Everyone who knows me knows that as a youngster my career paths that I set out for varied between astronaut and archaeologist. As Director of International Studies, though, students ask me about how I got into “things international.” I can point my finger at two things that opened up my eyes to the bigger world outside of St. Louis and the United States:

1. ABC’s Wide World of Sports
2. The Olympics

It was always around this time of year, after college football and before baseball, that the Finan household would flip on ABC’s Wide World of Sports on a weekend afternoon, and we would watch sports from around the world being covered by the likes of Keith Jackson and Howard Cosell…one week it would be the Highland Games from Scotland, the next it would be sumo wrestling from Japan and the next after that it would be ping pong in China. And then the grand prix at Monaco. Cliff diving in Acapulco. Surfing in Australia. Hurling in Ireland. Arm wrestling in California. And, of course, Evil Knieval jumping twenty double decker buses in London (and no, I was never stupid enough to try to really jump things with my bike).

But the Olympics were something totally different.

One of my first very clear memories as a boy (around my son Tommy’s age) was watching the opening ceremony of the Munich Olympics in 1972. I remembered watching all the flags, and asking which one was which, and what country it was. My parents never really exercised “tv control,” so when the Israeli athletes were taken hostage, and ABC broadcast it live, I watched the whole thing. I distinctly remember asking my mom “Mommy, they said that there are some guerrillas in there…why dont they call the zoo?” The voice of Jim McKay announcing the death of the Israeli Olympians is very clear in my mind, and I think I can say that it was at that point that international events, politics, and news became a huge interest of mine.

Four years later, I remember watching the opening ceremony of the Innsbruck games. My jaw hit the ground as an eight year old, seeing the Alps and all the coverage of Austria. My thought, at the time, was something along the lines of “Man, you mean people actually LIVE in places that look like a Richard Scarry village???” And from those Olympics, one scene stuck in my head. Franz Klammer, in the last run of the men’s downhill, behind on the time, with Frank Gifford commenting. Klammer nearly flew off the slopes three or four times…and the thought STILL gives me chills. So yesterday, we watched it on YouTube before dinner, and I nearly wept when my son Tommy cheered out (with Frank Gifford) “HE DID IT! HE DID IT! FRANZ KLAMMER DID IT!!!”

Four years later I caught the chicken pox during the Lake Placid games. I was fairly old for the chicken pox, and had quite a fever, and was home for, oh, about two weeks (no, seriously, I had the chicken pox). My family had gone to 7pm mass on that Saturday night, and when they got back, I was jumping up and down, because the USA was going to win.

I couldn’t blame Jimmy Carter for boycotting the 1980 Olympic games, given the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. However I was really ticked off that ABC let NBC outbid them for the rights to the game. You just cant replace guys like Jim McKay, Keith Jackson, Frank Gifford, Chris Shenkel, and Curt Gowdy.

You can watch Franz Klammer win the gold here.

Wow. The new SLU webpage looks absolutely awesome. Very clean, very sharp.

And Im not saying that because of my slide on the main page…

So much for Christmas Break, 2009-10.

I had a lot of writing to catch up on, and managed to finish a book that Im editing for Four Courts Press, Ireland’s leading academic publisher. The book is a collection of essays related to the region around Lough Ce in the middle ages. It should be coming out this Spring, God willing. The publishers wanted me to add a chapter to it, so I had to whip some lingering research into shape and submit it for review…around 8,000 words worth in around three weeks at night after everyone at home is asleep!

Im also the General Editor for Eolas: The Journal of the American Society of Irish Medieval Studies, which means Im putting the final touches on that. It should be finished in the next couple weeks or so.

Ive also been finishing a couple other articles to go out in the next month.

AND, of course, Ive been putting together the syllabus to my new course this Spring, Castles in History and Archaeology. The class is full, and I’ve managed to put together a pretty good course, I think. I have a number of repeat customers, which is always a good sign.

On with the Christmas theme…

In around 1979 Santa brought an Aeronautical Lab Kit. The kit had a helium balloon, two balsa airplanes, and two rockets, one that was launched with a rubber-band and the other with a model rocket engine.

This was a pretty cool present for a kid like me who retained the idea of being an astronaut. But in another sense it was important because it opened the door to the hobby of model rockets when I was a kid. My brother Mike (who owns a downtown interior decoration shop called UMA), my cousin Thad Neal (SLU 1989) and I started building rockets and launching them at Tilles and Berra Parks in south St. Louis.

The key point to consider is that none of us managed to go into engineering. A couple companies sold rocket kits, but we tended to build rockets out of junk that rarely flew very well. My brother Mike once tried to build a rocket out of a Pringles can. It had a huge balsa nose cone, and we painted it with some old light blue latex paint off of my dad’s tool bench. We tried to launch it, and instead of flying off the pad, the engine shot right up the middle of the Pringles can and set it the can on fire. I was on the ground laughing.

I had a model of the Space Shuttle that I built in around 1980. It was beautiful. As a result, I was always scared to launch it. In around 1990, I had a summer job with some high school buddies, and we began to discuss building rockets. We tried to launch the Space Shuttle by the Mounted Police station in Forest Park, and it went up around twenty feet and took a nose dive that smashed the nose of the shuttle (which was supposed to come off at the apogee and glide down in a spiral). We then decided to modify the shuttle by sticking two engines into each of the solid rocket booster tubes (it was supposed to be a single engine model). I wired the engines together, pressed the ignition, and instead of igniting at the same time one ignited a second before the other. The result was that it flew off the launch pad and did a cart wheel across the field, and then it caught on fire. I was crying I was laughing so hard. We then launched an Estes Alpha III model rocket (a very solid and respectable rocket). It had a beautiful flight, the parachute came out, it began its descent, and then proceeded to land on Highway 40 and was run over by a semi.

Good times. Thanks Santa.

I always enjoyed watching the news on Christmas Eve, when the weather people would say that NORAD was tracking something on their radar. I was the kid who was also concerned that NORAD might mistake Santa for Soviet bombers coming over the polar ice cap and that they might scramble some fighter jets and shoot him down with all of our presents.  Such was life growing up in the 70s…

But with the technology NORAD has today they can very easily show Santa on radar, likely using satellite tracking and what not.  FINALLY…my military tax dollars going to good use.  Here is the link:

The NORAD Santa Tracker

With Christmas coming, I thought I would write a few blogs on Christmas related topics…

Most people generally assume that my idea about becoming an archaeologist stemmed from Indiana Jones.  I usually just go along with that, because thats what most people think intuitively when they hear archaeologist.  But actually my desire to be an archaeologist stemmed from a toy back in the 70s.

Growing up in the 70s was kind of strange, especially since I had an older brother who grew up in the 60s who gave me a lot of his toys (guns, soldiers, tanks, etc.).  So when I was five all I wanted for Christmas was a GI Joe.  This was 1973, and little did I know that at that point GI Joe was undergoing a metamorphosis from “America’s Fighting Man” to “Man of Adventure.”  Presumably because parents didn’t like the idea of their sons playing with GI Joes pretending they were fighting out the Tet Offensive, Hasbro decided to soften the image a bit and turn him into an “adventure” figure.  In the cartoons and advertising GI Joe became a guy that was part of “The Adventure Team,” and these guys went out and did cool things like fight cobras, capture pygmy gorillas, collect fallen nuclear satellites, and recover mummies and archaeological artifacts.

The thing was I always still thought of Joe as a soldier, in a way.  When I got my first for Christmas in 1973 he came with jungle fatigues, but on the box he was being chased by a gorilla.  I got a helicopter for him that year too, which meant that he could do things like fly to ruins in the backyard or the canyon that the stairs to my room became.  He was always doing a lot of climbing.  I tried to make a parachute for him once, and threw him out of a tree that I climbed in our back yard.  Laws of physics were never my specialty, and the paper bag that I used to make the parachute didnt work well.

But of course the other cool thing about it all was that you could send in an application to be part of the Adventure Team itself.  My dad dutifully filled out the application for us, and sent the $1.50 (pre-inflationary 70s prices!).  Four to six weeks later, an envelope arrived WITH MY NAME ON IT.  (Yeah, I know…this sounds very similar to Christmas Story, and you know what?  It is!)  In the envelope was a letter from Mike Triumph, Adventure Team Commander, welcoming me to the Adventure Team.  Wow…what a cool name.  Mike Triumph.  He must have a huge jaw with a name like that.  I imagined this place in Pawtucket RI that was just the coolest building on Earth, with guys just hanging out waiting to go on adventures with really cool equipment and guys designing helicopters and boats and all terrain vehicles and cool flying platforms in their free time.

A magazine came in the package, and despite it being a clear marketing ploy to buy more equipment, there were a bunch of stories about real people doing adventure stuff…Sir Edmund Hillary, Niel Armstrong, and Thor Heyerdahl.  Then there was a story about GI Joe going off into the desert to find a lost idol, and got lost in a sand storm, found the idol, and then the sand storm died down and he was back where he started or something like that.  Great stuff for six year old.

See that? A hammer headed stingray.

The packages always had cool names, like “Curse of the Mummy’s Idol,” “Jaws of Death,” or “Devil of the Deep.”  Devil of the Deep included a pontoon speed boat, and a genetic mutant animal that threatened all of humanity…the dreaded hammer-head stingray.  Yes, a cross between a hammer-head shark and a stingray.  Hey, Prof. Rick Mayden, dont tell me it cant happen.  I saw the thing.  AND it could fly like bird sometimes too.

There were about four good years of the Adventure Team…unfortunately they started feeling the pressure from the Six Million Dollar Man and Star Wars, and they tried to techno him up….that didnt work very well.

The first Christmas I was playing with him at my grandpa’s house on the Hill, and my cousin Virginia Toscano (who just passed away last month) said to my mom, “Barb, isn’t it cute how Tommy is playing with his doll in that helicopter?”

I said, quite confidently, “Cousin Virginia, GI Joe is NOT a doll.  He is an action figure and man of adventure.”

We had a bit of sad run there right after Thanksgiving.  We had to put our dog Shady down.  As you may have read in a previous posting, she and I once battled a giant opossum in our back yard in the Spring.  She was really a great dog…

We got her from the Humane Society in 2002.  My wife Marti and I were looking for a dog, and she stopped by the Humane Society one afternoon.  She called and said that there was a great looking black dog that looked really nice.  I went over there, and Shady and I met in the “meeting room” and I brought her home that day.  We thought she was a bit of a mutt, but it turns out she was a bread called a Flat Coat Retriever.  We found that out when we were watching the Westminster Dog Show that year…they commented that the Flat Coat is the “Peter Pan of the dog world” because they never grow up.

She was a really great dog, all the way up until she developed cancer this year.  She was great with our boys, and we already miss her quite a bit.  I was at Target today, and unfortunately I walked by the pet aisle.

So as I mentioned earlier in the year…I met up with Dr. Jason Organ from the Department of Anatomy in the Medical School by chance last year.  Jason and I travelled to Dublin in November to do some quick research on some of the skeletons from Kilteasheen, while I deliver the final report on Kilteasheen to the Royal Irish Academy with my colleague, Christopher Read.

The trip went really well.  Jason and I went through around eighty skeletons, and identified twenty for study. The real issue was whether the skeletons had their first and second molars in their mandible, as Jason suggested that these teeth seemed to be the most prevalent in the collection.  The casting went very smoothly (as Jason remarked, its a heck of lot easier than taking castings on sleeping monkeys in Costa Rica!).  The really good thing, though, was that we were able to look at the other elements of the skeletons to try and figure if we can do additional research on them.

The night before the lecture Jason, Chris, and I had dinner with Terry Barry of Trinity College, Dublin.  Terry has been a friend to Americans doing Irish medieval studies for years.  I can honestly say that I would not be where I am without his help.  In 1992 he was the first person I even emailed overseas.  It was quite strange at the time.  He was very friendly, and offered a lot of advice from the outset about research topics and sources.  I am very honored to call him colleague at this stage of the game.

The lecture went really well.  Chris and I have been working together at Kilteasheen for around six years, and, as we say, it is really time to put a cork in the fine bottle so we can actually publish what we have.  But the bottom line is that we accomplished a great deal with the site, despite the doubts that some expressed in us originally.  We successfully proved the nay-sayers wrong.

I also had a meeting with my friend and colleague Richard Oram from the University of Stirling in Scotland. Together we are working on a four university exchange program devoted to archaeology and medieval studies.  The idea of the program is to provide interested students from SLU the opportunity to study archaeology at the University of Stirling, the University of Exeter, and the National University of Galway-Ireland.  At the graduate level, we hope to put together an exchange program for doctoral students so that our students can go to one of the universities to do research and their students can come to SLU to use the Vatican Film Library and our scholars.

We crammed in a hell of a lot in four days.

I am becoming increasingly aware of the fact that some of my students in fact think I dress funny.  At first, I thought I had received a compliment in my Spring course evaluations (”Dr. Finan has some great vests and polo shirts”).  But then the student who submitted the comment joked with me at convocation, “What, no vest?”

Hey, I like vests.  They are not as formal or warm as a jacket, yet they step things up a bit.

On to my sock problem.  Ten years ago, I had grown increasingly frustrated with my socks.  Back in the day, I just never wore socks (it was an 80s/Miami Vice sort of thing).  When I started teaching, though, I had to start dressing more professionally, so I bought a bunch of different styled socks.  Well, then I drove myself crazy, because I could never find the right match for each sock.  So I decided to limit myself to two styles of socks…tan and dark navy blue.  That way, it would be easy to match them and I could just throw them in a drawer.

As a historian, though, I should have been mindful of the “Law of Unintended Consequences.”  What I didnt realize is that by purchasing all of my socks at the same time would mean that they would likely all wear out at the same time.  So a few months ago I went to Target, and lo and behold they only sold them in bunches of threes.  That, coupled with the fact that not all my socks wore out, means that I am back to square one with my socks.

In short, I have become the professor that people likely make fun of for not having matching socks.