Good morning, Whitewater

In our schools today, the 8th grade band will tour the elementary schools today, and tonight at 7 p.m. it’s the Awards and Recognition program at the high school.

Tonight, at 7 p.m., the League of Women Voters will hold a panel discussion on housing issues at the Municipal Building.

In American history today, it’s the anniversary of the Iraq War, beginning in 2003. Few will commemorate the anniversary, and at any rate, that conflict ended — as you well know — with a Mission Accomplished long ago.

Good morning, Whitewater

From 4 to 5 p.m. today, there’s a public meeting of the Tree Commission in Whitewater. Why just 4 to 5, though? Hard to believe that one can contain that work into the cramped space of one mere hour. There must be thousands of trees in Whitewater — that’s not a lot of time, per tree. A silver maple’s getting shortchanged in all this, most likely.

Wired has a story about American ingenuity today, “March 18, 1931: The Schick Hits the Fans,” about the introduction of the first useful electric shavers:

1931: The first practical, electric shavers go on sale. They’re definitely a cut above their clumsy predecessors.

The gizmos were the brainchild of Jacob Schick. He served in the U.S. Army in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War and after. Schick developed dysentery in the tropics, and after a yearlong recovery, the Army transferred him to Alaska for his health….

Schick set his mind to devising a more comfortable way to shave. He devised rough plans, so to speak, for a shaving head at the end of a flexible cable that was powered by an external motor. He sent the idea to manufacturers, and they quickly rejected the idea….

After the war, he wanted to improve and market his electric shaver invention, but needed capital. So he applied the concept of the ammunition clip to the razor with the Magazine Repeating Razor. It was a forerunner of the injector razor: You could load and unload the blade without risk of cutting your fingers.

He sold that business off to return to the electric shaver. With exquisite timing, he put his first electric shavers on the market in 1929, just in time for the stock market collapse and ensuing Great Depression. The early models didn’t sell well. The design was still a clumsy contraption with a heavy motor connected by a metal cable to the reciprocating shaving head.

Business was so bad that the Schicks had to mortgage their home to get money to keep the company going. But Schick figured out how to make his product a success by making it handy.
He got rid of the flexible cable and put a small electric motor inside the same unit as the shaving head. The entire apparatus was encased in sleek, black bakelite and fit comfortably in your hand. An electric appliance cord supplied power to the motor, which had to be kick-started by a turn-wheel switch on the unit.

Schick set up a factory in Stamford, Connecticut. The new model went on sale in New York City on March 18, 1931.

They sold for $25 each (that’s about $350 in today’s money). About 3,000 moved the first year, and sales increased until 1.5 million were in users’ hands by 1937….

Schick got rich and retired to Canada. But his lingering health problems caught up with him, and he died in 1937. He said the lifespan of a man who shaved correctly every day would be 120 — he lived less than half that time.

Good morning, Whitewater

It’s St. Patrick’s Day today, but I know that scarcely matters to you. Far more important, I wouldn’t wonder, is your interest in the Common Council meeting, scheduled for tonight at 6:30 p.m. If you otherwise had no justification to drink, you do now…

(Quick note — the Common Council agenda is a pdf document, and tonight’s agenda was scanned as text, not a simple image. This makes the agenda’s format more useful, and like that of other City of Whitewater agendas available online.)

Of my particular interest tonight — First reading of two proposed ordinances —

O-2 Adopting Regulations Concerning Neighborhood Preservation – Chronic Nuisance Ordinance (Request of Councilmember Allen).

O-4 Adoption of Ordinance assigning recommendation for Board and Commission members to City Manager and Common Council President (instead of current Nominations Committee) (Request of Councilmember Allen).

At Lincoln School tonight — proud home of the Lincoln Leopards — it’s Musical Fine Arts night — beginning from 6 p.m. to about 7:40 p.m.

Good morning, Whitewater

From Free Whitewater

It’s Sunshine Week across America —

a national initiative to open a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information. Participants include print, broadcast and online news media, civic groups, libraries, non-profits, schools and others interested in the public’s right to know.

Sunshine Week is led by the American Society of Newspaper Editors and is funded primarily by a challenge grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation of Miami.

Though spearheaded by journalists, Sunshine Week is about the public’s right to know what its government is doing, and why. Sunshine Week seeks to enlighten and empower people to play an active role in their government at all levels, and to give them access to information that makes their lives better and their communities stronger.

Sunshine Week is a non-partisan initiative whose supporters are conservative, liberal and everything in between.

I’ll post on Sunshine Week throughout the week.

Locally, in Whitewater today, there’s a Park & Rec Board meeting at 5:30 p.m., and a Planning Commission meeting at 6 p.m.

Good morning, Whitewater

There are no public meetings today, for the City of Whitewater, but on Saturday at 10 a.m. there will be a candidates’ forum in the Common Council chambers. The Whitewater League of Women Voters is sponsoring the event. (Note: The City of Whitewater’s website, as of this writing, lists the start time as 9:30 a.m.; the League of Women Voters newsletter lists it as 10 a.m.)

In American history on this day, in 1942, the U.S. Army launched a K-9 Corps. The History Channel’s website has the details:

On this day in 1942, the Quartermaster Corps (QMC) of the United States Army begins training dogs for the newly established War Dog Program, or “K-9 Corps.”

Well over a million dogs served on both sides during World War I, carrying messages along the complex network of trenches and providing some measure of psychological comfort to the soldiers. The most famous dog to emerge from the war was Rin Tin Tin, an abandoned puppy of German war dogs found in France in 1918 and taken to the United States, where he made his film debut in the 1922 silent film The Man from Hell’s River. As the first bona fide animal movie star, Rin Tin Tin made the little-known German Shepherd breed famous across the country.

In the United States, the practice of training dogs for military purposes was largely abandoned after World War I. When the country entered World War II in December 1941, the American Kennel Association and a group called Dogs for Defense began a movement to mobilize dog owners to donate healthy and capable animals to the Quartermaster Corps of the U.S. Army. Training began in March 1942, and that fall the QMC was given the task of training dogs for the U.S. Navy, Marines and Coast Guard as well.

The K-9 Corps initially accepted over 30 breeds of dogs, but the list was soon narrowed to seven: German Shepherds, Belgian sheep dogs, Doberman Pinschers, collies, Siberian Huskies, Malumutes and Eskimo dogs. Members of the K-9 Corps were trained for a total of 8 to 12 weeks. After basic obedience training, they were sent through one of four specialized programs to prepare them for work as sentry dogs, scout or patrol dogs, messenger dogs or mine-detection dogs. In active combat duty, scout dogs proved especially essential by alerting patrols to the approach of the enemy and preventing surprise attacks.

I won’t be completely satisfied until Whitewater has a local version of this program. It won’t be long, I’m sure, as I would guess a proposed municipal hiring freeze will apply only to people.