Another Drake's Landing photo from Sports Illustrated

This is my uncle and my father in another ducking hunting photo that appeared in the January 14, 1957 issue of Sports Illustrated.  I already posted a different photo and the text of the section of the article about Drake's Landing.  The photos would have been taken when the writer of the article, Virginia Kraft, and the photographer, whose name I haven't found yet, visited the camp in December 1956. "The camp" or "the duck camp" were our family's shorthand terms for Drake's Landing.  We went to the camp when I was a kid more often for fishing in the warm months than for duck hunting during duck season. But duck hunting was the big deal and the only kind of hunting we did, except for my forays into the woods to try to shoot squirrels with a .22 rifle.  Never did shoot one, but I was not patient enough (or serious enough about it) to just sit and wait, and didn't have a trained dog to help me.  So I've never skinned or gutted a squirrel.  Or anything else for that matter, except for filleting or scaling and gutting fish.  We had help at the camp who de-feathered and gutted the dead ducks we brought in.  I haven't hunted ducks in many years, but that could change.  Same with squirrel, deer, rabbits.  Especially since I'm a part-time country boy nowadays.

Venus, Jupiter, Moon

Or, tonight, that should be moon, Venus, Jupiter, lowest to highest in the evening sky.  Mercury is even visible for a little while after sunset if you have a flat horizon to the west. What a fine springlike day today was, and now I'm thankful for the clear sky tonight and I hope tomorrow too.  Living in a small town has the advantage of a relatively dark sky (the farm is even better, though not as good as in the old days of yore, late last century).  Orion and the dog star are blazing away in the western sky, visible from my side yard at about my bedtime, which these days is 10 pm.  The moon-Venus-Jupiter-show gets even better on the 24th and 25th, and then in March comes the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter.

Algebra can be useful

(This is a note I wrote to my brothers in June 2005.  My brother Jeff was saying at the time that the more items the rest of us brothers kept out of Mother's estate sale the less money he'd get overall  He chose not to keep any items himself in order to maximize the cash he'd get.  But he didn't consider that he'd get his full one-fifth of the appraised value of anything the others of us kept for ourselves, whereas the items in the sale were subject to the 30% fee of the company that handled the sale.)

The simplified estate sale formula

Let’s say the estate sale brings in $20,000.  This is an estimate based on Roy having said he hoped we’d leave in enough stuff for the sale to bring in $20,000.   E in the formula below represents this value, and is the same as (T – X) in the formula I used earlier.   X is still what it was earlier, the total value of the items we keep out of the sale.  U is still the amount any individual keeps out, and $ is the amount an individual will get. 

From Kristin’s June 1^st email, we currently have X = $16,593.

$ =  .70E/5 + X/5  – U  =  14,000/5 + 16,593/5  – U   =  6,118.60 – U .

With each brother’s value of U as shown in Kristin’s email, the proceeds from a  $20,000 sale would give

Jeff:      $ = 6,118.60 –       0.00  =  6,118.60

Greg:    $ = 6,118.60 – 4,385.00  = 1,733.60

Steven: $ = 6,118.60 – 2,431.00  = 3,687.60

Arch:    $ = 6,118.60 – 5,525.00  =    593.60

David:  $ = 6,118.60 – 4,252.00  = 1,866.60

The X/5 in the formula represents each persons 1/5 interest in the total amount of stuff we keep.  One thing this shows is that Jeff gets more money, not less, when the rest of us keep items out of the sale.  He gets his full 1/5 share of the items we keep, whereas if we put everything in the sale, he and the others of us would only get 70% of our 1/5 share. 

For the above figures, the amount we’d each get based on everything (including the car) selling for the appraised price and our getting 70% of the total is

$  =  .70(E + X)/5  =  .70(20,000 + 16,593)/5  = .70(36,593)/5  =  5,123.02

(If we sold the car on the open market for $3,600 we’d each get a little more than this, but not much—about $200 more.)  With the rest of us keeping $16,593 worth of stuff out of the sale, Jeff gets a little over about a thousand dollars more than he would if we put everything in the sale.