A Wandering Octogenarian Mind. May 3, 2018

Copyright © 2018                         John F. Oyler

May 3, 2018

A Wandering Octogenarian Mind

According to the Third Amendment of the Octogenarian Bill of Rights, it is permissible for people eighty years of age or older to engage in mind wandering rather than thinking logically. I certainly am taking full advantage of this right lately. I begin focusing on one subject and, a few minutes later, am obsessed with something completely different.

For example, at our recent workshop on George Washington in southwestern Pennsylvania, I mentioned that the primary unit for length used in Washington’s surveys was the “pole”. Washington’s survey of a 400 acre plot of land was a perfect square with sides each 258 poles (4,257 feet) long. I explained that the term pole was synonymous with “rod” and “perch”, and that it was sixteen and one-half feet long.

Incidentally, the unit “acre” was established as the amount of land that one man could plow in one day, a plot 660 feet long by 66 feet wide (43,560 square feet). Early surveyors measured distance using a measuring stick sixteen and a half feet long; hence the term pole. Consequently, the acre was forty poles long by four poles wide.

We believe Washington used such poles in his surveys; it is well documented that Mason and Dixon brought calibrated poles with them for their well-known survey of the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland.

At this point my wandering mind produced the term “smoot” as another unfamiliar unit of measurement. In 1958 Oliver R. Smoot was a pledge at the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity. As a prank, his pledge class was instructed to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge, which connects Cambridge and Boston via Massachusetts Avenue, using young Mr. Smoot as a measuring stick.

He stretched out, with his heels at one end of the bridge, and a chalk mark was applied at the top of his head, a distance which turned out to be five feet and seven inches. He then got up, moved to the chalk mark, and the whole procedure was repeated. This was repeated three hundred and sixty-four times, ending up twenty seven inches from the other end of the bridge.

Eventually Mr. Smoot got tired of getting up and lying down, so his fellow surveyors resorted to picking him up and depositing him, just like any other measuring pole. The official length of the bridge was recorded as 364.4 smoots. In successive years other Lambda Chi pledge classes renewed the markings. On the fiftieth anniversary of the original prank, a plaque was installed on the bridge commemorating it.

The term became official in 2011 when it was added to the fifth edition of the American Heritage. More recently its immortality was insured when Google added it to its list of units available in Google maps. WMBR, the MIT student radio station broadcasts at a wavelength of two smoots.

Ironically, Oliver Smoot’s fifteen minutes of fame in 1958 was the precursor of a distinguished career in the field of standards. He  was Chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) from 2001 to 2002 and President of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) from 2003 to 2004. Small wonder the unit smoot has become a household term, at least in Cambridge.

Other famous recent Cambridge characters include “Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers”. Officially named Ray and Tom Magliozzi, their popular NPR radio show, Car Talk, was aired live from 1988 to 2012 and is still being heard as reruns. When our son John was a student at MIT in the late 1980s, he took us to visit their Cambridge auto-repair shop, the Good News Garage. Somewhere I have a photograph of me standing in front of it.

Which leads me to another Cambridge legend, Harvard student “Rinehart”. Years ago I shared an apartment in Gary, Indiana, with a fellow Dravo employee, Dick Lux. A big fan of Swing Era jazz, he introduced me to the Count Basie classic, “Harvard Blues”, which features Jimmy Rushing as vocalist. It is an improbable blues song about a Harvard student in the 1930s.

The student “wears Brooks clothes and white shoes all the time.” I presume “Brooks” is Brooks Brothers and the shoes are the classic “white bucks”. He gets “three C’s and a D, thinks checks from home sublime”. “I don’t keep dogs or women in my room”. That’s easy to understand, but then Rushing inexplicably sings, “Rinehart, Rinehart, I’m a most indifferent guy”. For years I wondered who Rinehart was.

Recently I learned that there was a custom at Harvard for students to shout “Oh, Ri-i-i-inehart” at the top of their voices, in public places and public events. Apparently there was a Harvard student named James Bryce Gordon Rinehart, class of 1900, who was the subject of this fad. One version of the story is that he was a popular tutor, and some helpless scholar would stand in the Quad and shout his name when he needed help.

My favorite pastime on Saturday evenings is to listen to “Saturday Night Swing Session” on radio station WQLN (Erie) via the Internet. Years ago its host was Bill Garts, a Meadville resident whom we got to know through the Allegheny Jazz Society concerts. In those days we listened to the program live in the summer when we were at our cottage at Conneaut Lake.

After Bill died the program was continued by Phil Atteberry, another gentleman we had met through the Jazz Society. Among other things, Phil teaches English and jazz history at Pitt-Titusville. His fascination with jazz is inherited from his father, who grew up in the Swing Era. I always enjoy his programming, especially the second hour when he focuses on a specific theme.

Recently he featured an of performances by Jimmy Rushing, many of which were recorded when he was a vital part of the Count Basie. One of them, of course, was “Harvard Blues”, after which Phil discussed its unusual history. Its lyrics were written by a prominent journalist, George Frazier. He graduated from Harvard in 1932 and wrote Harvard Blues that year. By 1941 he was a well-known jazz critic and was able to persuade Basie to record the song with Jimmy Rushing as vocalist.

Although the lyrics made no sense to either Rushing or Basie, they managed to produce a classic, one that is a favorite of most jazz fans. Phil discussed the Rinehart reference and admitted he had been skeptical about the various speculative explanations regarding its origin. Recently, however he was reading John Dos Passos’ masterpiece, “1919”, and found a reference to the “Oh, Ri-i-i-inehart” custom there. Incidentally Dos Passos also graduated from Harvard in 1932; perhaps he and Frazier were drinking buddies.

So my mind has wandered from a young George Washington to an equally young John Dos Passos. The “Oh, Ri-i-i-inehart” custom has reminded me of a similar story, the origin of name “Hoya” for Georgetown athletic teams. Better leave that for a future column.