Foellinger-Freimann Botanical Conservatory

Posted on July 11, 2022 by admin

Some years ago, we passed through Fort Wayne on the way home from Dayton. It was a Sunday afternoon, and we had a choice between lunch and spending some time at the Foellinger–Freimann Botanical Conservatory, which is in downtown Fort Wayne. Lunch usually wins out in such situations, and it did then.

But I didn’t forget about Fort Wayne’s conservatory. I like a good conservatory or botanical garden, whether under glass or open air. Forty years ago, while on my first visit to D.C., I happened on my first botanical garden — the most impressive United States Botanic Garden — and that piqued my interest.

On July 2, we arrived in Fort Wayne an hour before the conservatory closed. Enough time this time. Not the most promising exterior. I’ve always been partial to domes when it comes to sheltering large numbers of plants.

Foellinger-Freimann itself is nearly 40 years old, the result of redevelopment of the site by city, with the support of the Foellinger Foundation and the Frank Freimann Charitable Trust, both local orgs.

The grounds include 24,500 square feet of indoor gardens under three structures with slanting glass roofs, plus four outside gardens. From across the street, it looks a little bland, but it works well as a green space once you’re inside.

The first roofed garden has changing displays. The theme when we went was the gardens of Paris.

Nice. I guess it could have been the gardens of Nice — that would be different. But no, Paris gets all the glory. Wonder if the Corn Palace ever does Paris as its theme.

Next, a tropical garden. Guaranteed to be lush in July or January.

Too many good-looking flowers to name. At least, I don’t want to bother with names.

And not just flowers.

But I will say this is a breadfruit plant.

In the desert habitat, the plants are sparser, as you’d expect, but no less interesting.

Various cacti, of course.

Including the fishhook barrel cactus, a painful-sounding name if there ever was one.

Outside, it was summer and the gardens weren’t short on blossoms.

Just before heading back inside, I caught this view.

The Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, which is across the street, looks like it’s inspecting the glass of Foellinger-Freimann.

Thanks, Grandma

Posted on July 10, 2022 by admin

Fifty-five years ago, my grandmother — Grandma, always — took me on a train ride from San Antonio to Austin. I found evidence of it tucked away in an envelope at my mother’s house some time ago.

Grandma thoughtfully made a note of the fact that it was my first train ride, and the date: July 8, 1967. I was visiting Grandma for a while that summer, as I did in the years before we lived in San Antonio.

Come to think of it, the next summer while I visited her, my family moved from Denton to San Antonio. (Not the stuff of a sitcom; I knew perfectly well we were moving.) Grandma was the one who first took me to visit the house that my mother had bought, and would live in for nearly 50 years.

I find it amusing that a child counted as half a person for the purposes of train fare. Grandma thus paid fare $4.41 for one and a half riders. Adjust that for inflation, and she paid more than $38 in our current, beleaguered dollars.

Good old Missouri Pacific. Mopac.

We must have been visiting someone she knew in Austin, but I don’t remember anything about that. I do remember wisps from the ride itself, mostly the view out the window. I’m sure she knew a train ride would be a thrill for a six-year-old.

But there was more to it than that. I also remember that she told me that it might not be possible for me to ride a train when I was older, so she wanted to take me. Certainly Grandma knew, by 1967, that the writing was on the wall for U.S. passenger train service, or at least Mopac. Maybe she wanted a last ride herself, before passenger trains went the way of the buffalo.

(Outdated analogy. Like the buffalo, passenger trains came to a population bottleneck known as Amtrak, rather than total extinction.)

I imagine an older version of myself — not even now, but perhaps from mid-90s — appearing to her and saying, Grandma, I’ve ridden a lot of trains. In Europe and Asia — and once across Russia from Asia to Europe. I’ve taken the bullet train, and even Amtrak from San Antonio to San Francisco in 1990, though it was distinctly second rate.

And those are just the intercity trains. I’ve lost count of how many different subways and light rail lines I’ve taken, but it would be dozens.

She probably would have been a mite skeptical of those assertions.

It was a one-way ticket. We returned by bus the next day.

Go Greyhound. Grandma also noted that it was my first bus ride. She was being thrifty in not taking the train back, I think. The bus fare is recorded as $1.35 (just short of $12 now), though I don’t know whether that was for the two of us or just me. Even if she paid double that herself, that would have been less than the train.

She probably didn’t think buses would quit running. I don’t remember the bus ride at all.

Future me could pop up again: Grandma, I’ve been on a lot of buses, too, in lots of states and countries. I took one across Australia once. But even in America, I’ve gotten around — all the way from Boston to Los Angeles, once, and that was just part of the trip!

Isn’t that nice, she’d say, thinking at least that her grandson has a healthy imagination.

Downtown Fort Wayne

Posted on July 7, 2022 by admin

RIP, Will Friend. I didn’t know him well, but did meet him at events over the years, and we got along. I didn’t realize he was quite that young.

Toward the end of the afternoon on Saturday, we took a walk in downtown Fort Wayne. Not long after parking the car, this caught our attention.

Not just any pedestrian bridge, but the historic Wells Street Bridge over the St. Marys River. A sign on the 1884 truss bridge names the Wrought Iron Bridge Company of Akron, Ohio, as the bridgebuilder.

For nearly 100 years, vehicular traffic crossed the bridge, but in 1982 it became a pedestrian walkway. A view from the bridge, toward a less-developed part of the city.

After you cross the bridge, there is another elevated walkway, this one over a small section of riverbank. The blue building in the background is a block of riverside apartments, under construction. Move to Fort Wayne, young members of the laptop class. While rents don’t exactly seem cheap there — I don’t think anywhere counts as that anymore — there have to better deals than in the large cities.

The walk offers a view of the Fort Wayne — skyline isn’t quite the word. A view of a few larger buildings in the background, with Promenade Park in the foreground. We soon rested a while at that park, lounging around on iron chairs at an iron table, drinking soda. Rest: always an essential part of any walkabout.

Occasional party boats ply the St. Marys.

Away from the river is Freimann Square, home of the aforementioned Anthony Wayne statue, as well as a fountain and flower beds.

Not far is the Allen County Courthouse, designed around the turn of the 20th century by Hoosier architect Brentwood Tolan.

The figure on top, I’ve read, is a copper Lady Liberty that turns, as a vane does, with the wind.

A few decades pass and you get art deco. In this case, the Lincoln Bank Tower, another of those structures started just in time — 1929. Design by another Hoosier architect, Alvin Strauss.
It could have been the German American Bank Tower, but for some hard-to-figure reason the bank changed its name in 1918.

The Japanese Friendship Garden, on a tenth of an acre near the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, was gift of one of Fort Wayne’s sister cities, Takaoka. I had to look it up, even though I probably passed through it on a train the fall we went to Hida-Takayama. I suspect most Japanese, faced with the name Fort Wayne, would have to look it up, too.

The museum was closed when we got there, but the garden is always open. Bonus: the garden also features a 2002 time capsule under a rock, slated for a 2027 opening.

Elsewhere downtown: Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. Dating from 1860, it is the oldest church building in Fort Wayne, with its Gothic design attributed to Rev. Msgr. Julian Benoit.

Vigil mass was about to start, but we got a peek.

It isn’t the only sizable church around. A few blocks away is St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church.

Not open. Too bad, looks like quite a looker inside.

Northern Indiana Dash

Posted on July 6, 2022 by admin

Ah, high summer.

That’s in Dallas. I’m not there. Today’s high here was 79 F., a dip from a hot and muggy 90s-day on Tuesday. Several degrees of latitude will make that difference.

One of these days, the times might catch up with Gen. “Mad” Anthony Wayne, leader in the Revolution and scourge of the Northwest Territory Indians, but for now, you can find him on horseback in bronze at Freimann Square in downtown Fort Wayne, Indiana, in a work by Chicagoan George Etienne Ganiere (1865-1935).

We gazed a Mad Anthony for a few moments as part of our trip through northern Indiana. I wanted to take a short trip over the long Independence Day weekend, but I didn’t want it to consume the entire three days.

So on Saturday, we left in mid-morning and made our way to Fort Wayne, where we stayed overnight. On Sunday, we returned across northern Indiana to get home, which took up most of the day.

We arrived in Nappanee, Indiana, for lunch on Saturday. I’m glad to report that Main Street Roasters (not so new anymore, it seems) makes a fine pulled pork sandwich. Yuriko said the ingredients in her Cobb salad tasted very fresh, and I sampled some, and agreed. The place was doing a brisk business.

We figured the main source for both fresh pork and fresh greens was the Amish farms in the area. Nappanee is considered the focus of one of the country’s larger Amish populations, though that’s a little hard to tell in a casual look around downtown, which isn’t so different from other Indiana towns its size (pop. nearly 7,000). Out away from town, though, you can see from the road farm houses and other buildings, clustered closer than in other rural areas, which is characteristic of Amish settlements.

In town, Plain People in carriages rolled by now and then. Some female store clerks wore the small head coverings common among Mennonites. The Amish tourist attraction in Nappanee known as Amish Acres closed in late 2019, and a more upmarket property re-opened the next year — in an example of bad timing, though it seems to have survived — as The Barns at Nappanee, Home of Amish Acres. Maybe all those extra words are going to cost you more.

Across the street from Main Street Roasters (and not Amish Acres).

On Sunday, our first brief stop was at Magic Wand, home of the Magicburger, which can be found in Churubusco, Indiana.

We didn’t have a magic burger, but rather shared a strawberry milkshake to go. Among strawberry milkshakes, it was the real deal. The real tasty deal, straw-quaffed as we speed along U.S. 33.

Churubusco was a name I took an instant liking to. The town fathers apparently read in their newspapers about the battle of that name, and wanted the town to borrow a bit of its martial glory. According to some sources, it gets shortened in our time, and maybe for a long time, to Busco. I also noticed references to the place, on signs and the like, as Turtletown. Really? What was that about? I wondered.

The Beast of Busco, that’s what. Quite a story. A giant among turtles that the townsfolk never could quite capture. I haven’t had this much fun reading hyperlocal history — lore — since I chanced across a small lake in Wisconsin that is supposedly home to an underwater pyramid. Turtle Days was last month.

Another spot for a short visit on Sunday: Warsaw, Indiana. It’s the seat of Kosciusko County, with a handsome Second Empire courthouse rising in the town square.

Designed in the 1880s by Thomas J. Tolan, who died during construction, the Indiana Historical Society says. The project was completed by his son, Brentwood S. Tolan.

The square sports some other handsome buildings, too.

Warsaw is also home to a garden the likes of which I’d never imagined, and the reason I stopped in town, days after spotting it on Google Maps and then looking it up: the Warsaw Biblical Gardens.

The brainchild of a local woman back in the 1980s with access to the land. “It would be no ordinary garden — not a rock garden, nor a rose garden, nor a perennial garden — it would be a truly unique and beautiful Biblical Garden,” the garden’s web site says.

“Actually, we say ‘gardens’ because the Warsaw Biblical Gardens has a variety of areas: the Forest, Brook, Meadow, Desert, Crop and Herb gardens; the Grape Arbor; and the Gathering site. Warsaw Biblical Gardens is ¾-acre in size, and there are very few gardens like this in the United States.

“The term ‘biblical’ refers mainly to the fact that the plants, trees, flowers, herbs, etc., are mentioned in the Old and/or New Testaments of the Bible. These have been carefully researched to preserve the integrity of the Gardens’ uniqueness.

“The Warsaw/Winona Lake area of Indiana has a long religious history. That history begins perhaps with the Chatauqua times of Winona Lake, now being revived. [Really?] Many other famous historical religious figures made their home’s here, from Homer Rodeheaver to Fanny Crosby to Billy Sunday.”

I won’t pretend I didn’t have to look up the first two of those three. Regardless, it’s a stunning little place.

Go far — always good if you can manage it. But also go near.

Antiques of Naperville

Posted on June 30, 2022 by admin

Back on July 5, since of course the stretch from Canada Day to Independence Day at the very least ought to be a row of holidays.

At a shop called Antiques of Naperville, which is tucked away on a side street in that suburb’s downtown, there is a sign that says:

Take All The Photos You Want
Please
Tag Us @Antiques of Naperville
#shopdoggibson #brownbarnantiques

Sure thing. This doesn’t count as a tag, but it is a mention. I took the place up on its offer of no-limits photography, because there was so much stuff around. Interesting stuff. That’s all I ask of an antique store. Not every shop allows pictures, but is that not a mistake in this age of social media?

This was the place I found the Charley Weaver bartender doll, previously posted. Nearby him were these ties — and somehow they’re in the same bric-a-brac milieu as ol’ Charley.

Divers reading material.

Dell. We always had many more Gold Key comics than Dell, but there were a few around the house.

Paperbacks. Not that old. We had this book when I was young and I read it. And the next one.

Something we didn’t have: Shiva.

Shiva is the Destroyer, and it occurs to me that destruction doesn’t have to be dramatic and fast, does it? Sometimes — often? — usually? — destruction is gradual, happening off in a quiet corner or nook, but inexorable all the same. Such as for the objects in an antique shop, for instance.

Characters more friendly than Shiva.

I have to say it: Very interesting, but stoopid. You bet your sweet bippy.

“As seen on Antiques Roadshow.” This very thing, or just one like it?

A traveling game of chance, its sign said, used by con men. No doubt.

Items no longer needed by drivers, fortunately.

Yuriko pointed out the inhabitant of a chair in the shop.

For a moment I thought it was a doll or cushion of some kind, but then one of the dog’s paws twitched. It was a living dog. Probably the most inert dog I’ve ever seen, and a lot of dogs are inert a lot of the time. This dog paid no attention to any of the people shuffling through the shop, and barely acknowledged it when Yuriko petted him.

Art Show at Naper Settlement

Posted on June 29, 2022 by admin

Parking in downtown Naperville on a sunny summer Sunday takes a little time, featuring as it does slow drives through a few full parking lots and passing by other lots that look full, while navigating the crooked grid of streets and keeping an eye out for a free flow of pedestrians.

I’ve been on worse parking treks. Before too long, we found a spot at Naperville Central High School, whose lot was open and no charge. To reach the riverwalk from there, you have to go around Naper Settlement, an open-air museum covering 12 acres and featuring historic buildings from the vicinity.

Unless you go into the museum, which we didn’t particularly want to, since we’d been there before. September of ’09, when we attended a pow-wow.

Then we found out that an art show was going on, with no admission to the grounds. So we popped in for a look-see.

“Since 1959, the Naperville Woman’s Club has presented a free art fair in the summer,” the Naper Settlement web site says. “The longest continuously running art fair in Illinois, this event brings a weekend of art and artistry to Naper Settlement in a free, fun, and family-friendly environment.” My italics.

Some nice work was for sale. We managed not to buy anything, remarkably enough.

In that first pic, he’s selling ceramic graters. Not something I would have thought of.

I was more interested in taking a look at the buildings, even though most of them were closed. The crown jewel of the museum, of course, is the handsome Martin Mitchell Mansion, which we toured those years ago. I didn’t remember much about Mitchell — just that he made money in bricks, many of which are evident in the house, and that his daughter was a dwarf who willed the property to the city.

The Daniels House.

Hamilton C. Daniels (1820-97) doctored in 19th-century Naperville. Wonder whether, toward the end, old doc Daniels was still a miasma man or he came around to germ theory.

The Century Memorial Chapel.

Formerly St. John’s Episcopal in Naperville, dating from 1864.

The museum also has some nice gardens.

Speaking of gardens, there was a special display of Victory Gardens. Boxes honoring the originals, anyway, and individual service members.

Something I learned from the signage: In 1943, seven million acres of Victory Gardens were planted, producing 40% of the nation’s fresh produce that year.

One more structure, though there are 30 all together on the grounds: the Murray Outhouse.

How many outhouses in the world are named? There have to be others, but there couldn’t be that many.

Along the West Branch of the DuPage River

Posted on June 28, 2022 by admin

Naperville, the second-largest Chicago suburb by population at nearly 148,000, has much to recommend a casual visitor, either in warm months or colder ones. (Way-far west Aurora, surprisingly, is number one at nearly 200,000 souls.)

Sunday was warm, but not hot enough to keep us from a stroll along West Branch of the DuPage River, which passes through downtown Naperville, and is in fact one of the village’s main amenities. The river is broad at that point.

But not that deep. A foot or two at most, yet deep enough for ducks and kayaks.

The walkways along the river are fairly narrow.

Both banks are connected by wooden foot bridges.

With small parks and other features on either side.

Including some artwork. Such as “Wall of Faces,” whose plaque says that it was “created by Naperville school children and molded by local artists to represent the casualties of September 11, 2001.”

And a bronze Dick Tracy. I don’t think I’d noticed that before.

It’s been there since 2010, so I just wasn’t paying attention. But why Naperville? I associate the comic policeman with Woodstock, Illinois, home of creator Chester Gould. The plaque explained that Dick Locher (1929-2017), who was one of Gould’s successors in writing and drawing the comic, lived in Naperville. In fact he was a multi-talented fellow, creating this statue as well.

Household Hazardous Waste Run ’22

Posted on June 27, 2022 by admin

There are five permanent places in the state that will take household hazardous waste off your hands, no charge beyond your taxes, according to this Illinois EPA site, plus collections that move from place to place.

One of the permanent facilities, the closest one to where we live (I think), is in Naperville, open on Saturdays and Sundays 9 am to 2 pm. That’s what took us to Naperville on Sunday. Mid-morning, I loaded the back of the car with a variety of chemicals previously found in our garage: cans and bottles and other vessels tucked away in open cardboard boxes so they wouldn’t clatter around too much.

The village of Naperville says that acceptable items include aerosol cans, automotive fluids (including oil, gasoline and anti-freeze), car batteries, fire extinguishers, mercury, paints and stains (oil-based only), peanut oil, pesticides, propane tanks, solvents, thermostats and “unknown hazardous substances.” That last one, I have to say, is pretty bold of the village.

Unacceptable: ammo, compressed gas (except propane), explosives, helium tanks, latex paint, paper or glass or wood — those three generally aren’t hazardous, unless some falls on you, or fuels an out-of-control fire — radioactive materials, sharps, tires, trash or alkaline batteries.

I had none of those. Of the acceptable ones, I had everything but car batteries, fire extinguishers, mercury, thermostats and peanut oil. Peanut oil? Apparently it gums up pipes in high concentrations. Also, I had no unknown hazardous substances, such as boxes one finds floating in the bay.

Since offloading your household waste down in Naperville is first come, first serve, I imagined waiting in a long line in my car, each car belching out auto emissions as they snaked slowly toward the pickup point, where masked state employees appeared and disappeared according to some schedule opaque to me. Hours might be lost to the process.

When we got there, exactly no other cars were ahead of us, and only one came in behind us. A man wearing a white clean suit — are there any other colors? — but not a helmet, asked were we were from, and I told him.

Then he and a partner, also be-clean suited, quickly examined everything in the back and removed everything but a single can, which in their opinion was empty, and could be put in regular trash. That was it. Took all of about two minutes, once the driving was done. Sometimes things work as they are supposed to, even when dealing with the state. Seldom is that written about or mentioned. So I’m doing that now.

Naperville is nearly a half-hour drive from where we live, meaning we weren’t about to turn around and go home right away, burning the gas just for that. So we spent the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon there. I’m glad we did, because otherwise I wouldn’t have made the acquaintance of an homunculus Charley Weaver.

More on that later. Enough to say now that someone my age just caught the tail end of Charley Weaver.

Regal Country Inn, 2017

Posted on June 26, 2022 by admin

Rain yesterday morning, cool temps in the afternoon. Cool morning today, pretty warm but not blazing hot in the afternoon. Saw a few fireflies last week. Harbingers of high summer, they are. Always glad to see them.

Has it been five years since our last visit to the UP? Apparently so. I wish I’d taken more detailed pictures of the place we stayed, the Regal Country Inn in Wakefield, Mich., which wasn’t remotely regal, more-or-less country, and certainly an inn.

The motel was located on U.S. 2, which passes along the roof of the United States.

The reason I should have documented the place better is sic transit gloria mundi.

Ah, well. Wonder whether the place fell victim to the pandemic or merely the slings and arrows of commercial fortune.

It was a pleasantly comfortable independent motel, owned by the fellow who greeted us at the front desk.

Bob, I’ll call him, because I don’t remember his name, but Bob fits. Bob gave me a discount for paying in cash. Good old Bob. Maybe our stay was off the books. I didn’t ask.

We stayed in a second-floor room, near an opening over the lower level and among a fair amount of bric-a-brac.

His cutout was there, but as far as I know the place didn’t claim that the Duke ever stayed at the Regal Country Inn.

Jerome Huppert Woods

Posted on June 21, 2022 by admin

As forecast, temps didn’t break 80 degrees F. on Saturday. A good day to hit the trail.

A trail, anyway. The one we hit happened to be the Des Plaines River Trail, which parallels the river of that name, on a short section through Jerome Huppert Woods. The place might be named for this man, a casualty of WWII. How many Jerome Hupperts have there been? He was from Wisconsin, so that would be a little unusual, but hardly impossible.

The woods are a small slice of undeveloped land along the river. My guess would be that the Cook County Forest Preserve District was able to acquire most of the land along the Des Plaines because it is prone to flooding. A little further from the forest preserve land at that point, the suburb of River Grove surrounds the area, and it’s fully developed.

The reach the trail proper, you go along a connecting trail from a parking lot and recreation field to a short, graffiti’d tunnel under a road.

There’s enough undeveloped land in the area to support some large fauna, looks like.

I don’t look at the creature and think Bambi. Rather, I think, deer ticks, vector of Lyme disease. Best to keep your distance. Still, it was nice to see.

Recent rains seem to have created, or at least enlarged, a stagnant pond that isn’t visibly connected to the river.