2011 is going to be a difficult year for our city’s homeless people and for the folks I have shared space with at the Tenn. Career Center, aka unemployment office. I am finding a role to play in this picture, not a major one by any means, but a role. Some of you have seen my begging for computer gear on facebook. There will likely be more of that as I set up pc stations at the St. Andrews Center, and eventually in other venues. Do respond as you are able.

While bits & bytes won’t feed the 5000, learning pc skills will help them fish for employment in waters that are as unfriendly as those below the dam during flood season.

2011 is the 50th anniversary of the founding of TVRM, the local railroad museum. That group knows something about surviving hard times. They were on the verge of foreclosure, with the bank threatening to even take their tunnel. Can’t you just imagine a nearly 1000 foot-long drive through window. The judge could not either, and the group was allowed to redo the debt. (They subsequently paid off every penny). Now their 100+ year-old locomotive No. 630 is almost ready to resume service pulling excursion trains. Join me this Spring, at track-side. Bring your camera!

2011 looks to be the year of the conservative in politics. They act like they just discovered it. If only the Conservatives had been practicing what they preach for the past decade this country’s finances might be in better shape. I was conservative (not the same as being one) when it was not trendy. In 2011 I will attempt to continue conservatively, as a good steward, in the tradition of John Wesley’s “Earn all you can, give all you can, save all you can.”

So welcome, 2011, to my world. 2010 is in my memory book (not to mention tattooed on 2 dozen facebook photo albums). It was a very good year., thanks to all of you who made it so.

Mother died thinking, if she remembered, that her first-born was gainfully employed at a newspaper. She and Dad valued both gainful employment, and newspapers, all of their lives. 2009 shredded the newspaper industry, ending the employment for thousands of loyal and dedicated journalists. Recession next-door became depression at home. But frequent visits to the Career Center (read unemployment center) offered copious evidence that 2009 was doing far worse damage to others’ lives than mine.

And in 2009, three talented photojournalist interns served the readers of the Chattanooga Times Free Press. They were the first photo-interns at that paper, and the Chattanooga Times before it, that I did not have an opportunity to mentor and coach since the intern program began at the Times years ago. I learned from every one of them, and they helped keep me young-in-mind.

So 2009, leave this world on a dreary cloudy day and don’t look back. I’ll let the tears dry and embrace Twenty-ten’s uncertainty. And maybe I’ll figure out what I want to be when I grow up.

By the numbers; a typical COBRA medical insurance premium is about 900/month, family deductible, $1500 per member/year.. never mind copays and the 20% patients pay after the deductible is met. 900 x 12 months plus 1500 is over 12k per year. Unemployment benefits almost cover that, leaving a small deficit to use for food, heat, rent or mortgage, etc. Even if medical insurance and treatments were free, the family would have about 12k/ year to live on. What part of deficit-to-live-on is hard for the CPAs and lawyers in Congress to understand?

Now I have no idea who complained to the church about people sleeping on the porch, on concrete, with spiders, bugs and maybe an occasional church-mouse for company. And the sleepers who were complained about may not have been truly destitute homeless people, with no place to put their head down at night.

Three things are evident: An increasing number of people are losing jobs, homes (sometimes everything) and they can’t all fit in the shelters, the police have more important crimes to clear than porch-sleeping, the pastor who placed the sign would have preferred that his door could be open to the needy, rather than having his porch closed.

One thing is not evident, but likely. Whoever complained is sleeping comfortably and undisturbed now that the spiders and bugs have the porch to themselves.

1976, Salisbury, N.C.

American Freedom Train (AFT) locomotive 4449 spent her last night in the employ of Southern Railway at Salisbury, N.C. after arriving from Atlanta with a Birmingham to Washington one-way excursion. Washington is where the 4449, Queen of the Southern Pacific locomotives and the last operable one of its class, was to take over the AFT for its final months of duty. For photographers following the train, that night was just one more in a motel room, or in my case, in a car, curled up between boxes of film and cheese-crackers.

The 4449 was spotted for the night near the passenger station. Groups of fans took pictures and then drifted away as night fell. It started out to be a long one, and then an idea began to simmer. There appeared to be a chance of getting a photo of the steam locomotive and the Southern Railway Crescent’s streamlined diesel engines in the after-midnight hours, a photo that would be rare even taken by day. Southern’s timetable showed both north and south bound Crescents stopping in Salisbury between midnight and 3:00a.m.

The next three hours were spent getting the Nikkormat and tripod located where the station and 4449 could both be seen through the viewfinder. It was dark! The station would want at least one second at f2.8 exposure with fast film. And the 4449 was in a darker area. A fast enough shutter speed to stop the moving train would not reveal the 4449, even with its reflective aluminum-colored nose. Expose for the steamer and the passenger train would be a streak. Then, another photographer showed up and set up his tripod in the middle of my staked out scene to get a closer picture of the Crescent. I brooded. What I didn’t need was the brightest thing in that photo being some guy’s tripod. As the time approached for the north bound Crescent’s arrival, I worried way more about the darkness enveloping the 4449 than the cameraman standing by the baggage car at the center of the photo.

The horn of a diesel locomotive announced the Crescent’s impending arrival. At the same time, a yard engine pulled into view and stopped. Its headlight bathed the 4449 in warm incandescent light and generally vanquished the shadows around it. Moments later the northbound Crescent’s engines eased to a stop in the left side of my camera’s viewfinder. The 24mm lens took it all in, including the guy with the tripod. At least he held still. And looking back, I think I’ll leave him there, even though he would photo-chop out so easily with editing software. I just wish O. Winston Link had been there to light the scene and record it on large format film.

photo ©John W. Coniglio

The Republicans and Democrats who will vote on the health care bill(s) have their elections and re-elections paid for in part by the healthcare industry’s campaign contributions. The organizations that make up the health care industry have an army of lobbyists who guide, influence, persuade and otherwise determine how the legislators vote on bills affecting the health care industry. The legislators naturally claim neutrality as they cling to their wallets, but the legislation often reads like it was written by the industry, for the industry, of the industry.

All the people mentioned so far can afford and have health insurance. The politicians  have the best health care plans other people’s (the taxpayers) money can buy. The lobbyists and other industry reps have plans through their employers. These are the folks who are supposed to change a system that already works for them? If you believe that please click the “Donate” button at the end of this page and follow the instr…

The money trail

*Taxpayers pay for the elected politicians exclusive health care plan.  You can’t have it, but you must pay for it.
*Health care industry contributions turbo-charge the election/re-election spending of both Democrats and Republicans.
*People needing health care (all of us) pay most of our health care dollars to insurance companies, or COBRA middlemen (see item immediately above).
*Professional Corporations receive the negotiated amount of payments for medical services from insurance companies. Some of that money is paid to the doctor who performed the service.

Over simplified? Of course, since the laws governing health care were written by a pride of lawyers with a murder of accountants riding shotgun on the golden-gurney-that-goes-to-Washington.

The other money trail
Ends. More than ten-percent of Americans are unemployed. Millions more work part-time. There is no money trail for them. There is precious little money trail for those with incomes near what government euphemistically calls “poverty” level.

*Unemployment insurance lasts a shorter time than an elected representative’s term in the U.S. House.
*A month’s unemployment almost pays a month’s individual health policy premium.
*COBRA premium payment assistance defrays the cost of insurance for less than a year.
*A laid-off worker who has a mortgage has less than a year from lay-off to be hired somewhere else with similar pay and benefits (not likely in 2009 or 10) or decide between the mortgage or health insurance. The brutal truth is the family will lose both within two years in most cases.
*The handicapped and under-educated, and those living far from public transportation face those challenges sooner and the results are likely to be even more devastating.
*Without a way to pay for health and dental care, you don’t get sick.
Do you believe? <Donate>
*The public emergency room will treat you, if you wait long enough. Usually. If you can get there.

The gap, make that the void
Between the groups in the two parts above, is deeper than the coffers of the RNC and DNC combined, and wider than the flux between East and West, or Red and Blue or Life and Death.

The Fix
Make that the Doug Flutie last-gasp (literally?) toss of hope. Google it if you don’t know what it was. Maybe this isn’t the fix for health care, but we-the-people, well, all but the few with more money than common sense will sing, dance and vote their approval. Right now we are mostly nauseated.

*REMOVE the money trail. From right now, to as far back as there are seated senators and representatives- return all contributions from the health care industry to any and all political causes, campaigns and committees. ALL. From individuals as well as corporate entities. Give it all back. Of course it’s been spent. The banks have stimulus money to lend. Return all the industry’s influence buying power back to the industry.
*Concurrently, END NOW the practice of funding elections with ANY special interest money.

*REMOVE the U.S, Senators and Representatives from any and all health insurance plans. This is so they will begin to understand the problems we the people face daily. To make the experience more real for them, immediately set all Congressional pay at minimum wage, measured by factory-grade employee time-clocks in their offices and House and Senate chambers only.

As a cost control measure, yearly wages are capped at $28,674.33 and subject to FICA, Medicare, Medicaid and anything else taken out of ordinary workers’ paychecks. Adequate military-style housing is available for those preferring to not rent apartments. Additionally, one week of vacation is earned after one year of service. Eight sick days are allowed with a doctor’s note of verification. So they will have to see a doctor. So they are going to need health insurance. So they are maybe going to begin to understand the problem they are supposed to solve.

Required as part of the solution

*Everyone votes on the final proposal. It’s a national one-person one vote, 50%+1 wins. If the answer is, “No,” they start over. When they offer a solution that protects the handicapped single parent raising 3 kids in the trailer park, it will pass.
*The Federal government, including Congress will be included in any plan they propose. There will be no exclusions, nor favoritism extended to those elected, appointed or bought in to office. That applies to retirement as well. They join Social Security, like the rest of us.
*States will hold elections to replace those Congress-persons who are more interested in serving themselves than solving the nation’s problems. Those elections will adhere to the precepts outlined above.

Radical? Maybe.
Favoring Republicans or Democrats? No.
Absurd? No more so than the system where lobbyists make laws, pay for laws and benefit from laws at the expense of those who have no say in the laws.

The concept of, “Representation by the people, of the people and for the people,” comes to mind. What a revolutionary idea.

Some time in the mid-1980s
The grad student in physics was a few years from the doors of his lab when the car he was riding to preschool in turned from a main road to a service road that led into the train yard. The radio had announced the departure of an extra train southbound on AGS and clear for Main Street and 23rd. In English that means it was leaving Chattanooga for Birmingham and had use of the tracks south of the Central Avenue viaduct.

Now-a-days if a father and son were to drive into a train yard they would be declared terrorists and at the very least would be treated like sinners and kicked out with a warning that they would be safer invading North Korea than ever daring to set foot near a box car again. But, back then the railroad was a friendlier place, as long as “visitors” stayed off the tracks and out of the way. The view from the car was good enough for the youngster as the mighty steam locomotive stepped over switches while heading for the main tracks.

The road ran out near a junction with tracks that served downtown Chattanooga and the steamer began to pull away. And there, waiting was a northbound Southern Railway freight. Dad had time to lean out the window and make a photo before the steamer was obscured by the diesels. The youngster was not even late to class and he had a story to tell. His interest in the locomotive grew and he used to tape record its whistle when it passed about a mile from his home. And he was there when it left Chattanooga for the last time, after the railroad withdrew steam from its portfolio.

The American family must have been on some afternoon outing to downtown London and were going to catch the tube (subway) at Ealing Broadway station. The oldest of the three children, a pre-Beatles era teen carried an Argus 75 camera, the point-and-shoot of the day. It had one shutter speed, fixed focus and aperture and a film-winder that took several turns to advance one frame. When a train passed by, the photographer got one shot at the engine.

On this particular adventure, train-spotting was just a benefit of going somewhere else and the camera-toting teen was without his trusty British Railways log book, where each locomotive observed was carefully underlined, in pen if a photo was made, in pencil if just seen. So no verification exists for some photos made on non-train-spotting trips.

As the family walked into the station a train was approaching on the inbound (toward London) track used by the goods (freight) trains. The teen took a moment to aim the Argus. The steam locomotive was a “Hall” class engine, so dirty the number on the front was hard to read. It was going fast enough that the Argus and Ilford 620 film could not handle the motion blur, and the scene was looking straight into the sun. The Argus clicked and the number, 5972, was carefully written on a piece of paper and transferred to the list of things photographed on that roll of 12 pictures.

Upon return to the USA, the negatives were put in small envelopes, each with the engine number in the upper-left corner, and including a “C” if the negative was color, and put away. The chemist shop (drug store) prints of the black and white negatives were of marginal quality, not something a kid would use to try and impress an art teacher nor a girlfriend. That film has mostly languished in a box in a closet ever since.

While the teen train-spotter was trying (in vain) to impress the girls back home, old 5972, named “Olton Hall” (many British locomotives had names as well as numbers) was being withdrawn from service. It was sent to a scrap-yard, but somehow avoided the torch for 20 years. In 2001 it was chosen to appear in a Harry Potter film and is now as well known among young train-fans as its smaller and cheekier cousin, Thomas the Tank engine.

The Potter fans will tell you that the engine’s name is “Hogwarts Castle,” as that’s what is used in the movie. And while it was named “Olton Hall” in 1937 at Swindon, where it was built, I’m not one to argue with a few million fans of a guy with magical powers.

And since even the best photo-editing software is unable to reveal the number on the blurry front of the engine, you must decide for yourself. Is it Hogwarts or hogwash?

BR 5972 leads a goods train through Ealing Broadway station in 1962.