WM C HASSELBRINK OF FRANCISCO INDIANA FOUND!

 FRANCISCO MAN GOES MISSING FOR 20 YEARS
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Just walks away from shop, farm and family - DISAPPEARS!
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DISCOVERED DEAD SOME 284 MILES FROM HOME

This crazy story happened in the first three decades of the 20th Century in a rural part of Southwest Indiana where I'm from. I have marital connections to this family from Francisco, Indiana. It's such a small farming hamlet, one time hub of commerce on the Wabash & Erie Canal, that I'm related to most of it's early inhabitants.

Well, the Hasselbrinck family is no exception. The spelling with a "c" seems to have come from the old country. William Carl, the subject of this made-for-TV saga, was the child of German immigrants, born in 1856. He grew up on a farm in rural Gibson County, outside Francisco (or Frisco, as locals call it). In his 50's, he put together stock and capital to open a hardware store in town, circa 1909. It had been in business with the aid of his son George William Hasselbrinck, about four years when the owner walked away.

Reasons are sketchy as to why, but on a Thursday, middle of September 1913, with no advanced warning, William simply walked away...from his home, from his store, from the hamlet of Frisco, Indiana. 

24 Sep 1913 Evansville Courier and Journal, p. 19

Apparently, the day was 18 Sep 1913 and the talk about Oakland City and Princeton and surrounding towns was about this mysterious disappearance of a 56-year-old man. The article, above, ran in the nearby Evansville newspapers almost a week later. A few days after that, it was picked up by a paper in Madison (IN) this time with speculation as to why.

27 Sep 1913 Madison Daily Herald, p. 2

All up and down the Ohio Valley, local Indiana papers were picking up the thread, like this one two weeks post-disappearance, and each sheds some new light. The article, below, from Spencer County, says that the subject was last seen cashing a $17 check at a bank in Princeton. Where he was headed was not known. A family and community grasping for answers assumes the man was "slightly deranged."

3 Oct 1913 Rockport Democrat, p. 3

After 40 days, the Evansville papers run a picture of William with his physical details and announcement of a $25 reward offered by his wife. This would translate in today's currency to about $740. Later, we learn that his description and this reward were circulated nationwide.

1 Nov 1913 Evansville Courier and Press, p. 6

Then, in 1914, an apparent break in the missing persons case! The body of a man is found floating in the Ohio River near Evansville. It has been drowned for some time and is decomposed, but folks say it matches William's description. The community is cautiously hopeful. This article ran on the front page of the Princeton Democrat newspaper:

20 May 1914 Princeton Daily Democrat, p. 1

The following day, the Evansville Journal reported on the body found:

21 May 1914 Evansville Journal, p. 5

Even the small town Poseyville News weighed in on the matter some eight days later. Interesting to note, the piece of evidence heretofore unknown. William was last seen aboard an interurban headed towards Evansville. That could have been the route our wayward wonderer took, but who can be sure?

29 May 1914 Poseyville News, p. 4

After the excitement and buzz over potential closure to this case, reality began settling in upon the family. His estate was settled and in Sep 1918, five years after her husband died, the alleged widow went after his life insurance company, as reported on the front page of the Oakland City paper.

20 Sep 1918 Oakland City Journal, p. 1

I'm sure interest died down in the immediate aftermath of the body found near Evansville years earlier. The family gave up hope of ever hearing from him again and doubted they'd learn the details of his passing. It was as if he'd just vanished from the planet. There was no GPS or Internet, surveillance cameras or cable news. In fact, news in 1913 travelled very slowly at times, especially in rural areas like Gibson County, Indiana. It must have seemed like all hope was lost.

Meanwhile, on the opposite end of Illinois, almost 300 miles away, William was farming in the community of Glasford, keeping a journal and speaking of his faraway home. When the connections were made, he was already laid to rest. His family had given up on ever finding him more than 10 years earlier. He'd been gone for almost 20 full years!

The story hit the newswires and this United Press article ran in the 9 May 1933 Indianapolis Times on p. 4. This must have given the family some modicum of closure, even if the why's and how's could never be answered. William Carl Hasselbrink would be brought home and laid to rest. In fact, he was buried in southern Gibson County, southwest of his Francisco home, at St. Paul's Cemetery along State Road 168.

I found all of these articles yesterday in a search for relatives. It took me on a wild ride down some rabbit holes, but I was transfixed and fascinated by the details--that a man would just walk away from his home, his family, his life of more than half a century and move that far away and just start over, too afraid, perhaps, to contact his wife or to go home. This would make for great television drama. Who has the number for Netflix, Hulu or AppleTV?

The Price of Hubris (NASA followup)

Without external reality checks, many critics suggested, NASA had become isolated in its own delusional can-do ideology, derived from its Apollo mission successes," says Ann Larabee in her Sep 2013 article on pomoculture.org. Further, she states, "From these days of childhood innocence, the agency had grown increasingly isolated, streamlined and pressurized, indulging in overweening bureaupathological fantasies about its abilities, despite budget cuts...driven by fantasies of invulnerability and a need for unanimity"

hu*bris
/ˈ(h)yo͞obrəs/  noun
excessive pride or self-confidence.

Learn to pronounce

The exceprt above is, again, from the Larabee article, mentioned at the outset. Humans, it seems, are so busy getting in their own way, they can't see the forest for their person. 

Hubris syndrome is associated with power, more likely to manifest itself the longer the person exercises power and the greater the power they exercise. A syndrome not to be applied to anyone with existing mental illness or brain damage. Usually symptoms abate when the person no longer exercises power, says the Right Honorable Lord David Owen (SOURCE: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4952940/pdf/428.pdf).

NASA was created in 1958, during the pinnacle of the Cold War in the late 50s/early 60s, and it has been led since it's inception by white, Anglo men. And while they deserve moderate credit for a climate of inclusion, it took a recent film to show the absolute mission-critical role African-American women played in the space race. Who could forget that image of Tom Hank's character beating down that segregated bathroom sign (in the name of productivity, mind you)? But NASA still has a long way to go.

If the 2020 Challenger doc that I finished yesterday and blogged reaction to, along with the Columbia disaster didn't teach us anything, it's that these white, Anglo men were arrogant, nearly untouchable, gods of the space age. Their hubris was on full display in the documentary. Mulloy and Lucas' arrogance and defiance reminded me of the Klan leaders in the film "Mississippi Burning." But those two a-holes were just products of their environment.

President Reagan told his investigatory commission to find a scapegoat, essentially, and save for a few brave men like Feynman and Kutyna, on that commission, Roger's WOULD HAVE!

As I blogged a few days ago, I grew up on Reaganomics and Fundamental Christianity. Ronald Reagan was almost revered as The Christ. I was spoon-fed the propaganda from Hollywood about "the American Dream" growing up. I watched "Father Knows Best" and "Leave It To Beaver." I was firmly entrenched in the Patriarchy and Aristocracy of our Founding "Fathers." Just that last term alone should make you stop and think--Founding Fathers, God the Father, Father Time...

So at the height of the Cold War, as Baby Boomers were brainwashed to grab for the brass ring (or picket fence, as it may be), sell their souls to corporations and worship the Golden Calf, as it were, we were all thrust into this race to space, like it or not. My very first paycheck from Little Ceasar's had FICA, Soc. Sec. and Federal Income Tax deducted from it, and part of the latter was to fund programs like NASA. I was a believer. I gave my tithe.

That myth of the American Dream that began to crumble in the cultural revolution of the 60's and it's decades-long propaganda campaign convinced most of us that NASA were our 21st century "Superfriends." Defying the calls for transparency, because it's easy to claim "top secrecy" when you're an agency of war, the patriarchy kept marching forward and spending money like water...YOUR MONEY AND MINE!! (So in a roundabout way, we have the blood of those 17 astronauts on OUR hands!)

Now did we benefit from some of the advances of science achieved through NASA programs? Most certainly...but at what cost? I know we lost 17 astronauts along the way, beginning in the Apollo program. But did we sell our souls?

The myth, rooted in ideals like Manifest Destiny, continues to be propped up by the Patriarchy. Let's look at some of it's benefits:

- The KKK and it's neo-fascist successors

- Imbalance of power

- Inequality

- Systemic racism

- The ONE PERCENTERS

- Decimation of the middle class

- The mafia

- Deeply divided nation

- Distrust of institutions

- Genocide (Native peoples and minorities)

- Drug epidemic

- Oppression/Crime

- A police state

...but those are just the highlights. 

If you want to know more, stay tuned.

I think these policies, and the Patriarchy, that put them in place, these ideologies that they continue to prop up as "a dream," are leading us down a very dark path...but I'll blog more about that in the coming days.

Space, The Final Frontier...right?

The Ringer.com calls Challenger: The Final Flight, "a three-hour exhumation of a traumatic event that imprinted itself on the psyche of anyone who was watching when it went down." As a senior high school student, who watched from my Indianapolis classroom (at Bishop Chatard, Class of '86), I can certainly attest to this. This image, which I saw live on closed circuit television, is the first thing that comes to mind whenever I hear "Space Shuttle Challenger." It was, indeed, a traumatic moment.

Seven lives were lost that day; countless others were changed forever.

I highly encourage you to watch the documentary.

I grew up in the Space Age.

Two days after I was born, Apollo 5 made the first flight test of the propulsion systems of the Lunar Module ascent/descent capability. Three months later, Apollo 8 launches on the first manned mission to the moon and provides the first ever photograph of the entire Earth from outer space. It orbited the Moon ten times without landing. The moon landing would happen before my first birthday.

Earthrise taken from Apollo 8 (NASA)

 
I looked up to the stars with wonder and knew that going up there and out there was possible. I grew up watching series like Space: 1999 and Star Trek (the original series with Shatner and Nimoy) and believing that THIS was our future, achievable in my lifetime. After all, "space, the final frontier," was just a short ride on a rocket or shuttle away. And we all believed it was safe. The Ringer article linked in the opening of this post states, "Although the three-man crew of Apollo 1 was killed in a cabin fire in a 1967 launch rehearsal test, NASA never lost an astronaut en route to space until the Challenger disaster."

To put a finer point on it, The Globe and Mail, Canada, reported in Feb 2003, after the Columbia tragedy, "Before the space-shuttle program, three astronauts -- the crew of Apollo 1, who died Jan. 27, 1967, in a launch-pad fire in their capsule during training -- were killed on the job. But from 1986 to 2003, two shuttle disasters have killed 14 people who were flying in a craft with far more advanced technology."

That day in January 1986 changed everything I believed was possible. But I paid little attention to the public hearings or the immediate aftermath. I was focused on finishing out my senior year, partying with friends and preparing for a move to Florida, which happened the week after graduation in June '86.

As fate would have it, my dad's career trajectory took us to Tallahassee, where in Mar 2003 a Challenger Learning Center opened. Ironically, the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster had occurred just one month previous. Over time, however, the memories of both tragedies began to fade and NASA shut down it's shuttle program. In my mind, the causes of both fatal accidents due to human error and hubris began to meld together, so that by the time I watched the Challenger documentary on Netflix in 2022, I was thinking that both O-ring failure in the rocket booster AND tile damage to the shuttle were one in the same incident. Time does that to memory and I have a nearly 54-year-old brain.

"In the wake of what happened with Challenger, NASA made technical changes to the shuttle and also worked to change the safety and accountability culture of its workforce. The shuttle program resumed flights in 1988," says a Space.com Feb 2022 article. "They had their mind set on going up and proving to the world they were right and they knew what they were doing. But they didn't," said Bob Ebeling, former Thiokol engineer, who's objections to Challenger's launch are well documented in the 2020 Netflix doc. He spoke with NPR in January 2016. Three months later, Ebeling died at 89. NPR's 21 Mar 2016 headline read, "Challenger Engineer Who Warned Of Shuttle Disaster Dies." You can read his NY Times obit here.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, one of the [Roger's] commission’s more skeptical members, added his own appendix to their report, asking for greater transparency from NASA and a more realistic assessment of space travel’s risks. This direct quote from the Houston Chronicle's Preview website June 2021 review of Kevin Cook's book, The Burning Blue, is a highlight of the Netflix doc. The documentary chronicles Feynman famously bringing a small O-ring to the public hearing and explaining the physics behind the effects of freezing temperatures on the rubber seal. It changed the whole tone of the committee and led to it's ultimate findings.

The Ringer article summarizes, "the agency covered up its culpability and stubbornly resisted pinpointing a cause..." and blames a "tradition of institutional failure." I'll reserve my judgment and personal opinion for now, though I did use the word hubris, above. Let's tackle that subject in a separate post. But, suffice to say, the 2020 Challenger documentary was an eye-opening experience. It brought back all of the memories from that day in '86  and those that followed. I had actually forgotten how long a history the NASA Shuttle program had after that tragedy, some 15 YEARS! And yet, what did they learn? It turns out, not much. The arrogance and hubris of our government was once again on full display in February 2003. The shutdown of the Shuttle program forced NASA to rethink space exploration and the government's role.