Eyewitness accounts verify that Villa used Indian Powerplus motorcycles to attack Torrean, which he captured in 1914
http://www.ridingvintage.com/2013/02/pancho-villa-original-motorcycle-outlaw.html
Saturday, May 29, 2021
Sally Robinson in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., if she looks small, that's because she's 88 pounds, 4 foot 11
In the year 1900, Anne French became the first woman to be issued a license to drive an automobile in Washington D.C. Oddly enough, Washington D.C.'s progressive stance on women driving cars did not include motorcycles. It took another 37 years before the first women was issued a motorcycle license.
By dint of stamping her foot Sally Robinson, of 2120 H Street Northwest, has become the only girl in Washington licensed to ride a motorcycle.
Miss Robinson—all 88 pounds of her—has been operating motorcycles on and off since 1928, but last spring she decided she wanted a permit. The policeman assigned to officiate at her examination had different ideas, however. Although the District has no law against women motorcyclists, this examiner apparently thought it should have.
"First he said I was too little, then he said I was too young," Miss Robinson declaimed yesterday, malice toward all policeman shining in her eyes." She is 27, years old and 4 feet 11 inches tall, and didn't see what either factor had to do with her sitting behind the handlebars of a motorcycle.
"I passed the written examination all right—passed it twice, in fact. The first time I got 80 on it, but that wasn't good enough for him so I went down again and got 92, when that didn't satisfy him, I got my lawyer.
"Well, that cop looked from me to the lawyer, and from the lawyer to me, and then he said I could take my road test," she continued. Her difficulties had not ended, however. Thinking all was well, she said goodbye to her lawyer and started out for the road test.
Then the policeman announced he would not ride with her in the sidecar of the machine he provided for the test —he said he was afraid to.
But when the test was over, the examiner announced, "Lady, you handle it as well as a man could. Your balance is swell and you know the machine. But I didn't see you kick it over so I can't give you the permit."
That was when Miss Robinson started "cussing him out." "I called him such names - well, I was ashamed of myself. But it worked, and I have the permit."
Miss Robinson uses the smallest type of machine built, but at that it weighs 325 pounds, nearly four times as much as she does. Despite the fact, it occasionally falls on her, she insists she would rather ride that machine than eat when she's hungry. As for automobiles, she has no use for them whatsoever.
https://www.womenridersnow.com/pages/pioneers_the_first_woman_motorcycle_license.aspx
During WWII, women were called up to serve as motorcycle dispatchers for messages for the British Royal Navy.
By 1939, it was clear that every able-bodied British seamen would be needed to serve on ships so the Royal Navy decided to reconstitute the Women’s Royal Navy Service—nicknamed "The Wrens"—which had been disbanded after World War I. Initially 3,000 women were enlisted to perform shore based duties thus freeing up their male counterparts to go to sea. The Royal Navy made the Wren's focus on land-missions abundantly clear using the recruitment slogan “Join the Wrens and Free a Man for the Fleet."
Thank you Rolf!
WADJDA is a 10-year-old girl living in Saudi Arabia. Although she lives in a conservative world, Wadjda is fun loving, entrepreneurial and always pushing the boundaries of what she can get away with.
After a fight with her friend Abdullah, a neighborhood boy she shouldn't be playing with, Wadjda sees a beautiful green bicycle for sale. She wants the bicycle desperately so that she can beat Abdullah in a race. But Wadjda's mother won't allow it, fearing repercussions from a society that sees bicycles as dangerous to a girl's virtue.
So Wadjda decides to try and raise the money herself.
At first, Wadjda's plans are thwarted when she is caught running various schemes at school. Just as she is losing hope of raising enough money, she hears of a cash prize for a Koran recitation competition at her school.
She devotes herself to the memorization and recitation of Koranic verses, and her teachers begin to see Wadjda as a model pious girl. The competition isn‘t going to be easy, especially for a troublemaker like Wadjda, but she refuses to give in. She is determined to continue fighting for her dreams...
train wrecks have been caused by a lot of things.... but if you had to list the many causes of train collisions, would you ever guess one thing your list must show, is a watch? At least 6 trains crashes have been found to have been caused by watches.
Inaccurate watches created differences in perceived time, sometimes leading to accidents. While only a small percentage of train wrecks were due to inaccurate watches, several horrible train accidents pointed out that the nation's railroads were not all running on reliable timepieces.
A head-on train collision occurred on April 18, 1891 on the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway at Kipton, 40 miles west of Cleveland, Ohio, which made headlines across the country.
The Fast Mail train No. 14 was heading East. On the same track passenger train, No. 21 the Toledo Express, was heading West. The engineer and conductor of the westbound passenger train were given written train orders near Elyria to let the eastbound fast mail train pass them at Kipton, a small station west of Oberlin. The passenger train engineer was told that fast mail train was running on time as they left Elyria, also on time, according to the engineer's pocket watch.
The two trains collided head-on at Kipton, the passenger train was under full brakes just about to pull into the siding, but the fast mail was at full speed, the passenger train hadn't made it into the Kipton siding on time. Both engineers, the passenger train fireman and six postal clerks were reported killed. the fast mail fireman and one other person were seriously injured. Both engines, three mail cars and one baggage car were reported completely wrecked. US Post Office also sustained great property losses.
The official report stated that not enough time was allowed for the passenger train train to get into the siding.3 Many contemporary accounts quote Webb C. Ball, Cleveland, Ohio jeweler who was appointed by the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway to investigate time keeping issues on the line following the collision, from an copyrighted interview by James B Morrow in 1910, citing the engineer's who's watch had stopped for 4 minutes, then started again as the cause of the accident, differing from the original report.
Other accidents were linked to inaccurate watches, some of which also resulted in fatalities including:
August 9, 1853 Camden & Amboy Old Bridge, New Jersey 4 killed Engineer's watch 2.5 minutes slow
August 12, 1853 Providence & Worcester Valley Falls, Rhode Island 14 killed Conductor's watch 2 minutes slow
August 1878 Panhandle Mingo Junction, Ohio 18 killed Conductor's watch 20 minutes slow
November 1882 Illinois & St. Louis Belleville, Illinois 2 killed watch 54 minutes slow
November 1893 Hocking Valley Bradner, Ohio 4 killed Engineer's watch 17 minutes slow
A railway conductor was indicted for manslaughter in connection with the Mingo Junction accident in which it was determined his pocket watch was incorrect.
http://www.railswest.com/time/watches.html has a LOT of info on watches and the railroad use, and it's very interesting reading. I'm not going to post more about it, as I think it would bore most people. But, I'll say that Waltham and Elgin watches were across the board, some of the best watches accepted throughout railroading.
Friday, May 28, 2021
Oh wow, ponder for a moment how long it took for some poor boy to collect and cut out all the cars he lusted after, and paste them on the wall next to his bed. This is one of the coolest, most fundamental, love for cars I've seen
It's what they had to work with, before the posters of the 70s
graveyards and roads... not a very commonly connected juxtaposition, but it seems to be a bit more common than I thought
the Meadowlark Pioneer Cemetery is in the median of Rancho Santa Fe and Meadowlark Ranch Road.
The El Campo Santo cemetery is on San Diego's 'Old Town' tourist area, and was so large, due to 477 graves, that it's under the street and sidewalks. https://hiddensandiego.net/things-to-do/places/el-campo-santo-cemetery
And of course, there are the graves in the airport runway I posted about last August http://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2020/08/when-savannah-airport-built-extension.html
the Tintin box set was well designed with the spines displaying a race car
That's why I get a press pass to Comic Con every year; I keep looking to see what examples there are of why a car guy should be given that press pass to share the art that is made that bridges my various interests
https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Adventures-Tintin-Compact-Editions/dp/1405278455/ref=sr_1_13
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