Pinal County Historical Museum

Nolan and I visited the Pinal County Historical Museum that I had led a group of residents to a week before. I had told Nolan about it and he wanted to go.

.. Of course the displays of county history started with the pottery from 500 A.D. but we didn't start taking photos until the more current items. These intricately woven baskets were amazing.

Vases made of cholla (pronouced choy-a) cactus skeletons.

Three-legged table made of cholla skeleton.

Bookcase of cholla with stuffed gila monster.

Water fountain from an old school.

The two red boxes on the bottom were interesting. Chill Tonic and Swamp Root.

During Prohibition you could get a prescription for medicinal liquor.

Oh the elusive cure for fatness!

This is a combination high chair, potty chair, stroller and play table.

Read this for a chuckle.

Old office furniture and machines from the old courthouse.

There some very interesting things here. Like this Ediphone, precursor to the Dictaphone.

What wrong with this typewriter?

It has a regular QUERTY keyboard but it has two instead of one. There wasn't a shift key so the upper set is for upper case letters and the lower set is for lower case letters.

Now that's a different arrangement.

Then there were the times when you needed a portable. Just like a laptop today.

Another portable.

Sorry for the glare.

Just like today, if you have a famous name, it gets put on everything.

The museum has an extensive collection of bullets including some wooden ones.

Personal property in a home was taxed and this was one way to hide your radio. The electric cord ran up inside a leg and the speakers faced downward.

Notice the rolls of music.

No this isn't some torture devise. It's a hair curler from a beauty salon.

What this museum is most noted for is its Arizona State Prison Collection.

But before the gas chamber came the hangings. The rope from each hanging was kept and is displayed with a photo of the person hung.

These four guys wanted to be hung with the same rope.

I never saw this in the movies.

This is interesting.

Barbed wire collection.

WW II stories.

Yes POWs were brought to Arizona.

Cotton Pickin'

So we've posted photos of cotton bales along the roads before but today we saw more of the process.

I made a wrong turn but look what we found... a cotton field being harvested.

This is one of the cotton compactors that form the bales. The box is lowered to the ground before they start.

A belt inside the hopper moves the cotton to the edge where it drops into one of the compactors. The blue rail on tops of the red box is the actual compacting parts. It moves up and down plus pushes the cotton to the rear of the box.

Up close of the picker.

Here you can see the compactor in a different position. The hopper is being dumped in front of it.

The hopper operator sure dumped a lot of cotton on the ground. You can just make out the guy beside the compactor throwing some back into the box.

October Happenings

We had a Halloween party at the park but had poor attendance due to so many other things happening. Anyway here's some of the spooks out that night.

I planned to be a full bunch of grapes instead of a half of a bunch but this is all the coverage I got with 38 balloons. There were enough balloons there to make it hard to sit or do much of anything.

We put an entry into a Relay for Life fundraiser called "Dress your Banana Split". Creative people, huh? Do you understand the Addressed Banana? Addressed - a dressed. LOL We just thought we would take some bananas for kicks and all we used was a marker for our "costume". Yeap, the Siamese Twins were our contribution. Maybe next year we'll have triples.