Tag: World War II
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Gulf Coast Weekend
The college tours continued again last weekend although I didn’t go. My wife and our older son headed towards sites in Ohio and Pennsylvania. The younger guy and I flew down to the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Mississippi to visit with family instead. He didn’t get to go on the great road trip over the holidays…
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Time Zones in Greenland
It’s been awhile since I thought about Time Zones. However recently I happened to be looking at a map and I remembered the peculiarities of Greenland. I did scratch the surface of this a long time ago in Islands Split by Time Zones. Now I wanted to revisit Greenland in more detail because it offered…
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Tenaha, Timpson, Bobo, and Blair
During deep winter I focus a lot of efforts on my genealogy hobby. I think it’s because the holidays offer big blocks of time where I’m stuck indoors. I can concentrate on intricate details as I piece together my family puzzle. Recently a line of research brought my attention to a small town in East…
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Adjacent Tree Towns
While looking at a map recently I noticed two curious towns in Wisconsin. Their names seemed perfectly fine and normal, Poplar and Maple. Their proximity seemed more than a little coincidental. I never found an explanation for collocated tree towns and the pattern didn’t extend to other settlements in Douglas County. Nonetheless, I felt a…
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Michigan, Part 4 (Above and Below)
It wasn’t always easy finding sites that appealed to every member of the family during our Michigan trip. I searched high and low, from way up in the sky to deep undersea, for our little day trips during our week away from home. Local roads took us to three different places in three distinct directions…
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More Fill in Millard
I noticed an anomaly as I pulled together the spreadsheet of every county named for a U.S. president for the recent Last Presidential Counties article. There was a single Millard County. It represented the only county designated for a president’s first name rather than his surname. Well, as far as I could determine. It got…
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Cactus
The previous article about Spanish punctuation embedded in various place names in the United States made my mind wander to the Desert Southwest. Then it led me down a mental tangent related to cacti for some unknown reason. As I daydreamed, I considered, perhaps I should examine places named cactus. There weren’t many, and even…
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Mutual Ownership Defense Housing
My reference to Audubon Park, New Jersey in For More Birds revealed an historic experiment in middle class public housing. In that instance the earlier residents of Audubon voted the newly-arrived shipyard workers out of their borough. So in response, those displaced residents created a separate Audubon Park borough. In the meantime, that anecdote revealed…
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For More Birds
I kicked-up a lot of material as I researched Audubon, Iowa in the recent For the Birds. Originally I’d hope to feature several Audubon towns in the United States — and I do believe they are found only in the United States — and was completely overwhelmed by wonderful delights in rural Iowa. Today I…
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Menacing Island
I spied an island full of deviants. What else could explain a cluster of geographic features with names such as Freak, Lunatic, Menace, Germ, Moron, Filthy and Maniac? I plotted my discoveries along with several other bizarre placenames I’d encountered within a single map. This included the only spot in the United States named, and…