So here we are starting another round of Daylight Savings Time Hell. I can walk around the house and move all the clocks forward by an hour, but my internal clock doesn’t reset that easily. I’ll be grumpy in the morning for the next couple of weeks.
In a previous post here, I discuss learning that most countries don’t participate in the DST sham. So why should it surprise me that Washington would jump on the band wagon for this program? It even has a typical, false advertising name like so much Washington legislation. Daylight Savings Time… There are no savings with this… It’s just a compressed version of Robbing Peter To Pay Paul that is a signature of so much that comes out of Washington. Can you say Affordable Care Act? What about the Social Security Lockbox that doesn’t exist to save the money currently being put into the program. Like I said… I’m grumpy…
I was asked to make a presentation to Wabash Marketplace at their annual meeting. I didn’t really know what the organization was, though I had heard of them. What I gleaned from the the meeting was that they were the equivalent of a downtown merchant’s association or chamber except they also had a leaning towards historical preservation. The City of Wabash doesn’t have a Chamber of Commerce, but rather there is a Wabash County Chamber of Commerce. Wabash Marketplace centers on promotion of the downtown.
The meeting was held at the Charley Creek Inn and I was asked to speak in conjunction with Brent Martin and Jeff Kumfer of SRKM Architects on the Charley Creek Inn Expansion. Below is the text of my speech. Brent and Jeff had provided some pictures, but since I don’t have those, I’ve included some of my own here.
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In listening to the some of the opening discussion of Marketplace I learned a lot. One of the things I learned is that I’ve stolen from you on multiple occasions! I just didn’t realize some of the ideas I had seen implemented here in Wabash and had taken back to Culver and Plymouth began with the Marketplace organization! One of my favorite unattributed quotes is, “Plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery.”
I thought I would start this out by telling a little bit about my company and how we became involved with this project. Easterday construction company was started in Culver, Indiana some time in the 1920’s by my great grandfather, Russell Easterday. Russell was a school teacher who worked construction in the summer for James I. Barnes Construction out of Logansport. His skill and dedication caught the eye of Mr Barnes and he quickly moved up in the company. The company was doing a lot of work at the Culver Academies at the time. Eventually Mr Barnes tapped my grandpa to start at Division of his company and that was beginning of Easterday Construction – Russell L. Easterday Construction and Supply Company at that time.
Our association with the Ford family begin about 25 years ago. The original incarnation of Brent and Jeff company, Scearce & Associates, had designed a guest house on Richard’s property. We were asked to bid on the work. We had submitted a bid, but had not been awarded the project yet, when a tornado came through Wabash and damaged Richard’s uncle’s house. Richard called on Saturday and ask my father if he would come look at the damage. Dad said that he would and asked if he needed to come then? Richard said no, Monday would be fine. Richard called again on Sunday to confirm that Dad was coming on Monday. Dad found this amusing and confirmed that he would be there Monday morning. Monday morning dad went to Wabash and checked out the damage. Tuesday morning he sent one of our superintendents, Roger Thews, to complete repairs. Richard met Roger, showed him where the damage was, and showed him the rest room in the basement of his house, and told him our crew could use it. Richard had an aversion to having portable toilets on his property.
Richard called my father the next day and awarded us the guest house project. Richard told Dad he was the first contractor that showed up when he said he would. He said he was also extremely impressed that when he came down to check on Roger. He had put down a walk-off mat between the door and the restroom to keep his home clean. Roger also had it cleaned it that night, and every night, before he went home. We still use this as an example with our crew on what a difference a first impression makes.
Since that time, we completed many projects for Richard culminating in the Dr James Ford historic home. He became more than a client, he was a friend. There was a period when Richard was ill and didn’t do much with us. I got a call from him to come look at a few things and it was nice to reconnect. After 1 kitchen table meeting with him he rermarked, I forgot how much fun it was working with you. The feeling was mutual.
Richard had a running joke with my father. Richard loved to send faxes and leave messages at the office at odd hours. He said My father was the only contractor he knew who returned his calls. Something of a tradition I strive to continue! My father said that he would call from all over the world and ask if dad had time to speak to him! If only all our clients were so polite!
We started working on this project, the Charley Creek Inn Expansion, with Richard before he passed away. That was the first time I got to meet Mr Kaler. Throughout this process its been obvious that he has share the respect for a Richard that I have. When the project reemerged last year, I had the opportunity to begin working with Richard nephews, Steve, Dan and Mark. I have found them to be every bit the gentleman that Richard was. When it came time to select an architect, I recommended SRKM due to Richard’s long association with them as well as Easterday Construction’s long history with them.
As I mentioned earlier, their firm was the firm that designed the first project we completed for Richard. I’m not sure if Brent and Jeff even know this, but my father once asked Richard how that relationship started. Richard said that he had once visited his brother at Purdue. Don Scearce, the founder of Scearce and Associates, was a fraternity brother of Richard’s brother. Richard remarked, “he was nice to me.” Richard always looked for good and kind people and surrounded himself with them.
SRKM and Easterday Construction have worked well together on multiple projects in the past. On this project, they took the initial ground work I had done with Mr. Kaler and the Ford family and fleshed out the design to make the details pop. That’s what architects do! Now I’ll shut up and let Brent talk a little bit about his firm and go through a little bit of the design process on the project.
<At the end of Brent and Jeff’s presentation I asked to make some closing remarks.> I asked Brent to include a picture of the bust of Richard Ford that sits in the Lobby of the Charley Creek Inn. I understand that this was put there as a tribute from Richard’s classmates. While I have expressed my growing admiration for Mr. Kaler and the Richard’s nephews as we work through this project, seeing that bust in the lobby each time I come down here reminds me that Richard is watching me. It reminds me that I want to do a good job for Richard. Because above and beyond all the work he allowed me to do for him as a contractor, I want to do a good job for him as a friend.
One of my best friends, Kim Whitten, is a lurker here. Since I am HORRIBLE about proofing my own work*, I always ask her to tell me if she finds any errors. Recently she pointed out that I use two spaces after periods, which was old “typewriter thinking” and if I didn’t want to show my age, I should stop that. This was the first I had heard of this, so immediately I assumed that this was a product of Twitter and Texting, where you have limited characters. Surely formal writing should still observe the two space rule I’d learned in school? Nay-nay!
Kim sent me to the Cult of Pedagogy website where I read a couple of articles on the subject (here and here) along with a sometimes heated comment argument thread. Apparently this has ALWAYS been wrong. It’s a product of the manual typewriter era, when the original typewriters produced documents in a monospace font style without proper kerning for the skinny letters like “i” and “l”.
I went to my favorite snide grammar guide, “The Oatmeal“, but he let me down on this one. A little more looking took me to Slate. It would appear that those in the single space camp are quite the Nazis about it too, as illustrated by this quote in an article from Slate: “Forget about tolerating differences of opinion: typographically speaking, typing two spaces before the start of a new sentence is absolutely, unequivocally wrong,” Ilene Strizver, who runs a typographic consulting firm The Type Studio, once wrote. “When I see two spaces I shake my head and I go, Aye yay yay. I talk about ‘type crimes’ often, and in terms of what you can do wrong, this one deserves life imprisonment. It’s a pure sign of amateur typography.” Hmmmmm… If Ilene ruled the world, I would be serving multiple life sentences by now.
I’m not sure why I chose to take typing in high school, other than the fact that I didn’t like study halls and it fit my schedule. Whatever the reason, I will be forever glad that I did. I make a point of recommending typing class to any kids that I might influence. I think it’s unfortunate that typing is falling out of vogue due to the use of texting on phones and the hunt-and-peck writing used by most tablets. (I’ve ranted about that in the past.) I still think it is one of the most useful tools that I learned in high school. It is a skill that I use daily. And for that reason, changing from two spaces to one is going to really slow me down… There will be a lot of backspacing to remove that extra space. The double strike of the space bar by my thumb at the end of a sentence is just too ingrained.
Far be it from me to want to appear old-fashioned and outdated. I will do my best to lose the double space… going forward. It is definitely not worth it to me to go back and “correct” things I’ve written in the past. The thought that I could be judged negatively on this is somewhat mind-blowing, but stranger things have happened in our politically correct world. I don’t want to be doing hard time if Ms Strizver or some other typesetter becomes emperor of the world!
“Stop doing this!” image borrowed from Cult of Pedagoy
“ing.” image borrowed from Slate
* Somehow my brain seems to go into autocorrect mode when I read something I’ve written. I know what I meant to say, and I gloss over my errors as if they weren’t there. Conversely, when reading someone else’s work, if I run across one spelling or punctuation error, I immediately and irretrievably slip into proof-reading mode. I am picking up on every mistake along the way while struggling to get back to reading the content.
PS – And just for fun, I left one double space after a sentence in this article so the anal among my lurkers have something to do…