The Ceramic Insulator

I have been wanting to share this story for awhile but wanted to wait until the found the item it was about, which I did during my last trip to Eastern Oregon. This story is from a couple portions of email's sent to me from Jenny Gomez, one of Dad's long term girlfriends who he lived with for many years. It is about a ceramic insulator. One of the first entries on this blog mentions the insulators. For those unfamiliar with them, they are ceramic, glass, plastic, etc material that can resist electrical currents check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulator_(electrical). Glass are what I was most familiar with and what Dad mostly collected. Next time you are driving by power lines out in an older area check out the lines - I bet you'll see the multi-colored glass insulators. Growing up they were paper weights on my Dad's desk, or lined up on shelves.

Here is how the email from Jenny goes:

"There is one story of an obscure item that keeps weighing on my mind. I
think your Dad is pushing me to tell it. It's about an insulator.


As you know we went far and wide hunting for antiques. Every weekend or any
time we had a weeks vacation together. Years ago we went camping and our goal
was to hit every ghost town listed on the map (of Oregon). We ended up in the
town of Cornucopia somewhere over near Eastern Oregon. As we were walking around the itty bitty town your Dad looked up into a tree and said something to the effect of "OMG" and began to climb it.

I was pretty dumbfounded. He took a knife out of his pocket and began to dig
into the trunk of the tree. By then I could see what he was after. Somehow
an insulator had been embedded way up into the trunk. It was probably put
there to string the lines at one time. I thought for sure someone was going
to call the cops on him. He finally got it out after a while and came down.
I said something like "run like hell" so we ran back to the car and took
off. After we were done laughing he handed it to me and said "I got this
just for you". And we broke out laughing some more. We used it to prop open
the bedroom door and so we could keep it separate from the others. It still
did until a few years ago."

She explained in that same email that after Dad had moved back to Huntington and
had collected all his various collections from the different places he had them
stored over the years that she had wrapped it up with the others for him and was
unsure if he even knew that she had done so. She added this last bit in another
email when I asked to post this,

"I remember you dad did make the comment after we left there that no one would
have called the cops because it would have taken them 2-3 hours to get there
depending on where they were in the county. There usually is one sheriff per
county out in the middle of nowhere. So the joke was on me!"

I really loved hearing this story since it was a perfect Dad story. I have a vague memory of him telling me about it as well. It really embodied his love of exploring and antiques, his sense of adventure and his constant playfulness. I was so glad when I found it packed up with several other insulators.