7/24/2023 0 Comments Golden spike sesquicentennialOver the course of a century and a half, this photo has been framed by historians, scholars and educators to capture the entire narrative of the construction of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad. Russell’s “East and West Shaking Hands at Laying of the Last Rail,” commonly known as “The Champagne Photo”. Shortly thereafter, this singular moment in time was memorialized by Andrew J. On May 10, 1869, a Golden Spike was ceremoniously driven into a polished laurel tie at Promontory Summit, Utah linking two great oceans, uniting a Civil War-torn nation and propelling America to become a world industrial leader. THE SPIKE150 LEGACY SELECTION COMMITTEE STATEMENT The Spike 150 Legacy Selection Committee seeks an artist(s) to take the singular point of time of the driving of the Golden Spike and extend the visual and time panorama to include and honor all of the railroad workers from many different cultures and backgrounds whose backbreaking efforts were crucial in the awe-inspiring construction of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad measuring 1776 miles of track. This project has been initiated by the Spike 150 Commission to commission an artist’s vision to include and honor the voices of the diverse communities that labored on and were impacted by the driving of the Golden Spike and the creation of the Transcontinental Railroad. After all, I’m not as tough as nails.Ĭhuck Fulkerson, ’70, lives in Newtown, Conn. With an extra dose of caution, I kept the final spikes away from my mouth. It was months before I had the energy to finish building my railroad. As for mine, I couldn’t care less what happened to it. Leland Stanford’s spike is engraved with his name and resides in the Cantor Arts Center. Six months later, I’m fine-and I might even become infamous: My surgeon is writing an article about my operation for a medical journal. Gangrene and emerging sepsis complicated my recovery. He eventually extracted the tiny invader through an incision in my navel. He discovered that the spike I’d swallowed was trapped in my appendix and had perforated it. The appendectomy took the surgeon twice as long as he’d expected. If you’re going to swallow a nail, the smaller the better, right? Not in my case. It was after midnight when the abdominal surgeon arrived. If you’re going to swallow a nail, the smaller the better, right?Īn ER physician speculated that I had acute appendicitis, and an X-ray confirmed the presence of a foreign object. Paula followed me home and called my sister, Mary, a nurse. In too much pain to finish, I left for home and headed toward the sofa. I was at a nearby bar, enjoying a glass of wine with my friend Paula. The tech asked me to schedule an X-ray to see what the artifact was. Up until then, I had attributed reoccurring episodes of nausea and stomach pain to having eaten expired sour cream or salsa. Recalling my Stanford days in archaeology, I joked, “An arrowhead in my belly?” The tech deadpanned, “In medicine, an artifact is a foreign object that doesn’t belong in you.” “You’ve got an artifact in your gut,” he said. Months later, I was in the middle of having a routine MRI when the technician brought the machine to a halt. As far as I knew, I’d driven all the nails I’d mouthed into my railbed. In the absence of a third hand, it’s the most convenient place to stash them. Like carpenters, model makers routinely hold their next-up nails firmly between their lips. They were also minuscule and easy to misplace. Stanford’s spike was 17.6-karat gold and symbolic mine were steel and sword-sharp. I’d made plenty of model railroads, but this layout was my tiniest yet-220 times smaller than the real thing. But before I could drive home my final spike, disaster struck. To commemorate the sesquicentennial of Stanford’s swing-and-miss, I’d been building my own model of that railroad. As the story goes, he raised his silver-plated maul, brought it down-and missed, striking the railroad tie. On May 10, 1869, Leland Stanford stepped up to the Golden Spike, the final link in the United States’ first transcontinental railroad.
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