The 1968 Pattonville Heights Bunter Abend
May 4, 1968, about halfway between the MLK assassination and the RFK assassination. I can still mumble some of the songs.

The 1968 Pattonville Heights Bunter Abend
May 4, 1968, about halfway between the MLK assassination and the RFK assassination. I can still mumble some of the songs.
08/25/2010 in Tom McMahon | Permalink | Comments (0)
It's kind of an involved story, so I'll tell it step by step:
Have a Happy Thanksgiving, Everybody!!!
11/25/2009 in Tom McMahon | Permalink | Comments (2)
An Odd Little House 3 Doors Down From Our Old House on Crane Avenue in Hazel Crest Where We Lived 50 Years Ago
Have you ever seen such a small house with so many windows?
09/18/2009 in Tom McMahon | Permalink | Comments (1)
Our Old House on Crane Avenue in Hazel Crest Where We Lived 50 Years Ago
A Google Maps/Virtual Painter production
09/17/2009 in Tom McMahon, Virtual Painter | Permalink | Comments (0)
An excerpt from Esquire:
You ask yourself, "What is a pipe? What purpose does it serve?" So muses Tom McMahon, master plumber of Croton-on-Hudson, New York, instructing a new disciple at the dawn of a new day. His beard is white, his head smooth as an egg, his face sweet and mournful as an old dog. He's sixty years old, and he's been fixing things all his life. He fixed cars in high school and the Army decorated him for fixing things in Korea, then he came home and got a job fixing forklifts at the GM plant down in Tarrytown and ended up as night-shift maintenance supervisor at the paint shop, striking out on his own back in 1988. He's the kind of master craftsman — if you're lucky, there's one in your town — who gets hired for the tough jobs, like replumbing an old hotel into dozens of independent heat zones or re-creating the giant pipes of the steam era for a local millionaire's private steam museum. So he's been thinking about this question his entire life.
"The pipe makes civilization possible," he says.
By separating the waste from the potable water, he explains, the pipe allows people to live together in large groups without dying of dysentery. And the Latin word for lead, which is what the Romans used for pipes, is plumbum. So the plumber, when you think about it, is the foundation for a whole host of miracles. "Put it this way, my daughter, working for ten dollars or twelve dollars an hour in a nursing home, working on her associate's degree, she can walk through the door of her apartment and command it to be light and dark. She can command it to be hot or cold. She can go into the kitchen and command sanitary water to come forth at whatever temperature she likes and dismiss it at her pleasure. She can go into this unit and you can keep food cold for days. You go to this unit and you can command your food to be hot. A king! with all his troops! a hundred years ago couldn't do that."
Finding stuff like this is why I Google my name every day.
08/04/2009 in Tom McMahon | Permalink | Comments (2)
It's been the home away from home for televangelist Jim Bakker, perennial presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche, Sotheby's chairman A. Alfred Taubman, and may soon be the home of Bernie Madoff. Up the road 100 miles or so from where ex-Enron CEO Jeff Skilling spends his time these days.
When we lived there in the late seventies it was still the Rochester State Hospital. And yes, we literally lived across the street, in the Edelweiss Apartments. Those old state hospitals have a lot of mysterious history.
07/06/2009 in Tom McMahon | Permalink | Comments (1)
That's my Dad, of course. Scanned from the 1965 Echo, the Pattonville High School yearbook. I think we lost something important when society abandoned the idea that you had a duty to live your life such that your hometown and your high school would be proud of you.
04/04/2009 in Tom McMahon | Permalink | Comments (1)
04/01/2009 in Tom McMahon | Permalink | Comments (1)
I took these photos just before we got rid of the VW Vanagon that we had for 17 years. The first two photos are taken from outside the garage. The door in the back of the photo leads to our kitchen. I overbuilt this ramp because I'm not a good enough carpenter to figure out where to cut corners, and because with the "docking" maneuver needed to get our son Ryan out of the van and into the ramp, I knew we woud be banging into this ramp on a regular basis.
My Life Lesson Takeaway: If you have something really important and you don't have the skill to build it like a professional, you can compensate by throwing more and better material at the problem. It's not the cheapest way, but it will get the job done.
03/23/2009 in Tom McMahon | Permalink | Comments (0)
It was my Dad Jim who got wounded, not my Uncle George. Long Story Short: They're both alive today, and doing just fine. Their Mother, who had a weak heart, was not so lucky. She died in 1948, and my Dad thinks it was the strain of having 4 sons in the war. And these telegrams.
03/16/2009 in Tom McMahon, WorldWar2 | Permalink | Comments (0)