Coming Soon! Five new interviews!

Larry Bensky

Larry is renown radio personality with Pacifica Radio of California. He was a young Yale graduate in the 1960's fighting for social justice at every angle and I interviewed him recently, specifically about his experiences living in one of the first major "hippy communes" in America. (As a follow-up, we have another conversation planned to talk about the famous summer of 1968!)

Janet Pollock

In my interview with Janet, we learn what it was like to be an orphan in the U.S. in the 1940's, before social systems were in place for tragic family situations like Janet's. Her mother died when she was 4 and her father died suddenly of a massive heart attack when she was 9, leaving her alone in San Diego, in the care of a woman who she now believes was a prostitute. At the age of 10, neglected in every way, Janet found a postcard in a drawer with the name and address of her aunt who lived across the United States in Washingon, D.C. The woman she was living with put her on a bus to cross the country alone. Of course, she lost her ticket and what little money she had by the time she reached Texas. But there is a happy ending and the story is amazing!

Carla Helfrich

Carla, now well into her 80's, was a child in Germany near the end of WWII and she tells us about the way ordinary people were forced to live during those final years of the war. She remembers being one of the children that would run alongside the American tanks as they rolled into her village, and the children begged for cigarettes and chewing gum. 

Thomas V. 

In my interview with Tom, we learn about another aspect of being a young man in the 1960's. (From my earlier interview with Bob Verderber, we learn about being a soldier who volunteered to fight in Vietnam but ended up getting assigned to the Pentagon for the duration.) Tom was a "conscientious objector", one of many who refused to participate in the draft as a matter of conscience. Those were turbulent times when it comes to the changing definition of "patriotic" and obeying "authority".

Ned Brannon

Ned is a classic Vermonter: dairy farmer all his life and through much of that, he was also a rural mail carrier. The stories abound! The extraordinary complexities of delivering the mail in Vermont winters, the neighbors, and friends who were true characters, the wonders of coming from generations of resilient people who made the best of all they had. What a great man!

Can you hear me now? From Operator to iPad

One of the special people I have interviewed recently is 93 years young and a woman I have known all my life. At 77, Maddie Howard was my babysitter, when I was a 10 pound newborn. Even then, Maddie was showing up at our house in her jeans and rolling up her sleeves to take care of me and my 2 older sisters.  

She has always modeled “aging gracefully” for our family and many others, and she keeps on going as if she was still 65!

 Maddie and I had a conversation about communication recently for this website and I can't think of a more wonderful way to spend an hour than sitting at her kitchen table chatting. 

I knew she had effortlessly navigated the evolving stages of telephone communications, and used a cell phone just as well as any 40-somethings, but what I didn’t know was that her roots were especially deep in communications.  Let's listen... 

Maddie was one of the original telephone, operators, connecting callers with cables that needed to be plugged in and out of vast walls of holes.

Image Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_switchboard

Maddie and I spoke at great length one Sunday afternoon about how the telephone was so important to her husband, a country doctor. Everyone had their home phone number and Dr. Howard would get calls at all hours, in any weather, and gladly drove to people’s homes to care for his patients.

She said that they were lucky because they had a private line, but in those days, most people shared their telephone line with their neighbors, in something called a “party line.” I was curious about how that worked when it comes to privacy, but Maddie said people seemed more courteous back in those days and honored each other’s privacy.

While you could listen in on your neighbors, you probably wouldn’t tell anyone about what you heard. (Maddie demonstrated the nuances of what you had to do to listen in but not be discovered!)

She said there was one phone in the house, usually in the kitchen, so there was no thought to privacy on the phone inside your own household either.

This made me think about how “privacy” isn’t really “private” in the digital world. A digital “conversation” or photos are essentially “public” because of the digital ability to share everything.  That reality was not lost on Maddie. She spoke at length about how people seemed to cherish deeply personal moments back when they happened organically in a slower world. People who were “gossips” were considered the lowest class.

But in our world of sharing content on the web,  “the gossip” is even muddy water too.

Image Source: http://www.sacbee.com/entertainment/living/health-fitness/article45080046.html

Maddie and I also spoke about how technologies like Texting and Emails have changed the way we connect with others. At one point in the interview Maddie jumped up suddenly and grabbed her ipad off the kitchen counter. She excitedly opened her email andread emails from her family to us, one after another, and pointed at them with joy. They were tiny, instant moments of connection. They seemed to have all the weight of a personally, hand- written note, but even better connection because of the immediacy of the feedback loop.

 It was fantastic to see her zoom around on her ipad as I imagined her once plugging and unplugging the cables at the phone company.

This small revelation made me hopeful about the way my own parents may grow old gracefully, adapting and taking advantage of what is possible.

It made me realize that by the time I am Maddie’s age – 77 years from now – who know’s how we will all be communicating!!

And that thought made me dive deeper into the history of the telephone. Again, this is something most of us think we know something about, but might find ourselves actually thin on facts. 

Image Source: http://boredstiffgeeks.blogspot.com/2010/03/youre-skating-on-thin-ice-mister.html

Maddie’s life experiences with the telephone made me want to do a little research for us to understand the scope of the most ever-present technology in the world. You may already know that in March of 1876 Alexander Graham Bell was the person who spoke the first words into a telephone, speaking to his assistant in the next room.

While that was 51 years before Maddie was even born, the telephone did not advance very well in its initial half-century, so Maddie lived through the telephone’s major leaps.

In 1877 the first telephone line was constructed and the first “long distance” call (to a person 10 miles away) was placed but there was no way to connect multitudes of people. That’s when telephone operators became the linchpin in the whole system...

Image Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVDGuCjog_0

To make a phone call required someone – usually a woman, sitting in a place called “an exchange” – to plug cables into a vast array of receiver wholes, literally connecting caller and receiver by hand after a brief conversation with the caller. Maddie tells us that was one of her first jobs as a young woman..

I found it interesting to learn that the “styles” of telephones has always been a factor in its history. You may have seen in the movies the two piece phone called a candlestick phone that was used for 40 years of telephone history. There were two types. One required using both hands and the other, you spoke into a little bell-shaped receiver attached to a wooden box on the wall, and you held another bell-shaped piece by your ear during the phone call.

Maddie remembers using this wall-mounted box telephone throughout her childhood, but it died out in the 1930’s just about the beginning of her working life, when styles and technology allowed for rotary phonels.

The rotary phone became really popular in the 1940’s. To dial, you just put your finger in the hole over the number you were choosing, and then you would rotate the dial clockwise with your finger in the hole until your finger reached a little stopping arm, and then released. The dial would then slowly rotate back, counter-clockwise, to the resting position, while making a characteristic series of clicking noises.

Image Source: http://bgr.com/2013/12/13/telephone-timeline-a-brief-history-of-the-phone/

My parents, who were born in 1960, remember rotary phones in their homes but the version was much more modern than the previous picture.

It seems to me that dialing like that would be incredibly tedious, but they say that dialing long distance was a big deal, almost never done, and even more of a surprise to me was that almost all local telephone numbers were just 5 didgets long. 

Most people were using push button phones by the mid 1970s which seem much closer to what we all think of as a telephone. Each key would transmit a certain frequency, signaling to the telephone operator which number you wanted to call. Rarely did we have to actually speak to an operator, and the job market there shrank significantly.

Imaage Source: http://blogs.lanacion.com.ar/movilandia/noticias

Once the phone became essentially a box with buttons, the box behind the push buttons just got smaller, and smaller until we eventually, in the early 1990’s we had wireless phones in cars that weighed about 8 pounds and were about the size of a shoe box. By the late 1990’s average folks had cell phones about the size and shape of a smallish TV remote. Now, of course, we are pushing buttons on something smaller than a deck of cards by weight and dimensions.

The rest of the story may be familiar:

2003 saw the first cellphone with a camera, just about the same time digital cameras replaced film cameras. 2004 saw the first cellphones with personal information capabilities like PalmPilot. Blackberry came along in 2005 and everything was going their way until the first iPhone in 2007. Not to be outdone by Apple, Google bought Android and unveiled the Android operating system in 2007 too. 

None of this was lost on Maddie. As I mentioned, she was staying in touch with everyone with the most popular devices today, and I suppose if I drop by her kitchen when she's 98, she'll be teaching me a thing or two about whatever we are doing for communication then.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

Most of my facts came from a few good sources on the web:

www.abbieandeveline.com/tag/abbie-elizabeth-webber/page/2/

http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/150/1870.xhtml

http://bgr.com/2013/12/13/telephone-timeline-a-brief-history-of-the-phone/

You Can't Get an Uncle Bob at Walmart!

I've got an Uncle Bob who means the world to me, and who's had such a rich life that I could interview him on a dozen different subjects.

All the conversations would be filled with both fun and insights, and in fact, I remember one such occasion when he had us all in stitches and he said, "Never forget! You can't get an Uncle Bob at Walmart!"

Since then, in our family, we roll out that expression whenever we marvel at his remarkable influence on us. 

For the first of many interviews I hope to do with my uncle, Bob Verderber of Lincoln Illinois, I chose to have him tell us about the era that shaped his early adulthood: the Vietnam War era. I've always been confused about why my generation knows almost nothing about that war. In fact, if I was a conspiracy theorist, I could imagine that keeping us uninformed about that war, probably made it easier to get us into the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

We didn't know the lessons that should have been gained by Vietnam. Here's my uncle Bob to tell us about the things he experienced and the perspectives he gained...

SOUNDCLOUD

Uncle Bob's honesty and deep feelings made me feel it was even more important for us to take an opportunity to dig deeper into information about this era in America's history.  Have you ever noticed that all the American history books stop at WWII? I believe part of the reason for that is the complexity of the story. 

So I did some homework for us all and I've collected some interesting facts that might give some backstory to Uncle Bob's observations.

To start with, did you know that the Vietnam War was the longest and most unpopular war in the 20th century? It was easy to see why. It seems to me that we came into the war riding the hubris from WWII and racked with fear of communist domination.

Hubris and fear seem a bad combination to build on.

In my opinion, the decisions the U.S. made were a slippery slope of doubling-down, over and over again, to recover after previously ill-considered decisions.

See what you think. Look at this timeline:

The sparks that ignited the Vietnam War actually started after WWII when the allies decided that Vietnam should go back to being a French colony. (The Japanese had taken over Vietnam during WWII but a tremendous power vacuum opened up when the Japanese left after losing the war.) Predictably, there was a Vietnamese revolutionary and communist, Ho Chi Minh, who wanted freedom for the country of Vietnam. His forces began to battle the french at every opportunity and seeing a communist movement gaining momentum, the U.S. started sending aid to the french in 1950. 

That forced Ho Chi Minh to go looking for his own advocates and he easily gained support from communist China and the Soviet Union.

When the French lost an important battle to Ho Chi Minh's forces in 1954, they abandoned the idea of holding on to the colony and fearing the communists would roll over into South Vietnam, the U.S. more openly stepped in to help the south avoid elections to unify the country (fearing the communists would win). From 1956 to 1960, the U.S. tried to support the person they installed as the ruler of South Vietnam. (Another misstep as he was later exposed as a terrible leader, hated by his own people and executed in 1963.) 

In 1959 Ho Chi Minh declared all out war in order reunite the entire country under one rule.

Image Source: http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Vietnam_War

In 1961, U.S. military advisors decided to take a direct role in the war. It was all downhill from there as circumstances drew our forces deeper and deeper into the fight. Famously, in 1964,  two US Destroyers were attacked by the North Vietnamese and in response to that the first official U.S. troops arrived in Vietnam to begin major bombing campaigns in North Vietnam, to which Ho Chi Mihn responded with the Tet Offensive, attacking more than 100 cities in South Vietnam. 

From 1965 to 1969, President Lyndon Johnson put limits on U.S. troops, not allowing them to attack North Vietnam directly, as the idea was to help the Southern Vietnamese get strong enough to fight the North rather than having the US win the war for them. This policy lead to utter pandemonium for U.S. troops as the jungles of Vietnam were nearly impenetrable, and laden with booby traps and ambushes. Sometimes they ended up being attacked by the people they thought they were fighting for!

Image Source: http://www.nocaptionneeded.com/category/photographers-showcase/

President Nixon was next up to try his own policies and began saying that he was withdrawing US troops in 1969, but all the while, escalating incursions into neighboring Cambodia as a last ditch effort. Unfortunately, the North Vietnamese soon started the march across the border toward Saigon and in 1973 the famous airlift of the last U.S. personnel in Saigon was necessary, leaving the country to officially become unified as a communist country. 

The U.S. had lost the war effort completely and lost an important chapter in the Cold War, leaving its reputation as a world power in tatters.

The consequences of the Vietnam war were many and varied. The Vietnam War cost the United States 58,000 lives and  cost 1-2 million Vietnamese deaths. 

Many U.S. citizens were so dismayed about the way we were drawn into the war that the war resulted in congress enacting the War Powers Act in 1973, which required the president to receive explicit Congressional approval before committing American forces overseas.

The domestic consequences sent shock waves through generations, families, campuses and communities. Students objected to the draft (the average age of the American soldiers in Vietnam was 19, 7 years younger than WWII soldiers) and because one could avoid the draft if you were in college, 80% of the American soldiers came from the lower classes.

Image Source: https://www.pinterest.com/treasurebox123/flower-child/

This was the first war where Americans watch body bags being taken out of the jungle right in their living rooms on the television.

There was a lack of coherent meaning of the war.  The innocent Vietnamese peasants being killed in the crossfire and the American chemical warfare destroying the environment. Tensions increased as demonstrators all over America felt they were being ignored. During the growing war protests Ohio National Guardsmen open fire on student demonstrators and killed 4 at Kent State University.

Image Source: http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/ictcs/

My Uncle Bob is a self-made man who thinks for himself. After doing this research, I can see why his feelings about the war would have been emotionally confusing and intellectually taxing. Everything made sense and nothing made sense. 

I'll close with the following famous photo from those tumultuous years. I think it says a lot:

Image Source: https://www.pinterest.com/treasurebox123/flower-child/

Most of my information came from one of three good sources:

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/era.cfm?eraid=18

http://www.ushistory.org/us/55d.asp

http://www.ducksters.com/history/cold_war/vietnam_war.php

Read more at: http://www.ducksters.com/history/cold_war/vietnam_war.php

Charles Moore: A Life Long Career in Railroading

My  interview with Charles Moore was one of my favorites because I honestly went into the interview blind. I had never spoken at length with Mr. Moore and I knew nothing about the railroad industry; less than nothing if that's possible. I wanted to try an interview that was truly like meeting someone in an airport and chatting spontaneously. 

I asked Charles lots about the history of railroads because he spent most of his working life in that industry: starting out in an entry level position and eventually winding up as a high level executive. By the end of the interview I was genuinely intrigued by the stories of advances in technology and I learned a lot about leadership.

You will notice right away that Charles is an engaging out going guy. This allowed me to be more in the flow interview. The more Mr. Moore spoke, the more questions came to mind.  

By the end of the interview, Mr. Moore and I were good friends, and I could tell he became someone in my life who I could go to in the future for advice!

BONUS INFORMATION: 

After my interview with Charlie I was inspired to dive deeper into the history of the railroad. It’s one of those topics you think you know enough about and yet on closer inspection, I realized my generation probably has very little contact with railroads. Charlie sparked my curiosity and here some interesting highlights from my research.

Image source: http://railroad.historyproject.ucdavis.edu/

First, I had always heard the Railroads were responsible for the opening of the western United States, but never realized how much railroads were responsible for the expansion and unification of the United States during the early and mid 1800's when our collection of diverse territories and states were coming together.

Image source: http://texaslastfrontier.com/railroad/railroad-galleries/trains-of-the-old-west/

Did you know that 26 states were admitted to the union from 1830 to 1920? It may have been the railroads that formed the first ties between states like Iowa (1837), Michigan (1846), Wisconsin (1848), Texas (1845), Montana (1889), North Dakota (1889), Utah (1896),  nd New Mexico (1912) to name only a few.

Image Source: http://www.mrvanduyne.com/west/railroads10.htm

In 1827, one of the first railroads was built to compete with the Erie Canal for carrying goods. By 1840 there were 2300 miles of track east of the Mississippi and a decade later 9000 miles of track. Unfortunately, there was no standardization of track sizes (some laid 4'8" apart and others 6 feet apart) and greed  made rates and working conditions very unfair.

The transcontinental railroad became a reality in 1860 thanks to Abraham Lincoln, but the "Golden Age" of the railroads were the years between 1880 and 1920, when goods and people began moving all over our continent and before other modes of transportation (automobiles and airplanes) were invented.

Image Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcontinental_railroad

By the 1890's the smaller track size became the standard for 163,000 miles  of track.

The most fascinating innovations to the untrained eye would have to be the design of trains through the decades.  

In the beginning, railroad locomotive and car design was borrowing heavily from the horse and buggy design. We humans tend to do that with everything new, don't we? Rarely do we come up with something completely new, with no resemblance to the thing it is replacing.

(If you'd like to see another example of this, take a look at my conversation with a 93 year old friend who told me everything she'd experienced with the history of telephones, and at the end of my interview, she pulled out her iPad and showed me her close connections to everyone she knows through that totally unique invention!) 

But I digress!.. Just look at this passenger train design - a horse and buggy hybrid - from 1830:

Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framingham_Railroad_Station

By the 1880s the locomotives and passenger cars had found their own grand style and people using the system felt like modern space travelers. The journey between Cincinnati and St. Louis once took 3 hard days and nights of bumpy travel, but with railroads, it could be done in 16 hours! 

Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framingham_Railroad_Station

The height of railroad popularity in the 1920's inspired the fastest coal powered designs of the  1930's, 40's and 50's. These locomotives were practically streamlined piece of art deco. Here are three from the dozens I saw:

Image Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framingham_Railroad_Station

Image Source: http://ogrforum.ogaugerr.com/topic/the-5-best-looking-streamlined-steam-locomotives?reply=13960184939808860

Image Source: http://donsdepot.donrossgroup.net/dr2821.htm

In fact the longer I looked at locomotive design the more I wondered how many manufacturers there must have been, and how important design must have been. It was like looking at all the makes and models of cars through the 20th Century. Some were all style and others clearly workhorses. 

Most of us realize the railroad industry reached an all time low in the 1950's, 60's and 70's with the rise of the interstate highway system in the U.S. Did you notice a moment in the interview when Mr. Moore called the interstates "Freeways." I think that's a point that we shouldn't miss here. 

The interstate system made trucking goods all over the continent essentially "free" for the trucking companies. They do not have to pay very much extra for their part in maintaining, or fixing the wear and tear their industry put on our roads. But the railroads had to foot the bill for 100% of the upkeep and maintenance of their infrastructure. 

Image Source: http://www.lightrailnow.org/

Many of the most well known railroad companies went out of business about that time, and passenger rail became dilapidated and forgotten, and freight movement hung on by it's fingertips.

But as is the case in so many aspects of life, the pendulum did swing back in the favor of the Railroads in the 1980's with de-regulation. And just about that same time, grid-lock on American highways became a major problem for the movement of goods. Both these changes gave the railroad industry some relief since the 80's their have been gains.  Now high-speed rail seems to be a promising possibility.

Image Source: http://www.wired.com/2010/04/the-trouble-with-high-speed-rail/

I suspect my generation will support and may even demand the same high speed rail that is so important already in other countries around the world. Many of us like urban lifestyles without the burdens of owning an automobile. We hate the new gridlock we face at airports, and we can happily spend our time on the web while moving briskly along between cities. 

I can see promise here, but we are going to have to play catch-up! Here's a graph of how far behind the curve we are in our investment in this advancement:

Image Source: http://www.ushsr.com/

Maybe we will see another upswing, but for the time being, every time I cross a railroad track, I'm going to appreciate the history those rails have witnessed.

Thanks so much to Charlie Moore for taking us all on a little journey we would not have gone on without him. He's inspired us to appreciate the past, present and future!

Chuck Verderber On Growing Up in the 60's

The Verderber family 1969

My Father, Dr. Chuch Verderber, has had many unusually experiences in life, but few were as influential as growing up in the 1960’s. That was an era that I feel my generation knows little about despite the fact that many things occurred in the 60’s that shaped America into what it is today. In my interview, I asked my dad what it was like to grow up in an era when parents had less fear, kids were less scheduled, and everybody was not looking at screens.

His many funny stories are insightful in the way the point us in new directions. Maybe you can't turn back time, but we can make choices about what we choose as perspective and time-fillers. 

Playing basketball on Rebel Memorial Court. My dad is the little guy, still on the ground as his brothers and their friends battle for the ball in the backyard. 

In the 60's, kids didn't have to have a special shoe for every sport. In fact, my dad's family was just making ends meet so cleets for the track team would have been a luxury. Here's my dad running bare foot on the cinder tracks.

After the conversation I recorded with my father, I felt like I needed to relate the time period to historical events and other things we know about so I looked at a few timelines that included some major themes. 

The 60's saw the assassinations of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy. Men walked on the moon for the first time. Segregation and racial discrimination was alive and well, but Civil Rights marches and tensions were constantly in the news.  The Vietnam war eventually dominated everyone's thinking too, while the Beetles, Rolling Stones ad Beach Boys endlessly played as a backdrop from record players. 

Image Source: https://technostories.wordpress.com/tag/ript/

My parents tell me they had only  4 channels on their TVs, and never, never wore seat belts in the car or bike helmets. Parents turned the kids loose in the morning and the only rule was to be back for dinner by the time the street lights were coming on in the evening.  Parents didn't worry about children being abducted, having peanut allergies or getting Lyme's disease. There were no such thing as sun screen, water bottles or cell phones.

Source: Pinterest Popular TV shows from 1960's

Shopping malls were not common in the 1960's and in some schools, girls were not allowed to wear pants. They had to wear dresses or skirts below the knee. Cateye and Clark Kent glasses were the fashion. 

There were no ATM's so you had to guess how much money you might need over the weekend. Dentists, Doctors and food service people did not wear gloves and coffee was only available if you made it yourself at home. (What!.. No Starbucks!) Oh, there were no "Quick Stop Gas Stations" where you could fill up and get coffee, fast-food, and minor groceries.

Image Source: http://www.ultraswank.net/kitsch/games-and-gadgets-of-the-60s/

People actually played games; actually with each other in the 1960's! (Just kidding... but really! now-a-days, it seems we are getting too good at being alone/together, on our phones!)

And as to this whole cell phone problem...

To put it simply; I'm told that life was simpler, and it wasn't such a bad thing.

Al Ward

Al Ward, 92, is a WWII veteran that had a job that many don't know much about. During his time in the military he was aboard a minesweeper. His boat was responsible for clearing the sea of all kinds of mines. 

Image Source: St. Albans Messenger newspaper http://www.samessenger.com/veterans-day-minesweeper-trolls-his-memory/

In his interview he talks about his adventures in the navy and his travels across the world, as near the end of the war he was sent to find his own way to his next assignment on a ship in the Pacific Ocean. Essentially, his story sounds like a scavenger hunt. He started in the Carribean, and hopped aboard ship after ship, going in the right direction. His tales of the journey are great fun and raise all sorts of questions.

Let's have a listen...

It was such a pleasure to hear about so many aspects of Al Ward’s interesting life, and one particular chapter intrigued me so I decided to get us all up to speed about Al’s comments about his work on a vessel called a Mine Sweeper in WWII.

It was kind of shocked to learn that mines were laid in waters so close to the U.S. in the Gulf of Mexico, on the Carolina coast and throughout the Caribbean Sea. I suspect many in my generation think of WWII as a war fought in Europe and the Pacific Ocean.

“Sweeping” bays and heavily trafficked shipping lanes of mines also intriqued me and here’s what I found about the technologies of the past and present.

Not only did minesweepers clear waterways for warships and merchant shipping, they also dismantled the heavy protection given strategic areas, clearing a path for important amphibious landings. And then, even after the war, they were instrumental in returning the world to an era of safe shipping because tens of thousands of mines were left in place all over the oceans of the world after both sides went home.

Image Source: http://www.exelisinc.com/solutions/Mechanical-Mine-Sweeping-System/Pages/default.aspx

Many of the early mines were contact mines, like the ones in the picture above, that had a number of metal horns protruding from the metal shell, which when struck with sufficient force, such as that by a ship’s hull, activated the firing mechanism, detonating 600 lbs. of explosive TNT. They floated just below the surface and were anchored to the bottom, so the process of clearing them consisted of cutting their tether to the bottom. In one method, two ships would moved in parallel through a minefield with a wire rope stretched between them.  

Image Source: http://web.mst.edu/~rogersda/military_service/persian_gulf_ops.htm

In another method,  a single ship would drag a long cable attached to a large float attached to a device called an otter or kite which made the float swing way out, nearing parallel to the ship towing it.

Image Source: http://www.koreanwaronline.com/history/pledge.htm

With the same cutting cable principle, the mine’s mooring ropes would be cut and the mines would float to the surface. The following is another more detailed diagram of this strategy, but what I found particularly interesting was how they discovered a way to only expose one ship in a flotilla of minesweepers to the danger of accidentally striking a mine. Take a look at the bottom part of this diagram where it shows the formations the ships took through the water. See how only the lead boat was in any danger of striking a mine! This way, many ships could be deployed in a formation that cleared large swaths in short order.

Image Source: Image Source: http://hmascastlemaine.org.au/minesweeping/

Either way, the “rope” was designed so it acted as a saw and cut through the mine mooring lines.

 When the released mine rose to the surface, it was destroyed by gunfire.

Image Source: http://globalmilitaryreview.blogspot.com/2013/08/japan-maritime-self-defense-force-jmsdf.html

Sounds simple and ingenius.

Al Ward worked in the engine room on one of these important ships.

And what of the use of mines in modern warfare? Well, as you might guess, this old problem is still around, but technology has made minesweeping far safer and more efficient. 

Enter: the drone minesweeping: the US Navy let's robots hunt and destroy mines. A technology called Knifefish finds the mines and then another called UISS comes into play. Knifefish emits a spoof signal that prompts the mines to detonate and then quickly swims back to the monthership on its own. In theory, every ship could carry this technology on its own and deploy it as needed. 

Image Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2606316/Goodbye-minehunters-hello-tiny-drone-submarines-Royal-Navy-tests-hi-tech-devices

Dedicated minesweeping vessels would only be needed for large scale projects.

I have to say that I hope for a day that mining the seas becomes a useless exercise because the drone technology make it so easy to foil. 

Thanks to the early bravery and ingenuity of guys like Al Ward. That day may come sooner than we think.

[All my information came from the sources I've credited in my chosen photos and http://www.britannica.com/technology/minesweeper]