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My Thoughts
The Julian News 5
by Michele Harvey
Small Town Stories
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Bohemian Rhapsody In Medieval times Kutny Hora, now a picturesque village in the rolling hills of Bohemia, was a major silver mining town. The mines were productive even though the technology wasn’t exactly 21st century. Miners slithered down the shaft on leather aprons and climbed back on primitive ladders at the end of a ten to twelve hour day, often taking a couple of hours to crawl up 1500 feet. They didn’t always make it. Lighting in the mines often didn’t really exist and bathrooms with flush toilets a dream of centuries in the future. Miners could eat and drink what they could carry down, and it was a long day. The average lifespan was 35 years. Once the silver was above ground it was smelted and refined and mixed with copper alloy and generally done to what is done to silver to make it into the coin of the realm. The men who made the actual coins would put a round disc of silver alloy on a coin sized engraving in the middle of a large iron disc. They then placed another huge piece of iron with a coin sized round hole down through the middle over it. Next they took a very heavy cylinder with the other side of the coin engraved on one end and slid it down the hole. They then hit the top of the cylinder with a heavy hammer. WHAP-0! It made a ringing singing clang that echoed around the stone-walled chamber. Each of the ten to twelve men did this two hundred times a day in what was considered the best job in town. They lost their hearing early on. Kutny Hora also has a stunning high Gothic church which must be nice and cool in summer. It certainly is cool in winter. The earth beneath the town was described as “like Swiss cheese” with mine shafts going down and around to a depth of, as we said, up to 1500 feet. The five high ceilinged floors in our lovely, Art Nouveau Prague hotel meant a climb of perhaps 50 feet on a staircase that wrapped up and around a lovely elevator with old-fashioned engraving and graceful iron curlicues housing a modern, quiet, and fast interior. We thought of the miners as we took the elevator.
I have a friend who grew up in the small town of Tuolumne City, California east of highway 49 and quite a ways due east of Stockton. Even now the town has a population that is under 2000 which for me qualifies it as a small town. She and her husband now live in Kerman, a few miles outside of Fresno. She told me that she reads The Julian News online and likes my column because she finds so many small town feelings in it. This started a story telling time that she and I enjoyed because our small town stories were so true and so funny. My friend told me that in the next bigger town to the town she grew up in they had a local newspaper that published crimes. These crimes often had to do with a drunk man passing out somewhere in town or a drunk driver driving into a ditch with no injuries reported. Crime didn’t reign supreme in her small town. I told her about the woman who used to own a gift shop in Julian and had to bring her very elderly mother to work with her. She left her mother in the car each day so she could nap comfortably. People often saw her napping, thought she was dead and called the sheriffs. Finally, after many calls to the sheriffs over the months, the shop owner hung a sign on her mother that read “I’m not dead. I’m sleeping.” My friend and her husband live near a man who once came home from work and slumped over in his vehicle. They thought they should check on him because he might have needed help. Her husband told her to walk over there and she said “No”. She didn’t want to see him if he was dead. She told her husband that he had worked in a mortuary at one time, so he should go look at the slumped over neighbor. By the time they made their decision as to who would go look at the man, he woke up and walked into his house. Some small towns have a town drunk. This person is tolerated or ignored and seldom causes any problems. Years ago, our town had Dutch. Dutch wasn’t a smiling man, but he didn’t bother people, so he just said hello and hung out at a local bar. One night a man bet Dutch $100.00 that he couldn’t live without drinking alcohol for a year. The bet was on and Dutch meandered home. On his way home his Stetson hat fell off of his head. He was so drunk that he didn’t notice. A man saw Dutch’s well known hat on the ground and picked it up thinking he would give it back to Dutch when he saw him again. Dutch made it through that year of sobriety. When he returned to the bar to collect his $100.00 the man who saved his hat for a full year greeted him, handing over the Stetson. Dutch took one look at him, saying that No Man was allowed to touch his hat and punched the guy square in the face. In the mid-1980s I used to make and sell my crafts at the local town hall. One morning I was unloading my goods from my truck behind the town hall when I saw Dutch. This was about 7 a.m. I asked him if he was waking up or if he was going to bed. He told me that he wasn’t sure. We used to have a sheriff ’s deputy named Teddy Linton. His mother owned a grocery store on the way to Valley Center and I once read a newspaper article about her. Another time I read an article about a man whose last name was Linton who had been arrested. I asked Teddy if they were related and he said that some Lintons are either famous or infamous. Then he smiled at me and that was that. Recently 2 people broke into a local pie shop late at night. Apparently the would-be burglars didn’t look into the front bakery windows. If they had, they would have seen someone working inside who was able to call 911 promptly when they used a crowbar to break in. I don’t think they have been apprehended, but I do know that they didn’t get away with anything. One day, about 25 years ago I was making lunch and glanced out my kitchen window. Standing at my clothesline were 3 horses. I have no horses on my property, so that was a big surprise. Another small town story. A few weeks ago, after I closed my store for the evening, I was walking from my store to my car and I saw 2 young ladies who looked puzzled. I asked if I could help. They weren’t certain where they had parked their car. They asked if I could tell them where Washington and State Street intersected. I told them that we don’t have a State Street. Then they asked where Washington and “B” Street intersected. I told them that those streets run parallel. While they were asking me questions, they were looking at an IPhone, presumably at a map. After another minute or so of conversation, they were certain that they parked on 2nd Street between Washington and “B” Street. I told them how to walk there and it didn’t dawn on me until I had driven nearly all the way home that I’m not sure that block of 2nd Street has available parking. Do these things happen in big towns and cities? We used to have a man up here who dressed like his impression of Paul Bunyan. He wore tight pants with suspenders, showing off his hairy chest and he wore tall black work boots. The man liked to get into fist fights and it seemed like he thought fighting was a manly thing to do. One of those show off for the girls kind of things. I never actually saw him win a fight, however I saw his biggest loss. That evening he was taunting a small man who sat in the back of a pickup truck. The man finally had heard more than enough insults, so he picked up a crowbar that was lying in the bed of the truck and hit his taunter upside the head. No one was seriously injured though I’m sure one of those men had one serious headache. Again, do these things happen in places that are not small towns? I love the stories that show off the uniqueness of small towns. These are my thoughts.
What New Research Shows About Probiotics and Baby Health (StatePoint) A new clinical trial shows that parents can safely improve gut health in that crucial first year of life while a baby’s metabolism and immune system are developing. A team of scientists at the University of California Davis have spent years researching a beneficial gut bacteria called B. infantis that has gone missing in nine out of 10 U.S. babies. Scientists attribute this trend to modern medical practices such as antibiotic usage and C-Sections. Unfortunately, when this good bacteria is missing, baby’s gut microbiome often becomes disrupted, increasing the risk of developing short- and long-term health issues like colic, eczema, allergies, diabetes and obesity. The groundbreaking news, notes the new clinical trial, is that a probiotic called Evivo results in rapid and substantial restoration of gut health in babies. “When the right bacteria for babies is combined with breast milk, it can restore the microbiome to its naturally protective state, boosting levels of good bacteria and reducing levels of potentially harmful bacteria, which have been linked to increased risk for long-term conditions such as eczema, allergies, diabetes and obesity,” says Dr. Tanya Altmann, a pediatrician and best-selling nutrition author. “Doing this early in a baby’s life has the
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