Ground Zero

Monday is Groundhog Day.
Pennsylvania’s “Punxsutawney Phil” will get the limelight, as always. The search for shadow will make most newspapers and television stations, and the news will also crash the Internet.
I doubt there will be a moment of silence for “Willie,” once the only groundhog living in Manhattan.
This weather expert died on Thursday, Feb. 2, 1933 — Groundhog Day — on the cusp of stardom.
I’d never heard this story before, but it made the front page of the old Schenectady Gazette. Here’s the sad retelling:
“Willie” was a clubhouse pet for New York City Boy Scout Troop 472. The kids had been feeding and coaching the small animal, preparing him for Groundhog Day heroics. Because open space was —and remains — hard to find in the city, Scouts and their chiefs planned to escort “Willie” to the observation tower of a Fifth Avenue skyscraper. The weather forecaster would have wide open looks at a sunny or cloudy sky.
The stunt involved photographers and a small crowd watching “Willie” show off. The Scouts would then release the woods-dweller into the wilds of New York. Presumably, once they took elevators back to the lobby and found a patch of green.
“Willie” had his own ideas. Scoutmaster Harold Whitford and his nature study team were on their way to the big building when fate and tragedy teamed up in a deadly double feature. The groundhog was in a cage, and something was driving him crazy. Maybe it was the sunlight shining through the thin metal bars of his holding cell.
“Willie” squirmed out of the box. Witnesses said he dashed toward a patch of shadow in the center of the street, where he was run over by a truck.
Scouts tried to save their pal, but little could be done. And that’s how “Willie” lost his chance to compete with that gloryhound, Punxsutawney Phil.

Zero Ground

When Albert Stephens found work, he stayed the course.
Albert was on the job in Saratoga Springs on Jan. 26, 1909, looking over a bunch of toboggans at the city’s toboggan slide. Riders had slipped into a clubhouse to shake the winter chill.
The crew had picked a good night to avoid the cold, just as Albert — who lived on Maple Avenue — had picked the wrong night for part-time employment. Weather observers said the temperature was well below zero. “At Lake Desolation, on top of the Greenfield Mountains, a new record of 49 below zero was set,” read the Schenectady Gazette.
While snow was freezing, so was Albert. “The peculiar part of it was that the boy was standing up all the time and was unaware that the cold was overwhelming him,” read the old Gazette.
Albert may have turned into a snowman had not Mrs. John L. Henning Jr., a nurse, noticed the boy’s rigid stance. She approached him, discovered he was nearly unconscious, and began spreading the word.
Dr. George F. Comstock was at the hill, and examined Albert within the warm confines of the clubhouse. The medical man could not detect a pulse at first, and just a flutter of a heartbeat. But higher temperatures — and seasonal “restoratives” — brought the lad around.
“Dr. Comstock said that it was a remarkable case that the boy should be freezing to death standing up,” the newspaper said. “The physician said that in a few minutes longer, the boy would have died from the exposure.”

The Invaders

Some people saw seeing strange things in the sky during the mid-1960s.
Sharon Zych of Rexford saw strange things on the ground. On Monday, Jan 2, 1967. the 16-year-old student at Shenendehowa High School discovered hundreds of snowballs in the back yard of her home on Garnsey Road.
Another crop had appeared in a field across the street from the Zych residence.
Sharon’s father, Eugene, offered a possible solution: He said the balls might have been formed by the perfect combination of wet snow, humid air and light wind. Sharon did not seem spooked by the winter invaders. She smiled and looked like a giant queen, sitting in a land of miniature igloos.
Click HERE to see Sharon and her subjects.

Message to Space

E.T. phoned home in 1981. G.E. phoned moon in 1961.
The General Electric Co. showed off its stellar communications skills on Tuesday, Feb. 21, 1961, transmitting voice signals to the Earth’s closest celestial neighbor. The stunt involved Democratic Senator Warren G. Magnuson in Washington, D.C., and groundbreaking ceremonies for the multi-million dollar U.S. science pavilion at the Century 21 exposition in Seattle, Wa.
Here’s how it worked: Magnuson spoke by telephone from the nation’s capital, and the man’s words moved through phone lines to the Bell Telephone lab in Holmdel, N.J. From there, the voice was short-waved to the moon. The signal was then picked up by the General Electric observatory in Rotterdam, where engineers placed the message into an AT&T land line, which carried it to crowds gathered at the exposition site.
There was a small screw-up. A transmitter shut down right around the time science guys were making connections just before 5:30 p.m. As the line was being tested — just before Magnuson went on — a woman’s voice came though the ether.
“Frank? Frank?” she said.
Associated Press reported that technicians told the women they were trying to telephone the moon, and asked if she could ring off. “Good heavens,” she replied. “This is Glendale, Calif.”
Then she hung up.
Click HERE to see photos of the local men who plotted G.E.’s trip to the moon.

Radioactive Snow II

In the Feb. 2 edition of The Gazette, I wrote a small piece about radioactive snow that worried people in 1951.
Seems this was not just a quickly-forgotten incident. Some people have always believed atomic fallout from the early 1950s caused deadly problems.
“I read the article with interest, but was surprised when it concluded without mentioning the area cancer deaths attributed to the 1951 radioactive fallout, especially east of Troy,” wrote Dr. Miriam Katz, of the Earth & Environmental Sciences
department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “Atmospheric conditions concentrated fallout there, and cesium made its way from soils to grasses to cows to milk — and to children.”
The radioactive fallout remains a talking point.