“The Biggest Meteor Shower of the Century”

I found an old 3” floppy disk in a box of obsolete software in the basement.  It contained a collection of documents created long ago in Ventura Publisher version 4, with a Windows 95 operating system.  Some letters, lots of memories.  I couldn’t get Ventura Publisher 4 to run on XP, so I had to extract the text from the formatting manually.   Here’s some.

August 12, 1993


I can't believe I fell for it again. “The biggest meteor shower of the century”  “Hundreds of meteors will streak across the sky each and every minute”   I took the word of the people who sold me Kohoutek back in the 70s (surely you remember the Comet Of The Century? It lit up the night sky in an apocolyptic glory whose brightness would on some nights rival that of the moon. Halley's Comet would be a mere Christmas tree bulb in comparison...)  


So last night I went down to the lake, because the best view would be in the northeast corner of the sky, a view of the sky which Milwaukee's lakefront specializes in. I hurried to get down to the lakefront by sunset, because that is the time when the spectacular spectacle would be at its most dazzling. 


It was the usual crowd at the South Shore lakefront; people fishing, launching and landing boats, people feeding the ducks and seagulls. Winds were calm, the sky was clear. A few people looked like they couldn't account for their being there—those were people like ME who rushed down to the lakefront to see the celestial spectacular promised by the Illuminated Ones; and we saw .... 


Nothing.


I felt kind of foolish for awhile; too agitated to pretend that I'd just come down there for fresh air and a nice walk. I didn't want to go home right away, because, well, you know then they would know what I had been down at the lakefront for.  “Yeah, can you believe it, he came down to see the MEEEEteors! Look, Gary! Over there! Up in the sky! Oops, it's only an airplane! What a sap! Hey, Meteor Boy, look at this! Oh, wait, that's my flash light. Haw Haw, made you look!

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