A Ghost from Lighthound's Past

I'm sure I will do a poor job of telling this account...

I was servicing a copy machine today and the woman that called was right there with me while I showed her the issue. The scan glass was dirty even though she said she had cleaned it.. The "copy" room has two 4 ft 4 bulb overhead fixture which one is dead and the other less than adequately bight so I produced my "neck light" (Aleph single cell body, Aleph standard tail cap, McClicky, Promethus Blue Boot, VME head, and M31L) as I always do with my 47 year old eyes and showed her the white out and sludge on the glass. I told her you can see this problem easily when you use a flashlight. I asked, "Don't you have a flashlight? There was a 100% chance of dark when you got out of bed this morning." Awkward silence... It was raining today so I asked if she had packed an umbrella... "Well, no. I don't used umbrellas. I'm not afraid of getting wet." I quipped, "Are you afraid of tripping in the dark?" This brought more silence, a confused look and then a rush to her nearby desk where she produced a coin cell light and she proudly announced, "I do have a flashlight." She had forgot all about it dangling there on her key chain. She gently squeezed it and a very dim, pale, and blue light tried to shine forth. She proceeded to turn off the room light switch to show me how "useful" it was... It was not. She handed it to me and I looked over this "masterpiece" of modern technology and noticed the strangest thing... There was a logo on this little 5mm LED button cell light... An image of an elongated hound dog with letters spelling "Lighthound" on it...

This starts my 25 minute interrogation of where she might have gotten this. I asked, "How about your husband, do you have a husband?" "A husband and a boyfriend," she says. My turn for awkward silence... I went on and on about Lighthound and all the things they sold, all the things I had bought there, and where they had been located. I got no where. I had started to accumulate an audience after my lengthy dissertation concerning flashlights, lanyard supplies, EDC, batteries, chargers, parts, bezels, bulbs, and a host of other things I know little about.. I was just trying to throw out some "dots" hoping she might hear one to connect. She finally commented she probably got it at the local Goodwill.. WHAT!! This does not help me solve this mystery!! I left with more questions than answers and couldn't hardly wait to tell a bunch of crazy folks just like me on the internet that get worked up over things just like this...

I thought about it all the way back to the shop, how that little guy wound up on her key chain... Still pondering over it right now...

Cool story--thanks for sharing skillet. The hound dog would be the last thing I would expect to see around such an "unenlightened" individual!

Man, I miss Lighthound....

Good story, I miss lighthound as well - always preferred them over battery junction. Looking for a new go to US company for all light related needs. So far good experience from going gear.

You know you're a flashaholic when you enjoyed reading skillet's story as much as he did relaying it. :thumbsup:

~ Chance

I miss getting those coin cell lights with my batteries and paracord. RIP Lighthound.

Husband and boyfriend, and the copier glass is dirty? Wash your hands..

Great story tho :thumbsup:

Great, if unfinished, story.

Love how this thread has drawn out the "old timers" that have real memories of Lighthound...

Good tale. Lighthounds owner, John , is a good guy. Definitely one of us. I wish him success in any new endeavours. The physical store was a wonderful place to visit and shop for anyone afflicted with the illumination dependency. I always really liked the corporate logo. I have a thread bare Lighthound t-shirt and quite a few of those really practical freebies that were invariably included with every purchase. Thanks John, best wishes.

skillet said:

.... a very dim, pale, and blue light tried to shine forth ....

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Just hearing 'Lighthound', makes me think of the Joni Mitchell song, "...Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone..." Lighthound was wonderful, and I miss them. The song reference dates me, I know.

Never had a chance to do business with them as they were closing when I started really getting into lights. Great story skillet, that just means there is someone else like us runming around KY. What part of the state were you in?

Great story. Kinda highlights the typical flashlight user and how 'any ole light will do' versus us junkies who know the right tool for the right job makes the task at hand a pleasure instead of a chore.

Right now at my work I'm a temporary office dweller who has been assigned my own cubicle. Woohoo! (Big deal in their world). The office has the latest gadgets for copying, printing, stapling, typing and all that jazz. Well being a rainy day I noticed some cubicles have jacket hooks. Some do not. The younger crowd has hooks, the older crowd (like me) use a chair back or a right angle to hang the wet jacket on.
Being kinda brash I went around the (3) three supply rooms opening drawers and cabinets looking for my own cubicle jacket hook.
One lady asked what I was doing. I responded that I was attempting to follow company safety policy by searching for a jacket hook to avoid potential back injury from bending over to pickup my rain jacket. (Staple and paper cuts are a huge deal to these folks so a back injury means days out of work.) So impressed with my enthusiasm to avoid a reportable incident she tagged along and joined the search.
Last drawer had an old mini Maglite clone. Incan and everything. It was a 2x triple A with a mini mag sized head. Hmmmm... pretty cool. So then my thoughts turned to "this place has a $30,000 printer, 600 pounds of rubber bands, 3.4 tons of fancy paper, enough printer ink to paint a line around the earth 3 or 4 times... and this one cheesy incan flashlight with fing-chung cells installed backwards". (Probably the original batteries.)
At some point I'll add that one to my 'mini mag' collection and replace it with a 2x Double A LED number of some kind. Perhaps in 10 years I'll run into the 2x Double A light and replace it again.

Knowing the story aint as cool as finding a person with a Lighthound this thread reminded my how many everyday people do not fathom the importance of a good flashlight. I don't mean a brand X or a certain tint, but a flashlight that turns on in darkness without a palm whack and stays lit for at least 30 minutes. These days there's no reason that every house, business or office shouldn't have at least one working flashlight bright enough to light a breaker box or find your way down the stairs. 911 shoulda taught every office dweller that. Heck my company gives away flashlight for Christmas for that reason. Yet nobody in the building uses them. Afterall, they have celphones. lol

Tac Gunner said:

Ehatcpsrt of the state were you in?

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I'm interpreting this as a question regarding the location of incident..... Campbellsville, KY in Taylor county

There are otherCPF'ers here in the Bluegrass.

Seeing that Lighthound logo took me by surprise yesterday and that is why I went a little over the top with the questions and such to this soul who had no idea of the lengths I was willing to go to track down where that .25cent light came from.

^^ lol I interperated it as "what the heck did 'word guess' think he was saying ?"... Maybe it thought he was speaking in Zanzabaren? Then I looked at my keyboard and thought "sausage finger syndrome" strikes again.

Meanwhile I wonder if the customer went out and bought a hand gun or a guard dog thinking that crazy copy tech guy was going to abduct her one night... hopefully she at least bought a more modern flashlight... just in case. lol

Lighthound logo was one of the coolest ever. Still miss the Hound.

Yup, typing on a tablet with big thumbs results in those typing incidents lol.

Skillet I have seen a few others floating around here, I would still like to try and have a CPF meet and greet sometime but that's for another topic.

I agree, that logo is pretty cool. I probably would have been the same way had someone had an item from ome of the stores I shop with such as Going Gear, Illumn, etc.

Very cool story.

I miss Lighthound as well. I recall browsing their site one day trying to make up my mind about a new Solarforce purchase and a few accessories then going back to it a day or two later only to be greeted by the dreaded 404. Followed by the final message...

I never did buy the items I had decided on that day, from anyone.

Light Hound was the very first place I bought LiIon. I bought a charger and 3 AW 18650 2200mAh batteries. This was prob back in 2008-2009 not sure if I was a member then. I liked how they had really neat lights and knives.

I know John for a very long time, even from before I became a member of this forum.

Fresh Light said:

Light Hound was the very first place I bought LiIon. I bought a charger and 3 AW 18650 2200mAh batteries. This was prob back in 2008-2009 not sure if I was a member then. I liked how they had really neat lights and knives.

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Only thing I didn't like was once something got sold out, much of the time it was never re-stocked unless it was very popular. This meant that you could take a couple of months off, come back, and there'd be all new items.... Also, that meant you better order anything obscure you wanted from the Hound, NOW. 'cause in a month or two, it might be gone forever. Other than that, I loved the Hound. Put in multiple large orders back when I was working security at the big Con-Ed complex in Astoria. Ironically, it might have been the best security gig I ever had.