Category Archives: Family

Thursday Postscripts

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Beverly Shores, Indiana, pop. 600 or so, is completely surrounded by Indiana Dunes NP. One way to get to the town, or the national park for that matter, is to take the South Shore Line from Chicago. If you do so, the place to get off is at Beverly Shores station.
Beverly Shores Train StationSince its renovation in recent years, the station also includes an art galley. Closed when we got there.
Beverly Shores Train StationWhen I’m pretty sure no train is nearby, it’s hard to resist a shot of the rails converging off toward the horizon. The rails go on forever in a silver trail to the setting sun.
near the Beverly Shores Train Station

Arthur Gerber designed the station in 1929. “Gerber was the staff architect for Samuel Insull, who then owned the line, [and] it is one of several examples of an ‘Insull Spanish’ style used on the rail line,” writes historic preservationist Susie Trexler.

Insull must have been fond of the style. “Say, Gerber, old man, whip up some more Spanish-style stations.”

After all, look at his mansion, which is generally classified as Mediterranean.
Cuneo Mansioncuneo mansionBetter known as the Cuneo Mansion, for its second owner, but utility magnate Insull had it built. Above are shots I took when we visited. When was that? I couldn’t remember till I checked. Ten years ago.

The fellow interred in the Beyond the Vines columbarium at Bohemian National Cemetery is Benjamin George Maldonado, 34, who died unexpectedly of an undiscovered brain cyst, according to a column in the Tribune by John Kass.

“The priest gave a great eulogy of Ben,” Kass quoted Maldonado’s widow as saying. “His urn had a baseball on top. We all signed the baseball that went into the wall. There were sandwiches and sodas, and we had a picnic. He was so young. A headstone would have been so somber.”

The man who created the columbarium, whom Kass also quotes, was Dennis Mascari. He’s interred there now as well.

My brother Jay is skeptical that the parade pictures posted on Sunday were taken in September 1967, he told me by email. Two reasons: yellow foliage and people wearing a little more than they would on a very warm Texas September day.

As Jay points out, mid-September is far too early for changing leaves. But I color corrected the images. In the original, faded now for more than half a century, it’s hard to tell whether the leaves are green or yellow. Denton Texas 1967

In the color corrected version, some of the leaves look green, some yellow. I don’t know whether that reflects the original color of the leaves, or the color-correction process itself. So I’d say the leaf colors are inconclusive.

The clothes are a more compelling argument. The kid on the top of the station wagon is indeed wearing more than any kid would in high 80s temps, and so is the woman on the flatbed, and maybe the men leaning against that vehicle, who seem to be wearing long-sleeve shirts or jackets. Of course, the members of the band would wear their uniforms no matter how hot it was. I remember some sweaty times in my own band uniform, about 10 years later.

“When is it then?” Jay writes. “I don’t know. I know that the Denton HS band was one of many high school bands that participated in the NTSU homecoming — which sources online say was November 11, 1967 — but: (1) I have no recollection of a parade, only of marching in formation on the playing field, and (2) if there was a parade, it seems odd that it’s heading away from NTSU rather than towards it, as it appears to be the case here. Of course, the fact that I don’t remember a parade isn’t dispositive, nor is the direction.”

Ah, well. Guess we’ll never know for sure. The lesson here is to write the date on the back of physical prints. But even that is an increasingly obsolete bit of advice.

Myrick Nathan 1875Here’s Nathan Myrick, founder of La Crosse, Wisconsin, whose for-certain public domain image I obtained. Founding a town is more than most people get to do.

It occurs to me that I’ve now visited all of the 15 largest municipalities in Wisconsin, and maybe the 20 largest, though I don’t remember visiting New Berlin, but as a Milwaukee suburb, it’s likely that I passed through.

Is that important for some reason? No. But for a state in which I’ve never lived, I’ve been there a lot. As an old Chicago friend of mine once said, one of the amenities of living in the Chicago area is access to Wisconsin. I agree.

Hickory Street Parade, Denton, Texas, 1967 (Probably)

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I have a photo book holding a scattering of images made when my family lived in Denton, Texas, which was from 1965 to ’68. There are perhaps two dozen pictures. Photos were only made on special occasions, such as my birthday or when family visited from out of town.

Three of the pictures are of the Denton High School band, of which my brother Jay was a member, marching down Hickory St., which is the street our house was on, in 1967.  The edge of the photos says Aug 69, but that only means we didn’t get around to developing the film for almost two years.
Denton Texas Hickory Street Sept 13, 1967 That is not me sitting on a car in the first image. My mother must have taken the shots with our Instamatic 104, since I don’t think she would have been interested in fiddling with the more complicated cameras that my father left behind. Provided we had our Instamatic by then, which seems likely.

She stood on the sidewalk on Hickory St., probably near its intersection with Denton St.
At least, the angle of the third picture makes me think that’s where she stood. One the houses not far west of that point is still there, though deeper blue.

I must have watched the parade, but I have no memory of it. At the time I was six, and had just started first grade at Sam Houston Elementary School in Denton. I walked to school, so it wasn’t far away. There’s a school of that name still in the Denton ISD, but it’s far from where we lived and has a late 20th century look to it.

Thinking about it now, I suspect the school I went to was already old when I went there — maybe built in the ’20s to update whatever rudimentary facilities the town had before that. I expect the building I knew is long gone.

Also: here’s the house where we lived. The house is a different color now, but the enormous tree is still in the front yard! It seemed so vast to my boyhood self. Then again, it is pretty big. An old maple that produced huge leaves. Or was it an oak that produced huge acorns? Both kinds of trees were in the neighborhood and I would collect their scatterings.

I digress. Why was there a parade on that day in Denton, Texas? One possibility is that it was part of the September 13 publicity celebration for the regional premiere of Bonnie and Clyde, which was at a movie theater near the courthouse, only a few blocks to the east of where we lived. Parts of the movie were filmed in North Texas, near Denton, in places that could easily pass for 30 years earlier. The University of North Texas published an article a few years ago about the filming and the regional premiere.

Some of the stars of the movie rode in a small motorcade down Hickory to the courthouse square, and naturally the high school band had to be part of it. If my mother took any pictures of the movie stars, they’ve been lost. But I seriously doubt she did. Taking pictures of her son’s band is one thing, but actors in a movie (I suspect) she had no interest in seeing? Naah.

Late Summer Thursday Stew

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A package arrived in the mail for Lilly today from UIUC.

“Your high GPA has earned you the privilege of graduating Cum Laude…. This accomplishment, which is referred to as Latin Honors, is also recognized by a special bronze cord,” the enclosed letter said. “Because we were unable to have an on campus commencement ceremony in May, we will be mailing cords to the mailing address you have on file with campus.”

Sure enough, the package also included a bronze cord, looking something like a curtain accessory. Lilly’s already in the Pacific Northwest, so she’ll have to wait for one of us to deliver it in person, since I’m not planning on re-mailing it.

Never got a Latin Honor myself. Missed it by a whisker of GPA, I think. But I don’t really remember, and in nearly 40 years, that fact has never come up at any time for any reason.

I’m surprised some of these TV shows count as public domain. Then again, under the copyright rules before Disney put its imprint on the law, copyright holders had to renew after a certain number of years, and I expect many producers didn’t bother. The other day I watched the first episode of Car 54, Where Are You? It had its amusing moments.

Summer is ebbing away. I’m trying to spend as much time on my deck as possible. A refuge from work and word of the troubled world beyond my little spot.

A few days ago, after work but before dinner, I parked myself on the reclining deck chair on the deck and managed to take a nap. My family marveled at that, considering the heat and noise of the cicadas. But it wasn’t that hot that late in the day, and the sound of cicadas is something to drift off to sleep to, though not as soothing as cricketsong.

I’m about half way through The Unredeemed Captive by John Demos (1994), which Lilly and Ann gave to me last Christmas, on a tip (I believe) from one of Ann’s teachers.

“The setting for this haunting and encyclopedically researched work of history is colonial Massachusetts,” Penguin Random House says. “There, in February 1704, a French and Indian war party descended on the village of Deerfield, abducting a Puritan minister and his children. Although John Williams was eventually released, his daughter horrified the family by staying with her captors and marrying a Mohawk husband.”

It’s a good read about a time and place I’m not especially familiar with, early 18th-century New England. Interesting how in only 50 years or so, that place evolved into the more familiar (to me) mid-century and Revolutionary New England.

Wait, when did Random House and Penguin merge? In 2013, it turns out. I wasn’t paying attention because book publishing isn’t my sort of publishing. I’m used to thinking of Penguin as a solidly British operation, but these days it’s owned by shadowy German billionaires.

Return of the Zhu-Zhus

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“A line of severe storms slammed through downtown Chicago and surrounding areas Monday, downing trees and power lines, which sparked fires in the city, officials said,” CNN reported last night. That, and there was some riotous looting too.

“More than a million homes and businesses in the Midwest are without power, including a third of all of customers in Iowa,” CNN continued. “The wind was so strong when the storm passed through Perry, Iowa, it blew pieces of boards from other buildings into the walls of a house.”

So we lucked out. As I mentioned, the winds were fairly tame in my tiny corner of the world. After such wind and rain as we had had passed yesterday, I went out in the yard to pick up items that moved around a little, such as one of the deck chairs. The sun had returned and I noticed the rain-speckled hibiscus picking up the light.hibiscusToday we opened up a box that has been sitting in our laundry room for a good many years, tucked under a few other boxes. I call it a laundry room, but being home to the washer and dryer is only one of its functions. Crap we don’t want to put partly out in the elements — in the garage, that is — goes there.

On Saturday, since this is a Summer of Nowhere, I spent a fair number of hours in the garage, till the trash bin was mostly full and garage crap had been rearranged somewhat.

Back to the box. Among many other things, it contained five Zhu-Zhu Pets. Mechanical hamsters, since I’m not sure they rise to the level of robot hamsters.

Ann marveled at them. Her 17-year-old self reflected on how important they were to her seven-year-old self. She got her first one for that birthday. Like most toys, they were important until they weren’t.
What amazed me was that the batteries have held out on all of them. They all still move around and make various preprogramed noises.

That’s about 20 seconds of randomly selected Zhu-Zhu Pet sounds, squeaks and whirs coming directly from 2010 to you in 2020.

Lilly and James Burke — Twice

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During our long drive to the Canadian Rockies and back in the summer of 2006, we made a stop on the return in Bismarck, North Dakota (and Zap, too). Mainly to see the state capitol — my kind of sight.

Outside the building is a statue of John Burke, 10th governor of North Dakota and Treasurer of the United States for all of the Wilson administration, among other offices he held in the Progressive Era. My kind of sight as well — and my kind of whimsy to have Lilly, age 8, pose with it.
John Burke statue North Dakota CapitolIt’s a duplicate of a bronze by Utah sculptor Avard Fairbanks, put in its current place in 1963. Looks pretty good for being out in the Dakota winters for so many years. The summers as well, since I remember that day in Bismarck was pretty hot.

Note the hat covering one of Burke’s feet. I just noticed it the other day, looking at the picture. It’s my Route of Seeing cap, given to me by Ed. I told him I would take pictures of in various places, to send to him. I wonder whether I remembered to do so in this case (I was wearing it in the Zap picture as well).

Forward to 2011. We went to Washington, DC, that summer. Part of the visit involved a tour of the U.S. Capitol. Where is the original Fairbanks statue of Honest John Burke? There.

Naturally I had Lilly, now 13, stand next to it. Bet not many non-North Dakotans can say they’ve posed with both, and probably a fair number of North Dakotans haven’t either.John Burke statue US Capitol

The image didn’t come out so well, but so what. By then I wasn’t carrying around Route of Seeing, though it’s still tucked away with our other caps somewhere. Maybe I’ll take it somewhere again. (More likely, I’ll forget.)

Landhaus Elfriede

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This is a beaten-up 8 x 8-inch print, very old itself, of an image I’m pretty sure my father took when he was in Europe with the U.S. Army in the mid-50s. I haven’t found the source image, probably a b&w negative, though I haven’t been looking very hard.

Landhaus Elfriede, Austria 1955

I brought the print home from a recent visit to San Antonio, especially taken with the composition. Moves right up from solidity and the Earth to misty mountains in the Sky. And — those haystacks. What a shot. Dad must have liked the image, too, or he wouldn’t have enlarged it (I’m assuming he did).

No note of time or place is on the back, but it was enough to for me to think, Somewhere in Germany, ca. 1955.

The other day I looked at it closer, and noticed the words written on the building: Landhaus Elfriede.

Landhaus ElfriedeGerman all right. Something to put into a search engine. I was mildly surprised to find an existing establishment of that name near Fitzmoos, Austria. Or as its web site says, “ein paar Autominuten vom Zentrum Filzmoos.”

The building pictured on the web site is some different from my father’s image, though their roofs are compellingly similar. You could argue — and I am going to argue — that the similarity is close enough, with any differences between the two attributable to rehab, renovation or fix-up-the-damn-thing efforts over the last 65 years. Now it rents apartments on a short-term basis.

It’s also reasonable to think my parents stayed there while on leave, because of course they did — it’s in the Alps, for crying out loud (and near Salzburg, besides). I like to think the mountains behind the Landhaus Elfriede, which are only faintly pictured in Dad’s photo, mightily impressed my parents, who grew up among hills and flats but not mountains.

Thursday Slumgullion

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A while ago, I sent a message in a professional capacity to one of Ikea’s subsidiaries. It bounced back, with this message as a reply.

Det gick inte att leverera till följande mottagare eller grupper:
centrespr@ingka.com

Det gick inte att hitta den angivna e-postadressen. Kontrollera mottagarens e-postadress och skicka sedan meddelandet igen. Kontakta e-postadministratören om problemet kvarstår.

Recent movies seen here at home, as if they would be anywhere else, include The Stranger, an Orson Welles noir that I’d never gotten around to seeing; I’ll go along with Variety’s contemporary assessment, quoted in Wiki — it’s a “socko melodrama” — and it made me sorry Welles didn’t get to make that many pictures. Chicago, which was better on the second viewing; the first was when it was fairly new. For a Few Dollars More, which was as good as I remembered it. The pointlessly rejiggered version of Star Wars, which Ann hadn’t seen any version of. The Hundred-Foot Journey, a fair-to-middling foodie movie.

Star Trek watching continues: “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” “The Naked Time,” “Space Seed,” and — because I thought Ann should see some of the lesser lights of the original series, “The Way to Eden,” which is the episode that features space hippies. She continues to get a kick out of the series, especially the costumes, and double especially the space-hippie garb. Made me smile, too.

“The Way to Eden” was bad enough, but not quite as bad as I remember. With a few tweaks, such as making the hippies at least slightly sympathetic, it could have been a much better episode.

Speaking of TV, I had an encounter with the spanking-new HBO Max today. As in, something I wanted to watch on a service I already pay for suddenly disappeared into this latest scheme to tunnel into my wallet. FO, HBO Max. There’s nothing on TV I can’t live without. Nothing.

Last Saturday, which was part sunny and later rainy, I did a lot. A lot of the kind of things you do to keep life running more-or-less on track. I record it here because, if in some future time when the memory of the day has faded, I want to marvel — assuming I survive middle age to marvel — at how productive I was that May day during the pandemic. The rest of the family was likewise busy that day, going all Marie Kondo on the upstairs bedrooms, from which much debris has been removed. Call it spring cleaning.

Besides taking my meals and watching an episode of the remarkably good (if basic) Greatest Events of WWII, I mowed part of our lawn, repaired a windchime, did some of the laundry, cleaned the inside of my car, went to the bank, post office, and drug store (all drive through), walked the dog, helped Ann remove a lot of items from a high shelf in her room, did a first run-through of my taxes, helped Lilly fill out her taxes, vacuumed the living room, swept two rooms, fixed a leaky pipe under the kitchen sink, and washed a lot of dishes. I ended the day reading a bit of Moby-Dick, which I’m slowly working my way through.

Mother & Children, Illustrated

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Something Lilly drew in 2003 around Mother’s Day. Maybe even for Mother’s Day. Seems likely.

Tempus fugit. Which means I have to note that Lilly is now a college graduate, as of this month. Because our moment in history is entirely too interesting, there will be no public ceremony acknowledging her achievement. You got the paper, I tell her.

Thursday Things

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I don’t drive around that much these days, but every time I do the signs of the times are out for me to see. Literal signs.
During a walk this week, a common area closed.
At least the walk around the small lake was open.

The latest movies in the stay-at-home-on-demand-movie-watching-extravaganza: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (Ann’s suggestion) and Goldfinger (mine).

I’d never seen the former all the way through. I remember first seeing part of it in the common room of some cheap accommodations in Pusan. Watching it now, I’m willing to argue that there’s a touch — just a touch — of magical realism to the thing. I may be the only one to think that.

As for Goldfinger, I told Ann that if she watched only one Bond movie, that should be it.

Our latest Star Trek episode was “Amok Time,” the one in which Spock goes all funny in the groin because hyperrational Vulcans have to mate like salmon every seven years or something. Ann was much amused by the Vulcan costumes. Yes, I said, the costume designers must have had a grand old time working for Star Trek.

This can be found in our back yard. A retired inflatable yoga ball, you might call it, but I think of it as our model Neptune.model Neptune

Also, an image to play around with, applying the PhotoScape Bokeh function that I didn’t know I had until now.

The dog in a favorite position.
I believe she’s officially an old dog now, though I don’t know which office determines that. Anyway, no new tricks for her. She never was one for them even as a younger dog, though we didn’t try to train her all that hard.