Our Daily Dead

LA Times
Barbara McMartin, 73, an Adirondack expert who wrote more than two dozen books on New York’s North Country, died Tuesday of cancer at her home on Canada Lake on the southern edge of Adirondack Park in Fulton County, N.Y.

A Vassar College graduate, McMartin earned a doctorate in mathematics from City University of New York in 1972, the same year she published her first Adirondack guidebook. The Johnstown, N.Y., native went on to write 25 books on the Adirondack Mountains in addition to numerous magazine and newspaper articles.

McMartin was widely respected by state agency officials and environmentalists alike for her knowledge of the Adirondacks, a 6-million-acre park made up of public and private land. Her knowledge of the region and its history was so deep that she was once called “the Rand McNally of upstate New York” by the New York Daily News.

An advocate of forest preservation, McMartin contributed policy initiatives to the New York Department of Environmental Conservation. She also served on numerous boards of Adirondack preservation groups.

NY Times
Brian Roylance, an English publisher whose company, Genesis Publications, turned rock into history with hand-crafted, autographed limited editions of musicians’ memoirs and photography collections, died on Tuesday in Guildford, England. He was 60.

His son, Nicholas, said that Mr. Roylance died during a soccer game with friends, apparently of a heart attack.

Mr. Roylance’s company published books by George Harrison (including his memoir, “I Me Mine,” and two books of reproduced lyric manuscripts) and Ringo Starr (”Postcards From the Boys,” a collection of postcards sent to him by the other Beatles), as well as “Sometime in New York,” a collection of Bob Gruen’s photographs of John Lennon. Among the other Beatles-related books Mr. Roylance published were “Fifty Years Adrift,” a memoir by Derek Taylor, who worked for the Beatles in various capacities in the 1960’s and again in the 1990’s, and “Playback,” an autobiography by the group’s record producer, George Martin.

Mr. Roylance also published photography collections by Astrid Kirchherr, Jurgen Vollmer and Max Scheler, who photographed the Beatles during their early years as a Hamburg bar band. And he issued an edition that included reproductions of paintings by Stuart Sutcliffe, the Beatles’ original bassist, who left the band to pursue his art career but died in 1962. As a result of his work on various Beatles-related projects, starting with Harrison’s “I Me Mine” in 1980, Mr. Roylance was enlisted by Apple, the group’s company, to assemble “The Beatles Anthology,” a book based on the band’s video autobiography. It was published by Chronicle in 2000.

The success of his Beatles projects also opened other doors in the rock music world for Mr. Roylance. Among the company’s publications are books devoted to Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Brian Wilson, the Who, Pink Floyd and Ravi Shankar.
Blinds & Shutters

Pack a bag, jump in the car, then drive just a short ways and you’ll find yourself in the hills that Barbara McMartin described in her books. Well, a short drive if you live in Montreal, Boston, Syracuse, West Chazy, Potsdam, Owls Head, Ste Clotilde De Chateauguay, or perhaps even New York City.

The Adirondack Mountains Wikipedia tells us do not form a connected range like the Appalachians, but rather are a serious of 46 peaks isolated or in small groups. Geologists would further tell you that the Adirondacks are not geologically related to the Appalachians, but rather pertain geologically to the Laurentian Mountains of Canada. And lest we forget the Adirondacks are also home to that lake where some sporting types gathered in yonder past days: Lake Placid

And if you’re scouring for another interesting read with a slight tie try E.L. Doctorow’s Loon Lake.

Or you could just stay home, order up a new Adirondack chair and do a bit of surfing over to the Genesis Publications books page. You’ll find books about Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Bob Marley, The Who, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie and Ravi Shankar. You’ll also find a few you might not have expected. And remember to thank Brian Roylance as he was the publisher at Genesis.

Remember: “Place your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.” ~ Lazarus Long

NY Times
Mary Lee Settle, a master of historical fiction who recreated time and place with visceral, almost fanatical accuracy, died Tuesday at a hospice in Charlottesville, Va. She was 87 and made her home in Charlottesville.

The cause was lung cancer, said her son, Christopher Weathersbee.

Ms. Settle, who was a National Book Award winner and the author of the novels known as “The Beulah Quintet,” explained her research process in an introduction to “O Beulah Land,” the first in an interconnected five-book saga that spanned three centuries, from Cromwell’s England to what Ms. Settle called “the feudal coal culture” of West Virginia, her native state.

To inform her book, she wrote, it was necessary to “let the past become a present, let it fall beyond intelligence into reliving, which is true sensuous recall, where dreams come from with all their fears and future hopes of things long past.”

“The Beulah Quintet” novels, written between 1956 and 1982, were linked by an exploration of the ways American concepts of personal freedom evolved, and began with the journey of former English prisoners to West Virginia’s Kanawha Valley (called Beulah in the novels). For instance, the plot of “The Scapegoat” (1980), the fourth volume, unfolds during a violent 1912 confrontation between miners and owners. The other books are “Know Nothing” (1960), “Prisons” (written in 1973, years after “O Beulah Land,” but labeled Book I because the action takes place earlier in history) and “The Killing Ground” (1982).

But Ms. Settle’s work ranged far beyond her birthplace, geographically and otherwise. In 1978, she received the National Book Award for “Blood Tie,” the story of American and British expatriates in Turkey. She had been living there, well aware of the sociocultural influences that traveled both ways between natives and outsiders. Reviewing the novel in The New York Times, Anatole Broyard wrote that the American and British characters were “like so many Typhoid Marys, carrying the disease of change, change as a fever, wherever they go.”

If Ms. Settle’s work was never wildly fashionable - possibly because “I don’t write about being vaguely unhappy in Connecticut,” she once said - that allowed it to age well.

Mary Lee Settle is our ODDguest today. Ms. Settle is best known for her Beulah Land Quintet. One reviewer had this to say about the series: “A prevailing theme throughout all her novels is the struggle for freedom at all levels, intimately, domestically, historically or panoramically. Consistent in her novels is the domineering matriarch, often struggling beyond her means. In her creation of Canona, she creates all the American stereotypes with complex characters from antagonistic religious, social and economic backgrounds.”

Now exactly how we go from domineering matriarchs to pirates even we can’t begin to answer, but Avast Ye Scurvy Dogs! Now suppose for a moment that you are out there searching for a something - perhaps a new outlook on life or the fundamental meaning to it all or a good recipe or even something for Halloween. You are Saved! The ODD Infinite Number of Monkeys Research Department has scored another direct hit just for you - sally forth and join the swelling ranks of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. And as yet another ODDly stunning public service scoured the web we have so that you might purchase your full pirate regalia. We’ve decided that the Captain Laffite outfit is just ODD enough for us.

And if you still find your life lacking you can always spend some time playing Virtual Pursuit.

“If you get to thinkin’ you’re a person of some influence, try orderin’ somebody else’s dog around.” ~ Will Rogers

NY Times
Harry Heltzer, who began at the 3M Company as a $12-a-week manual laborer, invented one of the company’s most profitable products and rose to be its top executive, died on Sept. 21 at his home in Lenoir, N.C. He was 94.

A granddaughter, Deborah Heltzer, confirmed the death.

Mr. Heltzer’s invention was a new way of making reflective signs for use on highways. It went on to become a market leader.

As head of 3M, a diversified technology and manufacturing company founded as the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, Mr. Heltzer expanded the company to 150 countries, directly investing in new businesses abroad instead of just selling products.

From 1966 to 1972, years in which he was at the top of the company, earnings rose sharply. Nearly a third of that increase came after he rose from president to chairman and chief executive in October 1970.

Mr. Heltzer was fond of pointing out that none of 3M’s 30,000 products, the most famous of which is Scotch tape, generated more than 5 percent of its total revenue.

“It’s all nickel and dime stuff,” he said in a newspaper interview in the 1970’s. “But those nickels and dimes, they sure do add up.”

Mr. Heltzer was born in Cincinnati on Aug. 22, 1911, and moved to Minneapolis as a child. He graduated from the University of Minnesota in metallurgical engineering, then went to work for 3M as a laborer in its abrasives department.

His first job was unloading roofing granules from boxcars for 35 cents an hour. His wife, Elizabeth, told The Star Tribune of Minneapolis for its obituary article that he liked to say, “I asked for a job, and they gave me a job and a shovel.”

In 1937, he was assigned to a project to make the center striping on highways more reflective at night than was possible with the standard white or yellow paint. A Minnesota highway official had suggested painting glass beads onto the stripe.

The first problem Mr. Heltzer encountered was a lack of glass beads small enough to use. He proceeded to make his own, often through novel methods. One was to drop molten glass from his window.

He finally fashioned an acceptable double-coated tape with beads on one side, but he could not make it stick to the road during a Minnesota winter. So he used the process he developed to make a material for signs, which was sold as Scotchlite reflective sheeting.
Orange Traffic Cone
3M Scotchlite Reflective Striping Tape, 1 in x 50 ft - White Silver

I used to live in a room full of mirrors
All I could see was me
Well I took my spirit and I crashed my mirrors
Now the whole world is here for me to see ~Room Full of Mirrors, Jimi Hendrix

Harry Heltzer invented a new way of making reflective signs for use on our nation’s highways. Thank Harry next time you arrive safely after navigating your way during a nighttime drive.

Reflective highway signs leads us to reflect on reflective surfaces closer to home - a wee little something we call mirrors. Unless of course you are Kilgore Trout in which case you’d call them leaks. Kilgore you see was convinced that mirrors were really doorways to other universes. Telling Kilgore that you were going to take a leak naturally led him to think you were off stealing mirrors.

Reflecting is also something we do with lives, ideas, &etc. For example, Winnie The Pooh had his “Thotful Spot” where a bear of very little brain could reflect on things. Sometimes after a serious bit of talk or a good moral lesson you just need to retire to your thoughtful spot.

An old Cherokee was teaching his grandchildren about life. He said to them, “A battle is raging inside me … it is a terrible fight between two wolves. One wolf represents fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego. The other stands for joy, peace, love, hope, sharing, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, friendship, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.”

The old man fixed the children with a firm stare. “This same fight is going on inside you, and inside every other person, too.”

They thought about it for a minute and then one child asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”

The old Cherokee replied: “The one you feed.”