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Marion and I spent five days at the Museum; she to attend to the very important business of handling the money, while I was busy preparing some donated items for unloading, and working on several different projects in our collection of engines.

Our dear friend and Steam Engine Row Crew veteran, Jerre Hawk, who has had a lot of health problems in the past couple of years, has sold his Playa Del Rey home, and is moving into assisted living so he can have some help while he recuperates from knee surgery. He is moving to Buena Park, near his friend Diane Mason, and hopes to be able to attend Shows in the future, when he is able to get around.

Jerre generously donated a roll-cab, a nice collection of tools, some excellent books, a Roberts reel-to-reel stereo tape recorder, and a fine model Stuart steam engine driven generator, complete with a boiler, that he built in his own shop.

In years past, he demonstrated this neat little unit to the kids during our old School Days programs, and the kids were generally more impressed with the model plant than they were with the big engines, because they could see and understand the whole process with Jerre’s model.

We generally expect August to be pretty warm, but that last weekend was a humdinger, with a lot of tropical heat and humidity, and not enough breezes to do any good. We had a surprise visit by a thunder storm that smacked us at 0700 on Sunday morning and lasted until 1000. Dave Denny told me that we got 0.30 inches of rain, and believe me, things got pretty slippery and sticky for a while. We were concerned that it might wash out the Bluegrass folks, but they carried on with workshops and other groups, and by about 1300, the grass was dry enough to do their stuff on our outdoor stage. It turned out to be a very good day for all concerned.

We had a respectable number of interested visitors during the Bluegrass show. Some were pretty knowledgeable about the stuff, and then there were others who were absolutely amazed such big machines could have been built in the late 19th and early 20th Century.

We have been trying to get a very large water softener, donated to us by Claremont College several years ago, ready to use. But have run up against several snags, not the least of which is that we do not have sufficient water flow capacity, to back-wash it efficiently after regeneration.

AGSEM Member, Kurt Hostetter has given Steam Engine Row a nice, rebuilt, adequately sized, Culligan softener and brine tank, that will supply us with all the water we need for our operations. He has offered to help us get the unit installed, has already delivered it to Steam Engine Row.

I have already jacked up the big unit we got from Claremont College so it can be picked up and moved out of the way. In doing so, I called upon Eric McConnon and Travis Durst to help me move a really heavy Duff-Barret railroad track jack. That I borrowed from the Steam Tractor shed, down to S.E.R. So I could get under the big brute and lift it up by stages until it was high enough to get under with a forklift. Thanks to both of these young engineers! (I took it back with a hand truck on my tilt-bed utility trailer.) I am going to suggest to Dean Alling that the big unit would be ideal for the Steam Tractor operation because they have so many boilers, and operate them pretty regularly.

Virgil White and Kent Graham moved one of our oldest, but unfortunately incomplete, engines from its old spot among operating engines out to our “bone yard”. Then they moved a Troy engine that was given to us by Gene Trumble on to the empty place, where it can be fitted up with lubricators and operated. Well, I’ve used up a lot of space, and so I believe that I had better knock it off and get this piece on its way to Greg. Auf Wiedersehen!

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