Return to traditional values ?

Tri Cities pictures from 2007 trip, Atomic Foods, Sacagawea Trail.

Visiting Tri Cities of Washington State (Pasco, Kennewick and Richland) reminds me of what it must be like to go back to an America of the 1950s.  A time when so called "traditional values" ruled. 

For those who want a return to traditional values, "be careful what you ask for as you may just get it." 

Richland is home of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.  Its high school team is called the bombers; last I knew .  The mushroom cloud is a school logo; at least according to this sign.  Hanford was going great guns in the 1950s.

Now the nuclear reservation is just a shadow of its former glory.  Employee layoffs at Hanford have taken their toll on the region's economy.  Most of the news out of Hanford, now days, is about clean up. 

Some people are horrified to find this logo.  I have mixed feelings about it.  The logo could be seen as part of our cultural heritage.  Like Makah Indian whale hunts and Roman war stories, human history holds both pain and progress.  Remembering the past has some value at least, but it is also good to be free from the past.

More recently (since 1999), I hear that the name of the team has been changed along with the logo.

Several years ago, former Washington State governor Dixie Lee Ray gave a speech at WWU in Bellingham. She was controversial since she was an advocate of nuclear power.  They nicknamed her "Dixie Lee Radiation."  When she gave her speech, and spoke of the benefits of the atom, the entire lecture hall erupted with the sound of 300 college students going "ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss" After a slight pause, she said, "could someone please remove the snakes."

List of things kids used to enjoy? in the so called good old days

Open pit fires in the yard (Now banned in most areas due to air pollution rules).

Seeing how different things burned; plastics, medicines, detergents.

Candy cigarettes.

Riding with no bicycle helmet.

Cap guns in the school yard.

Some kid who brought a vial of mercury droplets that rolled around on his desk at school. 

Wrist watch hands that glowed in the dark with a touch of radium mixed into the phosphorus.

The smell of a freshly oiled gravel road along the river after the city sprayed it with old crank case oil to dampen the dust.

The junk yard near the main street of town.

George W. Bush (That just slipped in there).