Just over 30 years ago, on May 30, 1984, my daughter Rachel and I witnessed a fairly rare astronomical event.
Some such events are thousands of years apart. Comet Hale-Bop’s dust and gas produced a great, bright tail in 1997. When it returns, if ever, we will have long been dust, only our dust won’t light up the night.
May 30 was also my late wife Diane’s birthday. She taught first grade at Oakwood Elementary School in Yanceyville, where Rachel was in the second grade in 1984.
The event of May 30, 1984, was an “annular” solar eclipse, in which an outer ring of the sun’s surface is still visible.
In the early 1960s, I observed some partial solar eclipses from my front yard on the Old Concord Road.
Using the pinhole-projection method, I put a pinhole in one end of a cardboard box to watch the sun’s projected image on a sheet of white paper taped to the box’s opposite inside surface.
In this, the would-be observer puts his head partway into the box to view, but not all the way, for then his head would “eclipse” the images of both moon and sun.
Standing in my yard in the 1960s, my head partially inside a pasteboard box, in full view of my neighbors and passing cars on the Old Concord Road, I probably made for a strange sight.
If any of those neighbors had previously puzzled that I might be somewhat “different,” then seeing me in my front yard with a cardboard box over my head probably turned that surmise into certainty.
I later on remember someplace in Salisbury selling exposed sheets of photographic film for safe solar eclipse viewing.
On May 30, 1984, Oakwood Elementary School’s staff was being very “big brotherly” (appropriate, considering the year) in protecting the children’s vision, as well they should have been.
“Eclipse time” recesses were cancelled. The children were watching a televised broadcast of the eclipse in the school’s lower grades activity area, with blinds tightly shut to prevent any child from taking a “solar peek.”
These extra precautions to prevent an assault on the eyes from outer space made me think that the principal had seen the old movie “The Day of the Triffids” (1962).
I was determined that Rachel should have an opportunity to experience the additional outdoor phenomena associated with an annular solar eclipse, less than a total eclipse, but appreciable: darkening of the sky, drop in temperature, etc., so I picked her up from school and we went to the yard of her grandmother Doris Moore (my mother-in-law) on Pemberton street in Yanceyville.
Local (and colorful) Clarence Lilly Pemberton Jr., Esquire (for whom the street was named) lived across from Doris, who had been his secretary.
“Mr. Pem,” as everyone in Caswell County knew him, waxed eloquent in courtroom orations and conversations, including those with me. He idolized the late Sen. Sam J. Ervin Jr., and in coming away from some of our talks, I felt that he possibly even “out-Sam’d” that other “simple country lawyer.” Mr. Pem was one of those “old time” Southern Democrats (whose traditional brand of conservatism, just like the Bible, probably gave the snake short shrift).
So we waited to see a fairly rare astronomical event, standing across the road from the home of a Southern gentleman, who although more frequently sighted than a solar eclipse, was something of an “event” himself.
Our heads were sufficiently “boxed,” like back on the Old Concord Road, but we also took time “out of the box” to experience the other phenomena: darkening sky, dropping temperature, stirring breeze, and a streetlight coming on. Birds headed to their nests, and one of Mr. Pem’s confused roosters started crowing.
Soon it was over, and I returned Rachel to school.
I sometimes think back to something seen in mid-eclipse that day which seemed a little scary, both then and now. Far in the West, the sky was a bruise-like black-and-blue, stormy looking, but without clouds.
We were seeing the night, stirred from daytime sleep and racing on at that irregular hour to attempt its regular task: the taking of the day.