Lee High School - Huntsville Alabama Alumni

WHITE HOUSE, TN. - Since Sue had to work on Thanksgiving day, I went and ate my Thanksgiving meal with her in the hospital cafeteria. I was probably the only one who was there because I wanted to be, and I am thankful that was my only reason for the trip to the hospital. Also, because of that we got a late start on our holiday trip to see Sue's daugther and her family.

I also have something else to be thankful for this year. Late Thursday afternoon I got the call I have been waiting for and found out that my application for the early buyout program was approved! My final day of work at the university will be December 31, 2008. It would be a great night to go celebrate except for the fact that Sue has to work on New Year's Day this year.

I've started scanning the first three years of the original Lee's Traveller that Greg Dixon was kind enough to loan me, and in doing so have found a lot of things to share with you in reflection. You will see several items in the coming weeks and I hope you will join me in the trip down memory lane.

Please include your class year with your e-mails.

T. Tommy

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Lee's Traveller -

Then and Now

by Tommy Towery

Class of '64

It was odd that in one of the issues I was scanning I came upon an article written back in 1962 about how the newspaper was produced. I guess I felt that someday it might be of interest to someone - I just didn't know that it would be me that found it so informative. So, below is the article written in 1962 about the Lee's Traveller process, followed by an article I wrote for the web version back in 2005. You will see that there is quite a bit of difference except in one area. I am still pleading for you, the readers, to send me some stories to print.

What's Wrong This Time

Reprinted from Lee's Traveller

October 24, 1962

Last year and this year many people have asked me what was holding up the paper when it was late coming out. To the students of Lee we address this article on how to publish a school newspaper.

To publish a school newspaper, naturally we start at the beginning and that is getting the news. This may sound like the easiest part of publishing a newspaper, but this is not true. We must get news that is interesting and something that is worthy of being published in the paper. We also must be careful to get news which will not hurt anyone. Even with leaving out these items, there are still plenty of subjects to write about.

The next step is proofreading the articles that have been written. The proofreader must watch for misspelled words, sentence fragments and words incorrectly divided.

After the articles have been proofread, they must be typed on layout sheets. The paper is first formed on these payout sheets. When the complete paper has been assembled it is then passed on to the typing room.

In the typing room the paper is typed on stencils. The stencils are placed on the mimeograph machine and run one at a time. Page two is placed on the back of page one, with care taken not to put the paper in up-side-down. The complete paper must be done in this manner.

After the newspaper has been completed, the next step is to distribute it. One person from each room comes to get the papers for his room. This eliminates the problem of being stormed by the entire school for the papers.

The last step is to sit back and calmly listen to everyone tell what is wrong with the paper.

Today's Traveller

Reprinted and Updated from March 21, 2005

The web site is hosted by a company named Homestead. It was originally a free service but as the size and demand on the site grew, I had to go to a paid service. It cost $125 a year to have it hosted by them. It costs $10.00 a year to keep the name registered. Classmates dot com is the most universal place on the internet for people to try to find old school friends. To be able to contact new people that sign up on the Classmates website, I have maintained a gold membership there that costs $35 a year. All costs are paid by me personally as a “hobby” expense. There is no charge to any of the readers to receive the weekly issues, nor do any funds come from the money collected for reunions. We do no advertising and take in no advertising revenue. We have no official status as an organization or publication. None of the advisory board members are paid, but instead volunteer their time to write stories and contribute to the site as a result of the friendship and comradely they feel with their classmates.

E-mail from the readers starts coming in as soon as the issue is published. Each week, normally on Friday or Saturday night, the new issue begins to take shape. The site is constructed solely by me, using the software supplied by and supported by Homestead. I use stories submitted by the readers or the staff, include any e-mails received, and post any notices that have been sent to me. Inputs such as e-mails received after Friday sometimes may not be included that week; depending upon how much of the work has already been done on the issue. Sometimes inputs that only identify a mystery item by “name only” with no supportive story or information may not be used. It does not entertain readers just to give the name of an item.

The official publication day of each week’s paper is Monday, but it normally comes out on Saturday night. It is like a magazine that may arrive a month early but has an official publication date printed on it. It takes between three and four hours each week for me to collect the e-mails, to edit photos and save them in the right format for the web, and to find mystery items and Lee-Bay items. If I have to write the main story, that takes another hour or so. I usually spend an hour each week answering e-mails as well.

For those that wish to have a weekly notification of when the new issue is available, a mailing list is created from the information submitted to the site. Due to the complicated process of maintaining this mailing list, the only way for anyone to have their name added to it is to email me. You do not have to get this weekly email to view the site - just go to www.leestraveller.com on your web browser.

The number of hits the site receives is listed at the top of each issue. We average a little over 300 visits a week. That number is very conservative, since it is the addition of the number of hits each week, added to the total number of the week before. If someone goes back and looks at past issues, those hits are not reflected in the total.

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Bruce Fowler, Class of '66 -I do not recall the name of the beast, if ever I knew it. We used them when I was in graduate school and then in the early years of paid work to make viewgraphs. The machine used some form of thermographic process. The ink on the page, being dark, had greater heat capacity than the paper. One covered the page of original composition with a sheet to be transferred to. These transfer sheets were relatively flimsy and came in paper or plastic (transparent) versions. My experience was primarily with the latter since Xerox machines were already in early diffusion. The combination of original and transfer were fed into a slot where they were taken into the bowels of the machine where the two were heated appropriately and the inked information on the original was transferred. Proper calibration was needed to assure contrast separation.

I had little experience with this technology for copying, primarily using to make viewgraphs. Their use was limited to small meetings of a singular instance. For larger meetings or several instances, more robust media was necessary, in which case the options were photographic viewgraphs - viewgraphs made using photographic means, or 35mm slides.

Another bit of memorabilia derives from the requirements on the ink used on the original composition. Since "quick and dirty" viewgraphs tended to be made by hand in those days - the alternative was to pay for a commercial artistic technician to make them - the preferred method of inking was to use a Rapidiograph pen with India ink. Since I had little call to compose engineering drawings, this was about my only use of such an instrument outside of note taking in graduate school.

From Wikipedia

Thermo-Fax (very often called Thermofax) is 3M's trademarked name for a photocopying technology which it introduced in 1950. It was a form of thermographic printing and an example of a dry silver process.

It was a significant advance as no chemicals were required, other than what was contained in the copy paper. A thin sheet of heat sensitive copy paper was placed on the original document to be copied, and exposed to infrared energy. Where the image on the original contained carbon, the image absorbed the infrared energy and was heated. The heated image then transferred heat to the heat sensitive paper producing a blackened copy image of the original.

The Thermofax process was temperamental. The coated paper tended to curl, and being heat-sensitive, copies were not archival. The darkness setting was tricky to adjust, and drifted as the machine warmed up. Copy darkness often varied across a page, some portions of the text being too light and others too dark. Since the heat absorption of ink does not necessarily correlate with its visible appearance, there were occasional idiosyncrasies; some inks that looked nearly black to the eye might not copy at all, and an exposure setting that worked well for some originals might require a change to make usable copies with another.

Subject:Aerobatic Flying

Bob MacIlveen

Class of '65

Thanks, I never dreamed that you would publish that article. I just thought you might get a kick out of it. By the way that is the very glider which Jason and I flew for the week. That absolutely was my limit of terror combined with fun.

I don’t think that I was ever quite so terrified and excited at the same time. To be a truly safe pilot you have so know what to do when the unexpected jumps out at you. The flagstaff at Az Soaring is you never know what you can do until you learn to fly….. or at least push the envelope. That was a great week in Arizona studying both with a world champion pilot and world champion dentists. It is really all the same thing.

Soaring or gliding is something that I have wanted to do ever since days at Lee HS. Mike Kuettner’s father first encouraged me to take it up. Dr. Kuettner is 99 and stills works fulltime as a meteorologist.

We have lots of good years ahead of us.

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Subject:Something cool that Xerox is doing

Linda Livingston

If you go to this web site, www.LetsSayThanks.com you can pick out a thank you card and Xerox will print it and it will be sent to a soldier that is currently serving in Iraq . You can't pick out who gets it, but it will go to a member of the armed services.

How AMAZING it would be if we could get everyone we know to send one!!! This is a great site. Please send a card. It is FREE and it only takes a second.

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