Creative History

  It is November of 1924 and wild rumors of back-stabbing and deceit have been flying around the town of Xenia, Ohio. Xenia, Ohio in 1924 is a bit of a thriving boom-town.  Home to some 20,000 souls; part of the Dayton, Ohio metropolitan area, Xenia is notorious as the site of frequent tornadoes, but it is also well known throughout the United States as a hub on the Pennsylvania and Baltimore and Ohio Railroads. The central location of Xenia has, by 1924, made it the seat of Greene County, Ohio and home to the county’s courthouse, sheriff’s department, jail and other governmental departments. In late November of 1924 two police officers, both employed by the Pennsylvania Railroad, one time friends but now bitter enemies are about to be at the center of a crime that will shock all of America. Greene County Courthouse in Xenia, Ohio At the beginning of 1924 Lieutenant Charles Mackrodt was an officer with the Pennsylvania Railroad Police.  Despite being well known, a...

  The explosion creates a bright red and orange fireball that is five miles wide in diameter--a mini manmade flaming sun.  This fireball is visible to the naked eye from over six-hundred miles away.  In the seconds after the explosion a giant mushroom cloud over forty-two miles high, eight times the size of Mount Everest, reaches all the way into the stratosphere. A witness, commissioned by the Soviet Union as a cameraman to document the event, and flying in an observation aircraft some fifty miles from the detonation described what he witnessed years later by saying, “Slowly and silently the fireball crept upwards.  Having broken through the thick layer of clouds it kept growing…it seemed to suck the whole earth into it.  The spectacle was fantastic, unreal, spectacular.” It is October 30, 1961 in the skies over the Soviet Union on the edge of the Arctic Circle and this is the test detonation of the “Tsar Bomba” or “Tsar’s Bomb”--the largest and most powerf...

  On February 13, 1961 three small business owners: Wallace Lane, Virginia Maxey and Mike Mikesell--artisans by trade who specialize in the crafting of handmade jewelry and sell their creations at a local boutique--are out in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains near the Nevada border in western California scouring the arid countryside looking for interesting mineral specimens known as ‘geodes’. A ‘geode’ in geologic terms is defined as a: Geological secondary formation within sedimentary or volcanic rocks.  In layman's terms a geode is typically a hollowed out rock usually in the shape of a sphere, or cylinder, with some sort of mineral deposit at the center.  Usually these mineral deposits are quite colorful, and often they are very beautiful which is why geodes are something that three small business owners specializing in handmade jewelry would be out scouring a California hillside in search of in the first place. As it was, on that fateful day of February 13,...