McMurdo’s Camp Hotties!

This has nothing to do with Holmes, but is an odd story that might amuse some of you. The software used for this web site, wordpress.com, stores some statistics and related information that the site author can review. I noticed that we just had a big spike in the number of views (hits). It shot way up and then dropped down to the normal trickle in a day or two. WordPress also has a feature that shows what search-engine terms were used to find the site. There was a group of strange ones, involving women, such as Women of Camp McMurdos, McMurdo girls, and the like.

Turns out there was an item on the national newswire involving Station McMurdo, which is a permanent settlement of scientists and researchers in Antarctica. The story was that the UN, or whatever agency manages the research station, had recently issued condoms to all their personnel. Condoms had always been available at the commissary, but due to the nature of the closed society, that could lead to embarrassments, so a decision was made to give some to everyone whether or not they needed or wanted them.

The cyber-voyeurs of the world hoping to read about hot times at Ice Station Zebra were probably disappointed when they hit this site. Oh, well !

Doyle’s Relative, Maybe ??

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Scotland in 1859. He became a prolific writer; among his many works was “The Canon”, revered for its record of the exploits of the famous British detective, Sherlock Holmes, consisting of 56 short stories and four novels. After a very successful career, Doyle died in England in 1930.

Another writer with a middle name, Erle Stanley Gardner, was born thirty years after Doyle, in Malden, Massachusetts in the USA, in the year 1889. Gardner was also a prolific writer; he turned out 80 novels featuring the criminal defense attorney, Perry Mason, and also wrote 30 Cool and Lam detective novels under the pen name A.A. Fair, plus many other works. Generally, he is considered to be a writer of “pulp fiction”. Gardner died in 1970 in Temecula, California, a desert resort town south of Los Angeles.

There are a some interesting  similarities between Doyle and Gardner and the people they wrote about,  Holmes and Mason.

Holmes was a detective, and Mason an attorney.  Mason’s cases generally involved quite a bit of detective work. Typically, Mason’s clients were falsely charged with a crime, usually murder. Mason would get them off by identifying the real killer in dramatic fashion in courtroom scenes. Like Holmes, Mason “played it close to the vest”, often leaving his associates (and the readers) puzzled about what he knew and what he planned. Rather than doing his own sleuthing, Mason employed Paul Drake, a friend and a P.I., owner of the Drake Detective Agency.

Many of Doyle’s stories were first published in magazines, notably the Strand in London. The longer novels were serialized. Gardner’s novels were often serialized in the Saturday Evening Post prior to publication as books.

Doyle took an interest in real-life convicted criminals who appeared to be victims of overzealous police and prosecutors. He worked personally on two actual cases and secured the release of prisoners who had been falsely convicted. The resulting publicity and Doyle’s advocacy led to the creation of the Court of Criminal Appeal in England and Wales, an addition to the official court system that provided important safeguards for the accused.

Gardner, writing in Argosy, a men’s crime and adventure magazine, created a private organization known as the Court of Last Resort. It consisted of Gardner himself and an impressive group of legal and criminal investigation experts he recruited, including a former FBI investigator, a criminologist, a lie detector expert, a detective and forensic expert, and a prison psychologist. While not part of any official or government organization, with the publicity generated by the popular magazine, actions of the “Court” freed at least 15 people who had been wrongly convicted of crimes from the late 1940’s until 1960.

Like Holmes, Mason often took on cases that he found to be of singular interest, remitting his fees altogether.

Like Holmes, Mason did not seem to have much interest in, or devote any time to the fair sex. (Mason did have an attractive assistant, Della Street, but their relationship was always businesslike and respectful, and never blossomed into anything more.) Mason was a bachelor and seemed to live for his work alone.

Mason often had to deal with a policeman, Lt. Tragg, who tended to be hard-working and tenacious, but often wrong, not too different from Lestrade, whom Holmes dealt with on many cases.

So how did McMurdo’s Camp become interested in Perry Mason and Erle Stanley Gardner? Besides a mis-spent youth reading about both Holmes and Mason, more recently a couple of sawyers in the Camp were sitting around the stove last winter discussing one of the Holmes stories, The Adventure of the Second Stain (SECO), and commented on the somewhat alliterative title. This led to the observation that two more Adventures shared names with similar attributes, namely The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist (SOLI) and The Adventure of the Dying Detective (DYIN). The discussion quickly slid into the Perry Mason novels, many of which have names of this sort. Here are a few (note that these were called cases, not adventures):

The Case of the Singing Skirt
The Case of the Daring Decoy
The Case of the Mythical Monkeys
The Case of the Waylaid Wolf
The Case of the Duplicate Daughter
The Case of the Shapely Shadow
The Case of the Spurious Spinster
The Case of the Amorous Aunt
The Case of the Phantom Fortune
The Case of the Troubled Trustee
The Case of the Queenly Contestant
The Case of the Daring Divorcee

Not all the Perry Mason stories had names like this, but a very large number of them did. This list is just a sampling.

In case you were worried, we are not going to go on and try to demonstrate that Della Street and Paul Drake were the illegitimate grandchildren of Mycroft Holmes and Julia Stoner, or anything like that. We just thought some of the parallels are interesting. Overall, there can be no doubt that Sherlock Holmes has a great deal more staying power than Perry Mason, despite the popular long-running television show starring Raymond Burr as Mason.

Story Name Antagonist List (see Activities page)

The Cyber-Campers have completed the assignment. View the results in “PAGES”. (Box at upper right)

That Train

On February 4, 1875, our namesake, Jack McMurdo, went for a little ride on a train and then on into history.

The Canon tells us almost nothing about the train itself, except that it had at least two passenger cars.

It is most likely that given its setting, it was also pulling empty ore and coal cars back to be reloaded at the mines. We know that actual smelting of iron ore was taking place on the hillsides, given the mention of slag heaps, cinder dumps, and the red glow of furnaces, which must have been blast furnaces used in the production of pig iron. Slag and cinders are not the byproducts of mining coal and iron, but of ore reduction, although we cannot be certain of Doyle’s knowledge of these processes. Mention of the shafts of collieries definitely tells us there were coal mines. The reference to the iron and coal valleys of the Vermissa district indicates iron mines as well, and of course there would be no need to have furnaces to simply burn up the coal that was being mined. In any event the railroad had to be used to transport coal and iron from whatever source to the furnaces, and then to transport the refined iron to its users.

I believe the railroad line was called the Gilmerton, Merton, and Vermissa Rail Road (GM & V RR). This is in line with the common pattern of railroad names of the era. Small railroads serving a special regional function were referred to as “short lines”, which is undoubtedly what the GM & V was.

The locomotive in service at the time was most likely a Baldwin, the predominant maker of locomotives of the era. The Baldwin Locomotive Works was headquartered in the Philadelphia area which is in Pennsylvania, the location of the Vermissa Valley.

Here are two photos of Baldwin Locomotives of the era. The locomotives of the GM&V were probably fairly new, given the prosperity of the mining district, and that fact that there would have been plenty of investment money for expansion and modernization during and following the Civil War.

The photo at right is the original “Builders Photograph” of a locomotive delivered to the GM&V in 1873.

Below you see the museum locomotive “Tahoe” from the Virginia and Truckee railroad, which represents a good parallel. The “Virginia” of “Virginia and Truckee” is not the State of Virginia, it is Virginia City, Nevada, a mining town in the mountains of the West, much like Vermissa in the East. This is a credible demonstration that it is the sort of locomotive likely to have been in service on the GM&V railroad. The V&T

connected to the               transcontinental UnionPacific RR at Truckee, California, near the Nevada border.

Little is known today about the Gilmerton, Merton, and Vermissa Railroad. It did not last long as an independent operation, and soon merged with two other short lines, their names being long forgotten by history. Later, these combined lines were bought out by the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western which subsequently merged with the Nickel Plate Road, and then floundered following the consolidation of the New York Central and the Pennsylvania Railroads into the Penn Central giant.

By this time, the development of the Mesabi Iron Range in Minnesota and the expansion of the Soo Locks at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, had spelled the death of smaller iron-mining operations in the East.   The  mines in the Vermissa iron and coal districts had either become depleted or financially unviable, and  ceased operations.

One-hundred and thirty years after McMurdo’s ride up the valley, very little remains, except for crumbling remains of the masonry of the blast furnaces, and two small museums devoted to the mining boom of 1855-1890. Rain, time, freezing and thawing, dust and dirt have allowed nature to take control over the cinder dumps and slag heaps, and for the most part they are not discernible under the plant overgrowth to the casual observer.

Elementary, my Dear Watson, (let’s) Possess our Souls in Patience

“Elementary, my dear Watson!” Everyone has heard this, and most Sherlockians know the phrase was never spoken by the Master in The Canon. Holmes did describe things as “elementary” a number of times, and addressed Watson as “my dear Watson” frequently, but the terms were never combined the way popular culture would have us believe.

So did Holmes have a favorite phrase? Of course to answer that you would have to specify a length. If it was three words, “My dear Watson” might take the prize. For something longer than three words, I suggest “Possess our souls in patience”. Holmes says this in VALL, WIST, LADY, and 3GAR. (The Valley of Fear, The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge, The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax, and The Adventure of the Three Garridebs)

Was this really a Holmes original, or did he pick it up somewhere else? I think it sounds Biblical, but I do not know the context. After all, the editions of the Holy Writ are so numerous . . .

Here is the same phrase used in a May 27, 1918 newspaper article from New York Times, quoting a British General regarding the outcome of a WWI military operation. Maybe General Maurice was a Sherlockian, too!

Dayton Symposium 2008

One of our Campers, Jim Zych (rhymes with bike) attended the Holmes Symposium in Dayton, Ohio, in March and has submitted this account:

Friday evening, the Agra Treasurers of Dayton hosted a reception. Revolvers and Handcuffs made of Chocolate were the order of the day! That evening it was announced next year’s symposium would be held May 15-17 instead of the customary March date in hopes the weather would be more cooperative–which was met with enthusiasm.

A total of 35 people attended the symposium in spite of the 12+ inches of snow and Level 3 driving alerts in the area (that means stay off the roads). Many of the members of the Indianapolis, Columbus and Cincinnati areas were not able to attend because of the weather (like OUR first meeting).

A total of 7 presentations were made including one by our member, Regina Stinson, BSI. Her topic–The Moving Sherlock/A Study in Film–dealt with the many actors over the years that have played Sherlock Holmes. The presentation included several film clips to complement and illustrate the points of her text.

Several vendors also attended and a combination of books, photographs, videos, knitted items and unique Bric-a-brac were available.

The evening closed with a cocktail hour, buffet dinner and a Sherlockian “Brain Buster” quiz. Normally the quiz would have been held Sunday morning but was moved forward due to the weather. This gave everyone the opportunity to get an earlier start home–or at least a decent start time since we lost 1 hour with the change to Daylight Savings Time.

Thanks to Cathy Gill for organizing the symposium and to the Agra Treasurers for hosting Friday’s reception.

Son of Speedy Internet Connections

This is supposed to be about Holmes, not the Camp Office computer. But right after telling our correspondents we were unlikely to ever have a fast connection and warning them about sending big files, an opportunity that we had not heard of before popped up and we signed on. Regulars and members have been notified of the new e-mail address that resulted (see also the “Join up” page).

For the curious, it is a wireless connection through the Alltel cell phone system. You get a little gizmo not as big as a spectacles case, that plugs into a USB port. I think it could best be described as a cell phone lacking a speaker, microphone and keypad. By getting rid of the old provider, the extra phone line, and then switching phone service, the cost is about a wash, or maybe a dollar or two favorable. And it works great. Up-front cost after a rebate was under $100.

Speedy Internet Connections

If you have one, great. Most people do these days. Those of us living in tree-filled valleys out in the pineries do not, and have little prospect of getting one anytime soon. So if you are inclined to e-Mail graphics-laden multi-meg files to the Camp Office, please check first. Maybe we can work out a better way, or a convenient time.

Logo

We don’t have one, but might like to. Are there any specialists or experts out there who want to help? My belief is that a good logo should be simple, recognizable, and uncluttered, but not dippy. Should it be Homes-oriented, lumber camp-oriented, or combine the two themes in a clever manner? I would not call this an urgent issue but if anyone wants to pick up the ball and run with it, then everybody else take one step backwards. Contact Matilda by e-Mail or submit a comment.

J. F. Christ Abbreviations

Sherlockians often refer to the stories and novels of The Canon by a four-letter all-caps abbreviation. In our posts and articles we shall make it a practice to write out story names with the abbreviation in parentheses, as was done in the article in the Activities page. In casual correspondence we may use abbreviations alone. If you are not skilled at communicating using this “code” you can find it lots of places. Just Google JF Christ abbreviations.

With the exception of titles involving a number, CHAS, mentioned as part of our members’ assignments, is one of only two (do you know the other?) that doesn’t simply use four ordered letters of the main words in the title as the abbreviation. Must be because “Chas” is a common abbreviation for ”Charles”. It would be easy to draw oneself into an argument on this subject. Even more interesting, why do titles containing a number not follow a consistent pattern? For example, 3GAR, 3GAB, and 3STU are used, but not 5ORA or 6NAP. You could further complicate the question by thinking about ordinal and cardinal numbers, maybe coming up with 2NDS or 2STA instead of SECO.

If any of you campers wish to achieve eternal fame, you may submit a brief monograph on this phenomenon as a comment, or e-Mail it to the Camp Office.