, 2025
~~COLUMBUS DAY~~ ITALY DAY

John Scalzi posts on BlueSky, “If you want to get nerdy about it, Columbus wasn't ‘Italian.’ He was Genoese. There was no unified nation of Italy until the 1860s. He was backdated into a general Italian-ness by the Knights of Columbus, who led the push for the federal holiday here in the US.”

Debarge316 comments, “There have got to be a number of other great options for Italian Americans to celebrate. And who wouldn't love a holiday revolving around Italian food? Just swap the slave trader for almost anyone else and it would be a success.”

According to the date on the pictures, two years ago this month Google’s “Street View” camera vehicle made a pass down Amazon Alley, which runs beside my apartment.

You’ll notice that my parking space is simply a graveled rectangle in the corner of the lawn, which otherwise consists of a 60’ by 60’ square of grass. Several rabbits graze here and on the neighbors’ lawns. We don’t consider them pests because we don’t have gardens, and they’re welcome to nibble our clover.

Sometimes they hide under the branches of the forty-foot pine trees that separate the lawn from the alley.

But sometimes I find them much closer — underneath the shelter of my car.

As a general rule, whenever I leave any parking space I let out the brake gradually, because there have been times I’ve discovered I was in Drive when I thought I was in Reverse or vice versa. I’m especially slow about pulling out of this particular space. I want to give any lurking animal friend a chance to hop away from those tires when they start to roll.

When I reach the street I often look back and see a rabbit next to my parking space, watching me depart. He may be almost tame, but for some reason he never waves goodbye.

OCTOBER 9, 2025
KNOB FINALLY FIGURED OUT

The recently replaced knob on the inside of the door to my apartment has a smaller gizmo in the middle. In one orientation of the gizmo, the door is locked to keep out strangers, and in the other position it's unlocked.

However, in the beginning I wasn't able to remember which orientation was which. I had to try turning the doorknob to make sure it was locked.

This year I realized that imagined hand gestures could be a mnemonic trick. (Does everybody already know this?) Vertical means “Stay out!” Horizontal means “Come on in! You're welcome.”

In the foreground: the Stony Creek Mill Pond, constructed in 2003. Across the water: a weaving shop, built in Georgia before the Civil War.

No, this isn't a photoshopped composite. It's a picture I took in suburban Detroit, in a place called Greenfield Village. There I saw a roundhouse and a round house and a contrabass triangle. Elsewhere in Michigan I ate schnitzel, watched wind make electricity, and bought a blue Santa.

When I was enrolled at Oberlin College, my favorite place was WOBC-FM. I loved to hang out with my friends in the spacious studios of the student-operated radio station on the third floor of Wilder Hall, the student union building.

Nearly six decades later, in the wake of COVID, senior Emma DeRogatis-Frilingos told the Oberlin Review that “there's been a complete and utter disruption, and it's hard to focus on little things like tradition and consistency. There's been a campus-wide forgetfulness. Clubs and traditions have been disappearing.”

And WOBC literally disappeared from the third floor of Wilder. On April 28, 2022, came the announcement: the station was going to be disassembled and moved to a temporary location on the fourth floor as part of a multi-year project of renovating the building. In September 2023, I visited those smaller quarters.

On May 24, 2025, another tour of the quarters included one of my former colleagues: J. Michael Barone, who had been WOBC's Classical Music Director when I was Program Director in 1968. Mike writes:

I was on campus in May to receive an Alumni Award during commencement weekend, and happened to get into town just before the WOBC photo-op on the stairs in front of Finney.

I was surprised that, despite it being a special 75th anniversary year for WOBC, so few alumni showed up (fewer than half a dozen?).

They were doing 'history' interviews upstairs and coaxed me to visit them (as I was the oldest alumni representative on hand) and I provided them with about 20 minutes of my connection to WOBC ... which led directly to my involvement with what was to grow into Minnesota Public Radio, where I am still employed after 57 years (!).

Though I cannot discount my Conservatory courses in organ and music history, my experience during three years at WOBC provided me (and likely many others ... Randy Bongarten?!?) with (little did I realize it at the time) a lifetime career option which has, in its strange way, touched many. For instance, it was a delight to learn, while interviewing the 30-year-old Johannes Skoog (winner of the 2023 Canadian International Organ Competition and, subsequently, appointed Royal Swedish Organist) that he knew all about Pipedreams and had been listening (online) for the past 15 years!

Then the bottom fell out. Mike included last Friday's article by Skylar Brunk of the Review, who quoted student engineer Beck Robertson:

Peters G33 is a temporarily-vacant faculty office in the basement of 138-year-old Peters Hall. The building includes classrooms for world language study. Unfortunately, during many hours of the day and night there's little other activity there.

WOBC moved their equipment into G33 late last month. They hoped to train DJs and begin broadcasting early this month. And they still dream of a future permanent home, still promised for a renovated space in Wilder.

Andrea Simakis, the director of media relations for the College, emailed the Review: “We know this displacement has been tough for everyone at WOBC and appreciate their help and patience as we work to build a safe and accessible home for WOBC operations.”

Many news stories about Taylor Swift's latest album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” featured a closeup of the cover. Was I the only person who wondered why there's an ugly white scratch running across the singer's face?

It turns out that she's partly submerged. The ragged white line is merely the edge of the water. Oh.

The federal government has introduced a website called College Scorecard that allows families to compare universities on several different metrics. One of them is how much money a recent graduate can expect to make.

At one end of the scale, alumni of North Dakota’s Sitting Bull College earn an average annual salary of only $11,600. At the other end, SUNY Downstate Medical Center graduates are paid nearly 11 times as much. In between are institutions you’ve actually heard of: MIT $91,600, Harvard $87,200, Penn State $47,500. My alma mater, Oberlin College, barely beat the national average at $38,400. In fact, 48% of Oberlin graduates earn less than people with only a high school diploma!

But that’s okay. I’m not surprised that Oberlinians are paid less than SUNY doctors, or MIT engineers, or Harvard lawyers, or Penn State executives. We tend to heed less lucrative callings. We may become educators or social workers or classical musicians or organic farmers or pastors or poets or performers. Our treasures are not necessarily in our bank accounts.

UPDATE, JUNE 1965: Speaking to graduating seniors, Herbert C. Mayer of the Class of 1915 offered this observation. "Oberlin may lack a high percentage of millionaires or tycoons, but it always scores high in lawyers, doctors, clergymen, teachers, and public servants. If you could read the volume of letters from my own Class of 1915 for our 50th anniversary, you would see the golden thread of moral leadership that runs through all of them."

UPDATE, JANUARY 2015: Aya T. Kanai of the Class of 2000, fashion director at Cosmopolitan, tweeted, "I use what I learned in college every day, because at Oberlin I learned analytical thinking. It helps me every day."

UPDATE, NOVEMBER 2015: Class co-agent Chip Hauss ’69 (left) made a recent visit to Oberlin. “He saw three young women studying in the science center at 10 a.m. on a Saturday. After he got over his delight to find students studying so early and his frustration at their not knowing where he could get some caffeine, he stayed and talked.

“Ellie, Grace, and Tricia represent what is best about Oberlin. All are athletes and top students. All see Oberlin preparing them for careers in social change. Tricia is a neuroscience major who will become a nurse practitioner and a lawyer who can work for social justice. Ellie wants to work in disaster relief in war-torn parts of the world. Grace, alas, hasn’t sent me her resume yet.”

UPDATE, FEBRUARY 2016: Dr. Loretta Jackson-Hayes, an associate professor of chemistry in Memphis, promotes a liberal education for scientists. She writes in part, “Our culture has drawn an artificial line between art and science, one that did not exist for innovators like Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs. Leonardo’s curiosity and passion for painting, writing, engineering and biology helped him triumph in both art and science. Jobs declared: ‘It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.’

“A scientist trained in the liberal arts has another huge advantage: writing ability. The University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine’s Gail Morris told Newsweek, ‘We need whole people.’

“Many in government and business publicly question the value of such an education. Yet employers in every sector continue to scoop up my students because of their ability to apply cross-disciplinary thinking to an incredibly complex world.”

If you ask whether college is worth it, don’t just compare how much you’ll make to how much it’ll cost. Consider more than return versus investment. A college is not merely a trade school to prepare you for a specific career. A college — particularly a liberal arts college like Oberlin — is a place where young performers and politicians, poets and physicists, talk to each other. It prepares you for life.

Scott Renshaw posts that he has “literally never heard the phrase ‘do your own research’ from the mouth of anyone who shows even a rudimentary understanding of how one conducts reliable research. And why are there suddenly more planets and stars than there were in the 1600s? Clearly some root cause is to blame, and not the advancement of scientific knowledge.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Virginia Montanez calls a brain-wormed weirdo, notes that autism rates among eight-year-olds have risen from 0.7 percent in 2000 to 3 percent in 2022. What might be the root cause that we can blame for this very dramatic 300% increase?

Autism Is Not a Single Condition and Has No Single Cause
Fernanda González for Wired, October 6, 2025

People diagnosed in early childhood often have a different genetic profile than those diagnosed later in life. Researchers found only a slight overlap between the two groups. Uta Frith, an emeritus professor of cognitive development, writes: “If there is talk about an ‘autism epidemic,’ a ‘cause of autism,’ or a ‘treatment for autism,’ the immediate question must be, which kind of autism?”

In the New York Times, autistic Maia Szalavitz writes, “To see the nation's scientific agencies following Mr. Kennedy's lead and promoting pseudoscience is shattering.” And Jessica Grose opines that the Trump administration is using Tylenol to blame mothers for their children's autism because it's easier than building a society that can support people with special needs.