Bloomington Ramble ’24

Posted on July 29, 2024 by admin

Want good soft serve ice cream in an unpretentious setting? Look no further than Carl’s Ice Cream, a plain-looking shop deep in the heart of Bloomington, Illinois. Also, look for its anthropomorphic soft serve cone rising over the parking lot.

Yuriko and Ann had strawberry, I had chocolate. Carl’s in Bloomington – there’s also one in Normal, with an ice cream muffler man outside – was an early afternoon stop on Saturday. We spent part, but not all of the weekend, in Bloomington.

Something we (I) also had time to do was take a better look at the impressive three-legged communications tower in downtown Bloomington. It’s visible for quite a distance, and makes me wonder, why aren’t more communication towers this interesting?

Much of the day was hot, or at least very warm, and sunny, a prelude to heavy rains early Sunday morning. So Yuriko was content to stay in the car – with the AC running – when I took in a few closer views of tower.

Pantagraph articles about the tower are paywalled, but snippets poke through from search engine results:

In the last 30 years of telephone, radio and other network service, the Tower Center became a sort of landmark for downtown Bloomington, lovingly nicknamed the city’s “Eiffel Tower.”

Bloomington’s ‘Eiffel Tower’ changes hands after 30 years

The McLean County Center for Human Services Recovery Program is gaining a new home beneath the iconic 420-foot communications tower in Bloomington…

Another source tells me that the tower dates from 1989. The Tower Center is the two-story building under the tower, now belonging to McLean County.

After the rain cleared away, late Sunday morning was as toasty as Saturday had been, but more humid. I decided against a walkabout at the Park Hill Cemetery in Bloomington. It’s good to ration your time under those hot and copper skies.

Still, we drove around a bit through the cemetery. Not a lot of memorial variety, but not bad.

Now I can say I’ve seen Mike Ehrmantraut’s grave. But not that Mike Ehrmantraut, of course. The fellow offed by Walter White, being fictional, must have an equally fictional grave.

Adjacent the cemetery is the sizable Miller Park, which includes the Miller Park Zoo. We didn’t want to use our ration of intense sunlight at a zoo either, but in the park itself.

When you see a steam locomotive in park (and its tender), you really ought to get out and look.

Three million miles. So the train could have, with the right track, gone to the Moon and back a number of times, provided it took its own oxygen to keep that engine going.

And what would the display be without a caboose? Partly because that’s just a fun word to say.

Ignorant fellow that I am, I didn’t know the Nickel Plate Road, so I looked it up later. Once upon a time, it was a major regional RR, spanning northern Ohio, Indiana and Illinois.

Miller Park features a sizable war memorial.

In its vicinity are some retired weapons of war, such as a captured German 210 mm Krupp Howitzer (in better shape than this one).

As well as a WWI tank. Created for that conflict, at least. An M1917 light tank. Apparently none made it to the front during the war, but were put in service for a few years after the war by the U.S. Army.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one of those on display. I’m reminded of my great-uncle Ralph. I understand — from my mother, and maybe even grandma told me this — that he was in a tank corps in France, with the American Expeditionary Forces. Such a posting is said to be fairly dangerous, and I believe it. Supposedly, Ralph was poised to go to the front at the time of the Armistice, which might well have saved him.

Gonzovision ’82

Posted on July 21, 2024 by admin

It’s entirely possible that this is the only place this photograph is posted anywhere. Considering the imponderable size of all the servers everywhere, that would be something. But also completely trivial, since there’s no end of physical images tucked away collecting dust.

I’ve had this physical print in my possession for more than 40 years. How exactly I got it in the first place, I don’t remember. It looks like a publicity shot, with the white border trimmed out for scanning, though nothing was printed there to indicate who they are, which seems like a serious lapse. Maybe that cost extra, or they couldn’t agree on a name yet.

But I know them (mostly). The five people were the members of a short-lived comedy troupe in Nashville, Gonzo Theatre.

One reference to the troupe online I’ve found is at a page on Newspapers.com depicting the July 18, 1982 Daily News-Journal of Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

The entirety of the text: NASHVILLE July 23, 31 “Gonzovision” will be presented by the writers of Gonzo Theatre every weekend at The Cannery, 811 Palmer Place.

The troupe name was Gonzo Theatre and the show was called Gonzovision. On the back of the photo, someone else wrote Gonzovision, and I added 1982.

On July 23 that year – very likely, since on the 31st I was caving in rural Tennessee – I went with some of my friends to The Cannery to see Gonzovision (the venue is still around as Cannery Hall). I remember being entertained, but otherwise not much else about the show. At one point, one of the troupe pretended to be Bob Dylan, another pretended to be Ethel Merman, and they did a duet. That was funny.

Also, there was a well-known local politico in the audience, who was red-nose drunk at the time, and the troupe spent some time making fun of him. I wish I could remember who that was, and what they said, but my notes are silent on the matter. Even 20 years ago, I couldn’t remember much more about the skits.

All this brings to mind Jim Varney. Not because he was a member of the troupe at that moment – he had better, and far more remunerative things to do at that time. Rather, some of the members of Gonzo Theatre would soon be in the very first Ernest movie, Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam, a flick that took a bit of my money and about an hour and a half of my time for little in return.

Lee Johnson is at top left of the photo. He’s no doubt the reason we knew about the show at all, since we were tight with his younger brother Mike. Mac Bennett, whose career in movies was very brief, is top right. Sometime later, I heard him recite from memory, at a party and with great verve, a translation of Baudelaire’s “Get Drunk.”

Jackie Welch is bottom left. These days she’s “a professional life coach and president of Visions Manifest Coaching Services,” according to imdb, but whose web site doesn’t exist anymore. She has had a minor career in the movies – including a couple of other Ernest movies, Ernest Goes to Jail and Ernest Scared Stupid, and the short-lived TV show, Hey, Vern, It’s Ernest. Too bad Varney died when he did (2000) or she might have been in such epics as Ernest Goes to War, Ernest Rockets to Mars and Ernest and the Zombie Apocalypse, which surely would have been made in the 2010s.

I can’t remember the name of fellow in the lower center, who looks to be the head of the troupe, but I do know that to the right of him was Daniel Butler, who was also in Ernest movies, but is better known (relatively speaking) for a thing called America’s Dumbest Criminals. Again, too bad Varney’s career was cut short: Butler could have been his counterpart in My Dinner With Ernest.

A Night in the Suburbs Watching A Night in Casablanca

Posted on July 11, 2024 by admin

We had a bit of rain from what might have been the edge of hurricane Beryl earlier this week, as that weather system petered out over North America. Hard for non-experts like me to say, though. Clear today but a high of around only 80° F. Not bad for high summer.

I looked up Sig Ruman the other day. I remembered at least one of his performances – the pompous doctor with the pointy beard in A Day at the Races (1937), who of course is on the receiving end of Marxian wit, especially Groucho’s.

Ruman was in A Night at the Opera as well. Need a pompous German character for your movie? Siegfried Carl Alban Rumann (d. 1967) was one such during the golden age of the studio system. He has 130 credits at imdb.

I looked him up because he also had a part in A Night in Casablanca (1946), the second-to-last Marx Brothers movie. I found it available to view online (with commercials) not long ago, and decided to watch it. I wasn’t sure I’d seen all of the movie, and if I had, maybe on TV more than 50 years ago, so my recollection wasn’t there.

The only scene I remembered at all was typical Harpo. Early in the movie, he’s leaning against a wall, and another character comes by and says, “Say, what do think you’re doing? Holding up the building?”

Harpo nods emphatically. The other character, unimpressed, drags Harpo away, and naturally the building collapses.

A Night in Casablanca has all of the elements of earlier Marx Brothers movies – each of the three brothers doing their own physical and wordplay shticks, a good-looking pair of non-entities as romantic leads, a story that doesn’t matter or even make a lot of sense, straight characters flustered by the brother’s antics (but no Margaret Dumont), a few songs, and a highly kinetic final half hour or so that ought to have the brothers in top form. Such as in Duck Soup, when they go off to the front to fight Sylvania in one of the funnier romps ever put to film.

Sorry to say that A Night in Casablanca is one of the brothers’ lesser efforts. Not a terrible movie, just not a very good one. There are a few laughs. This is the Marx Brothers, after all. Harpo did what Harpo always did, and Groucho had some good lines, such as to the hotel staff:

From now on the essence of this hotel will be speed. If a customer asks you for a three-minute egg, give it to him in two minutes. If he asks you for a two-minute egg, give it to him in one minute. If he asks you for a one-minute egg, give him the chicken and let him work it out for himself!

A lot of the comedy doesn’t work very well. In one scene, the brothers hide in the room of Count Pfefferman (Sig Ruman), a former Nazi trying to get away with Nazi loot hidden in Casablanca. The brothers sneak in and out of hiding to unpack and otherwise re-arrange Pfefferman’s luggage and personal effects, to delay his departure.

It’s comedy, of course, and it depends on Pfefferman not seeing or being aware of the brothers, whom he overlooks in completely unbelievable ways. Even comedy has to have some attachment to reality, and the scene has none, and so it doesn’t really land. The scene had the feeling of being filler, as well, as it drags on.

Ruman has a fairly large part in the movie, but it doesn’t quite work. He’s the main antagonist and villain, and is as nasty as a comedy allows. He’s a former Nazi only because Germany lost the war. But Teutonic nastiness, combined with the sort of befuddled fluster he got from dealing with the Marx Brothers, isn’t a particularly good mix.

Then there’s the matter of the high-octane comic chase toward the end of the movie. That didn’t work either. It was too much like the thrill-a-minute scenes of a cheap action serial of the period, involving the brothers in a truck chasing an airplane down a runway, climbing into the airplane via a ladder, foiling the villain Pfefferman and his henchmen who are trying to get away with the loot, and crashing the airplane in such a way that somehow resolves the story and doesn’t kill anyone. Groucho, Chico and Harpo as action heroes? I don’t think so. The scene was kinetic, all right. Just not very funny.

Still, I’m not sorry I spent an hour and a half watching the movie. I can be a completist when it comes to the Marx Brothers. But I don’t want to see it again, as I do Duck Soup. Or most of the others.

One more thing: an actress named Mary Dees was in A Night in Casablanca as “minor role” (uncredited), according to imdb. That got my attention, but I’m not going through the movie again to see if I can spot her.

Dees is best known, apparently, as a double for Jean Harlow for a short stint. Besides “minor role,” her other movie parts tended to be the likes of “chorus girl, uncredited,” “redhead, uncredited,” “girl, uncredited,” and “babe, uncredited.” After A Night in Casablanca, she quit the movies and reportedly lived on until 2004.

High Summer Thursday

Posted on June 27, 2024 by admin

Fireflies have been spotted in the yard. Actually I saw a few a week or more ago, early ones, but now they’re out consistently. They’re denizens of high summer, at least around here.

So time for a summer break, in honor of the upcoming Independence Day and Canada Day and the idea of summer indolence. When the living is easy. Alas, there are no destinations ahead for us, at least not for the moment. Back posting around July 7. It will still be high summer, unless something funny happens to the Earth’s tilt on its axis.

The living is easy if you’ve got an AC and the means to furnish it with electricity. Got my latest electric bill today, a steep one, with ComEd helpfully informing me that we used an average of 151% more kWh each day in June 2024 (May 24-June 24, that is) than the same period a year earlier, which is certainly a business way to look at things. This June’s been pretty hot, but also rainy. Practically subtropical this year.

I will say this about the utility: only one power loss in recent memory, which was a few months ago, and lasted only about 10 seconds. Before that, the most recent blackout I remember was on MLK Day, maybe 10 years ago, about a hour long. It wasn’t that cold, so we weren’t at risk from the chill. It was daytime, so we weren’t in the dark either, and I think we played a board game.

The view from my temporary bed the other day.

Not long before I’d woken up from a screening colonoscopy, and had enough energy to put on my pants. The end result was good: the doc found no lurking neoplasms. The worst part of the procedure is over by the time you get to the clinic anyway. Namely, downing the vile liquid beforehand.

My last round of gulping was from 3 to 5 a.m., so to make the time pass – when I wasn’t rushing to the bathroom – I watched a couple of episodes of Northern Exposure, which recently appeared on one of the streaming services I pay for. Now I’m working my way through the series. I saw some, but not all of the episodes when it was new, including a few that a friend had sent me on videotape when I lived in Japan.

Those were the first I’d ever seen, watched on the VHS player that fed into my little Korean TV (the first TV I ever bought, for about ¥25,000 on one of Osaka’s electronic retail streets). The very first one impressed me as amusing. I watched another episode and thought, amusing. And interesting.

Then I watched a third one – which happened to be the late first-season episode “Aurora Borealis: A Fairy Tale for Big People,” originally aired August 30, 1990. My reaction: what is this? How can this be on network television? It’s too wonderfully odd.

One of the plot threads of that particular episode involves Bernard, a long-lost half-brother of Chris, showing up in town for reasons he can’t explain. (That episode also happened to be the one in which Joel meets misanthrope Adam, a character played with remarkable comic focus by Adam Arkin, who later became recurring and somewhat more domesticated.)

Early on, before they know they are related, Bernard and Chris are in the Brick, and have this discussion.

Shelly: What were you talking about this morning? Jung and — what was that other stuff?

Chris: The collective unconscious.

Shelly: Do they tour, or do they just cut records?

[That would, in fact, be a great name for a band.]

Chris: Well, I’ll be reading excerpts from Jung and his study Man and His Symbols all week. So — you can catch up.

Bernard: That was you on the radio?

Chris: Yeah.

Bernard: Interesting. Very interesting.

Chris: Have you read any Jung?

Bernard: No. But I’ve had some strange dreams lately. Very strange.

Shelly: Me too.

Chris: Well, everybody does. I mean, Jung says that dreams are the woofer and tweeter of the total sound system.

Bernard forms an unusually tight bond with Chris, again for reasons they can’t explain, since they still don’t realize they are related. Tired after spending time working on a large metal sculpture Chris is building outside his trailer, they bunk down and promptly share a dream. Or rather you, the viewer, slowly realize that is happening, as dreamtime Chris and dreamtime Bernard talk things over in the cab of a truck neither of them is driving; someone off camera is. In the background is the Chordettes’ recording of “Sandman.”

They talk about their father, who was a long-haul truck driver, and are on the verge of realizing he had two families when they wonder who, in fact, is driving.

“Who are you?” they ask the driver at the same time.

“Hello, boys,” says the balding, gray-bearded driver with an eye patch (?) and a brown suit, in a mildly Germanic accent. “I am Carl Jung. And while I know much about the collective unconscious, I don’t know how to drive!”

They all scream as the truck heads out of control. Naturally, that’s when they wake up.

That scene makes me laugh, just thinking about it. It’s inspired. At the moment I saw it, I realized I needed to watch more of the show. And so I did for a while, but not consistently, and then not often for the next 30 years or so.

Fast forward to last month, when a handful of episodes (including “Aurora Borealis”) were available to watch on the trans-Atlantic flights on Aer Lingus. So I watched a few, including “Aurora Borealis,” and later discovered the show is now streaming for the first time ever. About time, I’d say.

Bashful Bob

Posted on June 26, 2024 by admin

I didn’t imagine it: Bashful Bob’s Motel in Page, Arizona, was a real place, which I called “a real, honest-to-God tourist court” more than a quarter-century ago. I still have a card I picked up when we stayed there in 1997.When we returned to Page two years ago, the renovated place was the pleasant but less interestingly named, and more expensive, Lake Powell Motel. Bob Wombacher was nowhere to be found. Not a surprise, since he died in 2011.

I suspect, but don’t actually remember, that we met Bob briefly in May ’97, when we checked in. Running an honest-to-God tourist court is (was) usually hands-on work for the proprietor. In our time, someone with a name like Wombacher, if he left any trace at all, can be found on the Internet.

Turns out Bob was more than a tourist court operator. He left a legacy of obscure humorous poetry, according to a curious site called Porkopolis, the “arts, literature, philosophy and other considerations of the pig.” (Which has a page devoted to Arnold Ziffle, I’m glad to say.)

Bob wrote a poem about pigs, or at least referencing pigs. A collection of Bob’s – Rhyme Time – can be found here. It includes such verse as (picked at random for their brevity):

“Just Following Orders”

I step inside my fav’rite store
And spy a cone inside the door.
“Wet floor,” it states, and so I do
Exactly what it tells me to.
Then, rather wishing I had not,
I’m banished to the parking lot.

“All Set”

I’ve saved enough money
To last me for life.
The children are grown;
I don’t have a wife.
I’ve got enough money.
Yes, plenty and then some.
To last me forever.
(At least ’til I spend some.)

“Half-Pint”

It isn’t that I’m little.
I’m just not very tall.
Until I grow,
I’m last to know
When rain begins to fall.

I also wondered: Bashful Bob? I always considered that a just bit of alliterative whimsy on the part of Bob, but I now know there was a song of that name recorded by Bobby Vee. Mainly because I just found out.

Maybe the song title was an inspiration for him. If so, it was still a bit of Bob’s whimsy. Mr. Wombacher seems like the kind of guy to name his business after a teen-idol pop song of an earlier time, just for fun.

He May Ride Forever ‘neath the Streets of Boston

Posted on June 24, 2024 by admin

Something I never thought of until today: you can buy booklets to hold fortune cookie fortunes. One at Amazon promises 10 pages that hold 40 fortunes, for $12.99. That came to mind, or rather set me looking, when I happened across another fortune I saved:

Magic time is creale when an unconventional person comes to stay.

I supposed “created” was meant, but in any case that sounds like the pitch for a sitcom episode.

I’m not buying a fortune holder. Those little slips will be tucked away with my business card accumulation: five holders so far, holding some hundred number of cards. Many are restaurant cards, some dating back to the ’80s. Others include a sampling of hotels, museums, shops, even a few churches.

Also, transit cards. I got a kick out of this one.

I used it during my most recent visit to Boston in 2018. Previously the system used metal tokens, but of course those are gone. CharlieTickets and CharlieCards were introduced in 2006.

Charlie was the sad-sack (and poor) protagonist of the song “M.T.A.,” which I know well. That is, the Kingston Trio’s 1959 recording, but not so much about its background. So naturally I had to look into it.

“The text of the song was written in 1949 by Jacqueline Steiner and Bess Lomax Hawes,” writes Jonathan Reed, once a student at MIT. “It was one of seven songs written for [Walter] O’Brien’s campaign, each one emphasized a key point of his platform. [He was running for mayor of Boston that year.]

“One recording was made of each song, and they were broadcast from a sound truck that drove around the streets of Boston. This earned O’Brien a $10 fine for disturbing the peace.”

The Kingston Trio got ahold of it a decade later and it sounds like they had fun with it. Clearly the song endures locally, enough to receive a sort of official recognition by the modern MBTA.

A Lisbon Ramble

Posted on May 24, 2024 by admin

Rain and wind sometimes but sun and warmth other times this week here in northern Illinois. Had breakfast on the deck most of the days since we returned. Lisbon wasn’t quite as warm as expected, with cool evenings – a little below 20° C. – evolving into warmish days, maybe 25° C. or so, followed again by cool evenings. We were rained on only once, more about which later.

Back to posting on Tuesday, in honor of Decoration Day, even though that’s next Thursday. I’m all for three-day weekends, or four or five, but we ought to acknowledge the heart of the occasion.

We arrived tired in the early afternoon of May 14 at the smallish but popular Praça Luís de Camões, emerging from the artificial lighting of the Metro into broad sunlight on the warmest day during our near-week in southern Portugal, just shy of about 30° C as they reckon things.

At once the dulcet sounds of these three gentlemen captured our attention, and we joined the loose ring of those listening. A good thing to do while sitting around getting ready to catch your second wind.

They played their versions of jazz standards and more recent songs. Sweet versions, each of the musicians taking the tunes aloft in distinctive ways. I didn’t see their names posted, even when I got close enough to drop in one euro each, so they’ll just have to be the Musicians of Praça Luís de Camões.

They had an enthusiastic audience member. He danced around on his feet for a while, the lay on the plaza tiles and “danced” around in that position.

We’d have listened longer, but we needed to obey our thirst, to use the ad phase that’s too good just to be that. Facing the square: McDonald’s. We each had a cold drink.

That’s my idea of a good souvenir, and I took it as such.

We headed down a busy retail street, R. Garrett, a thoroughfare with the likes of Ale-Hop Rua Garrett, Stradivarius women’s clothing, Gardenia shoe store, bbnails, Happy Socks, Livraria & Cafe, a book store, and the Percassipt quilt shop. A handsome street at spots. And under development.

Basílica de Nossa Senhora dos Mártires, the Basilica of Our Lady of the Martyrs, also rises on the street.

Before 1755 there was a different church on this site. As a Christian site, its roots stem back before Moorish domination of the Iberian peninsula.

Reinaldo Manuel dos Santos designed the current church, and of him Portuguese Wiki says: “Reinaldo Manuel dos Santos (1731-1791). Arquiteto e engenheiro militar português, foi um dos maiores expoentes da arquitetura e do urbanismo pombalinos,” which I believe is clear enough except for that business about pombalinos, a building and design style distinctive to Lisbon after the earthquake.

Now that’s a ceiling for the ages.

At R. do Carmo, a pedestrian street, Yuriko and Ann went to examine a particular clothing and other item store, while I took a wander.

People seemed to be paying attention to something.

They were right to take pictures. Stand just off the street was Elevador de Santa Justa, a Machine Age lift connecting two parts of the city, each at a different elevation.

I’d read about it, but didn’t make a particular plan to see it. But there it was. The work of one Raoul Mesnier du Ponsard, who is known for this structure and others like it. We didn’t get around to taking a ride, since time is short and Lisbon’s destination list is long, whoever compiles it.

Center, Texas & Logansport, Louisiana

Posted on April 28, 2024 by admin

The town of Center, Texas is in East Texas, while the town of West, Texas is in Central Texas. Just a mild example of Texas naming oddities. This is the state with Cut and Shoot, Dime Box and Jot-Em-Down, after all.

We spent the night in Center (pop. 5,200) and the next morning, April 14, took a look around the Shelby County Courthouse, which also happens to the focus of downtown Center.

It’s a less common style for courthouses, Romanesque Revival, at least in my experience. Impressive brickwork. The story of one John Joseph Emmett Gibson is given in a Texas Historical Commission sign on the site. Originally a brickmaker from Ireland, Gibson ultimately made his way to Texas, in time to design and oversee construction of the courthouse in the 1880s, showing off his skill with bricks.

Older than the courthouse is the nearby former jail. These days home to the local C-of-C.

An assortment of buildings line the square. Mostly occupied. That includes the art deco Rio, open since 1926 as a movie theater, without having been closed or put to any other use since then, which is remarkable in itself.

Not a retro theater, either, but one showing new movies. Such as Unsung Hero and The Fall Guy, coming soon.

“Unsung Hero is a 2024 American Christian drama film directed by Richard Ramsey and Joel Smallbone. The film follows Rebecca, Joel, and Luke Smallbone of For King & Country, and their life journey to become Christian recording artists.”

“The Fall Guy is a 2024 American action comedy film directed by David Leitch and written by Drew Pearce, loosely based on the 1980s TV series about stunt performers. The film follows a stuntman working on his ex-girlfriend’s directorial debut action film, only to find himself involved in a conspiracy surrounding the film’s lead actor.”

I’d never heard of either of them, but now I have. 1980s TV series about stunt performers? That didn’t ring a bell either. So that’s what Glen A. Larson did after the implosion of the original Battlestar Galactica, and Lee Majors did after the Six Million Dollar Man was retired for lack of replacement parts.

How did I miss that? Right, I didn’t have a television in the ’80s.

More buildings on the square.

One that’s small but stately. Farmers of Shelby County, it says, your money is safe here.

It was. Farmers is still an ongoing operation, nearly 120 years after its founding. The bank still occupies the building, and has other locations in East Texas.

Not every building on the square is occupied.

Not every building is even a building any more, but clues remain.

That didn’t take long to look up. Site of a dry goods store for much of the 20th century.

Shelby County partly borders De Soto Parish, Louisiana. That morning, we headed for the border, driving on Texas 7 and then U.S. 84 until we got to a town without any sign noting its name (or maybe we missed it), crossing a river without any identification either. I remembered I wanted to mail a few postcards when I saw a sign pointing the way to a post office. When we got to the p.o., I saw that we were in Logansport, Louisiana. We’d crossed the Sabine River, but as noted, there was nothing to tell us that.

Missed the former international boundary marker, too. I didn’t read about it until later. It’s a few miles out of Logansport (pop. 1,300), and once (and briefly) marked the border between the Republic of Texas and the United States.

No matter. Took a look around Logansport.

Here’s the name we missed. Not on the road we came in on.

Main Street.

Seen in a shop window in Main Street. Do they celebrate Mardi Gras in Logansport?

Yes they do, in the form of a parade put on my an outfit called the Krewe of Aquarius.

We spent some time in a resale store on the main street, Swamp Water Flea Market. I spotted something I don’t think I’ve ever seen at a resale shop.

Yours for $150, an antique leg iron. Not sure I’d want to have it around. Seems like a haunted artifact that might land you in an episode of The Twilight Zone.

Have You Ever Been to Nacogdoches?

Posted on April 25, 2024 by admin

When planning our most recent trip, devising its dumbbell structure of three days on the road, five in place, and four more on the road, it occurred to me that with a little southward jiggering from Dallas, we could visit Nacogdoches, Texas, one of the oldest towns in the state, rife with history: home to prehistoric Indian activity and the establishment of a Spanish mission in the 18th century, base of filibusters and other rebellions in the early 19th, mentioned famously in a late John Wayne movie, and much more.

All that would have been a reason to come, but mainly I wanted to visit my old friend Kirk, resident of the town for nearly 40 years. We hung out mostly in high school, but had known each other as far back as elementary school, ca. 1970.

In exchanging text messages ahead of the visit, we couldn’t remember the last time we’d seen each other, but finally decided, once Yuriko and I met Kirk and his wife Lisa at their home for lunch on April 13, that it was probably in April 1986 at the wedding of a mutual friend of ours in Austin.

That’s a long time. We had a good visit, a good reconnect – I find it good to reconnect – spending most of the afternoon with them, hearing about life in Nacogdoches, his medical practice there, their raising six children, all grown.

Later in the day, Yuriko and I spent a little time in downtown Nacogdoches, which offers a more sizable square than most towns, even in Texas, handsome on the whole, with a scattering of specialty retail in the area, but mostly still professional services, city government offices and other utilitarian activities.

Mural detail a block from the square, facing a parking lot.

We arrived during the 12th annual Nacogdoches Wine Swirl, just by raw chance. I’d never heard of a “wine swirl.” The brick streets around what I took to be the courthouse were closed to cars. People clustered here and there and lined up for wine.

The square doesn’t surround a courthouse, but rather a former federal building, now the Charles Bright Visitors Center. Nearby is “The Gateway,” depicting doughty American pioneers traveling the Old San Antonio Road into Texas, a fairly recent work (2013) of Michael Boyett.

“The ticketed wine event will showcase Texas wineries and local and regional food trucks and shopping vendors along the historic brick streets,” Visit Nacogdoches says regarding the event. More marketing at work, with the goal of furthering Nacogdoches as a day-trip town.

That Texas has wineries is not news. I went with Jay to visit one of the earlier ones in the Hill Country in the mid-70s. But did Central Texas wine makers come all the way to Nacogdoches to sell their wares? Further investigation tells me there’s an established wine-growing biz in East Texas.

“But, what if I were to tell you that East Texas has over 30 wineries and vineyards just waiting to be explored?!” Totally Texas Travel breathlessly says. Even if that isn’t the precise number, I’ll take even a paid travel site as a reasonable source the existence of wineries here.

Moreover, there’s a marketing invention called the Piney Woods Wine Trail.

The Piney Woods Wine Trail? In East Texas? That goes against stereotype, and I won’t have it. They make (and drink) either beer (domestic beer, closer to Texas-made the better) or hard liquor, the closer to homemade the better. That’s what I get for traveling into East Texas, a busted stereotype.

How I Learned Michael Landon Didn’t Look Much Like Charles Ingalls

Posted on April 21, 2024 by admin

Because of our drive through southern Missouri on April 6, first on Missouri 32, then U.S. 63 and U.S. 60, generally trending west but also somewhat south, I’ve learned a few things.

One, there’s a crater on Venus named after Laura Ingalls Wilder, which is mentioned in passing here and confirmed by the USGS.

All features on that planet are named after females, real or fictional. Specifically, according to the IAU, craters are named for “women who have made outstanding or fundamental contributions to their field (over 20 km); common female first names (under 20 km).” I assume the measurements refer to diameter.

This page on planetary nomenclature is fascinating stuff, as far as I’m concerned. Dig down a little deeper, and you’ll find 900 Venusian crater names, from Abigail (the name) and Abington (actress Francis Abington) to Zurka (gypsy first name) and Zbereva (aviator Lidiya Zvereva, d. 1916). With a death date like that, I’d assume a flying accident, but no: typhoid fever.

Also, I learned that Michael Landon, who portrayed Laura Ingalls Wilder’s father on TV, doesn’t look much like the man, Charles Ingalls. I can see that for myself, as he’s pictured with his wife Caroline here.

If it had been up to me, Landon would have at least sported a beard like Chas. Ingalls’. I don’t know whether that would have made Little House on the Prairie a better show, but it couldn’t have hurt.

The drive wasn’t quite car commercial driving. There was some traffic, and while the spring green woods and flowering patches of Mark Twain National Forest and the farms and businesses and churches and small-town buildings of southern Missouri offered pleasant enough scenery (and a favorite town name: Cabool), it wasn’t a Class A two-lane drive, as we would experience later, in Arkansas.

Late in the afternoon, we came to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home and Museum, near U.S. 60 as it passes through Mansfield, Mo., and we were just in time to catch the last tour of the day. That’s what ultimately turned my attention to Venusian craters, 19th-century beards, etc.

Not bad for an essentially self-built house – mostly by Wilder’s husband, Almanzo Wilder. She lived until 1957, for many years at this house, and could afford comfortable furnishings later in life.

Though the colors and styles were different, the living room nevertheless reminded me of my grandparents’ home in San Antonio. It had a similar old-folks-in-mid-century feeling somehow.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Entertainment