Taishō-Era Beer

Posted on February 12, 2023 by admin

Back to the vault of my old correspondence again, for a postcard I mailed from Japan nearly 29 years ago. I picked up a set of cards at the Sapporo Brewery in Sapporo, Hokkaido on our trip there in the fall of ’93. One reason to visit the brewery — the main one, as it happened — was dinner at the beer garden, for its splendid Mongolian barbecue.

The cards were reproductions of old advertising posters for that brand of beer.

A Taishō-era (大正) poster, in this case. In particular, Taishō 13, or as most of the rest of the world would call it, 1924.

As an era, Taishō didn’t last much longer, expiring in 1926 with the sickly emperor Yoshihito, who became known as Taishō posthumously. Taishō Democracy, such as it was, didn’t last much longer either, since like Weimar Germany, it had never really taken root, and the Depression laid the groundwork for its demise.

Face to Face With a Short Snorter for the First Time

Posted on February 7, 2023 by admin

After our walk in the forest on Sunday, we dropped by an antique mall that we visit occasionally, and I saw something I’d read about years earlier, but had never actually seen. And I mean many years ago – maybe as long ago as junior high in the mid-70s, when I was browsing through one of the dictionaries we had at home, as one did before the Internet. I did, anyway.

By chance one day, I happened across the term short snorter. Occasionally afterward I’d mention it to someone else, and no one had ever heard of it. But I didn’t forget. That’s the kind of obscurity worth treasuring. In more recent years, I found mention of them online.

There under glass on Sunday – which accounts for the glare – was a short snorter.

Evidently, this silver certificate began its career as a short snorter on July 11, 1944 at Crumlin, near Lough Neagh, in County Antrim, Northern Ireland.

In our time, naturally, there are web sites devoted to short snorters. Even so, I’m sure that most people still haven’t heard of them, since they seem to have faded after WWII, as lost to time time as A cards.

“A short snorter is a banknote which was signed by various persons traveling together or meeting up at different events and records who was met,” the Short Snorter Project says. “The tradition was started by bush pilots in Alaska in the 1920s and subsequently spread through the growth of military and commercial aviation. If you signed a short snorter and that person could not produce it upon request, they owed you a dollar or a drink.”

Not only was it a real thing, there are short snorters with names, as the page details, such as the General Hoyt Vandenberg Snorter, the Harry Hopkins Snorter and the Yalta Snorter, among others.

The page also claims that “short snorters come to light at coins shops and coin shows where most dealers pay very little for them as they are heavily worn and ‘not very collectible.’ ”

Tell that to the antique dealer offering the note I saw. The asking price: $95. Obscurity worth treasuring, maybe, but I wasn’t inclined to pay that much.

Groundhog Day Without Groundhogs

Posted on February 5, 2023 by admin

Last Thursday temps were around freezing during the day, which is pretty good in Illinois for that oddity of an occasion, Groundhog Day.

The day shares more than one might think with Christmas, though of course it isn’t an all-consuming religious and cultural event in much of the world, just a relatively minor one. Still, it has pagan taproots connected to astronomical lore in northern Europe, an association with a Christian holiday (Candlemass), folklore imported from German-speaking lands, Victorians putting it in its modern form, a universal appearance on North American calendars (Canadians take note of the day too), and famed representations in mass media in the 20th century (e.g., Groundhog Day).

The closest show-marmot event to where we live seems to be the one involving Woodstock Willie, whose effigy I saw in the warmer month of July. We weren’t inclined to trudge all the way to exurban Woodstock on Thursday for the event, however.

Rather, we loaded ourselves and the dog in the car for the less than 10-minute drive to Schaumburg Town Square for a walkabout, after certain other errands. We knew that Friday was to be bitterly cold, so wanted to get out in the tolerable temps (still around freezing) before that happened.

No festivities going on there. In fact, no one else was there at all. Still plenty of ice on the pond and snow on the ground.

A Polar Trac stands ready to deal with more snow.

No venturing out onto the ice. Of course. I didn’t need a red flag to tell me that.

Hard to believe, but this patch of ground, a garden —

— is going to have an entirely different character –

— in only about four months.

Two Bloomington Churches

Posted on February 2, 2023 by admin

Before leaving Bloomington on Sunday, I took a quick look at a couple of churches. Holy Trinity is an imposing brick edifice at Main and Chestnut not far from downtown. Walkable distance, in fact, except on a cold day, so I drove from near the former courthouse and parked across the street for my look.

Closed on Sunday afternoon, so I didn’t see the inside.

It’s a 1930s art deco replacement for a 19th-century structure that burned down early on the morning of March 8, 1932. I found a digitized book, History of Holy Trinity Parish by the Rt. Rev. Msgr. S.N. Moore (1952), that describes the event.

“It would be hard to say how the fire started, but there were suspicious circumstances,” he wrote, then mentioning other fires in town all within a few days of the burning of the church, including ones at a dance pavilion and another at a grade school.

“At this time, because of the depression, the Communists were very active in Bloomington. The fires in Bloomington did follow a certain pattern – the church, the school, both of which of necessity be soon replaced.”

Reds, huh? Well, maybe. Insurance paid for the current building, designed by A.F. Moratz, a busy local architect, according to the always informative Pantagraph.

Less than a mile to the west is Historic Saint Patrick’s, dating from the late 19th century and not the site of a fire that I know of, communist-set or otherwise. I assume the church was originally built for the area’s Irish population.

I went inside. A mass was in progress, so I didn’t take pictures. A fellow named Kevin did, and it’s a nice collection.

Not the First Street Paved With Bricks

Posted on February 1, 2023 by admin

One more thing caught my attention near the former McLean County Courthouse on Sunday: a plaque set in bricks.

Center Street

Site

First brick pavement in the United States

Innovation to modern highways

Installed 1877 by Napoleon B. Heafer

This plaque set in original paving brick and

presented to the city of Bloomington May 11, 1968

By Bloomington Junior High School students

Their participation in Illinois

sesquicentennial observance.

A small thing of note, if true. A small amount of investigation reveals, however, that it isn’t true, at least according to Bill Kemp of the McLean County Museum of History, and I’m inclined to believe him rather than a class of junior high kids from 50+ years ago (and I’ve cited Kemp before).

“This stubborn, well-worn myth has been around for nearly a century, if not longer, though as often is the case with local legends and lore, there is some truth to the story,” the Pentagraph reported in 2012 in an article by Kemp. “The plaque correctly states that Napoleon B. Heafer ‘installed’ a stretch of brick pavement in 1877, and it’s mostly correct in that this represented an ‘innovation to modern highways’ (though ‘streets’ would be a more appropriate word choice than ‘highways’).

“The first U.S. patent for brick paving dates to 1868, and some claim Charleston, W. Va., laid the nation’s first brick street in 1873.”

Just another example of origination folklore, looks like. In the same category as the first hamburger or the invention of baseball. I’d say the story of Napoleon B. Heafer himself is much more interesting than the assertion that he did the first brick paving of a street (he’s pictured to the right, image borrowed from the museum).

A failed prospector out west, Heafer’s one of those 19th-century businessmen that came out of nowhere and by dint of imagination and his own hard work – or luck and the toil of his employees, take your pick – made a fortune supplying something urgently needed right then by the growing nation.

“In 1861, Heafer and James McGregor established a brick yard at the corner of Hannah Street and Croxton Avenue [in Bloomington],” the museum explains. “Over the next 23 years, N.B. Heafer and Co. expanded to include seven acres of ground and multiple brick yards as well as a large pond that was often used for swimming parties. By 1883 Heafer claimed that it was the largest clay tile factory in the United States.

“In the late 1880s, the brick and tile industry peaked due to an incredibly high demand from farmers needing a way to drain their swampy fields… after much experimentation, Heafer made his first brick tile pipe in 1879. It was a round tile with a diameter of about 3 inches. Later he made them as large as 24-30 inches in diameter, which was more effective. Eventually nearly every farm in the county was drained to some extent, employing clay tiles.”

The Former McLean County Courthouse

Posted on January 31, 2023 by admin

Now we’re in the pit of winter. Temps last night and into the morning dipped below zero Fahrenheit for some hours and didn’t rise much higher than positive single digits afterward. As of posting time, it’s 3 degrees F. hereabouts. But at least the roads aren’t iced over, as they are in parts of the South.

As far as I’m concerned, zero Fahrenheit is the gold standard for cold, as 100 F. is for heat. Thus demonstrating the genius of Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit when it came to thermometry, though I don’t disparage those other men of science, Anders Celsius or William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin or even William Rankine.

Temps (F) weren’t quite as cold when I took Ann back to Normal on Sunday, and there was no snow, so the traveling along I-55 was easy enough. Once I’d dropped her off, I took note of the fact that it was still light. So I headed to downtown Bloomington, where I’ve spent some wintertime moments, and took a look at the former McLean County Courthouse, now home to the McLean County Museum of History.

Impressive. Design credit is given to a Peoria firm, Reeves and Baillie, who were busy in their time, it seems.

This is the third – or fourth – building on the site, depending on whether you count the restoration following a major fire 1900 (the small image is post-fire). Whatever the count, the building took its current form in the first years of the 20th century, and remained an actual courthouse until 1976.

For the last 30 years or so, the museum has occupied all four floors of the place. Ann told me she and some friends went there one day earlier this semester and found it worth the visit. I would have gone in, but it’s closed on Sundays. So I had to content myself with the sights to be seen circumambulating the building.

Such as war memorials.

It took considerably longer to get around to this one.

In Illinois, Lincoln Was Here plaques are plentiful.

Looks like Lincoln is still in Bloomington. Bronze Lincoln anyway, and those are plentiful in the Land of Lincoln too. Of course they are.

By local artist Rick Harney and dedicated in 2000. That’s the bearded, presidential Lincoln, so one that never actually would have made an appearance in Bloomington, but never mind. Lincoln is Lincoln.

Vestiges of Marshall Field’s

Posted on January 12, 2023 by admin

Back to posting on January 17, out of respect to the legacy of Dr. King, because a holiday’s a holiday, and also since it’s nice to have a little time off not long after a sizable stretch of holidays, which can be a bit tiring.

We’re just ahead the pit of winter, but for now anyway the weather isn’t that bad. “Pit” is an inexact term, of course, but I think of it as the last week of January and the first one of February, more or less. Since the Christmas freeze, temps have been more moderate, but I expect another gelid blast sometime soon.

The following is a reminder that, once upon a time, department stores were the disruptors.

“The development of the department store posed a serious threat to smaller retailers,” explains the Encyclopedia of Chicago. “Many small merchants tried to rally the public against the new behemoths, but they failed to gain much support. Rather than rally to the side of traditional merchants, Chicago shoppers embraced the new form of retail.

“The opening of the new Marshall Field’s State Street store in 1902, only a few years after anti–department store protests, signaled that this newer type of institution had won the admiration of consumers. The opening was a sensational event, and the store decided not to start selling items on its first day of business so that more of the eager public would be able to pass through.”

Ah, if only passing through the building were quite as awe-inspiring here in the fraught 21st century. Still, a visit has its moments of visual splendor. If you look up.

I need to spend more time looking this masterpiece. In person, I mean. Closer views are available on higher floors, but it’s a wow even from the ground floor. Worth the crick you might get putting your neck in just the right position to see it.

“The highlight of the Marshall Field store was the Tiffany Dome (1907), a glass mosaic covering six thousand square feet, six floors high,” EOC says.

Not just any glass, but a special kind of glass that Tiffany & Co. had just invented. State-of-the-Victorian-art amorphous solids in a glassy myriad of hues, in other words.

The Marshall Field Building’s other yawning space – a building that takes up a city block has ample room for yawning spaces – is worth the uplook too.

A building of this kind also has a practically limitless supply of engaging detail. Some of it is literally underfoot, and by literally, I mean literally.

Back on the seventh floor, not long after noon, we wandered through a not particularly busy clutch of quick-service restaurants. At some point, department store management erased the longstanding and high-quality casual food service in the basement, and reconfigured parts of the seventh floor for food service.

Near the restaurants is a corner with floor-to-ceiling windows. Hard to pass those up, so we didn’t. We took in the views from northwest corner of the building.

Looking north on State St.

Looking west on Washington St.

A few years ago, the ornate venue originally known as the Oriental Theatre, which started as a 1920s movie palace, took a new name, Nederlander. After theater impresario James M. Nederlander (d. 2016). Doesn’t he count as a New Yorker? Guess his company would argue that it is national, as indeed it is.

Elsewhere on the seventh floor is a pocket-sized, plain hallway with a small exhibit of figures from Marshall Field Christmas windows on State Street, which were as much holiday tradition at the store as decorating the Walnut Room or hiring a Santa Claus, with thousands of Chicagoans and tourists seeing the windows every year and developing fond memories of the place.

As recently as 2015, the windows were inventive expressions of the window designers’ art.

The items on display in the hall aren’t particularly old: most are from this century. Such as from 2004.

2006.

A luminous creation from 2005.

I could write more – say, 1000 words – contrasting these artifacts with the 2022 State Street Christmas windows, but I don’t need to. Here’s one of the storied windows this Christmastime.

One could take the current owners of the building to task for this diminished creativity, but it isn’t the cause of anything, only a symptom.

I can’t end on that sour note.

While taking pictures at an elegantly decorated part of the seventh floor, I caught an image of a passing lass, elegant as her surroundings.

Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie

Posted on January 9, 2023 by admin

Early in the morning of June 5, 1942, coincidentally as the fateful Battle of Midway was underway thousands of miles away, workers were loading anti-tank mines into railroad boxcars at the Elwood Ordnance Plant in rural Will County, Illinois. It was war work, and occasionally as dangerous as being on a front line.

An unknown event triggered a massive explosion that morning at Building 10 of the plant, killing at least 48 workers and injuring almost as many. More than 80 years later, at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, you can see a statue honoring those men.

Carved on the plinth is June 5, 1942 Explosion, along with lists of names, plus two more names under March 24, 1945 Explosion, which I assume is a later incident, though there isn’t any other information on hand to tell me. In fact, I wasn’t completely sure there was an accident in June 1942 until I looked it up later, so as memorials go, this one could use a little more exposition.

Still, its heart is in the right place. Those men died in the war every bit as much as the American flyers over the Pacific at the Battle of Midway, and deserve a memorial too. Apparently it took a while for them to get one; not too long ago, the Chicago Tribune published a story about it, though even now I’m not sure if the statue we saw used to be at the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery, or is a second one.

Elwood Ordnance Plant was part of a larger facility eventually known as the Joliet Arsenal, which once totaled 23,542 acres with nearly 1,400 structures. At its WWII peak, about 22,000 people worked there.

Now most of that acreage is the tallgrass prairie, devoid of many people but not without reminders of its past.

We arrived mid-afternoon on December 29. As large as it is, we only had time for a small section, starting at the Midewin Iron Bridge Trailhead. A short trail from there leads to a bridge across Illinois 53, but also to a set of tracks that go deeper into the tallgrass prairie.

We walked to the tracks.

Clearly they used to be roads.

Now these roads are called the Group 63 Trail, which is a 3.5-loop around the Group 63 bunker field. The road cutting through the middle, however, is the Group 63 Spur. The location of the worker memorial is at the added red dot (I also added the trail names, since Google maps isn’t quite that complete).

Along the spur, which we walked, are abandoned concrete bunkers, relics of long-ago munitions manufacturing. There were more along the southern branch of the Group 63 Trail, which we also walked.

That particular bunker is open, supposedly the only one on the trail. All that’s inside are a few benches. The acoustics are interesting, though. It would be a good place for a very small concert.

Other bunkers — most of them, and there were many — are overgrown. In the summer, they must be almost completely obscured.

On we went.

Near the Group 63 Trail, a large part of the tallgrass prairie is a range reserved for buffalo, fenced off and with signs telling casual visitors to stay out. But there also are a few small viewing platforms on your side of the fence to watch for buffalo. I’m sure they’re out there, but we didn’t see any that day.

We barely even saw any other people, despite the relative good weather. So we enjoyed an experience of remoteness, without actually being remote — you can faintly hear traffic along the highway, after all. This isn’t the first time I’ve found that off the beaten path isn’t really very far off.

The National Shrine of St. Thérèse

Posted on January 8, 2023 by admin

Well over a decade ago, during a summertime visit to San Antonio, I drove to the west side of the city to see the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Little Flower, which I’d never seen or even heard of before, despite growing up in that city. It was very hot that day, as it tends to be that time of the year, so I didn’t linger outside to take many pictures, though I snapped a few marginal ones.

This is a better image. I’m not sure at what point I realized that the basilica in San Antonio and the National Shrine of St. Thérèse in Darien, Illinois, were dedicated to the same person, Thérèse de Lisieux, but I know now. And whatever else I know about St. Thérèse, I also have some sense of her immense popularity as a saint, inspiring edifices around the world in her honor.

We arrived at the Darien shrine just before noon on December 29, an overcast but not especially cold day. Above freezing, anyway. There it is, I told Yuriko.

So we went in. A few minutes passed before I realized that we not in the shrine, but in the nearby museum building, which I believe was the shrine before a new one was completed a few years ago. The sign on this building makes me think that. If so, there needs to be a signage update.

This is the current shrine.

In effect, this is the fourth shrine to her that has existed in the Chicago area. The first two were in the city, a larger one succeeding the original as her popularity grew in the 1920s.

The church that housed the second shrine burned down nearly 50 years ago, but by the 1980s the Carmelites were able to find the scratch the build a third shrine out in the suburbs. The demographics were going that way anyway.

The Carmelites tasked Charles Vincent George Architects, based in nearby Naperville, to design the fourth and latest shrine, which was completed in 2018.

Behind the altar is St. Thérèse in glass.

“The architectural solution pays homage to St. Therese throughout, from the main building’s shape, inspired by the unfolding petals of a flower, a nod to St. Therese’s nickname ‘Little Flower,’ to key structures, such as the plaza clock tower, reminding us of her clockmaker father, and the 24-column colonnade, serving as a symbol of St. Therese’s 24 years of life,” CVG notes.

“As St. Therese had humble beginnings, special attention was taken to provide simple building materials using stone, brick and the limited use of wood for construction materials. The entire building layout focuses on the center altar and image of St. Therese etched in the chancel glass wall, through which there are views of her statue built out into the lake behind the chapel.”

In December, St. Thérèse is the star of Christmas trees in the shrine.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a tree decorated with prayers before, but there it was. All of them to the saint.

The museum included some seasonal features as well, such as a nativity under a more permanent woodwork depicting the saint.

Just in case anyone is uncertain, labels come with the nativity scene. Guess that’s helpful for kids who have just learned to read, but I as far as can remember as a kid, the figures were something that everyone knew. Essential Christmas lore, even for public school children. Maybe that’s not true anymore.

Modern stained glass. Some nice abstractions plus holy figures.

What would a saint’s shrine complex be without some relics?

I didn’t know dust could count as a relic, but I’m not up on what can and can not constitute a relic. The museum also has a few relics of Thérèse’s parents, Louis and Zélie Martin, who happen to be saints as well.

“Louis had tried to become a monk, but was rejected because he could not master Latin,” a sign in the museum says. “Zélie Guérin tried to become a Sister of Charity, but was rejected due to poor health.”

They couldn’t take vows, but apparently did the next best thing: produce five daughters (the survivors of nine children), all of whom became nuns.

Plan B Travels at the End of ’22

Posted on January 5, 2023 by admin

Since Tucson was a no go, we decided to spend the same three days, December 29 to 31, visiting new sights close enough to home to be at home, come bedtime. A suite of day trips, that is. If you can’t go far, go near.

On the first day, we drove southward to near our old west suburban haunts, stopping first in Darien, Illinois, which is home to the National Shrine of St. Thérèse. I’d visited the shrine by myself at some point ca. 1999, but took no notes and made no photos, so I didn’t remember much. Besides, I’d read that a new shrine building was completed only in 2018, so it counted as a new place for me.

I’d also forgotten that Thérèse of Lisieux is also known as the Little Flower of Jesus. The entrance of the new shrine announces that, silently, as you enter.

Later that day, we made our way further south to the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie. Strictly speaking, we’d been there before as well, all the way back in the summer of ’04. I told Yuriko we’d been there, but she didn’t remember. Maybe I remember because I spent a lot of time that day pushing Ann’s stroller along an uneven grass path under a hot sun. I seem to have left that part out of my posting about it, however.

On the other hand, Midewin is large, with about 13,000 acres and 30 miles of trails open to the public, so I’m sure we walked through an entirely different part this time – one with visible reminders of the area’s time as the site of an ammunition plant.

The sun wasn’t an issue this time.

On December 30, we made our way to a different sort of human environment: downtown Chicago, by way of driving to near O’Hare, parking the car, and riding the El into town. Without planning to, we found something downtown we’d never seen before, an art exhibit in the underground Pedway.

The Art of American Victorian Stained Glass, featuring well over a dozen windows from the late 19th century and early 20th. Wow. Well hidden and remarkable.

We also spent time in other parts of downtown, including a walkabout inside holiday- season Macy’s. I’ve been there any number of times, of course, but this time I appreciated the place with new eyes. One conclusion: it ain’t no Marshall Field.

Well, some things are the same. Macy’s still has the holiday horns hanging on State Street.

One of these days, I ought to give State Street the Wall Street or William Street treatment, but I’d have to be by myself to do so. State Street might not exactly be a great street, but it still has character.

By that, I mean skyscrapers from the early days of steel-reinforced buildings. Also, astonishingly intricate ironwork from a time when a department store (the vanished Carson Pirie Scott) could afford such things.

Actually, the Louis Sullivan building at State and Madison — the (0 0) of the street numbering system in Chicago — was built in 1899 for the retail firm Schlesinger & Mayer; Carson Pirie Scott was a Johnny-come-lately when it bought Schlesinger in 1904. These days there’s a Target in the lower floor. Sic transit gloria tabernae, I guess.

On the last day of 2022, we headed away from metro Chicago again. We’d considered Starved Rock State Park as a destination, but I wanted something new, so we went to Buffalo Rock State Park, which is more-or-less across the Illinois River from Starved Rock. Nice little park.

Afterward, the weather was good enough, and the temps just warm enough, to allow us to eat Chinese takeout at a picnic table in Washington Park in Ottawa, Illinois, in our coats. The last time we were there, it was hot as blazes.

Didn’t look around too much this time, though someday I want a good look at the many churches along Lafayette St. in Ottawa. I did take a look at LaSalle County’s Civil War memorial.

A closer look at the base –

– reveals that even the names of the Honored Dead are no match for Time.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: History