First Steps

[captainsblog]

I did two things Friday bracketing my relatively short workday that may lead to other things later on. The day was short because I had nothing scheduled, just made progress on a backlog of painstaking petition preparations, and was waiting to see if they had finally fixed the air conditioning in our office. Our suite is divided into three zones, one controlled by thermostat in my office, one in the conference room, and one at the other end of our space. The other one was having trouble because they had never bothered to switch it from HEAT to COOL at the end of the winter (which, despite stereotypes to the contrary, did not just end last week). I had properly changed that setting for our zone, but never did figure out how to use the programming-the-VCR technology of the “run program” that was setting it back every night. Whoever last did it set it back to 78F, so during a particularly hot stretch earlier in the week, when it tried to bring it back down to 72 in the morning, it overloaded the circuit. The landlord sent a guy over to reset the breaker and I figured out how to reprogram our zone so it doesn’t go as high overnight . It’s also got cooler at the end of the week, and that should also help.

The first of the first steps I took was my attempt to begin a discussion about the ethical problem I ran into last week with another lawyer who was using a third-party service to decide whether to pay a check to me or not. I looked up who is in charge of our local bar association Ethics committee. I’ve met him once or twice, but don’t run into him much in practice. He is the son of the one remaining bankruptcy judge sitting in Buffalo, so his father recuses for any case that Craig might appear on. After describing the problem in much the same words, some of them literally the same words, I posted here earlier this week, it occurred to me, Hey! That’s pretty good! Maybe I could turn it into a seminar outline and get actual continuing education credits for having this happen to me! I got a fairly quick reply, but it essentially mounted to “the organized bar association takes the summer off and we don’t do anything until September, so talk to us then.“

I’ll make a note of that. It also ties in nicely with the other first step I took at the end of the day for something else in September.

——

I finished the workday early enough to head over to one of the local stores that specializes in running gear. I explained to the kid who eventually came over (the first I encountered was busy pounding away at his payment terminal, probably another victim of that day’s Crowdstrike snafu) that I was about to start preparing for my first 5K in many years, and didn’t want to do it in a sketchy old pair of Skechers, the old people kicks we've both been migrating to over the past several years. I picked this place because it was the closer of the two I see a lot at packet pickups, and I'd been told they do a much more thorough job of measuring your feet before deciding what will work best on them. He took me over to a scale-looking pad with foot placements on the floor, which connected by some kind of wireless technology to an iPad or something similar that he was holding. I just stood there and within two minutes, he had my feet sized, the two of them differentiated, and way more information about arches than I had ever thought of.

It did bring back a faint old memory from very early childhood of going into a Buster Brown store next to Waldbaums and having my feet x-rayed. Yes, this was a Thing:

“You can see all the bones of your toes. They look like a bunch of twigs. And when you wiggle your foot, the bones wiggle too.”
~Soup. Robert Newton Peck. 1974

Before this research, my entire knowledge of these early shoe-fitting fluoroscopes came from two book: a brief mention at the end of the children’s book Soup by Robert Newton Peck; and a longer, darker scene in Stephen King’s 1986 book IT. The two depictions were contrasting, to say the least.

Once upon a time, 10,000 of these fluoroscopes found their way to American shoe stores. They were state-of-the-art, bulky, heavy, and immensely expensive. Each cost from $650 to $1500, at least as much as two Ford Model Ts (around $13,000 in today’s dollars). Store owners offset the expense by parading them out in newspaper ads. The machines became customer-drawing showpieces and shoes had turned into science.

ADRIAN’S MACHINE, ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR VERSIONS



I never did grow a third foot, so I guess it worked out OK.

He then had me do a quick stroll in stocking feet toward the door and deck, to see how much, if any, imbalance there was between the two feet in the way I walked. Armed, or probably legged, with all that data, he recommended a shoe half the size up from the 12s I’ve been usually wearing, but not in a wide width in that size. It’s hard enough finding 12s at all, much less half sizes, and any department store or other such place.

He came back with three choices in 12 and a half. First was a New Balance in mostly light blue. (I'd told him to avoid all-white, since I attract stains like an electron magnet.) . I've worn that brand before and seen a lot of NBs on feet at the gym, so, sure, let's try. As I did the test walk, I couldn't even feel the calluses and sore spots I've developed.

Hadn't heard of the second.  Ultra, Altra, something like that. These were all black. About the same.

Finally, one I had seen but never purchased: Saucony. Also a light blue. Similarly like walking on air.

I leaned toward the NBs, before asking what they each cost. That pair, of course, was the most expensive of the three by 20 bucks, the other two being the same price. Despite my lifelong instilled habit of being cheap frugal, I've also had a habit of picking the most expensive out of a lot anytime I don't search on price alone in the first place. I ultimately went with the last one on, the Saucony:
 

In the end, I wound up getting not only a new pair of sneakers but a weird story I didn't know about my former home town. I had a vague, distant recollection of "Saucony" somehow being connected with the Mobil brand of gas stations. The kid gave me a blank stare; he quite possibly didn't know what Mobil was. I googled it when I got home and I was two letters off: Mobil, now ExxonMobil, is descended from a company called "SOCONY," an acronym for "Standard Oil Company Of New York," one of the many tentacles of monopoly before the government broke up the Standard Oil cartel in the early 20th century.  I remembered that part, and having seen some vintage product with the name on it:



What I didn't know was the provenance of that company before the Rockefellers (originally from Richford, New York on the way to Ithaca) was something called the Vacuum Oil Company, founded in 1866 in Rochester:

Vacuum Oil was founded in 1866 by Matthew Ewing and Hiram Bond Everest, of Rochester, New York. Lubrication oil was an accidental discovery while attempting to distill kerosene. Everest noted the residue from the extraction was suitable as a lubricant. Soon after, the product became popular for use in steam engines and internal-combustion engines. Ewing sold his interest to Everest, who carried on the company. Vacuum was bought by Standard Oil in 1879.
It had used "Mobiloil" automobile lubricating oil brand since 1904, and by 1918 it became recognizable enough that the company filed it for registration as a trademark (it was registered in 1920). When Standard Oil was broken up in 1911 due to the Sherman Antitrust Act, Vacuum became an independent company again. Vacuum Oil and Standard Oil of New York (Socony) merged in 1931, after the government gave up attempts to prevent it. The newly-combined entity, Socony-Vacuum Corp, was the world's third-largest oil company.

The rest of the Wiki piece is full of bizarre intrigue- Nazi collaboration, takeover attempts including blowing up a plant in the process, and naturally tons more antitrust violations, none of which are prevented today.  Everest lived until 1913, abandoning the Flower City for California after earning all his riches.  In almost 40 years living and working in that community, I never heard his name among the Pantheon of Inventors such as Eastman, Carlson or Bausch and Lomb that line the city's streets with banners and fill its cemeteries with bones.

Maybe they got the name of his company misspelled.