Andy received the following email today from a past member. Quite the interesting little read!!
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Hello Andy:
My name is John Hudak. I'm a former member and past president of the Hamilton Centre from back in the 70's and 80's. I see that Bob Speck is still a member so he will know who I am.
First off I want to say just how heartbroken and sickened I was to hear of this terrible act of vandalism. I trust that the club will be able to recover from this travesty.
Both Bob Speck and myself, along with many other members, helped to build that observatory, from doing the initial surveying of the property with Peter Ashenhurst to the actual construction of the building and installation of the equipment. Peter Ashenhurst, thanks to his connections in the building trade, was able to get some folks to come in and put up the bulk of the building for us gratis - although I'm sure he was able to call in some favours. Bob might remember more about the circumstances. At one point we noticed that the door had been installed backwards. It was to open inwards but instead now opened outwards. It was too late to do anything about it but we quickly realized that maybe this was a plus as you could not easily kick in the door as you would be forcing it inwards against the frame. This turned out to be fortuitous.
Not too long after we had become operational a group of us were going up to the observatory one weekend during the daytime to do some work on the building. I was first to pull into the lot and I noticed that the dome was open. At first I assumed someone was there already ahead of me, but I noticed that there were no other cars there. I then thought maybe someone had been up the previous night to do some observing and somehow had forgotten to close up the dome, but I quickly discounted that scenario at which point my heart sank and the reality of the situation hit me. Sure enough after a few minutes a couple of heads popped out of the dome. Two teenagers had broken into the observatory. As they could not have kicked in the door they somehow managed to climb up on the roof via the low side of the building and got the dome open. By this time several other members had arrived, Bob Speck being one of them. By now these two kids were out and standing on the roof. We ran to the low side of the building to head them off. They looked like they wanted to get down but Bob, in a threatening tone, strongly suggested that they stay up there if they didn't want to come to harm. At this point one of the other members, Mike Holmes if I recall, took off to go to the nearby farm house to call the police. This was of course in the days before cell phones, and I don't think we had installed a phone in the building yet. Eventually the two kids did come down and we held them up against the wall, waiting for the police to arrive. One of them was quite snotty and he said to me that they would both take off and get away as we couldn't possibly catch both of them. I agreed that one of them might get away but that the other one would not, and that they just might require some medical attention afterwards. I was taking karate lessons at the time and had on one of my karate school T-shirts, which they seemed to notice. At this point they calmed down and resigned themselves to their fate. The police eventually arrived and took them away. Fortunately for us they didn't cause too much damage. Unfortunately this is a fact of life when you have a facility out in an isolated location. We did eventually install a phone line, and at one point one of the members attempted to install some sort of alarm system, although I don't know how useful it would have been as it was pretty rudimentary.
Anyway, my thoughts and condolences go out to the members of the Hamilton Centre for your loss. The culprit seems to have been quite determined and I don't know if there is any security system that can prevent that. Hopefully he will be caught. Good luck with your recovery and rebuilding efforts.
John Hudak
