Month: September 2016

At that time on that day the Estate D’Yusmith will descend into near total darkness for 1 minute 35 seconds as it is in the path of the great eclipse of 2017. Now that is not as much as the 2 minutes 40 seconds you would get if you were northeast of Nashville but its more than I’ve ever experienced before.

I’ve seen partial eclipses before and I have memory of some kind of an eclipse from when I was a kid. In fact this got me thinking about that as I have a definite memory of one happening and I’ve had to do some research to try to figure out if I was actually remembering or if it actually happened.
As I remembered it I was waiting in the car at Eavey’s grocery in Fort Wayne when it continued to get darker and darker and then got lighter and lighter. I don’t remember being aware of it being an eclipse but I assume I must have been. This all occurred while everyone that was with us was in the grocery. I thought i was maybe 9 or 10 at the time. So I went searching for eclipse candidates for what I remembered. It had to be early to mid afternoon because of where I recall the sun being out the wind shield of the car, closer to mid afternoon. As it turns out there is only one possibility between 1950 and 1965 and that was July 20 1963 that in Fort Wayne . Check out the information here. So it would seem that at 4:40 in the afternoon I might have been in the parking lot of Eaveys in Fort Wayne. There are some problems with this theory including: this was a Thursday afternoon and Dad certainly would not have been there and I don’t recall Mom making trips to Fort Wayne alone or during the week. I was 13 Polly was 9 and Lori was 3 within a week of being 4 which I don’t see a trip by Mom alone with all three of us. Polly and I maybe. The time was at the outer limit of time needed to get home in time to be home when Dad got home. Anyway, I remember an eclipse at Eaveys parking lot in the car. The other 2 or 3 I have experienced I don’t much remember. If you look at the paths of all the total eclipses from 1951 to 2000 you will see that I’ve not been near any of the others to even get much of a partial experience.

Just as a side note Eaveys in Fort Wayne was a big grocery store. In fact when it was built in the late 1950’s it was the largest grocery store in the world and was featured on the cover, and a story about, in Life magazine. Of course at 80000 sq. ft. it now would be about the size of the toilet paper section of the big Walmart.

So you can see that being in the path of a total eclipse is pretty much a once in a lifetime event. Although as you can see below that that at least for a small subset of people in Arkansas and Southern Illinois that for some reason they get 2 in a 28 year span. And Central Indiana gets one in 8 years. In fact it looks like Portland is right on the center line.

Now that you have all that information plan on being in Nashville on the above date for what would be what could be the only chance to see the great eclipse from the Estate D’Yusmith.