Ice Box Canyon Hike

November 11, 2013 - Me, Lisa and Andrew had gone hiking a few weeks ago up in Red Rock Canyon and missed the trail and ended up walking along this arroyo that paralleled the trail, but was cut so deep, we couldn't see anything. It was called the Keystone trail and was supposed to end at Keystone Rock or something. When we got to the end of the arroyo, it was blocked by huge boulders, so we decided to climb up the side and walk back on the firmer plateau above. Fairly uneventful, except the base of the arroyo was all gravel and sand, so it was tough walking.

So last Monday we decided a different trail and checked the path on Google Maps and took the Icebox Canyon trail which looked a lot more scenic. The drive around from the entrance of Red Rock park takes about 25 minutes to get to the parking lot at the trailhead. We got there about 12:15. Followed the trail which was mostly through chaparral and scrub with some places where there were rocks set into the smaller ridges that were easy climbs...almost like steps. Further into the canyon it got rockier and more narrow, there were rock climbers on the sides of the canyon. A lot of people on the trail because they waived the entrance fee for Veterans Day.

When we got close to the end of the trail before it got ridiculous with 10 foot high boulders to get around, a guy about my age and three young women come down from the end. We ask him how much further and it wasn't far and he said the girls were kicking his butt, payback for when they were little and couldn't keep up. We go another 200 feet or so and there's the end and too much to bother going further, although we could see people much further in the canyon. We turned around and headed back and it wasn't more than 500 feet before we see the guy on the ground and a woman starting CPR.

It was about 1:45 now. She was a nurse but wasn't strong enough to do it correctly, so I took over. Lisa canvassed the gathering crowd for anyone else who knew CPR and if anyone called 911. One of the guy's daughters had booked it down the canyon since there was no signal where we were. Another of his daughters did rescue breaths while I did compressions. Lisa did a quick assessment and held his head to keep his spine aligned and to open his airway.  He was clearly already dead, no pulse, eyes fixed and unresponsive, only agonal respirations. No fall injuries. Lisa got some info out of the daughter that he had meds for bipolar disorder,  had suffered from depression and had some tremors in the past. He had water and eaten 20 minutes before. We could hear the other daughter wailing down in the canyon.  The newspaper reported that his son had called 911, so perhaps she had to hand the phone to someone else to talk to the dispatcher, but there was no son there.

We kept up CPR anyway for the daughters' sake, switching off with another guy who knew CPR, and by 1:55 an EMT showed up and soon after, 3 guys from Seattle who are wilderness first responders up there, so this guy couldn't have had more help if he'd had a chance. They had a CPR mask so we could have more people do rescue breaths. We had my son and some others clear a smoother patch of ground as we were all kneeling on rocks. During one of my breaks I moved the bystanders away and sent those coming out of the canyon around a different way so the kids wouldn't have to see him. A helicopter came into the canyon at 2:20 and we waved him in, but it just circled to assess the scene and left. It came back 10 minutes later and dropped off an LVMPD search and rescue cop.
He told us to keep up CPR while he spoke to the daughter. He then came back and told us to stop and declared him dead. The cop, Jim Roberts, turned him on his side to check his back - I assume for lividity which would be another sign of death.  We covered him up and gave statements to the cop. The cop had some firemen come up the trail to bring the daughters back down and direct them to the command post at the Canyon Overlook off Rte. 158 where the coroner was.

We left and saw the daughters and CCFD pulling out of the parking lot. Later they packaged up the body in a Stokes basket and flew him suspended below the helicopter to the command center. I texted my wife once we were at the parking lot to let her know why we were late. She checked the news and saw the initial story that was all wrong, so she sent an email to the newspaper with the corrections. Next thing, my daughter and I are getting calls from the reporter. So after they finished up at the command center at 6, the reporter came to my house to interview me. We didn't let them use our names mostly because of Lisa's status as a doctor. Didn't want anyone coming back and saying we could have done more and seeing dollar signs after that Dr. So I gave them this detailed account for 15 minutes and they cut it down to 5 seconds. 

 

Turned out the coroner found out the guy had been hospitalized recently for depression and was a recovering meth addict. He wasn't a regular hiker and meth will do a job on your cardiac system. He had no business doing that kind of exertion. It's a 2000' climb into that canyon from the parking lot and the end is about 6000' feet in altitude. Still waiting for a cause of death, but I am guessing heart attack.

 

 

 

The Poniards...Ponards...uh.. Punyards

Well it took some sleuthing because James Poniard's descendants and their contemporaries couldn't get the spelling correct.  James went from Brittany, France some time in the early 1800s to work for the Lambert's in Galway, Ireland collecting tithes from tenants at Castle Lambert in Athenry. Things probably weren't so great in France at the time and one story has it that James' sister married into the Lambert's and brought her brother along.

Latrr, James and Sarah Monahan had a slew of kids and when things started going badly in the titihe collecting biz they took off for different parts,  Some sons went to Canada, Australia, and Charleston. Some stayed in Ireland. I think the Lambert's had some business interests in Charleston, so maybe that is how Anthony Poniard ended up here. At some point his wife Bridget Eagle joined him, but wasn't on the manifest for the ship Victoria when Anthony came in The 1850s. Anthony became a teamster.  His brother Darby came over at the outbreak of the Civil War And was promptly dispatched to Ft Sumter and killed by a Yankee Parrott shell in about 1862 3 days after he arrived. Darby's CO spelled his name as Punyard.  Anthony was older so he was a teammaster in the reserve artillery. Not sure if he saw any action, as his unit was called up and moved into NC as the war ended. He was very musically talented, which may  have  influenced Herb Ponard to pursue a music career.

 Someone of the Poniard's set up shop as a bookkeeper eventually and  later went into biz with John J Delaney possibly after JJ married Anthony's daughter Mary or before. Mary and John's kids were Greta and Norbert.  Greta married Louis Honer and she gave birth to Louis (Jack), John (Billy) and Margaret (my Mom). Norbert had a great job as head of purchasing for some company and never had any kids. When he died, his wife Rose\ got a hot 1956 T-bird hardtop and a mink coat. She came to visit to show them off and I never saw her again.

Anthony's daughter Theresa married a John Ham who was a steamboat captain and smuggler for the Confederacy during the war.  Their family included Rita Lindley Ham who married Martin Corbin and had
four daughters and a son, including Maggie and Sara who live in  Brattleboro, VT and are on FB. Rita was an artist for the Catholic church and her works were published in their newsletters and magazines.



See more slightly inaccurate details on the Poniards here:

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~irlgalway/galwayp.pdf
.

Anthony and Bridget Poniard Grave in St Lawrence Cemetary in Charleston SC

 

 Anthony Poniard's house on Wentworth St, Charleston, SC

Poniard slave quarters behind house on Wentworth St.

James Poniard's sundial in  Galway, Ireland

The first Louis Honer

Well maybe not the first but we are talking about relevance to us who are here today.  Our Louis Honer came from Cincinnati and had a lot of brothers. His oldest brother Albert ended up with the family business: a jewelry store in Cincinnati that their father took over after marrying the bosses' daughter. Our Louis Honer ended up in the printing buainess as a stereotyper. That was a union job at the time. I don't know if he did that in Cincinnati or if it didn't happen until he ended up in Atlanta.

He was a union organizer in Atlanta and maybe he was sent there for that purpose.  .He was a founder in the union and there was a time when union busters threw trash on his lawn and threatened his family and he chased them off with a shotgun.

There's also a story of him taking a bar bet and cold cocking a horse with one punch and winning the bet.  He died fighting off a mugger when he was in his 70's and he happened to fall down the stairs actually in the subway station in New York and that's what killed him.  He was also one of the early members of the first chapter Knights of Columbus in Atlanta.   My Mom said he was a founder but I checked with the KofC and he wasn't.  Once a pit bull, bit my Mom when she was a kid, busily adopting every stray dog in the neighborhood until they had up to 13 of them. Louis took the pit bull by the hind legs, swung it around and smashed its skull in against a telephone pole.

His son, Louis, worked for the Clyde line as a purser and docked in Charleston often and maybe that's where he met Greta Delaney. I have no idea how all the Honers ended up in NYC..unless the original Louis had something to do with it. But since Greta's roots are in Charleston, I see no reason for her to come north before her marriage to Louis Jr.

Uncle Jack...big and gregarious

Uncle Jack was about 6 years older than my mom so I don't think they were as close has my mom was to Billy. Uncle Jack's real name was Louis and Uncle Billy's name was John. A nurse or more likely a house keeper or babysitter couldn't keep their names straight so she gave them the names of Jack and Billy and it stuck.

Uncle Billy was sickly as a kid I think he had Saint Vitus dance and had to go through some therapy to get stronger. Uncle Jack introduced him to rowing and Billy excelled at the single sculls. I also remember a picture of Uncle Jack with football gear on and the old leather helmets. I'm not sure how he got the affiliation with rowing teams and football teams but he was obviously a man about town.

He once took us to Roosevelt Raceway to watch the trotters. I thought those horses would be hard to bet on because they all seem to be able to do the same pace. But it was still pretty exciting to watch the horses run.

Once he took me, my sister, and cousin Ronnie to Jahns ice cream parlor and we had a super duper for two which the four of us could not finish. I have never seen so much ice cream in one bowl more like a soup tureen than a bowl. It was huge.

I don't know how uncle Billy ended up in such a different type of career than Jack. Uncle Jack was definitely his father's son. Louis Honer Sr was very much an white collar worker at the Clyde lines where he was a purser.


Uncle Jack really had the need for the thrill of closing a deal and he worked primarily selling fencing, real estate and mortgages. I remember him saying that a good salesman could sell anything and he would send friends of his out on sales calls where they knew nothing a the product and still were able to close the deal when they were good salesman.

I remember when Uncle Jack mentioned that when he came back from World War II and the sailors landed in San Francisco. The first thing that they wanted wasn't liquor, they wanted real milk. After all those days at sea and drinking reconstituted milk they wanted the real thing.

Working with Uncle Billy

My first summer job after high school was as a laborer at Royal Guard fence company in Westbury. I started out sorting fittings and loading trucks. Eventually I got to drive the ftorklift and go out on jobs. That was the first time I had ever made cement. Me and two iron workers were sent down to Coney Island to put in some posts along the boardwalk on a retaining wall. I had to mix all the cement by, hand for the posts,. Obviously I never done that and  made it pretty sloppy. Trying to push a wheel barrel of sloppy cement along 2x6's laid in the sand was kind of difficult. At one point the cement got the better of me and started tipping. I couldn't hold the wheelbarrow and it flipped me over the retaining wall and all the cement came down on top of me. Eventually we did get the posts in and the guys bought me a Rheingold and a hot dog for lunch.

I also was called upon to be a flag man on the Belt Parkway under the Verranzano bridge while other guys fixed guardrail along the Belt Parkway. It was pretty dangerous and I came pretty close to getting hit a few times. They eventually replaced me with a mechanical dummy and he ended up losing his arm. At the end of that summer I thought I knew something about the building of fences. The following summer I asked Uncle Billy if I could work with him at the fence company he was at. He did get me the job.

I learn from one of the guys to make cement by making a pit in a big pile of sand on the back of the truck and dumping the cement into it. He would just watch the color of the soil and when it was right he would pitch in to the wheelbarrow and add water. He was so much faster than I was until I got the knack. Uncle Billy showed me how to stretch chain link fence and how to do mitres for hills and dips. He was a real hero to me after all he had been through in WWII.

He had Ranger training but ended up with Patton. He was guarding a bridge when shellfire came too close and he got hit in the head with shrapnel. The guy next to him had his head blown off.  He also got shot in the leg later in the war.  He ended up with a steel plate to replace part of his skull. One of the most even tempered guys I knew. And he had a lot to put up with between me and one other guy named Elwin Peters.  We were useless some mornings after partying all night.  But when a new guy came on we would bust his butt to see if he could do the job.  We would flip 250 lb rolls of fence wire onto our shoulders and throw them over the side of the truck. Then tell the newbie to finish loading in the same way. Had to know what you were doing to not have it land on the ground or yourself.  I got into a fight with one smartass..but two summers of fence work and a summer of Kenpo lessons and he was on the ground. I learned more about using tools and having the confidence to taking on construction projects from Uncle Billy than three years of shop classes. Did I mention he was also my godfather?

The great cremains caper

When my father passed on 2001, he was married to a drunken crackpot named Margory Hagy Parente.  For some reason as his health declined they packed up their house and spread their stuff all over Abingdon, where ever she could scam space from someone. Pretty sure the title to their house had some issues and it was never really all theirs. Or they were renting and never let on.

Anyway, she drives north with Dad to her friend's house in Sag Harbor, NY. Her friend is a Monseigneur who didn't use it often since his diocese was in Brooklyn. He owed my Dad a favor anyway since my dad paid his way to see the Pope.

So my Dad goes into the hospital and I stay in the house for a while and visit him until I have to go back home. Lisa was moving into the dorms at USC at that time and I had to help her move. My dad passed away at that time and I went back for the funeral. My sister came out also and we went through the memorial service and went back to the house in Sag Harbor for everyone to enjoy a buffet that I had put together with Marge's son.

My father's cremains were on the coffee table and Marge told us that she intended to put them into the Long Island Sound. My sister and I talked about it and decided he needed to be buried with our mother and that we didn't believe that what Marjorie was saying was my father's wishes. So at the end of the buffet I ran into a interference and told Margorie off. Margaret grabbed my father's remains and ran out the door with the kids. I followed and so did everyone else. Unfortunately cousin Lorraine was in the bathroom and came out and everyone was gone and had a rather sheepish exit to perform on her own.

The rest of the story is on my sister's blog margeweiner.blogspot. com. But it took us  about 6 years to bury him because we didn't have the cremation certificate and had to wait till Margorie died to get it.

I should mention that Dad and Margorie only knew each other because her husband, Gene and Dad worked together at Meenan Oil.  Gene died on the job from a heart attack and Margorie was desperate to find a sugar daddy.

My Dad had already dated a number of close friends after my Mom passed. One was Barbara Will who would have been a great catch. She was level headed and loaded and a really nice person. Somehow Marjorie chased them all off and weedled her way into moving in with my father.
I know my father took Mary O'flaherty to Paris and may have dated Aunt Ronnie as well. I am sure there were others and I know he had a wild time on a trip to India where he shacked up with a married Canadian woman in Kashmir and an Indian woman on a cruise in Greece.

Remembering snow days

Was just dreaming about the old snow days when we were kids and how we'd listen to the radio for the school closures, hoping ours was on the list.  Of course if it was that bad, it mean a few hours of shoveling the front stoop and walk to the sideway, back steps and that walk.  And of course we lived on a corner so there was 250 feet of sidewalk around three sides of the house and a double car plus driveway on the other side.  The wind would whip around so our next door neighbor's driveway was clean down to the concrete, while ours would have a couple feet of drifts.  Just resigned myself to that's the way it goes.  Fortunately there was a grassy strip on both sides of the driveway to pile the snow up on.  It was a heck of a workout.  The worst was clearing a path all the way to the street, then having the plow come through and pile a bunch of hard packed snow, slush and ice back into the gap.

But I'm sure for those of you who still deal with snow, this is not a distant memory.  Although we didn't have a snowblower, so all of it was hand dug or pushed.  Also annoying was the fluffy powder, because you couldn't pick much of it up and you couldn't throw it either.  You'd have to walk it gently to the side and pour it off the shovel.  There was a happy medium between the powder and the hard packed ice, where the snow was just wet enough to throw, but not too hard to scrape off the ground.

Once all that was done, it was time to break out the sleds.  Mostly my friends and I would go to the Hempstead Turnpike overpass at Wantagh Parkway.  The on ramp at the southwest corner wasn't a regular cloverleaf, since it came from a side road parallel to the parkway.  There was plenty of room to slide down from the turnpike across the flats without coming anywhere near the onramp.  We'd go up and down that hill dozens of times, sitting on the sled, laying on the sled, two on the sled.  Once a kid fell off his sled in front of me and I ran over his leg.  But with all the layers of clothes we had on, it didn't hurt him.  When we had the time, we'd also go to what was then Salisbury Park, now Eisenhower Park, a little over a mile away.  That had longer hills, but it was a pretty exhausting, wet walk home from there after climbing up the hill so many times.  I seem to remember flying off the edge of the sidewalk into the frozen lake sometimes.  For a while the lake was empty also and we'd go off the edge, through the air and onto the snow about 6 feet down.  But usually that didn't end as well as it sounds, so I'm pretty sure we only tried that a couple times.

The best place, when we could get a ride, was the Bethpage State Park Golf Course.  That had some really big hills.  Usually my friend Jimmy's father would take us.  We wouldn't get too many runs inthough, because it was at night and it was a long hike up the hill.  But it sure was a heck of a ride.

I also remember going out at night when snow first started to fall and being the first one to put bicycle tracks in the snow.  Everything was so much quieter as the snow falling blocked the normal ambient noise from the turnpike.  Very peaceful.