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Your timely reply almost makes me wish I had attended Georgia Tech- so you could more accurately call me a "ramblin' wreck". Not an engineer, but passed SMAW all positions to ASTM and API codes and know just enough of metallurgy (both ferrous and non-ferrous metals) to be considered "dangerous". Almost makes me wish I had attended college after HS, instead of enlisting in the USMC, but that's water gone under the bridge.

I also appreciate brother Suponski's "thanks" to your reply. With Pulaski days (or per the syntax in Dave's first rate article covering the North East SxS Classic pages 20-21 and 22)-- maybe that's Pulaski day'?? Fourth graph, near the end-' so that us boy's could--? boy's what- baseball gloves, hockey sticks? the unneeded apostrophe here indicates possive, ditto the last line- These gal's are the best- gal's what- purses, membership cards in the Ladies Aid Society, what? I might have rewritten that as-- "so that we could go out to play- and These gals are the best (and I am sure they are, even women being involved in a man's (ok to use the possessive here Dave) sport is an conundrum to me. I could feel the battery acid breath of Sister Mary Frigidare breathing down my neck in English composition, almost here the 'swishing' of her 15" ruler- aka- "The old knuckle cracker" as she was a stickler for getting it right- every time. As are most bosses in the skilled trades, as we both know. Great article and fotos, almost (but not quite) makes me wish I lived in the Eastern Seaboard and had an interest in breaking clays as you fellows have.

Often wondered about those Twists of fate- how the world might have been different if an Austrian Corporal with the Iron cross was killed by an Allied sniper instead of American poet/soldier Joyce Kilmer by a German sniper. How might the outcome of WW11 in the ETO have been if the soldier with the nervous breakdown had not been in that tent in Sicily when Patton visited- General George S. Patton Jr. logged far more hours visiting field hospitals and awarding purple hearts and other decorations for valor in combat than any other American or british field Commander in the entire during of the War in Europe.