Cars I’ve owned

1955 Chevy BelAir. This was like my first car. Dad paid $65 for it. It was black and silver with velour interior and a Wonderbar radio. Unfortunately, it was a Pennsylvania car so it was full of rust.

Here are photos of the kinds of cars I’ve owned in my life. Some are quite cool. Others are rather boring. All of them were mine! I don’t have photos of all the actual cars I’ve owned, so I tried to find good example photos online. I hope you enjoy a walk down auto memory lane with me.

OK, it's not a car--it's my first Harley. It's a 2001 Sportster 883. I had it for a year in Germany.

Bory standing by our 2004 Harley-Davidson Road Glide outside the Hondo, Texas, courthouse on May 11, 2007.

Another view of my 2004 Harley-Davidson Road Glide.

I own this 2006 Chevy Silverado Hybrid 4X4. It's in storage at my house in Texas.

1962 Plymouth Belvedere. Mine was all black. I painted the wheels white and put a white "bumble bee" racing stripe around the trunk.

1961 Plymouth Belvedere. Mine was lime-green with a white top.

1959 Chevy Impala. Mine was a kind of tan color. It had a monster 348 engine and it could FLY!

1964 Chevy Impala. Mine was all silver. It was quite unusual because it had a 327 motor, bench seats, a four-speed transmission with the shifter on the floor, and a factory tachometer on the dash. It was a beautiful car and it could fly. I traded it and an old Yamaha motorcycle for the 1958 Corvette.

1958 Chevy Corvette. Mine was White with red interior. It had a 327 motor. It was very fast and lots of fun.

1971 VW Super Beetle. Believe it or not, I bought this when I sold the Corvette. Believe me, this was no Corvette!!

1972 Chevy Blazer 4X4. Mine was all white with sky-blue interior. I traded the VW for this because my wife was going to stay in North Dakota for a year while I served in Thailand.

1968 Opel Kadett Wagon. Mine was light blue and a piece of junk, but when it was running it got good gas mileage.

1955 Chevy 210 Tradesman 2-door Wagon. Mine was green with a six cylinder motor and a 3-speed manual transmission with the shifter on the steering column. I bought it as a project car. I stripped it and tried to restore it but it was just too rusty.

1955 Chevy 5-window pickup. This was a project truck. It had a six cylinder motor when I bought it. I put a 327 motor in it that I rebuilt. I also installed a 3-speed overdrive transmission with the shifter in the floor. I painted it 1967 Lincoln Continental Moondust Gold. I had the seats covered in an ivory color with gold highlights. Cool old truck.

1976 Honda Civic CVCC Wagon. Mine was sky blue. Great gas mileage. Not much legroom!

1964 Chevy Nova. Mine was white. It had a six-cylinder motor and a three-speed standard transmission. I had this while I was going to school at LCC in 1978-1979.

1970 VW Karmen Ghia. I bought one just like this when I moved from Athens to Kaiserslautern in 1984. It had new paint but the body was a rusty mess. The engine never worked well and the hood (which you had to open to add gas) would freeze shut when it snowed. I got rid of it as quickly as I could.

1985 Jeep CJ 7. Mine was this color but with tan seats. I had the Jeep for almost 10 years. All my kids, except for Jada, learned to drive on this great old vehicle!

1979 Chevy Caprice. This was a cool car. I bought if from Dub Smith in Wolfforth, TX. It had a 350 cu.in. motor and ran strong. Mine was a kind of yellow color. Jessica wrecked the front end so I replaced it with a white one and never got it repainted.

1994 Buick Century. This is similar to mine. I bought it from my father when he got too sick to drive. It was the first "almost new" car he ever owned.

My mother, Dorothy Jean Firestone Emery

Dorothy Jean Firestone high school graduation photo 1941

Dorothy Jean Firestone Emery

Born October 4, 1923, West Bridgewater, PA

Died, May 8, 1965 (a day before Mother’s Day), Rochester, PA

My mother was born to John Raymond Firestone and Emma Hannah Weyand Firestone. She lived her entire life in Beaver County, PA. She died too young, at 41 years from cancer, in the Rochester General Hospital, just a couple of miles from where she was born. As far as I know she never flew in an airplane and she never got a drivers license. She worked at the soda fountain a 5 and 10 cent store on the main street of Rochester after she graduated from high school. I think that’s where she met my father. I’m the middle child and only son of my mother. My older sister is Joyce and my younger sister is Kathy.

I was just 14 when my mother died. Mom had surgery on Halloween Day of 1964. She had been having “stomach problems” so the doctor decided to do a hysterectomy. According to what dad told us later, when they cut her open they found that she was riddled with cancer so they just closed her up and sent her home. They gave her six weeks to live but she lived over six months. I don’t think dad or the doctors told mom she had cancer or that she was dying. She must have known though. Dad never told me how sick she was. It was only after she died that I learned about the cancer. She seemed to recover some strength in the two months after her surgery. She was still weak at Christmas 1964, but we went to my grandparents (Firestone) for our typical Christmas Day celebrations. Almost immediately after the New Year she started getting weaker. Dad took her to the hospital in early February 1965 because she was feeling so sick. He told us that he let her off near the emergency room door and went to park the car. When he came back she was on her knees and couldn’t get up. They admitted her to the hospital that day and she never left. My birthday was just a month before she died. She was very weak and confused the last few months of her life. Dad took a birthday card to the hospital for her to sign for me. She signed it “Dorothy Emery.” It was probably the last thing she ever wrote. I still have the card.

It’s surprising how few really strong memories I have of my mother. Of course, I can “see” her in my mind’s eye but actual events aren’t very clear to me. I remember her as rather shy. My dad’s brothers, Al and Bill (and sometimes Harold) liked to tease mom. She would always blush and try to ignore them. I think either Al or Bill had dated mom for awhile before she married dad. I may be wrong about that though. Mom didn’t smoke, drink, or use bad language. She did love tea and drank it throughout the day. I clearly remember that mom would never talk badly about another person, even if other people in a room were. The one exception I remember was when we heard the news that some Soviet leader had died. Mom said something like, “The world will be a better place now.” I always thought she said this when Khrushchev died but when I looked him up I found that he died in 1971, so it couldn’t have been at his death. Stalin died in 1953, so I’m sure I was too young to remember that. Hm-m-m?

We always went camping for a week or two every summer when I was young. I don’t know if mom really enjoyed it or not. She would spend most of her time cooking and cleaning up. Dad would go fishing. The kids would run and play. Sometimes mom would go with us to the beach for awhile but mostly she’d just work the whole time were at the campsite.

We had an old-style wringer washing machine in the basement of our house. Before I was old enough to start school I would follow mom around the house as she did her housework. One time I went to the basement with her. She had to leave for a minute and told me not to mess with the washing machine and to be especially careful of the wringer on the top. The wringer was a mechanism of two rollers that you would feed the clothes through to help wring the water out of them so they’d dry faster. The rollers were made of a hard rubber substance. There was a very strong spring that pushed the rollers together to squeeze the water out of the clothes. You would start feeding clothes in between the moving rollers and they would grab the clothing, pull it through, and squeeze the water out. Well don’t you know, as soon as mom left I put my fingers up to the rollers and the silly machine grabbed my hand and started running me through the wringer. I started screaming and mom came to my rescue. No broken bones, but sore fingers and humiliation when she told dad about it that night. On another occasion (I was a toddler so I only know this because mom and dad told me about it) I started down the stairs into the basement and fell. I bounced down the stairs but mom caught me just before I hit the cement floor. Again, I had no broken bones.

Another time when I was a little guy I was in the dining room with mom while she was ironing. We had an old wooden china cabinet. It had glass doors on the top, two silverware drawers below that, and two storage places with doors on the bottom. We used the left hand drawer as a silverware drawer but the right hand one was a catch-all drawer. Any small thing that didn’t have another specific place in the house went into this drawer. I remember there were nails, nuts, bolts, fishing bobbers, small tools, and many other things. On this day I opened the drawer and was investigating its contents. I found a little paper packed, about the size of a pack of paper matches. The front flap had a little slot so it could be completely closed. I was curious so I opened the flap. Inside was a very thin rubber device. I took it out and stretched it out. I’d never seen anything like it before. It looked like a big balloon but the opening was bigger than any balloon I’d ever seen. I put my thumb in the open end and turned around and showed my mother. I asked her, “Mom, is this something to put on your thumb to keep it dry if you get it cut?” She stuttered for a moment, told me “yes,” and asked me to put it back where I found it. I looked in the drawer for it at other times but I never saw it again.

We didn’t have a clothes dryer when I was young. We had either cloth or wire clotheslines strung between posts in our back yard. I remember going out with mom many times to watch her hang the clothes to dry. When I got old enough I would hand clothes or clothespins to her. I remember very clearly that she would run a wet cloth down the length of the clothesline every time before she hung the clothes. That was necessary in Western Pennsylvania in the 50s and 60s because of the air pollution caused by all the steel mills in the Beaver River and Ohio River valleys. I was probably about 10 years old before I understood how dirty things got because of all the pollution. I remember as a young child thinking that snow always turned black on top over night naturally.

Dad was always a bit of a tease. I very clearly remember my mother saying “Oh, Howard!” many, many times.

I’ll post this now but I’ll add memories as they come to me.

Comments?

Fixing an RF-4C Phantom

In late 1974 I was working as a heavy maintenance aircraft mechanic. I worked in AeroRepair, or what we called R&R (repair and reclamation). We were responsible for doing heavy maintenance on the several makes and models of aircraft at Shaw AFB. The primary aircraft on the base was the RF-4C Phantom. This was the photo-reconnaissance version of the F-4C Phantom fighter jet. This model of the F-4 did not carry any armament, only camers and sensors. The most common work we did in R&R was to remove and replace landing gear assemblies, outer wing sections, horizontal tail assemblies, canopies and the various flight control assemblies. We also adjusted the flight control mechanisms, did operational tests on various systems, and prepared engine bays for engine replacement.

Another part of our job was crash recovery. If an aircraft crashed on or near the base we were responsible for recovering all the pieces and helping with the crash investigation (from a maintenance perspective). Most of the mechanics in our branch were qualified to drive all the vehicles used in our job, including the giant 50 ton motorized crane, which could pick up and transport a complete F-4. I was licensed to drive every vehicle in our branch.

One day we got a call that an RF-4C, tail number 265, had just crash-landed on the runway. We immediately responded. The plane was still on the main runway and had to be removed. We brought out the 50 ton crane to do the job. I rode in it and helped direct it to the accident site. The driver was a friend and co-worker named “Pappy” Atkins (Pappy was diagnosed with leukemia and died several years later in his hometown of Slidell, LA). We “carried” the jet to our maintenance hanger and set it down on jacks because two of it’s landing gear assemblies had been damaged in the crash-landing.

We learned that the pilot in the front seat was transitioning from another jet to the RF-4C. An instructor pilot was in the rear seat. They had a normal flight and were coming in for a landing. The pilot didn’t bring the nose of the aircraft down quickly enough after the main wheels touched the runway and the instructor pilot told him to get the nose on the runway. It seems the student jammed the flight control stick forward, causing both of the main landing gears to jump into the air and all of the weight of the aircraft to go onto the nose landing gear. The instructor immediately grabbed the stick and pulled the nose back off the ground, allowing the main gears to settle back onto the runway. When he lowered the nose again, the nose landing gear shattered, the radome (big black fiberglass nose of the aircraft) dropped to the runway,  and the pitot tube (the hollow sensor projecting out of the radome) went under the arresting cable that runs across the runway (usually grabbed by the tailhook of the airplanes, like on an aircraft carrier). The thick cable cut through the radome, destroyed the forward radar package, and buried itself in the frame of the nose of the airplane. The plane came to an abrupt stop just at the edge of the runway. The arresting cable also wedged itself between one of the main tires and the landing gear strut. The pilots tried to open their canopies but the entire front end of the airplane had been slightly bent and they wouldn’t open. They were afraid a fire would start at any moment so they blew the canopies. One of the canopies landed on a wing of the airplane, destroying the trailing edge flap. No fire ever broke out.

We freed the RF-4C from the arresting cable, lifted it with the 50 ton crane, and took it to our maintenance hanger. We carefully set it down on a set of jacks because of the missing nose landing gear mechanism. Everyone who was anyone came to the hanger to see the crashed jet. The Wing Commander, Col. Roland Hull also came. He was relieved that the pilots were OK but he was concerned about the condition of the jet. It’s a bad reflection on a commander if he loses one of his planes. He asked our boss if there was a possibility that the plane could be fixed. Our boss said it probably could be, but it would take a couple of days to determine the extent of damage. The Commander asked him to do his best to get it fixed and back into the air quickly. Our boss knew he needed to assign someone to the airplane to supervise the repairs that would be done by many different shops on the base. He asked me if I’d like the job. I’d been in the shop for about a year. I was a pretty good mechanic and the boss knew I was very organized. He knew he’d need someone who could keep track of the ordering parts and the maintenance flow. I told him I’d love the job but I had some requests. I explained that when I was in Thailand I saw something that caused me concern. Two F-4E aircraft were waiting to taxi onto the runway when a bigger airplane tried to taxi by them. The wingtip of the bigger plane hit the vertical tails of both F-4Es, badly damaging both airplanes. One was repaired quite quickly but the other one was more badly damaged. They put it into a hanger but didn’t assign anyone to it to supervise the repairs. Whenever a mechanic got hurt and couldn’t walk around the flightline, they’d put him into the hanger to try to order parts and schedule maintenance on the broken plane. As soon as that mechanic would get well the plane would just sit. Parts that had been ordered for the jet would just be thrown into the hanger around the plane. When someone on the flightline needed a part quickly for another jet they’d just drive by the hanger to see if the part was there. If they found what they needed they’d just take the part. That plane didn’t get fixed the entire time I was in Thailand because they hadn’t assigned one mechanic to supervise the repairs and they didn’t control the parts for it. So, I told my boss I’d love the opportunity to supervise the repairs if he’d guarantee me that we’d keep someone on the plane 24 hours a day until it was repaired. I also asked him if he’d talk to the Chief of Maintenance for me. I wanted to know that no one could just come in and take parts I’d already ordered for this jet and also that no one could take parts off my jet to fix another jet (this is a common practice known as cannibalization–you take good parts off a badly broken plane to fix a good plane quickly and then you back-order the parts for the badly broken plane). He got the Wing Commander to assign a security policeman on the plane round-the-clock and the Chief of Maintenance let all the shops know they couldn’t take anything off the plane without his written approval.

The Wing Commander told our boss that he really wanted the plane to fly again before two months. If a plane was damaged and couldn’t be repaired in that time it was moved into a different category of damage, which reflected badly on the Wing Commander. My boss told him he couldn’t promise it would fly that quickly but that we’d try to make it happen. I worked long hours on the plane for two months. During this time I didn’t work on any other jets. However, I did compete in the NCO (Non-commissioned Officer) of the Month competition during that time and won the top prize for the whole base! We went right down to the line to get the plane repaired in two months. It was difficult because some of the parts we needed weren’t anywhere in the Air Force supply system. We had to get the lower camera access door off a plane that had crashed in the Gulf of Mexico, was recovered, and was laying in a heap in the Air Force aircraft graveyard in Arizona. They had to turn the wrecked hulk over with a bulldozer to get to the door. It was so badly damaged that our sheet metal shop had to replace all the skin on the door before we could use it. We finally got everything fixed and did all the required operational checks we could do in the hanger. We turned it over the the test flight pilots on the last day of the two month repair time. No one expected the aircraft to be cleared by the pilot on it’s first FCF (functional check flight). The pilot kept the plane in the air for almost an hour and a half. When he landed he smiled and said, “It cleared!” It was returned to the operational fleet.

From the outside, no one could tell 265 had ever been in a serious accident. However, if you opened any of the doors on the nose section and looked inside you could see all the repairs that had been done to the structure of the plane. Also, they did measurements on the plane and determined that it was bent almost two inches from the front of the windscreen to the tip of the radome. You couldn’t tell that it was bent but it was. Pilots later told us that it couldn’t fly quite as fast as other RF-4Cs they’d flown. About a year after 265 was returned to the fleet I was walking on the flightline. I saw some pilots at the plane and stopped to talk with them. They told me they were from the Idaho Air National Guard and they were taking the plane to their unit (it was common for older planes from the active fleet to be given to the National Guard units in various states). I asked them if they knew that 265 had crash-landed. The pilot looked astonished and said, “It crashed? It CRASHED!” I told him the story of the crash-landing and the repairs we’d done. I showed him some of the repairs up in the camera bay in the nose of the plane. I told him the plane had been flying with few problems since it had been repaired. He seemed somewhat comforted but still slightly uneasy about climbing into it for the flight to Idaho. That was the last I saw or heard of RF-4C tail number 265.

Wijshagen, Belgium, Celtic burial urn (Cista)–or–Dead guy in a bucket!

Front of a publication by the Belgian National Archaelolgical Ministry showing the three Celtic burial urns found at Wijshagen, Belgium, in 1986 and 1987.

Statue of the Celtic burial urn I found. The statue is in front of the church building in Wijshagen, Belgium.

While Bob DiBella was digging up the bronze pin of a 2,000 Roman woman (see previous post) I was zeroing in on a deep and loud signal from my metal detector just a few yards away. I had a very high-tech Garrett detector so I was able to detect metal objects easily. I knew from the tone and strength of the signal that whatever was buried below my feet was deep and rather large. That meant it was probably very old and probably Roman!  My heart started beating faster as the beeps on my detector got louder.

The soil at this place was very sandy. There were no rocks. The archaeologists who had been working the site for the previous two summers had removed all the grass and topsoil. It was very easy to dig for buried objects. I slowly began to remove soil from the place under the search coil of my detector. As usual, I started with a small hole. After a couple of scoops I found nothing so I checked the area with my detector again. The signal I got told me there was definitely something there, just deeper. I enlarged the hole and continued to dig carefully so as not to damage whatever was in the soil. I continued to check the growing hole every six inches or so but I still didn’t find what was making my detector send out the signals. The deeper I dug the louder and stronger the signals got and the more excited I got. I enlarged the radius of the hole and continued to dig deeper. At one foot, still nothing–clean sandy soil. At two feet, still nothing–a louder signal still, but no metal yet. At one yard the detector was screaming at me and I finally saw a circular green stain about ten inches across. Now I was really excited. There are only two metals that make green stains when buried for a long time–copper and bronze. I enlarged the hole even more and after just a few more inches of digging I saw the round metal object that made the green stain. I knew immediately it was some kind of bucket and I knew for sure it was as old as the Roman coins that had been found above it just the day before.

I very carefully excavated around the object. As more of it was exposed I saw that it was indeed a bucket. It had horizontal ridges down the sides, much like a modern metal coffee can. There were also metal loops attached on the top lip of the bucket where a handle had been attached at one time. As I dug down around the bucket and started finding bronze items laying all around it–there were twenty in all. Another object near the bucket was a twisted bronze handle for the bucket. I also found a big (fist-sized) blob of rusted iron near the base of the bucket. Although I had never seen one, I was sure that I had found a first century Roman burial urn.

While I was still clearing the dirt from around the bucket and before I removed it from the ground a car pulled up and a Belgian father and son got out and came to see what we were doing. The man started speaking in Flemish and when I said I only spoke English his teenage son began to translate for us. The man asked what we were doing. I told him we were metal detecting and that we had the permission of the national archaeologists to look for coins and things at the site. He said something about us having a pretty big and deep hole for just some coins. He walked over and looked down into the hole. When he saw the exposed bucket he asked what it was and I told him I thought it was an old bucket. He smirked and said that it was probably only one or two hundred years old. I told him I thought it was older, and he said that it was probably nothing important because they’d found things going all the way back to Neolithic times at this site in the past. When he looked closer and saw the bucket clearly and the twenty bronze items I’d found around it, he told me I should probably stop until he could get an archaeologist to look at it. He said he was a member of the local archaeological society and he knew of an archaeology student who lived nearby. They got in their car and drove off.

I told Bob that that was probably going to be the end of it for us. I was sure they would take the bucket and the bronze pieces. I continued cleaning the dirt from around the bucket and then I removed it and the bronze pieces from the hole and set them at the edge of the hole. The bucket was full of sandy soil so I dug into the center of the bucket and began to remove some of the dirt. A little over halfway down in the bucket I came to a layer of gray ash and pieces of bones. I knew for sure then that what I had found was a burial urn. A few minutes later they returned. A young man, Guido Creemers, was with them. He was an archaeological student. He ran over to the bucket and started talking very quickly about how he had to take the bucket and all the bronze pieces and give them to his professor. He gently bundled everything into a cardboard box, put the box in the trunk of the other man’s car, and they drove off. I was sure that was the last I’d see of my mysterious bucket.

The next day I was coming out of a meeting on the military base when a Belgian military officer approached me and asked me if I knew the man who had found an old bucket with a metal detector a few days before. I told him I was the man and asked him if there was a problem or if I was in some kind of trouble. He said he didn’t know anything, only that someone from the Belgian Department of Archaeology had contacted them and asked them to get the name and phone number of the American military guy who had found the old bucket with a metal detector. I gave him the information and immediately began to worry.

That evening I got a call from a man named Luc van Impe. He identified himself as the head of ancient burials for the Department/Ministry of Archaeology of the Belgian government. He wanted to ask me some questions about the urn that I’d found. I immediately asked him if I was in any trouble. I told him that my friend, Rich Evans, had received verbal approval from the archaeologists who had been at the site for two years before we started detecting there. Mr. van Impe told me he wanted to explain the Belgian law about metal detecting on public property. Then he said that there wasn’t any law! He said I wasn’t in any trouble because the law in place at the time said that I could search and dig on any public property and I could keep anything I found. (NOTE:The law concerning hobby metal detecting has changed in Belgium. It is now very difficult for a hobbyist with a metal detector to get permission to search. Please consult local authorities or the nearest museum in Belgium if you go there and want to metal detect.) Mr. van Impe said he wanted to come visit me to ask questions about what I saw as I was digging the urn out of the ground. The problem was that archaeologists want things left in situ, which means that they want to record how they are in the original soil before they are carefully removed. All of that information was gone because I removed the urn, the handle, the iron blob, and the twenty bronze items before Guido Creemers arrived. I gave him my address and he said he’d be over the next night to talk. Before he hung up he asked me how I knew to detect where I was detecting. I began to explain how my friend, Rich Evans, who lived near the site had asked me to detect there. He interrupted me and said, “No, how did you know to search there?” I again began to explain about finding some Roman coins there the day before and that’s why I returned to the same general area. Again he interrupted me and asked, “No, how did you know to search in that exact spot?” I told him I had gotten a signal on my detector that sounded rather large and deep so I started digging. He was silent for a moment and said, “Oh, you must have been using an American military mine detector.” I assured him I was using a commercial hobby detector (My detector was a hobby detector, but it was one of the best on the market at the time.). He said that was impossible and asked again how I knew to dig in that exact spot. I again assured him that I had just picked up the signal with my detector and began digging. He was incredulous and began to ask again but then he said, “I find it almost impossible to believe that you could detect the urn with a commercial hobby metal detector because the archaeological student told me the hold was over a meter deep (over three feet). I explained that the Garrett metal detector I was using was one of the best on the market and it had indeed detected the urn at that depth. He asked where I got it and I told him I ordered it through the mail from a company in Florida. He was dumbfounded. He told me that he found it very difficult to believe that such a detector could find things so deep because his archaeologists had tried using detectors some years before and they just didn’t work well. The truth is that detector technology improves almost as quickly as computer technology so my detector was light years ahead of the ones they would have used five or ten years before.

Again he asked if he could come visit to talk about the find. We scheduled a time for the next night. Then he said, “Do you know how much trouble you’ve caused by finding the urn?” I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about because he had just told me that it was legal for me to search and dig up what I detected. He said I caused trouble for him and his colleagues because the urn wasn’t supposed to be there. I had no idea what he meant and asked him to explain. He said, “The urn shouldn’t be where you found it!” That just didn’t make sense and I said, “You knew this was a Roman site so why shouldn’t there be a Roman burial urn at a first century Roman site?” He said, “Oh no! That’s the problem–it isn’t a Roman urn, it’s a Celtic urn.” I was surprised because I found it a meter below what had been proven to be a Roman roadside rest area and maybe even a temple site. But I asked him why it would be such a big problem because it was Celtic instead of Roman. He said, “The problem is that they weren’t here then. And, it isn’t from the first century, it’s from the fifth century B.C.” He went on to explain that before I found the urn there had never been any archaeological evidence that the Celts had been in that part of Belgium at that time in history. He said that a farmer had found a Celtic urn from about the same period on the southern Belgian border with France in the last century but nothing like this had been found so far north (I found the urn about 30 miles south of the northern Belgian border with the Netherlands). He said that my find of the urn had just upturned everything they had believed about where the Celts were in the fifth century B.C.

The next evening Mr. van Impe came to my house as he said he would. As soon as he came in and got comfortable he said he wanted to explain something to me. He told me again that there was no law in Belgium prohibiting me from keeping the urn and all the objects I found around it. He said it was mine to keep. I thought just a second or two and then I told him I couldn’t keep it. I told him it needed to be preserved, studied, and then put on display in a Belgian museum for the Belgian people to see. I thought he was going to start crying. He said that the Belgian government wasn’t allowed to pay me for the urn. I told him I didn’t want any money, I just wanted to give it to the people who should have it–the people who could preserve it and appreciate it. He thanked my profusely! We spent the next hour or so talking about how I found the urn and what I saw as I dug down into the soil. He sketched out a picture as I explained. I told him his sketch pretty well represented how the urn was positioned in the ground and how the bronze objects were positioned around it. Before he left he thanked me again for giving it to the archaeologists from the Belgian government. I assured him it was what I wanted to do but I did ask him for a few considerations from him. I asked if I could have the permission of the Belgian government to search on any public land in Belgium without interference from any government officials. He told me that I could and that if anyone ever stopped me to just tell them that I was an amateur archaeologists working with him and to have them call him for confirmation. I also asked I could receive credit for finding the urn and turning it over to the proper Belgian officials. He said that my name would be mentioned in any article he wrote about the find. He also told me that I would never have to pay to enter any museum in Belgium. He said all I had to do was tell the people at the museum that I worked with him and I’d be let in for free forever. During our discussion about the urn I told him about the ring and coins I’d found the day before I found the urn and about the pin of the Roman woman Bob DiBella had found. He asked if he could take these things so they could study and record them. I told him I’d have to get the pin from Bob but I gave him the ring and the coins. He promised all things would be returned to us, and they were. He also told me that they were immediately going to reopen the archaeological dig at the site where I found the urn. Also, they were going to come back the next summer to excavate four burial mound located within a thousand yards of the urn. They knew about the mounds before but didn’t excavate them because they assumed they were Roman burials from the first century and most Roman burials from that period were open cremations–the ashes and remaining bone fragments weren’t gathered up and put into any kind of container, they just piled a mound of earth over the cremation site to commemorate the dead person.  Mr. van Impe promised to keep in touch with me, thanked me again, and left.

Word of my find spread quickly. I had an older Belgian friend who was also a treasure hunter. He usually didn’t use a detector but he had an uncanny knack for finding ancient artifacts in the ground. I had been to his house several times and he had quite a collection of artifacts from prehistoric to modern times. He contacted me when he heard I’d found the urn and asked me to come to his house. When I arrived he very aggressively told me that the urn was mine and I should ask for it back from the Belgian archaeological officials. I told him I had given it to them and I would not ask for it back. He again told me that the law was on my side and if I asked for it back they had to give it to me. I told him I wouldn’t and asked him why he was so insistent that I get it back. He said he wanted to buy if from me and he’d pay me $1,000. I assured him I wouldn’t ask for it back because it was historically important and I’d already donated it to the Belgian government. He finally sighed and stopped asking me to try to get it back. I knew he bought and sold antiquities and I was sure he didn’t want to buy it for his own collection. I smiled and asked him, “If I got it and sold it to you, who would you sell it to and for how much?” He said, “You really aren’t going to ask for it back, are you?” I told him I wasn’t so it was his turn to smile. He said he had a buyer in Amsterdam who had already offered to buy it from him. He said he could probably get $20,000 to $30,000 for it. After I caught my breath I just smiled at him but in my heart I knew I’d done the right thing. However, one fleeting thought ran through my mind, “A new Corvette cost about $30,000…hmmm!” (Remember, this was 1986 and that was the price of a Corvette then.)

They did an immediate excavation of the immediate area where I found the urn. They dug up the ground for about five meters in every direction and dug deeper than I’d found the urn but they found nothing else of any consequence. The next summer the archaeologists returned to dig up the four mounds located nearby. In two of the mounts the found open cremations but in the other two they found other bronze Celtic burial urns. After they analyzed all three urns, the ashes and bones, and the bronze and iron pieces I found with my urn (there was nothing buried with the other two urns), they determined that all three urns had had other uses before they were used as burial vessels. The one I found had been a cista. Click on these links to read about ancient cistas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cista; http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/gr/b/bronze_casket_cista.aspx. They also said that they believed all three burials should be considered aristocratic burials because of the bronze urns used for the cremation remains. The larger of the two other urns they believe belonged to a Celtic chieftain, the smaller one probably belonged to his wife. They believe mine was the son of the chieftain. The other two urns predate mine by up to fifty years. These three “royal” burials in one location indicate there probably was a settlement nearby. The archaeologist had no idea of such a settlement this far north at this early date and they continue to search for it. As far as I know, they haven’t found any other evidence of a permanent Celtic occupation in the area of the urn. The archaeologists also discovered that the bone fragments in my urn were from a human and a horse. Obviously, the man buried in my urn was a warrior whose horse was killed and cremated with him. All three urns date to the 5th/4th century before Christ. They determined that the lump of rusty iron I found with the urn was the horses iron bit. They have been able to restore it pretty well, considering how long it had been buried. They also think that the cista originally had two twisted bronze handles, even though I found only one with it. Some of the bronze ornaments I found with the urn were attachment pieces for the horses bridle. Others were finial ends for sticks. However six or eight of the items are still a mystery to the archaeologists. These were hollow, round bronze orbs about the size of large grapes. Each of them had two hollow tubes protruding from them about 90 degrees. They said they had never seen such items associated with Celtic burials or any other ancient burials. They have no idea of their original purpose. All three of the buckets have been professionally restored by the Belgian National Museum. They are on permanent display in the Gallo-Roman Museum in Tongeren, Belgium (see the webpage for the museum at: http://www.gallo-romeinsmuseum.be/index.php –sorry, it isn’t in English– you can see a quality photo of my urn and one of the other urns at this page of their website: http://www.gallo-romeinsmuseum.be/content.php?hmID=1839&smID=1711&ssmID=189 ). There is also an archaeological report about the Wijshagen urn field in French at: http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/pica_0752-5656_1998_num_1_1_2267. They have some drawings of the bronze items I found with the urn in this article.

Mr. van Impe was good to his word. Soon after our initial meeting (we had several more over the next few months) I received a letter from the Belgian government, thanking me for turning the urn and the bronze pieces over to “the rightful owners”–the Belgian people. He also later sent me some very beautiful, professional photos of the urn and bronze items I found as well as a photo of all three urns together. Unfortunately, these photos are in storage in Texas now so I can’t attach them to this article. A couple of years after I found the urn I got a booklet in the mail from Mr. van Impe. It was a professional report on the Wijshagen urns. Mr. van Impe indeed gave me credit for finding the cista and turning it over to the Belgian authorities, as he promised he would. Another article was printed about the urns and my name and military rank was listed in the footnotes as the finder of the first Celtic urn at Wijshagen. I took Mr. van Impe up on his offer to visit museums in Belgium and get in for free. I used his name to get into the National Museum in Brussels while I was still stationed there in the late 1980s. In 1995 I took a group of college students on a short mission trip to Eindhoven in the Netherlands for six weeks. Our group made a trip down to Tongeren to visit the Gallo-Roman Museum where my urn was. I told them I was the amateur archaeologist, working with Mr. Luc van Impe, who found the Wijshagen urn. They welcomed me very warmly and invited me into the museum without paying. However, we did have to pay the entrance fee for the three students who were with me.

Mr. Guido Creemers, the young archaeological student who came to take the urn from me on the day I found it, is now the Director of the Gallo-Roman Museum in Tongeren. You can see a story about him which includes a nice color photo of him leaning against the display case that contains the urn and bronze pieces I found. The story is at: http://www.nieuwsblad.be/article/detail.aspx?articleid=RN2AIM4T

One final, interesting note about finding this urn. My second daughter, Julie, is married to Philippe Frerot, who is Belgian. They have three children. They can say that their American grandfather is responsible for helping rewrite the ancient history of their native country, Belgium. How about that?

Nikki’s Oral History Report on her Grandfather, Howard Emery

This is an oral history report my niece, Nikki, did for an English class in 1994.

She interviewed my Dad, her Granddad, Howard Emery, and wrote the report.

Oral History Report

by

Nicole Hare

1/3/94

(Nikki received a grade of 90)

Childhood Questions

What jobs did you have when you were young? What did you have to do?

Describe your family, your home and your neighborhood.

What were your parents like?

Was your dad anything like you are? (jokester)

How big was your family?

What were they like?

What things did you and your peers do and play?

Did you do any rotten things?

Did you and your peers do mean things to people?

Howard Benson Emery

Sixty-nine year old (born August 15, 1924)

Maternal grandfather of Nicole R. Hare

Howard had many different jobs when he was young. At one point he sold Cloverine Salve, delivered magazines door-to-door and had a paper route of daily and Sunday papers which made over one hundred papers. First he started out walking with papers in a big bag, then he got a wagon and then he graduated to a bicycle with saddlebags. Howard had this paper route the whole time through grade school until he went to high school.

In high school Howard got a job at a men’s dry goods store where he worked after school from 4 p.m. – 9 p.m. and all day Saturday from 9 a.m. – 9 p.m. He made $18.00 all week and back then that was considered a lot of money. Howard would give his mother $10.00 for board and would have $8.00 to spend all week. He was rich!

Because of a big family, Howard lived in a two-story house. It was a white house made of wood. The house had quite a large basement. Connected to the house was a verandah porch. The basement went under it and the rest of the house. In the basement under the verandah was the laundry room.

The neighborhood was called Allendale. In Allendale a country road of dirt runs through. There were only eleven houses. Most of the families were of four or five.

In the summer time at home he and his five brothers and sisters and his mother and father would work a big garden. They raised everything they ate. Howard’s dad would butcher three pigs every fall. They had their own chickens but they didn’t have their own cow so they had to buy milk and butter. The family grew corn, beans, tomatoes and cucumbers. His mother would can some food for the winter.

In the summer when the berries grew ripe, the family would go into the woods and pick blackberries. Howard’s mother would make blackberry jelly and jam. She would can a hundred quarts of blackberries and make pies so the family could eat blackberries in the winter.

Howard and one of his brothers once worked for a farmer all day long digging and made 50 cents for a day’s work.

While still in high school, Howard was drafted into the Army during World War II and served in the Pacific. He received many medals such as Good Conduct, Sharpshooter, the Bronze Star and The Asiatic Combat Ribbon with Arrowhead representing the beachhead on the island of Cebu in the Philippines.

After returning home, he worked in a men’s haberdashery for nine years.

Howard’s parents were nice parents, but strict. They were fair in punishments and were also church going people.

Howard’s dad, like Howard, was a jokester. If Howard would bring a girl home for Sunday dinner, his father would push his chair back and look at the girl and say, “Young lady, don’t you go home and say what you did last time you were here.” And she would say, “What’s that”? He’d say “Don’t go home and say we didn’t feed you.” Of course, she wouldn’t know what to say since this was her first visit.

Howard had quite a big family. There were six children, two girls and four boys. The girls are named Belva and Pat. The boys are Harold, Allen, Jr., Howard and William.

Howard’s brothers and sisters would fight a lot with each other, but also would stick up for one another against other people.

Howard, his brothers and sisters and peers played many different games together. Some were baseball and street hockey using tin cans. They didn’t have hockey clubs so they would have to go to the woods and cut down a tree. They had to find a branch that was shaped like a hockey stick and shave it down into a hockey stick.

With the girls he and his peers would play Rover, Rover Won’t You Come Over and Hide and Seek. Howard would try to hide with a pretty girl.

The boys would play cowboys and indians. Once they took some barbed wire and tied one of the boys pretending to be an indian to a tree. Everyone then forgot about him being tied up and went home for dinner. Later on they remembered he was still tied up to the tree and went back to free him. He was mad as a hornet, swore at them and then stalked off home. The boys were scolded by their parents and never again tied anyone to a tree.

This is a glimpse of what life was like in the 1930’s and 1940’s for my grandfather growing up in the country.

Who is that two thousand year old woman?

The day after I found the Roman ring and the coins I returned to the old Roman site with 2 Lt. Bob DiBella. Bob was my loading officer and had just arrived at Kliene Brogel with his young wife. They were staying in the same hotel as we were while they also were trying to find local housing.

Bob had never been metal detecting but he was excited about the ring and coins I showed him from the previous day’s search. He asked if he could go along to watch me search the area again. I offered to let him use my son’s metal detector. I had bought Jeff a low-cost Garrett machine when we were stationed at Ramstein Air Base. It wasn’t a toy but it wasn’t a very sophisticated machine. Since I’d found the ring and all the coins almost on the surface the day before I thought he might actually be able to find something with Jeff’s machine.

We went to the site and began searching. I went to the area where I’d found the ring and coins the day before and Bob searched about 15-20 away from me so our machines wouldn’t “chatter” at each other by being too close. I found a couple of small coins and had just picked up a loud and deep signal (more about this in my next post!!) when Bob yelled that he had found something. He came over to me and held out a dark metal object that had the face of a woman on it. I immediately recognized it as being of Roman manufacture. It was a face-on bust of an upper-class Roman woman of the first century. I recognized the style of her dress, necklace, and hair as being Roman and from that period. The item seemed to be a kind of broach that could be worn on a shirt or vest. It was concave on the back but it had a pin protruding from the back of it so it could be pushed through clothing and secured from behind. It was made of bronze and had a very nice and uniform brown-green patina from it’s two millennia in the ground.

Bob also turned this over to the archaeologist from the Belgium National Museum. They confirmed that it dated from the first century. They thought the details on the face of the woman seemed to look like black African. They said it was not unknown in the first century for African slaves to receive manumission and to even become “citizens” of the Roman Empire. There is no way to know who the woman was whose face was memorialized on this ancient pin but her features are still clear. The archaeologists suggested that the pin might have been given to her son or husband to wear on his travels/during his military service, to remind him of his mother or wife. The museum returned the pin to Bob at the same time they returned the ring and coins that I had found. Bob kept the pin until right before he was transferred from Kleine Brogel. Surprisingly, he handed the pin to me one day and told me that it probably meant more to me than to him, as he knew I had a growing collection of Roman artifacts from Germany and now Belgium. I was honored to take the pin and keep it in my collection.

Two thousand year old Roman Minerva carnelian ring

When I arrived in Belgium I found that my reputation as a successful metal detectorist had proceeded me. One of the guys who worked for me in the the Munitions Loading section, Rich Evans, told me about an archaeological dig that had been going on in the field across from his house for the previous two summers. He lived in the community of Wijshagen which is near Meeuwen.  He told me that he had an old metal detector but that it wasn’t very good. He had talked with the archaeologists at the site and they told him they were finished and the city was going to plant pine trees on the site. The archaeologists had not used detectors so Rich asked them if it would be OK for him to scan the site with his detector when they were finished to see if he could find anything they might have missed. They told him it would be OK. The law in Belgium at that time (it has change since then!!!) was that you could use metal detectors on “public land” and you could keep whatever you found.

Rich “bugged” me for several weeks to bring my detector to the site. I was getting settled so I kept putting him off. Finally, I agreed to go out on a Saturday afternoon. Rich and several other young guys who worked in the Munitions Maintenance section were with me. The area was very flat and sandy. The archaeologists had cleared off all the underbrush and the top few inches of soil. We went to the center of the area they had excavated. I started sweeping my detector and almost immediately began to find things. I found three large Roman coins and four smaller ones in about an hour. The large coins, the size is called “sestertius,” were from the Emperors Vespsaian, July 1, 69 AD – June 24, 79 AD; Titus, June 24, 79 AD – September 13, 81 AD; and Trajan, January 28, 98 AD – August 7, 117 AD. I don’t remember who was depicted on the smaller coins. I was able to find so many coins so quickly because the Belgian archaeologists had only used wire screens to check the dirt. Also, they dug trenches and didn’t check all the dirt in the site.

At some time during this first expedition I got a signal and found a lump of rusted metal almost on the surface of the ground. It looked like a piece of old rusty iron pipe so I just put it into the “junk” pocket of my detecting apron. One of the young guys with me asked if he could look more closely at it so I pulled it out and handed it to him. After a few seconds he said that it looked as if there was some kind of red stone in the middle of the rusty blob. I took it back from him and looked at it myself. Indeed, I could see something buried under the rust. I took the hunting knife I was using to dig in the sand and scraped across the top of the circle of rusty iron. Immediately a chunk of rust fell off exposing a beautifully carved red stone (see photo). At once I knew that I had found an ancient Roman ring. I later turned the ring and the coins over to the National Museum of Belgium in Brussels. After they catalogued the ring and the coins they returned them to me. They told me the ring was a Roman ring from about the time of Christ, plus or minus 100 years. They said the stone was a carnelian (a semi-precious gemstone) and the figure on the ring was the Roman goddess Minerva (the romanized Greek goddess Athena). They said that the carving style was called “intaglio” which means that the image was cut down into the stone instead of being carved in relief (above the surface of the stone). They thought that it must have been carved in Rome by a master jeweler because of the fine detail. They couldn’t figure out why such a high quality stone would have been mounted in an iron ring instead of bronze, silver, or gold.

After the museum returned the ring to me (they had preserved the original iron ring, even though the bottom had broken off), I took the stone and the original ring to a master jeweler in The Netherlands. I asked him to make an 18 kt. gold ring as close to the original as he could. As you can see from the photo, he did a masterful job.

The archaeologists in Brussels believe this site was a rest stop along an old Roman road. They have not found any proof that there was a Roman village nearby and it probably wasn’t a military encampment as they have found no weapons at the site.  Also, they think there might have been a temple here for travelers to worship. If there was a temple it would have been a wooden structure because they have not found any stone buildings. They base their theory about this being a rest stop and temple site because of the large number of coins and either whole or broken pieces of jewelry found in the ground. Such items would have been given as offerings to the god or gods  worshiped at this place. On subsequent metal detecting visits I found many more Roman coins as well as some pieces of jewelry.  The coins found here date the Roman use of the site to the late first century and early second century A.D.

Retired! A civilian again.

I retired from the Air Force on the first of August, 1991. I had served my country a few months over twenty years. The obvious big question was, “What’s next?”

I knew I loved teaching so I thought it would be great if I could find a job or a career as a teacher of some sort. I had planned to be a preacher or missionary for many years. I first got out of the military in 1978 to finish my college education at Lubbock Christian College in the area of Biblical Studies. My goal was to become a preacher. I decided to go back into the military through the Officers Training School (OTS) soon after receiving my BA degree because of our growing family and lack of preaching job offers. Now I was faced with the decision again of what to do to support my family outside the military.

My grandfather Firestone passed away several months before I retired from the military. I received a little over $10,000 as my inheritance. At about the same time I heard of an organization called Leadership Management Institute (LMI) our of Waco, TX. They were founded by a man named Paul J. Meyer. Their business was to sell business and personal leadership training courses and materials. The company offered franchises to people wanting to start their own business using LMI materials and coaching. As my wife had indicated she really didn’t want to be a preacher’s wife I thought LMI might be a good opportunity. My last two and a half years in the Air Force had been teaching third-year AFROTC students at Texas Tech University. The third-year courses were all about leadership and management training for prospective Air Force officer students. It seemed to be a good match. I invested my entire inheritance as a down payment for a franchise in the Lubbock, TX, area. There were no other LMI franchises in the Texas Panhandle region at the time so I thought this would really work for us.

We rented an office in the newly developed Business Incubator in Lubbock. We received our materials and began to set up our business. As part of the franchise deal we received an inventory of LMI materials. These consisted of packets of cassette tapes and study books on many leadership topics, both for business and personal leadership development. It was good material but probably over-priced. I still have some of the materials stored in my garage.

If I was a good teacher and instructor, I wasn’t a good salesman! The purpose of the business was to market the training courses to businesses. We were to contact area businesses and sell them on the idea of our company providing training to their employees. As a part of the deal the business would buy the training materials and we would provide an instructor (that would be me) to conduct the training, either at their place of business or in the conference room at the Business Incubator where we had our office. Whether I was just a terrible salesman or the business climate of the early 1990s was poor, our business did not succeed. After several months of frustration and failure I worked a deal with LMI to cancel my franchise at the forfeiture of my entire down payment. I was allowed to keep all the training courses we had already received. So I had a garage full of training courses, no inheritance, and no job. Back to square one!

Things my dad taught me.

My father was Howard Benson Emery. He was born on August 15, 1924 and he died on July 4, 1996. His father was Allen Emery Sr. (May 3, 1898-November 20, 1947)  and his mother was Alta Mae Blake Emery (September 14, 1895-January 16, 1964). Dad was born on Parrot Street in Moundsville, West Virginia, right across the street from the Moundsville State Penitentiary. He served in the U.S. Army in the South Pacific during WW II. He was drafted on July 5, 1943 (he was 19 and a senior at Rochester, PA, High School at the time, having been held back in third grade when the family moved to PA) and was honorably discharged on December 9, 1945. He saw bloody action as his unit, the 182nd Infantry Americal Division, fought its way across the islands of the South Pacific toward Japan. He fought across Luzon in the Philippines and was on a troop ship, headed toward an invasion of mainland Japan when the atomic bombs were dropped. He received the Bronze Star for heroic actions in the line of duty on March 10 and 11, 1944, on Bougainville in the Solomon Islands. He is buried beside my mother, Dorothy Jean Firestone Emery, in the Garden of the Resurrection section of Sylvania Hills Cemetery on Sunflower Road near New Brighton and Rochester, PA.

Dad and I didn’t always see eye-to-eye, but I’m sure many sons could say that about the relationship with their fathers. Dad was a good man, a good husband, and a good father. I believe he suffered Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from his wartime service. I only began to think about the possibility of him having life-long problems related to the war after he died. Looking back on the part of his life that I knew about I believe I see indicators that would point to some degree of PTSD. It’s nothing I could ever prove but I think it’s possible.

When I think back on my short time with my father (I left home to join the Air Force when I was about 18 1/2), I realize he taught me many useful things. Here are some of the things my dad taught me. I’ll add to the list as I remember more:

– All aspects of fishing

– How to hang wallpaper

– How to handle tools for cars as well as for building

– How to tie a necktie

– How to respect others

– How to laugh and to make others laugh

– How to cook

– All about camping

– How to build a building (we built a small barn for our pony together)

– How to drive

– How to operate a small outboard motorboat

– How to cut grass with a power mower

– How to find rare old coins in his insurance collection coin bag (he was an insurance agent for many years)

– How to build foundation pillars for a building and get their heights the same using a piece of clear plastic tubing and water

– Why I should never smoke

– How to plant and manage a garden

– How to whistle shrilly through my teeth

– How to plant fence posts and how to string electric wire on them

– How to tell stories about my life

– How to properly paint a room

– How to make hard Christmas candy

– How to be polite

– How to install wall paneling and dropped ceilings

– How to open and use a checking/savings account

– How to play horseshoes

– How to cry (even though we were both men!)

Lubbock, Texas, from my windshield, Part II

In the summer of 1989 we were finally heading back to the good ‘ol US of A after six years overseas. I reasoned that I’d never be promoted to Major as I became an officer after almost nine years of enlisted service. Besides, the Air Force was slowing down it’s promotion boards in order to force people like me, with a lot of enlisted time, into retirement. I had planned for years to one day be an Air Force Reserve Officer Training Course (AFROTC) instructor before I retired. To that end I got a Masters Degree in Education while stationed at Ramstein Air Base in Germany (1984-1986). I was pretty sure this would be my last military assignment.

I was accepted to be an AFROTC instructor and received an assignment to Texas Tech in Lubbock, TX. Before we left Belgium I was contacted by the Inspector General unit of the United States Air Forces in Europe (USAFE) and asked to become an inspector for the Munitions Maintenance Units. As the Maintenance Supervisor for the MUNSS at Kleine Brogel, I had helped to achieve the best inspection record for any MUNSS in Europe to date. However, I thought it was time to get my family back to the US so the older kids could be settled into one place for their last years of high school. I declined the invitation to go back to Ramstein and off we went to Lubbock, again.

We got to Texas in June and immediately began looking for a house. We decided we wanted to buy a place that was big enough to be comfortable for our family but we didn’t want to live right in the heart of town. We didn’t want to rush into buying a house so an old friend of ours from our first time of living in Lubbock, Steve Huddle, rented us a small house across the street from his house. We used borrowed furniture, a roll-away bed, and air mattresses for a couple of months until we could find a house to buy and have our furniture delivered. We found a house about twelve miles outside Lubbock, just north of Wolfforth,  and began the process to buy it. At the same time I had to go to Maxwell AFB in Montgomery, Alabama, for six weeks to attend Academic Instructor Course (AIC) in order to be ready to teach when classes started in August. It was a very hot summer (especially hot for us after living in cool and wet Belgium for the last three years) and the little house we were renting didn’t have central air. The family was pretty uncomfortable there for the six weeks I was away in Alabama.