By Gerard J. St. John

In 2015, Catherine and I celebrated our 49^th wedding anniversary with a trip to the Hudson Valley.  One of our stops was at West Point, New York, the home of the United States Military Academy.  Restrictions on travel within the military base were tight, a result of the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001.  One of the options available to us was a tour of the West Point military cemetery. 

We did not expect that any of the grave sites would be of particular significance to us.  However, a few of the sites did attract our attention.  One was the grave of George Armstrong Custer.  We had been to the Little Big Horn Battlefield, in Montana.  We knew about Custer, and that his remains were among the few left intact by the avenging squaws after the battle.  Most of the cavalrymen’s remains are buried in a mass grave at the base of a memorial atop Last Stand Hill.  Another attention-getting name was Norman Schwartzkopf, the commander of American forces in the Gulf War.  His father was also buried nearby.  Norman outranked his father, but the biggest difference between the two at the West Point cemetery was the modest gravestone chosen by Norman, in comparison to the elaborate memorial chosen by his father.

            Our guide also pointed out gravestones that had small stones or pebbles on them.  We were told that this was a Jewish custom.  They are called “stones of remembrance.”  The stones serve several purposes.  They let everyone know that the gravesite was recently visited.  They affirm that the spiritual remains are immortal, just like a rock.  And they are evidence of prayers for the deceased.  We were impressed by this stoney tradition.  Today, if you visit our family gravesite you will find that the gravestone is topped by two small stones, one for Greg and one for Ger.

            Rock formations were common where I grew up.  The bridle path alongside Pennypack Creek (which we pronounced “Crik”) was dotted with outcroppings of large boulders.  The Solly Avenue recreation center, across the street from Father Judge High School, had been a quarry back in the 1700s.  It provided building material for many of the elaborate stone homes and churches in the neighborhood – and maybe even for the large dam on the Pennypack that most of us thought was a natural waterfall.

            One afternoon when we were walking along the Pennypack, Dad picked up a small stone and threw it into the murky water.  Much to my surprise, the stone bounced off the surface of the water, and bounced again before it sank into the creek.  Wow!  How did that happen?

            It is a matter of basic physics.  When a spinning stone strikes water at a small angle, the water transmits an upward force to the bottom of the stone.  If the force is great enough, it causes the stone to rise up out of the water.  The faster the speed of the stone, the greater the amount of force generated by its contact with the water, and the longer the bounce.  Skipping stones is one of those things that can be enjoyed by anyone virtually anywhere in the world.  Wherever there are people, there are stones and water – and it seems that many of us have a natural instinct to throw stones into bodies of water.  It is an activity that is not limited by geographic boundaries, wealth, education, language or cultural background.  Everyone does it.  At some places, there are even contests to determine who can coax the most skips out of a stone.  The current Guinness World Record is 88 skips.  That is a lot of skips.

            Scientific articles say that the angle of contact with the surface of the water must be less than 45 degrees; and that the optimum angle is 20 degrees.  Any stone that strikes the water at an angle greater than 45 degrees will sink.  I can buy that.  Experts also say that to generate 88 skips, the stone must be thrown at 25 miles per hour with a spin of 14 revolutions per minute.  I don’t believe it.  Somewhere among my memorabilia is a certification of the Philadelphia Department of Recreation attesting to the fact that I once threw a baseball 74 miles per hour, well above the 25 mph target.  The certification says nothing about the rate of spin, but I used to have a record player that operated at 45 rpm, and my baseball pitches spun a whole lot faster than those small records – but still my stones sink after the third or fourth bounce.

            I wonder what Eddie Feigner would have said if he was the holder of that 88-skip Guinness Record.  Feigner was probably the greatest softball pitcher of all time.  He “barnstormed” the world with his unique four-man softball team, winning more than 90% of the time.  His fastball was clocked at more than 104 miles per hour.  Keep in mind that a softball pitcher is only 43 feet from the batter, a lot closer than is the case in baseball.  Feigner’s fastball went by the batter in about one-third of a second, hardly enough time for any batter to react, much less hit the ball.  When asked what it was like to dominate a sport, Feigner complained that softball was a “peanut sport” that nobody cared about.  He said it was “like being the world champion nose-blower.”  I suspect that being the world champion stone skipper would not have improved his outlook.