143 Washington Street NYC

Posted on by Thor

While Pam was meeting with 9/11 Museum colleges, I decided to sketch at 143 Washington Street, which was the home of the Hickey Family. My grandmother Josephine Marie Hickey grew up here. Augustus Arthur Thorspecken met her while he was stationed on Governor’s Island during WWI. He didn’t go to Europe because he caught the Spanish Flu. The Hickey store might have been on the ground floor of the 143 Washington Street address.

The brownstone is gone. 140 Washington, across the street is a huge hotel. The 9/11 Memorial is one block north. A large synagogue is between Washington Street and the 9/11 Memorial. The site where the Hickeys lived is now a utilities storage lot. The fence around it is covered with images of brownstones but they are not historically accurate representations of what used to be here.

It was bloody cold. I had to keep warming my drawing hand in my coat pocket. Shadows of the skyscrapers in the financial district downtown mean that you only have a half hour at most of sunshine. When I started sketching I was in sunlight reflected of the glass facade of a skyscraper. I was then plunged into the fridged shadows of a skyscraper. Just as I was about to give up, since I was so cold, the sun flooded out from behind a tower and warmed me up. With the sketch line work complete I was thrust info the shadows again. I decided to add color across the street where it was still sunny. Wearing a mask is actually helpful in the cold since it kept my lower face warm. Since I didn’t have my art stool, I kept dancing around as I sketched. Moving around probably also help keep me from freezing.

 

D-Day

Posted on by Thor

On December 10, 2020 more Americans died in s single day than died on the invasion of Normandy in WWII. Now, more than half a million Americans have died from COVID-19. That is more than the number of Americans who died in WWI, WWII and the Vietnam wars combined.

Daignault said, “This is our generation’s D-Day.” The entire country is a war zone. Today the troops are the doctors, nurses and medical personnel risking their own health to treat the sick.

Everyone is fatigued as we near the one year anniversary of the start of the world wide pandemic. People are tired of wearing masks and want life to return to “normal.” But with new variants of the virus spreading through Florida    and the US, this is not the time to let our guards down. The war is far from over.

Case numbers have been falling as have the number of deaths from the virus but we are just now down to the numbers that equal the summer surge. Back then we hoped that was as bad as it could get and people gathered together to celebrate July 4th and other holidays creating super spreader events. We are just now coming down from the Christmas, New Years and Superbowl superspreaders. The insurrection on the capitol had t be the worst imaginable superspreader event and those numbers have yet to be seen. Hopefully everyone who can get a shot of vaccine will get a shot. Right now we are inn a race to keep up with the potential spread of the highly more contagious UK variant the spreads 70% more efficiently. Wear a mask, social distance and wash your hands the end is in sight.

100 Day Patriots

Posted on by Thor

President-elect Joe Biden on Thursday December 3, 2020 said he plans to ask the nation to wear masks for his first 100 days in office. He also said he’ll issue a standing order mandating masks in certain places. “Just 100 days to mask. Not forever — 100 days,” Mr. Biden said. “I think we’ll see a significant reduction if that occurs with vaccinations and masking, to drive down the numbers considerably.”

In researching my great grandfather Augustus Arthur Thorspecken, I found that he registered for the WWI draft  in June of 1917. I then found a newspaper clipping that showed that he was on leave from Camp Funston in January of 1918. Camp Funston in Kansas was the place where the first cases of Spanish flu first appeared and within a few weeks 1100 were sick. Since army training was 6 weeks in length, Augustus was likely at ground zero for the start of the Spanish Flu before he was shipped over to France. Because of the war, the flu spread to 24 of 36 U.S. army bases and then to Europe. The tight quarters of the camps were a perfect incubator to ignite the spread of the disease that resulted in an estimated  50 million deaths worldwide with about 675,000 deaths in the United States. My grandfather survived the pandemic and the war only to die of pneumonia 25 years later at the start of WWII.

Because there was a war going on, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic downplayed the spread of the virus. They did not want to appear weak. The first wave of the virus was like a tsunami that initially pulls water away from the shore, only to return in a towering, second wave. As the influenza spread across America, public health officials, determined to keep morale up, began to lie. U.S. Surgeon General Rupert Blue said, “There is no cause for alarm if precautions are observed.” As the disease accelerated newspapers assured readers that influenza posed no danger.

People knew that this was no common flu. The numbers were too staggering. There were not enough coffins for the dead. Mass graves had to be dug. They could not trust what politicians said. Society began to disintegrate. In 1918, without leadership, without the truth, trust evaporated. And people could only look after themselves. The most important lesson from 1918 is that politicians need to to tell the truth. This is a lesson that was not learned by the 2020 POTUS who lost. Joe Biden wants to start working to mitigate the damage already done with the simple request to wear a mask. Patriots who care about fellow Americans will pitch in.