Let me urge everyone to take special care in watching the solar eclipse next Monday. Aug. 21.

I speak from experience.

Phoenix area residents watched a similar partial solar eclipse in September 1960. I wasin the eighth grade.

I was very enthused about anything to do with space. I couldn‘t wait to see the eclipse. To protect my eyes, I wore a smoked glass visor from an old Steve Canyon helmet (nothing more than a toy) and two pair of dark sunglasses.

I did what they said to do on TV. I looked at it for short periods of time. And I still damaged my retina. At first I didn’t know anything was wrong. I went to school the next day and looking at one of my textbooks, I noticed I could block out two letters in a word. A closer look showed me that it was the image of the eclipse I could see. I had burned that image on my retina.

I went to drafting class and I could not see if two lines would meet in a corner. The damage had been done. There was no sensation in my eye that this damage was taking place. Yes, the spot is still on my right eye. When I get an eye exam, I look at the letter next to the one I am reading to see what the letter is.

So, I urge everyone to take special care in looking at the eclipse. I wouldn’t trust any other source than to watch it on your iPad or use the old trick of taking two paper plates and poking a pinhole in one. You can then hold the two plates in front of each other with the hole in the plate closest to the sun. The sun’s coverage will be about 66 percent in Fountain Hills.

You can see from the illustration on this page how much of the sun will be covered.

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We had another good turnout at this year’s Italian dinner fundraiser last Saturday night.

Proceeds from the night go to the River of Time Museum. The event originated as a spaghetti dinner fundraiser in the 1990s. Board member Bruce Hansen, who passed away last year, and I planned the first dinner and prepared the food with the assistance of another board member Terry Merrell.

It was advertised as an all-you-can-eat affair. We cooked the food at the Men’s Club and then took it to the old Community Center (now the Fountain Hills Theater building), where it was served. We took over the former Chamber building at Fountain Park. We opened our first museum in that building and we stopped doing the dinners.

Several years later, Bob Thomson, then president of the River of Time Museum Foundation, suggested the spaghetti dinners be resumed. “They were a good way to raise money,” he said.

We had no idea how successful resuming the spaghetti dinners would be. The auction was added along the way and that really upped our revenue. We billed it as a white elephant auction. People donated items ranging from old pictures to computers.

We also have changed it from a spaghetti dinner to an Italian dinner. Some parents had complained about the “messy” spaghetti.

There was no total as of Monday afternoon as to how well we did, When I was finishing writing this column, I do know that attendance was down slightly but over 300 were still there that night.

That isn’t bad for a summer event in Fountain Hills!