Olivet Nazarene University

Posted on March 23, 2021 by admin

College campuses usually offer pleasant places to stroll on warm days, or even when it isn’t so warm, so with that in mind I wanted to take a walk around the 250-acre Olivet Nazarene University in Bourbonnais, Illinois, on Sunday. Since we’d just taken a walk at Kankakee River State Park, the rest of the family was less enthusiastic about the idea. They waited in the car while I took a 10-minute amble.

I’d heard of the Strickler Planetarium. I imagined it would be a little larger, but no doubt it’s a good facility.

Nice clock tower.

“The Thomas H. Milby Memorial Clock Tower is provided by the J. Harlan Milby Family to remind us that during his student days in 1956, Tom walked these paths on his way to heaven,” the university says. There are carillon bells up there, but I wasn’t around long enough to hear them.

Not far away is a smokestack. As far as I know, it isn’t named in honor of anyone. For a suitable donation, I’ll bet it could be arranged.

I’d call it the Old ONU Stack. Or maybe not so old. If what I read here is correct, it had to be rebuilt after a tornado knocked it down in 1963.

ONU, as the name says, is a Nazarene university. The school’s roots go back to 1907, around the time that various Pentecostal and Holiness groups started merging to form the modern Nazarenes, a process entirely too complicated to summarize here.

ONU itself got started in a wide place in the road called Olivet, Illinois, not far south of Danville, and was originally Illinois Holiness University, a name I believe I would have kept. The school mascot could have been the Rollers, for instance. Or maybe the Fighting Wesleyans.

Be that as it may, the school took the name of the town, no doubt for its association with the Mount of Olives, and kept the name when it moved to Bourbonnais in 1940 after a fire destroyed its main building in Olivet.

Even the small details harken to the school’s early time. Such as on the manhole covers.

Nice design. Features the seal of the school, noting its 1907 origin. One of the many manhole covers of the world that receive little attention, but which are actually pretty cool.

Kankakee River State Park

Posted on March 22, 2021 by admin

Late Sunday morning we headed south once more, dog and all, to walk on paths under clear skies and through warm air. March has provided some good weekends so far.

But first we had lunch in the car at a small park in Bourbonnais, Illinois, bought from the drive-thru of a delightful place called Niro’s Gyros, across the road from Olivet Nazarene University. We would have eaten at the park shelter, but it was warm enough for al fresco to be pleasant only out in sun, not in the shade.

Nero’s Gyros would be funnier, but I guess the owner’s name is Niro or something like it. I ate a gyro, and Niro does right by them. Yuriko had a Philly cheesesteak and Ann some Italian sausage, and were well satisfied too.

Then we went to Kankakee River State Park, a few miles away. I first went there in the late ’80s, but we visited most recently — not that recent, really — when Ann was small enough to play on the swing set like this.
So it’s been a while. Most of the 4,000-acre park includes both banks of the Kankakee for 11 miles or so, but not quite all of it. Yesterday we picked a part of the park that doesn’t follow the Kankakee River, but rather a tributary called Rock Creek.

That part of the park has one thing to recommend it: a trail that follows the creek, then loops around through the forest back to the parking lot. One source puts it at two miles, but it didn’t feel that long. It might be two combined with another loop trail to the north, but never mind. We had a good walk.

When I said the trail follows Rock Creek, what I meant was that it follows a bluff about 30 feet above the creek. There were paths to climb down to the creek, but we didn’t bother with anything more than taking in some of the views.

It’s one of the wider trails I’ve been on lately, at least the part paralleling the creek.

At one point is a view of a waterfall.

Niagara it ain’t, or even some of the wonderful falls in the UP, but as I told Ann, who knows, in 50,000 years it might be a mighty waterfall.

The trail, as mentioned, looped away from the creek and passed through wooded territory back to the start. Nice and smooth, with most of the mud dry. Very pleasant.

The only curiosities along the way were manmade. Sunglasses.

A shoe.

I can see some one dropping the sunglasses, and someone else putting them on the sign. But the shoe? A nice-looking one, too. Put there just to make passersby wonder why it was put there? If so, it succeeded momentarily.

Bottle Cap Alley

Posted on March 21, 2021 by admin

My brother Jay and I had lunch at the Dixie Chicken in College Station, Texas, while visiting Texas A&M in the spring of ’14. It isn’t far from campus. I wanted to visit A&M because I’d heard about it all my life. My grandfather was an Aggie, Class of 1916, and I knew people my age who went there, but I’m certain I’d have heard about it anyway, growing up in Texas.

I’d never heard of Bottle Cap Alley, which is next to Dixie Chicken. Soon I learned about the place.
It’s the kind of place that tends to be shunted off into the “quirky attractions” ghetto. I don’t care much for that word, with its slight whiff of condescension. Maybe that’s just my take, but anyway I’d prefer to call Bottle Cap Alley odd or peculiar.

Underfoot were bottle caps. Lots of bottle caps (and cigarette butts and leaves, but never mind). A peculiar feeling, walking on bottle caps.

Bottle caps and I go back a long way. During grade school, I was an assiduous collector, accumulating a mass of them in a box that had once held a television — back when TVs were serious pieces of furniture. From that mass, I found examples of all sorts of caps and glued them to large pieces of cardboard, a couple of hundred at least, including some prized examples that Jay picked up for me in Europe in the summer of ’72.

I lost interest later, around junior high, as one does. The mass in the box are long gone, maybe delivered to a recycler. But the caps on the boards are still in a closet in the house where my mother used to live, and where my brother Jim now lives. I might retrieve them someday or, just for the fun of thinking about it, leave them for my heirs to find even further in the future, unexplained.

Pine Removal

Posted on March 18, 2021 by admin

Not long ago, I noticed that a tall pine tree in a neighboring yard was dead all the way up. It had long been one of those pines whose lower branches died off, but whose top branches were still green year-round. No longer.

Our neighbor must have noticed this too, because one fine morning recently at about 8, the noise of tree removal started. I heard that, of course, but what really got me out of bed was our dog, who took a loud interest in the goings-on. I was thus up, so I figured I might as well take a few pictures.

By the time I got around to that, the crew has stripped off the lower branches of the tree and feed them to a chipper. That was the real source of the noise, not the cutting of the branches.Rather than remove the top limps, the pro tree-climber got into position —— to cut off the whole top. Repeat until the whole tree was gone. But I didn’t stick around for that, breakfast was calling.

Cemeteries Along Archer Avenue

Posted on March 17, 2021 by admin

First of all, just about any search for information about Resurrection Catholic Cemetery & Mausoleums in Justice, Illinois, is going to turn up a reference to Resurrection Mary, a ghost purported to hitch rides along Archer Avenue, or in one version I read, go dancing with a living man at a dance hall that used to be on that road. Afterward, he gives her a ride back to her home — which turns out to be Resurrection, as the poor lass had died in a car crash at some earlier time.

The vanishing hitchhiker story, in other words. So well known that that’s the title of Jan Harold Brunvand’s book on urban legends, The Vanishing Hitchhiker, which I read in the ’80s, along with a lot of other people. If I remember right, the story has been attested back to the 19th century, when it involved a horse-drawn wagon rather than an automobile, and I suspect — with their high-quality roads, wagons and belief in spooks — the Romans must have told a similar story.

What’s the enduring appeal? Can’t say. Also can’t say that I take it any more seriously than it deserves, which isn’t much, though it is an element in Resurrection’s sense of place, so that’s something.

I arrived at Resurrection early in the afternoon on Saturday. At once I noticed that it was a busy place. Maybe the busiest cemetery I’ve been to since we went to Arlington National in ’11. I counted no fewer than six funerals going on during the hour or so I was there, plus a lot of other people simply visiting graves. It was a good day for a visit.

It’s an expansive Catholic cemetery founded in 1904, with about 190,000 permanent residents resting across 400 acres, so I was able to stay at a distance from everyone else. Not particularly for health reasons, but because as a cemetery tourist it’s important not to bother people during more somber visits. Usually it isn’t much of any issue.

Resurrection is a curious mix of a cemetery. Parts of it are thick with upright stones, while other parts feature mostly include flush-to-the-ground plaques, though memorials of both kinds can be found in every section. The cemetery has a scattering of trees and is almost completely flat, except for undeveloped places where piles of soil exist as a byproduct of large landscaping efforts.

There is still a fair amount of unpopulated land, since the Catholic Church is nothing if not an organization that plans centuries ahead. There is also a sizable belt of wetlands near the edge of the property, full of reeds, that I suspect will never be developed, and which probably counts as the cemetery’s effort to be green.

The cemetery’s indoor mausoleum features the world’s largest stained glass window, at least according to Roadside America, with 2,448 panels telling Bible stories. That surely would have been a sight to see.

As soon as I parked next to the building, however, I noticed a line of cars snaking along the road I had just driven to get there. Sure enough, it was a funeral procession headed for the mausoleum, so I made myself scarce and didn’t make it back later. Another time, maybe, since the place does look to be a midcentury tour-de-force.

Instead I spent some time at one of the outdoor mausoleum complexes.

No stained glass, but there are mosaics of Biblical scenes on some of the walls of niches. I’d never seen anything quite like that.

Though not thick with funerary art like some grand old rural cemeteries, there is some at Resurrection. New-looking works especially, the likes of which can probably be ordered online. Yep.

This statue marks a small section devoted to the Sisters of Saint Joseph of the Third Order of Saint Francis, a group I’d never heard of. They’re still around.

One large work of art, a bronze of St. John Paul II, has its own Roadside America entry, which — in typical RA style — calls it the “20-Foot-Tall Pope.”
“In 1969 and again in 1976, before he became Pope John Paul II, Karol Cardinal Wojtyla, the Archbishop of Kracow [sic], walked the grounds of Resurrection Cemetery in Justice, Illinois,” the cemetery web site notes. “In 1969, the Cardinal visited Resurrection Cemetery to see and bless the Polish Millennium Shrine honoring the 1000th anniversary (966 – 1966) of Christianity in Poland.

“On Memorial Day, May 30th, 2016, Archbishop Cupich blessed a 20 foot tall bronze statue of Saint Pope John Paul II that’s placed on an eight foot tall American black granite base located in Resurrection Cemetery directly behind the cemetery’s office building.

“Commissioned by the Catholic Cemeteries of the Archdiocese of Chicago in 2013 and designed by Teresa Clark of Clark Design[, the] statue weighs approximately 8,000 pounds and rests upon a black granite base of 86,000 pounds.”

Good to take note of monumental things at a cemetery, but also to pay attention to some of the more human-sized stories that the stones and other memorials clearly allude to.

Such as recent bereavement. Not far from John Paul.

In the thick of other stones.

Found on the grounds of the outdoor mausoleum.

Resurrection wasn’t the only cemetery on Archer Avenue I saw on Saturday. Next to it is another large burial ground, Bethania, which is nonsectarian, and looked crowded with upright stones. I didn’t have the energy for it.

I did take a drive through the rolling terrain of Fairmount-Willow Hills Memorial Park, which is also on Archer Avenue, though in the village of Willow Hills. Most of its memorials are flush to the ground, though there are upright ones. Overall, that gives an impression of large open spaces.

On a sizable hill is a sizable clock tower, with niches around the base (and maybe inside; it was locked).
I noticed that its clockface (not visible in my picture) wasn’t telling the right time, but as I visited the tower chimed the correct hour. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a clock tower at a cemetery, but somehow it belongs. Reminds us of that thing, time, that we will all run out of someday.

Red Gate Woods, The Dawn of the Atomic Age & Ray Cats

Posted on March 16, 2021 by admin

At about 15,000 acres, the Palos Preserves form the largest concentration of land in the Forest Preserve District of Cook County. Names pour out from the map, if you bother to look: Willow Springs Woods, Paw Paw Woods Nature Preserve, Wolf Road Woods, Saganashkee Slough Woods, McMahon Woods, Spears Woods, White Oak Woods, Crooked Creek Woods, Cap Sauers Holding Nature Preserve, and Swallow Cliff Woods North.

The preserves include Camp Bullfrog Lake, Tomahawk Slough, Maple Lake, Longjohn Slough, Crawdad Slough, Joe’s Pond, Horsetail Lake, Laughing Squaw Sloughs, Camp Kiwanis Equestrian Staging Area, and the Little Red Schoolhouse Nature Center. About 50 miles of trails cross this arboreal kingdom in southwest Cook County.

Red Gate Woods is much like the other sections, but with a singular distinction. It includes the burial site of the world’s first nuclear reactor, the famed CP-1, which was originally at the University of Chicago but soon rebuilt at Red Gate as CP-2 since, you know, nuclear research in a densely populated urban area was understood to be a risky proposition even in the early 1940s.

I’d known about Red Gate for a while, but never gotten around to visiting the site. Pleasantly warm Saturday was the time to do so, I decided.

The entrance to Red Gate is on Archer Avenue very near St. James at Sag Bridge. A sign at the edge of the Red Gate parking lot describes how to get to the burial site, so off I went along an unpaved and still somewhat muddy trail. Soon that connects with a paved trail, which made the going easier.

The hills weren’t that steep, but there were slopes along the way.

I almost missed the site. It’s actually on a spur off the main trail, out in an open field. It is the open field.

The stone includes some informal editing. Do I believe the area is dangerous? No, I do not. Not to someone who spends five minutes there.

The burial area, the stone says, is marked by six corner markers 100 feet from the stone (presumably, in six directions). So I went looking for one of the markers. It wasn’t hard to find. I spotted most of the rest of them as well.

Saw this as well. A well.

Maybe it is dangerous to dig there, but I couldn’t say for how long. Another century? A thousand years? More? Does Red Gate need a long-time nuclear waste warning? I’m not smart enough to know, but it would be interesting if the forest preserve district installed one.

And turn a few special cats loose in the area. Eh? Mental Floss mentions a plan — who knows how serious — to warn distant posterity of radioactive hazards using specially bred cats.

“But the strangest suggestion by far came from two German linguists. They argued that governments around the world should breed cats that turn colors when exposed to radiation. These so-called ‘ray cats’ could then be immortalized in song and legend, so that even after the scientific knowledge of radiation had been lost to the sands of time, folklore would tell of their supernatural power to change their fur in the presence of extreme danger.”

In song and legend. Someone has already written the song.

St. James at Sag Bridge Catholic Church and Cemetery

Posted on March 15, 2021 by admin

Saturday was warm and pleasant, Sunday raw and unpleasant, and today — Ides of March Snow. If Rome had had a few inches that day, Caesar might have stayed home, since the rarity of snow would surely have been a warning not to do any official business. Oh, well.

Except for scattered dirty piles in parking lots, all of the massive February snows had melted by March 14. The March 15 snow will last a few days at most, due to a warming trend predicted for later in the week.

Illinois has a few hills, typically relics of ancient glacial movements. Built on top of one of them, in the village of Lemont, is St. James at Sag Bridge Catholic Church, which got its start in historic times — but still quite a while ago, in the 1830s.

On the slope of the hill is the church cemetery. One side of the hill — maybe better to call it a ridge — is quite steep, yet still sports stones.

The rest of the family had other things to do during the day on Saturday, which as mentioned turned out to be clear and warm, so I headed south for a look around the suburban stretch of Archer Avenue (Illinois 171) between Lemont and the village of Justice.

The urban section of Archer Avenue, “Archey Road,” was the haunt of Mr. Dooley once upon a time, but that’s a matter best left for others to describe (if you feel like paying for access).

In our time, suburban Archer Avenue is a thoroughfare featuring independent and chain restaurants, small office buildings, auto repair shops, liquor stores, churches, schools, municipal facilities, and vast cemeteries. The surrounding forest preserve lands are even larger, the further out you go.

St. James at Sag Bridge is near the junction of Archer Avenue and the north-south Illinois 83, which (to the north) is one of the main transit spines of DuPage County. St. James’ hill also rises near the triple waterways of the Des Plaines River, the manmade Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, and an older manmade leftover of the 19th-century canal-building boom, the tiny-by-comparison Illinois & Michigan Canal.

To the south of the church and cemetery is yet another artificial waterway, the early 20th century Calumet Sag Channel, which gives the area its name, Sag Bridge, for a predecessor bridge of the one that now carries 171/83 across the channel. The Calumet Sag connects the Calumet River system with the Sanitary and Ship Canal, which it joins just to the west of the church. It’s a complicated bit of geography that I was only vaguely aware of before I decided to examine this part of Archer Avenue.

Sag? I wondered about that as well. The full name of the canal is the Calumet-Saganashkee Channel. I didn’t know that either, but learning it generated another question, as is often the case. Saganashkee?

Named after a local feature with a modified Indian name, it seems: Saganashkee Slough, which is a lake on forest preserve land in the area.

“A case in point is Saganashkee Slough,” the Chicago Tribune reported in 1994. “It was formerly a huge swamp that extended from west of 104th Avenue to the limits of Blue Island, and its original name, Ausaganashkee, is a Potawatomi Indian word that means ‘slush of the earth,’ wrote former Forest Preserve District general superintendent Cap Sauer in a historical account written in the late 1940s.

“During the construction of the I&M Canal in the 1830s, a feeder ditch was dug in the swamp that helped supply additional water to the canal. The slough was almost destroyed in the 1920s by blasting during the construction of the Cal-Sag Channel. Saganashkee was reconstructed by the forest preserve district, although in much smaller form, Berg said. At 325 acres, it is still, however, one of the largest bodies of water in the district.”

As for St. James, the church was founded to serve workers, mostly Irishmen, who were building the Illinois and Michigan Canal, with the current structure completed in the 1850s. A place to go Sunday morning after Saturday night revels, and sometimes donnybrooks, at least according to Irish stereotypes. I suspect the congregation is a good deal more diverse these days.

It’s a handsome limestone building, built from material from nearby Lemont-Sag quarries, which provided stone for Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago and the Chicago Water Tower besides. I understand the St. James interior is quite beautiful, but it was locked when I visited.

The Our Lady of the Forest grotto on the grounds was, of course, open for a look.

Compared with the church building, the grotto is new, built in 1998 for the for the 165th anniversary of the parish. See grottos when you can.

Chicago Mass Vax ’21

Posted on March 14, 2021 by admin

The United Center mass vaccination site isn’t actually in the arena itself, but under a set of interconnected tents set up in one of the arena’s parking lots, there on the Near West Side of Chicago. We weren’t there on Friday afternoon to get vaccinated ourselves, since that continues to be elusive, though I expect that to change before too long.

Rather, we’d come to escort a family friend, a little old Japanese lady Yuriko knows well, who is somewhat infirm and has limited English. I’d managed via the appropriate web site to make a first shot appointment for her for early Friday afternoon, so off we went to the city.

With some trepidation that the on-site organization might be slapdash. Parking might be an issue. Lines might be long. Maybe no one would know what’s going on. Maybe her appointment would have been mysteriously cancelled, or there would be no record of it.

Maybe there would be indications that the federal effort to vaccinate the nation was a hopeless fiasco.

Reports of shifting eligibility for the shots at the United Center didn’t bode well for things. A couple of post-registration emails didn’t foster a sense of confidence in the effort, either. A day or so after the initial registration, which was for 1:30 on Friday, I got an email saying the the appointment had been changed to 3 on Friday. OK, fine.

A few hours later, I got another email telling me to ignore the first email, and that the appointment was still at 1:30. Hm. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d received another email saying that the people who’d sent the first erroneous email had been sacked — and then another message saying that the people who’d sacked the first set of people had been sacked. And maybe a report that a møøse was løøse, biting people.

Anyway, we drove in from the northwest suburbs, arriving just after 1. Parking, at least, wasn’t an issue, with plenty of people guiding cars into another of the United Center lots. We walked from that lot, across a street, toward the vaccination tents.

No long lines, either, though the site was set up for them.

The entrance to the vax tents was in was practically in the shadow of the 960,000-square-foot United Center and other buildings.

I’m glad to report that the process was simple and without delay. This particular site, at least, had no whiff of fiasco about it. Everything was well organized. Plenty of people — mostly members of the 101st Airborne Division — were on hand to point you to each step: checking in, health questions, and then the vaccination.

It took less than five minutes from the entrance to the waiting area after the shots, where you’re supposed to wait for 30 minutes to make sure you don’t have a funny reaction. So we waited. That was the longest part of the process by far.

The only slightly irritating moment involved signing up for the booster. Point your phone at this QR code, said signs with large QR codes on them, and it will start the process of signing up for you. I’ve been down this road before. I point my phone at a QR code and it does precisely nothing. There must be a step missing that I don’t know about, and no one ever mentions, because everyone who knows about it assumes everyone else knows about it. That’s a common problem with tech, I find, but ultimately not a big deal in this case.

Staff with iPads were on prowl looking for people who couldn’t use the QR code for one reason or another, and soon one of them had signed our friend in for her second shot, which will be in early April back at this same temporary vax complex.

St. Joseph, Joliet

Posted on March 10, 2021 by admin

The iron works in Joliet might be ruins these days, but St. Joseph Catholic Church, one of the city’s major church buildings, still stands on Chicago St. downtown. It’s the second church on the site, built in 1905 to serve Slovenian immigrants, many of whom worked in the local iron and steel mills.

By the time we got there on Sunday, masses were over, and it might have been closed in the afternoon even under normal circumstances. Still, we got a good look at the exterior.

“The St. Joseph community includes Slovenian attire and music in its Masses, offers one Mass in Slovenian each month, refers to the Virgin Mary by her Slovenian name of Marija Pomagaj and holds a celebration for St. Nicholas Day, which is a tradition in Slovenia,” Shaw Media reported on the occasion of the parish’s 125th anniversary, including some interior shots.

Charles Wallace, an Irish-born Chicago architect (1871-1949), designed St. Joseph. He apparently did a fair number of churches in the Chicago area during the golden age of church building for large immigrant communities.

Across the street from the church is this building, headquarters of the Slovenian Union of America as well as the Slovenian Women’s Union of America Heritage Museum. The building dates from 1910.

Closed, of course. My kind of little museum, though, so we might visit some other time. Might visit Slovenia some other time, too, with any luck. I hear it’s a pleasant place to visit.

Hadley Valley Preserve

Posted on March 9, 2021 by admin

On Sunday after leaving the Joliet Iron Works Historic Site, we planned to get takeout at a place in Joliet found via Google Maps, but after driving a few blocks, an old-fashioned technique for finding something to eat kicked in. That is, we saw it ourselves, and stopped on impulse.

Chicken-N-Spice. The place looked good, and it was: crispy fried chicken, warm mashed potatoes and gravy and tender biscuits. It was still a little cool to eat outside, so we found a spot to park and ate in the car.

After lunch we drove to the Kansas-shaped Hadley Valley Preserve, a unit of the Forest Preserve District of Will County.

Not really much of a valley, but the 685-acre preserve is a savanna, according to the FPD: a grassland with scattered tree growth and a mix of shrubs and wildflowers (in season).

Looks that way.

The trail makes an oval all the way around. We walked the whole thing counterclockwise, about 2.5 miles, with temps in the mid-50s and sunshine that wasn’t oppressive. Most of the mud had dried up by the time we walked it, unlike last week’s trail.

There were other walkers but also horses and their riders, about a dozen all together at one point or another on the trail.

Rolls of hay. Not as picturesque as possible, but the scattered rolls have some charm.Spring Creek runs from east to west through the length of the preserve.

The creek eventually connects with Hickory Creek in Joliet, and from there flows to the Des Plaines River and, of course, the far-off Gulf of Mexico eventually.