In the years that followed, my main exercise was long night-time walks through Magnolia, sometimes even in the rain, when I would do all of my thinking about cases I was working on in my law practice.
Around 11:30 p.m. on one heavily overcast, drizzly night, after the Cumberland Farms store on Evesham Road, at the railroad tracks, became One Stop Shop, I was walking north up the sidewalk on the residence side of Southeast Atlantic Avenue, from Monroe Avenue toward Evesham Road. I happened to look up toward One Stop Shop and I saw an amazing thing: A small meteorite making a "fshshshsh" sound and leaving a tail of sparks broke through the rain clouds a few hundred feet up and hit the roof of One Stop Shop with a loud "pop."
Above, a daytime portrayal of the view I had
of the One Stop Shop food store
at the moment the meteorite came down out of the overcast, rainy night sky
as I walked north up SE Atlantic Avenue
from Monroe Avenue toward Evesham Road.
The dotted line traces the path of the meteorite seen by me.
The next day, I told the guy at the cash register in One Stop Shop that though the meteorite probably bounced-off into someone's yard, there was a chance that it was still up there, on their roof. I think that he thought that I was crazy.
Who knows -- it might still be up there, right?
That was not my only contact with meteorites in Magnolia.
Our kids attended grade school at Our Lady of Grace on the White Horse Pike in Somerdale. For his school science fair project, I taught one of our boys how to wrap a powerful bar magnet from Edmund Scientific in a plastic bag and then press it into the dry dirt in our garden to collect tiny magnetic particles and then deposit the particles onto a paper plate. I showed him how the tiniest magnetic particles would actually roll on the paper plate like little marbles, and how these same particles, when viewed under a microscope, turned out to be relatively perfect little spheres.
A micrometeorite made of magnetic iron or nickel molecules
condensing together in the upper atmosphere
after a meteor captured by Earth's gravity smashed into the atmosphere, melted, vaporized, and cooled so that the metallic elements in the gas coalesced together
into the tiny ball shapes which we were looking at under a microscope.
into the tiny ball shapes which we were looking at under a microscope.
Anyone can collect these from their garden with a magnet.
This is because they were micrometeorites made of iron or nickel molecules condensing together in the upper atmosphere after a meteor captured by Earth's gravity smashed into the atmosphere, melted, vaporized, and cooled so that the metallic elements in the gas coalesced together into the tiny ball shapes which we were looking at.
That son collected a small vial full of micrometeorites with his magnet, and bolted it to his explanatory display for the science fair.
That son collected a small vial full of micrometeorites with his magnet, and bolted it to his explanatory display for the science fair.
The most interesting "encounter" with a meteorite in the history of Magnolia may have occurred at our home in February, 1983.
On February 10, 1983, I was working in my law office in Medford, New Jersey. My wife was in Philadelphia, investigating one of her parolees in her work as a New Jersey State Parole Officer.
Some time shortly after noon, my law office telephone rang, and I picked-up.
"Hi, Pete," a female voice said on the other end. "This is Renee Albright, your next door neighbor on Warwick Road. I hate to tell you this, but your house is on fire."
I laughed and said, "Come on, Renee. Why are you really calling?"
"Pete," she insisted, "No joke! Your house is on fire!"
I said, "WHAAAAAAAAAAAAT???!!!" and I slammed down the telephone and ran out of my office and sped home in my car.
My wife was in her car on the Walt Whitman Bridge on her way back to the District 7 Parole Office. She was listening to KYW Radio when she heard a report about a house on fire "on Warwick Road near Jackson Avenue in Magnolia." She made a bee line for Magnolia, and arrived there before I did, and, lo and behold, it was our house.
I drove up seconds later, just as the firemen were making their entry into the Jackson-Avenue-side door. Inevitably, the event oxygenated the smoldering fire inside, making it explode, squeezing heavy dark smoke out of all upstairs windows, like brown toothpaste, just as our neighbor Renee Albright was snapping her next picture. Our cat Inky bolted out the Jackson Avenue door at the same moment.
After the firemen extinguished the blaze, I entered the house with the Fire Marshall. Except for some sections of the roof, third floor ceiling, and third floor floor, the third floor was a total burn-out. The second floor was burned-out from half-way up the walls to the ceilings. The rest of the house was heavily smoke damaged.
The Fire Marshall found the "hot spot" -- the probable point of fire ignition -- in Rise`'s sewing room on the second floor, where fire cut a deep hole in the wood floor there, near an outlet.
The Fire Marshall saw a charred ironing board laying on its side, and a burned-up iron lying in the "hot spot" hole, and wrote in his report that a hot iron tumbling off the ironing board had started the fire.
I said, "How could it have been the iron? The only un-burnt spot on the top of the ironing board is shaped like an iron. Clearly, the iron was face-down on the ironing board, but it PROTECTED the ironing board where it was face-down because it was COLD! One of the firemen probably accidentally knocked the iron into the hot spot hole."
"Well, what's your theory?" he asked.
"Two alternatives," I answered.
"First, my wife did her sewing in this room. She's a water drinker. She often kept a cup of water on the table here that had her sewing machine. The foot pedal for the sewing machine was under the right edge of the table. It was plugged-into the outlet over there, where the hot spot is. Our cat Inky liked to jump-up on tables and look out the windows at the cars passing by. If Inky jumped-up on this table and knocked over my wife's water and the water landed on her sewing machine's foot pedal, it might have shorted-out the foot pedal, causing it to draw maximum voltage from the plug at the wall. If the breaker for that line in the basement didn't pop open because of corrosion, the wire in the wall might have overheated and started the fire.
"Second, I just noticed something." I squatted in front of the hot spot on the floor. "If you look up from the hot spot on the floor, you'll notice that it lines up with a series of holes through the ceiling of this room, through the third floor floor, through the third floor ceiling, and through the roof.
How the holes through the roof to the hot spot
were seen to be lined-up after our house fire in February, 1983.
If a meteorite did indeed cause the fire,
it punched a hole in the roof, at 1,
cut through the third floor ceiling, at 2,
punched through the third floor floor, at 3,
cut through the second floor ceiling, at 4,
and slammed into the hot spot, at 5, setting it on fire.
"It's as though something came shooting out of the sky and started the fire right here, where the hot spot is.
"A red-hot meteorite?" I concluded with a question mark in my voice.
The Fire Marshall burst out laughing and said, "Sorry. 'Hot iron tumbling off the ironing board' stays. Your ideas are wild exercises of the imagination!"
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