A Work Progressing

Softly we sing, We
Voice the innermost thoughts that Are
Hidden behind the furniture of our mental rooms, As
Guests relax on the sofas, Blind
To the melody that clings in the air like Vines

The world is madly Spinning
Forces are pulling Ourselves
Moving from one orbit, going Around
Yet another shiny thing, And

Not satisfied here, we spin Around
And search for other bright Objects
That attract the eyes And
The egos with Thoughts

Greedy and self-serving Not
Because we intend so, Truly
We are thoughtless in Our
Action, it’s just the nature that we Own.

(with sincere thanks to Lucy)


www.youtube.com/watch

www.youtube.com/watch

My brother is older and has some first hand knowledge of the White Witch. Often, a group of his friends would be driving around, usually “dragging the main”. For a diversion they would drive out to Wildcat Canyon and park in the mansion’s driveway backwards in order to leave quickly. Then they would wait until a light would come on, or movement in the window, and they would take off with the girls screaming. A version of ring the doorbell and run.

One time they brought a “newbie”, a big football type guy, no girls. The “witch” flung the front door open, and stood there silhouetted in the doorlight. He screamed and fell on the floor of the car. They drove off quickly. That was a real event. The other White Witch stories may have some fiction about them, some appear to be adapted from other disconnected stories.

1. She approached parked cars with couples that were making out, then scratched the window with her nails.

2. People were parked and making out when they heard a dripping sound. Then there was blood on the windshield.

3. She was seen walking on the road by her house, then she disappeared.

4. One of the patients at her sanitarium escaped, and she knocked on cars to find him.

5. She is seen walking around in the park at night.

6. She used a shotgun loaded with rock salt to shoot at teenaged trespassers.

7. Scathing music was played for the patients in the sanitarium, it can still be heard late at night, coming from no known source.

8. A young man could not start his car after making out with his girlfriend. He left her in the locked car while he walked to the front of the park to use the pay phone. When he returned he found his girlfriend dead, scared to death by the White Witch. Now the girlfriend’s ghost haunts the park looking for the boyfriend that left her.

9. She has long, wild, white hair and is in a long black dress. She has long, wild, white hair and is sometimes dressed in a wedding gown.

10. One of the White Witch’s patients in the sanitarium had a hook instead of a right hand. The patient had a history of violence. While parked and making out, a couple hears on the radio that the police are looking for someone who had escaped from the sanitarium. The couple heard light scratching on the car. They knew that the White Witch liked to scratch on the cars that were parked. The young man quickly backed out and sped out of the park. He took his girlfriend home, got out of the car to go to the passenger’s side to open the door for his girlfriend. There, hanging on the door handle was a bloody hook, ripped from someone’s arm.

If you grew up in the late 1950s, early 1960s you heard the stories of the White Witch of Wildcat Canyon. She lived in a haunted mansion behind Alvarado Park in Richmond, CA. There was a “speculation” highway built with the idea to develop the land during Richmond’s growth after WWII.

The driving teenagers of the area called it the Deadend Highway, there were very few roads or driveways that connected. One of the driveways was to the Tewksbury Mansion. The mansion was originally built by Richmond pioneer Dr. Jacob M. Tewksbury for his daughter, Eugenia, and her second husband William Mintzer, early President of Bank of America in Point Richmond.

In 1914 it was purchased by Dr. Hendrik Belgum, a native of Norway who had lived in Wisconsin. Dr. Belgum turned the two story mansion into a small private sanitarium, called the Grande Vista Sanitarium. It was popular with the wealthy in Piedmont and Berkeley. It was off the beaten path but still accessible for visiting families.

By the 1940s it seemed that Dr. Belgum was distancing himself from regular outside contact. He preferred the company of the few patients that he had, along with his two spinster sisters that also lived at the Sanitarium, Inga Belgum and Ida Ruth Belgum. Dr Belgum died fighting a fire that was threatening the house in 1948.

The house passed to Dr. Belgum’s brother Bernard Belgum. In 1959 another sister, Christine Heimann, was widowed, and moved from Wisconsin. Bernard tried to keep running the Sanitarium for a few years but he didn’t have a medical degree and there were fewer patients. Only Ida Ruth lived on in the mansion to help maintain the property.

Bernard died in 1963,leaving everything to Christine and Ida. Ida Ruth was a noted local artist, and led a solitary life. She died in 1964. The mansion was empty. Christine, or Kristine, died in 1971 and during the estate sale it was discovered that the abandoned property had been vandalized and eventually burnt to the ground. The property eventually passed to the East Bay Regional Parks.

My guess is that the White Witch of Wildcat Canyon was not a witch at all, but instead, she was the last care giver of the Grande Vista Sanitarium, the artist Ida Ruth Belgum.

The Grande Vista Sanitarium

Not the White Witch. This is Kristi Belgum, Ida Belgium’s mother.

This is my attempt to justify the hours of research into genealogy. I have been on an interesting path, at first I was just collecting names, dates, and places. I would quickly gather then move on for more. It was a little bit like “notches on a gun”, or maybe less dramatically, “nice pieces of Depression Glass”. I had wished that there was more, but the data didn’t provide stories. They were for the most part farmers. Kind of ordinary farmers.

Then I underwent a change. Using the data, I tried to piece together the reason for moving. Using historical events to explain why the dramatic shift. I found that a lot of moves came right after a significant death in the family, most times it was children. Sometimes it was the death of an older family member that had been cared for. Without being able to find diaries or letters, I can’t prove the reasons, but there had to be reasons.

Sometimes I found newspaper articles or obituaries that gave more clues. Collecting data morphed into collecting stories, or conditional stories. I found a distant cousin in Germany that told me the story of over 100 families that wanted to migrate to the USA in order to avoid the constant threat of war. They were right on the French/German border. The Siegfried Line ran right through their village. They had to apply to the emperor for permission. Apparently they had heard about the Hessians going to Pennsylvania.

The emperor said no, but he promised some wonderful newly opened land on the other side of the country, on the border with Poland. It was free, newly drained swampland, lots of water, they spoke German, and he said he would not draft their sons for war. The 100+ families packed up and founded the city of Gros Fahlenwerder, Kreis Soldin, Newmark. Still barely in Prussia. This was around 1800. Apparently the Mayor’s house had a name carved into the lintel, “Diestler”.

Part barn, part house, part official residence.

Well, this was very interesting stuff, and I thank Manfred for his hard work, travel to Poland to dig out the information. Oh yeah, they left one border on one side of the country to go to another border with the same problems. During WWII the place was overrun, many were killed, the rest were driven out. The entire county was given to Poland after the war. Fortunately for my family, they saw the writing on the wall, and had made plans to individually go to the US about 100 years earlier.

Like I said, there are reasons for things, some can be found out by other data, some by reason, and some by a good hunch.

Well, I was pretty happy with my research. I had small, very small, victories, the further back in time, the less data is found. Unless of course you get lucky and have someone famous pop up. No such luck, just farmers, no horse thieves, no bank robbers, no movie stars. And gosh, the holy grail would be to tap into some royalty.

The big reason this would be cool is because so many people have worked to tighten the accuracy of the data. They spend years of the hobby in finding the missing lineage. In the US we have the Daughters of the American Revolution, in Europe there are hundreds of official, and thousands of unofficial data compilers. And it is mostly on the Internet.

Well, I had a bunch of Norwegian farmers on my mother’s side, and German farmers on my fathers side. No gold mine of data to be found.

I was plugging away, going back to the 1600 and 1500s where the data tapers to zero. To add to mix I was using Google to search a few names in addition to the usual family history sites. Then I found a “countess”. A young woman that had married a well-to-do farmer. Bringing her lineage in exchange for a nice house. Suddenly I had a royal connection! I began to search the other families around the same time, and found two or three other connections to the same royal line. It appears times were tough even for blue bloods.

In short order I was connected to most of the royal houses in Northern Europe, particularly of the Scandinavian countries. Royals marry other royals, so the line goes on. There was almost to much data, so I found that I was focusing on direct lineage. Grandparents! I was looking for direct ancestors, not removed cousins or uncles. How many grandparents could I find? On one royal line I went back to 60th great grandparents. Not all were kings and queens. Sometimes the house fell on hard times, wars, revolutions… But the data was there, and some interesting stories to be documented.

I am borrowing heavily from Wikipedia because is it so easy. My hope is to get an interesting list of characters, then find out more from additional sources. So this part of my blog is dedicated to great grandparents..

I spoken of my love of sailing. So many analogies to real life. The great one is relating the tongue (or thoughts) to the tiller/rudder. A very small shift can end up putting you miles off course. There is a need to be constantly adjusting, constantly attending to course direction, based upon the compass, the tide, the wave action, the wind, and most importantly local knowledge. And then then are times when you have to tack.

Tacking is very dangerous, you release the sheets for the jib, the sail goes limp, you throw the tiller in the opposite direction, and the point of the bow crosses the wind. You lose almost complete control. The main boom swings over to the other side, it is first limp with no power, you adjust. The sheets are wound on the winches, and the jib slowly filled with the wind. You crank and crank, then fine adjust.

After you tighten the sheets, trim the main, then off you go, still heading in the same general direction, but the need to change will come again. The wind is howling and the spray flows over the boat with each wave. To get to your destination you will adjust, and readjust, and you will tack and tack again. So it is with life.

I think many people get tired with the process. Sometimes changing the destination is simpler than the process that is necessary to get there. The curious part is that you get to a place that you didn’t want, nor was it a place you were meant to go.

Sailors learn to master the wind, tack into it, change direction multiple times but always with the destination as the goal. And there is a goal, to get to a point where the wind is behind you, no more beating into the wind. You are wing-and-wing, full extended sails, surfing on the crest of waves, and the ocean is silent.

I love the double and triple meaning of words. “It all depends upon your perspective.” What does that mean? Converging railroad tracks in the distance? Or, what you see depends upon where you stand. Generally, I know this to be true, there is a far better chance of understanding if you can actually see the problem.

So, having a place to stand, allows you to see. Changing perspective allows you to see more of a thing. I remember one of the things that stuck with me after reading Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land” was the concept of a Fair Witness. Someone who was trained to tell the absolute truth. Ask them what color a house was, and they would reply, “the color I see reflected on this side is off-white!”. It could have been painted blue on the back side. A change of perspective would have allowed that to be seen.

Often we extend our “sight” to our “thought”. Our vision of history is not only from our personal experience, but also from what we have read and heard. When we throw in a well produced film or video, it is almost as if we have seen it personally. That can be a slippery slope.

Gathering a balanced perspective in history can be difficult when the victors are the only voices. Emphasizing the other side without facts also creates a dilemma. I try as hard as I can, but I can’t read what is not written. And I suppose I can’t fully trust what is written without knowing the specific perspective.

I’m writing this now after I’ve just listened to “Murder Most afoul” by Bob Dylan. It was written and recorded almost a decade ago, but Dylan just recently released it. It’s a rather long ballad about John Kennedy’s assassination. It brought me back. While I wasn’t an adult, it probably was my first “adult-like” thought. I had a first hand experience. I followed the news, I watched the press conferences, I saw Ruby shoot Oswald in the parking garage. It was multiple murders most foul.

From my perspective things might have actually started to spin out of control from that point. A few flashes of brilliance, but mostly darker going forward. RFK, MLK, Vietnam, Chicago, Kent State, Nixon, Agnew, on and on…

It’s a personal perspective that hasn’t changed much from what I’ve seen and read since. I hope I live long enough to see a paradigm shift, where things are building, more then they are falling apart.

There was a time when we would seek out kosher chicken from the butcher, not Safeway. There was probably not much difference in the quality of the meat, the Safeway chicken had the label kosher so my guess is that it’s death was humane. But the butcher variety came with all the extras necessary for the various side products needing “”schmaltz”, the secret ingredient of Jewish health food. The various sweet meats, the scrawny neck bones, and the slightly scary chicken feet. Everything tucked away in the carcass of the bird. Like a surprise box.

Well, it was this surprise that caused my wife to flee the kitchen, leaving the bird unattended in the sink. I was told to deal with it. When I arrived the chicken lay there with one scrawny foot peaking out, as if the chicken was giving birth to an alien. It was a terrifying sight!

I removed both feet, neck and innards, then had an interesting thought. I was busy at the sink, running water, and the two kids were right in the next room watching television. Sherry was still hiding from the chicken feet somewhere.

I’m not saying I ran this next few minutes through a proper “parenting filter”, but I went ahead with the plan anyway. I ran the hot water until there was plenty of steam wafting about. Then I grabbed the chicken feet, one in each hand, and pulled my shirt cuffs down to cover my fists. Then I screamed that the water was too hot. “Jeowww!, I’ve burned my hands. Help me! Help me!” Both kids came running into the kitchen just in time for me to turn around, silhouetted by billowing clouds of steam, reaching out with my hideous claws.

The looks on their faces told me of future years of intense therapy. Widening eyes, screams of fear and empathy, and a sudden awareness of “what was I thinking?”

I don’t usually repost, but this was just too snarky to pass up. British sarcasm!

An Obituary printed in the London* *Times…..Absolutely Dead Brilliant!!* 👌👌

Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense, who has been with us for many years. No one knows for sure how old he was, since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape. He will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as: 

– Knowing when to come in out of the rain; 

– Why the early bird gets the worm; 

– Life isn’t always fair; 

– And maybe it was my fault. 

Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don’t spend more than you can earn) and reliable strategies (adults, not children, are in charge).

His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but overbearing regulations were set in place. Reports of a 6-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended from school for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition. 

Common Sense lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the job that they themselves had failed to do in disciplining their unruly children. 

It declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to administer sun lotion or an aspirin to a student; but could not inform parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion. 

Common Sense lost the will to live as the churches became businesses; and criminals received better treatment than their victims. 

Common Sense took a beating when you couldn’t defend yourself from a burglar in your own home and the burglar could sue you for assault. 

Common Sense finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot. She spilled a little in her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement. 

Common Sense was preceded in death,

-by his parents, Truth and Trust,

-by his wife, Discretion,

-by his daughter, Responsibility,

-and by his son, Reason. 

He is survived by his 5 stepbrothers; 

– I Know My Rights 

– I Want It Now 

– Someone Else Is To Blame ,I’m always right,

everybody is wrong —

– I’m A Victim

– Pay me for Doing Nothing 

Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone. 

If you still remember him, pass this on. If not, join the majority and do nothing.

————-

“Common Sennse is so uncommon”