Nor’East ’26 Scraps

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The run of days from Juneteenth to July 4 at least, and even better to Nunavut Day (July 9), would be a fine time to slow down, like between Christmas and New Year’s Day, only warmer and without the mad runup to December 25. Back to posting around July 6.

Thousands of impressions flitter by on the road, most instantly forgotten when literally on the road – driving, you need to be in the moment, or else – or quickly forgotten, when “on the road” means you’re out and about somewhere that isn’t home. Still, a handful of details stick, even without photos. But photos help.

Maine

I call it “Self-portrait with Goth Prom.” Poster spotted in downtown Bangor.

In the Maine Statehouse, a flat-ish object of a different kind.

Lincolnville, on the coast of not far from Belfast.

Lincolnville, Maine

Carnivorous whelks. I was frankly ignorant about carnivorous whelks, and glad to learn a little about them. Because what a great name for a snail.

Too bad I wasn’t hungry in Belfast. I’d have had tacos.

The Penobscot River and the Penobscot Narrows Bridge. A literal and scenic highpoint on that part of US 1 as it winds through near-coastal Maine. The bridge includes an observatory, unfortunately not open in April. Driving over the bridge itself was another pleasure of coastal Maine.

Helen’s Restaurant in Ellsworth. Tasty fish and chips. Haddock, specifically. What do you take for a haddock? “Well, sometimes I take-a aspirin, sometimes I take-a calomel.” It was some years before I learned that calomel was something I’d never take in a million years.

Massachusetts

Our Lady of Czestochowa Parish, Turners Falls.

The church was closed. So was Poet’s Seat Tower.

As the tower appeared more than 100 years ago.

Shelburne.

Massachusetts 112 (Route 112) in Hamilton County. Car commercial driving.

Goshen Cemetery, just off Route 112.

Ohio

A solid bank building in Niles, across the street from where William McKinley was born. The Dollar Savings Bank Co. sounds like the kind of place that George Babbitt would mention, but distain in favor of a bank with longstanding ties to the best business men in Zenith.

An Admiral Dewey clock at the McKinley Birthplace Museum. A textbook case, that Dewey, of how fleeting fame usually is.

Passing through northeast Ohio intrigued me greatly about that part of the state. Akron, Canton, Youngstown, Austintown — all places I can imagine going, and enjoying the visits. See ’em before the reverse migration really gets underway.

Further west, the drive on the Lincoln Highway (US 30) was a pleasure: mostly four lanes, rarely crowded. The flat farmlands don’t qualify as conventionally scenic, but the budding springtime fecundity has a lot to recommend it, even as a strictly visual pleasure: the bright greens of new leaves, the brown and grays of the fields recently plowed, small roads heading off usually at right angles to the main road, a run between Upper Sandusky and I-75 near Lima with few buildings of any kind, except distant farm structures.

Downtown Lima: the Allen County courthouse, seen from North St.

Looks like my kind of breakfast place. Closed on Sunday anyway.

Another North St. detail. Spiderman sitting on — something. A large scoop of strawberry ice cream?

Saint Rose Church in the hamlet of Saint Rose, not far east of the Ohio-Indiana line. A Cross-Tipped Church.

Pennsylvania

The hills at the edge of Punxsutanwney.

The drive west across Pennsylvania began across the Delaware River from Port Jervis, NY, taking US 209 southwest through part of Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. Bet the straight-ish, two-lane road is busier in peak recreation season in the Recreation Area, but in April, I booked along without encountering much in the way of traffic. Trees were still budding, but it wouldn’t be long before some stretches of the highway would pass through green tunnels. The sunlight was already casting green leaf shadows on the road.

Watch Groundhog Day, and the impression is that the festivities are held in the center of town — which they are, in the Punxsutanwney stand-in of Woodstock, Illinois. Go to Punxsutanwney itself and learn that the February 2 fest is a few miles from town in a place called Gobbler’s Knob.

Gobbler's Knob

One more Phil. Iron Phil.

The clerk at the Gobbler’s Knob gift shop took pains to let me know that the site, and the festivities, were overseen by a nonprofit, not the commonwealth. Outside is the nonprofit’s bus, or at least I assume that, probably used to ferry people from town to GK and vice-versa, to help deal with the popularity of the event.

I like a good local festival as much as anyone, but February 2 is a deal-breaker. Can’t Phil come out again on August 2 to predict how much longer summer is going to last?

One More (Indiana)

Miami Chief Francois Godfroy stands at the corner of Main Street and Huntington Street/Indiana 18 in Montpelier. Well, maybe it’s supposed to remind passersby of the chief more than actually depict him.

A Daughters of the American Revolution historical marker says: Reserved by U.S. to Chief Francois Godfroy of the Miami Nation of Indians by treaty at St. Mary’s, Ohio, 6 October 1818. 3,849 acres on Salamonie River at La Petite Prairie, Harrison Township, Blackford County: reserve lands sold 1827, 1836.

Waymarking says: “The statue was made in Venice, CA in 1960 for the Tom Wood Pontiac dealership in Indianapolis. Later it was in front of the Indian Museum at Eagle Creek Park In Indianapolis. After the museum closed, the statue (of more a plains Indian than a NE Indiana tribe) was obtained by Chief Larry Godfroy — a descendant who presented it to the City of Montpelier and they erected it as a monument in 1984.”

Maria Stein Shrine of the Holy Relics

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It’s always good to see that visitors are welcome.

To be a visitor at the Maria Stein Shrine of the Holy Relics, however, you have to make your way to Maria Stein, Ohio, a census-designated place in Mercer County whose population is just over 1,000. As for Mercer County, its western edge is the border with Indiana and the nearest city of any size is Lima, to the northeast. The region isn’t precisely remote – this is the Midwest, after all – but it isn’t overrun with visitors.

The shrine rates a point-of-interest on my Rand McNally Road Atlas (Maria Stein Shrine, it says), and I find that kind of thing intriguing, especially when I’m going to be nearby anyway. So I visited the shrine on the last day of my trip, on the way home.

The shrine is part of the former Motherhouse of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Precious Blood (who relocated to Dayton 100+ years ago). Also part of the complex is the Adoration Chapel, where I went first.

The relic shrine is adjacent to the chapel. It’s all about the relics. As it should be.

“The Maria Stein Shrine of the Holy Relics houses over 1,200 relics of the Saints and the True Cross,” says the shrine’s web site. “95% of the relics in the Maria Stein collection are First Class. The first relics were brought to the area by Fr. Francis de Sales Brunner, who founded most of the local churches and convents, bringing priests, brothers, and sisters of the Precious Blood communities to America.

“After his death, the significant collection of his relics, including a Calendar of Relics, and the bodily remains of St. Victoria, were under the care of the Sisters. In 1872, Fr. J. M. Gartner, a priest from Milwaukee, acquired 175 relics for safekeeping in the New World. When he brought them to America, his original intent was to have a kind of traveling exhibit. But the faithful wanted them kept together and suggested finding a permanent place for the collection.

“When he heard about the many relics under the care of the Sisters of the Precious Blood, he approached the Sisters, and together they gathered all of the relics into one collection, and we became the Shrine of the Holy Relics in 1875.”

Besides reliquaries large and small, the shrine also includes some fine woodwork and stained glass.

A minute’s drive from the shrine, on the two-lane highway Ohio 119, is the site of St. John the Baptist Catholic Church. Site because it is a ruin. Or was the day in April when I visited, as it’s probably gone by now. From the looks of things, demolition was in progress.

How is it that a late 19th-century brick church was being razed? I was aghast for a little while, but a posted notice told me that the church had been severely damaged by fire in May 2025.

A damn shame, but it turns out — something I didn’t know buzzing down Ohio 119, seeing church after church in otherwise tiny towns — that this part of Ohio is home to many immigrant Catholic churches, mostly tall and brick and over 100 years old. The cluster of churches even has a name: Land of the Cross-Tipped Churches. Dang, now this is another place I want to re-visit. This happens to me fairly often.

The Armstrong Air & Space Museum

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I’d never had any Moon Cheeze. Or even heard of it.

But I did eat Space Food Sticks from time to time in the days of Apollo and maybe a little after. As the ad says, Moon Cheeze was made in Wapakoneta, Ohio, hometown of Neil Armstrong.

“It seems to have been just regular American cheddar cheese,” Weird Universe says. “Only the packaging was special. It came in a container shaped like the state of Ohio.” In the ad above, it looks like an astronaut is drifting away from the safety of the Command and Service modules, like the (dead) astronaut did in 2001.

On the last day of my recent trip, I diverted a bit to Wapakoneta to visit the Armstrong Air & Space Museum, which I’d bypassed a decade earlier, and was rewarded for my effort when I saw the Moon Cheeze ad and a lot more.

It’s conveniently located near a Waffle House.

Worth the price of admission by itself: the Gemini 8 capsule, in which Neil Armstrong and David Scott nearly bought the space farm due to a malfunctioning thruster.

They survived, of course, and in fact Scott is still alive at 94. Besides Gemini 8, he flew on Apollo 9 and Apollo 15. Being seventh man to walk on the Moon doesn’t get you a museum, however; that’s reserved for being first. Fame is funny that way.

Neil Armstrong and David Scott. NASA public domain photo.

The museum isn’t large, but it does feature a number of good artifacts. The Smithsonian and the Kansas Cosmosphere shouldn’t have everything.

An H1 engine, which were used on Saturn 1 and Saturn 1B rockets.

Newspapers from around the world covering the Apollo 11 landing.

Some artwork. Looks like a spacesuit, but it’s a statue depicting Armstrong’s suit.

A painting from 1969.

It seems that the Armstrong and Aldrin didn’t report the alarming apparition of President Kennedy hovering over the lunar surface. Conspiracy theorists, take note.

Flag Day

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Every year since 2014 (except for 2020) old Chicago-area friends have come to my house on the second Saturday of June for conversation and grilled meat, and so it was yesterday. The Gabfest, we call it. Twice over the years the weather has driven us inside for the event, but usually it’s on my deck, and so it was yesterday. Always a delight. This year two out-of-town old friends were able to join us for the first time, for an extra measure of delight.

A few years ago, I started decorating the yard with flags for the Gabfest, and so it was yesterday. As it happens, Flag Day, “the runty stepchild among American national holidays,” is around this time of year, and of course happens to be today. So I left the flags up after the event. Also, just after we finished last night, it rained pretty hard, and I left the flags out to dry today.

These four represent places I’ve lived, left to right: Texas, Tennessee, Chicago (and its suburbs) and Osaka.

Also a few years ago, I acquired small flags from each country I’ve visited, including the U.S. and the DDR, which was most certainly a country in 1983, but not such subnational entities as Hong Kong and Macao. The small flags go in the pot plants lining the edge of the deck.

At first 31, but adding others as necessary to make the current total of 36. So 40 flags in all. Guess you could call it Flags Day around here.

Warren, Ohio

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An example of nonlinear tourism, a term I just made up, is my visit to Warren, Ohio. Linear tourism, another term I just (logically) made up, is picking a destination and sticking to it. That isn’t a bad approach, some of the time. But at other times, one follows an urge to go that next place on the map, to see what you can see. Nonlinear tourism has an element of spontaneity, obviously, and it probably isn’t the best way to plan a long trip.

Sometimes the rewards are worth the slight meander. There I was in Niles, done with my visit to McKinley sites, and I thought: Warren’s just up the road. So I went. Warren is the seat of Trumbull County, and a prosperous place 100-plus years ago – Packard got its start there, for one thing – and so the county could afford a grand courthouse in 1895. That was worth the side trip right there.

Front and back.

The buildings ringing the courthouse were also worth a look. Warren might not be the industrial hub it once was (though Ohio is making a comeback in that regard), but it isn’t in bad shape, from the looks of things.

That’s what commercial buildings need more of: onion domes.

One more place in Warren before I headed west: a replica lunar module on a mock lunar surface.

It’s called “First Flight Lunar Module.” Its web site says: “Neil Armstrong and his family made their home in Warren, Ohio, for a time when he was a young boy. An interest in flying developed at an early age and on July 26, 1936, at the age of 6, young Neil and his father, Stephen, embarked on his first flight in a Ford Tri-Motor airplane – a Tin Goose – from Warren Airways on Parkman Road, now the site of the Apollo 11 First Flight Lunar Module…

Replicas of Gemini 8 and the Apollo 11 Command/Service Module are also at hand. (And the Escape Tower and part of the third stage, too.)

“Neil’s achievements and ties to the local community inspired retired area photographer Pete Perich’s dream to create a memorial honoring Armstrong. Through the vision of Pete’s daughter, Linda Carpenter, and the technical assistance of Lisa Goetsch, the long-time dream began to become a reality in the summer of 2001.”

Cool. Another benefit of nonlinear tourism for me.

The National McKinley Birthplace Memorial

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Recently in Niles, Ohio, I had an encounter with one of the four assassinated presidents. If you go to the right place in that town (pop. 18,400), you can’t miss him.

Not just him either. Note the busts surrounding President McKinley, which are men associated with him in one way or another. Hay I knew; Bliss I had to look up.

The most direct route between Punxsutawney, Pa. and Lima, Ohio, passes pretty close to Niles. I had a little extra time, by design, on the second-to-last day of my recent trip. Niles happens to be the birthplace of William McKinley, and in our time, home of the National McKinley Birthplace Memorial and the McKinley Birthplace Home and Research Center – that’s two entities, a block apart.

The Birthplace Memorial is imposing and grand, another edifice designed by McKim, Mead & White.

The memorial has two wings, one a public library, the other an auditorium sporting McKinley artifacts, and a collection of flags.

William and Ida dressed, I believe, for his second inauguration in 1901.

As mentioned, the McKinley Birthplace Home and Research Center is a block from the memorial. It’s considerably more modest.

It’s also a replica, and apparently not a very close one, the original house having burned down almost 90 years ago. Still, looks are free (like at the memorial), so I had a look.

On display are a number of McKinley-adjacent artifacts. I liked the plates especially. One features the president himself.

Another features Admiral Dewey. How often do you hear about him any more? Even less than McKinley.

The president’s maternal grandmother’s gravestone is propped up against a wall. I suppose it was at risk of completely falling apart wherever it was, and (I hope) it was replaced in situ.

I liked this as well.


I looked up James Stevenson McKinley (d. 1847) on Find a Grave and that inspired me to look a little further into the McKinley ancestry. James’ father was David “The Patriot” McKinley (d. 1840). David’s father was John “The Wagonmaster” McKinley (d. 1779). John’s father was David “The Weaver” McKinley (d. 1760). That David’s father was James “The Trooper” MacKinlay (d. 1760), back in Ireland, at which point the nicknames peter out.

Punxsutawney Phil, Spirit Animal

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The strange thing about Groundhog Day, to me at least, isn’t its taproots in northern European folklore or even that weather forecasting based on mammal movements has been known for centuries if not millennia. Or that Germans brought its celebration to North America and that the event morphed in various ways, or that it became more widely known internationally because of a certain very good movie. Or even that the town of Punxsutanwney, Pennsylvania, has capitalized on Groundhog Day.

What mystifies me is why, among all the possible folkloric-flavored immigrant quasi-holidays, Groundhog Day has consistently been featured on calendars for longer than I can remember. It puzzled me as a kid, since I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen such a creature, and what I heard about the day involved some nonsensical thing in faraway Pennsylvania. That might have been childish provincialism at play, but even now it still strikes me as odd that so many Americans pay attention to the day, or at least have heard of it.

Just for grins – because I knew I wouldn’t get a compelling answer – I asked ChatGPT, “When did Groundhog Day start appearing on calendars?” I’ll boil the answer down for you: “Dunno. That’s just the way it’s been for years, Jack.” Maybe that’s how educators can get around AI cheating: assign essays on questions that don’t really have any answer. How many pancakes does it take to shingle a doghouse?* – that kind of thing. The learning isn’t in the finding an answer, but in the writing.

* Actually there is an answer: 42. Because oranges can’t fly, submarines have no doors and ice cream has no bones.

On the way home in late April, I spent the night in Punxsutanwney and had a gas the next morning looking for as many depictions of Punxsutanwney Phil as I could find. It’s an endless pursuit, something like looking for all the Lincolns in Springfield, Illinois.

This one was the closest to my motel. It was at my motel.

Downtown Phils, such as in front of a florist and an optometrist and a “beauty bar.”

In front of a bakery and on a trash can and at the post office.

Of course he had his own shop. I bought postcards there.

The tallest Phil, I think. I had to park the car to get a good look.

Patriotic Phil. We could do worse for the semiquincentennial.

Phil carved from wood.

Metal Phil, one of four at some of the crosswalks that included a switch on the pole to let the lights know you were waiting.

Serious Phil.

The city flag.

Actually, this one looks more like a cartoon bear. But I’ll bet it’s Phil anyway.

He’s everywhere.

Then there’s official Phil. He and mate Phyllis live behind glass, in the “burrow.”

The groundhog clearly counts as Punxsutanwney’s spirit animal, a concept that seems to be elastic enough to include mascot and whatever else you care to pack in. More towns ought to have them.

Vanderbilt Mansion National Historic Site

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Up the road a piece from FDR’s home in Hyde Park, one of the Vanderbilts had a mansion built in the late 19th century on a gentle bluff above the Hudson. The river valley wasn’t an obscure choice by him or the elder Roosevelt or any of the other wealthy mansion-builders of the period. Pleasure travelers had started coming to the Hudson River Valley in the early 19th century, representing the first U.S. tourist boom.

They came for good vistas, for one thing. So did I.

“In the works of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper and the paintings of Thomas Cole and others of the Hudson River School, travelers in the region encountered the nation’s first literary and artistic movements,” says a summary of The Birth of American Tourism: New York, the Hudson Valley, and American Culture, 1790-1835 by Richard H. Gassan (2008).

In effect, those writers and painters were the influencers of their day, though not quite at the frenetic pace of, say, Instagram. I’ve decided not to worry about the influence of, say, Instagram on modern tourism. Overtourism is a real problem in a narrow range of places, and best dealt with locally, but most criticism of mass tourism is snobbery anyway: why, those people are going to all the wrong places for the wrong reasons and thinking and doing the wrong things when they get there! Bah.

The latest in my series on NPS fire hydrants. This one, a little worse for wear, is on the Vanderbilt site.

The Vanderbilts were known for commissioning mansions, of course, so many that I suggest they be known as the mansion-building Vanderbilts, like the Lighthouse-building Stevensons. Though not, curiously, the Commodore himself. He had other things to do, like amassing a vast fortune in the first place, and founding one of the nation’s great (ahem) universities.

Anyway, grandson Frederick William Vanderbilt (d. 1938) thought that the Hudson River Valley was just the place for a country estate, which it is, so he tasked McKim, Mead & White, architects to robber barons and other deep-pocketed clients, to design it. Frederick and his wife Louise clearly wanted a Euro-style palace on the Hudson, and that’s what they got.

Stately. That’s the word for it. Like Wayne Manor. Well, in some iterations.

Inside.

Palatial and museum-like.

The skylight was pretty cool, bringing in light all the way to the lowest floor through this aperture.

The effort to build and decorate the place must have been considerable, and I hope it provided wages for a lot of workers for a long time, both in the development and maintenance. But it’s a little sterile, for all its architectural pedigree.

Our guide — you need a guide to visit the interior, though the grounds are essentially a public park (and what a park) — said that the Park Service didn’t mind having the mansion, but the Vanderbilt site was more about preserving a long stretch of the right bank of the Hudson River and its views. As I took in some of those views, I had to agree.

Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site

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A lot of museum artifacts are behind glass. Some really old, brittle and famous items are encased in an atmosphere of nitrogen, the better to extend their existence, I understand (and nitrogen anoxia sounds like an unfortunate accidental way to die). That might have been the case with the underwhelming display of the overwhelmingly historic Book of Kells. But in any case, glass interferes with our right as iPhone-carrying tourists to take really good pictures with almost no effort.

An example: a stuffed bird I saw in April.

The picture might be lousy due to the glass, but the artifact – and some other stuffed birds in the same case – did something a history museum ought to do: teach. I learned, looking there at a bird dead more than a century, that as a boy in the early 1890s Franklin Delano Roosevelt pursued a taxidermy hobby.

I’d come to Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site in Hyde Park, New York, the flush of spring, on my way home from the Northeast. I made time for the site because a visit had been impossible in October.

I understand that during FDR’s boyhood, the place wasn’t quite as wooded, but even so the trees (and thus birds) must have been plentiful. One of the paths on the grounds.

Views from the second story of the mansion.

Though the greenery obscures the splendid Hudson River, even a short look around gives you some idea why James and Sara Roosevelt thought building a residence here was a good idea, and why Franklin was deeply attached to the place all his life.

Is it important to know that boy FDR shot and stuffed birds (though he later had them stuffed professionally)? In and of itself, maybe not. I’ve heard about him all my life, read books about him and seen documentary films, and visited the FDR D.C. memorial, and somehow that detail never came up. Knowing about his short-lived taxidermy hobby doesn’t help me understand the New Deal or World War II any better, in as much as I know about those big-picture events.

Still, it’s a humanizing detail, and I believe that’s good to know about figures as famed and studied and lionized as FDR. It also allows for a bit of informed speculation about Franklin, a rich only child with an overbearing mother. By the time he was old enough to tote a gun, he probably needed to get away periodically from the mansion and its familial confines. Shooting birds out on the sprawling grounds of Hyde Park on the Hudson was just the ticket.

Also, it’s simply fun to learn something like that – like when I found out that Chester A. Arthur played the banjo. I’m odd that way.

The Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site, which is the official National Park Service designation for the place, includes the mansion (Springwood, by name) and grounds, but also a presidential museum and library. The mansion is a mansion without being a Gilded Age exercise in ostentation.

It’s a big place, lots of rooms and some elegant décor (and stuffed birds), all original artifacts, so there’s no doubt it was a wealthy household. Still, even though it’s literally a museum in our time, in FDR’s time I doubt it felt like a museum at all, unlike some Gilded Age exercises in ostentation – and I’m thinking of the Vanderbilt mansion nearby, more about which later.

Best not to jump to too many conclusions based on the vibe of the mansion, but it does dovetail with the generally understood notion that FDR was self-assured and at ease in the upper class. No need for him to show off, any more than James and Sara did.

Speaking of James and Sara.

Note: the tour guide – you need to be on a tour to see the inside of Springwood – was perfectly forthcoming about the well-known fact (to historians) that the Delano fortune was built on opium.

Other artifacts of note included some of the president’s coping mechanisms — literal mechanisms — for his handicap.

The historic site also includes many, many depictions of FDR, as one would expect. Such as Franklin and Eleanor in bronze. Or just Franklin in bronze, or other materials.

Campaign material and other laudatory items are well represented in the museum.

Editorial cartoons. The president as a sphinx was especially amusing.

A chilling artifact: a fragment of a slug meant for FDR, fired at him on February 15, 1933 by Guiseppe Zangara.

“One of the wounded was William Sinnott, a detective who had frequently acted as Roosevelt’s bodyguard in New York City,” says In Roosevelt History. “Sinnott had just moved to Miami earlier that week when he was called to assist FDR’s security staff.

“The bullet fragment pictured above was removed from Mr. Sinnott’s wounded head. Ten other fragments from the bullet that struck him remained in his body. When visiting Sinnott in the hospital, FDR said, ‘You couldn’t hurt him, bullets just bounced off his skull.’ Mr. Sinnott was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1940 in recognition of his service that day. In 1946, Mr. and Mrs. Sinnott donated the bullet fragment in this specially designed presentation case made by Lambert Brothers Jewelers to the FDR Library.”

Historians don’t generally adhere to the Great Man school of history any more, but it’s nevertheless a fertile source of speculation to imagine how different things might be for the nation and the world had it been Roosevelt and not Anton Cermak who died in 1933.

Though he eventually died away from home, in Georgia — ah, another presidential site I must see — FDR came full circle to Hyde Park. First, the bed in which he was born.

Ultimately, his final resting place is on the grounds, along with Eleanor. Gardening had just begun when I paid my respects.

RIP, Mr. President and First Lady.