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air compressor to power the signals.

The goal is to restore numerous railroad signals, creating a unique interactive where, at the press of a button, the signal will show off its lights and sounds.

The signal garden started when young volunteers wanted to restore one of the signals as a senior project in 2020.

“Since the museum was closed for 2020 we didn’t do much work maintaining the running fleet, instead we started restoring signals,” shared Ryan Blake in an email.

“The plan is to have them in an outdoor display that will be interactive. We will have buttons that when pushed set off a timer relay that allows the signals to light up and make noise for maybe 15 seconds. We think this will be a hit for the kids.

“It’s also giving our younger volunteers a great chance to learn more new restoration techniques that they can use to maintain and restore our collection of historic vehicles.”

Blake, who spearheaded the fund drive for the streetcar, is working on removing the control panels of several A- and C-type BART cars, which are slated to be scrapped, selling them as a way to raise funds for a proposed Rapid Transit History Center.

He got involved at the museum in 2014 after two close friends joined.

“Ever since then building the museum has become an obsession of mine,” Blake shared in an email.

“For (the) 502, I look forward to one day restoring it,” he wrote. “We need to find someone who is a master at metal forming to repair the major fire damage from when it was stored in San Diego. I hope all the future restorations I’m involved with at the museum put me in a position where I’m able to do the work myself.”

The streetcar had been outdoors for almost 50 years before the volunteers acquired it.

Now, it’s owned by the Bay Area Electric Railroad Association, a nonprofit, and the Western Railway Museum.

“The car has nine lives,” Marcopulos said on moving day in 2020. “It’s one of the most interesting stories that it is being moved in the middle of a global pandemic.”

There is the hope of securing an auto body mechanic willing to donate time to help with the restoration. “Back in 1984 when the 502 was in San Diego waiting to be restored by the San Diego Electric

Railway Association, the car was lit up by an arsonist,” Marcopolus said in an email. “The ensuing fire severely damaged the upper frame of the car, bowing it near the center and rippling many of the rear body panels. “If we were able to find a volunteer who was familiar with repairing sheet metal bodywork, it would be a huge boost in getting this car looking great again,” he wrote.

“We also may need to fabricate some new skirting from scratch as not all the ‘Since the museum was closed for 2020 we didn’t do much work maintaining the running fleet, instead we started restoring signals.’ — Ryan Blake panels were still with the car when we received it.” The first work to be completed is a hard question as much of the car has been gutted, he said. The first step would likely be to get it over the work pit inside the restoration shop. The majority of the electrical components used to operate the car are located underneath. “Theoretically, the majority of the components should still be there, however, most of it will likely need to be temporarily removed so it can be repaired and a list of what’s missing can be put together,” Marcopolus wrote. “While all the electrical components are being repaired and/ or replaced we can begin work on the body.” Marcopulos still scrolls through the photo albums on his phone to show co-workers, friends and occasionally helpless bystanders the process it took to get the streetcar to its new home. “It took three years and five volunteers, including myself, putting in countless hours to negotiate the sale, find out how we even ship this historic car just over 100 miles to its new home and manage to (raise funds) for the entire project in the middle of a global pandemic. The memories I have of the whole process will definitely remain fresh in my mind for many years to come,” he wrote.

Director

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Dirt the Cat at the Nevada Northern Railway.

“We had some exciting times getting him to become the icon he became. Managing the NN’s visitor services for five years was a real thrill. It was an honor to work at such a preserved and historic location. After some time on the east coast working on the 2-ft. gauges of Maine, I have now planted my feet in the ground here at the Western Railway Museum,” he wrote.

He also shared his first impressions of the Western Railway Museum.

“I am blown away by what has been accomplished here already,” he wrote. “The welcoming volunteers, the wonderfully preserved equipment, and the beautiful grounds make such an excellent combination for a museum. Learning more about the old traditions of electric railroading, kept alive and well here at Western Railway Museum, I hope to bring new perspectives and opportunities to the museum. Anything is possible if we dream it up and work together to get there.”

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Tutu explained his devotion to social justice in religious terms, saying his Christian faith demanded that he speak out for the underdog and the oppressed. He also believed that South Africa, with its unique combination of the developed and developing worlds, was a “rainbow nation” and microcosm of global issues, including race and poverty. “Once we have got it right,” he said, “South Africa will be the paradigm for the rest of the world.”

Desmond Mpilo Tutu, the son of a schoolteacher and a laundress, was born Oct. 7, 1931, in a small gold-mining town in the Transvaal, the South African heartland. He wanted to become a doctor, but his family could not afford medical school.

After graduating from the University of South Africa in 1954, he followed in his father’s footsteps by teaching high school. He abandoned teaching as a career after the White-minority government, as part of its crusade to codify White superiority, passed the Bantu Education Act, consigning Blacks to poorly funded, secondrate schools.

Tutu next chose to study for the Anglican priesthood, inspired in part by Bishop Trevor Huddleston, who one day tipped his hat to Tutu’s mother when he passed her on the street.

“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Tutu once told Washington Post journalist Steven Mufson for the book “Fighting Years: Black Resistance and the Struggle for a New South Africa,” “a White man who greeted a Black working-class woman.”

Huddleston, a vocal opponent of apartheid whom the government later expelled to his native Britain, became Tutu’s spiritual mentor as well. The Anglican Church, a small but influential religious community within South Africa, welcomed to its ranks the articulate young Black clergyman.

After earning a bachelor’s in divinity and master’s degree in theology from King’s College, in London, Tutu spent

Dudley Brooks/The Washington Post file Archbishop Desmond Tutu, left, holds up the hand of Nelson Mandela on the balcony of City Hall in Cape Town, South Africa, after Mandela was proclaimed president in Parliament.

years teaching in South Africa and working in England as an administrator with the Theological Education Fund, which administered scholarships funds for the World Council of Churches.

He was named the first Black Anglican dean of Johannesburg in 1975, bishop of Lesotho one year later and general secretary of the South African Council of Churches in 1978.

He used the council position to become a high-profile spokesman for racial equality and nonviolence. As Black unrest spread throughout the country beginning in 1984, his offices at Khotso House in downtown Johannesburg became the nerve center for the liberation movement, housing a host of antiapartheid organizations, including trade unions and grass-roots community organizations.

For his efforts, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984. Government officials, who conducted a smear campaign, accusing him of being a secret communist, reluctantly allowed him to attend the event in Oslo. He began his address characteristically, by citing the recent killings of a 6-year-old Black child by security forces and a White baby by Black rioters. Both deaths, he said, “are part of the high cost of apartheid.”

Violence on both sides was wrong, he told his distinguished audience. But, he added, “the primary violence is that of apartheid, the violence of forced population removals, of inferior education, of detention without trial.”

Even during that solemn event, Tutu couldn’t help making a joke: A Zambian boasts about his country’s minister for naval affairs to a South African, who points out disparagingly that landlocked Zambia has no navy. The Zambian replies, “Well, in South Africa you have a minister of justice, don’t you?”

Tutu was more than a just a spiritual cheerleader for the antiapartheid movement. There were times when he angered his fellow activists by opposing violence committed in the name of Black liberation just as vehemently as he denounced state-sanctioned violence.

When anti-apartheid activists began targeting for death purported government collaborators, Tutu several times waded into angry mobs of demonstrators to rescue alleged informers. In the impoverished Black township of Duduza east of Johannesburg in July 1985, he and a fellow Anglican bishop, dressed in purple robes, pulled to safety a man alleged to be an undercover policeman at a funeral for four young men killed in political violence. The crowd had yanked the man from his car, set it on fire and sought to drag him on top of it to form a “funeral pyre” in vengeance for the four deaths.

“If you do this again,” he scolded a crowd in nearby KwaThema after the murder of another alleged informer, “I will find it difficult to speak out for our liberation. We must be able, at the end of the day, to walk with our heads held high. Freedom must come, but freedom must come in the right way.”

In the nearby township of Daveyton, even while openly defying the government’s ban on political funerals, Tutu interposed himself between Black mourners and hundreds of heavily armed soldiers to prevent a violent confrontation. Then, as always, he couched his political actions in the spirit and tradition of the Bible. “I don’t want to go to jail,” he told the crowd. “But if I am to go to jail for preaching the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, then so be it.”

Tutu’s personal courage and adherence to nonviolence won many accolades abroad, but at times alienated Blacks in South Africa. In February 1986, he intervened to end three days of violent clashes in Alexandra township outside Johannesburg by pledging to take grievances to President P.W. Botha.

When Botha refused to meet with him, he returned empty-handed and was booed when he addressed a crowd of 45,000 at Alexandra stadium. He later confessed that if he were a young Black man, he wouldn’t follow his own preachings, according to Mufson’s book.

Later that year, Tutu was elected archbishop of Cape Town, the first Black head of the Anglican Church in South Africa. He relished his new role and the privileges that came attached. Dismissing suggestions that he live in a Black township, he settled into the luxurious official residence while opening up the swimming pool to Black youths from the townships, Mufson reported.

After Mandela’s release from prison in 1990, the lifting of the ban on the African National Congress, the major Black resistance organization, and the government’s gradual dismantling of the apartheid laws, Tutu’s profile seemed to fade.

But in 1995, then-President Mandela named him chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was tasked with producing an accurate record of the previous regime’s gross human rights violations while offering compensation to victims and amnesty to perpetrators willing to give a full public accounting of their deeds.

Tutu used his exuberant sense of humor and gift for setting people at ease to launch the commission. Asked at the first open public hearing what he wanted to be called, he replied, “You can call me anything as long as you don’t call me ‘Your Graciousness.’ ” He added, “I don’t think I intimidate people. I hope they think I’m fun.”

In 1955 he married Leah Nomalizo Shenxane. He is survived by her and their four children, Trevor, Thandeka, Naomi and Mpho; seven grandchildren and great-grandchildren; and his younger sister, Gloria Radebe.

Study

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who has led separate studies into the longterm effects of Covid-19. “For a long time now, we have been scratching our heads and asking why long Covid seems to affect so many organ systems. This paper sheds some light, and may help explain why long Covid can occur even in people who had mild or asymptomatic acute disease.”

The findings haven’t yet been reviewed by independent scientists, and are mostly based on data gathered from fatal Covid-19 cases, not patients with long Covid-19 or “post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2,” as it’s also called.

Contentious findings

The coronavirus’s propensity to infect cells outside the airways and lungs is contested, with numerous studies providing evidence for and against the possibility.

The research undertaken at the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, is based on extensive sampling and analysis of tissues taken during autopsies on 44 patients who died after contracting the coronavirus during the first year of the pandemic in the U.S.

The burden of infection outside the respiratory tract and time to viral clearance isn’t well characterized, particularly in the brain, wrote Daniel Chertow, who runs the NIH’s emerging pathogens section, and his colleagues.

The group detected persistent SARS-CoV-2 RNA in multiple parts of the body, including regions throughout the brain, for as long as 230 days following symptom onset. This may represent infection with defective virus, which has been described in persistent infection with the measles virus, they said.

In contrast to other Covid-19 autopsy research, the NIH team’s post-mortem tissue collection was more comprehensive and typically occurred within about a day of the patient’s death. ers also used a variety of tissue preservation techniques to detect and quantify viral levels, as well as grow the virus collected from multiple tissues, including lung, heart, small intestine and adrenal gland from deceased Covid patients during their first week of illness.

“Our results collectively show that while the highest burden of SARSCoV-2 is in the airways and lung, the virus can disseminate early during infection and infect cells throughout the entire body, including widely throughout the brain,” the authors said.

The researchers posit that infection of the pulmonary system may result in an early “viremic” phase, in which the virus is present in the bloodstream and is seeded throughout the body, including across the blood-brain barrier, even in patients experiencing mild or no symptoms. One patient in the autopsy study was a juvenile who likely died from unrelated seizure complications, suggesting infected children without severe Covid-19 can also experience systemic infection, they said.

Immune response

The less-efficient viral clearance in tissues outside the pulmonary system may be related to a weak immune response outside the respiratory tract, the authors said.

SARS-CoV-2 RNA was detected in the brains of all six autopsy patients who died more than a month after developing symptoms, and across most locations evaluated in the brain in five, including one patient who died 230 days after symptom onset.

The focus on multiple brain areas is especially helpful, said Al-Aly at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System.

“It can help us understand the neurocognitive decline or ‘brain fog’ and other neuropsychiatric manifestations of long Covid,” he said. “We need to start thinking of SARSCoV-2 as a systemic virus that may clear in some people, but in others may persist for weeks or months and produce long Covid – a multifaceted systemic disorder.”