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.

Elephant Rocks State Park

Posted on April 20, 2024 by admin

When planning our not-quite-direct drive to Dallas, I figured we’d have time for one Missouri state park on the morning of April 6, before heading west and south slightly into Arkansas for the night. But which one in SE Mo.?

Such excellent names: Taum Sauk Mountain State Park, Johnson’s Shut-Ins State Park and Elephant Rocks State Park. In the end, we went with Elephant Rocks, and on a Saturday, the place was popular but not overrun. Mostly, I figure, day-trippers from St. Louis out with their small children and dogs, all of whom need walking (as I can attest from experience). The park also offered the open-air pleasures of picnicking, especially on a warm spring day ahead of full-blown mosquito season, in which we ourselves partook.

A mile’s worth of paved path snakes among ancient granite boulders. At only about 133 acres, the park is small. Even so, out in the field of boulders, the park didn’t seem so crowded.

Time, geologic uplift and millions of years of erosion produced the boulders, and — I learned — the area counts as a tor.

“The landform is called a ‘tor,’ a stack or pile of spheroidally weathered residual granite rock boulders sitting atop a bedrock mass of the same rock,” says an excellent brochure produced by Missouri State Parks that provides brief but informative descriptions of the park and its history.

“While tors exist elsewhere in the United States and worldwide, they are not abundant anywhere. Elephant Rocks is Missouri’s finest tor and one of the best examples in the Midwest.”

That just makes my day, finding out that I visited a fine tor. Seriously. I didn’t even know there was a geologic definition. Big, rocky hill is how I’d have defined it. I’ve known about tors since the moment I slapped my head upon realizing I could have visited Glastonbury Tor, but didn’t.

People go on about sunsets and views of the ocean and mountain vistas, but human beings are also pretty fond of impressive rocks. Some of us travel a good ways to see them.

Some fat man’s misery paths.

“Just outside the park is the oldest recorded commercial granite quarry in the state, producing fine red granite called ‘Missouri Red,’ the brochure says. This quarry, opened in 1869, furnished facing stone for the Eads Bridge piers standing on the Mississippi River levee in St. Louis.”

Cool. A quarry needed a railroad spur, and even a small railroad needed a building for locomotive maintenance. The ruin of such a building stands in the park.

It’s had the benefit of some reconstruction, would be my guess. It certainly looked sturdy enough that I didn’t think that rock was going to tumble on my head.

Must be Missouri Red. Why wouldn’t you built it using the stone you had at hand? Good old Missouri Red, which sounds like a dime novel character or a strain of cannabis.

Potosi, Missouri

Posted on April 19, 2024 by admin

Sometime in late 18th century, Frenchmen came to a spot in the wilds of North America, which in later years would be southeastern Missouri, and began digging for lead in a place they called Mine Au Breton – Mine of the Breton, for Brittany native Francis Azor, who pioneered the effort in the area to extract the element. The name didn’t last, however. Since early U.S. sovereignty, it’s been Potosi, Missouri.

Still, the earlier name lingers in a small park in Potosi, which we visited on the morning of April 6 after leaving where we’d spent the night, Farmington.

A nice little park, a block from the town’s main thoroughfare, High Street. Mine a Breton Creek runs through it.

A small bridge crosses the creek at one point. You wouldn’t think such a bridge would merit a name, but the people of Potosi (pop. 2,500) clearly disagree.

Red Bridge. It even has a former name: Steel Wagon Bridge. Maybe more minor bridges should have names. Adds a little character to localities. Of course, if that caught on, most of them would be named after minor local politicos.

After the Louisiana Purchase was a done deal, Americans came to the area, but Moses Austin was already there, having cut a deal with the Spanish to mine there. Texas schoolchildren learn who he was, or at least they did 50+ years ago, when I was such a schoolchild. He’s the father of Stephen F. Austin, who was the Father of Texas. So maybe Moses is the Grandpa of Texas. My brother Jay suggested that we visit Potosi to see his grave, and since it was only a few miles out of the way, we did.

The grave itself isn’t one of the better-looking ones I’ve ever seen: a white, virtually unadorned slab under an uninspired protective shelter.

His wife Mary Brown Austin, daughter of an iron mine owner and mother of Stephen F., is there as well. We didn’t hear that much about her in school.

Moses Austin came to the area to mine lead – and escape debt back in Virginia — and apparently had a good go of it in the 1810s, though I suspect life wasn’t as good for the slaves that did the actual digging. Austin is credited with renaming the town Potosi, after the place in Bolivia, a silver mining center known as the location Spanish colonial mint, producer of countless Spanish dollars. Educated miners like Austin would have known it, anyway, and maybe he was thinking big. As in, dreams of silver. But lead would have to do.

Quite the go-getter, Moses Austin. “He & his 40 to 50 slaves & employees built bridges, roads, a store, a blacksmith shop, a flour mill, a saw mill, a shot tower, and turned out the first sheet lead & cannonballs made in Missouri,” the informative Carroll’s Corner posted.

Austin suffered reversals and ultimately lost his fortune in the Panic of 1819, and so schemed to take settlers to the underpopulated wilds of Texas, then part of New Spain — to escape his debts, among other things. He received a land grant from the Spanish Crown (that’s quite a story), and was set to go when death came calling, leaving the task to his son – who had to deal with newly independent Mexico for his grant. That’s another story, one far from modern Potosi.

Google Maps calls the cemetery along High Street, with the Austins’ grave, City Cemetery. A sign at the site says: Potosi Presbyterian Cemetery, Est. 1833.

It’s a mid-sized, old-style cemetery with some charm.

With memorials broken and worn.

And others still waiting for that wear to happen. It will.

High Street is the location of a handsome county courthouse (Washington County), the third on the site and a 1908 design by one Henry Hohenschild, a Missouri architect who did a number of public buildings. Remarkably, the same document tells us that Moses Austin (probably) designed the county’s first courthouse. Moses was one busy guy.

There are a number of antique stores on High Street, and while Yuriko was off exploring them, I was buttonholed by two Jehovah’s Witnesses sitting with their material across the road from the courthouse. Or rather, I allowed myself to be buttonholed, so I could talk a little religion. Just like I did in Salt Lake City. Or religion-adjacent. I think the ladies, Mary and Kay I believe it was, were surprised that I knew about the sale of the JW HQ property in Brooklyn some years ago.

Missouri Mines State Historic Site

Posted on April 18, 2024 by admin

Funniest thing I’ve heard in a while, at least in the category of unintentional comedy. The narrator of a video about The Wire that I watched today – just finished the third season, watching once a week or so – broke narrative for a commercial.

“If Omar is coming for you, you’ll need the perfect shoe to get away,” he said, holding up a pair of some running shoes.

Drive about six hours from metro Chicago, south past St. Louis on the state of Missouri side of the Mississippi River, go almost as far as Farmington, Mo. (pop. 18,200) and leave the main road, but only a short distance down a side road, and you’ll find a place to ruminate on time and decay and poisoning. If you’re the ruminating sort.

Another day, another day exposed to the elements for the former industrial structures at Federal Mill No. 3, which processed zinc and lead ore from 1906 to 1972 and became property of the state shortly after its closure. It’s now Missouri Mines State Historic Site. Smelting does what it does, leaves slag and moves on. The weathered, rusty structures should count as a kind of slag, but one you can look up at in some awe.

We’d arrived about an hour before the grounds closed on the afternoon of April 5. Except for one state park service employee, no one else was around, though there were signs advertising an upcoming eclipse event, since this part of Missouri was in the path of totality. Bet the place was overrun for that.

Before coming to the Lead Belt of Missouri, I’d vaguely thought that lead mining was only an historic phenomenon, something like the copper mining in the UP that left behind relics. Missouri Mines didn’t do anything to correct that impression, at least at first. Later I found out was wrong.

“Lead and fur were the most important exports from Missouri during its early years as a Spanish, French, and then United States territory (Burford, 1978),” wrote Cheryl M. Seeger in a monograph called, “History of Mining in the Southeast Missouri Lead District and Description of Mine Processes, Regulatory Controls, Environmental Effects, and Mine Facilities in the Viburnum Trend Subdistrict” (2008).

“Southeastern Missouri, with the largest known concentration of galena (lead sulfide) in the world, was the site of the first prolonged mining in the state and has produced lead almost continuously since 1721,” Seeger notes. Largest in the world? Who knew? (Besides Cheryl Seeger, that is.)

Wiki published a map to illustrate the point, posted by one Kbh3rd, who is duly acknowledged here under the terms of Creative Commons 3.0.

Looks like all the mining action migrated to the west, but not far west, in the 20th century. In the monograph, I also learned that Moses Austin was a lead miner in the region – more about him later.

Most of the buildings at Missouri Mines SHS were roped off, and probably for good reason. But large windows were open, allowing a look inside the largest of them.

Mighty ruins are one thing, but I also like the smaller pieces.

An oddity, but one dug up nearby.

A giant fossil thrombolite, a nearby sign said. Fossilized creatures, if you can call them that, from a billion years ago.

Next to the state historic site is St. Joe State Park, with a path leading into that park. The day was warm, but not too warm for a walk. It was then we realized the thing we’d forgotten for the trip, because there’s always something: hats. But we managed.

It was like walking straight into one of the more desolate parts of the West instead of lush, springtime Missouri.

Another legacy of lead mining: ruined land, considered fit only for off-road vehicle tracks these days. Look at enough maps of the Lead Belt, and you’ll find the Superfund maps, too – which cover most of the area.

Is there Superfund site tourism? There must be. No? Now there’s an opportunity for some gritty tours, believe me.

Or maybe infrastructure tourism.

Sign me up for that one.

Spring Break Bits

Posted on April 4, 2024 by admin

It might not feel like spring out there, but no matter. Time for spring break. Back to posting around April 18.

Not long ago, an entire movie on YouTube called First Spaceship on Venus came to my attention, and I decided to watch a few minutes to see how bad it might be. Soon I realized, this isn’t that bad. For what was clearly a pre-manned spaceflight depiction of spaceflight, not bad at all. I didn’t have time to finish it, but I will at some point.

I’d never heard of it. But I have heard of Stanisław Lem. I read His Master’s Voice years ago – nearly 40 years, so I don’t remember much – and saw the 1972 movie version of Solaris, ditto, though I’ve read it’s rather different from his novel. Turns out First Spaceship on Venus is the American title of Silent Star (Der Schweigende Stern), an East German-Polish production from 1960. Lem wrote the source book, The Astronauts, a few years earlier. The American version is dubbed into English and, I understand, cut in length.

Also, if you want, you can listen to the original soundtrack of Der Schweigende Stern. YouTube’s quite the place.

More idle curiosity for the day: checking ticket prices for Billy Joel and Stevie Nicks, who are appearing the same night at Soldier Field in June. The closest ticket for sale is pretty close indeed: front section, third row. For resale, actually. There are a scattering of resale tickets available in that section, with those on the third row listed for $3,791 + fees. Oddly enough, fourth row seats list for $2,794 + fees. At least for now. So one row ahead, where you can catch a slightly better glimpse of Mr. Joel’s shiny pate, is worth about a grand more?

I expect that represents dynamic pricing of some kind, facilitated by soulless algorithms in the service of maximized shareholder value, and varies from moment to moment. But I was never one for front row seats anyway, or even third or fourth. Checking further, I found that you can bring your opera glasses and sit way back for $179. As it happens, I’ve seen both of those entertainers; separately, in 1979 and 1980. I don’t remember what I paid. A handy inflation calculator tells me that $179 now is the equivalent of $47 back then. I’m positive I didn’t pay that much, total, for both tickets.

Visiting Queen of All Saints Basilica in Chicago last month, I took an image of carved text that puzzled me a bit, but then I forgot to look it up.

“Ecumenical Year?” I remembered to look into that more recently, and realized that it must refer to the first year of Vatican II, which was indeed 1962. Formally in English, the meeting was the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican.

Naturally, when one hears of Vatican II, it’s time to listen to “The Vatican Rag.”

The council might have been 60 years ago, but that song never gets old.

Gone the Way of Columbia Wearing a Phrygian Cap

Posted on March 24, 2024 by admin

A few years ago, a meme about Presidents Day came to my attention. The text: Think you should have Presidents’ Day off work? Name this man.

The image was that of Warren Harding. For me, that was easy. Maybe not so much for a lot of people, though I suspect no survey about President Harding’s enduring fame has ever been done.

A better obscure president for the meme would have been, say, James Garfield or Rutherford B. Hayes or Benjamin Harrison, since Gilded Age chief executives tend to merge into a single hazy gray-bearded visage, except of course for the moustachio’d rotundness of Chester A. Arthur and Grover Cleveland.

Fame wears thin. That came to mind this time last year at the Harding library and museum in Marion, Ohio. Among a number of other interesting artifacts, the museum posted newspaper reactions to the president’s unexpected death on August 2, 1923.

Note that Columbia is wearing a Phrygian cap. Whatever happened to Phrygian caps? Whatever happened to Columbia in editorial cartoons? They just faded away. Something like the memory of Harding, so vivid once upon a time.

Newspaper editorial cartoons don’t necessarily capture public sentiment, but I understand Harding was a popular president in his lifetime. In terms of reputation, then, he got out while he still had a good one. Not long after, the scandals of his administration came to light, along with allegations of an illegitimate daughter (which were true). A hundred years later, he’s obscure enough to meme-ify, except among historians, who don’t like him.

Monday Moonery

Posted on March 18, 2024 by admin

Why should we start sending people back to the Moon? Because it’s still there? Besides that. Rather, because the ranks of those who have flown to the Moon are getting pretty thin – something I thought of when I learned that Tom Stafford (Apollo 10) died. Now only seven of them are left, four who landed on the surface and three who got really close without landing.

At 88, the youngest of this rarefied group is Apollo 16’s Charles Duke. Three have passed just in the last few months, including Ken Mattingly (also Apollo 16) and Frank Borman (Apollo 8) and now Stafford. It wouldn’t be right somehow to have the experience of being close to the Moon slip out of living memory. The plan is for these astronauts to go next year on Artemis 2; we shall see.

If Artemis 2 does come to pass as planned, it would include among its crew one Jeremy Hansen, who happens to be a Canadian astronaut and would be the first non-American (non-citizen of the United States, to nitpickers) to pay a visit to the Moon. Assuming a knot of taikonauts doesn’t surprise the world before Artemis’ flight by appearing on the lunar surface hoisting the flag of the PRC.

Hansen, as Wiki succinctly put it, “Canadian astronaut, fighter pilot, physicist and former aquanaut.” If that’s not an action hero’s resume, I don’t know what would be.

Lots of rabbit-hole material here: Canada currently has four active astronauts (one of whom is Hansen) and a number of retired ones, including the dude astronaut who played “Space Oddity” on the ISS about 10 years ago. They work or worked for the Canadian Space Agency, which has been around since 1989 but I’d say is fairly low profile. Canadians have been going to space since before then, since Marc Garneau went up on a 1984 Shuttle mission. He happens to be a Québécois and until recently fairly highly positioned in the current Trudeau government.

Here’s a question for Moon landing deniers: how come some other nation (say, you know, China) hasn’t faked going to the Moon by now? Certainly Xi Jinping would be able to marshal the resources, by various carrots and sticks, to get the filming and other fakery done.

If someone (say, you know, Kubrick) could fake it using late ’60s video tech, wouldn’t the vast improvements in digital image creation since then mean a higher quality fake by the Chinese government? One so good no one would question it? Except of course for brave Moon-landing deniers.

I&M ’21

Posted on March 10, 2024 by admin

This is the day of the year, at least here in the U.S., when people get mildly irritated at the change of the clocks, because it is mildly irritating. (And traffic death stats are trotted out.) By late in the evening, everything’s just a little askew, but that goes away as the week progresses. Maybe early March is too early to switch, but do away with it all together? I’d still rather have those long summer days not end till 9 or 10 p.m. Even better, not have them ever begin at 4 a.m. or earlier. Call me picky that way.

A path I walked along about three years ago, during my visit to the storied Archer Avenue.

To the left in the image is the Illinois & Michigan Canal, relic of 1830s canal mania.

A rail line ran nearby too.

I’d make some comment about how the railroad made I&M obsolete, but that’s only partly true. The nearby Sanitary & Ship Canal eventually took its place, and is no relic. Rather, it’s a legacy of the heroic era of civil engineering (let’s put that between the Civil War and WWI), and is a waterway of commerce to this day. I&M is recreational.

21st-Century Leaps

Posted on February 29, 2024 by admin

Another February 29. If I counted right, my 16th. That got me to thinking, just how many February 29ths have there been? As in, ever? Not as simple a question as all that, first of all because the day Caesar inserted into the calendar was an extra one after the equivalent of our February 24, a situation that persisted for a long time. So a different question might be how many intercalary days have there been since the Julian calendar’s first (let’s say first one after the extra days tacked on 46 BC, the longest year in history).

I feel like I’m staring into a pretty extensive rabbit hole. So, I’m backing away.

2020

Last time around on February 29, no entry. I attended an exceptionally pleasant dinner party at an exurban San Antonio ranch house, on flat land in the direction of the Hill Country. Six of us, I think, eating and drinking a few glasses of wine and conversing. People wonder whether the art of conversation is dying, and I doubt it. But it might go underground.

Also, that was the last social gathering I attended until April ’21 counting ones with family members, and June that year that for groups of friends.

2016

“The saying represents something exceptionally easy, of course, but even so I’m not sure it would be.” I wrote. ”Let’s assume the barrel is full of water as well as fish. Unless we’re talking about really large carp or some such, you might disturb the water and scare the fish, but I’m not sure how many small fish would actually be hit. Also, you’d think that shooting would soon destroy a wooden barrel and cause a dangerous amount of flying debris. Or if it were a metal barrel, such as a steel oil drum, the danger of ricochets might be high.

“This is something for the Mythbusters fellows to investigate, but I suspect that shooting fish in a barrel never was anything but a metaphor, and by now a hackneyed one at that. So I’m reluctant to say that making fun of a press release I received recently — especially the first line — is like shooting fish in a barrel. But it cries out to be mocked.”

2012

“I’m sure that I learned about Leap Year at an early age, like most people. But I never knew the details — Caesar and Sosigenes, the longest year in history (46 BC), Julian and Gregorian calendars, etc. — until I read The Clock We Live On. [I forgot to mention that Isaac Asimov wrote it? I’m rectifying that now.]

“The inside cover has an example of my father’s handwriting, something I don’t have too much of, so I wanted to save that too. Apparently he bought it in 1963, the year before he died.” [Sixty years and a day ago. RIP, dad]

“I first read it in 1977. Besides the story of the western calendar, there was plenty of other interesting topics — why days have 24 hours and hours 60 minutes, the development of clocks and chronometers, the establishment of meridians and time zones, and so on. The calendar chapter formed the basis of an oral report I did in high school Latin class.”

2008

“Battlefield gore is a necessary ingredient in any war movie of our time, as well as soldiers’ profanity, and understandably so. My own preference in historical fiction runs to verisimilitude, but that isn’t to say that I didn’t like The Sands of Iwo Jima.

“The most effective horror-of-war scene in Flags involved off-screen gore. At one point, one of the men (Iggy) goes mysteriously missing from the hillside. Later, his comrades discover that the Japanese pulled him into one of their caves and killed him in a way the American soldier who found him would only describe as, ‘look what they did to the poor son of a bitch.’ At that point one of the characters is looking at whatever remains of Iggy, but we don’t see it, and it’s much more horrible that way.”

2004

“Leap Year brings to mind the lore of King Numa reforming the early Roman calendar, Julius Caesar (and Sosigenes) replacing lunar with solar, Caligula trying to name a month after Germanicus (at least according to Robert Graves), Pope Gregory ordering his change but the Protestant parts of Europe ignoring it, and so on.

“When I was a kid I was fascinated by calendars, and would draw my own sometimes. In high school, I read about the history of the calendar on my own time, because it wasn’t part of any class. Even now I have some interest, though not as much as a fellow I know who spent time calculating the dates of Easter in the far distant future — thousands of years further than the standard Easter tables. I think he even wrote a computer program to do that for him.”

Spring Valley Farm Oddities

Posted on February 27, 2024 by admin

Sunday wasn’t quite as warm as yesterday, or today, whose unseasonably high temps came to a crashing end amid thunder and lightning and wind. The condition at about 7:30 pm. Sirens wailed from before then till 7:45.

A very spring-like event. Glad it’s over.

But it was warm enough Sunday to stroll a while at one of our default walking places, Spring Valley. We made it to the former farm, where no animals were to be seen. Pigs, cows, chickens, nowhere, though the barnyard odor lingered. No oinks or moos or the flapping of chickens. On vacation? I mused out loud. Off to a meat processing facility? I mused to myself. Kidding, but best not vocalized.

But my quest to see new things, even in very familiar places, and on a granular level, kept me busy. Or if not new things, a new look a them. Such as the wagons.

These look like work wagons. That can lead to a number of musings, such as, what a damn lot of work was involved in running a 19th-century farm. The vehicles are labor-saving devices in their own way, of course, but only so much labor.

It’s not so remarkable that the elderly in our time are in better shape than previous generations, a fact noted from AARP to ZDNET. Nutrition and healthcare are decidedly better now, but the long and short of it is that much work wore people out.

I’m sure I’d seen this bit of farm equipment before. But I’m not sure I’d looked at it. The more I looked, the odder it got.

Someone knows what that is. Locally, maybe someone at the park district. Further away, farmers. Or maybe it’s obvious, and I’m dense. Maybe, but it’s still a puzzler.

I fed the image into TinEye, a reserve image search engine. The results: TinEye searched over 65.7 billion images but didn’t find any matches for your search image. That’s probably because we have yet to crawl any pages where this image appears.

I also took a look at the windmill. Their artistry underappreciated, I believe.

Something was different. Whatever you call that part – the blades? They’d vanished. I was sure of it, and sure enough, when I looked at the picture I took of it in 2012, the difference was clear.

Out for repairs? Stolen for scrap or by a slightly demented collector? Blown down on windy day and wrecked beyond repair? We get those gusts sometimes, see above.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: History