For a long time I talked of putting a site on the internet, but procrastination and inertia kept me from doing anything. My brother Mark presently grew tired of hearing all the talk and put his foot firmly up my jumper by way of encouraging me to get on my ass and do something about it. Without that encouragement I would still be just talking. When I know what I want to do on the site, but not how to do it, Mark tells me how. When I don't know what I want to do, he'll tell me that too, and how to do it.

I've found that letters to the editors of our 'local' newspaper, if printed at all, were edited not only for brevity and clarity, as the paper says they might be, but also for content disagreeable to them, so I had to find somewhere else to have my say. And, I wanted to make some of my father's historical miscellany available to as many people as possible. My father, Cal Clayton, started squirreling stuff away when all but a few were still throwing it out, so there is fifty-years' accumulation to look at. I hoped, too, that I might get help in finding the identities of unnamed people in some photographs. For these reasons I started 'porthopehistory.com'. At least I think those are the reasons.

The 'us' in 'contact us' is my brother Mark Clayton, my father Cal Clayton [in spirit] and me. Mark makes sure things work technically in both Firefox and IE. I use Firefox almost exclusively, I don't concern myself with IE. I work on a 20 inch wide-screen LCD monitor set at a resolution of 1680 by 1050 and recommend that setting for viewing this site. If you should be offended by anything you see here, that will be my doing and, at least in part, your own.

contact us