when jen (dave's sister) was in highschool dave said he wanted to hide gold coins at various historical and cultural locations in berkshire county - kind of like pokemon with money - for jen to hunt for and find to learn stuff that dave had discovered about where we lived - and jenny told dave she rather he just give her the gold coins 😂
i should have mentioned this before - but i got 120 credits, almost all from bcc, because dave was transferring there in 1982-1983 and i thought i might as well go with him
later i was accepted into the master's degree program of landscape architecture at umass - just before i fell off a roof and got amnesia - even without a 4 year bachelor's degree, because of the variety of art, business, writing and science courses i had somehow passed with a cumulative gpa of 3.0 in about 4 years of college (tape recording the classes played a big part in the gpa score)
you might be able to get all of your 4 year degree credits for your major at your community college and save up money to transfer directly or nearly directly into an advanced degree program at your state university
https://greenguitarthreechordsandtruth.blogspot.com/2022/02/when-jen-was-in-highschool-dave-said-he.html?m=1
so steely dan's 'my old school' is about 45 miles south west of bcc in the town of annandale on the hudson in new york where bob dylan's pump that didn't work 'because the vandals took the handle' was located and chris claremont attended
- claremont is the creator of the x-men's 'massachusetts academy', fictionally situated somewhere in the berkshires, that eventually became the 2nd 'xavier's school for gifted youngsters'
donald fagan eventually returned to bard college (now university) which made me ponder our old school, bcc
bcc might have been more important than we thought
many of you still remember mrs w, the calculus teacher who became mayor of pittsfield and was reportedly one of the top ten mathematicians in the world and who created a novel program to train and fund people to become entrepreneurs in the city
she looked exactly the same as mrs k, who was our remedial math teacher at arizona state when i attended the school from 1981 to 1982 and who was a visiting soviet union mathematician who was also reportedly one of the top 10 mathematicians in the world and after one of her business calculus classes at bcc, mrs w apparently told me she had defected and asked me to promise not to tell
maybe you also remember mrs evans, the computer science teacher who told us it had been her job during the cold war to deposit g e's computer tapes down the west shaft of the hoosac tunnel
now we found out from the internet that g e ordnance in pittsfield built the guidance systems for the u s early nuclear icbms and might have been building icbm guidance systems right up until the pittsfield g e closed
after we discovered lona cohen, who had smuggled the first atomic bomb plans from los alamos to the soviet consulate in new york city, had grown up in adams and had worked for the berkshire fine spinning associates in adams which eventually became berkshire-hathaway
then a williamstown group mentioned that dr preston robinson, who lived in williamstown, had invented the tantalum capacitor triggers for the first atomic bombs while working at sprague's
chem professor congdon had been a dragon soldier during ww2 as had dr langer who took williams college president baxter's place as head of the oss's - cum - cia's office of research and analysis, and while trying to find out if steely dan's guitarist and aeronautical engineering expert jeff baxter was related to president baxter, i discovered one of president baxter's sons lived in sandy hook, connecticut when the shooting occurred
why do i tell all this stuff ?
i tell people who ask that it is because the more i tell the more i find out, which is true - the evans family owns crane paper which made all of the paper dollars in the u s - and chevy chase is part of the family that owns crane paper and was while he played piano for donald fagan's band at bard college as he dated gwyneth paltrow's mom, blythe danner - then we find out bette davis grew up in lanesborough but gwyneth learned to act as a child in williamstown so when we learn gwyneth's version of 'bette davis eyes' reached number 5 in australia, things begin to take some sort of shape
our uncle howie was an evans who worked at g e and his grandson billy evans was the u s capitol cop who was killed by a mind control victim in a car attack on the u s capitol just after the january 6th attack on the u s capitol
but the real reason i tell so much personal stuff on facebook is because of an act of courage by a student in a circa 1983-84 bcc psychology class who was told she could receive an extra credit grade by allowing every member of the class to ask her a personal question without refusing to answer
curiously, i don't remember the professor's name i just remember thinking it was an interesting last name like english lit professor sturgis's last name is to jfk and john lennon assassination buffs
- bcc
...and as our last name is - many of you don't know john d rockefeller was hiding and got caught on a farm, taconic farm, which was 385 acres on the south shore of lake onota, possibly including where bcc now stands, a mile west of pittsfield on west street while he was being subpoenaed in 1907 for an antitrust suit that president taft used to break up the most powerful corporation in the world
taconic farm was built and owned by henry c valentine, the owner of valspar
rockefeller's daughter alta eventually bought mt hope farm in williamstown, 3/4 of a mile from the farm gramps lived on where dad and aunt sally (howie's wife and billy's grandma) were born in the barn of, near where stratton road and blair road met in 1910, the year before standard oil was finally broken up by president taft in 1911
curiously, gramps had been a north adams motorcycle cop at some point and it might have been his duty to find j d rockefeller
bcc is located on a former farm that became the place where homeless people were made to work on before it became the college
but these aren't the reasons i am writing today
i did a speech on bob dylan for the mandatory speech class taught by professor rothberg around 1984 and that summer as i was hanging out in front of the store at 5 corners in williamstown, a car stopped and asked for directions
the driver appeared to be bob dylan and wanted to know where the taconic trail was
i just told him and he left because an unwritten rule in williamstown is to just treat the famous people as regular people, which is what a lot of them reported that they liked about the town (jen once babysat 'john boy''s triplets, dave once bumped into and ate lunch with christopher reeve in a cabin and their dad did a commercial on wmnb with raymond burr)
one of the favorite things i've ever learned was from that speech class report i found from the main book i used for a reference - bob dylan had made a pilgrimage to visit woody guthrie who was suffering from huntington's disease and the book stated that dylan had taught a very young arlo guthrie how to play guitar
william vanderbilt lll had owned the store at 5 corners and his distant cousin john hammond, who grew up during the summers in lenox, had discovered dylan
governor vanderbilt had been 2nd in command of the oss's special operations department who had trained at a secret camp named 'camp x' in canada just like wolvie, sabertooth and deadpool
yet the real reason i am writing this has to do with the goo goo doll's song 'broadway'
see, i remember writing the lyrics to it at the mohawk bar in north adams the night / early morning after the wmnb announcer had said ella fitzgerald had died and that 'broadway is dark tonight' earlier that evening (she didn't die then but she did have open heart surgery about that time)
an older gent at the bar asked me what i was writing in my notebook so i told him i had just heard on the radio that ella fitzgerald had died and he turned ashen and said he used to manage her and asked if he might read my notebook
wiki says both of ella fitzgerald's managers had died before then but that the legendary music producer john hammond, who had lived in lenox, had discovered her
there is a lyric in the song that tells me that i really did write the words because it reminded me of something terrible i was thinking about when i wrote the line:
'and you're livin' in a world that you've best forgotten'
i just recently remembered what i wanted to forget about that night
you probably won't want to hear what it was, it was bad, and it was personal, but i can face it now and have to - to try to figure out what happened to me
so someday i might tell you, bcc, because of that girl who performed one of the bravest acts i ever witnessed by trying to answer all those personal questions honestly
but more important to bcc is that i believe i wrote the words to over 25 popular rock songs and that i wrote a number of the lyrics, according to my memories, 14 of them, while employed as a work study student at the bcc activities and recreation department, possibly making those lyrics the property of bcc
many of you don't know about dr lehovec yet, he lived on a street off of cole avenue in williamstown
his daughter sue was my sis's (a bcc alum) friend who was about 7 years older than me when i was about 10
she was really pretty and nice, and i made the mistake of telling her that i liked her once at our camp in woodford, vt
she frowned instead of smiling as i thought she would, and told me i would have to meet her dad - years later when i googled him i realized - i was a security threat !
p-n junction isolation is the fundamental component of the computer chip and dr lehovec invented it while working at sprague electric in north adams
dr lehovec was paid $1 for his invention as he was under contract at sprague's at the time
curiously, when i believe the lyrics to ''broadway' were written, penn central owned sprague electric which was just about to go out of business ('the one small point everyone's been missing around here') and the vanderbilts had created and probably still owned penn central (john hammond was a vanderbilt)
i don't yet know if penn-central still owns the patent to p-n junction isolation or if it were sold or leased to fairchild semiconductor who owned the patent for the computer chip or even who owns fairchild semiconductor (phoenix, arizona's onsemi)
i don't claim to own the lyrics because i believed they were inspired by something holy and that the groups and performers who did them made them sound beautiful ❤️ but i believe the being that inspired them might like bcc to get the funding it might be owed for them possibly being written while on the clock
of course, probably the only way to prove who wrote those lyrics is for whomever has the notebooks that went missing to give them back or present them publicly - except for one of the lyrics i had mailed to a friend, dave, at u mass who said he put the picture of a girl i had drawn on the page with the lyrics below it on the fridge door of his and his roomates' house during a party and 'everyone liked it'
the girl's drawing and the lyrics were partially inspired by a lady who was an artist who worked in the bcc administration building named gail and who had been my lab partner for one of the environmental science courses - and lynne
i remember gail's last name as parker, but that is kind of strange because gail parker is also the name of the mother of of the getty images getty whose brother had allegedly been kidnapped and had his ear cut off
dave's brother timmy's roomate at providence college 3 years before i believe the 'bush' song lyrics were written had been one of the gettys and the roomate had asked tim and dave's beautiful 15 year old sister to marry him
curiously, i believe the band 'bush' did the song i sent the lyrics of to dave and 'bush''s gavin rossdale stated that his primary influence had been 'the pixies' who had formed at u mass while dave was a student there after dave transferred from bcc - 'the pixies' were much bigger in the u k than in the u s
- drawing ms gail
interestingly, williamstown's grammy nominated music producer jeff gaskill, who grew up about 700 feet from governor vanderbilt's store and gas ⛽ station, was the credited location manager for one of the pixies' documentary/concert dvds and had gotten r e m to play a concert in williamstown in the 1980s because he had attended the same college as them in georgia and got to know the band's members
one of the songs i believe were partially written in the b c c activities and recreation office was 'what's the frequency, kenneth ?' about an attack on dan rather that i had read about in one of the bcc library's copies of rolling stone magazine
i think the key to finding the notebooks is williams college professor emeritus dr andrew crider who did volunteer psych counseling at bcc around 1984 and 1985
dave's next door neighbor in williamstown was professor crider
possibly because of all the amazing inventors and scientists in williamstown, i was part of a williams college psychology department apparent hypnotism experiment in 1978 on the mount greylock regional highschool football team backfield's first two strings and all 3 of the qb strings
then professor crider had performed the experiment, and i just asked him a second time (this time publicly on the williams college fb) to tell where the parameters, results and funding of the experiment could be found - click 'discussion'
