Prairie Light eBook Series

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Those Brown County Artists on eBAY

For those of you interested in Firma Phillips and other Indiana Artists of the 40's and 50's, I saw an auction a while back on ebay for a book entitled Those Brown County Artists - the ones who came, the ones who stayed, the ones who moved on, 1900-1950.

The ebay description reads:


Those Brown County Artists

Compiled by Barbara Judd

Edited by M. Joanne Nesbit

Copyright 1993

Published by Nana's Books

234 Pages

Soft Cover

BRAND NEW CONDITION

Just some of the artists written about in Those Brown County Artists:

Adam Emory Albright, Gustave Baumann, Dale Bessire, Curry Bohm, Karl Brandner, Sybil Connell, Anthony Buchta, John Bundy, Ruthven Byrum, Charles Dahlgreen, Homer Davisson, W.A. Eyden, Marie Goth, Alexis Fournier, Robert Root, Ethel Lomasney, Leota Loop, John Hafen, Glen Cooper Henshaw, Karl Martz, Paul Randall, Frederick Polley, William McKendree Snyder, Roy Trobaugh, Gaar Williams, Arnold Turtle, George Jo Mess, Frank Hohenberger, Lucie Hartrath, Carl Krafft, Kenneth Reeve, Doel Reed, Clifton Wheeler, Oscar Erickson, L.O. Griffith, Carl Graf, Georges LaChance, Paul Turner Sargent, Ada Shulz, Derk Smit, T.C. Steele, Will Vawter, E.K. Williams and many others.



The url is listed below:


Ebay Auction - Those Brown County Artists

While Aunt Firma is not mentioned in here (Technically, She's a Fountain County or Parke County Artist), she often traveled to Brown County to paint.

STOP THE PRESSES!

REPOST from 2006:

Wow! Stop the Presses, all you inquirers who want to know the worth of your painting by Firma Phillips! Wait'll You Read This!

At our first formal barn / garage / antique sale at our new location, lots of friends and neighbors stopped by. One friend from church Cathy Franz has been a patron of Aunt Firma's paintings for many years. She went to an estate sale recently where one of Aunt Firma's paintings sold for $1200!!!!!!

She was also telling me that there was a gentleman in ... Kokomo or was it Frankfurt ... who collects Aunt Firma's paintings. She is going to call to give me the contact information.

Sorry the information is so sketchy, the barn sale was hugely busy, and I didn't have time to write down all the details, but will fill them in as I get a chance.

JuneBug

How Dr. Wise Tested Rigor

When Dr. Wise did his research on rigor in chickens at Purdue University, he initially shaved his samples with a Hobart meat slicer as shown below:

He would place these samples into a small test chamber which also had several blades as shown below:
The sample was then run through a shear press similar to the one pictured below. The one below actually has a strain gauge whereas the instrument that Dr. Wise used was equipped with a proving ring that bent slightly to show resistance (as in pounds of force needed to shear the sample.)
One of the things that Dr. Wise has always wanted to finish was an article on the fate of Marilyn Monroe. He had always felt that the research he'd done for his Ph.D. could shed some light on her death and he followed the news of the time and subsequent books about it with great interest.

Dr. Wise's thoughts about the death of Marilyn Monroe




Dr. Wise's Article on the Death of Marilyn Monroe

In 1960 when Marilyn Monroe died, a young man named Raymond Wise was working on his PhD. thesis in Food Science. The particular problem he was trying to solve was how to speed up the process of rigor mortis in turkeys on their way to market. You see, it takes 24 hours for rigor mortis to resolve it self in turkeys. By comparison, It takes beef cattle 2 weeks. And it takes chickens only 4 hours. During all this time the animal must be kept in refrigerated storage, an added expense in getting food to the consumer, but an essential one for delivering meat that is tender.

One of the drugs that Dr. Wise studied in his search for a speedier way to resolve rigor in chickens was Nembutal. He discovered, however, that instead of speeding up resolution of rigor mortis, Nembutal prolonged it.

Interestingly, Nembutal at low levels is also used as a sedative for humans and was a medication that Marilyn Monroe reportedly took as a sleeping aid and the one that she reportedly died from. But was her death really suicide? Or was it something else?

Since earning his PhD., Dr. Raymond Wise has been a researcher, a farmer, and a business man for the past 50 years. He actually developed the powdered egg formula that NASA’s astronauts ate on their trip to the moon. Over the years he has consulted with major corporations in the food industry on a variety of problems, ranging from the crispness of 40% bran flakes and soda crackers to the tenderness of pork and beans. His list of clients included Kellogg, Swift, Eli Lilly, and many others. Now retired he writes about something that has been on his mind for many years, some information from his thesis that might help to more accurately pinpoint the time of death of Marilyn Monroe.




Some Reflections on the Death of Marilyn Monroe
by Raymond Wise, Ph.D., Purdue University
1960

Rigor Mortis occurs when striated muscle fibers are shortened by expenditure of energy in the form of ATP. Huxley (1958) reports shortening of the fibers, increasing in density. Wise (1960) found that Nembutal (Pentobarbital Sodium) lengthens the duration of rigor of muscles by 40% as evidenced by shear resistance of muscle when shear-tested. Resolution occurs when all the ATP are used up and tense muscle fibers relax.

Nembutal lengthens the resolution phase. The Wise study (1960) concluded that the Nembutal prolongs rigor duration and resolution several hours when compared to no use of Nembutal in control animals. While the Wise study used chicken muscle, and the Huxley study used rabbit muscle, these would be similar, and also have application to humans.
According to the Merck index, Nembutal is used in low dosage as a sedative, but is lethal in doses of 2 to 20 g. Marilyn Monroe’s death, however, was not due to ingestion of Nembutal pills but to a lethal injection in an internal site which may have been overlooked at her autopsy. This would account for the lack of external injection marks on her body.
Death comes when all the energy in dying tissue is exhausted. It occurs in the liver last, which accounts for the temperature of the liver in a pan during the autopsy of Marilyn Monroe being relatively high in a cool morgue on Sunday. The last part of the body to die when all ATP are used is the liver.
The bruises on Marilyn Monroe’s posterior indicate that she was probably alive when the ambulance driver James Hall accidentally dropped her while he was loading her into the ambulance at approximately 3:30 a.m.
Corpses do not bruise.

I believe my research on Rigor supports the evidence that Marilyn Monroe died later than was originally claimed by Dr. Engelberg when he initially pronounced her dead to Officer Clemmons shortly after 12:30a (p. 123, Marilyn Files). I believe that she died at 3:30 am or later. I believe Mrilyn Monroe was murdered for whatever reasons.

There was obviously a cover up that included many people. I won’t name all of the people involved, but two significant ones are:
  • The housekeeper, Mrs. Murray, who recanted her story in 1985 and
    said RFK was at Marilyn Monroe’s the evening before she died and that
    she had lied to provide an alibi for him and
  • JFK, the President of the United States.

Raymond G. Wise, Ph.D.
Bibliography
Huxley, H.E. (1958). Contraction of Muscle, Scientific
American
, (November Issue).
Merck Index, 7th Edition.

Nuland, Sherwin B. (1995). How We Die. Vintage Press.

Slatzer, Robert (1992). Marilyn Files. SPI Books.

Wise, Raymond G., Ph.D. (1960). Some Factors Affecting Poultry
Meat
(including a chapter on the effects of Nembutal on the duration
and resolution of rigor mortis). Thesis at Purdue University.