Monthly Archives: March 2019

Happy 11th Anniversary, Sam & Emily

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Sam and Emily’s wedding was 11 years ago now. That gives me just a little pause. I think I was going to post some images for their 10th anniversary last year, but forgot. Then again, why the overemphasis on multiples of 5 or 10?

Eleven’s a nice prime number. According to people who make such lists, the 11th anniversary is “traditionally” the steel anniversary. Sure, why not?

Who decided that? I don’t feel like looking into the question, but I suspect the notion of various gifts for various anniversaries evolved over the years, and was put into modern form by Victorians (for sentimental reasons) and early 20th-century ad men (for commercial reasons). The usual suspects, in other words.

Be that as it may, here’s an image of many members of the family as we were then. And Jesus.

Also, all of the grandchildren of Sam and Jo Ann Stribling.

The first image has been on the wall in Lilly’s room, or at least the room she uses when she’s home, for some years. The second one’s been on our refrigerator for years.

Boh Cameronian

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Not long ago I was informed that I could add a relatively inexpensive item to the Amazon basket to bring an order (that other people in the house wanted) up to the no-shipping-charge level. Funny how that works, but what to get?

I believe this is derisively known as a First World problem, but even in a context of affluence, that doesn’t count as a problem. It isn’t even an annoyance. Also, isn’t it time to retire that hoary old division of the world? (Not bad, but not my favorite song of theirs; that would be “Invisible Sun.”)

I decided I didn’t want to add to my household clutter, even things you (I) can’t have too many of — books, postcards, cheap coins, maps — so I got a box of Boh Cameronian.
Boh Cameronian! It’s been nearly 25 years since I had a fine cup of Boh, which is tea from the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia. I became acquainted with it on my first visit to that nation in 1992. Two years later, we visited the Boh tea plantation up in the highlands.
Cameron Highlands Boh tea plantationNote the long-sleeve shirt. The Cameron Highlands were a hill station for a reason.

I’ve never seen Boh tea on the shelf in the United States, unlike Typhoo tea, even in stores that carry unusual or rarefied imports. In more recent years, I checked on line for the tea. I found it, but at astronomical prices.

I hadn’t checked in a good while, and never on Amazon. When facing my First World problem, I was inspired to look for Boh. A box of 60 bags was available there for about $12, plus no shipping. Twenty cents a bag. More than, say, Lipton, but you don’t buy Lipton for nostalgia value, or much of anything but price.

Even if I took the recommendation on the box and limited one bag to making one cup of tea — which I suspect is merely to encourage more consumption — that would be 20¢ a cup. More likely I will make a pot with each bag, or about three cups: around 7¢ a cup. Entirely worth it.

The marketing blarney on the box is in English and Chinese. The English:

Boh Cameronian takes its name from the Cameron Highlands, one of those special regions in the world blessed with a superb environment for growing teas of unique character and quality. Here, at 5000 feet above sea level at the scenic Boh Gardens, time-honored methods and innovation are combined to yield fine teas. Founded in 1929 by J.A. Russell, the pioneer of Malaysia’s tea industry, Boh teas are today renowned for their freshness and distinctive flavour.

The company offers a short history of Russell and the Boh plantation here.

I haven’t opened the box yet. It came just yesterday. A pleasant moment over the weekend might be the time to make a pot of Boh. I doubt that I can wait for that first cup till it’s nice enough to sit out on the deck, but I bet I’ll enjoy the some Boh al fresco in the near future.

Evergreen Memorial Cemetery, Bloomington

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Sometime in the late 1990s, I visited the David Davis House in Bloomington, Illinois. As Lincoln’s campaign manager in 1860 — and important in getting him nominated in the first place — Davis was a behind-the-scenes man at a critical turning point in U.S. history. Lincoln put him on the Supreme Court in ’62.

On Sunday, I took a quick look at the house. As handsome as I remember.
David Davis House BloomingtonBut that isn’t why I swung through Bloomington. I wanted to see the Evergreen Memorial Cemetery. An impressive array of stones among the still-bare trees and brown grass.

Evergreen Memorial Cemetery, BloomingtonEvergreen Memorial Cemetery, BloomingtonEvergreen Memorial Cemetery, BloomingtonSome sizable memorials, too, befitting the prosperous place Bloomington was in the 19th century.

Evergreen Memorial Cemetery, BloomingtonEvergreen Memorial Cemetery, BloomingtonNot a huge amount of funerary art, but some.
Evergreen Memorial Cemetery, BloomingtonI’d come to visit the Stevensons. Here’s the Adlai Stevenson famed for being shellacked by Eisenhower but also for his denunciation of Soviet behavior on the world stage.

Evergreen Memorial Cemetery, Bloomington

This Adlai Stevenson was 23rd Vice President of the United States, from 1893 to 1897, during Cleveland’s second term.
Evergreen Memorial Cemetery, BloomingtonHad President Cleveland’s cancer in ’93 been more aggressive, or medical science not up to its extraction — a few years earlier, probably not — this is also the Stevenson who would have been president.

I didn’t know the Scotts also memorialized on the stone: Matthew and Julia Scott. Turns out Stevenson was married to Letitia, Julia’s sister. Also, Matthew T. Scott was a business partner of Adlai Stephenson, with a distinctly 19th-century CV: land speculation, newspaper publishing, a coal mine.

Just before I left, I took a look at something a little more unusual.
Evergreen Memorial Cemetery, BloomingtonAccording to a nearby plaque, the carving memorializes an airplane that crashed into the tree that used to stand there.

“On May 31, 1948, a group of citizens gathered at Evergreen Memorial Cemetery’s Civil War Veteran’s enclosure…” the plaque begins.

That must be here, very near the tree.

Evergreen Memorial Cemetery, Bloomington“… During the ceremony, a WWII trainer plane flown by James A. Tuley and passenger Chester H. Frahm was flying over Evergreen… to drop poppies over the grounds. The plane crashed into this tree, killing Frahm and severely injuring Tuley,” the plaque continues.

“In 2015 this tree had to come down and cemetery employees felt something more needed to be done with the wood from the tree… chainsaw artist Tim Gill was contacted and he accepted the challenge.”

The Pantagraph published a fuller version of the story.

Oak Grove Cemetery, LeRoy

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One place I wanted to visit during Sunday’s micro-excursion was the Evergreen Memorial Cemetery in Bloomington, Illinois, but just before I arrived at the town of LeRoy (see yesterday), which is about 20 miles from Bloomington, I spotted the Oak Grove Cemetery off U.S. 150.

I pulled in. Why not? I expected a small cemetery, but it stretched back for acres, with plenty of well-established trees that will probably fill out nicely beginning next month.

Oak Grove Cemetery, LaRoy IllinoisOak Grove Cemetery, LaRoy IllinoisOak Grove Cemetery, LeRoy IllinoisThere weren’t a lot a large memorials, but whoever Robert Flegel was, he and his wife Mary got an obelisk after their passing in the early 20th century.
Oak Grove Cemetery LaRoy IllinoisWhatever else he did, Flegel fought to save the Union, according to the inscription: Co. K, 108th Illinois Volunteer Infantry. Looks like his descendants or other family members are keen to decorate the many Flegel stones.

Oak Grove Cemetery LaRoy IllinoisThere are a lot of Munsters at Oak Grove as well.
Oak Grove Cemetery LaRoy IllinoisFurther back away from the road are older stones. Mostly 19th century, including some pioneers of McLean County, probably.
Oak Grove Cemetery LaRoy IllinoisAccording to Find-A-Grave, spiritualist Simeon H. West was buried in the cemetery after he “departed this life Apr. 2, 1920.” I hadn’t made his acquaintance yet — that happened later in the day — and I don’t remember seeing his fairly large stone.

LeRoy (Le Roy), Wausaneta and Simeon H. West

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On Sunday afternoon, as I headed roughly northwest on U.S. 150 in McLean County, Illinois, I impulsively made a turn off the main road onto Center St., which goes directly to the town square of LeRoy. Or rather, the town sort-of-circle.

I came to be in that part of Illinois because earlier in the day, I’d taken Lilly back to UIUC at the end of her spring break. Usually the trip to Champaign involves popping down on I-57 and returning the same way. But the day wasn’t that cold — not like last time — and despite sometime drizzle, I wanted to make a slight detour and return home via Bloomington.

Champaign to Bloomington could mean a short drive on I-74. Or, if you want something different in March, you take U.S. 150, passing close to the still-unplanted fields and by hulking grain silos and through towns like Mahomet, Mansfield, Farmer City, and LeRoy (sometimes styled Le Roy). The road roughly parallels the Interstate. I took it.

When I got to the LeRoy square (circle), I noticed some memorials inside the circle, including a statue on a pillar. While I was still driving, I took it to be a memorial featuring a Union soldier. I parked nearby and got out for a closer look.

The formal name of the round-shaped green space in LeRoy is Kiwanis Park. Visitors are greeted on one side of the circle by a shoe-store mural.

A building labeled “Town and City Hall” is next to the Le Roy Performing Arts & Media Center, which has the look of a former church building, but I didn’t take a closer look.

Also around the circle are an undertaker, the American Legion Post 79, a clinic and some other buildings.

Kiwanis Park itself has a gazebo. I have to like a place that has a gazebo.

There are also smaller memorials, such as one to all U.S. service men and women, and one to honor Victor, LeRoy Police K-9 Officer from 2005 to 2012.

As I got closer to the main memorial, I realized that it was no Union soldier.
It was an Indian.
If anyone else had been with me — and absolutely no one else was anywhere nearby — I would have said, “How about that?” or “That’s odd” or some such.

An inscription on the base says WAUSANETA. The year carved on the base is 1911.

Also on the base: Cultivate love, peace and harmony; life is too short and time too valuable to waste in angry strife. Be slow to believe evil reports about your neighbors. Be diligent in searching for something good to say about others, and when you find it don’t wait until they are dead, but say it at once.

And more: West’s Precepts. Love and thank the supreme power. Control your temper. Try to keep cheerful. Do all the good you can. Be honest, truthful and temperate. Help the poor, needy and sick. Encourage the weak and timid. Make a specialty of trying to add to the happiness of someone to-day…. and all other days.

What on Earth is this? Why is it in LeRoy, Illinois, about as off the beaten path as you can be?

Last night when I got home, I looked it up. It didn’t take long. The wonderfully named Pantagraph newspaper published an article in 2011 about Wausaneta by McLean County Museum of History Archivist/Librarian Bill Kemp.

“Although few know it today, this statue embodies LeRoy’s longtime ties to spiritualism…” Kemp wrote.

“The idea for such a statue came from local resident and ardent spiritualist Simeon H. West, and he foot the bill to purchase, ship and install the pre-cast metal Native American and its elaborate pedestal. West claimed that on more than one occasion he communed with a deceased Kickapoo named Wausaneta, and he erected this statue as a tribute to the chief and his people.

“The Wausaneta statue gazes in a northeasterly direction toward a long-gone Kickapoo fort or stockade located seven or so miles out of town. In late November 1905, West oversaw the placement of a granite marker at this rich archaeological and historic site (now considered part of the Grand Village of the Kickapoo).

“In the midst of that day’s heavy snow and howling winds, West had an intense spiritualist encounter, later reporting that he had established a ‘rapport with the spirits of the people who lived there in the distant past.’

It was then that he supposedly learned from these spirits that a Kickapoo by the name of Wausaneta was ‘head chief’ during the fort’s construction. In a later seance, West heard from Wausaneta himself, and was told that the chief had died at the age of 75 and was buried north of the historic marker.”

“LeRoy’s Wausaneta was unveiled to the public on New Year’s Day 1912. West, in his typical new-agey grandiosity, dedicated his statue ‘to the lovers of the beautiful in every country and in every clime until time shall be no more.’ ”

That made my day. It’s exactly the kind of eccentric sight I enjoy finding on the road, especially when serendipity leads me to it.

Punta Mita 2009

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Been almost exactly* 10 years since I visited Punta Mita, near Puerto Vallarta in Nayarit state. An awfully pleasant little trip, with plenty of views of the Bay of Banderas and its coastline. Including these images, but also these.
The villa where we stayed was much more luxurious than my usual haunts, at home or elsewhere.
Including a small infinity pool. A novelty for me.

It was the dry season, so the non-irrigated land was dry.
Naturally, the golf course was irrigated, except for the hole on a peninsula. I don’t play golf, but I was happy to wander around the course, on foot and in a golf cart.

Our guide around the resort.

She had an exotic background, if I remember right. A father from — Syria, I believe — who immigrated to one of the northern South American countries, where her mother was from. Later they came to Mexico.

* Some long-ago teacher got on my case for using the phrase “almost exactly.” Red-inked it, I think. “Either it is exact, or it is not” was, I believe, the faulty reasoning that gave birth to that nonsense. I can say now, in my opinion as a professional writer of some decades, that there’s nothing wrong with the construction.

Thursday Sundries

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I’m glad to report that Jimmy Carter has become the oldest person ever to be President of the United States, at 94 years, 172 days, topping George H.W. Bush. For many years, life expectancy was such that no one bested John Adams, who died at 90 in 1826. Finally Ronald Reagan lived longer than Adams in 2001. Since then, so have the elder Bush, Ford and Carter.

I’m not glad to report that we’ve been getting a raft of calls from an “800 Service” lately, asking me to contact “Apple Support Advisor” for unspecified but ominous reasons. Ah, spring is coming, and that must be the season for phishing.

Turns out it isn’t even a new scam, but this one didn’t say anything about iCloud.

Email subject line recently from a news outlet that has my address: “Meet R. Kelly’s lawyer.”

I don’t think so. Some years ago, I introduced my daughters to the concept of the List of Things I Don’t Care About. A lot celebrities are on the list. More are added all the time, mostly without me being conscious of it. R. Kelly’s been there a long time, but since his recent legal problems, he’s on the list with a bullet.

Here’s something I’d never heard of until the Internet offered it to me completely by chance, despite the fact that it happened in Texas, near a place that I drive by often when I visit that state: the Crash at Crush.

“On September 15, 1896, more than 40,000 people flocked to this spot to witness one of the most spectacular publicity stunts of the nineteenth century — a planned train wreck,” the Texas State Historical Association tells us.

“The man behind this unusual event was William George Crush, passenger agent for the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad… As the arena for his spectacle, Crush selected a shallow valley just north of Waco, conveniently located close to Katy’s Waco-Dallas track.

“In early September 500 workmen laid four miles of track for the collision run and constructed a grandstand for ‘honored guests,’ three speaker’s stands, two telegraph offices, a stand for reporters, and a bandstand. A restaurant was set up in a borrowed Ringling Brothers circus tent, and a huge carnival midway with dozens of medicine shows, game booths, and lemonade and soft-drink stands was built.

“At 5:00 P.M. engines No. 999 and 1001 squared off at opposite ends of the four-mile track. Crush appeared riding a white horse and trotted to the center of the track. He raised his white hat and after a pause whipped it sharply down. A great cheer went up from the crowd as they pressed forward for a better view.

“The locomotives jumped forward, and with whistles shrieking roared toward each other. Then, in a thunderous, grinding crash, the trains collided. The two locomotives rose up at their meeting and erupted in steam and smoke.

“Almost simultaneously, both boilers exploded, filling the air with pieces of flying metal. Spectators turned and ran in blind panic. Two young men and a woman were killed. At least six other people were injured seriously by the flying debris.”

Say what you want about the 19th century, they knew how to stage a spectacle. A dangerous spectacle, but it must have been quite a sight.

The article doesn’t say, but I assume the conductors had some way of keeping the throttles open after they themselves left the engines before they gathered too much speed.

Another thing I didn’t know (there are so many): Scott Joplin named one of his pieces, “Great Crush Collision March,” after the event. Guess it counts as one of the lesser-known railroad wreck songs, unlike the more famous “The Wreck of the Old 97.”

Various Spacewalkers

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The daylight around the spring equinox around here stretched from an overcast sunrise to an overcast sunset. But at least it wasn’t especially cold. Hints of spring are around, such as croci peeking out of the earth and robins bob-bob-bobbing.

For the equinox, time to list to “Equinox” by Coltrain.

Or, more obscurely, “E.V.A.” by Public Service Broadcasting. After all, a few days ago was the anniversary of the first spacewalk, undertaken by cosmonaut Alexei Leonov. He very nearly bought the farm there in orbit in 1965, but survives to this day at age 84.

He didn’t get a Google doodle this year. You’d think it would be a good one to illustrate, with “Google” standing in for the Voskhod 2 spacecraft, and Leonov floating nearby.

Interestingly, looking at this table, I see that there were long gaps between Soviet spacewalkers in the early days. After Leonov, no cosmonaut did so again until 1969, when two did; and then not again until 1977, after which red spacewalking became more regular.

The first non-American, non-Soviet spacewalker? One Jean-Loup Jacques Marie Chrétien, who also happened to be the first Frenchman in space in 1988.

The first woman? That would be Svetlana Yevgenyevna Savitskaya in 1984. Bet neither she nor Chrétien ever got a Google doodle.

Merrie England

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The point of going to Hyde Park on Sunday wasn’t merely to tool around the neighborhood, though that’s usually fun, but to see the Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company’s performance of Merrie England at Mandel Hall.

It was the fourth production of theirs we’ve seen, besides Patience (last year) Iolanthe (2017) and Yeomen of the Guard (2015). Seems like the company wanted to do something a little different this year. Like Gilbert & Sullivan, but not Gilbert & Sullivan.

Composer Edward German and librettist Basil Hood collaborated on Merrie England, which had its first run in 1902. G&S might not have been working together by then — Sullivan especially, who had the handicap of being dead — but clearly German & Hood were giving the people what they wanted, for a little while longer anyway. I understand that it was among the last new light operas produced by the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company.

Merrie England has all the same sort of whimsy and nonsense as G&S, set to music and enlivened by dance as in G&S. Supposedly it takes place in the age of Elizabeth I, who makes an appearance, along with other historic figures like Sir Walter Raleigh and the Earl of Essex.

The show has all you need in this kind of comic opera: love declared, thwarted and finally triumphant; word play and a few patter songs; a little swordplay and some chasing around the stage; even a cameo by an actual corgi and a supporting character who unexpectedly breaks out a trombone and starts to play it.

All of the cast struck me as talented, but I particularly enjoyed the comic styling of Jeffrey Luksik as Wilkins, who says he’s “poet and chief player in Shakespeare’s Company” who, in a bit of meta fun, insists that everything is better when put to music.

“I prophesy that he [Shakespeare] hath a misconception of the part of a writer in writing a part, in that he hath too little regard for the matters of singing and dancing; for a time will come when all comedies shall be musical, or the public will have none of them…

Dost remember in ‘To be, or not to be’?
Come the words ‘a sea of trouble’
The applause, I trow, would double
If he forthwith sang a song about the sea!”

Dorian McCall did a fine turn as the Earl of Essex, the villain but not really the villain. As the program notes put it, he has an “even baritone and a rich and flexible voice, recognized as having great style, musically and physically, on stage.”

Also impressive: Emma Sorensen, who played a woodland-dwelling character called Jill-All-Alone, a witch but not really a witch, unless she really was a witch. How such a slender woman can project such a powerful voice is beyond me.

A fuller review — “hijinks and humor galore” is in the apt head — along with a picture of the cast, is at the Hyde Park Herald.

Along E. 57th Street, Chicago

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Our stroll through a small slice of the Hyde Park neighborhood on Sunday took us westward on E. 57th St. for a few blocks, roughly between S. Kenwood Ave. and S. University Ave. As you head west, small businesses and flats give way to university property.

Mostly. This is the 57th St. side of the First Unitarian Church of Chicago.
According to the AIA Guide to Chicago, the church, which was completed in 1931, is a “textbook example of English Perpendicular Gothic design [that] fits in easily with the limestone facades and Gothic ornament of many Hyde Park residences and university buildings.”

Denison B. Hull did the design. “The son of a five-term, Republican U.S. representative, Morton Hull, he grew up in the Hyde Park area that his father represented in the 1920s,” the Chicago Tribune said in his 1988 obit.

“After serving as an officer in World War I, Mr. Hull was graduated from Harvard University. In 1922, he won first prize in an architectural design contest conducted by the university.

Among his noted architectural work, besides the First Unitarian Church, were the restoration of Old Church and the expansion of the historical museum, both in Bennington, Vt…

Mr. Hull was noted also as a scholar of ancient Greek and Greece.”

They don’t make ’em like that anymore.

I’ve never been able to see the inside of First Unitarian. Services are at 10 a.m. Sunday, and if I ever happen to be in Hyde Park then, I will attend one. Not just to see the interior, but also to see whatever it is Unitarians do during their services.

At 1219 E. 57th St. is the Neubauer Family Collegium for Culture and Society. More simply, the Neubauer Collegium.

According to a sign in front, exhibits can be seen inside, but not, as it happens, on Sunday. I wondered just what the organization was, and why I’d never heard of it. To answer the second question first: it was founded only in 2012, and makes its home in the former Meadville-Lombard Seminary Building.

As for what it does, the Neubauer — as best as I can describe it — is a humanities think tank.

UChicago News says: “The Neubauer Collegium will unite scholars in the common pursuit of ideas of grand scale and broad scope, making the University of Chicago a global destination for top scholars engaged in humanistic research while also pioneering efforts to share that research with the public.”

Here’s the view of the Reynolds Club bell tower from near 57th St.
As probably no one calls it: the John J. Mitchell Tower of the Joseph Reynolds Student Clubhouse. These days, the clubhouse, completed in 1903, is a student union. Joseph “Diamond Jo” Reynolds was a Gilded Age steamboat and railroad magnate whose bequest paid for the building; I believe John J. Mitchell was a Chicago banker who seems to have died in a road-rage incident.

As Time reported in 1927:

Near Chicago last week death came to banker John J. Mitchell, and to Mrs. Mitchell. They were driving in an open motor car from their country home at Lake Geneva, Ill., to Chicago for the funeral of their elder daughter’s father-in-law, when their machine met a roadside brawl. Two motor cars, going in opposite directions had tried to pass a hay wagon at the same time. Both cars went into a ditch; the drivers jumped clear and fell to words and fisticuffs. The haywagon stopped as did several machines. Their drivers wanted to see…

To read more, I’d have to subscribe, but I’d rather leave the story at that.

Here’s the view of the tower from inside the quad formed by the Reynolds Club and some other buildings.

Designed by Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, the building was “derived from St. John’s College at Oxford, and its domestic feeling is enhanced by a stair hall that could have come straight out of an English manor house.”

Also inside — behind the row of windows to the left of the tower, above — is the Charles L. Hutchinson Common, which SRC did as well. Hutchinson, better known as founder of the Art Institute of Chicago, ponied up for building the hall.

It’s also like stepping into Oxford. According to Wiki, anyway, “The Harry Potter film series has used the original hall at Christ Church in each of its films, imparting a tourist interest in its American replicate.[citation needed].”