Heart Happy (cathy_edgett) wrote,
Heart Happy
cathy_edgett

Building a dam -

There is an interesting article on Hoover Dam by Tom Huntington in the fall Invention and Technology magazine.    Huntington writes:  "Everything about the Hoover Dam is unfathomably enormous - and it went up in less than years during American's worst depression."   Interesting in light of what doesn't happen today.    Officially about 100 men died building the dam.  The commemorative plaque says, "They died to make the desert bloom."  Huntington says is might also say, "They died to tame a river."

What interests me in this is that those who worked on it were almost all "white men."  "Mongolians" (i.e., Chinese) were specifically banned, and later, even under pressure from the Roosevelt administration only a handful of Blacks were allowed to work.   This was in the 1930's.   Times have changed.


There is also an article in this magazine on the clothespin.  In 1998 the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of American History had an exhibit on "American clothespins."  People were nostalgic.  Then one day, the curator of the exhibit, heard a boy ask his father, "What's a clothespin, Dad?"   Here is this wonderful marvel and when is the last time most of us used one?   Remember clothespin people.     Take a spin through nostalgia today.
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