Video for you young guys

There is a lot of familiar pictures.

Jim Minnie (rest his soul) hired me in Cadastral in the early 60's.

Grand ole man from the GLO days.

Keith

There is a lot of familiar pictures.

> Jim Minnie (rest his soul) hired me in Cadastral in the early 60's.
>
> Grand ole man from the GLO days.
>
> Keith

And here I thought you were my age or close to it, Keith. 😉

PS: Glad to see you back!! :clap:

If you really think about it,

that was nearly 50 years ago!!!

Gee whiz!

Keith

Spot Light On "Surveying"

Here is another survey Video.

http://www.nspsmo.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=page.viewpage&pageid=850

Jim Minnie was a wonderfully funny guy, a kind man, and a great surveyor. I worked for him in the mid sixties in Nevada and again in the early 70's in Montana.

We used the 8-chain tape much more than the 5-chain tape; especially in the plains of Eastern Montana and the deserts of Utah, Nevada and Arizona. Sometimes we had to go down to a 2-chain, but not often. It just depended on the terrain and vegetation.

One reference to GLO brought a chuckle to the Arizona Office while working there. A man called in saying he found a 'glow' rock and wanted to know what to do with it. It took a minute for the secretary to figure out what he was talking about.

Thanks for the memory.

I also enjoyed the video about the modern surveyors and the work you youngsters are doing. It is really amazing what you can accomplish.

Jerry

Jerry

I have many fond memories of Jim in the office as I was the cadastral draftsman for a few years under him and George Tyrell.

And of course you will remember those nights at the MARLS convention when Jim and Tiny Tillotson would be ribbing each other about who won the big war. Tiny being a pilot and Jim being a navigator in the bombers over Germany.

I had never seen that video of Jim before and wondered where it was at for all these years?

Keith

If you really think about it,

G.L.O. equals Good Lookin' Outfit LOL.

If you really think about it,

> that was nearly 50 years ago!!!
>
> Gee whiz!
>
> Keith

So you started young!! 😉

Jerry

Keith:

I never met Jim Minnie, but used a lot of his work in the Townships around Glendo Reservoir when I worked for the Bureau of Reclamtion in the 1960's. I broke down many sections for monumenting the Reservoir boundary. This was all ground work, chaining and setting the 1/16 corners and doing section breakdowns the way they were meant to be done by running them on the ground and making the intersections as were required. Not by a mathematical position. His work was exceptional in some pretty rugged country.

If I remember correctly, he was in there in about 1953 prior to the building of the dam.

Interesting film.

One nit-pick: They show a solar compass while talking about the very beginnings of the rectangular survey, about 50 years too early for it. They should have showed a plain open sight compass then and the solar compass later.

Charles

I actually retraced a mile of his resurveyed lines down along the Montana-Wyoming boundary and reported a minute difference in bearing and he really gave me hell..in a friendly way about changing his record! I probably did it for the heck of it, but that is what I had from solar shots in the area.

I had an instance in the South Dakota Black Hills on a big township resurvey, where a rancher was accusing me of moving one of his Homestead Entry Survey corners and I denied it and told the rancher he could take it up with my boss, Jim Minnie. Well he did call Jim and Jim came down to see the situation and I took him out to the corner and showed him the two bearing trees still alive and well and that somebody had moved the stone from the corner position based on the bearing trees. The stone was lying face down about a chain away. My corner position, based on the bearing trees also fit almost exactly with the record HES lines coming into it.

We then met with the rancher and the rancher again accused me of moving his corner and Jim let loose with his Italian anger and let the guy have it. He told him that if he ever caught one of his boys, moving corners, he would fire him on the spot! I had previously taken the rancher to the corner and explained what I had come up with.

We never heard another word from the rancher, after Jim was through with him.

That night we went to the bar, had a few and laughed about the whole episode.

Another time, Jim came down to this same job with Clark Gumm, who was the Chief, of the Division of Cadastral Survey in the Washington Office and they wanted to go out on line with us. So the next morning we all headed out and things immediately went wrong. The instrument guy set up to extend the line and hit a 20" tree, so we had to jog around it instead of cutting it down. The rear chainman/note keeper got confused by all the directions that he was getting from Clark, that he ended up going a couple of chains past where we were supposed to find the next corner. Clark was telling him, "did you measure over to that fence", "did you see the marks in that tree", "did you get the direction of that drainage right" and others. Clark was having fun out on line and away from the office. I noticed that Jim was real antsy, and finally told me that he had diarrhea and had to get out of there. So he and I left and was laughing about Clark and all his directions to my crew.

The next day, we went back and reran the line without all the interruptions.

This was all on my township resurvey where Custer, So. Dak. is in the middle of it. It resulted in 22 sheets for the plat and over 200 pages of field notes.

It took three field seasons to complete in the late 60's

Keith

Bill

I am sure you are right about that, but who cares among friends? Only some surveyors would see the difference and some would not recognize the solar attachment.

Good video.

Keith

Nice movie. I may incorporate it into the Surveying 101 presentation I give to non-surveyor groups.

As long as we're nit-picking (Bill started it), I was amused by this statement from the movie:

"When they went out... and on top of a high knoll they established an initial point..."

I've been to the Point of Beginning in Ohio, the initial points of the 1st through the 6th P. M., the Gila and Salt River Meridian and the Salt Lake Meridian. With the exception of the Gila and Salt River I.P. (where I almost died*), I wouldn't characterize any of them as being on a high knoll. The P.O.B. was initially set along the bank of the Ohio River, the 2nd is in deep woods in a creek bottom, the 4th in Illinois is on an island in the middle of the Illinois River, the 5th is in a swamp.

*How did I almost die at the I.P. of the Gila and Salt River Meridian? I forgot to take my cell phone along when I climbed up there. I spent more time up there than my wife, waiting in the car below, thought was acceptable. She assumed I had experienced a heart attack, called me to check my condition and almost had a heart attack herself when my phone began ringing in the cup holder beside her. My near-death experience occurred when I returned to the car.