Rudy Honkala interviewed by Richard Ade - February 12, 2001

• Honkala, Rudy

Richard Ade Interviews

PLEASE STATE YOUR FULL NAME

Rudolph A. Honkala

WHERE WERE YOU BORN?

I was born in Salisbury, New Hampshire back in 1924.

HOW MANY PEOPLE WERE IN YOUR FAMLY?

Oh. My parents and my two older brothers. Fred Honkiler and Adolf Honkiler.

WHAT WAS YOUR FATHER’S OCCUPATION?

My father was an immigrant from Finland and he worked in the copper mines in Michigan for a number of years and then moved to New Hampshire, working granite quarries in West Concord. Silicosis drove a lot of these people out of the quarries and many of the Finish families bought farms that had more or less been abandoned as far as agriculture was concerned and struggled with these subsistance type farms. I don’t know really what his occupation would be…part-time farmer, I guess. My mother was a cook and she brought in, I suppose, at least half of the income.

WHAT WAS LIFE LIKE AT HOME?

Well, I guess it was generally quite pleasant. We grew up there during the depression days and had very little money but we never went hungry and we lived in the country and had all kinds of freedom to run around, fish and hunt and try to trap and things of that sort. But, we always worked.

WHAT DO YOU REMEMBER ABOUT YOUR GRANDPARENTS?

Well, I never met any of my grandparents. My parents came to the United States from Finland in the first decade of the 1900’s. My father’s old passport stated 1904 and I think my mother came over about the same time. She came to the States…they both landed in Boston and you hear all this business about Ellis Island but my parents didn’t go to Ellis Island. They landed in Boston. There was quite a substantial Finish colony in the North Shore area of Boston…Gloucester, Rockport, Rockland area. There were a number of granite quarries in the vicinity and the Fins kind of gravitated toward hard rock mining and quarrying.

WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR EARLIEST MEMORIES?

I thought about that many times when I told a number of people that it’s quite reasonable that I remember the excitement of a lot of people when Lindberg made his transatlantic flight in 1927…May of 1927. I would have been only a few months over three months old but I remember people talking about it with great enthusiasm. Other than that, my early memories…well, we didn’t have a motor vehicle of any kind. I think the horse that we had…the poor old ill…came into our ownership when we bought the farm. It came with the farm. I travelled…my two brothers were several years older than I and so I was home by myself for several years when they were already in school. My mother made excursions with the horse and wagon to Franklin, New Hampshire which was seven miles from home with various agricultural products that we had. She had customers and she made butter and we would sell butter and eggs and that sort of thing. I don’t remember the question, now. Did I answer it?

WHAT WERE YOUR MOST IMPORTANT EARLY INFLUENCES?

Early influences? Well, I suppose my teachers, to some extent. I guess my two brothers were my greatest influences. We went to a one room school house and the eighth grade was in the same room. I was just looking at a picture of the student body taken in 1929 when I was in the first grade. Both my brothers were in the same picture and outside of the three of us, there were about twenty-five in the group (first grade through eighth grade). My two brothers, at that time, were in the fifth and sixth grade. Outside of the three of us, I think there was one person in the group who finished high school. Outside of that, no one finished high school. Those were the days when kids were expected to get through grade school and work on the farm. But, my parents, particularly my mother who was really motivated to get us educated, had kind of a different view on the situation than some of the locals. I can remember remarks being thrown around by my parents about the importance of an education.

WHERE DID YOU FIRST GO TO SCHOOL?

The grade school was in Salisbury, New Hampshire and my mother worked as a cook. Many of her stints were in Franklin, New Hampshire. She worked for various of the wealthier people in Franklin and this included one Mr. Libby who was the superintendent of schools and one Ms. Rawl who was the principal of the junior high school. She particularly urged my mother to somehow arrange so that my brothers could get to Franklin to town to junior high school because they had absorbed about all that was available in the elementary school in Salisbury. She did this. I don’t know how she finagled it. She apparently convinced these people that my brothers should be going to junior high school in Franklin. They did leave the old elementary school in Salisbury at the end of the sixth grade and spent part of the seventh grade in Franklin. I did the same thing a few years later. Apparently, this helped us a great deal.

WHERE ELSE DID YOU GO TO SCHOOL AFTER THAT?

We all three went to the University of New Hampshire and graduated from the University and I took a shot at law school. I only went for one year but I gave it up because I already had a family and more family on the way so I had to go back to work. A number of years later I went back to study at the University of Montana and got a masters in geography.

WHERE DID YOU FIRST WORK?

Well, I worked at all kinds of places before I got through school. My first full time job was in the summer of 1937 and I was about fifteen years old. I worked for the local apple orchard. He had a crew every summer who mowed grass and a crew of four that did this for him. He came to the house one day hoping to hire my father who was probably the best man with a hand scythe in the territory, if not in the state or the county, at least. I learned early how to use a hand scythe and how to sharpen the scythe. As a matter of fact, we were grinding scythes when Alfred Sawyer, the local apple orchard man came by, and he talked to my father about working for him. My father said he had some other work that he had promised to do, so he couldn’t go. In the meantime, I had put the scythe blades back in the sack and I was cutting some grass where we were standing. I said I’ll go up and mow for you. He said “can you do that eight hours a day?” Actually, I guess it was nine hours a day as a matter of fact. I said “I don’t know, I’ve been trying.” And, he said why don’t you come up tomorrow and try it. So, that summer I worked all summer mowing with a hand scythe nine hours a day and half a day on Saturday for nine dollars per week. That was my first job and I thought it was marvelous. I suppose in today’s existence, my parents would have been arrested for cruel and unusual punishment and the man in the apple orchard might have been arrested for hiring me. I got my social security card when I was 13…1937. Then I had jobs all through college. The summer before my junior and senior years in ’45 and ’46 were particularly important to me because I built my orientation in the White Mountains. I went to the Crawford House in the summer of 1946 and the Cog Railway in the summer….let’s see….no, the Crawford House in the summer of 1945 and Cog Railway in 1946. In the summer of 1946 I had just graduated from the University of New Hampshire and I really had no plans. I spent considerable time in the summer in Mt. Washington. As a matter of fact, for several weeks I was the postmaster. I worked at the summer house and cancelled hundreds of post cards every day. That was about the extent of the postmaster’s job. Tourists would come up an mail postcards and I’d cancel them and bundle them up and send them down to Alton in the mail. While I was there I made acquaintances at the Mt. Washington Observatory and was kind of intrigued by the life up there and they had openings that fall for observers. They had a contract to do some basic research for the airforce on aircraft icing. This required some basic observations and they needed a little more man power. I applied and was accepted and it was part of the whole cycle of events…very significant job that I had as concerned to my future.

WHAT WAS YOUR WORST WORK EXPERIENCE?

Oh, I don’t know. I can’t really think of one. I can remember a couple of people who worked with me over the years who I didn’t relish working with all that much…but…work experiences? I can’t think of any that were that terribly bad. Nothing that I’d put in a very negative column.

WHAT DO YOU REMBER ABOUT WORLD WAR II?

Well, I did not have a very active participation. My freshman year in college was Pearl Harbor year. In the fall of 1941 and Pearl Harbor occurred in December 7th in the winter. There were a lot of my fellow students who enlisted immediately. I thought that I would too and I went home and my folks were really opposed to it. Both my brothers were already in the service and I was the third and last and they didn’t want me to go in. I finally acquiesced and said, well, I’ll register my sophomore year and see how it goes. I lived on campus that summer…the summer of 1942 and worked mainly in Portsmouth at various manual labor type of jobs…pick and shovel…Portsmouth Navy Yard and some of the surrounding areas where they were building fortified communication centers and that sort of thing. I did register to go back to school. I went back to campus with the idea of starting classes and the last of my buddies had gone into the service and I couldn’t see to stand there anymore so I snuck over Manchester, New Hampshire and enlisted. I went home and told my parents about it. They said well, if you’ve gotta go, then you’ve gotta go. So, I wanted to, at that time, you could enlist directly into the paratroopers and I thought that would be great. My eye sight was not good enough and they wouldn’t accept me..at that time they wouldn’t accept you in the paratroopers if you wore glasses…but they did accept people later on when they ran out of perfect bodies, but they didn’t accept those who were a little bit deficient. At that time, they couldn’t so I said well, I’ll just go in the air corp. (There was an air corp still at that time.) You can put me where ever you want. I wound up in the air corp as a regular operator mechanic. I went to Ft. Devens to get our uniforms and such. Then they put us on a train and shipped us to Atlantic City. We were on the beach there in Atlantic City…this was in December, which is not the time to go to Atlantic City to the beach….I was in the service and then hopped on another train and they took us to Scottsfield, Illinois which is kind of across the river from St. Louis, Missouri. There was a brand new operator/mechanic school located there in Scottsfield. They had a tremendous number of people there. I guess they had regular operator mechanic trainees by the thousands. I never did find out exactly how many of us there were. But, things went well until February. About a week before we were to finish the operations and most of the guys were scheduled to go to Brownsville, Texas to gunnery school and then we were going overseas.. I got up one morning and I could just barely walk. My knees were swollen and I didn’t know what was wrong. I spied that I had acute rheumatic fever. I wound up in the hospital in early February of 1943 and I was there until late May, at which time they discharged me as medically unfit. Nobody who had rheumatic fever …it was automatic…you were automatically restricted from the service for at least five years, as I found out. I headed home. I was really disappointed. I went back to the University and they all told me, well, the veterans administration will fix you up with some funds to go to school. I kept badgering the veterans administration and they said we’ll have you scheduled for a physical to determine how much disability you have to determine how much money you can get. This didn’t happen and didn’t happen. The summer went by. In the meantime, I had been rooming with a pre-med sudent and he adopted me as a case study, I guess. We discussed therapy and what I could do to improve my condition which was pretty sorry at that point. He said well, rheumatic fever is ordinarily…you have two choices. You either have complete bed rest or a graduated program of exercise. I said, well let’s try that exercise bit. So, we started hitting tennis balls around. The first day I lasted five minutes I suppose and then I’d have to lie down. But, by the end of the summer I could stay at it all afternoon. Of course, by then the VA got around to send me up to White River Junction to determine disability and by that time they could find none. I had no disability so I could get no money for school. The GI bill had not even been introduced at that point, so I stayed in school and the University said stay here and do what you can financially and we’ll let you go to school on the cuff. This was an informal arrangement. I stayed and worked in the diner and did various things to make money and tried not to get too deep in debt. I didn’t study very hard because I worked so I could stay in school. The GI bill finally came down in July of 1944 and I had been after these people for years….they had my name to go on the GI bill. It was kind of interesting. This was some ten years ago in the early ‘90’s or late ‘80’s. Smithsonian Magazine had an article about the GI bill and they got a call from Washington DC the first GI to go to school on the GI bill….he said he stared in September of 1944. I had already been collecting for two months at that point so I even pulled out the original letter that I got from the Veterans Administrating listing me as officially enrolled in the GI bill in July of 1944. I sent this to the Smithsonian Magazine and said, see, that fellow from Washington really wasn’t the first. I’m not sure that I was, but I’m sure I was ahead of that guy by a couple of months. I sent it in just for fun. I haven’t heard anything from them. Anyway, I hung in and got my degree.

WHAT U.S. PRESIDENT DID YOU LIKE BEST?

Oh, by choice I say Reagan has to stand among the best as far as I’m concerned.

WHY?

Well, I think he inspired confidence in people. I don’t think he was an intellectual giant but then I don’t thing you need to be to be president. I think he made all the right moves and was so well spoken that I think he had everybody fully well convinced that he was the man for the job.

WHO WAS YOUR LEAST FAVORITE PRESIDENT?

Well, I think we just got rid of him. Clinton. He’d have to rank pretty low on my list.

WHAT ARE SOME OF THE MOST IMPORTANT CHANGES IN YOUR LIFETIME?

Well, I suppose, you mean personal changes? I suppose getting married and having children would probably be pretty high up there. I suppose getting involved in polar work. I’ve always been interested in travel…not particularly polar travel in the early days, I didn’t know much about the polar areas. As a matter of fact, maps when I was in grade school, didn’t show very much of the polar areas, especially Antarctica. There was just this space at the bottom of the map. When I started at the school in Franklin, New Hampshire I frequently had to wait for a ride home. The library was pretty accessible and I started frequenting the library and I read of people who were adventurers. Richard Haliburten was one of my favorites. The Johnsons. Oh, I can’t remember his name…Richard Halburten traveled the world and I thought it would be neat to do the things that he did. I had no idea how he accomplished these things financially. In later years, I learned that his family had quite a bit of money and he was an ivy league man and he had the funds to do all these things. He finally met his end when he went to the Orient and he was lost in the Pacific. I remember in the early days, we didn’t have electricity. Our next door neighbors did…this was 1929 or 1930 when they would have a broadcast from Little America. I would go up to the neighbors when Richard E. Bird’s broadcast was scheduled. There was a big console and it would bleep and bleep and then finally….”This is Richard E. Bird…Little America….” I thought that was kind of…I liked that. It was like going to the moon in that era. I never thought that I would ever have the hope of doing that. But, when I started working on Mt. Washington, I could see that there were chances. In 1947 or 1948….Thin Ronnie…a fellow who had been with Burden in 1939 or 1940, his father had been with Burden in the early 30’s as a sail maker and a harness maker for the dogs as an old Norwegien. Thin Ronnie was his son and organized his own expedition down to the Antarctic. He took an expedition down and went down to Margarite Bay off of South America. He did considerable survey work down there. We heard that he was looking for people and I was….I intended to volunteer but Dr. Brooks who was our advisor at the Blue Hill Observatory in Massachusetts got on the radio and suggested that maybe I ought to go on some later expedition because I had so little experience. So, I seceded to that judgment and said forget it. But, an opportunity came up later and I did get to go and finally I went to the Antarctic three times. As I said earlier, I started working on Mt. Washington in the fall of 1946 and I had a most enjoyable tenure there and worked with some fabulous people and good experiences.

In 1949, I became enamored with a young lady who used to work at Pinkham Notch and took a series of trips up and down the east side of the mountain to spend time with her. We got along well and decided to get married. We got married in February of 1950 and I was employed by the US Weather Bureau at that time. On Mt. Washington there were no quarters up there for married people. In those days we worked three weeks and got a week off. Being married and getting a week off every month didn’t work too well so I had to look for an alternative as far as employment went. Fortunately, the weather bureau was looking for man and wife teams to man isolated stations up north. They sent out a flier saying that they had an opening at Bethel, Alaska and Campbell, Alaska. My wife was from Bethel, Maine so I got her on the telephone and called her up and said, how about it, do you want to go to Bethel, Alaska. She said sure. So, we put in for this position..this man and wife team..working at this weather station in Bethel, Alaska. By the time all the paperwork got in, the position had been filled. So, they offered us Campbell, Alaska. I’m grateful for that. It was much more interesting, really. It was further north and west and more isolated. Campbell was on St. Lawrence Island which was a fairly sizable island..about 175 miles west of Gnome and about 40 miles of the Siberia coast. You could see the Siberian hills on any clear day. In 1951, by the time we got there, the Cold War was gone and we could hear artillery…Russian artillery across the straits. It was a little bit weird to hear that but it was a very interesting place. An Eskimo village was about 200 to 300 decibels…right there near our station. I got to go walrus hunting, whale hunting and seal hunting with them and got to know the Eskimos quite well. We were up there going on our second year when our first child arrived. My wife had to fly into Gnome on the second of October in 1951 and at that time they used a fresh water landing strip…so we had to wait for the lake to freeze over. They needed 25 inches of ice before they felt they could safely land BC 3’s. She went into Gnome to have our oldest youngster on the 2nd of October and didn’t get back until the 16th of December. So, that was quite a long wait. We spent another year in Alaska at McGrass, Alaska. But then we were expecting our second youngster and my wife could no longer work so it wasn’t practical for us to stay up there anymore on just my salary. It was an expensive place to live. So, I resigned and moved back to New Hampshire. About a year later there was a vacancy for an official in charge at the Mt. Washington Observatory. In inquired about that and was hired and returned to work on Mt. Washington in late 1954. I had heard about the upcoming IGY (International Geophysical Year) and knew the U.S. intended to establish several stations in the Antarctic and indicated my desire to go if they did this. The Observatory said I could leave with no demerits if I wanted to go to the Antarctic. So, I applied and was accepted and my family, my wife, let me go. It was kind of tough. When I left my wife in New Hampshire with four children. My oldest had just turned five and the youngest was only a month old. But, my wife handled it well. The kids survived and they are now all pushing middle age. One of them will be 50 next fall. At the latest report, none of them were in jail or in treatment, so I guess they turned out all right.

HOW LONG HAVE YOU LIVED IN BETHEL?

Well, about 11 years. My wife is a native of Bethel. We were in the D.C. area for about a dozen years. I wound up working on the Hill for a congress man for a number of years and then worked for a regional commission. I worked as a geographer. I put together maps and information which I charted on energy and energy sources, coal in particularly. I did some work for American Mining and National Coal Association. I am fairly knowledgeable about energy and energy sources. My wife, as I mentioned, is a native in Bethel and her family was quite prominent locally. She has been working on and off when she has time on her family history. Our earlier moves were dictated by my job choices so I was responsible for many of our moves from Alaska to New Hampshire and New Hampshire to Montana and Montana to Virginia. So, when Bert wanted to come back to the hometown to do some work on her family history, I was on poor ground as far as protesting. We had just got a small place on a type of inlet down near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay and I thought it was a marvelous place but we couldn’t afford two places. So, when we got a place here, we sold our place down there.

WHAT DO YOU LIKE BEST ABOUT THIS AREA?

Oh, I don’t know. It’s country and I like the country. I think it’s fortunate to have Gould Academy. The sanctity of Gould makes big addition to the town and the presence of Gould here puts a kind of positive thing on a lot of things. The historical society here is really a prime mover. They are responsible for a lot of interesting activity here in town.

WHO WAS YOUR MOST UNFORGETTABLE CHARACTER?

Oh, I guess probably very, very definitely be Sir Hubert Wilkins. I had an opportunity to meet and get to know Sir Hubert quite well. He was a famed Australian who later moved to the states and adopted the states as his home. He started his adult life as a scientist..a naturalist. He did a great study of the Australian Outback. He spent something like two years in the field doing this. I guess this study is still accepted as a text-book type thing in Australia. He did this at the turn of the century. He and his employees worked as an adviser to the corp in Natick, Massachusetts and another mutual friend, whom I met through my work on Mt. Washington, worked with him there in Natick. We were going to an orientation session before one of my Antarctic trips and I went to him and met him and I took him with me to this orientation session. He spoke to us. He started his professional life as a biologist and then got into photography and was the first battlefield move photographer ever in 1909 or 1910. The Turks were fighting the Greeks and he was a battlefield photographer there and he got interested in ballooning and aviation. He did some early ballooning and he loved it. He then became a fighter pilot in World War I and maintained his interest in aviation….In the late 1920’s, he got interested in Polar aviation and in 1929 he flew from Pt. Barrell, Alaska to Spitsburgen…I’m trying to think if he was the pilot himself. He had a young Norwegien fellow with him from North Dakota. One of the landing fields in Alaska is named after this fellow and now I can’t come up with his name. I’m sorry…but anyway, Sir Hubert successfully made this flight which was a forerun of some modern flights that fly over the poles to get to Asia and such. He was a forerunner of those things. Just after he completed those flights, he then became the first man to fly in the Antarctic. He was an exceptional individual. He was the first to take a submarine under the ice in the Arctic. He did this in 1931. The submarine he named the Nautilis after an old friend. It was moderately successful and very sensational thing to do at the time. He got in trouble with the controls that took the submarine down and brought it up, so he had to cut short his trip. But, he did make significant progress under the polar ice of the Arctic Ocean. He was knighted for that trip to Spitsburg…..Ben Nileson was his pilot…I just came up with his name. When they went back to Alaska do to some flying, he was involved with salvaging a boat load of valuable firs, north of Siberia, some 400 miles west of Gnome. Ben was flying that route, trying to salvage his furs and he crashed over there and was killed. I stopped off in North Dakota a while back where there is a Ben Nileson museum which recognizes his great strides in aviation as an Alaskain bush pilot, flying for Sir Hubert. That was just a small North Dakota town with a railroad running through it. A one traffic light type of town. I found this museum but it was closed. There was a note on the door that if you really wanted to contact somebody to call this number. So, I called the number. A lady answered and she said if you can wait around for a half hour I’ll be there. If you go down two blocks to the corner you can get some good homemade doughnuts and coffee. So, I went down and had a doughnut and came back. The lady was a very charming and lovely lady and she was Ben Nileson’s niece. She was extremely interested to know that I had known Sir Hubert. We had a delightful conversation. She remembered the funeral when Ben’s body was brought down from Alaska. She said everybody who was anybody was at the funeral. Lots of senators, congressmen, the governor, etc. It was the biggest event that ever happened in that part of North Dakota, if not in the entire state. Well, anyway, Sir Hubert is the most unforgettable character, which is where I started out with this.

WHAT ADVICE DO YOU THINK IS THE MOST IMPORTANT TO GIVE TO A YOUNG PERSON BASED ON YOUR EXPERIENCES?

I don’t know…I guess if there is something I should have really done, it would have been to pay more attention to math. But, I guess I won’t pass that along. I say get as broad an education as you can. Take liberal arts and whatever you feel like taking and go from there.

WHAT DO YOU THINK THE FUTURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY WILL BE LIKE?

Well, I don’t know. I guess I suppose if I would be concerned about anything in the 21st Century it would be people quarreling over space. I’m certainly not worried about global warming. I can get on a soap box about global warming. Fifty years ago, my wife and I just kind of got settled down up near St. Lawrence Island. This was a very remote area. Alaska airlines would fly in…they tried to come in every two weeks but they didn’t always make it to bring mail. CAA (civil aeronautics association) handled our communication equipment. They would fly in occasionally, once per month, maybe. I was talking with a technician once named Harry Carl who came up periodically to check over the radio teletype. He’d check over our different electronic equipment and electrical equipment. He was very knowledgeable about weather and technical things. We would talk about different subjects. It was about the time that people started talking about the green house effect. I suppose there are a lot of people around today who think this is something that they just came up with. Well, we were talking about it 50 years ago. And, decided that it was probably something that we should keep an eye on but nothing seemed to be happening and as long as people were aware of it and we kept an eye on it, we should do something about it to show some negative effects. Well, that was 50 years ago. A year ago last month in January, US News and World Report…I read an article in the publication. It wasn’t very alarming, so it didn’t take up very much space. Just a couple of columns in the middle of the magazine. It reported the findings of the National Research Council who had meteorologists looking at global warming to see if anything was happening or if they could determine if anything was happening. They said that Global Warming is occurring and it amounts to 4/10’s of a degree and 1.2 or 1.4 degrees Fariegnheight in the last 50 years. They corrected this and said that actually, that was the degree of warming for the last 100 years. So, that’s not very earth shaking and that could be caused by any number of things and might just by some cyclical thing. They also said that they were unable to determine that there had been any warming aloft (surface temperatures that had been reported at various spots in the world.) To my utter shock and disgust, the US News and World Report just two weeks ago came up with a cover story on fantastic weahter..or something of that sort and they were forecasting increase in global temperatures of ….something like 5 to 8 degrees over the next 100 years. Even that isn’t too alarming to me, but the whole thing has been thrown out of kilter and I think either…well, I don’t know who to blame. I suppose maybe the media. They are always looking for something of a gloom doom type position to get headlines from. They probably harass some of these poor meteorologists to make some negative statement so they can stir people up. Even worse than that is the evaluation of what will happen with global warming. They seem to give off the opinion that if global warming does occur, if its warm enough, all of the polar places will melt. Well, there are low sea level coastal areas and this would extend up many of the rivers. If you look at demographics around the world you see that most of the world’s people live on water ways, either on the coast or on rivers. I would suggest that they look at the possibility of the probability of just the opposite happening. Sea level is going down instead of up because how else did our last ice age occur? In order for an ice age to occur, you had to have an ungodly amount of snow and in order to have that occur in the polar areas, you’ve got to raise the temperature. If the temperature remains as cold as it is today, the polar areas will never get much more snow. In order for another ice age, you need a good rise in temperature. Then, the air can hold the moisture and then when it gets to the arctic area where the air is truly cold enough, that cold air will cause that cold air to get wrung out of the clouds and it will fall as snow. Rather than having coastal areas inundated with water, they could have a new ice age. It’s worth thinking about.

DO YOU HAVE ANY OTHER COMMENTS YOU WOULD LIKE TO MAKE?

Well, a couple little comments on weather. One of the things…you see a lot of, especially on t.v., weather chill factors and they even show weather maps with just chill factor temperatures. These are temperatures that have been devised by men who worked in developing mens clothing for the US army. They needed some formulas that they could use in developing clothing for cold weather conditions. They wanted to take into effect wind. So, they devised this chill factor. I can’t give you the formula off the cuff..I have it home. Anyway, it says that if you expose bear flesh to temperature of 0 when its calm, you have such and such…effective. If the wind was blowing 50 miles an hour and it seemed not much colder and you need so much more protection from the wind than you do under calm conditions. This makes sense…but these people who talk about it on television…they don’t point out that it was just a tool that these people used in working with trying to protect people against the cold. It only applies to exposed bear skin. Unless you were running around nude, you would not have to worry about it at all. If you go into the lee side of the building, you’ve masked the entire effect of the chill factor…just get out of the wind. There are a lot of these things that get abused.

Another one is when they talk about snow…drifting snow…causing white out conditions. The term white out is a meteorological term and it applies to a condition that can only exist over an extensive snow surface. Like something you might find in northern Canada or the Antarctic. If you were standing on a snow surface and it was completely overcast, the white coming through the clouds above you will come down to the surface and bounce off the snow surface, up to the base of the clouds and back down. It will bounce back and forth…until it destroys all your shadows and you get a true white out. And when you step, you don’t know when your foot’s going to come down because you can’t see it. It causes all kinds of physical obstructions to vision..these people on t.v. get talking about these various things concerning weather…I guess they let there emotions get away with them.

I suppose it’s not very important to a lot of people, only the people who are used to using the terms properly.