Twenty-five Things

Here is a list of twenty-five things about me - in no particular order and of no particular value.

1. When I was younger, it used to bother me that I was so tall. Now, it is what it is.

2. I could watch the movie Airplane! over and over again, continuously.

3. When my right hand was crushed in the Navy and my index finger was nearly severed, my reaction was only mild annoyance.

4. I probably worked too much during the early part of my career. In one two year period, I worked three years. That's too much.

5. I am very happy with how my children turned out, I wish I'd had something to do with it.

6. I wish I had the opportunity to ask family history questions of my parents and grandparents. But that's not going to happen.

7. I find genealogical research to be like what Hal was referring to in 2001 A Space Odyssey when he said, "I am putting myself to the fullest possible use which is all I think that any conscious entity can hope to do."

8. I hate it when I have no one to blame but myself.

9. Writing in this blog is surprisingly satisfying.

10. My cursive writing was so bad when I was young that I have been printing everything I've written my whole life.

11. I am not Mr. Spock.

12. My taste in music has been evolving. I seem to enjoy things of a more mellow nature now. For heaven's sake, what's up with that?

13. Alcohol is a gift that I find difficult to refuse.

14. I know enough about Microsoft Windows and the tools necessary to support it to be an effective systems administrator. What do normal people do when their home computer goes all 'Windows' on them?

15. I have had many, many different jobs in my life but I've been with my current company for 31 years.

16. I really like glazed doughnuts.

17. I have a vision for Maryland genealogy where everyone's family history connects to everyone elses in a single metadatabase. I have the same vision for all the Kleyleins in the world.

18. I have very vivid dreams and sometimes I can remember them in great detail.

19. My favorite color is blue.

20. I have been walking since I was eight months old.

21. I have been to almost every state in the United States.

22. Simon and Garfunkel were right when they said, "A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest."

23. If I had actually kept a 'Journal of Unexpected Results', I would be on volume three hundred by now.

24. I once won a Caribbean vacation just by dropping my name in one of those 'Win a Prize' boxes at an appliance store.

25. I have learned that you never know what will happen next.

Bonus: I have been sending out a 'QUOTE OF THE DAY' for twelve years. Today's quote was:

"It's never too late to have a happy childhood."

- Burke Breathed, Bloom County

Dixie Highway

In my last post I brought up my connection to the Dixie Highway, so you'll have to read it to know what I'm talking about here. Sorry. Sometimes complete thoughts don't fit into a neat little box, sometimes they're sloppy and flop all over the place, you know, like life.

So, the Dixie Highway was a route connecting south Florida and Illinois and Michigan. This was no interstate highway, it was mostly two-lane as many roads were in the early days of US Roads. This was 1915 or thereabouts when it was conceived. Many roads didn't even have a route number, so the Dixie Highway was marked with a DH sign like this. I guess if you didn't see one for a couple of days, you were off the route.

The real 'interstates' in those days were the railroads and that's really what opened up Miami. Henry Flagler's Florida East Coast (FEC) railroad brought people down to his hotel and towns were built around the stations he peppered along the way. The house I grew up in on 118th Terrace was very near the FEC track and I used to walk along it as kid. The big boom in Miami was a direct result of the railroad. But as cars proliferated, more and more people came down the Dixie Highway.

As I discovered recently, there was an East Dixie Highway and a West Dixie Highway. They called them that because one road was on the east side of the tracks and the other on the west. I knew all about West Dixie, because it went right through North Miami, right through the center of town, right by one of the Royal Castle restaurants (No. 24) I used to work at. The North Miami Theater was on West Dixie, the Carvel's, the People's Gas plant, the Ancient Spanish Monastery, all the big attractions.

And it was an odd road, because it was not north-south or east-west. It was on an ANGLE. I know now that it was designed that way to dump people onto NE 2nd Avenue and then south to downtown. Coincidentally, I also worked at a Royal Castle (No. 2 which was really the first one) in Little River right on the West Dixie Highway (see below).

But when I was growing up, much of the East Dixie had been overlaid by Biscayne Boulevard, but not all of it as I discovered. The East Dixie (just the Dixie Highway for a while, since it was the first) followed the path of the old Military Highway originally cut to allow troops to fight in the Seminole Wars. Well, this road was pretty joggy because it followed a limestone ridge along the coastline. One of the jogs took it down NE 16th Avenue right where I lived on 118th Terrace.

The main house of our neighbor there, Kobe's Trailer Park, turned out to be one of the first houses in northern Miami. It was built by the Burr family in 1907. Now it's part of a condo complex. Northern people sit on the grounds and drink gin and tonics and don't realize they're on the site of one of the first farms in northern Miami. They grew pineapples and fruit trees and tomatoes and shipped them on the nearby railroad. All without air conditioning.

Farther south on another still existing jog of the East Dixie, my parents used to take us to an undeveloped part of what is now Miami Shores so we could run around (nice socks, Dave). I was able to track locations by means of photographs and we were right on the East Dixie. How about that! Another of my Royal Castles (No. 112) was only a couple of blocks from there and I never knew it.

So, two places that I lived and many events in my life are tied to the Dixie Highway. But you know, information like this doesn't always jump out at you. Sometimes you have to go and dig it up.

History at Your Feet

I was born in Miami, Florida.

When I was growing up, everyone I knew, except my brother, had moved there from somewhere else. Comparatively speaking, south Florida is 'new' compared to other parts of the United States. Maryland, for example has had English-speaking people there for four hundred years. Of course the US has no history at all compared to Europe or the far east. In Europe, you can bump into two thousand year old structures with no trouble at all. It became a joke that whenever we were driving on a very straight road somewhere in Europe, it had probably started as a Roman road and often it was true. When the Romans built a road, it was straight!

Many of the roads in Miami are straight, too. The land is relatively flat and the grid pattern worked there. It's not like Philadelphia at all, where there is NO DISCERNIBLE logic to where roads go. Many go in circles and since signs are expensive and rare, you can be lost for days.

But the roads were not always straight in Miami, the first ones followed a low shelf of limestone that follows the coast a bit inland. You see, most of what is now Greater Miami (Dade County) was just Everglades when the first non-Indian settlers arrived in the mid-1800s.
By 'Everglades', I mean swamp. Swamp with gators and rattlers and water moccasins and cotton-mouth snakes and coral snakes and scorpions and mosquitoes and land crabs. Oh, my. South Florida is semi-tropical which means it has two seasons, the dry season and the wet season. During the wet season, before the canals were dug, you could canoe around most of the Miami area. Houses could only be built on the small pine-covered islands that would jut up out of the water every now and again.

Before the Civil War, a road was commissioned by the military to allow troops to reach South Florida overland to fight the Seminoles in the Seminole Wars. This 'Military Trail' was the first road all the way to south Florida and it connected Fort Pierce, Fort Lauderdale and Fort Dallas. See, the kids going to Fort Lauderdale on Spring Break just think it's a cute name, but it was actually a fort. That's a cool word - fort. Fort, fort, fort. We don't use it enough nowadays.

Oh, didn't recognize the name 'Fort Dallas'? That's because it's called Miami now. But what's left of the fort is still downtown and you can visit it. The Military Trail became the County Road and later became part of the Dixie Highway. Long before there was an Interstate Highway System, the Dixie Highway was a marked route that ran all the way to Michigan.

Which brings me to the 'history at your feet' part of this story. When we were growing up, the only Dixie Highway we knew was West Dixie which ran on the west side of the Florida East Coast (FEC) railroad tracks. But the Military Trail route was actually East Dixie Highway. We never heard of it because it was decommissioned when Biscayne Boulevard was built. The Boulevard was built on part of the route but was straightened because it no longer had to follow the limestone shelf.

It wasn't until I started my research that I discovered that the house my parents were living in on NE 82nd Street when I was born (see the road to the left) was located right on the Military Trail/County Road/East Dixie Highway. When I visited there recently, in my mind's eye I viewed the Barefoot Mailman who walked the trail every week to bring the mail to Miami. I saw the covered wagons bringing the folks who would develop this swampy mess into farms and homes and schools. I saw the women in their long Victorian dresses and blouses buttoned to the neck (bikinis didn't come along until later). Covered head to toe in that heat! What suffering did they endure so we can sit in our condos and sip a gin and tonic?

But growing up, I was oblivious. The history is there at our feet, we just have to look down.

Social Networking

I've been doing genealogy research for a while now. And as I've mentioned before, there are all kinds of angles to it, history, demography, geography, etc. Now we can add Social Networking as a genealogy tool. At the end of November, my daughter helped me get set up on Facebook, LinkedIn and this whole blogging thing.

Since then I've made contact with a boatload of Kleyleins around the world. Kleylein is a fairly unusual name, relatively speaking (that's a genealogy joke). As a boy, I hated how different it was but as a genealogist, it is absolutely wonderful. Any Kleylein I run into can usually trace their ancestry to Unterrodach (or Oberrodach) in Bavaria and chances are pretty good that we're related. You can see where the town is by finding the little red dot I've made on the map of Germany. Notice that it is very near the old border of East Germany.

This is the little town my grandfather Peter Kleylein emmigrated from back in 1889. It's in Oberfranken near the Frankenwald Nature Preserve in an area that looks very much like central Pennsylvania. As a matter of fact, when we visited Germany we commented that the area there looks a lot like Pennsylvania, but with castles.

Kleylein is apparently a very old name, so old it doesn't conform to modern German spelling rules which would have it appear as Kleilein. Some of my German colleagues have even intimated that perhaps it is not a German name so I made fun of their heritage too.

Some of the families in town actually changed the spelling to Kleilein and there are still both spellings in town and around the world. As a matter of fact, there were so many Kleyleins that they hyphenated their last names to tell one another apart. There are names like Kleylein-Sohn, Kleylein-Feuerstein, and my family Kleylein-Weltdicker although many have dropped the hyphenated second name when they move somewhere where there is only one Kleylein family.

Now between Facebook and LinkedIn, I've found other Kleyleins in Germany of course, but also Switzerland, Austria, Canada, Argentina, Australia and in the US. How about that! Now the families who grew up around the river Rodach who are the descendants of the Flößers (rafters) who cut down the trees, lashed them together and floated on them to the sawmills are in every corner of the earth and we can find each other because of the Internet.

Just a few years ago, I could do a search on 'Kleylein' and get 25 hits. I just Googled 'Kleylein' a minute ago and got 21,000 hits and another 51,000 for Kleilein. So, we have plenty of raw information now, we just need a super-meta-knowledge-base to correlate it for us. In the mean time, I'll just keep working through the list one Kleylein at a time. I'm glad it's not Smith.

Resolution Time

I hate this time of year.

It's Resolution Time. No, I'm not talking about my Resolution Process which I invented. Oh, no, I will save that for a future post. Perhaps I should patent it first. No, I'm talking about the New Years Resolution thing. You see, I go to the gym a couple of times a week, three times if I can get away with it. And around this time of the year the gym is totally flooded with the Resolution People.

"I will go back to the gym."
"I will lose 150 pounds."
"I will not have a heart attack when I am thirty-five."

It's the same every year. These folks come in and you can always tell they have no idea what they're doing or what the 'gym etiquette' is. You know:

o Get out of the way
o Don't hog the machines
o Don't stare at the women

All the regulars know the rules and we know each other. It's only by sight, of course, we don't speak. That would create a disturbance in the force. So we can tell right away who the Resolution People are. Tonight there was a woman on the Nautilus machine that works your back. She was using five pounds of weight, which is about the effort you would expend leaning back in your Barcalounger. And she went on FOREVER. Of course, she could, there was NO EFFORT involved. She was just. . . leaning. No etiquette.

Well, they'll be gone soon, it's already thinner than it was. We'll be back to normal in a few more days. Then we'll fall back into our normal hierarchy. Oh, yes, there's a whole caste system at the gym. The exercise machine people hardly ever use free weights, it's not scientific enough. And the free weight people don't use the machines because it's not REALLY weightlifting. The rooms are kept separate, we don't mix here, folks. The cardio people just use the treadmills, they're not here for anything except pavement pounding. The racquetball people don't even LOOK at the rest of us, to them they're not even in a gym. And there are people who just swim and I swear some of the older guys just come in to take a shower. We stay out of each other's way and we get our stuff done.

Sometimes we collide in the steam room. It has occurred to me that I really only go to the gym to have the excuse to go in the steam room. After you've nearly killed yourself, it's a great luxury to go in and sweat all the pain out. I fill my water bottle up with ice water and pour it on my head while I'm in there so I can stay longer.

Yes, I know there's something wrong with me.

I'll tell you what, though, if I ALWAYS looked like I do after working out for an hour and half, well, the world would be a different place.

The Sound of a Train in the Distance

Last night, before I went to bed, I heard the sound of a train whistle in the distance. That's not so common nowadays and I know the only active train tracks in the area are miles away, so the sound had carried a long way.

In a fairly direct way, I owe my very existence to trains. My grandfather Peter Kleylein (below) emigrated from Unterrodach in Bavaria and as a young man found himself in Baltimore as a baker. He wasn't a baker when he left Germany, his occupation was listed as 'joiner' which could be anything from a carpenter to a sawmill worker. It would make sense that he would work with wood, since the major occupation in Unterrodach was lumberjacking and floating the trees to sawmills. There's a museum there dedicated to the history of Floessers. The German word (floater) has a kind of frontier mystique about it, like the American cowboy. The occupation 'joiner' may have been selected by the immigration people since there is no American translation for 'floater'.

These guys cut the trees down, dragged them down the mountains, lashed them together and rode the rafts thus created miles down the river to the sawmills and then made their way back home. Some of these rafts were big enough to have cabins on them where the men lived while they floated downstream. Of course there was a river in Unterrodach, the Rodach River (see Number 10 on the map below) that fed the river Main.
But my grandfather decided not to pursue this life and instead joined his brother Johann in Baltimore. However, when Peter arrived, there wasn't too much of a lumberjack operation going on in downtown Baltimore. Peter arrived alone in 1889 to join Johann and without lumberjacking available, he became a baker. He was sixteen.

In all the research I've done on Peter, his occupation never changed. His first documented job in the United States was baker and that's what he was doing when he died of tuberculosis in 1925.

By then he had gone through a lot of hard events in his life which will be fuel for other entries in this communication mechanism. But what has all this baker business got to do with railroad trains and my existence? You see, I try to make these things a big circle and answer the questions that have popped up in the beginning.

The circle has to do with the Baltimore Ravens stadium and why they named Mount Airy, Maryland 'Mount Airy' in the first place.

Back before the Interstate highway system (or highways. . . or even automobiles) the transportation system of choice was railroads. The B&O Railroad (Baltimore and Ohio) had a huge hub right in the middle of Baltimore. The stadium complex there in downtown Baltimore is built on the site of that huge B&O railroad station hub. Interestingly, that was the first railroad station built in the United States. This was 1828.

If you follow the rails west after Ellicott City from Baltimore on the map above, a couple of stops later is Mount Airy named for the cold, clean air carried over it's rather modest summit. It was clean enough to create a better atmosphere for those suffering from the crowding and bad air quality of cities like, say. . . Baltimore. So the Garrett Sanitarium was built in Mount Airy to treat people suffering from such lung diseases as tuberculosis.

So the youngest of eight of Johann Andreas Kleylein and Katherina Shaller took the B&O steam train west to Mount Airy and there met my grandmother Hallie Harrison, the youngest of twelve of Nimrod Harrison Jr. and Sarah Watkins.

The Harrisons and Watkins' had been in Maryland and Virginia since the dawn of time. John Watkins sailed with John Smith for heavens sake. And the Harrisons are part of the Virginia Harrisons that produced two presidents.

The story of how exactly it happened that these two met and became interested in one another is unfortunately not available to me. Yet. Perhaps it can be discovered at some point how a tubercular German immigrant baker who presumably spoke with a heavy foreign accent met and charmed a girl thirteen years younger than him whose family had already been in America for 300 years. I'm sure Nimrod and Sarah were thrilled with the prospect. He was twenty-nine when they married and she was sixteen.

The sound of a train in the distance has always been wistful and romantic. It carries with it the prospect of traveling to new places and meeting new people and having new adventures. As it happens in this case, all of those things were true.

Part of that adventure was the three boys this couple had, the oldest of which was my father Leon (below). What was it like for Peter and Hallie when they were first married and lived in Baltimore? Remember, these were the youngest of both families. I know for quite a while they lived on Barre Street in Baltimore just a few blocks east of the B&O Terminal so it was an easy commute for the sixteen year old Hallie to get back to Mount Airy. Barre Street is still there in a fairly well preserved state because it was trapped between the terminal and the waterfront which was a couple of blocks to the east. Now the terminal is the stadium complex and the waterfront is Inner Harbor. The noise and smoke and dirt from the rail complex is gone, but the results of it's existence are still with us.
I know, because I'm part of it.

My Left Eye

I went to the eye doctor today.

My ophthalmologist is Dr. Reto, the best eye doctor on earth. I believe I've been with him for fifteen years or so, that's a long time for a doctor/patient relationship. The last such long term relationship I had was with my first dermatologist, Dr. Cott and I'd still be with him if he hadn't died. Dr. Reto has been treating me for increased pressure in my left eye. It wasn't that it was going to blow up and pop, although how cool would THAT be? Right during some difficult meeting, there's Rich holding his head in his hands as he often does for long periods of time during meetings. Then suddenly
. . . POP! . . . like a bubble that you blew with bubble gum.

"What happened to Rich?"

"Oh, his eye popped, now what about that outage?"

No, this pressure would build up, squeeze my optic nerve and first the peripheral vision would go and eventually. . . BLINDNESS!

Well I wasn't really up for that, my fingers aren't really sensitive enough for braille (which was named for Louis Braille who devised it when he was like twelve or something). Here's what my name looks like in braille.

Looks a little like dominoes doesn't it? Nowadays, Louis would have sued the domino people for producing something 'too similar' to his stuff. But this was 200 years ago, people weren't quite so litigious then.

The treatment I was using was not having the desired effect and my left eye still had pressure that was beyond what was desirable. So Dr. Reto recommended a different medication that has a couple of unusual side effects. (Recommended! HAH! One of the alternatives was surgery.) Because I have blue eyes, the medication would change the color of my left eye grey or brown or possibly green (red would have been cool!) The change would be permanent. I would have one blue eye and one eye of a different color.

Isn't that GREAT! Now when people ask, "What's wrong with Rich?", they'll have something specific to talk about instead of just the usual generalities. But wait, there's MORE.

He also said there's a high probability that the eyelashes of my left eye would grow thicker, longer and more luxuriant.

So, naturally, I asked him, "I suppose I'm going to have to buy a derby hat, now." He just looked at me. "You know. . . Stanley Kubrick." Still nothing. Clockwork Orange? No, it seems Dr. Reto was unfamiliar with A Clockwork Orange, because he had spent his youth studying.

I'm kind of half hoping he doesn't look it up.

So my future is appearing like Malcolm McDowell whose unborn twin brother was still buried in his skull. I hate to say it but this has potential. I can see myself giving presentations and they'll always give me what I want and no one will ask me questions because they'll want me off the stage as fast as I can go.

Give me what I want - and I will go away!"

Metamorphosis

I have employed my incredible powers of observation to detect that my blog seems to have changed (e.g., morphed, devolved, deconstructed, slid) into a sort of a memoir. That was not exactly my original intent so I began feeling a bit of angst. Fortunately, I have an on-call social relationships counselor (that would be my daughter Leah) who advised me with all due professionalism, "Hey, it's your stupid blog." Of course, she is much too nice to say it exactly that way, but that was what I heard and it was good advice. As the Marines say, "There are many like it but this one is mine!"

Surprisingly, that thought is quite similar to what I wrote as the concluding catch-phrase at the bottom of this blog when I first started it. "I hope you enjoy this blog. It's mostly for me, but knock yourself out." Arrogant pinhead.

If this thing WERE a memoir, it would need a much better opening sentence like:

"I am born." - David Copperfield
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. . ." A Tale of Two Cities
"Call me Ishmael" - Moby Dick (that's for you, Leah) But would "Call me Rich" really work?

More likely it would be something ironic like:

“The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” The Go-Between
"Billy Pilgrim had come unstuck in time.” Slaughterhouse Five

Probably Vonnegut's idea is the best, so I'm going to steal that. Yes, unabashedly. Also, he had great hair.

So, my methodology will not be so much to deliver some sort of history in a linear fashion. I couldn't do that anyway having no memory left. Instead, I will bounce, as inspiration strikes me, from place to place and from epoch to epoch and let the gentle reader attempt to piece it all together. Good luck with that.

Since this tool is a conveyance of emotion and social connectivity as much (or more so) as sheer documentation of fact, my feelings about your struggle are like the Tom Hanks laugh scene in The Money Pit. Ha HAAAAAAAA ha ha ha ha!

I can only imagine some poor historian in the distant future trying to turn these ravings into something approximating a life story. Double good luck with that.

So, if anyone is still there, I intend to take the sputtering start I've made with this tool and build some sort of coordinated but unstructured flow into these entries. A little current-day commentary, some memories, some history, some genealogy, perhaps even throw in some actual events to spice it up.






"I am born."

Resume - Part 2

So, when last we met, Rich was eighteen and tired. Now, of course, he's older and perhaps even a bit more tired. If that isn't a complete synopsis, I'm sorry, you'll have to read the previous entry Resume - Part 1. See how clever the whole naming thing is working out? For those of you who were eighteen once, it may come as no surprise to you that my solution to this difficult circumstance was to run away. How's that for integrity and grit? As it happened, my friend Bob Deeter (who was in a very similar situation to my own) and I were driving down 27th. Avenue near the college when he suddenly said, "We should just go ahead and join the Navy."

It had never entered my mind to join the Navy, if I was going into any service, it would have been the Air Force. After all, I did spend a few years in the Civil Air Patrol where I had risen to the rank of First Sergeant and I loved to fly. But I could never be a pilot, <heavy sigh> because my eyes were no good and that kind of put a damper on the whole thing. But I had learned how to march and picked up some tips on leadership and learned how to calculate load factors on aircraft. And a couple of the guys in the squadron were the ones I worked with laying that industrial tile I spoke of earlier (see how all this ties all together?). And at that point I had no idea how many other people in my family had been in the Navy, Uncles and Cousins and Step-Grandfathers, oh, my. My father never spoke about his family, or else I wasn't listening, which is another really strong possibility. I found out about these Navy connections after I started delving into genealogy.

So, having nothing better to do, we joined the Navy. I know, you can almost hear the Village People in your head, can't you? "In the Navy!" But there was no such song when I joined, but there was the Vietnam War and chances were pretty high that we would go there. But this was June and we delayed entry until September so we could have the summer. Vietnam could wait. Bob's dad used his connections to get us jobs at Carlson Construction as laborers. I did spend some time working with carpenters which qualifies as 101 Intro to Carpentry, but most of the time we did demolition. And what a great time we had busting stuff up!

Most of the other laborers were middle-aged black guys who had been doing this stuff for twenty years and knew full well that what didn't get done today would be waiting for us tomorrow. But here come these two puppies bouncing around, "Hey, come on, let's wreck some more stuff!" They adopted us and tried their best not to get us killed. One particular job was EXCELLENT. We were contracted to replace the ceilings in an elementary school with new dropped ceilings. And that's where we came in because we had to remove the forty year old plaster and lath ceilings. The guys were using axes and pipes to break up the old ceiling and then sweep up the pieces. Man, that forty-year old dust was something to behold. So, Bob and I looked at the situation and knew right away we shouldn't push up, but should pull down. So we had the shop make us some sky hooks - a long pipe with a 90 degree angle at the end that we could poke up through the old ceiling. Ours had another piece supporting the angle so it wouldn't bend. Of course, you had to be careful not to hit the ceiling support beam when you pushing the pipe up with all your might because then you had to stand there for a while until your body stopped vibrating the way Bugs Bunny did when he ran into a street lamp. There was a down side, of course, because you were pulling all this stuff right down on top of yourself, but that's what hard hats are for, plus the fact that the work was getting done five times faster.

But I noticed that not only was the plaster strengthened with horse hair, the lath was attached to the beams with wire and not nails. You can almost guess what I did next. I crawled up into the space between the ceiling and the roof, cut the wires and pushed the lath DOWN, much easier and the pieces were bigger. Yeah, this was Miami in the summer, so it was 130 degrees up there, but youth and stupidity are a great combination. But even that wasn't enough. On this one long hallway, I went up and cut ALL the wires and then stomped down on one end and the whole ceiling peeled off like a banana peel and came down in one piece. What fun! As it happened, our supervisor heard the whoomp! (so did people for blocks around) and came to find me jumping down after doing a weeks work in two hours. He gave me a ten cent an hour raise. But this was 1966 and that was a lot!