Mission Burial Park, San Antonio

Posted on January 29, 2025 by admin

If a cemetery is going to have “park” in its name, “burial” is a refreshingly non-euphemistic adjective to go with it. Such as at Mission Burial Park, San Antonio, at least at the front entrance.

The place is also called Mission Burial Park South, because it is one of a number of cemeteries under the brand Mission Park, which is specific to San Antonio (where a lot of things are called “Mission”). The brand also includes local funeral homes and funeral chapels. I haven’t seen any of the other places, but South has to be the flagship and, in fact, it is very near both Mission San Jose and Mission San Juan Capistrano.

Replete with the kinds of names you’d expect in South Texas.

I knew a Zuehl in high school.

And maybe a name or two you wouldn’t expect. People get around.

A nice variety of sizes and angles when it comes to stones: one mark of an aesthetic cemetery. Even including flat stones. Just not too many.

That last one, Luby, has to be the restaurant family. Luby’s is owned by other investors these days. Once a sizeable chain, the company also owned other brands (for a while, Cheeseburger in Paradise). I had heard Luby’s was about to close all together a few years ago, but that didn’t happen, and there is still a fair residue of them in Texas. They’re probably not the cafeteria I remember from my youth, one of the mother’s go-to restaurants, but in the casual dining slot in our time.

Another notable South Texas family, the Steves.

They didn’t opt for a mausoleum, but others did.

What’s a mausoleum without stone Sphinx-like creatures guarding it?

An active cemetery still.

A particularly sad one, this.

We hadn’t planned to come to Mission Burial Park. After visiting Hot Wells, I fiddled with Google Maps and decided we needed to visit the nearby Espada Dam, an 18th-century relic of the Spanish presence in the area. Now part of the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park, “the dam diverted water from the San Antonio river and forced it into hand dug earthen ditches that carried the water to farms around the missions,” the NPS says. “Eventually emptying back into the San Antonio River [sic].”

The San Antonio River, which is the size of a largish creek in this part of Bexar County, flows near Hot Wells. Downstream maybe a half mile is the dam. But I made a wrong turn, and we found ourselves at the cemetery, which instantly looked intriguing.

The San Antonio River forms one boundary of the cemetery.

I think this is a back view of the dam from the cemetery.

Didn’t make it for a front view, which apparently can be seen from a small park across the river. Maybe next time. As for the cemetery, it was just another bit of serendipity on the road.

Hot Wells of Bexar County

Posted on January 28, 2025 by admin

For someone who grew up on the north side of San Antonio, South Presa Street on the south side meant one thing, and it wasn’t the fact that the street is a major thoroughfare in that part of town. Instead, it was the location of San Antonio State Hospital, founded in 1892 as the Southwestern Insane Asylum. When we 1970s kids mentioned the place, it was usually just called “South Presa,” as in, “You belong in South Presa!” “They’re taking you to South Presa!” Better than calling it a loony bin, I guess, but that’s what we meant.

The hospital is still there, though in a building that opened just last year, and with a South New Braunfels Avenue address. Jay and I drove by the 349-acre hospital grounds the day after we went to Corpus Christi, because one day out and about wasn’t enough for me. We did a kind a day trip to the south side on January 17, not to see the hospital, but rather a nearby site, also on South Presa: Hot Wells of Bexar County.

Which doesn’t have a permanent sign yet, though it has been a county park for five years now.

More than 100 years ago, Hot Wells was a posh place to take the waters. Sulfuric waters, in this case, via a well fed by the Edwards Aquifer.

“The first structure burned to the ground in 1894 after only one year of operation,” according to the Edwards Aquifer Web Site, whose page on the historic vicissitudes of Hot Wells is well worth reading.

“The most famous version of the spa was its replacement, a lavish Victorian-style structure built in 1900 that became a renowned, world-class vacation destination for celebrities, world leaders, and wealthy industrialists. Some of its visitors were Will Rogers, Charlie Chaplin, Teddy Roosevelt, Porfirio Diaz, Tom Mix, Douglas Fairbanks, and Cecil B. De Mille.”

Probably not all at the same time — the overlap would be a bit of a stretch — but wouldn’t that have been a guest list to beat all? Alas, time took its toll on the site (more fires, especially) and now visitors come for the stabilized ruins.

There’s a certain elegance to them, even in their ruined state.

The park is simple in execution. The ruins are fenced off, but a sidewalk goes all the way around.

Note the ghost signs: Ladies Pool, Gents Pool and High Diving Strictly Prohibited in the Pools.

Urban ruins aren’t that common, at least not in the US. Our real estate tends to be recycled with all the demolition tech we can bring to the job. But any city with any sense of history ought to have at least one ruin. Of course, San Antonio has its share of fine ruins. But one more is good. Nice work, Bexar County.

The USS Lexington Museum

Posted on January 27, 2025 by admin

It was a nicely structured day trip to Corpus Christi earlier this month, if I say so myself. We left not ridiculously early from SA, but early enough to catch a few easy sights in Corpus before lunch. After lunch: a single main attraction and then a drive home in time for dinner.

It was a Texas dinner: drive-through Whataburger.

The main attraction that day: The USS Lexington, CV-16, nickname, the Blue Ghost. That is to say, the 16th aircraft carrier belonging to the U.S. Navy, commissioned in early 1943 in the thick of the war in the Pacific, where it kicked ass. The ship survived the war with close calls and Japanese propaganda broadcasts asserting more than once that she had been destroyed. After a period of decommissioning beginning in the late ’40s, Lexington returned to serve throughout most of the Cold War.

Note the rising sun flag. That is where a kamikaze struck the ship off Luzon in November 1944, killing 50 men and wounding many more. RIP, sailormen.

That afternoon my brothers and I were entering what is now called the USS Lexington Museum, which is permanently moored across the ship channel from downtown Corpus Christi, where it has been since 1992, within sight of the Texas State Aquarium, the scattered buildings of North Beach, and the old highway bridge and the new one.

The Blue Ghost is one of five aircraft carrier museums nationwide, with two others in California, and one each in New York and South Carolina. These days, tourists enter the Lexington via the Hanger Deck. This deck and all the other lower decks are thick with exhibits, on many of the available surfaces, about the ship and its active service.

I’ve seen a similar bronze before.

George H.W. Bush as a young naval aviator. A sign is careful to point out that the future president was never assigned to the Lexington, but spent a few days recuperating here (“sack time,” he later called it) in June 1944 after being rescued from the ocean when mechanical issues forced him to ditch. Also, he trained as a naval aviator at Air Station Corpus Christi, so there is that connection.

We climbed a number of staircases to higher decks, through the Foc’sle and ultimately to the Flight Deck. Slow going at our age, but we went.

Some of the exhibits were very specific, such as the rat guards used by the vessel. I remember seeing those depicted in a Carl Barks comic, maybe a Scrooge McDuck adventure.

Others were more generalized, such as entire room in the Foc’sle about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Eventually we made our way to the Flight Deck, towered over by the island (the towering section including the bridge). Mostly, the Flight Deck is an open-air aircraft museum.

Sage advice.

Restoration in progress on a Phantom II.

An A-6 Intruder. Like a number of the other airplanes at the Lexington, on loan from the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola.

An AH-1 Cobra. There’s a warrior slogan for you, on the nose.

A T-2 Buckeye, developed in the late ’50s as a trainer. The marvel, when it comes to naval aviation, is how anyone learns it without getting killed.

How indeed. The sign mentions an incident on the Lexington in 1989, when a T-2 Buckeye flown by a trainee crashed into the aft section of the island, killing five and injuring others. Among the dead: Airman Lisa L. Mayo, 25, of Oklahoma City, the first woman killed aboard a U.S. carrier in the line of duty. Again RIP, those who died.

More.

Onward to the Bridge.

There’s the captain.

Spare and utilitarian, the Bridge is. Except for that wig.

Corpus ’79

Posted on January 26, 2025 by admin

The sparse neighborhood cut off from the rest of Corpus Christi by I-37 at least offers a view of the new bridge, nearly complete, that will connect downtown with the North Beach district. New bridge in the foreground, existing through-type arch bridge in the background.

The new bridge has been in the works awhile, including a delay arising from firing FIGG Bridge Engineers from the project part way through. Another FIGG bridge had infamously collapsed in 2018, with the NTSB reporting that “the probable cause of the Florida International University (FIU) pedestrian bridge collapse was the load and capacity calculation errors made by FIGG Bridge Engineers.” Reportedly TexDOT in particular was leery of that company continuing on the Corpus bridge project.

The new bridge will be open by this summer, and soon after the old bridge (vintage 1959) will be demolished. For a narrow window, including January 2025, there are two bridges.

We got a good look at the old bridge from a different vantage.

In this case, the Texas State Aquarium is in the foreground. If I’d known that old bridge was coming down so soon, I’d have taken better pictures of it, including from the ground practically under it in North Beach. Never mind. Time flies, things change.

When was the last time I was in Corpus Christi anyway? A question of no importance to anyone else, and not even that much to me, but something I wondered about while visiting the city (January 16). It occurred to me after I returned home that I might have documentation to pinpoint it – the pages of the desk calendars I kept, starting my sophomore year in high school. I used it, as one would, to keep track of things I had to do for school, but I also made notes about social activities, of which there were a fair number. A speech tournament counted as both, and a travel opportunity to boot, even if it were only to other high school campuses in town.

So I checked: I went to a speech tournament at CC Ray (W.B. Ray HS) January 12-13, 1979, and at CC King (Richard King HS) February 16-17, 1979, so the latter is the answer to my question. I don’t ever remember attending a tourney at CC Miller (Roy Miller HS), where my mother graduated in 1943, when the school was simply Corpus Christi HS, the only one in town.

Early in my sophomore year in high school, I was considering joining the speech club, which mainly would mean debating, and in the fullness of time that’s what I did. I must have mentioned my deliberations to my English teacher, Bill Swinny, who also taught drama at Alamo Heights HS. I can picture him: not as old as I am now, but wrinkled with a slightly leathery face, probably from years under a South Texas sun; silver narrow rim glasses; and a full shock of white hair without a hint of youth.

“If you do debate, your learning is going to go like this,” he said, holding his hands near each other, as if he were about to clap, and then spreading them wide apart – a hell of an effective gesture, with the fact that I remember it after nearly 50 years proving the point. Guess Swinny, who had been on the stage professionally, had that actor’s instinct for gestures.

He was right and it wasn’t long before I realized it. But I probably would have joined debate without his encouragement. Debate meant Friday and Saturday trips to other high schools in San Antonio (I suppose we got all or part of Fridays out of class to go, at least when I didn’t have a football game to go to, and assuming good enough grades). Even better, it sometimes meant going to other cities: Austin, Houston, Dallas, Corpus, even as far as Midland, Texas.

Under the sort of loose supervision that was common in those days. People wax nostalgic for that sort of thing, and they’re right.

I remember traveling by student-filled bus all the way to Stevens Point, Wisconsin in August 1978 for a school club trip (not speech, math) and being completely free to set my schedule once I got there. One day I skipped a few of the organized events and took a long walk around Stevens Point, including a visit to a local church, St. Stanislaus – probably the first time I’d ever looked inside a church, just to see it – and wandering through a large greenbelt around a pond, with fragrant pines that made the place seem intoxicatingly far away. I came home a better person for that amble, and being trusted not to be a moron.

Like band, speech was a social occasion with other members of the club, away from school, away from our families and usual-suspect friends for a little while. It meant nights in motels and occasionally actual hotels, and meals in restaurants beyond our usually haunts – generally organized by the students themselves, such as the time in Corpus we had to put our heads together, in those pre-Internet days, to find and procure food from the known-by-reputation somehow Star Pizza. (Or maybe Starr Pizza, since there’s a street of that name in the city). It might have been middling pizza by later standards, but I’m sure it tasted better for the effort we put into it.

We speech club types were bright but mostly well behaved, and I don’t remember that the teachers ever regretted our loose supervision. There were minor amounts of unreported underage drinking (which I never liked much myself), but no one got too stupid from it, to the point of anyone’s parents having to collect them.

There was the time we sang a few parody songs in one of our hotel rooms. In Houston, maybe. Fairly mild stuff, even then. “Rock Around the Clock” became “Rock Around the Cross,” for instance, with lyrics that would have been offensive, and certainly ridiculous, to some older ears in Texas at that time; but no one else heard it. We might have been loud enough to be heard in the hall, but I doubt in any other rooms. None of us recorded it, either. No one would have thought of that.

That same hotel-room gathering, without any one older around, we talked about what we knew or had heard about some of the other teams from other schools, including opinions about who were the toughest opponents, and otherwise. I don’t remember any details. It would be demented if I did. But I know that that moment was both business and pleasure.

Speech was also an opportunity to meet fairly smart girls who were also exotic. By exotic I don’t mean anything like ethnic background, but rather that they went to other high schools. Even more exotic, other high schools in other cities.

There turned out to be a lot of nuance to that meeting girls thing, something adolescent boys are only dimly aware of. During that single trip to Midland for a speech tourney, I remember my debate partner and I went up against two female partners from who knows what school in an early round of what was called Standard Debate: one team affirmative, the other negative, each partner speaking in turn about whatever the subject was that year. Energy policy? It was the energy-crisis ’70s, after all.

The opposing teams sat across from each other at the front of a classroom, with the judge and any other spectators sitting where students normally would, though in early rounds you could expect few other people besides the judge. So the teams had a pretty good view of each other. One of the opposing girls spent a fair amount of time staring at me. Or so it seemed.

She was lovely. My kind of lovely, as it happened: dark hair, dark eyes, slightly olive complexion. Unusual for those days – an era of straight hair for girls – she sported a lot of curls. Also, she was dressed if not to the nines, pretty close, since nice clothes were mandatory for all debaters, and of course the girls tended to put a lot of effort into how they looked, while it was enough for boys to be in a suit and have taken a shower recently.

I don’t remember anything else about that debate, not even who won. After it was over, the girl debate team was gone in a disappointing flash. No time for small talk, as was sometimes the case.

In conversation not long after with some other (male) debaters, this particular team and its curly-headed debater came up. That’s what she does, I was told, stares at male debaters to distract them. So it was high school-level psyop.

I could have taken a misogynistic lesson from that, but I don’t think I did, and certainly don’t now. She was just using an advantage that was temporarily hers, and, since everyone else seemed to learn about it pretty quickly, probably not that effective. But it was memorable.

One more story: there was that other time that the faculty advisor of the speech club, a youngish woman (early 30s, perhaps) who was with us on a trip to Uvalde, apparently left us completely and went across the border with her boyfriend for an entertaining evening (or night?). The student president of our chapter of the National Forensic League, who did not like her – thought of her as ditzy, if I remember his phrasing right – got wind of that and narked her out to the administration. Soon we had a new advisor. Supervision might have been loose, but it wasn’t supposed to be nil. I don’t know whether there were any other negative professional repercussions for that teacher or not.

Well, maybe that time that was an example of a teacher regretting the loose supervision of a bunch of bright ’70s high school students.

Scatterings

Posted on January 23, 2025 by admin

Texas – they say, or was it in a song? – is full of wide open spaces. “The Wide Open Spaces of Texas” must have been a lesser-known Western swing hit. Or not. The [Dixie] Chicks did one called “Wide Open Spaces,” which is clearly about coming of age and leaving home, and vaguely the West, but not as specific as Texas.

You don’t have to drive very far from urban and suburban Texas to find the spaces. Head south on US 281, which can be picked up in the urban-suburban conglomeration that is the northern half of Bexar County. The further south you go on that road, which becomes I-37, the more sparse the population and buildings become. Soon you pass into Atascosa County.

The increasingly arid land flattens out and the brush is pretty thick, browns and yellows and grays, maybe a less wild version of the thorny Nueces Strip further south. Or something like the Hill Country, but no hills, and few well-to-do city dwellers or retirees taking up residence there. Many Atascosa County residents are of the bovine sort, though I didn’t see that many cattle from the road, as one does sometimes. But they’re out there, the 2022 Census of Agriculture tells me: more than 65,000 head in the county that year, which sounds like a lot, but this is Texas. Plenty of counties have that many and many more.

A scattering of crops is also raised in the county, but for real economic action there’s the service industry, like in most places, and some oil. A scattering of pumpjacks is visible from the highway. That’s Atascosa County, a scattering of this and that. But with a family connection: my mother spent part of her formative years in Jourdanton, the county seat, and periodically even as late as the 1990s (I think), she would visit old friends there. I went with her sometimes in the ’70s.

From San Antonio, I-37 continues southeast through Atascosa, Live Oak and Jim Wells counties, to Nueces County, whose seat is Corpus. A few towns tick by, but not many: Campbellton, Whitsett, Swinney Switch (a fun name), Mathis, with slightly larger burgs just beyond the immediate highway: Three Rivers, George West, Sandia.

Choke Canyon State Park is some miles to the west of the road, and its reservoir is not visible, except in signage. But looking at an online review of the park, it’s clear that while the territory may be arid, not too much to support all kinds of fauna. Invisible from 80 mph, but the animals are out there, getting by.

“Stayed 2 days in a cabin,” houstonphotojourney says [all sic]. “Saw tons of javelinas and their babies, white tailed deer, gorgeous green jays were all over the park, wild turkeys, vermillion flycatchers, orange crowned warblers, ladder backed woodpeckers, downy woodpeckers, crested caracara, a wilson’s snipe, common ground doves, golden fronted woodpeckers, western meadowlarks, american coots, long billed thrashers, killdeer, verdin, had regular evening bunny visitors.”

We found some wide open spaces at a cemetery in Corpus Christi last week – at least in an urban context. Or barely urban, since the neighborhood around the cemeteries features a scattering of houses (that word again), a lot of vacant lots, darkened landscape and a large part of the city’s petrochemical industry in the near distance, toward Nueces Bay.

A graveyard that humanity is forgetting. Guess that is the fate of the majority of all graveyards so far. A scattering of stones are upright and legible, despite that.

Most are not.

Entire family plots are now anonymous, at least to casual visitors like my brothers and I.

There isn’t any signage to identify the cemetery that I could see. It was just some city blocks, if you can call them that, cobbled together as a burial ground, but it’s been a long time since any of the graves were new.

I knew from reading that a place called Bayview Cemetery was the historic cemetery to visit in Corpus. Early settlers are there, along with participants of the war with Mexico, marked by a fair number of standing stones, at least to judge by the photos. The kind of place at which the local historical society conducts periodic tours.

The cemetery we’d gone to was called Bayview on the electronic map. Turns out the historic one is called Old Bayview on the same map, but simply Baywiew in some of the other materials on line. Anyway, to get to the historic Bayview from the less picturesque Bayview, we had to deal with this knot of highways a bit to the east. If you’re going to be a big city in Texas, or at least aspire to be one, you need flyover expressways, and lots of ’em.

We didn’t make it. Instead of going to the cemetery, I managed to get in the lane to crosses the Harbor Bridge to North Beach, where we planned to eat anyway. Later, as we started on the way home, visiting the historic cemetery was again flummoxed by a wrong lane in the tangled overpasses. In cases like that, I take it as a sign, or at least a suggestion, to visit that place some other time.

At one point, I did stop across the street to check Google Maps and we were treated to a view of Corpus Christi Electric Co.

If that doesn’t say built during the 1960s, I don’t know what does. And so it was: 1965. Originally the Lew Williams Chevrolet Dealership, designed by Donnelly and Spear, with Wallace R. Wilkerson as structural engineer – something worth noting for a structure like this.

“Prominently sited at the intersection of two main thoroughfares, the circular former auto showroom links a set of eight hyperbolic paraboloids that dynamically thrust upward at each of their pointed ends,” says the Society of Architectural Historians. “At the time, the showroom’s 185-foot clear interior span was considered as the largest to be erected in concrete in the United States.”

Texas ’25

Posted on January 21, 2025 by admin

One way to deal with January, the grimmest month here in the frozen North (today’s high, 2° F.): adjust your latitude southward. Not everyone has that option, or really even that many people do. Humans get around, but we aren’t a migratory species. Anyway, I managed to travel recently from around 40° North to around 30° North and stay there for 10 days.

I flew from Chicago to Austin on January 9: from clear and chilly to overcast and not quite chilly enough for any precipitation to freeze. The flight path took us up and over an enormous winter storm passing south of Chicago at that time, whose southern edge expressed itself as cold rain in Austin. The storm made for spots of unnerving turbulence and some flight cancellations that day at places in between, such as Dallas, and a long descent into Austin Bergstrom through a gray soup. Hurray for radar.

On my return flight on January 19 out of Dallas — where I’d driven by then — I saw remnants of the earlier storm on the ground below. Somewhere over Missouri or southern Illinois that day, the ground still appeared white miles below, as far as I could see from my 737-800 perch.

Back in Chicago, there is very little snow on the ground. Dry January, indeed.

This was a family and friends trip, visiting more old friends than expected in Austin and San Antonio, including some I knew well in elementary school, meeting them in person for the first time in 40+ years, though I was on a zoom with one of them a few years ago. I’ve been making an effort to visit old friends for a few years now, because of mortality. Mine and theirs. People get a little weird if you say that part out loud, but I believe everyone feels the quiet ticking of the clock.

Also an Austin-San Antonio-Dallas trip, with a day in Corpus Christi thrown in for fun. Some places are like old friends you haven’t seen in decades, and so it was with Corpus, as Texans often call it. Not exactly a favorite destination from the old days, but I do have memories of high school speech tournaments at CC Ray and CC King (two Corpus high schools) maybe as recently as early 1979. I’m fairly sure Corpus was the first city except for San Antonio that I drove a car in, though that might have been Austin.

My brothers and I had lunch in the North Beach neighborhood of Corpus.

Seafood. The thing to eat on the Coast.

It was mostly an urban trip, but one fine day (nearly 60° F), old friends Tom and Nancy and I went to the suburban outskirts of Austin for lunch at the Round Rock location of the Salt Lick.

That too was visiting an old friend, in a way, though my fond memories are of the original Salt Lick in 1993, further out from metro Austin, in Driftwood, Texas, which is about as Hill Country as you can get. Still, the branch in Round Rock, with its long dining room and long tables and stone construction, seemed true to my memories of the original location. More importantly, the barbecue was just as good.

Afterward, we took a walk in the historic district of Round Rock – our Round Rock Ramble – near the intersection of Main and Mays, among the finely restored late 19th- and early 20th-century stone edifices with names like the Old Broom Factory, the Otto Reinke Building and the J.A. Nelson Co. Building. Businesses of the 21st century seem to be doing well in these old two- and three-story stone commercial buildings, including the likes of Fahrenheit Design, Organica Aesthetics (a plastic surgery spa), Gharma Zone Korean Food and the Brass Tap.

Nearby stands an impressive old water tower in a small park (Koughan Memorial Water Tower Park, according to Google Maps and Wiki).

The tower is yet another legacy of the WPA. Even better –

– you can stand right under it, something that isn’t always possible when it comes to public water infrastructure.

Chicago River Scenes

Posted on January 8, 2025 by admin

Above freezing temps in January, or December or February for that matter, mean a good day here in northern Illinois for a walk. That kind of thinking inspired us to go downtown on the Saturday after Christmas, an overcast but dry day without any bitter winter temps or in-your-face wind.

It wasn’t exactly warm, just not really cold. That happy condition inspired some people to do a bit more than walk. Spotted in the Chicago River.

A hot tub boat. I couldn’t remember whether I’d ever seen such a thing. Human ingenuity takes some odd turns. While I might not ever tool around in one myself, somehow I find it oddly reassuring that such a thing exists.

Looking the other way: one of the excellent bridges of the Chicago area. Or any urban area. The Michigan Avenue Bridge, which has formally been the Du Sable Bridge since 2010, named for the early settler and trade post operator in the vicinity.

We crossed bridge twice that day. Once on the upper level, which is always fairly busy, both with cars and trucks, and the flapping of flags, but also people on the wide pedestrian paths on either side. Later we crossed on the lower level. No one else was there.

Just another small example of how close off the beaten path can be. There’s nothing hard about reaching the lower level of Michigan Ave., and in fact there are a number of ways to get there.

The lower level walkway isn’t pretty, but there is urban texture.

It is also a good walk across an impressive steel bridge with a view, and that’s enough.

The National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum

Posted on January 7, 2025 by admin

You might say I had a vision recently.

A vision, but no mystic revelations. When I saw the Jesus bobbleheads in Milwaukee on the Friday after Christmas, I thought that a really good lyricist could do a follow up song to “Plastic Jesus,” which would be called “Bobblehead Jesus.” But I am not that person.

We’d dropped by the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum, where the bobbleheads crowd shelf after shelf after shelf: some 6,500 on display of the 10,000 figures the museum says it has.

But for Google Maps I might have missed National Bobblehead, which reminded me at once of the American Toby Jug Museum in Evanston. Still, there are some differences. Most of the tobies are behind glass, but not the bobbleheads, and most of the bobbleheads are sports figures, while the tobies have a wider variety of figures.

Like that other museum, National Bobblehead started with a single collection that morphed into something bigger – in this case, a bobblehead business for the two founders, Milwaukeeans Phil Sklar and Brad Novak. It isn’t enough that they collect them, though they still do, but they make them and sell them as well.

The museum asserts that Chinese nodding dolls had a vogue in Europe in the late 18th century, and that afterward various bobbly figures were made worldwide, with references to Germany and Russia and other places. These days sports figures dominate. Maybe three-quarters of the bobbleheads on display are sports figures, including both players and mascots.

Their popularity in the sports world has been growing since their introduction in the early 1960s in baseball. The first player-specific bobbleheads formed quite a lineup: Roberto Clemente, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris and Willie Mays.

Most of the others are entertainers and political or historic figures, as you’d expect.

More of him than I’d expect.

Can you really be a famous entertainer if you don’t have a bobblehead?

Near the gift shop – which sells bobbleheads, naturally – is a more than complete collection of U.S. presidents, in order, back-to-front, left-to-right, Washington to Biden.

More than complete because FDR is represented twice, once standing (with a cane) and the other in a wheelchair. Grover Cleveland is represented only once, however. Curiously, beginning with Herbert Hoover, all of the figures have their hands raised, as one does to a crowd. Before him, only TR does so, and he’s holding a top hat.

One more note: the museum occupies part of the second floor of one of the redeveloped Kramer International Foundry buildings in the Walker’s Point neighborhood of Milwaukee. That early 2000s project was an early one in the transformation of the neighborhood from industrial to retail and residential.

Milwaukee continues to surprise.

Mitchell Park Domes ’24

Posted on January 6, 2025 by admin

Since we went to Indiana just before Christmas, it only seemed logical (to me) to go to Wisconsin just after Christmas. Due to considerations I don’t need to detail, we chose to make it a day trip. Milwaukee is convenient that way.

We arrived at the Mitchell Park Domes late in the misty drizzly but not freezing morning of December 27. Not our first visit, but the last time was quite a while ago.

Didn’t remember this detail: An analemmatic sundial in the sidewalk near the entrance, the likes of which you don’t see often. But no sun.

Formally, the place is known as the Mitchell Park Horticultural Conservatory and, since the last time we were there, the fate of the Domes was the subject of a number of recommendations and other proposals. One proposal was to knock ’em down and replace them with something still undesigned, but which I suspect which would be more along the lines of immersive edu-tainment. Again, just a suspicion, but that would fit a pattern: destroy something distinctive to a particular place (in this case, Milwaukee) and put up something that could be anywhere, in the name of an enhanced guest experience that is interactive as a modest pinball arcade.

A few months ago, the county committed to spending some money on the Domes, including “a $30 million commitment from Milwaukee County once funding milestones are achieved,” according to Friends of the Domes, which unfortunately sounds like “when the county figures out how to get the money, this could take a while.” But at least the magnificent triad of domes isn’t going to be destroyed in a plan to merge it with the county’s Milwaukee Public Museum.

“Based on our review of the information we believe there could be a great guest experience which integrates the content and stories from Milwaukee Public Museum with the content and experience of the current Domes and Conservatory,” a 2019 report by an outfit called Gallagher Museum Services notes. “Specifically, the natural history portion of the MPM storyline fits very nicely with the Domes experiences. From our analysis, GMS has concluded that the Milwaukee Domes should be demolished. The cost of properly renovating the Domes greatly outweighs the benefit of doing so…”

A far as I can tell as a non-Milwaukeean, the reaction to that was, “Outweighs the benefits? Says who?” Anecdotal evidence supports the preservationists. On the Friday after Christmas this year, when people have more time to go out, they were out in force at the Domes. Not obscenely crowded, but pretty busy. All ages. Many were families with small children. Children who will, if allowed, take their own children one day.

The GMS report makes it sound like the Domes themselves aren’t really part of the “Domes experience,” which really just involves an elaborate garden, as opposed to an elaborate garden in a distinctive, placemaking setting. The experience, the report seems to assert, is portable: take it out from under the Domes and you’d still have the “Domes experience” somehow in a spiffy new building.

People like the Domes. They already want to go there. The Domes are not the Milwaukee Public Museum, which is a fine institution in its own right, however one might shoehorn the “Domes experience” into a part of that museum that happens to be about nature. The “Domes experience” is only found at the domes, and the people of Milwaukee know that.

I believe that too. Just for the vaulting glass overhead, if nothing else.

The Domes hold their crowds pretty well, too. We were able to circulate comfortably and without any sort of jostling.

The tropical dome.

The arid dome.

The show dome.

Christmas was represented, of course, but also Advent, Winter Solstice, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa.

As we did those years ago, we caught it during the holiday season show, and quite a show it is under the Domes.

Christmas Giants Roamed the Earth Once Upon a Time

Posted on January 5, 2025 by admin

The trappings of the holiday season are disappearing, as they always do in the grim early days of January. A few of the seasonally lit houses on the block are no longer cheerfully glowing, and I’ve seen a few forlorn Christmas trees out on the curb. Ours still stands inside, fully adorned, but even it is a short-timer.

I saw this figure in Chicago before Christmas, and in fact that wasn’t the only giant skeleton I’d seen re-decorated for the holidays.

I figure that considering the cost of such a skeleton – and possibly the pain-in-the-ass effort that goes into setting it up and taking it down – keeping it up just for Halloween didn’t appeal to the homeowner. Put on a Santa hat and red scarf and ho-ho-ho, it says Christmas, eh?

But what next? Some Cupid-like garb for Valentine’s Day, I suppose. An Easter bonnet for that holiday, which I think would look pretty funny, even though how often do you see Easter bonnets any more? An Uncle Sam hat for July 4 and I’m not sure what for Labor Day, and we’re practically back to Halloween and Christmas again.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Been There