Harry Austin

By Debra Utacia Krol

(Camp Verde, Ariz.) Unless you live in Indian Country—which encompasses not just reservations, but any place where Indians live, work, or play—you’ve probably never heard of the names Frank Harrison and Harry Austin.

The two men were members of what was then known as the Fort McDowell Mohave-Apache Tribe. Fort McDowell was actually one of the ancestral homes of the Yavapai people. But in the late 1800s, the U.S. Army forcibly marched the Yavapais off to a concentration camp in San Carlos, Arizona, where the mostly peaceable Yavapais were interned alongside Apache bands.

The Fort McDowell people didn’t give up their quest to return home, though. And in 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt signed an executive order giving them back 48,000 acres of land along the Verde River, just east of Phoenix.

In 1924 the story really got interesting: that was the year all Indians were brought into the union as actual citizens, courtesy of the Indian Citizenship Act. Among other things, the Act gave Indians the right to vote in elections. Unfortunately, many states defied the Act and deliberately denied Indians that most fundamental of American rights: the right to vote.

In an attempt to rectify the injustice, Peter Porter, a Pima Indian and member of the Gila River Indian Community, filed suit against the state of Arizona in 1928. But not only were Indians were under federal guardianship, the Arizona state constitution denied the vote to “mental incompetents and people under guardianship.” Thus the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that Indians could not vote.

What the state hadn’t reckoned on was Harrison and Austin’s determination.

Harrison had already fought for and won the right for Indians to join unions and secure well-paying jobs, especially construction jobs. When the United States joined World War II, Harrison joined 25,000 other Natives who saw combat. Many served with highest distinctions, and some, like Ira Hayes, the Pima Indian who helped raise the U.S. flag at Iwo Jima, became national heroes.

After risking his life on the battlefield for his country, Harrison returned home to his impoverished community, where he was still denied the right to vote. His elderly parents were forced to work hard to survive; many Yavapai elders were still denied old age assistance and other federal benefits even though payroll taxes were deducted from their paychecks.

Frank Harrison

Determined to correct the situation, he sought out Native rights advocates, including Arizona Congressman Richard Harless and attorneys Lemuel and Ben Mathews. All of them were committed to challenging the guardianship clause in the constitution.

On November 8, 1947, Harrison and Austin, the chairman of the Fort McDowell tribe, both walked into the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office to register to vote. When they were turned away, their attorneys immediately filed suit. The case eventually reached the Arizona Supreme Court. Rights groups like the National Congress of American Indians filed legal briefs supporting the case.

Just over half a year later, on July 15, 1948, the Arizona Supreme Court unanimously reversed the earlier courts’ rulings. Justice Levi S. Udall, (father of Congressman Morris Udall), quoted noted Indian law scholar Felix Cohen in his decision:

“In a democracy suffrage is the most basic civil right, since its exercise is the chief means whereby other rights may be safeguarded. To deny the right to vote where one is legally entitled to do so, is to do violence to the principles of freedom and equality.”

The case, Harrison v. Laveen, is now required reading in every Indian law class across the land.

Shortly after Arizona’s decision, other states that had been evading the law began revising their own statutes. (The last state to do so was Arizona’s companion state, its neighbor New Mexico.)

Yet Arizona then enacted a literacy test for potential voters, which effectively barred some 80 percent of the state’s Indians from pulling the lever. Only the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 eliminated the practice.

Lucinda Denny and Ella Doka, daughters of Frank Harrison and Harry Austin, have been carrying on the family tradition. Doka, left, was a leader in a 1992 standoff with federal agents over the seizure of Fort McDowell's slot machines.

Currently, rights advocates still monitor challenges to the right of American Indians to vote, but the Native vote is now considered pivotal to many politicians’ political ambitions.

In Arizona, the “Rez vote” is now considered a key swing constituency. It’s not unusual to see candidates marching at the Navajo Nation Fair parade, sampling fry bread, and kissing fat-cheeked babies on the campaign trail.

Harrison and Austin’s daughters, Ella Doka and Lucinda Denny, help out at Native voting drives. Denny makes it personal, reminding her own son, Dwayne, that his right to vote is what his grandfather fought for just over 60 years ago.

Debra Utacia Krol, an enrolled member of the Xolon (or Jolon) Salinan Tribe of central California, is a freelance journalist and NewsPlink correspondent based in Arizona.

Historic photos of Harrison and Austin courtesy of the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation.

A sister and her brother watch as their neighborhood is demolished. (Photo: Hacer Foggo)

By Sean David Hobbs

(Istanbul) The legendary music clubs and belly dancers were the first to go. There’s no longer a trace of the lively coffeeshops or balcony restaurants. And now, the once-narrow alleyways are strangely opened wide: because of the bulldozers, Sulukule, a gypsy settlement within Istanbul that dated back to before the 15th century, has become nothing more than a memory.

Nearly 1,000 years of history have been unceremoniously demolished over the past six months as the last buildings of this relic of the Ottoman empire have been razed. The roar of bulldozers was unbearable for those within earshot, but barely a sound has reverberated throughout the rest of Istanbul, Turkey and the world, as Europe’s oldest permanent gypsy settlement was torn down.

Sukru Punduk, center, treasures his traditional, close-knit community.

“Now it is gone,” laments Sukru Punduk, close to tears. Punduk, 41, is a Roma musician and native of the district, which traces its history back to Byzantine times. He sits with a few other Roma men in an Istanbul café, angered by the destruction of their homes, businesses and way of life. The demolition—or redevelopment, in the words of the governing authorities—began in 2006. The few remaining buildings next to Istanbul’s centuries-old stone walls were crushed during the past year.

The Roma families who were from this historic neighborhood feel the destruction is also an attack upon their heritage and culture. Once the proud home of nearly 5,000 Roma people, only about five percent are left in the district as bulldozers flatten the mounds of debris.

“Will we continue to exist or will our culture disappear?” Punduk asks.

In 2007, when this shot was taken, the area was still inhabited. (Photo: Sean David Hobbs)

Demolitions began in Sulukule in 2006 as the municipal government started a process billed as urban renewal. However, the national Turkish newspaper Hurriyet reported that the municipal government’s Justice and Development Party (known as the AK Party) sold some of the newly-emptied land to family members and friends of AK Party leaders.

Hacer Foggo, whose glasses give her the air of a scholar, is one of the founders of the activist group Sulukule Platform. She called the renewal plan “corrupt gentrification,” and strongly suspects an economic motivation. “The plan is to remove the poor from the city center and build expensive homes in Sulukule,” she said.

But residents were already being moved out in 2007. (Photo: Sean David Hobbs)

The Romani have been present in Istanbul since the middle of the 11th century, when the city was known as Constantinople. Built along the city’s ancient protective walls, Sulukule was Istanbul’s first entertainment district, which included a thriving red light sector. Generations of people from all over Turkey came to Sulukule’s famed music halls.

Punduk explains, “Ours was the culture of music and dance in Istanbul. People came to Sulukule for the music and the beautiful Romani belly dancers. We had fortune tellers and dancing bears.”

Two years ago, there were still kids in the streets. (Photo: Sean David Hobbs)

The exotic strain of Rom music that grew within Sulukule was a mix of traditional Balkan and Middle Eastern music intermingled over generations with the court music of the Byzantines and Ottomans. The result was a unique Istanbul sound.

The beginning of the end came in 1992, when conservative government leaders shut down Sulukule’s music and dance halls. Poverty and poor education—already chronic problems there—became even worse with the loss of the entertainment venues.

By last year, the piles of rubble were growing. (Photo: Hacer Foggo)

“Even after 1992, we could all live together at least. We were poor, but rent was cheap,” Punduk says. “We got by economically and preserved our culture.”

Then came the urban renewal plan of 2006, which resettled Roma in the Tasoluk public housing development 40 kilometers outside of central Istanbul. Over the past three years, nearly 700 families from Sulukule took up residence there—but only 20 families remain in the new neighborhood.

Uniformed police kept order for the bulldozers. (Photo: Hacer Foggo.)

High rent in the new development has forced some Roma onto the streets, and many more into cheap apartments throughout Istanbul where, stripped of their community and culture, many say they have suffered alienation and depression.

Watching the demolition of a thousand years of culture. (Photo: Hacer Foggo)

All of this has unfolded even though UNESCO listed Sulukule as an endangered World Heritage site. More recently, the U.S. Congress’ Joint Helsinki Commission urged the Turkish government to protect the Sulukule Roma.

The spot to wash your feet before prayers is gone. So is the rickety wooden house in the background. (Photo: Sean David Hobbs)

In April, the commission sent a letter to Turkish Prime Minister and AK Party leader Recep Tayip Erdogan, which noted that the “Roma community in Sulukule is living on the fringes of society and continues to be treated unfairly.” The letter urged Erdogan to implement a program to “preserve this centuries-old neighborhood and allow the Roma there to remain together as a community.”

This man has a portable stove, drinking water, and a coffee pot. But he needs more than a wall to maintain his community. (Photo: Hacer Foggo)

Punduk said he and other Romani leaders support music groups that reach out to Roma children, and thus keep the spirit, culture and artistry of Sulukule alive. Still, he is despondent when he considers all that has been lost. Sitting in the café and gazing at his Islamic prayer beads, Punduk has no answers.

“Ours is a very old culture,” he says, “It isn’t just Istanbul or Turkey which lost this special place. The world has lost a piece of its culture.”

Standing guard over rolled-up rugs and some furniture. (Photo: Hacer Foggo)

Sean David Hobbs is a New Orleans-based writer originally from Wisconsin. He lived in Istanbul for three years.

Tourism keeps alive The Town Too Tough to Die.

(Tombstone, Ariz.) Many Arizonans think of Tombstone as too touristy. They wouldn’t be caught dead here. But plenty of life still clings to this collection of one and two-story structures spread out on a little grid of wide streets in southern Arizona.

And why not? It’s got a killer name; that alone draws curiosity seekers. And for a recession-era destination, it’s great: there’s no admission fee to enter the town. Families enjoying a stay-cation don’t mind driving a couple of hours to get here from Phoenix or Tucson.

A parade on Allen Street circa 1881, on the same main drag as shown above.
(Photo: Kansas State Historical Society/W.B. Shillingberg)

Tombstone has had a turbulent past. There’s plenty of historical lore for anyone who is interested; all of it started with the discovery of silver in 1877.

The town was supposed to die in 1881, when the gunfight at the O.K. Corral exposed the dangerous feuds between the roving “cowboy” gangs from the south, and the immigrants and investors from the north.

Character players in 2009 look tough enough for the Tombstone of 130 years ago.

The town was again supposed to die in 1882, after fires pretty much destroyed the place.

Again, the town was supposed to die in 1885, when the mines had been emptied of silver and flooded with water. That helped deflate the population from more than 10,000 in 1882 to only 700 people in 1900.

The town sells not just stage coach rides, but bonnets, too.

It didn’t take long for locals to realize that tourism would help Tombstone stay alive. Buildings that were burned were rebuilt. The notorious gunfight at the O.K. Corral is still endlessly dissected; daily reenactments have been held for visitors’ pleasure for decades, at least since the annual “Helldorado Days” festival, held since 1929.

These reenactments employ varying numbers of actors, who find work with competing repertory companies. Barkers drum up business for stagecoach and mine tours. They hand out coupons, alert customers of coming “gun-fights,” and promise cold beers and sarsaparillas inside the saloons.

Barkers know how to lure in customers.

Of the 1,700 or so year-round residents, some of the rest are service professionals, or they work for the city or mom-and-pop establishments. There are no national chains here.

This past January, former First Lady Laura Bush announced Tombstone had been designated a “Preserve America Community.” Tourists don’t seem to mind that the town isn’t as authentically preserved as it could be, and that stucco and tile have been mixed in with the wooden storefronts.

Richard, 85, said keeping up his long acting career beats being in a rest home.

During the day, saloons, restaurants and shops are swarming; Tombstone’s official web site claims 400,000 tourists come each year. After sundown, the locals take over the establishments. It creates an unusual community.

A few months ago, Leah, a local server at the Six Gun City Restaurant, suffered a heart attack during her shift. She isn’t yet 30, but was in dire straits when no ambulance was available. An actor’s wife later said Tombstone officials had sold it to the nearby city of Bisbee. (Leah, she said, was airlifted to Tucson and received a pacemaker.)

Leah prepped for the Saturday night crowd at the Six Gun City Restaurant.

Daniel Raphael lives in Tucson and moonlights in Tombstone on weekends. He sized up Tombstone politics as “crazy.” He pointed out two blocks of the main drag, Allen Street, where the pavement was deliberately strewn with grit and sawdust.

“Some folks like having ‘authentic’ dirt streets,” he noted. “But bikers complain because it stops them from parking their hogs in front of the saloons.”

Reenactment player Daniel Raphael said competition among troupes is contentious.

As a consequence, he explained, “That means less business. So the mayor wants to paint the streets a dirt color.”

Anita Turner of the Tombstone Chamber of Commerce claims that tourism is up in 2009—there are about 500 visitors per month more than the average of the past two years. Her analysis explaining the positive trend?

“More advertising,” she said, “and several of the cable channels ran Tombstone again.”

One of the world's famous cemetaries: Tombstone's Boothill.

Tombstone’s official web site.

Jain Lemos is an established photography and publishing consultant.

Hello Kitty started life in Japan as an image on a vinyl coin purse.

A Hello Kitty house.

Thirty-five years later, Hello Kitty has developed into a brand character with huge clout but no visible mouth, who lives with her parents and twin sister, and who offers everything from pencils, appliances and credit cards to a Hello Kitty jet and a Hello Kitty-themed maternity hospital near Taipei.

A Hello Kitty plane.
(Photo: Yamaguchi Yoshiaki/Wikimedia Commons)

Until this year, Hello Kitty lacked only one thing: her very own tartan. That’s now been taken care of, as the Scottish Register of Tartans can attest.

Now, there's a Hello Kitty tartan.
Designer Yuko Yamaguchi assists with the announcement.
(Photo: Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images)

If wearing Kitty’s pink plaid doesn’t appeal to you, you can get a tartan of your own, as long as you can pay for it. Design and registry is $1,500, plus another few hundred dollars for the actual fabric: silk is more than twice the price of wool.

Compare Hello Kitty's tartan, center, with the one for Coca-Cola, left, and whiskey, right. (tartanregister.gov.uk)

There’s no requirement to belong to a Scottish clan. Cities, police and firefighting units have their own tartans. There’s a Jewish tartan, and a Coca-Cola tartan in a rich, chocolate brown, with a bit of classic caramel and a hint of Coke’s signature red. So refreshing.

The Whisky tartan, introduced in 2007, is an example of how the use of color tells how the whiskey is made: the five yellow lines stand for the fields of barley; the black squares, for the peat or coal used to dry it. The blue stands for the natural water; the black lines, the warehouse walls; and the small white lines are for the bottle.

That’s not such a stretch, really. Weaving is a near-universal craft, dating back at least 5,000 years. Colored stripes were incorporated into a plain weave to indicate a wearer’s rank. The more colored stripes, the more status.

Globe-trotting tartan, comfortable on the Masai. (Via kiltmaker.blogspot.com)

Tartan is the globe-trotting cloth, found in 14th century Spain and 18th century Japan. There are tartans in the kingdom of Bhutan and among the Masai of Africa. It is said that tartans originated in the Caucasus Mountains of Southern Russia, and migrated through Europe and central Asia.

Fun with sheep. (Via arbroath.blogspot.com)

Things didn’t really get cooking until sheep herds increased in size. More wool meant the that the fabric which had started as the size of a small rug could now be a long piece of material between 12 and 15 feet long. Highlanders pleated this around their waists in folds. They pulled it over their heads like a hood. They used it for a blanket at night.

Colonel William Gordon of Fyvie, by Pompeo-Batoni.
(The National Trust of Scotland)

By 1730, the linen plain weave had evolved into a sophisticated twill weave, and the patterns had evolved from simple stripes and patterns into recognizable tartans (from the French word tartaine). The sequence laid down by the numbers of colored threads wound on a piece of wood, or sett-sticks, determined the pattern.

Tartan status: Hello, Kitty?
(Holt Renfrew Canada)

You can imagine how a lowly sheepherder would yearn for such magnificence. Certainly we do, or Burberry’s registered tartans wouldn’t induce such high prices.

Naturally, Hello Kitty finally had to have a tartan to call her own.

Tartan gets around. (Photo: LokiVHS)

Kerry, 7, learns drums from Travis Calvin, 19.
(Photo: Shane Hennessey)

“Hey, look at you,” says the desk manager, by way of hello. “This is the first time I’ve seen you come in on time all year.” This is no ordinary clerk, though: this is Bob Kimbrough, the accomplished blues harmonica player.

Like all the teachers here at the Blues Arts and Education Program, both men have a comfortable, Mississippi Delta accent—and a ton of talent they’re ready to share. The program started in 1986; it operates out of the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Mississippi. It’s part of an effort to keep a hallowed, American genre alive amidst the onslaught of commercial rap music.

Railway cars still run near the Delta Blues Museum,
a former freight depot.
(Photo: JosephA, via Flickr)

Calvin begins tapping out beats until his six students show up. He’s only 19, but he’s a blues prodigy who won a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music. He has been playing guitar since he was eight years old; he says his mother wanted him to find something to do.

“I grew up in a bad neighborhood,” he explains. His hope is to tour as a professional musician, and then come back to Clarksdale and open up a music school.

Calvin’s students are grade-schoolers, teenagers, and a 60-year-old woman. Some of them share his story, and use the class as an ad hoc after-school center.

Robert, a seven-year-old bluesman. (Photo: Michael Perlstein)

“He’s always playing the drums,” says Teresa about her son Kerry, 7. She says she had to buy a new trash can after Kerry beat it to death with his drumsticks. “I’m really busy, and this way they come home at five o’clock all excited,” she says. “That’s all they want to know: ‘Is it class today?’”

Teresa also drops off her ten-year-old daughter, Keana, and Kerry’s friend Robert, 7.

Convenience might be a factor in shepherding kids to class. But the final effect serves as a cultural bloodline for this region’s amazing cultural gift to the world: the blues. They were birthed here in the Delta and the sound ultimately gave rise to rock-and-roll, blues rock, the British invasion and endless mutations of popular music that followed.

For the first ten minutes of class, teachers work with the students individually, giving them tips as they play. From behind his own bass guitar, Crisman directs Kerry on his drums, in the way a band member might.

The kids giggle at his jokes; sometimes they get excited and run around, banging their drum sticks on everything in sight.

“The beginning class is kind of a headache,” says Crisman, “but the headaches are worth it.”

And in fact, the cacophony magically unifies every now and then; the one-on-one jam sessions melt into one song as the students naturally pick up on each other’s looping chord progressions. Crisman is always at the mic, singing and playing guitar, while Calvin hops around on drums, piano and bass.

Christone, 10, mimics Crisman’s chord progressions, and moves his fingers quickly along with him as he breaks into a fast improvisation. Both throw their heads back. It’s a bit of joy for them both.

Jerry Fair playing with his band, the Mississippi Blues Crew. He teaches guitar licks to youngsters every week at the B.B. King Museum.
(Photo: Michael Perlstein)

This informal, master-pupil apprenticeship system is how Crisman, Calvin and their colleagues are passing on the blues torch. It’s what brought up such greats as Robert Johnson, Son House and Muddy Waters.

Down the road in Indianola, that’s how blues guitarist Jerry Fair teaches an evening guitar class at the B.B. King museum.

Poverty is rampant here; many of the downtown main streets of blues incubator towns such as Clarksdale, Cleveland, Greenwood, Greenville and Indianola are boarded up and half abandoned. A generation of youngsters would rather write rap songs than blues licks. It creates a concern that the blues are becoming a lost, or at least struggling, art form.

Baptist Town, where blues legend Robert Johnson played—and died.
Teens, in the background on the right, now listen to commercial rap music.
(Photo: Michael Perlstein)

Sylvester Hoover is a convenience store owner, tour guide, and cultural preservationist in Baptist Town, a collection of shotgun shacks just outside Greenwood. He says nearly all the young people there listen to rap music.

But here, where Robert Johnson played his last gig and then died after being poisoned, Hoover has seen a few of the teens add blues into their hip-hop, creating a hybrid he calls “blues rap.”

“It’s in their DNA,” Hoover says. “It’s part of their heritage even if they don’t realize it.”

A video of the program is available here.

Katie Urbaszewski is from New Orleans, where she’s a mass communication major at Loyola University.

The Noble & Cooley drum factory, built in 1872.

(Granville, Mass.) Tre Cool of the band Green Day bought his favorite snare drum for $600.

If you’re listening to him, or to Phil Collins, Paul McCartney, Sting, Billy Joel, or Van Halen, chances are you’re listening to a drum made by Noble & Cooley.

They are mythic drum-makers, and their story is a very American one.

Noble & Cooley is Jay Jones’s company. “Our drums go to tape very nicely,” he says mildly. “They are solid wood, steam-bent drum shells. Drums made from cross-ply just sound like cardboard.”

At first, the company was a small New England start-up, manufacturing in the kitchen—of Silas Noble’s house, back in 1852.

Jay Jones, drum-maker to the stars, using an 8-color printing press that is also a family heirloom.

Noble was a master mechanic. His partner, James Cooley, was Jones’s great-great-great grandfather. Cooley ran the business side. After two years of making toy drums, the partners built a proper factory in 1854. They made drums for the Union Army; these were Civil War times.

Jones himself used to trot over to the factory after school. “I was a 4th-grade pain-in-the-butt,” he admits. By the time he was 16, though, he spent his summers there, working the old machines from the 1870s that cut wood veneer, shaped metal, printed, steam bent hardwoods and mechanized assembly.

“A piece of wood that’s steam-bent has its own ring and pitch, and the pitch has real clarity,” he explains. “It takes 12 to 16 weeks and about 37 steps to build a drum from start to finish.” It takes that long because the wood needs ageing and curing before the drum is glued and assembled.

Even the weathervane on top of the factory has a drum.

Just about all drums were built this way until World War II changed all that. Needless to say, computers aren’t involved in Noble & Cooley’s manufacturing at all.

The area itself is extremely rural. Granville is a little town in the foothills of Massachusetts’ Berkshire Mountains, not far from Connecticut. The remains of stone walls demarking fields farmed during the Colonial Period are everywhere. The soil around here is thin and “grows rocks,” which rise to the surface after the winter freeze and thaw. The rocks were “harvested” with the help of oxen, and used to build those stone walls.

It helps a potential drummer understand why Noble and Cooley preferred to leave the agricultural life behind and turn to making drums. Like many others of their time, they could have moved to New York or Ohio, where the topsoil was deeper.

The factory: making money out of water.

Instead, like other Yankee problem-solvers, they noticed how much water flowed through the brooks and rivers, and used it for power. Water mills powered saws (as a former “pit-man” in a saw mill, I know how it feels to be covered with sawdust and sticky resin). Mills also helped grind grain, full cloth, mill snuff, and card wool. All this ingenuity helped make up for the lack of capital and people-power.

Noble & Cooley had that same spirit, and used water to power jigs and fixtures and a steam engine. By 1873, they were turning out 100,000 drums a year. In 1915, they added an electric generator. All of this equipment still works, and visitors can see it.

A printed metal sheet from the 1920s, that would have been formed into a cylinder to make a toy drum.

During World War II, Noble & Cooley made wooden reels for primer cord, and used paper and cardboard instead of metal to make their drums. When foreign competition started to heat up in the 1980s, they adjusted their business goals.

“We decided the world didn’t need another mediocre drum,” says Jay Jones. In order to pursue professional drummers, he simply refurbished the old machines from the 1880s to steam-bend the wood. They teamed up with the Avedis Zildjian Cymbal Company to create snare drums made out of their secret cymbal alloy. The very limited quantities of these drums make them very collectible.

This printed theme was for a toy drum made in the 1930s.

These days, Jones’ son, Nick, works part time at Noble & Cooley. They still make drums, and on holidays they operate as a museum, where anybody can watch how the old machines still work. No computer de-bugging is required.

Tours—and drums—are available by appointment at Noble & Cooley. On July 4th, the staff will make a toy drum in five minutes, using 15 steps.

Robert Stewart is on the board of the Society for Industrial Archaeology.

The first H-P headquarters. (Photo: ddebold/flickr)

Things change very quickly in Silicon Valley.

In 1939, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard built an innovative audio oscillator in this modest garage on Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, not far from Stanford University, where they had been classmates. Every computer today has some form of that technology.

The garage was the site of what is widely considered the beginning of a revolution in information itself. Yet the modest structure might have been destroyed, and gone the way of other key spots in Silicon Valley, had it not been named a state landmark in 2007. Hewlett-Packard (the company) bought the structure a few years ago.

Can't find the Shockley name on this sign.
(Photo: Jay McCauley)

Shockley Semiconductor was another launch pad of innovation. William Shockley had moved to Palo Alto to be near his mother. He was a Nobel Prize laureate who had co-invented the transistor in 1948 at Bell Labs in New Jersey. He recruited eight talented engineers and scientists, but his management style was blamed when they departed in 1956 to form Fairchild Semiconductor.

Shockley, furious, dubbed the defectors “The Traitorous Eight.” Fairchild went on to impress investors, while Shockley became increasingly weird. His racist statements are among the reasons why the industry may have preferred to forget him, and why the commemorative sign at the site of what had been Shockley Semiconductor doesn’t even mention Shockley by name.

At least there's a street sign.
(Photo: Jay McCauley)

Some feuds, like this one, end with a whimper: only a street sign remains where the Fairchild plant once stood. (The spot had become a major toxic waste site from all the underground tanks with solvents for processing silicon wafers).

The entire time, researchers sought to make electronics smaller. Transistors were smaller than vacuum tubes, which were their predecessors, but could gadgets be made even less bulky by integrating transistors with other components like resistors and capacitors?

Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments did just that in 1958: he created the very first integrated circuit. Unfortunately, each circuit required attaching tiny wires, so it wasn’t practical to manufacture in large numbers.

Dr. Hoerni's office was on the second floor, at the far end.
(Photo: Jay McCauley)

A year later, in 1959, or fifty years ago this summer, physicist Jean Hoerni of Fairchild came up with a solution. He used photolithography to etch a silicon wafer, almost like he was making a minuscule art print.

This reduced the bulk by making the whole enterprise utterly flat—dozens of transistors could fit onto a one-inch silicon wafer. This method also hugely reduced costs, because most of the processing steps could be applied at one time to every one of the tiny transistors on the wafer.

Another of the “Fairchildren,” Robert Noyce, expanded upon his colleague Hoerni’s invention. In July, 1959, he applied for a patent to wire together a bunch of planar transistors and other devices into a “monolithic integrated circuit.” This is the basic concept behind the entire integrated circuit industry.

The Control Data 6600: a new iPod is more powerful.
(Photo: Jay McCauley)

Meanwhile, Seymour Cray was looking for faster transistors to build a “supercomputer.” He was able to put Hoerni’s concept to commercial use, and placed some of Fairchild’s earliest large orders to create the Control Data 6600 in 1964, in Minneapolis. The computing power of this enormous device would have been roughly the same as an iPod—the first, slower iPod of several years ago, that is.

This machine, the Cray-1, was about 17 times more powerful than the CD 6600 above.
(Photo: Jay McCauley)

Seymour Cray’s third supercomputer, the iconic Cray-1 from 1976, had such huge power supply and refrigeration units they were turned into benches. These hulking contraptions were usually bought by government agencies, such as the Department of Defense. A few were sold commercially—Apple had one.

Yet another of the “traitorous eight,” Gordon Moore, had already observed in 1965 that the number of transistors that could realistically be created in a single device seemed to be doubling, roughly, every year. This became known as “Moore’s Law.”

(Photo: Stanford University Libraries)

Part of what made the area such a hotbed of innovation is that many folks from the brand-new semiconductor industry were located in the same geographic area. The closest watering hole around was Walker’s Wagon Wheel. Presumably, a lot of cross-pollination and cocktail-napkin scribbling took place there, between “Fairchildren” and others.

Don Hoefler, a reporter for Electronic News magazine, wrote an article in 1971 about the industry in the Santa Clara Valley. He referred to the area “Silicon Valley” and the name stuck. He was, reportedly, a regular at the Wagon Wheel.

No beer here for watering ideas.
(Photo: Jay McCauley)

Unfortunately, the Wagon Wheel was forced to close in 1997. The city of Mountain View had it bulldozed in 2003. This ghostly vacant lot is all that’s left.

Workers at a fab have to wear bunny suits: people are fundamentally contaminated.
(Photo courtesy of Intel Corp.)

Last year, in 2008, Intel decided to close “Fab D2,” the last major integrated circuit fabrication plant in Silicon Valley. Noyce and Moore themselves had founded Intel. Although there are still some smaller fabs and research fabs, not much silicon is manufactured in Silicon Valley anymore.

The almighty chip, or integrated circuit.

The common personal computer today has processors with more than 800 million transistors. If Moore’s Law continues to hold, the next personal computer might have over a billion transistors in its central processing unit.

Could that really be? On May 8th, at a Computer History Museum event commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Integrated Circuit, Moore himself said, “It’s as obvious as Newton’s Law.”

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, is currently celebrating the 50th anniversary of the invention of the integrated circuit, and some of the same digital pioneers are participating. The museum itself displays the original supercomputers and maintains The Wagon Wheel’s wagon wheel.

Jay McCauley came to Silicon Valley in 1976. He has held a variety of positions in system software development at Silicon Graphics, Inc. and elsewhere. Jay is currently the Vice President of the Society for Industrial Archeology. Follow him on Twitter at @jaym3.

A Shaker dressing room.

“Don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both necessary and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful.”
—Shaker design philosophy

Shaker interiors often feature wall pegs. (Photo: Thomas.Merton)

An elegant, minimalist—yet somehow grand—aesthetic is on display at the living history Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, Kentucky.

The 3,000-acre compound, founded in 1805, features 34 restored buildings and an extensive museum collection. There are also acres of farmland planted with heirloom varietals.

Bedroom. (Photo: Thomas.Merton)

The visual experience brings to mind the “Less is more” credo of Mies van der Rohe.

More on the history of the Shaker sect.
More on Shaker Village.
Pegboards and hangers available at Shaker Workshops.

Photos via Flickr. Front page photo by lumierefl.
A version of this story is at Remodelista.

New Orleans celebrates three kinds of events.

The first are mystical insider rituals, many rooted in the Catholic tradition of this former French colony, such as St. Joseph’s night or All Saints Day.

The second type follows the sports seasons; the home opener of the NFL’s New Orleans Saints is circled on calendars from Uptown New Orleans to the Jefferson Parish suburbs.

Finally, there are the huge spectacles that draw tourists by the thousands, the blow-out events like the Mardi Gras Carnival and Jazz Fest.

Hurricane Katrina hit nearly four years ago, adding anxious poignancy to each of these traditions: Would the local customs survive? Would visitors return? The tonnage of debris from Mardi Gras has even been weighed and measured as an indicator of the city’s resurrection.

Locals have their own benchmarks. The re-opening of a favorite restaurant. The return of a neighborhood second-line parade. The cursed futility of the Saints.

This year’s Carnival pulled off another small but important milestone toward recovery. For the first time since the storm, the parade offered a full contingent of flambeaux carriers.

These torch-bearers of the city’s nighttime Carnival parades were almost non-existent since Katrina—until now. This past Carnival, residents cheered the rugged men who carry the traditional flaming torches to light the nine February parades that precede the Lenten season.

The tradition goes back to the pre-Civil War era, when many of the flambeaux carriers were slaves of wealthy parade organizers. The earliest torches were fueled by oil dripping from cans affixed to wooden poles. Walking with a stick of dripping fire for a six-mile parade route was sweaty, soot-covered and often dangerous work.

Today, the parade routes are even longer and the large wooden contraptions are just as heavy. Kerosene has replaced lantern oil, but any experienced flambeaux carrier can display burn marks to attest to the risks. But that’s part of the tradition. Most of the flambeaux men are poor African-Americans who are blue-collar laborers by day, and the prospect of scooping up more than $100 in change tossed by parade spectators is worth the work.

It’s certainly not the money, though, that fuels the tradition. Deep inside, a flambeaux carrier is really a showman, and the best of them make a dance of it: dipping and twirling their fire sticks as they march and step alongside massive paper-mâché floats, sustained by the roar of the bead-hungry crowd and the marching band just up ahead.

These are portraits of some of this year’s New Orleans’ flambeaux carriers. Some are regulars who learned the tradition from a father or uncle. Others are some of the characters that decide to give flambeaux a try, some maybe just once, lighting one of New Orleans’ famed parades with kerosene lanterns shining against aluminum sheet metal, just as it was done more than 150 years ago.

But whether they’re first-timers or the original pre-Katrina old guard, the important thing is: they’re back.

Michael Perlstein covered crime in New Orleans for 20 years for the New Orleans Times-Picayune before earning two Pulitzer Prizes for his coverage of Hurricane Katrina.

All photos: Michael Perlstein.

Saws, tongs, picks: ice for the ice-box.

Water in the Congamond Lakes in Massachusetts was spring-fed, and produced high-quality ice. Fortunately, the New Haven-Northampton railroad line ran nearby, so it was simple to load big hunks of the stuff with plenty of protective sawdust into box cars bound for New York City. The box cars returned loaded with manure from the city’s horses, which was doubtless just as high-quality as the ice.

The back-and-forth trade didn’t stop there: the manure fertilized tobacco crops destined for New Yorkers’ cigars. This worked out so well that the Congamond Lakes ice production became a major source of ice in New England from 1900 – 1925. Fredrick Tudor, known as the “Ice King,” made millions of dollars. One presumes the box cars were cleaned of the high-quality manure before more ice went back in.

Commercial ice harvesting was a big enough job that the community turned out together to do it. Local farmers also harvested ice for their own use. Few people bother anymore, but Dennis Picard, the director of the Storrowtown Village Museum in West Springfield, Massachusetts, owns a complete set of antique ice-cutting tools. The photos show him demonstrating how farmers practiced the fine art of wielding ice-saws, lifting tongs, and pike poles on White’s Pond in West Suffield, Connecticut. More information is available here.

Robert Stewart is on the board of the Society for Industrial Archaeology.