Shopsmith Forums

I received the following from Everett this morning. He asked me to post it here. This is a sad day for the Forum and the Shopsmith community in general. I asked him to reconsider. Those of you that have his personal email address might want to send him some words of encouragement.

Quote from Everett:


'I have read some posts suggesting I am an Archivist opposed to a Historian.

Don’t have a clue why they expired my password here.

I’ve used it for several years but now it will not work. I will not request another.

As to the Historian aspect I have spent close to $8,000 traveling coast to coast gathering information and bits of history for book research in just the last few years.

There were years where I did not keep financial records and I shared much of it in the forums.

Nick Engler counseled me not to write a book when I met with him previously. I still worked on it gathering materials, going to libraries in California, Ohio and other locations where Shopsmith History might be found. I did not keep the expense receipts for fuel, car rentals, hotel accommodations, meals etc.

I’ve searched Microfilm records for Newspapers that aren’t digitally preserved, I have interviewed dozens of people some as far away as Australia.

I’ve never asked for a dime from anyone and I have never sold one single part. I gave away restored machines to people who had an interest but lacked the means or access to acquire equipment.

When someone needed something I had an extra of, I gave it to them.

I spent thousands of hours through the years painstakingly restoring documents that I donated to the Shopsmith Community, many of which were donated to me to fill in the blanks of what I found, bought, collected through the years.

I cannot begin to properly thank you, James, Dusty, Russ and others for all the assistance and volunteering to proof read the body of work we collaborated on through the years.

I know our late friend and another of my mentors, Bill Mayo. understood.

May God continue to comfort Ann Mayo. I have not spoken with her since Covid 19 pandemic began. I pray she is still with us, strong and healthy.

Please post my message to other members since I clearly cannot.

I guess it’s time. If I guess I am not a Historian, though I have extensive work in that field over 50 years since attending Texas Tech.

I believe I may now be history here. I believe folks may consider me Archived.

Respectfully,

Everett L. Davis"

It is hard for me to believe that this was intentional. Admin, from time to time, clears out usernames (and maybe passwords) and I would bet that yours got "Archived" as part of one of these purges.

I am saddened to see Everett will no longer be active here. Although he has not lately been a "daily" contributor here he has greatly contributed to the knowledge available here. For myself he has been a great source of information as I started out learning about Shopsmith Tools and it continues today. I have been honored to be able to help with his restoring documents he has done for all of us to have access to that otherwise may not be available.

So sad. I really hope Everett comes back. I have learned immensely from him on this forum in recent years. In addition to the technical aspects, I have developed a greater appreciation for the history behind these tools with every post from Everett and Russ. Your efforts are appreciated and valued.

The way I read it, it sounds like he has taken some offense to the Archivist/Historian labels-someone who knows him would have a better feel for it. Maybe he's just echoing the words used in the original post.

If it is the case that he has taken offense , I think the original posters archivist vs historian message was misconstrued. I don't think there was any intent to belittle Everetts contributions. In fact the message was enthusiastically appreciative . Of course, reading intent and emotion into other peoples messages is a dark art at best !

b

dusty wrote: ↑Thu Oct 28, 2021 2:07 pm It is hard for me to believe that this was intentional. Admin, from time to time, clears out usernames (and maybe passwords) and I would bet that yours got "Archived" as part of one of these purges.

It appears to be way more than that. As he stated in the other thread "I removed myself from all Shopsmith Facebook Groups", it all started with Facebook. He is being bombarded with hundreds of hits on his Google drive. He had over 400 hits in one 24 hour period. Each hit generates an email notice to his Gmail account that gets stored on his Google drive. If he can't get it stopped his drive will fill up. He is also getting hundreds of SPAM emails and advertisements.

As for the SS Forum account, this is what he just sent me about that.

Quote from Everett:

"Now it appears someone is purposefully logging into Shopsmith with my name and repeatedly entering enough bad passwords to lock me out for whatever the lockout period is.

Spoke with Shopsmith and there were several series of groups of multiple attempted logins throughout the night when I was asleep with my phone and tablets secured in another room. "

I hope Everett comes back. If anyone can reach out to him personally I hope that they do.

I've never been on FB but I have heard about the culture there and have seen the same thing on other message boards. Based on his comments about FB and the kind of experiences I can imagine he had there, probably worse than I can imagine really, I can understand his current concerns. And while I don't know the details, if someone was trying to log in as him it would not surprise me if it was a bad actor from FB stalking Everett online to harass him.

I do hope he returns and that this nonsense from another place ends.

Would another file repository be easier to manage, i.e. less work on Everett than Google Drive for this? When I first saw the post from Everett regarding Facebook and his Google Drive section, I wondered if maybe GitHub or some other file site might be an advantage. Google Drive is more of a shared network folder which tends to work better for smaller groups to access, whereas GitHub is a file repository which scales to any number of users to access. Just a thought. I don't know if this would help or not.

I am very sorry if Everett took offense in my archivist vs. historian comments. I have great respect and appreciation for both. Historians often do archival work and archivists, because of their involvement with their collections, write histories. I have done both, and would love to be working as either a historian or an archivist instead of my current computer technology career. My comments were made from my observation of work product, and I could obviously be dead wrong. When I was working in a community archive we searched out and collected documents, took actions to repair or preserve them, and made them available to the public through both a reading room and digitizing and publishing them on the web. We wrote technical documents on collection preservation as well as histories using our collections. But the main product that the public saw from our work were the collections themselves. The work of archivists is hard, and very often thankless, work. So I wrote my comments with great admiration and respect. Everett has done great work that is invaluable to our ShopSmith family.

I also know that historian work is incredibly hard. Doing research in musty archives, with century old documents, is the fun part. Staying current with theory and technology can also be pleasurable. But organizing, compiling, and analyzing the collected data to make sense of it and develop new understandings of its place in the historical conversation is really the difficult part.

Being new here (almost 5 months now, I think) my observations were made from that scan of time, so please take any of my comments in these forums with that in mind. I too hope Everett returns, I would miss his wisdom. I certainly know that there were other factors involved that most likely have had much more impact in his experience here, but with this post I just wanted to try to make clear my intention and heart-felt level of respect.

Many thanks to John for posting Everett’s concerns.

Everett is a well respected hobbyist who loved his shopsmith and others enough to help and support them on his dime , like many he has done a lot for the company . I would vote to have his login information restored . I believe he has earnt more respect than that . JMO