September 11, 2017

UPDATE AS OF FRIDAY SEPT. 15 RE: YOUR EMAILS. As of 11:45 this morning, just one ‘first Pizza Hut location in GB’ guess. Anyone else is welcome to try that one. Had a guess on the ’80s sitcom now revamped on Netflix. No, sorry, try a different show. We’ll visit again on Monday.

Greetings from the Computer Cave, cleverly concealed inside a capacious Asus laptop on top of my desk. Whoops, I blew it; now everyone’s gonna know where this stuff comes from.

Well, it’s Week 319 of these festivities, and Week 1 of street repair work in the neighborhood. Well, I guess street reconstruction would be a better term, since they’re tearing off the top two inches and replacing it with a Substance Yet To Be Determined. I put that in caps to make it more dramatic. It’s probably blacktop, aka asphalt.

The company doing it has already suffered its first casualty. They put up all these ‘No Through Traffic’ barricades (with nifty blinking ‘caution’ light attached) throughout the neighborhood. Heading out for my walk the other morning I passed one. Coming back down the same street twenty minutes later I could see from blocks away that the barricade was missing. Upon reaching the scene I realized the barricade was still there, but it lay in several bent and broken pieces on the ground, the now NON-blinking caution light about fifty feet away from the rest of the debris.

Obviously, someone who takes that route daily had just swung around the corner and realized too late that something was there that hadn’t been there the day before. Crunch. I don’t think they stuck around to answer embarrassing questions from any nosey cops, because surely they would have still been there when I came back down the street. When I drove through the area a few hours later the barricade had been replaced.

All of which made me think of the ‘smudgepot,’ the premier early traffic control device. Before fancy reflecting barricades and blinking caution lights there was the homely little smudgepot, as it was called. There was even a name brand one, the Toledo Torch. These kerosene-fueled devices, which resembled round bombs like you’d see in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon, just sat on the pavement surrounding road work areas or other hazards and gave off smoke and at night, a bright flame that could be seen from blocks away. They were very effective, but required re-fueling every day, so when the newer technology became available in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the smudgepot smudged no more. If you want to see one in action, just Google ‘smudgepot’ and it’ll give you a link to YouTube where a Toledo Torch collector has a short video of his fat little rascals blazing away in the night.

Yes, I AM easily amused. When the paving equipment finally gets to my block I may have to ask the guys if they have a smudgepot or two I could have. They’d be great for Halloween.

Let’s check the e-mail files and see how you did with the brainteasers from last week….

Well, one of the main problems with not having access to the Comments section of the website is that you don’t get to see if someone has already answered the question YOU were going to answer.

Consequently, we had five correct answers to the ‘place on Main with the slanty roof’ question. And no other guesses at all on the other questions.

Tell you what, until the Comments are up and running again, I’ll try to give you an update in this space on Thursday or Friday of each week and tell you which questions have been answered correctly so you can focus your intellectual firepower on the other ones.

Please continue to answer the questions by just e-mailing me at john.oconnor@eagleradio.net. I know this method is a little cumbersome, but please bear with us.

Okay, Terry was first in with ‘Griff’s Burger Bar’ as the slanty roof place in the 1800 block of Main. Terry also had some enjoyable memories of Triangle Drug.

Kim, Susan, Price Lister and Mark agreed with Terry. Susan said burgers were just 19 cents in the ‘60s, and Mark said he remembered them being 5 for a buck, which I guess is pretty much the same. They were still in biz when I got here in ’73. I don’t remember the price, but I DO remember they were good.

Side note to Susan: I didn’t quite understand your statement about Edith Ann. Do you wish to be called Edith Ann, or did you want to give her credit for helping you with an answer? A little more detail, please. Thanks.

So, the still-active questions are:

What pop-soul duo put the ‘Philadelphia sound’ back on the map—and charts– in the ‘80s?

What astronaut land on a farm and scared the locals until they found out who he was?

What actor with an ‘other-worldly’ name (actually, his Mom’s maiden name) stars in a popular political drama on Netflix?

Also on Netflix, what ‘80s sitcom has been revived with a brand new cast?

And a question suggested by (thank you) Mark: where was the first Pizza Hut located in Great Bend? Be specific.

Again, just e-mail your answers to john.oconnor@eagleradio.net. I will give you an update here later in the week on which questions have been answered, so you don’t waste a lot of neurons working on a question that’s already been answered.

Have a good ol’ time this week. Thanks for dropping in here.

John