Meador Manor

Darkness at Noon

Posted on May 10, 2025 by Granger Meador

Long ago, early in my years of teaching high school physics, I came across an old paperback book from 1961, The Watershed, with a cover that showed Johannes Kepler and an illustration of his first and second laws of planetary motion.

I snapped up the biography, enjoying it immensely. I used it to flesh out my lectures on our evolving understanding of the cosmos when we studied universal gravitation. A few years later, revisiting this entry in The Science Study Series, I noticed that it was actually an excerpt of a larger work of 1959, The Sleepwalkers.

I sought that out, devouring the thick tome, which was so interesting that it, along with Timothy Ferris’s Coming of Age in the Milky Way, led to me devoting a week of my course each year to the progress from Eudoxus in 300 BCE to Einstein in the early 1900s CE.

The author of The Sleepwalkers, Arthur Koestler, is best known for his book Darkness at Noon. From my introduction, you might guess it is about astronomical eclipses, but you would be wrong.

Koestler led a most interesting life. He was born in Budapest in 1905, studied engineering for awhile in Vienna, but when his father’s business failed, Arthur left for Palestine. He edited a German and Arabian weekly newspaper in Cairo, and became a journalist who traveled extensively.

In the early 1930s, he moved to the Soviet Union for a few years and was an active communist from 1931 to 1938. He participated in anti-fascist movements, and as a war correspondent in Spain during its Civil War, he was imprisoned, sentenced to death, but then released in a prisoner exchange.

Back in France, he struggled to make a living and agreed to write a sex encyclopedia, but his crooked cousin was exploiting him and Koestler only received a flat payment of 60 pounds for a work that sold in the tens of thousands.

In 1938, he resigned from the Communist Party, disillusioned by Stalin’s show trials of 1936 to 1938. Koestler was electrified by the confessions of Nikolai Bukharin, a popular and highly intellectual Bolshevik leader he had met in Russia. How could Bukharin and other defendents have been manipulated to confess to crimes they had clearly not committed? Why had the victims of Stalin’s coup de théâtre played their parts so willingly and gone so obediently to their deaths?

That led him to write an anti-communist novel while living in Paris with 21-year-old British sculptor Daphne Hardy. She translated his manuscript from German into English and smuggled it out of France when they fled ahead of the Nazi occupation of Paris. She fled to London, while Koestler joined the French Foreign Legion to hide his identity. For decades, her English translation was the only manuscript of the book known to have survived.

Koestler deserted the legion in North Africa, heard a false report that Hardy had died when her ship to Britain had been sunk, and tried unsuccessfully to commit suicide. He finally turned up in Britain without an entry permit and was imprisoned. He was still in prison when Hardy’s English translation of his novel was published in early 1941. It would make him famous.

Hardy was the one who had named the book Darkness at Noon. Koestler thought the title had come from a well-known line in Milton’s Samson Agonistes, “Oh dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,” but actually Hardy was inspired by a line from the book of Job: “They meet with darkness in the daytime, and grope in the noonday as in the night.”

The novel was a sensation, selling half a million copies in France alone and preventing the French Communist Party from being elected to join the government. Within a few years its surviving English translation had been re-translated into over thirty more languages, including a German version by Koestler himself.

Michael Foot, a future Labour Party leader in Britain, wrote, “Who will ever forget the first moment he read Darkness at Noon?” George Orwell thought the book was a brilliant novel and accepted its explanation of the show trials, impressed by the accuracy of its analysis of communism. Four years later, when Orwell was writing Animal Farm, he would pronounce Darkness at Noon a masterpiece.

Koestler’s original German manuscript of the novel, a carbon copy of which had been sent to a Swiss publisher as he and Hardy fled France, was considered lost until 2015, 32 years after Koestler’s death. A doctoral candidate working on Koestler’s writings stumbled across it in the archive of the founder of a Swiss publishing house. Its original title of Rubaschow, the German spelling of its protagonist, had likely prevented it from being identified earlier.

Hardy’s translation was compared to the original German, and revealed that Koestler had made some last-minute changes and his original included some passages not found in her translation. So the original manuscript was published, and that was translated into English by Philip Boehm.

Back in 1998, the Modern Library imprint of the Random House publishing firm polled its editorial board for their opinions of the best 100 English-language novels published during the 20th century. Darkness at Noon was ranked #8. Some years ago, I began marking off entries I had read in school and on my own.

My readings of Modern Library’s 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century

That inspired me to read Lolita and Under the Volcano in 2011, Pale Fire in 2017, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter in 2019, and A Room with a View in 2023.

Living under increasingly repressive state and federal governments in 2025, I decided it was time for Darkness at Noon. Would its message be as relevant to the populist autocracy that demagogues are creating in our country as it was to communist and Nazi regimes in the twentieth century?

I purchased the Kindle edition of the new translation by Boehm. It seemed like a relatively quick read, and my curiosity led me to compile these statistics on the reported word counts of the books I’ve read on the Modern Library list:

The Great Gatsby: 47,094
Lolita: 112,473
Brave New World: 64,531
The Sound and the Fury: 81,500
Darkness at Noon: 78,944
The Grapes of Wrath: 169,481
Under the Volcano: 144,000
I, Claudius: 100,000
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter: 121,960
Invisible Man: 95,000
Tender is the Night: 104,925
Animal Farm: 29,500
All the King’s Men: 286,000
Pale Fire: 95,000
Death Comes for the Archbishop: 72,000
A Room with a View: 65,000
Midnight’s Children: 208,000
The Magnificent Ambersons: 104,000

I found the story gripping, with its narrative increasingly confined as it progressed from one prison interrogation to the next. It certainly provides insights into totalitarian regimes and the intellectual traps that ensnared some early communist leaders.

But the Guardian’s William Skidelsky correctly notes that, “…today Koestler is a strangely marginal figure. Why is this? Partly, or perhaps precisely because he was so much a creature of the 20th century. The battles he fought are no longer quite our battles, and he seems sealed off from us by all that has happened since his death in 1983 – most notably, of course, the collapse of communism.”

The Greatest Books, which uses a meta-analysis of many reading lists to create its rankings, currently ranks the work as the 269th greatest book of all time.

The most relevant section of the book to our time was when Koestler, in the guise of his protagonist, outlined his “theory of the masses” in a long diary entry Rubashov composes in his cell before his final interrogation:

One hundred fifty years ago, on the day the Bastille was stormed [July 14, 1789], the European swing once again lurched into motion after a long period of inertia, with a vigorous push away from tyranny toward what seemed an unstoppable climb into the blue sky of freedom. The ascent into the spheres of liberalism and democracy lasted a hundred years. But lo and behold, it gradually began to lose speed as it came closer to the apex, the turning point of its trajectory; then, after a brief stasis, it started moving backward, in an increasingly rapid descent. And with the same vigor as before, it carried its passengers away from freedom and back to tyranny. Whoever kept staring at the sky instead of hanging on to the swing grew dizzy and tumbled out.

That spoke to me as we grip our own American swing in its fall.

Whoever wishes to avoid getting dizzy must try to grasp the laws of motion governing the swing. Because what we are facing is clearly a pendulum swing of history, from absolutism to democracy, from democracy to absolute dictatorship.

The degree of individual freedom a nation is able to attain and retain depends on the degree of its political maturity. The pendulum swing described above suggests that the political maturity of the masses does not follow the same constantly rising curve of a maturing individual, but is subject to more complicated laws.

The political maturity of the masses depends on their ability to discern their own interest, which presupposes a knowledge of the process of production and the distribution of goods. A nation’s ability to govern itself democratically is consequently determined by how well it understands the structure and functioning of the social body as a whole.

We certainly have issues in discerning our own interests these days.

However, every technical advance leads to a further complication of the economic framework, to new factors, new connections that the masses are at first unable to comprehend. And so every leap of technical progress brings with it a relative intellectual regression of the masses, a decline in their political maturity. At times it may take decades or even generations before the collective consciousness gradually catches up to the changed order and regains the capacity to govern itself that it had formerly possessed at a lower stage of civilization. The political maturity of the masses can therefore not be measured in absolute numbers, but always only relatively: namely in relation to the developmental stage of any given civilization.

When the balance between mass consciousness and objective reality is achieved, then democracy will inevitably prevail, by either peaceful or violent means, until the next, nearly always volatile leap of progress—for example, the invention of gunpowder or the mechanized loom—again places the masses in a condition of relative immaturity and makes it possible or necessary for the establishment of a new authoritarian regime.

I would argue that the internet has become such a framework with profound social effects that are now increasingly compounded by artificial intelligence.

The process is best compared to a ship being lifted through a series of locks. At the beginning of each stage, the ship is at a relatively low level, from which it is slowly raised until it is even with the next lock—but this glorious stage is of short duration, as it now faces a new set of levels, which again can be attained only slowly and gradually. The sides of the chamber represent the objective state of technological advancement, the mastery of natural forces; the water level in the chamber symbolizes the political maturity of the masses. Any attempt to measure this as an absolute height above sea level would be pointless; what is measured instead is the relative range of levels in each lock.

The invention of the steam engine brought a period of rapid objective progress, and as a consequence, a period of equally rapid subjective political regression. The industrial era is still historically young, the gap still very great between its enormously complicated economic structure and the intellectual awareness of the masses. It is therefore understandable that the relative political maturity of people in the first half of the twentieth century is less than it was two hundred years BC or at the conclusion of the feudal period.

If Koestler’s theory is applicable, can we hope that over time the political maturity of the masses will adapt to the internet and artificial intelligence, and the collective consciousness can regain the capacity to govern itself, swinging us away from tyranny? Perhaps, but his theory says adaptation is very slow.

I’m glad I read Darkness at Noon, as it gave me additional metaphors to consider as I ponder a political climate that is increasingly unsettling and worrisome.

As for Koestler, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1976 and chronic lymphocytic leukaemia in 1980. Upon realizing that his cancer had metastasized, he and his third wife of 28 years, Cynthia Jefferies, killed themselves in 1983.

A domineering man who engaged in many sexual affairs and generally treated the women in his life badly, he admitted in his autobiography that he had denounced a woman he had a relationship with to the Soviet secret police, an episode that explains the character of Orlova, whom the protagonist Rubashov betrays to save himself. That act becames a symbol of his moral decay during his own trial, and Rubashov comes to recognize the sacredness of the individual which contrasts with the Party’s disregard for individual lives.

Does that in any way redeem Koestler? Given his behavior, should his writings be shunned, as some do now with those of Neil Gaiman and other problematic authors? I’m reminded of how Woody Allen’s own predilections were translated in his film Manhattan. I generally choose to enjoy a work on its own merits, regardless of the virtuous or wicked actions of its creators. I’m glad I read Darkness at Noon, which sounds with the ring of truth.

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The Meanings We Make Up

Posted on April 30, 2025 by Granger Meador

Flags are inherently symbolic, with meanings often both subtle and mutable. The associations of colors shift over time and vary among cultures. In the Byzantine Empire, the Blues and Greens chariot racing groups evolved into powerful political and social factions, with the Blues often representing the upper classes and religious orthodoxy while the Greens represented the lower classes and Monophysitism. Their rivalry even led to riots and civil wars.

For the majority of my life, a Red was a Communist, not a Republican. Traditional political mapmakers often used blue for states that voted primarily Republican and red for Democratic strongholds. However, the close Presidential election of 2000 put color-coded maps of which states’ electoral votes were for each candidate before television viewers over an extended period, and the major media outlets began conforming to a scheme coding Democratic states blue and Republicans red, and that has become a fixture of politics for decades.

Which brings me to Oklahoma’s latest license plates, of all things. Last September the state began circulating a new default design. Lt. Governor Matt Pinnell and Service Oklahoma decided to base it on the state’s first flag, adding the current tagline and some tiny silhouettes.

I dislike Oklahoma’s new car license plates

I’m sure that Pinnell liked the bold and simple design, and maybe, just maybe, as one of the many Republicans who dominate our state government, he also liked the idea of a red plate in this oh-so-very-red state. [Weeks after this post, it was revealed that Governor Stitt was the person responsible for this design. Imagine that.]

The state’s license plates from 1989 to 2008 also borrowed from a state flag, but from the one we have had since 1925, by featuring its Osage war shield crisscrossed with a calumet and an olive branch. I liked those plates, and I didn’t mind when “Native America” was added to them from 1995 to 2008.

Those were replaced from 2009 to 2017 by plates inspired by Allan Houser’s Sacred Rain Arrow sculpture. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to reconsider a court of appeals ruling that threw out a lawsuit against them filed by a Christian pastor from Bethany. He alleged the image symbolized that there were multiple gods and the arrow was an intermediary for prayer. The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a “reasonable observer” would not draw such conclusions when viewing the plates.

I agree, and if the pastor were truly offended by the plate, he could always pay for a specialty plate in some other design. In his case, the state’s “In God We Trust” plate would be an obvious possibility, but as of 2025 there would be over 140 other choices, and even more if one can provide certain documentation.

I had my own objections, albeit based on aesthetics and not symbolism, to the next plate that adorned our cars by default, which featured a white scissortail flycatcher silhouette on a background of blue mountain forms. I just didn’t care for it, so I purchased a State Parks Pavilion specialty plate.

I liked that design, and how a portion of the fee is deposited with the Oklahoma Tourism and Recreation Department, which I worked for back in 1985. That brings us to 2024 when the latest default plate began to be distributed, and I do have a symbolic objection to it.

The flag it is based on was adopted four years after statehood in 1911, and it was designed by Ruth D. Clement, who just so happened to be a founder of the state branch of the Daughters of the Confederacy. I doubt it is a coincidence that Ruth designed a red field with a white star offset by blue, which are also elements of the Confederate battle flag.

Oklahoma’s first flag was designed by the founder of the state’s branch of the Daughters of the Confederacy

Mind you, other state flags have or had far more apparent Confederate symbolism. Take our neighbor to the east, Arkansas. It was part of the Confederacy, and the state flag it adopted in 1913 deliberately adapted multiple elements of the Confederate battle flag, shifting from a cross to a diamond shape to represent that at the time it had the only diamond mine in North America. If that wasn’t obvious enough, its legislature deliberately added another star in 1923 to the white field of the diamond that was specifically meant to represent the Confederacy. Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, and Florida also have or had state flags which were obvious Confederate symbols.

The Arkansas flag has obvious Confederate symbols

As for Oklahoma, its history is grounded in racial cleansing, and some of its displaced First Peoples were themselves slaveowners who dragged their black slaves along on their trails of tears. That putrid state of affairs helps explain why Senate Bill One, the symbolic first bill of the state senate in 1907, was a Jim Crow law that required separate coaches in all public rail cars for “the white and negro races” along with separate waiting rooms in each railroad depot.

Oklahoma’s history of racism is long, ugly, and brutal. In 1917, just five miles north of where I now live, a white mob in Dewey burned the homes of at least 20 black families, and four years later Tulsa had a race massacre 40 miles to the south. I’m pretty confident those occurred in a state flying a flag with subtle Confederate symbolism.

So why did Oklahoma abandon what I presume was its little nod to the Confederacy? Well, there was a Red Scare after World War I, and that was a fear not of rabid right-wingers but of communists and radical leftists. The often-embarrassing Oklahoma legislature passed a silly law in 1919, which lives on today as OS 21 § 374:

Any person in this state, who shall carry or cause to be carried, or publicly display any red flag or other emblem or banner, indicating disloyalty to the Government of the United States or a belief in anarchy or other political doctrines or beliefs, whose objects are either the disruption or destruction of organized government, or the defiance of the laws of the United States or of the State of Oklahoma, shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and upon conviction shall be punished by imprisonment in the Penitentiary of the State of Oklahoma for a term not exceeding ten (10) years, or by a fine not exceeding One Thousand Dollars ($1,000.00) or by both such imprisonment and fine.

Need I state the irony here?

In 1924 the Oklahoma Society Daughters of the American Revolution sponsored a competition to design a new state flag. Louise Funk Fluke of Shawnee designed a blue field with a centered Osage war shield with six painted crosses and seven pendant eagle feathers, overlaid by the peace pipe and olive branch. That’s plenty of symbolism that I don’t find objectionable.

My dilemma is similar to that once faced by the Bethany pastor. I don’t like the new plates which surround me, but a “reasonable observer” would not view them and draw my conclusions. So I don’t care if someone uses the default plate, but I’ll certainly continue to shell out the bucks each year to renew my State Parks Pavilion specialty plate. Maybe I’ll pretend the “46” on the plates doesn’t refer to Oklahoma being the 46th state in the union, but are rather an homage to our 46th President. That would be a hoot.

If you find my take on the symbolism of our plates silly, more power to you. After all, symbols are mutable. An example are the swastikas which adorn the 1920 road bridge in Bartlesville’s Johnstone Park. They were First Peoples symbols for good luck that pre-date the Nazi regime and its different version of the symbol.

One of the swastikas on the 1920 bridge in Johnstone Park

In 1925, Coca Cola used the swastika in advertisements, the Boy Scouts once used the symbol, and the Girls’ Club of America once called their magazine Swastika and sent swastika tokens to young readers.

The swastika symbol for the 45th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army was replaced by a thunderbird in the 1930s

The 45th Infantry Division of the National Guard, most associated with the Oklahoma Army National Guard, originally had a swastika as its symbol as a tribute to the large First Peoples population in the southwestern U.S.

However, the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, which used the swastika symbol pointing clockwise and tilted to stand on one point, led to that symbol and its variants being shunned elsewhere. Coke, the Boy Scouts, and the Girls’ Club dropped it, the 45th Infantry Division switched to a thunderbird, and Bartlesville now has signage explaining its bridge symbols. They didn’t have to do those things, since their swastikas didn’t fully echo the design of the Nazis, but like me with the original Oklahoma flag, it made them, shall we say, uncomfortable.

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¡Arriba, Arriba! ¡Ándale, Ándale!

Posted on April 26, 2025 by Granger Meador

Digital technology makes it easy to modify the rate of media playback, and pitch correction makes it far more practical. My wife routinely plays YouTube videos at high speeds, and some folks speed up their audiobooks and podcasts. Recently, Audible said 7% of its listeners had tried listening to audiobooks at higher speeds, with 1.2x and 1.5x being the most common choices, while those who listen to content at more than 2x are often listening to newspaper or magazine articles.

I prefer to listen to audio and watch videos at normal speed, but I have sped up a book or two that was read by a slow narrator. When I overhear one of Wendy’s videos playing back at high speed, instead of being reminded of Alvin & the Chipmunks, pitch correction instead leads me to think of Speedy Gonzales: “¡Arriba, arriba! ¡Ándale, ándale!”

Of course, analog technology also allowed for faster or slower playback, although it seldom compensated for the resulting change in pitch. Back in November 2023, when I reviewed my personal history with recorded music, I noted how the ready ability to change the rotational speeds on phonographs led to discoveries such as transforming Anita Ward into what I imagined to be a male singer by playing her song Ring My Bell on a 45 rpm single at the reduced speed of 33-1/3.

When I was in junior high school, one of the neighborhood kids had poor eyesight, and he had a special cassette tape player with adjustable playback speed for audiobooks. It was a Library of Congress C1 unit, which could lengthen the playback time of a standard C90 cassette, normally limited to 45 minutes of stereo audio on each side, to up to 6 hours using specially recorded 4-track monophonic tapes.

The units had no digital pitch correction, so we amused ourselves by playing with its vari-speed control.

Analog speed changes over at my house were accomplished via my mother’s 1950s four-speed Silvertone suitcase-style phonograph player, which could play records at 16-2/3, 33-1/3, 45, and 78 revolutions per minute.

Phonograph discs played at 78 rpm were produced from the late 1890s to the late 1950s, but the only ones we had were in an actual album of records by Nat King Cole that my father had picked up at a garage sale. I took it to Bartlesville High School decades later when showing phonograph technology to my physics students as an application of circular motion. Some still knew that an “album” was a 33-1/3 rpm 12-inch long-playing record, usually with 10-12 songs, but they didn’t realize its name came from the actual albums you needed to get that many songs on 78s. Such lingering anachronisms are fairly common…do you still hear people say they will “dial” a telephone number? I’ll wager they won’t!

Columbia introduced the 33-1/3 long playing record in 1948. It was not only larger and rotated more slowly, but it also downsized the grooves to be used with a stylus with a 0.001″ radius of curvature, whereas the styli for 78 rpm records had a 0.003″ curvature. RCA promptly initiated a format war, introducing its own smaller 45 rpm records, and when I was a kid you bought your singles on 45 rpm 7″ records and “albums” on 33-1/3 rpm 12″ records.

But what about the 16-2/3 playback speed on my mother’s old record player? I only used it to have fun slowing down albums by half and singles by almost 3/4. The format was never highly standardized, but some excellent articles by Mike Dicecco detail its use for some audiobooks and background music systems, as well as in a short-lived system for Chrysler automobiles in the late 1950s.

The three most common types of phonograph records

There are many examples of using variable tape speeds to create art. Beatle John Lennon famously wanted the song Strawberry Fields Forever to be released using two different takes which had different tempos and keys. Geoff Emerick and George Martin used the vari-speed control on the tape machines to speed up one take and slow down the other to better align the pitches.

Some UK disc jockeys failed to read the label and played this back at 45 rpm

However, I’m more amused by mistakes. Herb Alpert’s song Rise became a club hit in England, but at the wrong speed. The length of the song meant it wouldn’t fit on a 7-inch 45 rpm record without editing, so a 12-inch single was released. However, that single was cut for playback at 33-1/3 rpm, while at the time most 12-inch singles were played at 45 rpm. Some disc jockeys in Britain accidentally played it at the wrong speed, and that helped it become a disco hit over there.

Funly enough, Rise was originally written at a disco-friendly tempo of about 124 beats per minute, but Herb decided he preferred a slow take with a tempo of 100 beats per minute, which allowed club audiences to “dance and hug each other at the end of the night.” While that approach worked to propel the song to #1 in America, in some British clubs it was often accidentally being played at 135 beats per minute.

I listened to Rise at that rate, but I preferred the original. I couldn’t find a properly sped-up version online, so I ripped the 12″ single version of Rise into an MP3 file and used the Audacity software to speed it up. That’s easy to do, since Audacity’s Change Pitch and Speed effect dialog already has presets for changing playback from what would be 33-1/3, 45, or 78 on a phonograph to another of those speeds. I’m surprised that they didn’t include 16-2/3, but perhaps none of the Audacity programmers ever used a four-speed phonograph.

Other songs people have recommended for playback at altered speeds include I Got You Babe by Sonny & Cher, Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles, but like Jolene and Ring My Bell, those are all slow-downs. ¡Abajo, abajo! ¡No, no!

Speaking of slow, I was intrigued to see that actor Dan O’Herlihy did a spoken-word version of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine on 16-2/3 records. I remembered O’Herlihy’s resonant voice from the splendid 1964 movie Fail Safe. I can’t provide a sample of his take on Wells, but the Internet Archive has selections of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass read by O’Herlihy.

Years ago I watched Norman Field demonstrate a 20″ French Pathé ‘Theatre Disc’ from 1913 which was meant to be played at 60 rpm. I was surprised to learn that their “usual” 20-inch records played at an incredible 120 rpm. The high speed really vibrated the stylus, allowing for high-volume playback before electrical amplification.

At the other extreme, the internet informed me that there were some 8-1/3 rpm records produced by the American Foundation for the Blind, with 12″ versions that could play for up to six hours. I found a video of a 7″ 8 rpm disc being played, but the children’s story it presented was so boring that if I were a kid, I’d want to play it at 78, crying, “¡Arriba! ¡Ándale!”

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Steady as she goes

Posted on April 5, 2025 by Granger Meador

When there is an economic recession, we hear about major losses in stock valuations, job losses, and the impact on retirement savings. Economists worry that Trump’s trade wars could trigger another one, with a market correction and a bear market in the Nasdaq developing in the early spring of 2025. In the past two days, my 403(b), an educator’s version of a 401(k), lost 8% of its value, and I will be retiring in less than 15 months.

However, I’m not panicking. I’ve lived through eight recessions, with half of those coming over the past 35 years of my working life, and my approach for over 30 years has been to employ dollar cost averaging and stay the course, investing a fixed amount of money at regular intervals, regardless of the current market conditions. That reduces the impact of market volatility over time.

I was too young to remember the Nixon recession of 1970, and I have only scattered impressions from the 1973 oil crisis that triggered a recession. However, I was in high school during the twin energy crisis recessions of 1980 and 1981-1982, and those certainly impacted my family, since my father was a petroleum engineer.

The periods of growth in our country’s gross domestic product, interrupted by recessions [Source]

Dad was the manager of Gas Measurement for Cities Service, and he survived a takeover attempt by Mesa, a failed merger with Gulf, a merger with Occidental, and then Cities Service Gas being sold off to Northwest Energy and then Williams to pay down the debt from the Occidental merger. He was finally forced out in the Williams acquisition, ending his 35-year career in the petroleum industry at age 58.

My mother continued working at a savings and loan, but those institutions experienced a first wave of failures in that recession. Hers survived until 1991, but it then succumbed, ending her working life at age 54. That was right after the end of the Gulf War recession, the first recession during my own working life.

When I began teaching in 1989, my parents ensured that I had an individual retirement account that was added to annually, as they knew how important that would be for me decades later. I’ve always deposited the most I could in my IRA each year throughout my career, but the volatility of the market is better illustrated by my 403(b), in which I have invested about 10% of my gross salary each month since 1992.

I thought it might be instructive to see how it fared through three different recessions, but bear in mind that I am anything but a financial expert. I’m just sharing a fractional view of my own experience, and you should consult a professional financial advisor about your own investments, such as a Certified Financial Planner or Chartered Financial Analyst.

A majority of my 403(b) was invested in the stock market, and by the end of the long expansion of the 1990s I had invested about $24,000 while the account’s value had reached about $36,000. That computed to be a fantastic rate of return, but of course it couldn’t last.

The first 15 years of my 403(b); the recession of 2000-2002 was painful

When the Dot Com recession in 2001 struck, I trusted in the power of dollar cost averaging. So I made no adjustments in my investment mix nor the amount of my paycheck that was diverted each month into my ever-dwindling 403(b). By late 2002, I had invested about $31,000 in it, but its value was only $24,000! The recession had wiped out a decade of gains and then some, putting my account well underwater.

However, I knew that my monthly investment was then buying more shares at their reduced prices, and whenever the market finally recovered, my gains would reappear. I wasn’t back above water until the end of 2003, three years after my 403(b) began to tumble, and it never again reached the immense percentage gains of the 1990s. By the end of 2007, I had invested a total of $50,000 over the previous 15 years and the account was valued at $67,000. I calculated my overall rate of return somewhere between 4% and 5%. Nothing to brag about, but I had no financial advisor at the time, and my strategy was building what will eventually become one of my primary income sources in retirement.

Then the Great Recession hit, the longest economic downturn since World War II. My 403(b) again steadily declined, again going underwater.

My 403(b) during the Great Recession of 2008 and its slow recovery

By March 2009, I had invested over $54,000 in it since 1992 but the account was valued at less than $40,000. Again, I stayed the course, continuing to invest. The economy and the market recovered, and my account finally recovered to an overall return above 4% in late 2013, six years after the Great Recession began, and again beating overall inflation.

We then had some downturns and corrections, but there wasn’t another recession until COVID-19 triggered one in early 2020. By then I had invested over $112,000 and my account was valued at over $240,000, and I calculated my overall rate of return at around 6%.

I didn’t just keep dollar cost averaging, as I also needed to periodically assess the mix of assets, primarily how much was invested in higher-risk equities and how much in lower-risk fixed-income assets. On rare occasions, when the market was healthy, I have reallocated funds when my exposure to equities was too high for my comfort. However, I never made such adjustments when the market was down, as I wanted to lock in gains, not losses.

To keep my own amateur adjustments to a minimum, for some years I have kept most of the account in a Lifecycle Index 2035 fund, which gradually becomes more conservative in its investment mix over time. It currently has about 2/3 of its assets in equities and 1/3 in fixed-income assets. That will reach an even split in 2035 and by 2065 will be 20% equity and 80% fixed-income, although it seems unlikely I’ll still be around to witness that.

Most of my 403(b) is in a fund that gradually becomes more conservative over time to reduce risk in my old age

The COVID-19 recession didn’t impact my account nearly as much as the earlier Dot Com and Great recessions. My overall rate of return at first dipped to less than 5%, recovered over the next two years to reach almost 7%, but then dipped again in 2022.

Since then it gradually rebuilt to above 6%, and this week it dove to about 5.5%. I realize it could dip much lower before I retire in June 2026, when my deposits will stop. However, I don’t expect that impact on one of the legs of my retirement stool to delay my retirement nor reduce my withdrawal plans. My parents left the workforce at ages 54 and 58, right after recessions, yet they enjoyed long and comfortable retirements. It certainly helps that in addition to individual retirement accounts and 401(k)/403(b) plans, both my father and I were able to pay into defined-benefit pension plans that were shielded from market volatility, although their fixed payouts don’t offer protection from inflation.

I will keep my money invested, trusting that no matter how low the markets get, they will eventually rebound and my retirement assets will be rebuilt. My own experience is that could take a half decade or more after a big recession, but hopefully I have plenty of time. My father lived to age 97, my mother is enjoying independent living in Bartlesville at age 88, and I have a 50% chance of lasting another 30 years..and I fully intend to be retired for almost all of them.

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The Lonely Washing Machine Repairman

Posted on March 26, 2025 by Granger Meador

Throughout my childhood, from 1967 to 1988, actor Jesse White portrayed “Ol’ Lonely”, the Maytag repairman who never had enough to do. Eventually other actors, including Gordon Jump of WKRP in Cincinnati fame, played the role. The campaign rang true with our family, since our Maytag washers and dryers lasted for decades.

1962 Maytag ad about a Georgia woman whose Maytag finally needed a new part after a quarter century of heavy use

Before the iconic television ads, Maytag advertised its reliability in print with ads such as one about a Georgia woman whose 1936 Maytag washer was used by four families and finally needed a part replaced after 25 years.

In the early 1970s, my parents bought a Maytag washer, in the trendy avocado green of the day. In 1978, they purchased a matching Maytag dryer.

As a kid, when unsupervised I liked to dial up the spin cycle on the washer, prop open the lid, and jam its switch so it would keep running. I would toss in a washcloth and marvel at how it seemed to disappear due to the high spin rate and the limitations of my vision.

In 1989, when I moved into my own apartment in Bartlesville, I had a small washer and 120-volt electric dryer, of a brand I don’t recall. They were barely adequate, with the dryer taking an extraordinary amount of time to dry towels due to its low voltage. The next year I moved into a rent house and was delighted when my parents gave me their Maytag washer and gas dryer, even if the washer was about 18 years old and the dryer age 11. Those were far superior to what I had been using.

The washer finally did need a repair, as the water temperature selector switch stopped engaging. I unscrewed the top panel and was able to easily disconnect and remove the faulty switch, buy a new one from a local supplier, and be back in business. I could see my repair for years, since the new switch buttons were bright white, while the old buttons for cycle type and load size had yellowed with age.

My only repair was replacing the temperature selector switch

My 1996 Maytag only needed one repair over its 29 years of use

In 1996, the washer broke again, and this time it would have required a more significant repair that would have strained my finances as an underpaid schoolteacher in Oklahoma. However, I had just received the local Kurt Schmoldt Teacher Appreciation award, a cash prize that would cover virtually all of the cost of a new washer. So rather than try to have a 25-year-old unit repaired, I went to the local TECO appliance store, which Ted Schwermer founded in 1969; his son Gary ran the shop from 1985 to 2016.

A timer I found on eBay brought my washing machine back to life

I told them that I wanted another Maytag, and they fixed me up with one for $589 that ended up lasting 29 years. I did have one repair on that washer over the decades. In 2008, after perhaps 2,500 loads, the washer began running the motor at the wrong speed and sometimes stopped in the middle of a cycle. I had a repairman out, who said it was a bad timer and since the model was no longer manufactured, he could not replace it.

Rather than buy a new washer, I paid the repairman for his diagnosis and his time, and then I went on eBay to buy a new electromechanical timer for $88. I installed it and was back in business for almost 3,500 more loads of laundry. My total capital and repair costs ran to less than 13 cents per load over three decades.

However, a few weeks ago I was doing the laundry and my socks got wet…the ones I was wearing, that is. The washer had leaked water across the tiny utility room and a bit into the adjacent kitchen. I dried things out and checked the hoses and drain, but I couldn’t locate where the water leaked from. Later loads that day were fine, so I hoped it was just a fluke…but I knew better.

Sure enough, a couple of weeks later another load leaked a bit, and since the leak was something intermittently amiss inside a washer approaching 30 years of age, rather than crack it open to try to diagnose and repair it, I decided it was time for a replacement. It struck me as better to enter my retirement in July 2026 with one-year-old washer rather than one with 30-year-old parts. But this time, despite the great reliability of the Maytags of the 20th century, I knew that I wouldn’t be buying that brand.

A Very Brief Maytag History

One of Maytag’s first washing machines [Source]

Frederick Maytag, his two brothers-in-law, and George W. Parsons started a new farm implement company in Newton, Iowa in 1893, producing threshing machines, band cutters, and self-feeder attachments. It became the Maytag Company in 1909 after it began manufacturing washing machines to fill in the seasonal gaps in the farm equipment business.

The first Maytag washer, the “Pastime,” was a wooden tub model with a hand crank that had a retail price of $11 to $15, the equivalent of about $450 in 2025.

By 1927, the Maytag Company was producing more than twice as many washers as any other competitor. They didn’t start producing clothes dryers until 1953, and the Maytag family sold their appliance business in 1962. Its reputation for durability and dependability would endure until the 21st century.

Maytag was acquired by the Chicago Pacific Corporation, the remains of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad, in 1988, which also owned the US and UK divisions of Hoover. In 2004, it was still producing 88% of its products in older US-based factories, but the company hurt its reputation by selling low-end Amana models produced in Searcy, Arkansas as Maytag-branded ‘Legacy Series’ machines.

Front-load washing machines that used less water and energy were promoted by the government in the early 2000s, but Maytag’s Neptune line of front-load washers were called Stinkomatics by dissatisfied customers when the washers developed mold that was not easily cleaned. By 2005, the company’s market share had declined to all-time lows, sales were flat, and it was ranked low in customer satisfaction. Whirlpool completed its acquisition of Maytag in 2006.

Switching Brands

When I purchased my new Maytag washer in 1996, I kept using the 1978 avocado green gas dryer. Its burner finally failed in 2003. Consumer Reports had warned me that Maytag was no longer a reliable brand, so I purchased a KitchenAid gas dryer that worked fine until 2020. While the Maytag dryer had lasted 25 years with one igniter replacement during its run, the KitchenAid only lasted 17. By then, Wendy and I were married, and she isn’t a fan of natural gas dryers. Our 1981 home was built to support either type of dryer, so we switched to electric.

One of my backyard swings where I like to read my Kindle or listen to Audible; I wish my phone could tell me when a dryer load is done

I checked Consumer Reports, for which I’ve had a digital subscription for decades, and they recommended an electric dryer from LG. We had enjoyed using an LG washer and dryer in a rental cabin, so that sealed the deal.

The dryer is fine, although being a 240-volt electric unit, its cycle time is longer than the natural gas dryers I was used to, yet still far superior to the 120-volt electric dryer I used in 1989-1990. We like the tune it plays when a load is done, although it is one of the few appliances that I wish had a WiFi connection so that I could be out on my swing in the backyard and get an alert when it is done. I have compensated by setting timers on my Apple Watch that help somewhat, but I have a ordered a vibration sensor to see if I can program it to alert me. [See my update at the end of this post.]

Our new washer does have WiFi, although I doubt I will need remote notifications that a load of washing is completed. I had always used top-load washers with agitators, but I read about the pros and cons of front-loaders, agitators versus wash plates in top-loaders, and how Speed Queens are very reliable but have smaller tubs. I decided to go with the highest-rated top-load agitator washer, as I didn’t want to deal with the extra cleaning to properly maintain a front-loader. That turned out to be another LG unit.

I purchased Consumer Report’s highest-rated top-load agitator washer

A Very Brief LG History

LG was once Lucky-GoldStar. It was founded in South Korea in 1947 as Lak Hui Chemical Industrial Corporation; Lak Hui is pronounced “Lucky” in English. It established GoldStar in 1958 as it expanded its plastics business, and the company manufactures electronics, chemicals, appliances, and telecommunication devices. Four generations of the Koo family have managed the company.

In recent years, LG models have consistently ranked high in Consumer Reports, and I have enjoyed the 55″ LG OLED television I purchased in 2017. However, I grin when I remember that LG stands for Lucky-Goldstar, since there was a time decades ago when they were known for cheap bargain-basement electronics.

Our new washer is a top-load agitator by LG

My 1996 Maytag washer completed the largest load in about 25 minutes; modern-day washers typically take much more time, although they use less water and energy. Our new LG washer would take 90 minutes to complete its most aggressive normal cycle with Consumer Report’s eight pound test load. They report wash times from 65 to 120 minutes for front-loaders and 40 to 100 minutes for top-loaders with agitators.

Our dryer typically takes 60 to 90 minutes to dry a load, and I’m not used to a washer taking that long or more. So I suspect I’ll be taking advantage of the washer’s faster “TurboWash” mode, which still won’t be as brisk as my old Maytag.

The new washer was $848 plus $38 for new connectors, $50 to haul off the old Maytag, $79 tax, and $29 delivery for $1,044 total. That’s actually cheaper than my Maytag, which cost $686 with tax back in 1996, which would be about $1,400 in 2025 when adjusted for inflation. Even better, my old Maytag used 923 kilowatt-hours per year in the government’s tests, while the new LG uses only 210 kilowatt-hours per year.

However, can the LG washer last 29 years with only one fairly simple repair? Is there an LG repairman, and is he lonely? Time will tell.

April 8, 2025 UPDATE:

I purchased an Aqara Smart Hub and a Vibration Sensor for a total of $120. In the Aqara Home app, I created the Automation shown at right after setting the sensor to its highest sensitivity and placing it down on the side of the dryer where the drum appeared to vibrate it the most.

I turn on that automation if I’m going outside to recline on a swing while the dryer is running. The vibration detector checks each minute by default, and it only sends the push alarm if it doesn’t detect the vibration. I also reset the volume on the hub to zero, as it made arming and disarming chirps when I enabled and disabled my automation; I can tell that the Aqara products were designed for home security.

I’ve only had one false alarm thus far, on a load of sheets on the delicate dry cycle. I presume it didn’t vibrate enough, and if that is an issue, one can increase the delay time from 2 minutes, with one guy setting his to 5 or 10 minutes. However, I don’t want permanent press items sitting in the dryer that long, so I’ll see if the 2 minute delay will suffice for my needs. I could always make a separate automation for delicates.

The hub plugs into a wall socket for power, while the vibration sensor takes a CR2032 lithium coin cell that is supposed to last around two years.

July 2025 UPDATE:

For whatever reason, the vibration sensor stopped send me notifications. I didn’t bother trying to diagnose, but just unplugged the Aqara Smart Hub. Our LG washer still sends me notifications, and that will do until someday when the dryer dies and we buy a replacement that includes wireless notifications.