Fabyan on the Fox

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Looks like we’ve hit the mid-July stride of chamber of commercial weather, with low 80s F for highs, high 60s for lows, for some days ahead. On the other hand, standard forecasts don’t include smoke, which could well make a comeback in the coming days.

It was a rainy May and June, bringing the flow of the Fox River fairly high by the time last month that we took a short walk nearby, largely under the flush of greenery.

As mentioned, we visited the Fabyan Forest Preserve in Geneva, Illinois one Saturday not long ago. The holdings — formerly part of the estate of George Fabyan (d. 1936) — include land on both sides of the river, and a large island accessible on both sides by footbridges. The view from the island.

The Fabyan Windmill is visible from the island.

We didn’t go there this time, but rather lingered on the west bank, around the Fabyan Villa, which we toured, taking in the bogus mummy. FLW did some renovation on the property, a fact well emphasized at the museum.

One view from the villa toward the Fox. If you’re going to build near a river — or any flowing body of water — give it some height.

Fabyan collected a lot more, including European artwork, back when that was doable.

Once upon a time (probably), the Fabyan kitchen served New Era Potato Chips. Glad to see it. The memory of the same such can at the Cuneo Museum is a minor delight for me.

Back when food processors crowed about have food science on their side. These days, that might get them MAHA’d into consumer skepticism.

Outside, more features, including a ruin from Fabyan days. I understand that the Roman-themed pool on the island has mostly been reclaimed by the river. This wasn’t part of the pool. A out-of-place gatepost, from the looks of it.

More evidence of the passing wave of Egyptomania.

Looking a little worse for roughly a century of wear.

Purple Haze

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It did seem a little smoky out there today. Actually, a lot. More than I can remember, at least since I spent a smoky day in downtown Portland, Oregon some years ago. Or come to think of it, a very hazy day in Illinois only about three years ago.

The view from my deck this afternoon.

Official notice for today and tomorrow: The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency has issued a Red Forecast Air Pollution Action Day for Friday July 17th for the AirNow AQI forecast sectors of Rockford and all 6 Chicago area forecast sectors. This is in addition to downgrade of the ongoing action day to a Purple Forecast Air Pollution Action Day in effect today.

AQI is Air Quality Index and the thing is color coded.

So today we had Purple Haze, “Very Unhealthy.” Shouldn’t Red be the worst? Maybe the committee of weathermen and atmospheric scientists who invented the AQI considered the matter, and decided that Purple is worse. And worst of all? Maroon. True, I would alarmed if I stepped out into maroon-colored air, but we know things aren’t quite so literal.

Today’s air would have looked foggy, except it doesn’t get thicker at a distance. The smoke is evenly distributed, at least outside my back door. A smell of barbecue comes with the gray mist, except without any hint of the better, and sometimes wonderful smell of grilled meat.

Sunset on Tuesday, though of course my camera didn’t really capture it.

Sunset today, same caveat. Also, a different place, but we weren’t about to talk a walk around the same lake on a Purple Forecast Air Pollution Action Day.

The color looks ordinary, but the sun’s disk, embedded in the gray mist, was a rarely seen red-yellow-orange.

The Fabyan Mummy

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The Internet might be more vast a wasteland than the worried Newton Minow could ever imagine, but its oases of information – actual information, to judge by internal consistencies, linkable references and good writing – continue to amaze. For example, Mummies.com, which has lists of Egyptian mummies in the United States.

I went looking for such a site because of a recent encounter with a mummy. Or rather, a “mummy,” but we’ll get to that later.

This figure is on display at the Fabyan Villa, which is part of the Fabyan Forest Preserve on the west bank of the Fox River, in Geneva, Illinois. We visited a few weeks ago. Both the villa and the “mummy” are legacies of George Fabyan (d. 1936), who has been fated to go down in history – in a small way, but more than most people – as a wealthy eccentric. One of his eccentricities, like William Randolph Hearst writ small, was collecting eccentric artifacts.

A sign near the mummy-shaped artifact says that modern examination has proven it to be a fake. Whether George Fabyan knew this or not is an open question.

Remarkable thought, that there was once a market for mummies so brisk that counterfeiters made bank. It wasn’t called Egyptomania for nothing.

An anecdote from Mummies.com about a real mummy (Harwa) in possession of the Field Museum, which has 33 mummies, tells quite the tale:

Harwa’s adventurous afterlife is one example of how things have changed. In 1939, he became the first mummified person to fly on an airplane, and he was taken to a Broadway show upon his arrival in New York City. On display at the New York World’s Fair for two years, he then returned to the Field Museum after getting lost in the luggage and being sent to San Francisco.

There’s streaming service comedy gold in that, say 10 episodes: the misadventures of the promoter hired in 1939 to take care of the mummy, and his oddball assistant, who also happens to be a bombshell of a woman. High jinx ensue. The mummy is misplaced, more than once. There are various shenanigans on the airplane, and on Broadway. A rival promoter tries to steal the mummy. Weird things happen at the World’s Fair. Nothing supernatural, though one or another of the characters might worry about the Curse of Harwa — which a publicist make up. Maybe even a guest appearance by Col. Fabyan, who wants to buy the mummy. Of course, the actual Fabyan was already dead by then, but this is TV we’re talking about. You know, the outclassed wasteland.

Cantigny ’26

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You hear the most remarkable things sometimes, and I mean unbelievable things, marvelous in their stupidity, in passing in You Tube commercials. I let some ad run while doing something else today, some AI service that promises — pretty big promises — to be your peachy-keen personal assistant in some way. The line that caught my half-attention: “And don’t worry! [Product name] won’t be offended if you want to talk to a real human being.”

Let me italicize the part of that that needs it: “And don’t worry! [Product name] won’t be offended if you want to talk to a real human being.”

What? It’s just my opinion, of course, but taking offense means some sort of emotional capability, yes? As in, one specific to human brains. And AI systems have the emotional capability of a bag of hammers, yes?

At Cantigny in late May, I wasn’t feeling that photo urge. Yuriko was, at least when it came to flowers in arrays.

And as singles.

We go to Cantigny every few years, usually in late spring or early summer, a time of exuberant greenery and, of course, vivid flowers. Not a flowerbed is idle.

An image from Cantigny in 2010. A favorite.

This time, I did take a few snaps of some of the Cantigny buildings and landscapes. Such as the former McCormick manse.

Some long views of the grounds.

As the publisher of a great metropolitan newspaper, back when there were such things, Col. McCormick had the scratch to keep the place running. What are tech barons doing with their lucre? Nothing so stately.

Homer in Lombard

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Back when we saw Lilacia Park in Lombard, we also took a stroll down St. Charles Street, a major shopping street in that town, north of the Metra commuter rail tracks. A pleasant street with a number of local businesses.

Among other St. Charles Street businesses is Devious FX-Bob James Oddities & Curiosities, but we only spent a short time there. As the store’s web site says, “We offer goth jewelry, unique art, and unusual items you will not see anywhere else.” The skulls for sale, both human (replicas?) and animal, creeped out the other members of my party, so we went on our way.

On Park Ave., which intersects with St. Charles, Homer Simpson shills for a resale shop.

Specifically, JL Vintage Odds and Ends. It isn’t the only place I’ve seen Homer in a probably unauthorized commercial pose. Yet at this point Homer, I believe, belongs to humanity as a whole, strict ideas of intellectual property notwithstanding.

Odds and ends, all right. The oddest thing inside was, again, Homer.

Elgin Fire Barn No. 5 Museum

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It was a small puzzle. The building in front of me was called a “fire barn.” Not something you hear very often, and in fact I wondered whether I’d ever heard of the term before. The standard term is, of course, fire station. But it didn’t take long to work it out: horses are known to be kept in barns; the fire engines in Elgin, Illinois, used to be horse-drawn; so a barn to keep fire-department horses – and naturally other equipment – would be a fire barn, even after fire engines became horseless.

So at Elgin Fire Barn No. 5 Museum not long ago that I took an instant liking to fire barn. Even though they don’t house horses anymore, we’d do well to call our fire stations fire barns instead. A touch of poetry to an otherwise dry municipal designation.

Elgin No. 5 Fire Barn is a legacy of progressive ideas about fire suppression in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, built in 1903 as a solid edifice showing how serious the city was about deploying the cutting edge of fire-control technologies of the time. The building was in service for almost all of the 20th century and, as often for these things, narrowly escaped demolition after 1990. But the citizens of Elgin ultimately didn’t want to part with it. Good for them. The barn is owned by a nonprofit these days.

Much space in the museum is for fire engines that once called the barn home.

Elgin Fire Barn No. 5

Good old open-cab engines. The only other place you see them regularly are stylized versions on yellow signs warning motorists that a fire station is nearby. Otherwise, they are museum pieces. I remember editing an article for Fire Chief magazine 30 years ago in which the executive of a fire engine manufacturer said that even a special commission by a fire department for an open-cab engine — and he didn’t think it likely — would be declined.

The museum also holds an Elgin apparatus that had been retired before the building of Fire Barn No. 5, though in its mid-19th century heyday, this steam powered pumper was Star Trek tech, compared to able-bodies citizens trying to put out building fires with bucket brigades.

Speaking of advanced Victorian fire tech: the brass shapes of an alarm system based on telegraphy.

For a time in the 19th century, if you wanted a fire alarm telegraph system, you went to Gamewell. The name exists even yet as a unit of Honeywell.

We met Bob on the second floor. Well, “Bob” since my memory for names, never that good, isn’t improving with the years. A retired Elgin firefighter, Bob volunteered at the museum with a clear enthusiasm for the artifacts: the trucks, but also axes, ladders, a collection of helmets and turnout coats, department badges, photos of old-time firemen, documents and items and utensils used at the fire barn, considering that much time spent was there, between emergencies. Bob showed us around, since no one else was visiting the museum at that moment, and we had a good talk about the way things used to be, fire suppression-wise.

In front of the museum is a memorial to Illinois firefighters.

Part of the doughty school of bronzes, often depicting pioneers and soldiers and members of the CCC — and firemen ready to take on an emergency (though in this case, pre-SCBA, looks like). Doughty was definitely part of the job description.

Summer’s Profusion

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My backyard is as cluttered as my house, at least in summer, but with a living profusion of grass and leaves and insects and birds and small mammals, instead of papers, books, clothes, furniture, nicknacks, etc., etc. – inanimate all, so the comparison mostly fails. Still, profusion is the thing.

Outside, flower buds taking turns according to however it is that flowers “know” when to bloom. At the moment, coneflowers are opening.

I was inspired to spend a little while this afternoon documenting other parts of the profusion. An exultation of color, this time of year.

Animals are out and about. Such as the ants that are vying to rule the world.

And monarch butterflies going about their business.

The odd thing isn’t that I saw one today, but that it was still long enough for me to successfully fiddle with my camera and take the shot.

Books Are Seldom Made of Lettuce

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I’m glad for a lot of reasons that I lived in Japan in the early ’90s and not later. One reason: pre-Google and (more importantly) pre-Google Maps, you navigated by your own wits, aided by not-always-detailed paper maps, wayfaring signs in Japanese and sometimes English, directions from other foreigners – part of the mass of gaijin lore we all tapped into – and helpful Osakans.

It was doable. One time I bought a used bicycle from a colleague who lived in a fairly far corner of metro Osaka, far from me anyway, on the condition that I come take it away. Meaning about a 20-mile ride through the heart of greater Osaka, a ride I broke into two segments by locking the bike after the first day’s pedaling at a subway station and going home that way. Good thing Japanese streets are more or less suitable for bicycling, but less so for wayfinding, since the urban texture tended to be a rinse-and-repeat cycle of narrows streets, concrete apartment blocks, and small shops shoehorned into even narrower lanes.

Six- or eight-lane boulevards crisscrossed the region, and so did small and larger rivers. One time a helpful Osakan directed me to an elevator door tucked away in a grey wall of odd shapes and angles – a door that had been accidentally camouflaged by its utilitarian surroundings. The unmarked elevator took pedestrians and bicyclists down to the entrance of a spare, well-lit underground tunnel under a major river at a spot that had no bridge.

But I need to say that the rinse-and-repeat was only superficial. Like other places, most other places I’d say, with a little time and observation, details come into focus. In the case of Osaka, a shrine tucked into wall or a weedy embankment near a canalized creek that was home to a couple of gnarled, flowering trees, or sometime as incongruous as a speedboat parked in a spot for a car. Or an unusual handmade retail sign, clearly made by pop for the front of a mom-and-pop (or maybe by mom, who wouldn’t be accorded credit for it, and maybe not inclined to take credit).

There’s a Flickr collection, or even a coffee table book, in the unlimited variety of limited-edition retail signs, handmade or made by advertisers. A worldwide selection. They’re more sporadic in the Chicago suburbs, generally clustering on main shopping streets – of which there are a fair number, tucked away and locally focused. So far this summer we’ve made our way to a handful of suburban shopping streets.

Starting with the imprimatur of Tito, Alamo Heights High School Class of ’79.

Straightforward, gets the signing job done.

For those who aren’t into that whole neurotoxin thing.

“We need something out there now, we’re about to open.”

How could this not be a favorite?

True, not brown and soggy. Brown and crumbly, with enough time.

The Road Not Taken, Because of Construction

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Among the the wide galaxy of public policy, infrastructure maintenance is famously unsexy, at least here in North America. Probably most other places, too, though I can imagine Cultural Revolution China intensely focusing on the Seven Paths to Glorious Infrastructure or some such, with college professors and students hustled out for months at a time to pave roads and lay pipe for projects that never quite got finished.

So most infrastructure projects proceed unnoticed, unless they happen to impede one’s routines. Early in the road construction season this year here in northern Illinois, that is, after the last of the dirty snow piles had melted, work started on a nearby road that’s more than a side street but less than a major arterial – and one that I use a lot.

Took a stroll along the street late one afternoon recently.

Near the rubble and the dislocation.

Idle heavy equipment.

Major digging is under way. From the looks of it, the project involves not so much the surface of the street – though I suspect that will be repaved as well – as replacing major underground structures.

Ones that, I hope, continue to direct surges of water away from certain places. Such as my house.

Summer of Here

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It occurred to me over the Independence Day weekend that I’ve experienced roughly a quarter – 25% – of the entire history of the United States, accepting the commonly held age for the nation of 250 years. Anyone my age or older has, that is. One-quarter of a 250-year span is 62.5 years. At the age of 65, I can’t really claim to remember those first two and a half years, but the furthest reaches of my memory run back to the mid-1960s, so close enough.

And I have to add that if you’re Mel Brooks, you’ve lived 40% of the nation’s history.

Fifty years ago, on the much ballyhooed Bicentennial, it rained in San Antonio, where I was. We stayed home. On Saturday, on the much less ballyhooed 250th, it rained in metro Chicago, where I was. We stayed home. Coincidence? Well, yes.

Been home for a few months now, witnessing a wet and cool spring edge into a wet and warm summer in northern Illinois, and temps finally popped up into the 90s ahead of July 3. The heat was ended by rain and more rain. A pretty typical Northern summertime pattern.

Fireflies have made their appearance, though a meager number, and just today, this afternoon, I heard cicadas bleating ahead of dusk, though no cricketsong came afterward. Could be the Brotherhood of Orthopteran Insects is still negotiating a new contract for this year, and I won’t pretend I didn’t have to look up orthopteran. Mosquitoes are out looking for mammal blood, though considering the temporary wetlands that are our suburban lawns, not as many as you’d expect. Lit up the mosquito coils on my deck table this evening, and it seemed to work.

Old friends Neal and Michele visited from Chicago for the Fourth – a smaller version of the Gabfest, and indoors because of the rain. A delight all the same. They left before dark, after the rain had stopped. A little wet ground wasn’t going to keep the suburban populace from flouting Illinois’ nanny-state fireworks ban, one of the two nights of the year when the pop-pop-BOOM-pop-boom-fssst goes on for a few hours (the other is New Year’s Eve). In recent years I’ve repaired to the garage to listen to the July 4 explosions. The explosion acoustics are good in that cluttered enclosure.

I’ll be home for a few more months. 2026: Summer of Here. People pay money – I’ve paid money – to enjoy warm weather like this, but we’re getting it no extra charge. Also, even I’ve gotten a little tired of the pace of my driving lately.

No long drives this summer. But that doesn’t mean no drives. Back during the pandemic, my thinking was, if you can’t go far, go near, and that kind of thinking took us to new parts of Wisconsin and Illinois. No pandemic this year, fortunately, but the idea is a good one anyway.