Page 16 - Winterling's Chasing the Wind

My grandfather had tourist cabins for the travelers that came from points north to the
Jersey shore. Above one building was a water tank and inside was a piece of machinery
with a large wheel and a belt that ran to a pulley. We didn’t know it ran the pump that
filled the tank. As children, we would try turning the wheel to try to make it spin.
Luckily the pump never started while we were playing with it. My grandfather always
enjoyed improving the property he had developed at the corner of Motor Road and the
Atlantic City US 9 highway. One of his projects was building a 350 ft. picket fence
around his house. I was fascinated watching him of mix the concrete and pour it into a
mold for the fence posts. Forty years later and 24 years after his passing in 1952, I
returned to view the abandoned house. The fence was no longer there, but I retrieved
one of the concrete posts for a memorial of his life at my home in Jacksonville, FL.

One day in 1937 while returning from the river down the path in the woods, I heard a
hum in the sky and saw something that looked like a large gray cloud through the tree
branches. I curiously ran to a small clearing by the railroad tracks and recognized that it
was a dirigible that appeared to be only a thousand feet above the Toms River. The
enormity of it and the low monotone hum of the motors sounded very ominous to me.

A couple of hours later while eating dinner in the kitchen of our home, we heard a loud
rumble. My grandfather ran outside thinking his water tank had collapsed. Seeing black
smoke in the direction of Lakehurst, we all got in the car and drove to the Naval
Station. I remember looking through the fence at the edge of the airport and seeing the
haunting frame of the airship with the wreckage beneath it still smoldering.
I had remembered during those days in the 1930's of seeing calendars with a picture of
a tilted dirigible on a date when the Graf Zeppelin crashed. When I was growing up, we
didn’t receive toys or presents apart from birthdays and Christmas. But one day when I
met my grandfather returning Philadelphia, he presented me with a Gyroscope. This
strange contraption had a solid metal wheel inside a stiff wire container. After winding
a string around its axis, a swift pull would accelerate the wheel to cause an inexplicable
force. The gyroscope would resist any effort to turn it from its plane of rotation. This
taught me how the property of angular momentum is useful in navigation for airplanes,
ships, and spacecraft.

In 1937, we moved to Plainfield, NJ where I started the first grade in school. My
mother was a school teacher, and my father also taught school, but it was at Barnegat
High on the Jersey shore between Pine Beach and Mayetta. He was an excellent
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