Greetings from I. G. Farben

It's not called that anymore-it wasn't even called that when I worked in it decades ago. Then it was called the Creighton W. Abrams Building and was known as the US Army's V Corps Headquarters in Frankfurt am Main, FRG. The FRG, Federal Republic of Germany, was diplo-speak for West Germany; East Germany, the bad guys, were called the DDR, Deutsche Demokratische Republik.

It was a massive building and rumor had it that frightening chemical weapons had been developed in the annex behind the main building during the war. Another rumor had it that Frankfurt am Main was nearly totally destroyed during World War II except for the area where I. G. Farben had their massive corporate headquarters which is why Ike set up shop there. He and Mamie were gone by the time I got there, as was Checkers and his owner, too, though I once wore a cloth coat to a cat rodeo. I do know there was a great place around the corner to get kiwi and strawberry ice cream, so delicious it practically ate itself while you watched.

I was working in a video production facility that everyone liked, as an abstraction, but in terms of manning and funding, no one was too crazy about us. It's not that we weren't nice people or didn't deliver great products-we just cost lots of money. Armored vehicles were going for tens of millions of dollars, this was during the Cold War, remember, (a Gift Store?) and we were squared off against Ivan and his toady lackeys (our toadies were, of course, our friends and allies) and whoever blinked first laughed last. Or something. I forget. It was a long time ago. Anyway, we had LOTS of tanks. Video cameras cost tens of thousands of dollars and we had trouble getting money from the guys with all the tanks to buy us even one.

I thought about that yesterday when a florescent bulb in the fixture overhead "burned out". I remembered Ron Hicks, one of our engineers, and his running buddy, George Whose Last Name I Have Forgotten. George was from Samoa and was the most easy-going person I've ever seen, even when provoked by Ron Hicks. Ron was crazy-brilliant, but crazy. He and his wife had two very young boys, Brenden and LB. And if you guessed that LB was short for Little Brother, then, perhaps you met and know Ron because that's what the youngest one's name was and that's what the initials stood for.

Ron, as the chief engineer, saw his job as repairing the video field production equipment we took on our travels while accomplishing our jobs and broke. He skipped over almost all of that and cut directly to 'broke'. And he was right. We did inordinate amounts of damage to production equipment as it got run over by any number of tracked vehicles moving at high speeds across unforgiving terrain. When dropped from helicopters, it did not bounce, it splattered. Rain cases were not, as hoped, waterproof shock-mounted protection and so it went, one disappointment after another. And Ron and George repaired everything, even if we didn't come back with all the parts we started out with. There was a day we compensated by returning with part of a German motion picture camera, a very expensive motion picture camera, that was, alas, utterly worthless to us and anyone else. Ron and George did more with less than any two people since Adam & Eve.

But I thought of Ron because of the "burned out" light. Ron used to explain to the most junior of the field cameraman the differences in methods of illumination, a topic not really touched on in the Television Production Handbook by Herbert Zettl, the video equivalent of every Sacred Text of every major, and most of the minor, religions. Something not covered in Zettl? The little ones would lean forward and listen closely, and Uncle Ron didn't disappoint.

Incandescent light, he'd explain as if this were merely review because (yawn) all of us knew this already (or so his tone of voice would suggest), illuminates by driving darkness out of a defined space. He noted that late at night when you turned the nightstand light on, it always seemed even brighter than during the day, because at late night it was much darker. Heads would slowly nod and the sound of young fish flopping on the dock, hooks still in mouths, would begin to be heard.

Florescent light, he pointed out worked in the exact opposite way--it absorbed darkness and left only light. There would an occasional askance look-Ron would continue unperturbed because he was already to his clincher. How many of you, he'd ask, have ever removed a "burned out" (air quotes every time) florescent? All hands went up. And did you notice, he'd ask, how there was what looked like black very close to where the metal gap met the glass fixture at the two ends? Again, all heads nodded furiously. That, he explained, is because the florescent is full and can hold no more darkness and the leftovers are seeping out.

He'd allow that to linger for the briefest of moments before adding he could understand how some might be tempted to doubt him but, submitted for their approval, he'd add, have you ever thrown a "burned out" florescent light into a metal dumpster? Of course all of us had done this countless times. The next time you do it, he said, open the little door on the side of the dumpster and take a look in there--it's as black as a coal mine. Why? Because (of course!) throwing the glass florescent into the metal dumpster broke the glass, releasing all the stored up darkness the bulb had been sucking out of rooms for years, scattering it around the dumpster.

I do not recall Ron ever finding the time, or the opportunity, to correct the information he'd shared with the best and brightest videographers the US Army could send to Western Europe as we avoided, but documented nevertheless for all posterity, the deadly embrace of the Russian Bear.
-bill kenny