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A fine sculpture from the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts. It is carved from one piece of Marble. Even the veil is from the original stone and is part of the only block used for this. The sculptor is an Italian named Raffaelo Monti (1818-1881)
This is the Poster and box cover from my favorite movie "The Hairdressers Husband" it is a French film starring Anna Galiena. The story deals with this man's obsession with hairdressers going back to when he was a child. It develops into a story of a "perfect relationship" and its consequences.
D.B. Searles, my favorite Restaurant and bar in St. Cloud. I spent many wonderful hours here as an undergraduate at SCSU with people like Sundramoorthy Pathmanathan, my best friend from Penang, Maylasia. The bar is on the lower floor and the restaurant takes up the upper three floors. I used to go here every year for New Years Eve, it is a great place to bring in the New Year. The building itself was in the past the home of a car dealership, a bank, and most notably a funeral home. The waitresses say the have seen a ghost late at night and Tara a tall blonde woman says one ghost even touched her on the head one night.
This is a copy of a drawing, by Thomas Webster, done in 1824 of the Plesiosaurus found by Mary Anning of Lyme Regis in Dorset, England. Mary had been finding fossils since she was a small child and made her living as an adult locating fossils for the great museums and scientists of her day. She was relatively unknown until some research was done by Hugh Torrens. His article on Mary can be found listed in my references.
Newport Beach, California. I grew up about a mile from this beach. My Grandmother lived a half block down a side street from the pier shown. She used to catch Halibut from the pier for dinner a few times each week.
This is a skeleton of a plesiosaur that is now in the American Museum of Natural History. I like this picture because it shows the bones of the pelvic girdle so well. I identified some bones from our collection at SCSU, based on the angle of the picture. We are looking at the back left side of a plesiosaur 'swimming' away from us. Note the large upper leg bone and it's thickness compared to many others in the same general area. Due to this we find many of these bones in our site in South Dakota.HR>
Here is an example of what a short necked plesiosaur (or Pliosaur) called a Trinacromerum, might look like. This is the animal we are working on at our site. They were restricted, apparently to the Western Interior Seaway that covered much of the center of North America from the Gulf of Mexico up to the Arctic Ocean. It is said they were agile swimmers and certainly were carnivorous feeding on anything it could catch.
A post card of St. Cloud State University. I have an office in the building to the left of the building with the circular end on it. Both buildings are occupied by the sciences with most life sciences in the building on the right. That one is called the Math-Science Building, but math is no longer taught there. My building, much older, is called Brown Hall. My office is on the second floor just down the hall from the Paleontology Lab, which also houses Dr. Lewis.
My favorite photograph is from a winter in 1996-97. I took this during a small storm at about 2A.M. I set the shutter for 30 seconds and used the light from the street only. It is from our window looking to the East. Winter can be a really beautiful time if it only wasn't so dang cold! This winter in the picture we also had a temperature of 40 degrees below zero (up north had 60 below). It was fun trying to start a car that night!
1931 Stinson Tri-motor, a passenger plane from before World War Two. It has ten seats for the customers and one seat for a stewardess and the cabin with two seats for the pilot and co-pilot. Much of the body of the plane is wood and the plane can't go very high since the cabin is not pressurized for altitude. It's a bit noisy flying in this too with the three engines, two just outside the windows
Linda Heisler has been a friend of mine ever since we met at a dance in high school. (she doesn't remember) She lives now in Northern California in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. It's all gold rush country with many old historical towns nearby. Linda is an avid hiker and rock climber.
Jan Thomas, my friend from the snake picture, on a hike to Harney Peak, the tallest mountain East of the Rockies. A formation called "The Needles" is in the background, along with lots of Ponderosa Pines. Harney peak is the tall spire way back on the horizon. Jan still runs Stagebarn Crystal Cave in Piedmont, South Dakota.
St. Cloud from the air (In the 1931 Stinson Tri-Motor) We live just to the lower right in the picture, but a couple blocks down the street. I work right behind the brick building on the left center of the picture and SCSU is a few blocks down the street to the left from this building. The light area in the background is the main shopping area of St. Cloud. The small lake is Lake George and the river is the Mississippi River. It hasn't had many streams feed it yet to get very large.
Newport Beach, California looking out to the North West, this is the same pier from the photo taken from the air. It was one of the better places to surf, when I was in High School. There was a law then that limited us to before 7AM and after 5PM. They were afraid swimmers would get hit by the boards, so we mainly were body surfers from then on.
The Balboa Pavilion on the bay side of the penninsula. It was directly across the bay from Christian "Buddy" Ebsen's home at the time. He has a few very nice daughters and one son. I knew Cathy very well and went to school with Susannah. Bonnie and Kiki I met when they were smaller, along with Dusty, his son. Next to the Pavilion was the Balboa Fun Zone. We all used to spend hours playing games, riding the ferris wheel, the bumper cars and talking with friends. A couple of blocks up the street was the old Rendezvous Ballroom, where Dick Dale, the Righteous Brothers, and many others appeared on the weekends.
Me, peering out of my Dad's place of birth. It's a homestead my Grandfather built at the turn of the century (1900). He came over from Lithuania as a stowaway on a freighter. He was caught and worked for his passage, and then began as a coal miner in the Scranton, Pennsylvania area. He fought in the Spanish American War and wound up in the Southern Black Hills of South Dakota where he homesteaded a ranch and raised his family there along with Henrietta "Nettie" Wellner, a German settler from Wisconsin.
My pet bat, Ralphie! I used to work on a bat census every year in January. We used to go into the storm sewers and collect the bats, all were Big Brown Bats, Eptesicus fuscus. We would check their health, weigh them and band the ones that weren't already banded. This had been going on since the 1930's until the city of St. Cloud rebuilt the sewer system and the bats didn't like the changes and left. We did on the last year find a bat that had been banded twenty years before, meaning this bat was at least twenty years old, and older than the record listed for Big Browns.
My brother John, demonstrating the outhouse on my Grandfather's ranch. It has been abandoned for fifty years or more, but John still got the creeps from doing this. The ranch is now part of the Marty Family ranch, near Minnekahta, South Dakota.