Our Fog

      Every once in awhile, Indianapolis remembers it started out as a swamp, and throws out a pea-soup fog of impressive thickness.

     Oh, there's fog all over central Indiana this morning, tapering off into Illinois, but the heart of the city holds it cupped, like someone with an unexpected handful of overcooked oatmeal and nowhere to put it down.  From the front windows of Roseholme Cottage, the houses across the street are mist-wrapped mysteries, hazy shapes bulking from the gray that might conceal anything (but probably only nurses, retired dog-walkers and a guy who deals in used vehicles of questionable provenance).

     My car has gone somewhat foggy, too.  A week ago Sunday, I worked a late shift and on the way home,  noticed the normal-beam headlights were unaccountably dim.  Most of my night driving is on well-lit city streets, but there's a stretch along a nicely-wooded road, and thinking back, I realized I'd been having more and more trouble there with the headlights of oncoming cars.  I'd been blaming bright HID and LED bulbs, but those didn't suddenly appear on the market last November.

     It's time to replace the headlight bulbs of my car,* a task that carmakers have been making more and more awkward all my life.  It looks like the passenger-side change requires removing a large plastic cover (held with snap-in plastic rivets), unbolting the windshield-washer reservoir and setting it aside, popping out a twist-to-remove weatherproof cover (with wires through it) and reaching into the back of the light housing, where the socket comes out, bulb and all, in another quarter-turn-twist assembly.  At that point, you can finally unlatch the bulb from its socket and reverse the whole process.  The driver's side requires a similar procedure, minus the big plastic cover and bottle of windshield goop.

     Or I could just go to the oil-change place and have them do it while getting fresh oil and filters, which is what I will probably do.  It's filthy work, outdoors, and well, I'd as soon not.
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* My previous string of Hyundai Accents were successively named The Hot Needle of Inquiry, The Hotter Needle of Inquiry and either The Hottest Needle of Inquiry or The Needle of Inquiry So Hot You Would Just Plotz.  The Lexuses (Lexii?) have been much nicer, and I have never been sure if they should be The Pride of Chanur, The Solar Queen, or Unexpected Expense, but in either case, the present one rates a II after it.  (I tried The Skylark of Space for the first one, but it didn't stick.)  And bonus points to anyone who recognizes where all of the ship names comes from -- or all except the last, which was my own invention but is unlikely to be unique. 

Back Drying -- For Now

     The replacement fan impeller for my dryer arrived Friday.  I'm not terribly superstitious, but I was tired; I waited until Saturday to install it.

     The project didn't start well.  I assumed I needed to remove the drum, and when I got that far, I found that I didn't remember how.  There's a little trick to it.  Checking with an online repair video -- definitely not AI -- I learned the drum stays put for a fan replacement.  I rethreaded the belt (I'll be back to that) and took the front off the fan housing, a half-dozen sheet metal screws.  Sure enough, the fan had broken all around the hub, as expected.  I still needed to remove a lint and hair ball, a circlip and a round spring clamp.  The fuzz took a lot of work with regular needlenose pliers; it was really compressed.  For the next step, I could have sworn I had circlip pliers, but apparently I do not.

     You can use tiny round-needlenose pliers to remove a circlip, but the task requires patience.  The clip tends to slip off the tapering round jaws.  It took me five tries.  (And knowing the ways of circlips, I'd ordered a new one; in fact, I paid more for the parts because the cheaper places didn't stock them.)  Somehow the thing did not fly away to Parts Unknown when removed.  The clamp is easy; it's got three "ears" that stick up, two on one side and one on the other, and you just grab them with a pair of pliers and lift it off the hub.  The hub came off in pieces and the rest of the fan followed.  I used a cloth to remove the big chunks of lint and plastic and vacuumed the rest out before starting to install the new impeller.

     It wouldn't go on.  The shaft is D-shaped and everything needs to be lined up just right -- but it wouldn't go on even then.  It started and then stuck. I pried it off and cleaned the motor shaft with a rag.  It didn't help much.  I took it back off and cleaned up sprue around the opening with my pocket knife.  That worked a little better, but it didn't go far when I started it on the motor shaft..

     The instruction video had listed a deep-well 9/16" socket and a soft-headed hammer, showing how to tap the impeller in place.  I had them sitting ready, and proceeded to carefully apply force, expecting the worst.

     Nope.  Bit by bit, whack by whack, the impeller settled home.  I installed the new spring clamp around the hub, and then tackled the circlip.  It isn't any easier to use the wrong tool to install them than to remove them; after six tries, I got it about three-quarters engaged and popped it the rest of the way into the groove.

     From that point, reassembly is, as they say, the opposite of disassembly: cover, brace, feet (the fan cover fastens to the bottom of the chassis at two points), then the front of the dryer goes back on, two clips at the base that fit into slots, re-installation of the door switch in its holder, two sheet-metal screws at the top to hold the front to the sides (making sure the alignment pins are in their corresponding holes). Next, the wiring goes back in its clips and the top is lowered and latched.

     Tam came downstairs for the plugging in, exhaust-duct connection and, at last, the test run.  I set the dryer to run without heat and pushed the start button.

     It ran, and we looked at each other.  Whattaya know!  "Tam, keep an eye on it.  I'm going to check the exhaust opening."

     Outside, the little louvers had popped up, and there was a scattering of plastic fragments in the flowerbed, the same color as the broken fan.  Clean air was coming out of the vent.  I yelled, "It looks okay," into it and came back inside.  We watched the dryer run a little while longer.  It was...mostly smooth.

     Mostly.  There's a little vibration and rumble.  You can't see the drive pulley (it's on the back of the motor that the fan is on the front of) without removing the drum, but when I restrung the belt, it felt a little rough.  So I'm pretty sure that's going to be the next project.  I vacuumed a lot of drive-belt particles from the bottom of the dryer, too.

     Today, I'm on the third load of drying, and the machine is still running and still rumbling -- no worse, but no better, either.  I think I'm going to skip machine-drying my tennis shoes for awhile; even with pillows along for the ride,* they thump around pretty hard, and the drive pulley is the same decades-old plastic as the fan impeller. (Update: no, it's metal.  The tension idler is plastic but felt okay.  I may have worn out the support rollers I replaced a few years ago.)
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* This is the best trick I know for washing trainers: add a pair of pillows!  They keep action in the washer from becoming too chaotic, cushion the leaping-around in the dryer, and it fluffs your pillows at the same time!  But it's a lot of mass in motion with the shoes alone, and when you add wet pillows (washer) or damp ones (dryer) as well, it's a lot of load.  If things are going to break, that's going to make it happen sooner.

He Said What?

      Look, if you're going to put your political party forward as the party of moral probity and traditional virtues, admitting (or even claiming) you have snorted cocaine from the seat of a toilet should be an absolute bar to holding any public office, ever.  Period.

     And yet....


     I don't think we should cut politicians much slack for having smoked pot; it remains Federally illegal and it was against most or all state laws when our known pot smokers did so, even if they were only smoking it for the articles didn't inhale.  Drinking to excess is reprehensible, especially while in office.  But these are now vices at the outer edge of social acceptability, legal in many places under the proper circumstances.  Using cocaine...is not.  Snorting Bolivian Marching Powder off the seat of a commode previously used for its intended purposes is way beyond the pale.  Even joking about it (and make no mistake, that will be the face-saving retcon, despite the story having been told in utter seriousness) indicates a marked degeneracy.

     Many people in the current Administration make my skin crawl, and none more than our Secretary of Health and Human Services.

A Book And Some History

     Paperback books really got their start after World War Two as the pulp magazines were fading away -- but Uncle Sam gave them one heck of a jumpstart.

     As anyone who've served in our armed forces can tell you, service life, even during a global war, consists of a great deal of "hurry up and wait."  Once the traditional idle vices of the soldier and sailor have been used up -- complaining; telling more or less true stories of misadventure, home life or even derring-do; smoking; and idle speculation about what the brass have in store next -- and the pastimes so often assigned by non-commissioned officers (polishing shoes, peeling vegetables, making beds, shining the shiny things and painting the painted things) have been wrung dry, what's left?

     Assuming fighting, drinking and/or sex are off the table (which they usually were), one of the more portable options was reading.  But supplies of Astounding, G-8's Battle Aces, Spicy Detective or even Ranch Romances were a bit scarce, especially close to the various fronts, and the magazines were too large for easy shipping -- or a uniform pocket.  Besides, the War Department wanted to have a little say about the content; some of those pulps, well, phew.  Hardback books were even more unwieldy than pulp magazines, and they couldn't hand out Reader's Digest to everyone in uniform -- there was a war on, and paper was strictly rationed!

     But that digest size just about fit military pockets-- In 1942, a bunch of publishers, booksellers, librarians and authors got together (only so very slightly encouraged by the Office of War Information) to create the Council on Books in Wartime, under the motto, "Books are weapons in the war of ideas," and they intended for America's warriors to have the best armament possible.  They dreamed up (among other things) Armed Services Editions, genuinely pocket-sized, lightweight paperback books to suit every reader (within reasonable limits).  ASE reprints were hammered out by the millions, everything from William Makepeace Thackeray to Edgar Rice Burroughs, from H. P. Lovecraft to Thurber, Tolstoy and Thoreau.  They were printed on digest-sized presses, two books at a time, and then cut in half, resulting in a book longer than it was tall, just a little smaller than postwar paperbacks.*

     They were widely popular, carried, read, shared, swapped, and passed from hand to hand until they fell apart.

     And then, not too long after V-J Day, the presses...stopped.  As life returned to normal, the paperback book started showing up, filling the spots pulps once occupied.

     Elsewhere and years later, the delightful lunatics at Field Notes, who gave us the motto, "I'm not writing it down to remember it later, I'm writing it down to remember it now," were casting about for a new project.  Their line of notebooks includes constant variation, and they decided to do one rather wider than it was tall -- or vertically-hinged; it's got a cover on both ends for the two orientations, one short and wide, the other tall and skinny.  And someone in their office with an eye to history, or perhaps to recent books about history, saw it was just about the same size as an Armed Services Editions book.  They borrowed the bright primary color covers of the wartime books for theirs, and....

     Ordinary minds might have thought, "H'mm," and moved on.  For Field Notes, it was an opportunity.  ASE printed mystery novels, including a couple by Raymond Chandler, but Dashiell Hammett (a WW I veteran who had re-enlisted in 1942, despite being 48 years old and suffering from tuberculosis) was skipped.

     So they fixed it.  You can buy their brand-new, near-perfect match ASE edition of The Maltese Falcon right now.  It's a good story, well worth reading even if you have seen the film -- and the book and film are a remarkable example of how to go from the page to the screen.  Not everything makes the leap, but it's surprising how much does, and in which ways.  And you can hold in your hand the same kind of book that troops serving in WW II held, passing time in print while an entire world hung in the balance.

     I'm not getting paid to shill for Field Notes.  It's fine by me if you pick up a $1.50 used copy to read instead, or not at all; multiple versions have come out since the story was first serialized and with the film, it's practically an institution.  Copyright was renewed in the mid-1950s, so royalties from the Field Notes reprint will go to whoever presently holds the rights.

     It is indeed the stuff that dreams are made of -- but I'm not asking you the play the sap for me.
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* Alas, the paperback book is no more.  Paperbacks comprise something more than seventy-five percent of the Roberta X Library of Science Fiction, Fantasy and (separately shelved) Mystery, so this hits close to home for me.  Literally; bookshelves are what we have in the dining and living room instead of wallpaper.

Subverting The Future

     The FDA has declined Moderna's request for review of their mRNA flu vaccine, stymieing a path to approval for using the vaccine in the U.S.; that's a fact.

     I can't verify the follow-on yet; the only source is a single user on "X" (formerly Twitter), Leah Libresco Sargeant, who claims, "Moderna's CEO announced the company will no longer invest in new Phase 3 vaccine trials for infectious diseases...," sidelining develpment of mRNA vaccines for Epstein-Barr virus, shingles and herpes because without access to the U.S. market, the effort is likely to lose money.

     Big if true, and a real loss for humanity.  Moderna's a for-profit corporation, not a charity, and they didn't make the rules: if the corporation doesn't make money for its investors, the investors stop investing.

     The flu vaccine rejection is a direct result of RFK, Jr's thumb on the scales.  A successful vaccine is almost literally a "better mousetrap," and Moderna's track record is good -- not a sure thing, but about as close as it gets.  Americans voted for this, and the Senate didn't stop it.

     UPDATE: the quote looks legitimate; the original source appears to be a (paywalled, scroll quickly!) Bloomberg News article, itself quoted in Biospace, which was linked to by a piece at Marginal Revolution.  That's as much as I've found.

Rewriting Everything

     Not only does authoritarianism edit the past and abuse the present -- it wants to the steal the future, too.

     It's especially after the future for women.  The Heritage Foundation has a long-term blueprint to shove women back into "church, children and cooking," whether we want it or not -- and they're utterly serious about it.

     It's fantasy bullshit.  My mother was born in 1931, to parents who were born in the 19th Century.  Her mother was a schoolteacher who raised six children, ran a household, and worked all her life, at paying jobs and charity work.  My Mom worked full-time until her first child, worked part-time afterward, was a Girl Scout troop leader and, when my baby brother was older, a Cub Scout Den Mother; but by then, she was already working full-time again, too.

     She kept house all along, and did most of the cooking (dishes and routine gardening fell to the children when we were old enough, followed by lawn care and eventually some of the cooking and other household chores), and her jobs weren't inconsequential; starting as a secretary, she became an insurance adjuster, adjuster/manager, and ended up in the company's main office, handling claims running to a million dollars and more.   Mom and her mother were lifelong Republicans, active in their churches, and involved in local politics; but they certainly don't fit the mold today's conservatives would condemn them to.  And yet there they are, square in the past Heritage is busy lying about.

     This is -- as I wrote yesterday -- dictator stuff, and it aligns squarely with the social roles the WW II Axis powers assigned to women.

     For all their red, white and blue, flag-waving, publicly-praying poses, Mr. Trump's party is selling what the West fought to stop.  Polling suggests it's not quite working for them, but bear in mind that Axis leaders never let a little thing like public opinion get in their way.  Americans need to keep pushing back.

Rewriting History

     It starts small.  It starts with something that doesn't matter to most people.

     The Trump administration removed all mentions of transgender anything from the Stonewall National Monument, which is pretty weird since drag queens were among the most enthusiastic rioters after police raided the Mafia-run gay bar.  --But it's also weird because unless you're a member of the LGBTQ+ community or a student of political uprisings, the Stonewall Riots are a single line in a high school history book, if that.  And the National Monument consists of short sections of a few city streets and a park smaller than most suburban driveways; you'd have to read the plaques to notice that the alphabet-soup designation had been replaced by "LGB."  Then a few months later, they removed all overt mentions of bisexual people (presumably so Suburban Mom and Dad, unlikely to visit Stonewall to begin with, won't have to explain "bisexual" to Junior and Sis). Most recently, they took down the rainbow flag that had flown over the park in one form or another since 2017.

     This is a National Monument that matters a lot to LGBTQ+ people and a little to history buffs interested in how the powerless push back against the powerful -- and hardly at all to anyone else.  Maybe twelve percent of the population at the outside.  Why even mess with it?

     How about a smaller group, with a more broadly-known history?  Per the U. S. Census, a bit less than two percent of the U.S. population are Native Americans.  People with a little Native ancestry but no meaningful cultural connection,* like me, might bulk that up by another two to five percent.  But just about all of us learned about Custer's Last Stand.

     The Trump administration is busy revamping historical displays at Little Big Horn, polishing the General's tarnished reputation and sweeping mention of broken treaties and Federal government bad faith onto the ash-pile.

     Or take some even more general history, the General in question also having been our first President: at the President's House Site in Philadelphia, there was signage describing the nine enslaved people of George Washington's household at that location, with additional information about Colonial and early American slavery.  There was.  It's been taken down.  It's a matter of historical fact that George Washington owned slaves, most via his marriage to Martha Custis, and what details we have are mixed.  He appears to have freed one small group by leaving them for a year and a day in a location where such "abandonment" amounted to manumission -- but he owned other people, fellow Americans, until the day he died.  You won't get any of that nuance in Philadelphia now, only silence.  They've been unpersoned.

     This is dictator stuff.  Most of the West was shocked by Winston Smith's job in 1984 -- but Stalin had been retconning Soviet and Russian history for decades when Orwell wrote the book.

     History can be ugly.  Messy.  Imprecise.  It is by turns tragic, amusing and embarrassing.  We tell children simple, uplifting stories about their forebears, and hope it will inspire them to do better -- but as we grow, we learn more and more of the real story, and the more complex lessons it teaches.  Sanitizing and simplifying U.S. history, sweeping awkwardness under the rug, pretending "those people" were never there, or only on the sidelines, is morally impoverishing.  You're not obliged to like all our history, or think every bit of it was a good idea -- but you damned well ought to know what happened, by whom, to whom.  We can, at least, know why people were there, what blew up at Haymarket and who was killed or injured, even if we can never know for certain who threw the bomb.  History, as accurate as we can get it, matters far more than vibes.
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* I've checked.  Apparently, liking butter beans and cornbread doesn't count.  Harsh but fair.

Above Freezing!

     Today, the high reached 40°F.  Tonight's predicted low will be 33°.  We haven't seen our last freeze of the winter, I expect, but we're supposed to mostly stay above freezing for the next week.  We may see the upper 40s or even 50 by the weekend.

     It's a small respite, but I'll take it.

Heavy-Duty Cotton Twill

      A commenter asked, "What's a dungaree, anyway?"

     It turns out that's quite a question.  The easy answer is that it's a heavy, hard-wearing, twill-woven cotton fabric, typically yarn-dyed -- a sibling to denim.

     The harder answer branches and twines.  About as soon as people figured out some things -- wool, cotton, flax, hemp (and so on) -- can be spun into threads and the threads woven into cloth, they started working out various ways to weave it.

     Canvas -- from an Anglo-French or Old French root -- is heavy-duty cloth in a plain over one, under one weave, and it was first made from hemp: cannabis in Greek, or cannapaceus in Vulgar Latin.  The Dutch turned out a really tight-woven version suitable for, oh, sails, and called it "canvas cloth," except the Dutch word is "doek," and there's your canvas duck.  "Cotton duck" is canvas without the hemp.  Canvas is heavy stuff, great for tents, bags, maybe capes.  But it's stiff.  It doesn't drape nicely, and it'll sandpaper your skin.

     There are flexible weaves that are still tight, like twill.  It's an old pattern, and there's no telling it if was invented to make a pretty design, move better, wear less -- or someone just lost count.  Humans like to fiddle, and as soon as we had looms and some free time, we started trying things.  Twill weave was probably invented more than once, and there are multiple patterns that count as "twill."  But it's ideal for clothes.  By the Middle Ages, the French were making a good twill, "sergé de Nîmes," which you and I know as denim.  In the 19th Century, Levi Strauss started using it for workwear after Gold Rush miners -- miners! -- complained the canvas he made jeans from was too rough on their hides.

     (Wait, what's "serge?"  It's a specific two up, two down twill weave that flows nicely and the word meant "silken."  And "jeans?"  Weavers in Genoa, Italy copied the French weavers of Nimes, right down to the blue dye: blue Genoa cloth became "blue jean" material.  The name went from the cloth to clothing -- and "denim jeans" is either redundant or a well-hedged bet.)

     The thing is, another people had beaten French (and Italian) weavers and San Francisco tailors to the idea: in India, they'd been spinning and weaving cotton* for centuries if not millennia (when Alexander the Great invaded India in 327 BC, his troops soon swapped their woolen clothes for comfortable local cotton), and their wardrobes tended more to folding than cutting and sewing.  Twill had long been woven in and around the city of Dongri, giving rise to the Marathi word dongrī for the cloth, Urdu dungrī and Hindi dũgrī  -- and, by the 1600s, the English word dungaree.  It was a short step from the name of the cloth to the workwear, and thus we get dungarees.  The Indian original was yarn-dyed, and so is the thread for the modern cloth.  Yes, it's likely that hard-wearing farm (etc.) clothes of radically different cut and design were made from essentially the same fabric; when the human race comes up with a good idea, it tends to spread, getting reimagined as it goes.
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* Of some note, when you see pictures of Gandhi quietly sitting on the floor, running a spinning wheel?  He's not engaging in a gentle pastime, he's being defiant.  The Raj was happy to use Indian cotton -- in their own mills, mostly in England, and to sell the cloth back to Indians at a nice profit.  Just like marching to the sea to boil out salt, they didn't want the Indians doing for themselves.  This policy...engendered resentment.  You'll notice the Raj isn't around any more -- and the Indians have a spinning wheel on their flag.

I Didn't Think It Was Supposed To Sound Like That

      Saturday is my day to do laundry.  Especially this week -- I've got to fill in at work on Sunday.  So it had to get done today.

     First load, tops and delicates, a surprising amount of which can go in the dryer on low.  Which is where I put it.  I loaded the air-dry stuff onto plastic hangers and started the washer filling for the week's worth of work slacks that follow.

     H'mm, the old dryer's sounding a little rough.  I decided to check the outside vent as soon as I got upstairs.

     It didn't look too bad, but what was clunking around?  I did have three hooded sweatshirts in there....

     I took the slacks down and loaded the washer.  The dryer sounded worse.  It seemed to be varying in speed as the drum turned.  Was it a drive-belt issue?  Overloaded?  Motor failing?

     Most dryers have synchronous motors.  They need to be extremely unhappy before the speed starts to vary, and they usually don't last long after that.  And the noise was getting worse and worse, with occasional banging sounds.

     I decided to put everything on hangers and let it air-dry while I had a look at the dryer.  Not great, but it's winter and a pretty cold day: the air in my house is plenty dry and a little extra humidity wouldn't hurt.  A fair amount of messing with damp clothing later, I opened up the dryer.

     It still didn't look too bad.  I  found some lint balls in the exhaust vent, and maybe the belt is wearing faster than I'd like, but that was all.  In a spirit of trying things, I got my portable vacuum and started cleaning the squirrel-cage blower; the machine has been taking longer and longer to get clothes dry recently, and it did have some lint build-up on the vanes.

     In the process of cleaning the fan, I eventually realized the impeller was turning independently of the drive shaft.  Oh, it would turn if the shaft was turning, too, but it's supposed to be rigidly coupled.  And it was wobbling quite a bit.  That's the kind of thing that would account for the racket the dryer was making.

     Double-checking the drawings online, it looks like the motor shaft is D-shaped and the fan is clamped to it, with a matching opening at the hub.  I've ordered a replacement impeller, clamp and circlip.  Replacing it is probably going to be a fussy project, down at floor level, and until it arrives, we're out of the dryer business.

     In the meantime, my load of work slacks was done -- two pairs of medium-weight cargo slacks, a matching pair with a warm winter lining and three pairs of heavy double-front dungarees.  I improvised an indoor clothesline in the basement and plugged the dehumidifier back in.  I'm checking the progress of my tops and some time before bedtime, I'll move the dry ones to storage and bring the slacks upstairs, to dry where it's warmer.

     When it comes to clothes dryers, I have a skewed view: my Mom used the same 1949-vintage one well into the 1980s, getting it repaired as needed, and on some level, I may believe they're supposed to last forever.  I'll see how the repairs go.  The parts sites show a lot of the components for my dryer as "unavailable," so the clock is ticking.

It's Snowing Again

      After all, it is winter.  What did I expect?  But I still don't like it much.

It's Missionaries All The Way Down

     The first place I saw the company logo was the same as a lot of people: on an amplifier.  You saw big ones at concerts and smaller ones at radio stations, and they were just about indestructible: Crown amplifiers.  For many people of my generation and younger, there was an association between Crown amps and rock music.

     (The second place I saw the logo was on a product with closer links to the company's origin, a tape recorder.)

     You can imagine my surprise when, years later, I learned the "crown" in question wasn't meant to refer to any peak of technical perfection or earthly sovereign.  Nope.  It was the crown of Jesus.  And the story of the company was a story about missionaries -- some of them with slide rules and soldering irons.

     Crown didn't set out to make audio amplifiers, though they arrived at them pretty quickly.  They didn't even start out as "Crown."  In the years right after World War Two, audio tape recording was one of the hottest new technologies.  Everyone was finding new uses for high-fidelity recording and playback, easy editing and rapid duplication.  Looking back, it's easy to forget that the only audio recording system good for anything better than scratchy voice was discs, typically big 16" recordings, celluloid over a soft aluminum core, running at 78 rpm for best quality, easily broken, easily bent, flammable* and impossible to edit.  Everyone wanted tape -- and that included preachers.

     Religious institutions had been quick to adopt radio broadcasting when it started out.  How better to reach the populace than with their own programs, or better yet, their own stations?  Tape recording was a natural fit, for many reasons.  Even missionaries were using tape -- and that's how pastor (and radio amateur) Clarence C. Moore of Elkhart, Indiana first got involved.  Early tape recorders were large and fragile; Moore began modifying them to hold up to the rigors of missionary work.

     Clarence Moore was already involved with radio station HCJB in Quito, Ecuador.  Anyone who was a shortwave listener from the 1930s through the early 2000s will recognize the call letters.  At one point, you could pick up the station almost any time of night or day, just about anywhere in the world.  (Airport expansion and, reading between the lines, an increasingly uncooperative local government led the station to scale back high-power shortwave broadcasting, but they're still around, and these days the parent organization works to "plant" local-service stations in underserved locations all around the world.)  The station first went on the air in 1931, and was known for getting high-quality results on a tight budget.

     Back home in Elkhart, Moore's International Radio and Electronics Corporation had gone from modifying tape recorders to building their own -- lighter than the competition, simpler in some ways, but rugged and reliable.  Before too long, the missionaries were asking for PA amplifiers, and IREC built them, too, eventually becoming one of the first companies to combine the two, producing a portable (or at least luggable) recording and playback system capable of serving a crowd.

     By the 1960s, the company's products were selling to a wide group of customers.  The Moores owned radio stations in Elkhart and the company changed their name to Crown.  Maybe it was a subtle message to all the radio and music heathens who were using their equipment; under any name, the quality spoke for itself.  And that's notable.  There are some companies with religious affiliation that lean into religion -- "Buy our stuff 'cos we share your faith," and sometimes the goods don't quite measure up.  That's not how the pastor from Elkhart worked.  Crown was always first-rate.  A Crown amp would deliver power to a horrendous load without undue distortion -- they ran ads showing their more powerful amplifiers with 60 Hz audio plugged in the input running an electric drill from the output.

     Crown got into high-end hi-fi early on, and built a range of products.  They always had a close association with HCJB.  By the late 1970s, they were out of the tape recorder business, but were manufacturing FM tuners, graphic equalizers and other products along with amplifiers.  In 1980, they brought the first Pressure Zone Microphone to market -- it's a remarkable and very different approach to picking up sound, and the engineer behind it once worked for a radio station that I worked for, years later.  But that's another story, and one with too much unverifiable hearsay to tell.

     Moore had also been involved in RF work.  Early on, he'd developed a directional antenna for HCJB and in 1975, when the station needed a high-power shortwave transmitter, Crown offered workspace (and presumably expertise) in Elkhart to HCJB engineers, where they developed a 500,000 Watt, frequency-agile transmitter. Many of those transmitters remain in service around the world, long after the transmission center in Ecuador shut down.  Crown also got in on the early development of solid-state FM transmitters, and built models with outputs ranging from ten to 500 Watts that have sold well for years.

     Clarence Moore died in 1979.  In 2000, Crown's audio line was bought by Harman and it's still around, using a crown-in-circle logo.  Meanwhile, the RF side stayed with (or was repurchased by, information varies) Moore's descendants, and as a division of International Radio and Electronics, Crown Broadcast still builds FM transmitters (and rebroadcast receivers), with a crown-in-rounded-square logo.  The same family remains at the helm and the same faith guides them -- and, heathen that I am, I will note the quality of their products remains high.  SonSet Solutions continues the work of the engineering team that built and installed the big shortwave transmitters for HCJB, too, supporting religious broadcasters and the shortwave equipment as well as local-scaled stations.  That's quite a record of accomplishment for Clarence C. Moore!

     (Apocryphally, people who worked at the Moore's stations in Elkhart decades ago report they were typical medium-to-small-market owners, careful with their money, not paying DJs more than necessary -- but the stations did have some unique custom equipment, including a couple of the very few Crown-branded large audio mixers!)
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* A common prank at radio stations was to leave a small ball of celluloid cutterhead shavings in an ashtray.  It would go up almost like flash powder when a lit cigarette came near.  Given that the other thing laying around radio studios was heaps and heaps of paper -- logs, scripts, teletype wirecopy, newspapers and record sleeves ("shucks") -- you can imagine how popular this kind of hijinks was with management and other responsible adults.