History in The Bins

Posted on 2012-03-22 by Ken

So today I decided to take a trip out to the Goodwill Bins. It’s a pain in the ass to get to, so I don’t visit that often, but when I do I hope for the kind of stuff I found today. A lot of the regulars are there to scrape stuff to resell, which I can respect. But that’s not my goal when I hit up those blue plastic troughs. I’m often after the occasionally bizzare, sometimes personal, and always interesting documents that are only brought to light when someone donates an entire household’s worth of accumulated junk to one of the largest charitable thrift store chains in existence.

Amidst the easily dismissed and disturbingly sticky mass of trash that is one of the toy bins, I found a cache of such things. The tattered stack of newspaper clippings and heavily creased newsletters seemed to be part of a larger collection of ephemera, but in all my scouring of the surrounding bins I found nothing similar. What I did take home was three issues of “The Maintaineer”, a newsletter put together by members of the 10th Armored division maintenance battalion in Georgia, dating to the summer of 1942. With the newsletters were a few clippings from the Seattle Times dated early in 1945, all concerning action by the 10th in Bastogne, Belgium. The last object was a Japanese issued Phillipine ten centavos note, with holes punched in it which seem to be typical of notes given to soldiers as souveneirs after the end of the war.

I’ve scanned the Maintaineer issues, which can be found linked below. They’re an interesting snapshot of a very different time and place.
Volume 1, Number 1 (August 17th, 1942)
Volume 1, Number 3 (August 22nd, 1942)
Volume 1, Number 4 (September 5th, 1942)

On the road in Portland

Posted on 2012-03-09 by Ken

I’m far from an advocate of the automobile as a primary mode of transportation, but I still love me some vintage cars. Here’s some neat ones I’ve spotted in the wild.

T3 Volkswagen bus with a woody kit… As far as I know there wasn’t any kind of option for this (though you could get factory woody kits on American cars up into the 80s; there’s a factory turbocharged, woody kit, K-car wagon in one of the Portland Pick-n-pull lots). Someone put a lot of effort into this thing.

1951(pretty sure anyway) Chevrolet pickup with a utility bed. Digging the vintage visor.

Kinda doubt the bed is as old as the rest of the truck but the period tail lights are a nice touch.

Nike Site Summit 2005

Posted on 2012-03-09 by Ken

Another Anchorage NIKE site, Summit, is located near the Arctic Valley ski area in the Chugach mountains. Since being decommissioned in 1979 it had deteriorated considerably, thanks to the harsh weather, vandals, and military training exercises. I paid a visit to the launch bunkers and surrounding buildings in 2005.

They were rather decrepit, and completely open to the elements. While the situation for the site looked rather grim back when I checked it out, it seems to have improved considerably since. Friends of Nike Site Summit and the Alaska Association for Historic Preservation seem to have been successful in their push to get the site recognition as historic. Since the summer of 2010 FONSS have been performing restoration work at the site.