Not much to say this week, I’m going to New Orleans in two days, so my mind is kind of on that.

Ok, wait I thought of something…

The line about the runway being too short… I went to the Minter Field Air Museum in Shafter last summer.  It was something like 110 degrees outside and a B-17 was supposed to be there.  But when we got there we learned that the runway was too short for the plane to land on because of the heat.  If it landed it wouldn’t have been able to take off again.  So instead of landing the Flying Fortress did a fly by over the airfield.  It seemed like we were trapped in the heat and the smog and no one could save us, the ship they sent couldn’t even land, it could only fly past and look at our helpless faces, camera lenses, and pathetic waves.  I hope it found someplace better to land. Some place safe.

Minter Field B-17

John the Conqueror Root

So, in 1833 Frederick Douglass was a slave who rebelled against a brutal farmer and went on to become “The Sage of Anacostia” and is one of the most prominent figures in African American and United States History. Well that’s according to Wikipedia. But I read this interesting story* about another version of his rebellion. The story said that one day after a brutal beating Douglass ran out into the woods to hide. While he was out there he ran into an old Black man. The man told Douglass that he had something that could help him out with his problem. He handed Douglass some John the Conqueror root. He said that the root would protect him from anyone wanting to do him harm. So Douglass took the root and went back home where the brutal farmer continued to beat him. But this time Douglass lashed out at him and overcame the farmer. Douglass won this confrontation and the man never tried to beat him again. What’s interesting is that later after winning his freedom and writing his first autobiography, Douglass retold the story and attributed at least in small part his new found strength to the John the Conqueror root. But later in life he told the story again in another biography and this time left out all mention of the man in the forest giving him the root. So what really happened? Why did his story change? Did the root really protect him? Who knows..

*Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation -Mitch Horowitz

It took me way too long to find an appropriate paper clip from the 1930’s. I finally settled on this smart little guy called an owl clip, handsome fella isn’t he?

I watched this movie a few weeks ago called the roaring twenties. James Cagney played this character who’s story was a lot like Riskin’s, minus the demon hand of course. It was a great story about how so many small time gangsters were just out of business after the repeal of prohibition. In the movie the only thing James Cagney’s character held on to was one taxi cab out of hundreds that he used to smuggle alcohol in. I pictured Riskin the same way, except the one thing he was able to hold on to from his old life was the sports car.

My favorite line from roaring twenties:

“It was a dangerous, lawless, high tension era, that will grow more and more incredible with each passing year, until someday people will say it never could have happened at all.”  -1939

The plane that Fay is flying is the Gee Bee racer. The G B stands for the Granville Brothers who first created the aircraft as an air racing plane in 1931.

I got the idea for the remote controlled plane from a documentary I watched on Tesla by PBS a while back. It was an excellent program, I highly recommend it. In that program there was a segment about a device that Tesla said would end the need for wars. He brought out a small boat that was only a couple feet long and set it in the water, and to the amazement of the onlookers, the boat started moving around the water by itself, turning, and stopping and starting. They even made Tesla open up the boat to prove there wasn’t a little man inside. Tesla had been controlling the boat using radio waves. Of course now this technology has its place in war in the form of the Predator drone system, or remote controlled bomb robots, but it took decades for people to accept the idea of radio controlled devices as anything other than a toy.

This week I have a couple new pages in addition to the new post. I’ve set up a t-shirt page with three new designs. I’ve also set up a map of the 19XX’s journeys, so you can see where they are.
Click here to see them…
Here is one of the shirt designs…

I had to upload this picture of Sterling so that you could see our story’s first real villain in his natural environment, the shadows. Sunny days usually aren’t his cup of tea, so you’ll have to excuse him.

The star of this week’s episode is of course the Auburn 851 Boattail Speedster. This is a beautiful art deco car made by the Auburn Automobile company, who’s headquarters was also an Art deco landmark. Their headquarters near Auburn, Indiana was declared a national landmark in 2005.

Auburn 851


Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum

I’ve also uploaded a new poster of the Carpathian this week!

The Carpathian is based on a combination of real life airships, including the U.S.S. Macon and Akron, the Hindenburg, the Graf Zeppelin, and a few bits and pieces from many other lighter than air ships.

Just some background on why I chose the name Togo. Togo was the name of one of the lead dogs in the 1925 serum run to Nome Alaska. A diphtheria antitoxin was carried 674 miles through arctic storms to reach the city of Nome Alaska, which was experiencing an epidemic. At that time sled dogs were still the main form of transportation and communication between these small towns. Balto went on to become the most famous dog of all the lead dogs, but Togo ran a much more dangerous part of the route.

Hello, this week’s 19XX is a double long one, I decided that each upload will be two pages long, that way the story makes a little more sense, and there are not so many cliffhangers!
Things are calm now I know but pretty soon things are going to get a pretty hairy
and it won’t let up.
I also posted a couple pictures from the kid’s collection.
These were taken in his cabin on his first day aboard the Carpathian.

New York The year is 19XX- The crowing jewels of Art Deco skyscraper building have just been completed, the entire world is struggling with the great depression, powerful dust storms have swept the midwest, all over the world, megalomaniacs are securing their power, and the kid is about to begin a long journey, one that will take him to both poles, to every continent on the map, and a few that aren’t.