The way we were – Page 4

Remember when people thought Apple was dead?

Vintage 1997: The Power Macintosh 5500

It’s amazing how much abuse Macintoshes used to take from people who thought that Microsoft should, and would, rule the world. I put up with this for virtually my entire career in newspaper publishing. But without, I hope, being too boastful, I think the entire world now sees what we technology heretics saw decades ago.

I offer as evidence a piece I wrote in the San Francisco Examiner on Jan. 12, 1997. Because the Examiner closed in 2000 and its staff merged with the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle, this piece is now in the archive of the San Francisco Chronicle. The article’s headline is: “Next Up for Apple: Saved by Unix?”

What had happened then was that, in December 1996, Apple acquired NeXT, the company Steve Jobs had started after he was ousted from Apple in 1985. In July 1997, Jobs returned to Apple as CEO and started Apple’s Renaissance, including the development of the current Mac OS X operating system.

My article in the Examiner was published on a Sunday. Apple’s stock price the Friday before was $17.62 a share. As of today the share price is about $196, more than 11 times higher. In this piece, I argued that Apple was now on the right track, technically. However, I took no position on whether Apple’s technical strategy would succeed in the market, because the market is so fickle and Microsoft was so predatory.

That article, by the way, was noticed by investors and was widely cited. I, however, didn’t have the good sense to buy Apple stock.

I might also mention that, in my role as editorial systems director for the Examiner, I had the opportunity to talk with Gil Amelio when he came in to meet with the Examiner’s editorial board. This was during Amelio’s last months as Apple CEO, just before Steve Jobs returned as CEO. Amelio, in my opinion, deserves far more credit for Apple’s turnaround than he is generally given. I also had the opportunity to participate in a workshop with Apple’s human interfaces design team when they were designing and testing the look and feel of Mac OS X.

Remember when NASA used to thrill us with space age technology? No more. These days, who does, other than Apple? To build the beautiful human interface of Mac OS X on top of a Unix (FreeBSD) was an amazing feat.

Still, to my mind, the greatest computer operating system ever developed is Sun’s Solaris, a true Unix. Oracle bought Sun Microsystems last month. I hope Oracle respects what they now own.

From the good old days…

My cherished Selectric III from the San Francisco Examiner

If I had the space and the money, I could happily fill a warehouse with a collection of vintage technology. Typewriter technology, after steady development for at least 150 years, reached its apex in the 1970s with the IBM Correcting Selectric III. I own one of these. I salvaged it from a basement junk pile at the San Francisco Examiner. During the 1970s, newspaper newsrooms were filled with IBM Selectrics. Reporters and editors used them, and the typed pages were sent to the composing room, where the text was scanned from the pages. In those days, computers were too big and too expensive for the desktop, so typewriters still ruled.

The San Francisco Examiner copy desk, c. 1978.

My Selectric still has its Typewritorium sticker. The Typewritorium was made famous by Herb Caen, the columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, because that’s where Caen’s “Loyal Royal” was sent when it needed repairs. Caen’s Loyal Royal is still on display in the Chronicle’s lobby.

Over the river and through the woods

Round trip — more than 100 miles

I drove to Yadkin County today to visit family. It was good weather for photography, and the leaves were just beginning to turn, so I figured it was a good day to document the route from northern Stokes County, where I live, to the Yadkin Valley, where most of my family live, and where I grew up.

When I made the decision to move to Stokes County from California, it was after much deliberation. I weighed many factors. It’s hard to get to northern Stokes County. The roads are narrow, and crooked. Most people would need a map. It’s not a place where a commuter would want to live. But to me, these were positives, not negatives. I wanted to find a sweet spot between remoteness and access to commercial and medical centers. If I want to shop at Whole Foods, I can get to one (in Winston-Salem) in about an hour. If I needed to get to a major medical center, that’s also about an hour by road, but a few minutes by helicopter. And they do have helicopters.

If I want to visit family in Yadkin County, I have to drive for more than an hour. But what a drive it is. The route crosses two rivers (the Dan and the Yadkin), and runs through the shadows of the Sauratown Mountain range. Stokes County is so isolated that it has its own little isolated mountain range! It’s some of the best scenery to be found in the Yadkin Valley and the Blue Ridge foothills.

So here’s a photographic essay on the trip from my house to my mother’s house in Yadkin County. For the sake of photographic honesty, please be aware that I have focused on the picturesque and the historic. There’s plenty of plainness and a certain amount of rural squalor along the way. But why takes pictures of that?

Leaving home. Now that the house is done, I need to get started on the landscaping, don’t I?

The unpaved road above my house, past a neighbor’s horse pasture

Priddy’s General Store, which appeared in the cult film Cabin Fever

The Dan River at Danbury

This building in Danbury was once a church. Now AA meets there, according to the sign out front.

The old Stokes County courthouse

I believe this used to be the Danbury town hall. Now it’s a lawyer’s office.

A historic marker in Danbury

The entrance to Hanging Rock State Park, a few miles from Danbury. Just as in California, state parks are often under-appreciated, and awesome.

Hanging Rock, from Moore’s Spring Road

Hanging Rock, also from Moore’s Spring Road

Approaching Pilot Mountain. Do you know the word “monadnock”? Culturally, the thing to know about Pilot Mountain is that it was called “Mount Pilot” in the Andy Griffith Show. This is Mayberry Country, remember.

Old mill at Pinnacle. Pinnacle was the setting for the indie movie Junebug.

Pilot Mountain, looking over the roof of the Pinnacle post office

A pumpkin patch on the south side of Pilot Mountain

Coming into Siloam

An old storefront in Siloam. If agricultural tourism and the popularity of the Yadkin Valley Wine Region ever reach critical mass, what a great little restaurant this would make.

Across the road from the Siloam storefront. I have no idea what this little building is, but it must have some historical importance, because someone keeps it up.

Siloam will probably forever remain known for the night of Feb. 23, 1975, when an old suspension bridge across the Yadkin River collapsed, killing four people and injuring 16. This is the new bridge.

The Yadkin River at Siloam

The big house at Siloam. Grand farms were not the rule in this area. Small family farms were much more common. But Siloam clearly was once a hot spot. Not only was there fertile land in the river bottom, but there was also a railway line. It clearly was enough to make a few farmers rich.

Pilot Mountain again, when I passed it on my way home

The history of this area — at least the agricultural history — is best read in the remaining outbuildings. Certainly more than a few big barns like this one remain. More modest barns on the old family farms are common, and hundreds if not thousands of old tobacco barns remain. Still, an untold number of fine old outbuildings have fallen down and rotted away.

The south side of Hanging Rock State Park, on my way home

Seems like just yesterday…

Fred Flagler is in the far left foreground, June 1969. — Digital Forsyth, Frank Jones collection

That’s me on the far left. I recognize almost everyone in this photo. That’s Arlene Edwards in the chair in the right foreground, and Wallace Carroll in the chair to Arlene’s left. — Digital Forsyth, Frank Jones collection.

The man who hired me for my first job died Tuesday. That was Fred Flagler, former managing editor of the Winston-Salem Journal. Here is his obituary in the Winston-Salem Journal.

My first job was as a copy boy. The photos above were taken by Frank Jones in June 1969, the day Gordon Gray told the staff of the Journal that he was selling the newspaper to Media General.

What a lucky young’un I was to get a job as a newspaper copy boy. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect job for me. It exercised so many of my interests — language, communications, communications systems. In those days, news arrived in a room full of Teletype machines. Copy boys tore the printouts out of the machines and distributed the “copy” to the appropriate editors. I also typed local stories into a Teletype machine to be sent to the Associated Press bureau in Raleigh. These teletype machines were my first experience with communications technology. The Teletype signals, by the way, were carried over dedicated telephone circuits.

Frank Jones, the Journal photographer who became an institution and whose photographs document the history of this area for decades, taught me how to send photographs to the Associated Press using one of the most fascinating machines I’ve ever seen, a Steam Punk device if there ever was one. It was a drum scanner, basically. It was analog, of course, with tubes in it that needed time to warm up and stabilize before sending a photo. I spent a lot of time puzzling about what “phase” meant (the operator had to twiddle some controls to get the machine “in phase”). No one could explain “phase” then to my satisfaction. Now, with my amateur radio license and my interest in analog technology, it seems pretty simple.

Fred Flagler, as I recall, always had a line gauge (a metal ruler for measuring picas and points) in his back pocket. It probably was from Fred that I picked up a habit that followed me through my years at the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle — never go into the newsroom without a line gauge in your hand. It was sort of a techie nerd’s wand, I guess.

Thank you, Fred. You changed my life.

Rolling back the clock on sweets

These will be ready to eat tomorrow.

There are a couple of scenes in the BBC series Cranford, which is set in Cheshire around 1840, in which some children get very excited about the fact that their cherry tree has come into season. The children get a big thrill out of helping the new doctor in town knock cherries out of the tree. The BBC series, by the way, is based on the novel Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell, a less well known but witty and competent 19th-century writer.

Children love sweets. In those days, cherries were high in the hierarchy of sweets, something for children to get excited about. These days, what child would pay the slightest attention to a cherry tree, or plain fresh cherries? Even though sugar was common in the 19th century, you could be sure that children in those days got a great deal less of it, especially provincial children. Sugar has, of course, gotten cheaper and cheaper, and the newest innovation in cheap sugar is high fructose corn syrup. Government corn subsidies help make it cheap, no matter how much evidence links high fructose corn syrup to Americans’ health problems.

But we don’t have to eat it. I can testify that if we stop eating processed sweets, we become more like the children in Cranford. A raw peach once again becomes a sweet treat. Watermelon is thrilling (the watermelons here have been inexpensive and very good this summer).

One of my grandmothers was a genius at making pies. I don’t think I can remember there ever not being at least one kind of pie in her pie safe. Usually it was a fruit pie, though she sometimes made custard pies. Still, nobody was fat, because it was home-cooked, and the dinner (which is what they called lunch) and supper tables were loaded with a variety of home-cooked foods including lots of vegetables. Once again, drawing on the insights of Michael Pollan, our grandmothers proved that a little homemade pie won’t hurt you.

You can get the Cranford series on DVD. I understand that the BBC has another season in the works to be shown in Britain this year around Christmastime. I’d expect it to be available in the U.S. next year.

The ladies of Cranford eating sweets

Judi Dench as Miss Matty, Elizabeth Gaskell

Some old photos

Gladys and me, Winston-Salem, circa 1989. Photo by Gavin. Gladys had a stroke soon after this and completely lost the use of her legs. She slowly recovered, but she limped and dragged one of her hind feet for the rest of her life. She was the crippled collie. Gavin and I both were with her the day she died, in San Francisco, 1993. She is buried near Inverness on the Point Reyes peninsula.

My oldest friend is Gavin Geoffrey Dillard. We go back to 1972 or so. Gavin has been scanning photos from his collection.

Gavin Geoffrey Dillard, Tobaccoville, North Carolina, circa 1984. Photographer uncertain, possibly me.

Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, Los Angeles, circa 1985. Photo by Gavin.