Cut-out from the Pine Bluff High 1914 Annual

Walter Trulock, Jr, actually.  Seated in the middle.  And on the opposite side of the page:

Woman or Man?

The latest twist in the continuing saga of the dead man in the casket is that it might be a woman.  This is something I  considered a possibility from the beginning, but a co-worker of mine, a retired gentleman I hired to work when I'm off work, said the body in the photo resembles an aunt of his. 

An embalmer's photo perhaps?

Someone said today, visiting my office, that the photo of the dead man in his casket was probably taken by a person who worked at the funeral home where the man was embalmed. 

This person who was in my office, Ray, also said if that was the case they should be more careful with the photo(s) and not let them get out in public.  (I found it on the Recycling Center parking lot, where there are two 30-cubic-yard roll-off dumpsters, or 30-yd open tops, as we in the solid waste biz call 'em).  Ray also said (he says a lot) that his sisters in fact took photos of their deceased mother in her casket but he didn't want one since he wanted to remember her the way she was when she was alive.  Surely I could not agree more.  The strangeness of open caskets and viewing of the body.  Is it a way to reassure people that the person is really dead? 

My own body I plan to give to the nearest medical school, the Univeristy of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, in Little Rock.  Then I'd have a memorial marker out at the family plot in Pine Bluff.  I might even adopt the epitaph of a neaby marker of someone whose last name was Garner: "Lord, I tried."

Binary, Jobs, Lovins

See my previous post on binary numbers for more info and also for the correction I just made for the decimal expressions for the binary numbers 111011 and 111111.  


Also see this web page for "live" conversion of binary, decimal and hexadecimal numbers.


The binary equivalent of the decimal number 111,011 is 11011000110100011.  For decimal number 111,111 the binary expression is 11011001000000111.


I know!  Who cares?  

Well, I can take this opportunity to say I do without all the things Steve Jobs and crew have created.  I thought the original Apple II computer ad in Byte magazine in 1978 (I had a subscription) was pretty stupid, including the name (Apple).  Then in 1985 when I first used the Macintosh, I did not like it a bit.  I liked entering commands and programming, and didn't like the mouse experience, since as far as I could tell I was controlled by the computer rather than being able to control the computer.  I knew the machine language or "op codes" of the Motorola 68000 CPU in the Mac, but couldn't figure out how to get past the mickey mouse point-and-click environment and enter commands. 


Never had a ipod nor none of the other istuff, and don't care to. How have they improved the world?  The man close to Steve Jobs age (also my age) who would get my vote for working to change the world in a positive way is Amory Lovins, of the Rocky Mountain Institute.

To Sea Again in November

This article is scheduled for publication in December in the Jefferson County Historical Quarterly:

A Brief Reminiscence of World War II

by Walter N. Trulock III

Note from David Trulock: This is the second and final part of an autobiographical sketch my father wrote in 1981, eight years before he died. In the first part, published in the Quarterly six years ago (Vol. 33, No. 4), he wrote about his life up to his sophomore year at Hendrix College, 1940-41. The account picks up here during his junior year.

                On December 6, 1941, we had a big formal dance at Hendrix, and my closest friend, Ed Lester, had the bright idea that a group of us would stay up all night and go to breakfast in the dining hall in our tuxedos.  After breakfast we all went to bed and were sleeping soundly when someone came in after lunch and told us the unbelievable news—that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.

                Shortly after that, the Navy sent an officer to talk to a group of us about enlisting as apprentice seamen and being allowed to stay in school to get our degrees before going to midshipmen’s school for officer training.  Several of us in our junior year were sworn in to that program on January 28, 1942.  In the early spring of 1943, Hendrix announced it would award degrees to students who were called into service in their final nine weeks prior to graduation. The Navy had said it would call us when we got our degrees, not before.  So it took a little persuasion to get the Navy to call us early, but they did this and Ed Lester, Guy Moseley and I were ordered to report to Columbia University in New York on April 5, 1943. This began my longtime love affair with New York.

For the next 15 weeks we marched around Morningside Heights and went to classes eight hours a day in navigation, seamanship, gunnery, etc.  We studied every night until lights out at 10:30 p.m.  Our free time was from Saturday noon until 5:00 p.m. on Sunday, three out of every four weekends.  Ed, Guy, and I spent most of those Saturday nights in one room at the Roosevelt Hotel, going to see the Hit Parade Live with Frank Sinatra (it was free to those in uniform) and to see the shows at the Paramount, Roxy and Radio City, plus the big bands playing the Cafe Rouge at the Hotel Pennsylvania and the Bowman Room at the Biltmore.

My mother had a friend from her Hollins College days who had married a young lawyer from Atlanta who had risen rapidly in one of the great Wall Street law firms (he had the RCA account). They lived in Riverdale in the old Colgate mansion overlooking the Hudson River just north of Manhattan. I spent a few weekends with them (they had two daughters, one my age and one younger) during my stay at Columbia. This was my first glimpse of how the real rich lived. The stone house was huge and elegant with large rooms, high ceilings and beautiful grounds. They had a Scottish couple who lived on the property and acted as cook-maid and butler-chauffeur. Their home was to become my home away from home throughout my navy career.

I studied the unfamiliar subjects as though my life depended on learning the material and was rewarded by being among the top 25 graduates (out of 1280 graduates—1600 had started) who were honored at a sword dinner at the New York Yacht Club (only the top graduate got a sword).  My parents came up for our graduation and got to see the musical Oklahoma! which had just opened to rave reviews. Every graduate wanted sea duty—or said he did—and we three Arkansans got our wish. Ed was assigned to a destroyer escort, Guy to the Battleship Wyoming (a gunnery training ship in Norfolk, Virginia), and I was ordered to the USS Laub (DD613), a relatively new destroyer.  I was to report for duty on August 7 in Norfolk, but the Laub turned out to be in the Brooklyn Navy Yard instead, having just gotten back from the invasion of Sicily.

On August 10, 1943, I reported aboard the Laub, the ship that was to be my home for the next two years and two months. I arrived as an unbelievably green ensign and left as Gunnery Officer and Senior Watch Officer.  It took me only a few days to realize that much of my training had been useless. We were taught nothing about radar, sonar and the mechanical computer that solved the gunnery problem.  I also learned that I had to rely heavily—entirely, at first—on the senior petty officers who served under me to see that all of our gunnery, torpedo and fire control equipment was maintained and utilized properly.

Our first mission after I came aboard was to escort a convoy of troops and supplies to Oran, Algeria, where preparations were almost complete for the landing operation on the European mainland at Salerno, Italy. This first voyage was uneventful; the Germans and the weather cooperated to give us a smooth crossing and return. Much to my surprise we were back in the Brooklyn Navy Yard in only 30 days. I flew home for a quick leave and almost ruined my ears on my first commercial flight. The old DC-3's then in use by most airlines were not pressurized and my éustachian tubes were blocked and the pain on descent was intense. A doctor at Grider Field told me I should never fly again, but I have logged hundreds of thousands of miles in the air since then—thanks to pressurized cabins.

Our next trip was to England, stopping first at Swansea in Wales.  A few of us took a train to London where I watched an air raid from my hotel window near Piccadilly. Next we moved up to Glasgow, Scotland, then to Belfast, Northern Ireland, thus giving me a quick look at all four parts of the United Kingdom. We then escorted troops and supplies to the Mediterranean, stopping at Oran again. Our convoy was hit by German torpedo bombers off the coast of Tunisia. They sunk two large troopships and a destroyer just like ours. I'll never forget the sight of our sister ship slipping vertically, stern first, below the sea. We continued to Palermo, Sicily, and brought troops back to England, then we returned to New York.

We began 1944 with a quick convoy to Londonderry, Northern Ireland, and back. Our next mission was to escort some ammunition ships from Norfolk to the Mediterranean, but one of them became disabled in a severe storm.  We were assigned to stay with her, and in maintaining position near the stricken ship we necessarily had to get in the trough between mountainous waves during our turn.  We got caught in between and could not get out, rolled 72°, and lost one man and a lot of equipment overboard. I was asleep between watches on the wardroom couch and was buried under metal chairs and a movie projector. We limped back to our home navy yard in Brooklyn for repairs.

After three or four weeks in the yard, we left to join our squadron in the Mediterranean. We arrived in Naples in early May. What a beautiful harbor! What a dirty port city! There was an allied officers club high on a hill overlooking the bay with Mount Vesuvius in the background. It was an outdoor facility with tables set among orange trees. The Allied Armies in Italy had troops from many countries and it was a sight to see the different uniforms and faces of their officers:  Poles, French, Moroccan, Gurkhas, Sikhs, Australians, and South Africans, to name a few.

Every other night we would escort one or two American cruisers up the Italian coast to shell the German positions around the stalled beachhead at Anzio.  After being stalled for over six months after the initial landings, the Allies were about to mount a major offensive to break through to Rome.  On the night of May 22, the night before breakout attempt was to be launched, our officer of the deck zigged the wrong way on our zig-zag plan and we were rammed and almost cut in two by the Cruiser Philadelphia. By some miracle we only lost two men, but had to be towed back to Naples. We spent six weeks in dry dock there, were then towed all the way back to Boston and finally went to sea again in November.

                The story ends here because my dad wrote this for a genealogy project that my youngest brother Arch was working on at Pine Bluff High School. When it was time for Arch to turn in his project, Daddy stopped writing. Despite some prodding from my brothers and me, he didn’t pick it up again. 

But there is one final story he once told me:  His journey home after the war in October 1945 was on a Greyhound bus, which was scheduled to stop at the bus station in downtown Pine Bluff at about 3 a.m.  Since the bus was coming in on Highway 79 North, young Lt. (junior grade) Trulock asked the bus driver if he’d mind letting him off at the Free Bridge Store instead of the bus station.  The driver didn’t mind (Dad had a large wooden footlocker that traveled on into town and had to be picked up later), so my father’s return from the war was on foot.  He told me there was a full or nearly full moon that night as he walked the last mile home from the war.  I asked if he had a key to get in. From my own experience as a child on that same farm, I should have realized what the answer would be: “Oh, we never locked the door.” –DT

Veteran's Day (formerly Armistice Day)

Binary numbers and today and tomorrow's date

You know of course about the binary number system.  With computers being as common as pig tracks these days, everybody has heard that digital computers use binary numbers.  Not many people know that there are also analog computers, which perform mathematical operations such as differentiation and integration using "op amps" or operational amplifiers.  The first integrated circuits (chips) were op amps that combined many transistors in one package.  Who can forget the famous 741 op amp? 

Anyway, binary numbers were and are interesting in their own right, never mind computers.  Except I do remember when the first home computer was announced, in January 1975 in Popular Electronics (I had a subscription), and I was quite perplexed by what it was supposed to do.  It was a rectangular box that had several rows of single LEDs that displayed binary numbers in a simple on/off fashion.  Commands were entered as binary numbers using a row of switches.  That was it.  With external relays and such, you could turn on and off your house lights, for example.  Whoowee!  But it had an off-the-shelf microprocessor, the Intel 8008, so it was a microcomputer.  Popular Electronics gave the list of parts and instructions on how to build it.

It was useless as a calculator, but if you knew enough and could find the parts you could make it into  a bulky boxy desktop calculator.  Only high-dollar buyers of computers--university computer centers and large companies-- had CRT computer screens and the requisite equipment to make them usable. If you were taking a computer programming class, Fortran or Cobol or assembly language, you used punched cards to run your program, and you got the results on a large green-and-white paper printout.

Handheld calculators, however, had just a couple of years earlier become affordable for students. I had one my father bought me for the first physics class I took in the summer of '74.  It cost in the neighborhood of $100, a Texas Instruments scientific type.  I thus got interested in physics about the time slide rules were going out of fashion and were being replaced by calculators.  I never had to use a slide rule, and I don't remember seeing anyone carrying one around on his belt.  I did buy one at Hendrix College in 1978--actually the bookstore manager gave it to me, since no one was buying them by that time--and I learned the basics of how to use it.

But back to binary numbers.  The 17th century scientist-mathematician-philosopher Gottfried Liebniz called binary numbers the language of God.  This is because so many things in nature do take a dual or binary form, such as male-female, positive-negative, yin- yang, dark-light, love-hate, to-be-or-not-to-be.  Binary numbers, or base-2 numbers, are nowadays expressed in the symbols 1 and 0.  This is all you need for a number system: an incremental unit and identity element, and a "zero" as a placeholder and null element. 

When you write a number in normal decimal notation, you write it in descending powers of ten.  So 468 is 4 x 10-to-the-second-power + 6 x 10-to-the-first-power + 8 x 10-to-the zero-power.   And of course there are ten numerals or symbols in the base ten system, 0 thru 9.

So, today's and tomorrow's dates look like binary numbers (ignoring the backslashes or dashes you have to use to actually write the date, and of course with 2011 abbreviated to 11). An interesting (to me) exercise is to compute what decimal number these numbers, 111011 and 111111 (written in the American and not the European order), would represent if they were binary numbers:

111011  =  1x2⁵ + 1x2⁴ + 1x2³ + 0x2² + 1x2 + 1x1  =  32 + 16 + 8 + 0 + 2 + 1  =  59.  Since the 1 in 111111 replaces the zero placeholder at the 2² position of 111011, we just have to add 4 to 59 to get the decimal equivalent of 111111, which is 63.

A harder and even more pointless exercise is to consider the numbers to be decimal (111,011 and 111,111) and to compute their binary equivalents (maybe your calculator can do it).

As a final useless activity, here's the base 16 representation of the binary numbers 111011 and 111111.  Base 16 (hexadecimal) needs 6 more characters than base 10, and A, B, C, D, E, F are the universal choice.  Here's the binary to hex conversion:

0000=0, 0001=1, 0010=2, 0011=3, 0100=4, 0101=5, 0110=6, 0111=7, 1000=8, 1001=9, 1010=10, 1011=A, 1100=B, 1100=C, 1101=D, 1110=E, and 1111=F.

Our binary dates written as hexadecimal numbers are 11 1011 = 3A, and 11 1111 = 3F. (You group the binary digits (bits) into groups of four bits each to express them as hex numbers. I left out the two zeros to the left of the ones in writing 11, see?)

Now when you get some error message like this (I hope you don't) ....

"A fatal exception OE has occurred at 0167:BFF99B3B. The current application will be terminated.

*Press any key to terminate the current application.

*Press Ctrl+Alt+DEL to restart your computer.

You will lose any unsaved information in all applications. Press any key to continue."

....(in other words "press any key and you're still 1111 U 1100 K 1110 1101") you know why there are the Bs and Fs in there--it's a binary number expressed in hexadecimal notation.

Happy Armistice Day, eleven eleven eleven!

Random notes on the passing scene

Well, it's still snake weather around Pine Bluff.  It was about 75 degrees Fahrenheit at sunset today and as I was ending up my walk on the trail, sweating, I stopped for a moment after Jessie stopped (I'd put her back on the leash by then, to avoid her taking off after deer and being gone when I was ready to leave).  We were on a high sloping bank above the bayou, and I saw what at first looked like a stick, about 12 or 13 inches long, near a big cypress tree less than 10 feet away.  I looked closer, and yep, it was a snake.  Copperhead again, but bigger than the one that bit me on Sept 8.  It's skin was dark enough I thought at first it was a mocassin, but I looked closer and could see the copperhead pattern.  It kept it's head down, continuing to look very stick-like, even though I had a few words to say to it (no cussing, just normal conversational talk).   Earlier, in the middle of the trail, I'd seen a stick about the same size that looked like a snake due to its missing some bark in places and being slightly sinuous.   I stopped quickly when I saw it, then kicked it off the trail, relieved but with my heart beating a little faster.

Jessie stopped to sniff the air, not because of the snake, which she apparently didn't see.  She's seen them on the trail several times when she wasn't on the leash, passing right by them sometimes and other times stopping and looking warily at them and then going on her way, helped along by me shouting, "No!  Let's go!" several times.

I've been wearing boots on the trail ever since the snakebite.  This is the second or third snake I've seen since then.

Now let's get off snakes and onto burns.  The best thing you can do for a burn, the usual kitchen burn, is to get it under cold water immediately and keep it there for several minutes.  I did this after taking a hot iron skillet out of a 400 degree oven using a whatchamacallit (hot pad?), then a moment later getting burned when I pushed the skillet to the side on the stovetop with only my bare thumb and two fingers. How quickly one forgets when distracted by other thoughts...

In less than a second, I had my thumb and two fingers under cold running water and I kept them there, impatiently but with determination, for about 4 minutes.  Afterwards, I could still see the burned places (light brown), but they didn't hurt at all, and they disappeared in about 24 hours.  Apparently, the "less than a second" part is crucial.  You're almost superimposing the hot and the cold at a single moment, see?  Almost a superposition of the two.  Well, okay, more like an average, you're right. 

Now for stars and planets.  (Stars exist because they are burning, by the way.)  What's the bright "star" in the east at sunset?  I haven't looked it up, but I looked up at it a few nights ago with binoculars.  I saw what looked like tiny stars lined up (i.e.,.,., in the the same plane) next to the object, which was conclusive proof that it is Jupiter--the tiny "stars" are several of its moons. 

I guess the other, later-rising bright object is Saturn, since it's not reddish (then it would be Mars; don't know where Mars is right now).  And finally, that must be Venus in the west after sunset.  Now I'll go check out an astronomy website to see if I'm right.  Oh yeh, I'd rather be happy than right, but sometimes you, I, we can be both. Right?


A telescope is needed to see Saturn's rings, or maybe very powerful binoculars.  But it's sure an awe inspiring sight.  I was the astronomer's assistant on public nights at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock's observatory during the 1976-77 academic year when I first saw Saturn's rings, clearly and coldly, through the observatory's 26 inch telescope.  Austerity, serenity, and of course beautiful circular symmetry. Very much unlike just looking at a photo of it.   Also, try looking at the crescent moon with binoculars sometime.  You can see it three-dimensionally, like a giant beach ball with a flashlight shining on it.

Oh, yeh, and how about that asteroid passing nearby?  Makes me wonder when the next big one will hit, and where, and if it will be seen before it hits.  

"The Coyotes Ain't Got Me Yet"

I Am Curious (Black & White).