Greenburg, Kansas. The Big Well . . . . Winter 2018 - 2019

Happy New Year to all !!!

We are back on the road this winter and thought it was time to share some of the sights we have seen.

We decided to leave our RV park home base in Marathon, Florida in the middle of October this year and start heading in a westerly direction just as the "Snowbirds" started flocking to the Florida Keys.

Our goal for this year's trip was to stay off of the interstate highways as much as possible and to visit small, out of the way towns, that have been largely bypassed and forgotten since everyone started sticking to the freeways.

As always, we relied heavily on our "Roadside America" smartphone App to help us find quirky things along the way.

As we were traveling across the very southern edge of Kansas, we happened across a very small town, Greensburg, Kansas.

 This town had an odd look to it as well as a recommendation for a Roadside America attraction.

The odd part about this town was that it didn't look anything like the other towns we had been seeing while driving on this very old rural road in Kansas.

This town looked brand new.  EVERYTHING looked brand new.

We found a small RV park and set up for the night and then went to explore the town and visit "The Big Well".

We couldn't help but ask the same thing you just did. . . . What is The Big Well?

The Big Well is now a museum that houses the world's largest hand dug well.

The well was dug to provide the municipal water supply for Greensburg in 1887 and served that purpose until 1932.

The local workers that dug the well started work at sun-up and were paid fifty cents to a dollar every day at sun-down.  The crews consisted of 12-15 farmers, cowboys and transients using shovels, picks, half barrels, pulleys and ropes to remove the soil.

Stone for the well casing was brought in from a quarry 12 miles away on wagons and the dirt removed from the well was hauled away in the same wagons.  The dirt was scattered along the quarry road to raise low spots and level the old cattle trail.

As the shaft was dug, stones were installed to line it.  When completed, the well was 109 feet deep and 32 feet in diameter.

In 1972, the U.S. government designated The Big Well as a National Museum.

There is a spiral stairway that descends to about 30 feet above the bottom of the well and, of course, we went to the bottom.

It would have been a lot of work to dig this hole!

We found out why the Big Well was also a museum and why the town was so nice and new.

On May 4, 2007, 95% of the town was destroyed by an EF5 tornado, including the Big Well museum building.  The well was not damaged but everything else was gone.

This was a water tower that was next to the museum.

This was the museum

Greensburg, Kansas before the tornado

After

The whole town was rebuilt and the museum wasn't rebuilt and opened until 2012.

The museum was fascinating because of all of the photos and memorabilia regarding the tornado and its damage.

The town was so damaged that even the street signs were gone and you couldn't find your way around.  They had to put up temporary signs so that people could find their way home or to work sites.

This explained why everything was new.  We drove up and down almost every street and noticed that almost every yard had an underground storm shelter in their yard near the front door.

We would hate to be here during tornado season!

After spending the afternoon exploring, we had a quiet evening, and the next day continued on down the road to find our next surprise.

We will write more soon,

Tom & Suzie









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Wichita, Kansas, 2017, Part 3

After leaving Big Brutus, we continued westbound on small country roads and eventually arrived in Wichita, Kansas.  We knew that a large part of the aviation community that was such a big part of our lives originated in Wichita at several of the civilian aircraft manufacturers.

Cessna, Beech, and Stearman are all airplane manufacturers that had their beginnings in Wichita.

We went to visit the Kansas Aviation Museum in search of some of that history.  There were numerous displays depicting the evolution of aviation and we enjoyed our visit.

The Museum is located at the old airport terminal building which also housed the old control tower.

 

It was a beautiful building that fit your mental image of what old time airline passengers must have experienced at the beginning or end of their first airplane ride.  This internet photo shows what it looked like.



Inside were many interesting displays.



They had a beautifully restored Stearman.  They found it in a scrap yard.



After bringing it to their restoration hangar, they cleaned and straightened the airframe.



The next step was to find and overhaul an engine.



The final product looked like it just rolled off the assembly line back in 1931.







The control tower at the top of the building gave a great view back to the original Stearman factory, and all around the airport including the static museum displays.




Static Display
































When we left Wichita, we headed to Dodge City.  When we got there, we realized we were too late in the season and most of the shops were closed.

We walked around and Suzie met Wyatt Earp.



She also saw James Arness who was here because the old TV show Gunsmoke was filmed here.




From Dodge City, we headed on to Grand Junction, Colorado.  The drive through the Rockies was beautiful.  We lucked out and had dry roadways but a beautiful dusting of snow.














The trip through Colorado was beautiful and put us into Grand Junction in anticipation of going back to the Yampa Spa.

We hope you get a chance to get out there and see some of our great country and we will keep you posted on our travels.

Tom & Suzie

Big Brutus, 2017, Part 2 . . . . Who Knew?

After we left New Orleans, we started working our way in a northwesterly direction, trying to only drive on roads we had never been on before.  

We were generally headed toward Wichita, Kansas to see their air museum, but didn't have any type of a formal route planned.

As we drove, Suzie kept checking Roadside America for interesting things to see.  Then, out in the middle of nowhere in Kansas, on a little 2-lane highway, she said, "Turn left at the next street".

I did and we wound our way deeper into the local farm country.  After a few miles, we drove through the very small town of West Mineral, Kansas and as we popped out of the other side of town, we could see "BRUTUS".



What is Brutus?  Brutus is a HUGE Bucyrus-Erie coal mining shovel out in the middle of nowhere.

But wait, why is coal mining equipment in Kansas?  

There is lots of coal in Kansas and a lot of other places we don't usually associate with coal. 



It turned out that coal used to be a big deal here, and Brutus is  a BIG reminder of this.

How BIG?



Pretty big.  The little blue dot at the rear of the right rear track is Suzie !!!




This bucket would hold 90 cubic yards . . . enough to fill 3 train cars.

We were able to take a self guided tour of Brutus.  Each stop along the tour had a sign explaining what we were seeing.



We thought that was pretty big until we went through the museum after we climbed all over Brutus.

In the museum, we saw a picture from a really big shovel called Big Muskie.  Big Muskie isn't with us anymore and was destroyed after it reached the end of its useful life.

Its bucket would lift 220 cubic yards at one time.  It must have been something to see and here is a picture of its bucket.



Even though Brutus isn't as big as Big Muskie was, it was still something to see.



Everything about it was HUGE.



This is inside the big machinery room where the motors and generators were located that operated all of the equipment.  Behind me you can see the 2 giant winches that were used to raise and lower the boom.  They were driven by eight 500 horsepower DC motors that turned the 2 large spools that stored the 800' of 3" cable that raised and lowered the bucket.  The cable weighs about 25 pounds per foot.



This shovel was all electric and received its power from the local electrical power grid.  7,200 volts came into the shovel on long extension cords that reached down into the pit to power the shovel.

The shovel had 2 huge 3,500 horsepower electric alternating current motors that operated 2 huge generators that produced direct current electricity which then powered all of the drive motors of the shovel.  

The shovel started digging in 1962 and worked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for 11 years until it was no longer cost effective to mine coal here.

The shovel didn't actually mine the coal.  Instead, it removed the top soil which they called overburden.  By digging down from 20 to 75 feet, the coal seam would be exposed and then smaller equipment would break up and remove the coal.

Then the hole would be filled back in and the shovel would move on.  It traveled at about .22 MPH and over its life dug down to hundreds of miles of coal seams.

There was a 3 man crew that operated the shovel.  

An oiler had to oil and grease the machine constantly and that must have been quite a job, considering the size and all of the moving parts.  

The ground man worked in the lower section of the machine near the tracks.  He was responsible for moving the machine forward and backward as directed by the shovel operator as the excavation moved along the coal seam.

The third crewman was the shovel operator.

In this picture, where Suzie is sitting in the shovel operator's seat, you can see an unfilled portion of the old excavation that was left unfilled so that it could be used for recreation.  Now, miles and miles of waterway are all that remain of the mining operation and these lakes are stocked with fish for local fishermen to enjoy.



The machine was just huge.  There were 2 sets of tracks on each corner of the machine.



Each one of the track pads weighs 2,200 and there are over 35 pads on each track and the track assembly is over 6' tall.

The machine cost $6.5 million dollars in 1962 and took 11 months to assemble after all of the pieces were brought into the area on 150 train cars.

We enjoyed climbing all over Brutus and then spent quite a bit of time in the museum where we saw a movie about Brutus and the effort that went into saving him from the scrap heap.  They also had some great displays on how the mines were operated and the equipment that was used to extract the coal.

Brutus was a great little side trip and is the reason we are taking the back roads in the first place.

Who knew we would find something like this in the middle of nowhere in Kansas.

We will keep looking for more Gems like this and we will keep you posted,

Tom & Suzie

Hurricane Irma, WW II Museum NOLA, 2017, Part 1

After we did our part in the cleanup at our RV park, we packed up and hit the road for our annual winter drive around the country.  

Before we get to that, I need to clean up a loose end that some of you have been asking about.

In the last blogs, I mentioned that we had stored our jetskis and a friend's boat and all of the beach and pool furniture down in a hollowed out spot in the mangrove next to the RV park before we evacuated from Hurricane Irma.  I forgot to let you know if they all survived.

Yes, they did all survive with only one casualty.  The boat and the jetskis were covered in branches and leaves that blew off of all of the trees that surrounded them.  The boat didn't suffer any damage and once Bob and Lynne, its owners, cleaned all of the debris off, they were happy.



The jetskis almost made it.  They were also covered with debris.



The only damage was where a branch flew into one of the seats and ripped a big hole before flying away.



I was able to order a factory replacement seat cover from Yamaha and install it myself so everything is nice again.



Before we left the Keys, we winterized the skis and put them in storage at our friend Bruce's boat and lobster yard.

Our first new stop along our route was to visit the National World War II museum in New Orleans.

We spent a whole day walking through the numerous buildings looking at the exhibits.

An interesting exhibit did a very good job of showing just how unprepared the United States was before becoming involved in World War II.



This photo demonstrates the difference in manpower between the United States, Germany and Japan at the beginning of the war.



We also didn't realize how many ships were sunk by the Germans just off our coast in just 7 months in 1942.





One interactive exhibit was really an eye opener.  We signed up to go on a combat patrol aboard the USS Tang, the U.S. submarine credited with sinking the most ships during the war.

We were each issued a small I.D. card which represented an actual crewman aboard the submarine.

I was assigned to operate the depth controls, which was the station manned by Fred Sunday on the last patrol of the USS Tang during WW II.





The exhibit was the simulated interior of the submarine with controls and also a large video screen where the ceiling of the submarine would have been so that we could see a periscope view of what was happening on the surface during the final battle that the Tang participated in.

After we entered the simulator, the lights went down to very dim and voices began giving commands over the loud speaker telling the various crew positions what to do.  We adjusted the controls to submerge the submarine and Suzie had the assignment to push the button that fired the torpedos.

It was very exciting and scary at the same time as we watched the overhead video and saw ships approaching and then saw our torpedo's track away from our submarine and strike various ships, causing them to sink. 

Near the end of the simulation, we only had one torpedo left so the captain was very careful as he lined up for our last shot.  He then gave the order to fire and Suzie fired the last torpedo.

This is when it really got real.  

Our last torpedo did not run straight and true to the target!  It malfunctioned and began to turn.  

The turn continued and then, the torpedo hit US and sank us.

Smoke filled the simulator and all the lights dimmed and then went out and it was pitch black in the simulator and was very real.  It stayed dark for a long time, long enough for you to really understand what it might feel like to be trapped on the bottom of the ocean with little hope of rescue or survival.

The submarine sank to 180 feet.  Then, a Japanese Destroyer started to drop depth charges, which eventually started a fire in the battery compartment of the submarine.

Eventually, the crewmen evacuated to the forward compartment where they were able to open an escape hatch and try to ascend to the surface. 

This sinking was the first and only use by actual survivors of a sunken submarine to use the Momsen Lung, a rebreathing device that would allow you to breathe while ascending from the escape hatch.



 Of the 87 men on the crew, only 13 were able to escape the submarine and only 9 were recovered by the Japanese ships and later transferred to a POW camp.

This was a real eye opener and just about completed our experience on the Tang.

The lights came on and the simulator was finished and we left the room and went into another room.

There we got to see pictures of all of the crewmen who were on the Tang on it's last mission.  



Only the crewman in the lighted photos survived. 

We then looked for the crewman that we represented during our simulation and we were both shocked to find that just like that, we would have been dead!!!  Very sobering.

This is a list of all of the submarines we lost during WW II and a wall of names of the crewmen lost on those subs.





It was a BIG list!



The Tang was a very sobering experience for both of us and it really demonstrated that in a war, not only did the "bad guys" on the ships that we sank die . . . . . the "good guys" died too.

Maybe this war thing isn't such a good idea!

I guess that isn't a really happy way to end this chapter, but we are trying to remember all of the sacrifices that have been made to get us to where we are today.

More to come soon,

Tom & Suzie