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continued
This miscellaneous group got together just to go in caves. We weren't formal about anything. We never had official meetings as such. Shortly after we received our charter, Dick Sanders came down with polio, and it looked like he might be laid up or perhaps paralyzed for the rest of his life. When he got home from the hospital, we decided we had to keep in touch with him and we made him secretary of the cave club. We held a few informal meetings whenever a few of us dropped in to see him. We had a minimum amount of rules in our charter, and one was put in on account of knowing Dick so well; that any three members getting together constituted a quorum to conduct business. Fond as we were of Dick, we knew that he had a great delight for red tape. He could get you screwed up in more ways than you could believe. He liked to do everything in the most complicated way there was. When Betty and Larry were going to drop by Wytheville on their first visit, he gave them directions to my house. The result was that they drove up and down the streets for several hours until daylight and they were able to find someone to ask. If he had given them one method of finding the house, they'd have been OK. But, no, he gave them three ways and the result was total confusion.
Dick Sanders writes: "As it turned out, I was too much of a burgeoning bureaucrat and red-tape artist for the Wytheville Grotto. While I was at Warm Springs, GA, they held their second annual meeting, and elected Betty Sabatinos as Secretary."--Letter dated January 20, 1975.
Jean continues her narration with some of the trips and experiences which she and the other grotto members had in learning various caving techniques.
Our first trip as a Grotto was to Cass Cavein Pocahontas County, WV, with "Pete" leading the trip. Larry and Betty Sabatinos and Jean Lowry attended on July 29, 1950. The next day the group visited Poor Farm Cavewith Bob Lutz and Andy Clark of the Elkins Grotto.
We began to map some of the caves, and we found that Earl Thierry had beaten us into the area. Earl was an engineering graduate from VPI, and had lived briefly in the Wytheville area. He had done a lot of one-man exploring while he was there, and had drawn a series of the most remarkable compass and pace cave maps. We contacted Earl, who was by then living over in Norfolk. Once in awhile we'd manage to get together when they were having some sort of regional camporee. Earl was a really good caver.
We were a bunch of amateurs, and were going around into all the easy caves. Occasionally, you know, you'd come to places where you'd need to have a ladder or some rope. I checked a book out of the VPI Library, by an Englishman named Peacock, I think it was, that was all about mountaineering. It was full of such useful things as how to rope yourself up when you're going up a glacier. Peacock further remarked that after roping the whole party together, it was advisable to walk perpendicular to the crevasse, because if you walked parallel to it, this only increased funeral expenses. Well, this book described the use of prusik loops on ropes for climbing out of a crevasse. This was the first we'd heard of such loops. Peacock did mention that if you made a habit of falling into crevasses, you should carry a portable winch. We didn't have a portable winch. So, we hung a rope off the bottom of a bridge one night and Wayne, Doris, Larry, Betty, and I tried to learn how to prusik. We had the chest rope a little too long. With a little bit of practice though, we got the hang of it and it turned out to be a very useful technique. Then, Larry decided to make us some cable ladders. He had read descriptions of De Joli French ladders, and had seen Petrie using one in Raines Cave, WV. He sent off for airplane cable and duraluminum rods which were about twenty feet long. He was going to make them in his kitchen. However, Larry and I have much in common in some ways; we procrastinate. Those rods lay there, diagonally across the kitchen floor, for a period of several months with Betty having to step over them every time she went from the stove to the refrigerator, and getting more and more annoyed about it. Finally she got after him until he did cut them up and made the ladder. I still have one of the sections and it is used by East Carolina cavers when they go up to Virginia. This first ladder he made was a fifty-foot section, and weighed about l2 pounds. This was much stronger than the original specifications called for; he couldn't believe that they were adequate, so he multiplied everything by five!
In an interview with Anne Whittemore, February 1977, Larry noted that:' "The first ladder was fifty feet long with rungs of 5/16-inch cable. On the second and subsequent ladders the rungs were reduced to 3/8-inch cable. I made all the ladders in the VAR through the 1950's. They all had handmade brummel hooks. I made several for the VPI and DC Grottos, for Marguerite Klein, and finally Camp and Trail Outfitters wanted some. When the Wytheville and VPI Grottos joined forces, we had over 600 feet of cable ladder available to cavers,"
Roy Charlton relates some data on the early usage of ladders: we started out using rope ladders. When the' Sabatinos' moved into Virginia, we immediately jumped in and made a bunch of steel cable ladders. I made several hundred feet: 125 feet of my own, gave Earl fifty feet or so, and we used Betty's and Larry's ladders. The longest ladder I ever hung was 325 feet. We threw it into Mott Hole, WV. We tied it to a tree a little bit from the edge of the entrance and had a few feet on the ground.
The next time we decided to make a lighter ladder; he made it half as heavy. I never cared for his light ladders; when you started climbing down it, you found it hadn't unrolled smoothly. It would hang in a snarl. The first person down would have to hang upside-down from his safety rope while he untangled the snarl of the ladder. That was no fun at all. Kind of cut into your fingers a good bit too.
The first time we tried out the light ladder was at the old Shot Tower at Jackson's Ferry on the New River. Today, it has been restored, and a locked door prevents you from going in. But in those days, it hadn't been repaired. There was a square hole in the rotten boards of the floor, and we could look down into a natural sinkhole underneath. It was as deep as the Shot Tower was high, with water at the bottom.
We decided that this was a good place to practice going down something vertical, with no one there to watch us. Well, Larry and Betty went down first. I was last, and because of nervous tension, I guess, my hands began cramping as I neared the bottom. I had to go down the last fifteen feet hanging on with my elbows, with my arms through the rungs.
Larry and Betty weren't going to take any chances on loosing me on the way up. When they got up, they threw down a safety rope and I tied it on me. Before I could get my feet on the ladder, they began hauling me up. I went up hand-over-hand, with my feet kicking madly trying to get on the ladder; never did. I had some really bruised ribs for awhile. That, at least, was an experience that gave us a little confidence. continued
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