Twenty-Plus Years of December Firsts

Posted on December 1, 2024 by admin

Chilly days over the last week, a slide into winter even before the calendar turned to December. The first of this month now always reminds me of the sizable snow we got that day in 2006, coming as if winter were actually was signified by a particular day. Why that sticks in memory, it’s hard to say. Memory’s an oddity, often as not.

The following are the first paragraphs from postings on December 1, here at my corner of the Internet. If a year isn’t listed, that means I didn’t post that day. By my count, only eight of the 16 postings started with weather, counting one that is a quote from The Sun Also Rises about how good it is to be in a warm bed on a cold night. A few others mentioned some aspect of the holiday season, such as cops chasing a shoplifter with a taste for German Christmas ornaments.

2022: As expected, full winter is here. Not much more to say about that till a blizzard comes. We’re overdue one, at least when it comes to my completely nonscientific feelings on the matter. Not that I want one, just that it’s been a while, and the Old Man might want to let us have it this year.

2021: Ambler’s Texaco Gas Station is on the edge of Dwight, Illinois, not far from the Interstate, and after our short visit on Sunday, Ann and I went further into town, seeking a late lunch. We found it at El Cancun, a Mexican restaurant in the former (current?) Independent Order of Odd Fellows building, dating from 1916. Looks like the orange of the restaurant has been pasted on the less-colorful IOOF structure.

2020: About a month ago, our long-serving toaster oven gave up the mechanical ghost after how many years? No one could remember. Eventually, its heating element refused to heat, so we left it out for the junkmen at the same time as the standard trash, and sure enough it vanished in the night.

2019: December didn’t arrive with a blast of snow, but instead gray skies that gave up rain from time to time, which — by Sunday just after dark — had turned into light snow. In other words, weather like we’ve had much of the time since the Halloween snow fell, followed by the Veterans Day snow.

2016: Someone’s already thought of the Full Griswold. Maybe I’d heard of it before, but I don’t know where. I thought of it this evening driving along, noting the proliferation of Christmas lights in this part of the suburbs. Some displays, of course, are more elaborate than others, but I haven’t seen any Full Griswolds just yet.

2015: Some years, December comes in with the kind of snow we had before Thanksgiving. This year, rain as November ended and December began. El Niño?

2014: After a brief not-cold spell on Saturday and Sunday – I can’t call it warm, but still not bad – it’s winter cold again. Diligent neighbors used the interlude to sting lights on their houses or finishing removing leaves from their lawns. I did no such things.

2013: I took lousy notes during our four weeks in London in December 1994, so I can’t remember exactly when it was we took a day trip to Canterbury. It wasn’t December 1, because that day I saw a revival of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie somewhere in the West End, and after the show the lead actress made an appeal for donations to fund AIDS research, since it was World AIDS Day.

2011: On Saturday, we went to Chicago Premium Outlets, which is actually in Aurora, Illinois, just off I-88. I saw something there I’ve read about, but never seen before: an electric vehicle charging station.

2010: Some years, December 1 means snow. This year, for instance, unlike last year. But not that much; an early breath of winter across the landscape. Just enough to dust the sidewalks and streets, but not cover the grass. As if to say, this is only a taste of things to come, fool.

2009: “Whoa! Whoa! WHOA!” I heard that and when I turned around, caught a glimpse of a Chicago cop running by. I’m pretty sure he had said it. A moment before that I’d entered the German Christmas ornament shop at Kristkindlmarkt [sic] Chicago in Daley Plaza to take a look at the large selection of pretty, and pretty expensive, ornaments. Someone else in the shop said something about chasing a shoplifter, so I left the shop to do a little rubbernecking. Cops chasing a guy beats piles of German Christmas ornaments any day.

2008: “After supper we went up-stairs and smoked and read in bed to keep warm. Once in the night I woke and heard the wind blowing. It felt good to be warm and in bed.”
— The Sun Also Rises

2006: We were warned, and sure enough sometime after midnight on December 1, 2006, the clouds opened up, as if to tell us that today is the real beginning of winter, and don’t you forget it. First came sleet, then snow. It was still snowing at 6:30 in the morning when I got a call telling me that Lilly had no school. By about 10, it had stopped. We’d had about a foot of snow, judging by my unscientific eyeballing.

2005: Back in the late ’80s, one of the perks of my job at a publishing company was a real-time connection to the AP wire at our workstations. Stories queued up in the order they were published electronically, newer ones pushing older ones down toward the bottom. The interface was simple: green characters, no graphics, no hyperlinks.

2004: I read in the papers that tonight’s airing of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer represents the show’s 40th anniversary, making it nearly as old as me. I have a sneaking feeling it will be more durable than me, playing for a good many more decades before it finally peters out, but that isn’t because I like it. No, I never cared for it.

2003: Time to start this thing again, before the wheels completely rust up. December 1st is a good day to do it, too, being the start of meteorological winter. No need to wait around for the solstice around here, since it’s pretty cold just about every day now. What better definition of winter do you need?

A Normal Car

Posted on August 5, 2024 by admin

When I see a car decked out like this, I admire the effort that went into it. Spotted in a large parking lot in Normal, Illinois, a little over a week ago.

That effort is more than decorating the car’s surfaces. Cars move around. This isn’t going to be set and forget. What happens when you drive on the highway in that machine? Or a hard rain falls? Or wind gusts, even when it’s parked? Things fly off, of course. Lose, replace, lose, replace. The enthusiast who owns this car has to work at it that much more, and more often.

So – interesting to look at, but I wouldn’t want it in my driveway.

Return to Le Roy, Home of Wausaneta

Posted on August 1, 2024 by admin

It so happens that Moraine View State Recreation Area is only a few miles north of Le Roy, Illinois, a burg I passed through more than five years ago. At that time I made the acquaintance of Wausaneta, an imaginary Kickapoo chief. His statue has stood in Kiwanis Park in Le Roy for more than a century now, gift to the town of the wealthy crackpot who dreamed him up. I mean, gift to the town of the spiritualist and leading citizen who communed with Wausaneta those many years ago.

As of Sunday, the statue of Wausaneta still stands in Le Roy’s main square.

I didn’t remember the carved stump tree nearby.

Panther Tree, it’s called. The local high school mascot is a panther. The reason I don’t remember it is because it wasn’t there until late 2019; I came in March of that year.

While Yuriko dozed in the car, I took a stroll down Main Street, learning that this isn’t the only Le Roy.

Most of the buildings are occupied by one business or another. The former Le Roy State Bank is now the Oak & Flame Bourbon Hall.

Every town worth its salt had an opera house, once upon a time. In this case, that time was 1892.

The Princess Theatre had an abandoned look, but its web site that says that Horizon: An American Saga is playing there once a day until August 3. Only $5 for seniors and children, and $6 for adults, which might be what it’s worth.

“Marcus West, son of Simeon West, built the Princess Theater in 1916,” the web site says. Simeon West was the aforementioned wealthy crackpot.

“Architect Arthur L. Pillsbury designed the brick theater with limestone accents. The first movie was Tennessee’s Pardner on November 21, 1916. The original theater was a silent movie house with piano accompaniment, as talkies did not make their debut in Le Roy until 1931. A grandson of Marcus West recounts that West’s daughter, while in high school, substituted as piano player when the regular player was unable to accompany the film.”

This building looked genuinely empty. Not only empty, but still sporting a Trump-Pence sign, already a relic of yore. It has a future as a hipster bar, maybe.

Guns & Glory.

Guns & Glory offers firearms, cleaning, repair, concealed carry classes, and Bibles.

“We are probably the only gun shop and religious book store combined that you will find,” its web site says. “We believe we can provide the two most important things to protect you – ‘God and guns.’ ”

Used to be the First National Bank. And a Rexall drug store.

Someone went to some lengths to blot out the Rexall name, but not enough to efface it completely, if you know what you’re looking at.

I believe the drug store in Alamo Heights where I bought comics in the early ’70s was a Rexall, but I’m not quite sure. At some moment after I left town, it disappeared. That same dynamic happened so much that the brand now enjoys only a whisper of its ’50s coast-to-coast retail glory.

Moraine View State Recreation Area

Posted on July 31, 2024 by admin

Not far east and south of Bloomington-Normal is Moraine View State Recreation Area, unless you look at the Illinois Department of Natural Resources web site, which calls it Moraine View State Park. A distinction without much of a difference, probably, but anyway the sign on site says recreation area.

We arrived Saturday afternoon and set up our tent in a drive-in camp site. Though a weekend in summer, not all of the sites were occupied. In fact, quite a few were empty. Good to know that not every bit of every state park isn’t overrun every weekend.

The replacement for the leaky tent I returned.

Unlike the previous tent, the new one is a Coleman, larger than previous tents we’ve owned and a little more complicated to set up. Good to be able to stand up inside it. After a back yard test, we wanted to test it in the field, and Moraine View seemed like a good spot. I’m glad to report that it didn’t leak, despite fairly heavy rain Saturday night into Sunday morning, though the clammy atmosphere made it a little hard to sleep.

This is first time we’ve camped since, I think, 2014. For one thing, our daughters became increasingly vocal about the discomforts of camping. Another consideration has been the spread of Lyme disease from its East Coast haunts into the Upper Midwest, especially places we might want to go, such as Wisconsin and the UP. Illinois less so, but there are cases. Good news, however: someday soon a vaccine for it might be on the market again.

Moraine View’s a pleasant place, whatever you call it. At more than 1,680 acres, it’s not a huge park, but sizable enough to encompass all the land around a man-made body called Dawson Lake.

On land, there were easy trails through temperate lushness, in living color.

Or monochrome.

Though marshy, the place wasn’t overburdened with mosquitoes.

Non-geologist that I am, I wondered, where’s the moraine? Later I came across this Geologic Road Map of Illinois.

To the left, a detail from the map focusing on McLean County. The olive tinting designates moraine, legacy of the last time that ice covered this part of North America.

Such moraine is “largely unsorted sediment (till), a mixture of clay, silt, sand and gravel, deposited by moving or melting ice.”

That is, the moraine was all around us at Moraine View, making it one of the more aptly named units of the DNR.

The McLean County Museum of History

Posted on July 30, 2024 by admin

Revel in the obscurity: Details of posters advertising a regional brand of candy that hasn’t been made in years, created by a commercial artist no one has ever heard of, on display in a large town few people visit.

Bloomington-based Beich Candy Co. was the candy maker, and the posters advertise its Whiz Bar, whose slogan – until inflation made it obsolete – was “Whiz, best nickel candy there iz-z.”

The posters are behind glass at the McLean County Museum of History, and thus hard to photography in total without glare. But details work out nicely.

We visited the museum on Saturday morning.

“These posters were created by Don Shirley (1913-2001) for States Display, a local commercial art business,” notes the museum. “He was an artist and illustrator.”

A Prussian immigrant by the name of Paul F. Beich founded the candy company that carried his name. Beich Candy Co. lives on as a unit of Ferrero, with a candy factory in Bloomington (recently expanded), but Whiz seems to be no more. A chocolate-marshmallow-peanut confection, it sounds something like a Goo-Goo Cluster.

An even deeper dive into Beich Co. is at an Illinois Wesleyan University website. It’s the story of a food technologist who worked for the company, one Justin J. Alikonis.

“He designed and patented, among other things, a marshmallow-making machine, the ‘Whizolater,’ named after the Beich flagship candy bar, the Whiz,” the site says. “With no moving parts and operating solely on pressurized air, the Whizolater could make 1,400 gallons of marshmallow or nougat per hour.”

As local history museums go, McLean County is top drawer, with enough displays and artifacts to inspire all sorts of rabbit-hole expeditions, besides 20th-century candy making in central Illinois. Such as friends of Lincoln who otherwise would be lost to history.

He even looks a little like Lincoln, but maybe that’s just 19th-century styling.

Otherwise obscure incidents in McLean County history make their appearance as well, such as one in 1854, when a mob of Know-Nothings smashed 50 barrels each of brandy and cherry bounce, and 50 casks each of “high wine,” gin and whiskey taken from groggeries in Bloomington, according to the museum.

I had to look up cherry bounce. For those who like their neurotoxins sweet, I guess. The Know-Nothings were destroying the alcohol – “washed the prairie” with it, said a contemporary account, though perhaps some of it was squirreled away by thirsty Know-Nothings – presumably because it was associated with immigrant saloons.

A flag. For union and liberty.

A replica of the one carried by the 33rd Illinois Infantry Regiment, which has its start comprised of teachers and students and former students at Normal University (later ISU), with university president Charles E. Hovey as its colonel.

Most local history museums have oddities, and so does McLean County.

It’s a little hard to tell, but that’s a large chair. Though I’m six feet tall, my feet barely touched the ground. “Yes, please sit here!” its sign said. “The owners of Howard & Kirkpatrick’s Home Furnishings places this oversized chair outside their store to draw customers inside.”

The displays and artifacts are one thing, but what really makes the museum sing is its digs in the former courthouse.

Especially the former courtroom.

In which hangs a portrait of Vice President Adlai Stevenson.

The courthouse dates from the early 1900s, a time when officialdom at least believed that the physical structures of republican government ought to have a touch of grandeur.

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.

Hidden Creek Nature Sanctuary & Constitution Trail

Posted on May 6, 2024 by admin

Late yesterday afternoon, while Ann was saying goodbye to friends, we had a few hours to spend in Normal. Before long we were walking the short trails of Hidden Creek Nature Sanctuary, which is part of the local park district.

At about five and a half acres, the park isn’t large, but it is lush here in rising spring. Some of it is a standard park.

With the sort of small memorials you sometimes find in parks.

“Squirrel whisperer”? That’s a new one on me, but of course the idea’s been kicking around a while. Such as a mention in this 2014 report about tame squirrels at Penn State and the student that interacted with them, who was called “a squirrel whisperer” and who posted their pictures.

Update: Dozens of squirrels were arrested at protests at Penn State last week. Tame, my foot.

Elsewhere undergrowth luxuriates on either side of unpaved paths — and a bridge.

A crick runs through the spring greens.

The hand of man is never very far away. Young man, I suspect.

Constitution Trail runs next to the sanctuary, pointing both north and south. Go south, and you come to Illinois State’s campus. Go north, and you walk behind Bloomington residences, some single-family with large yards, some townhouses clearly built to take advantage of the trail as an amenity.

We went north about a half-mile, then back. We could have gone on past I-55 via an underpass, and on to the edge of town, but we didn’t go nearly that far. It’s part of a network of trails in Bloomington-Normal, and beyond, and not especially new. The dedication of the trail was on the 200th anniversary of the adoption of the U.S. Constitution in 1987.

Another branch follows the former U.S. 66 as it traverses McLean County. I’ve trodden the trail at Tawanda (a little).

The branch we walked was obviously a former railroad line, or so I thought. I was right: an Illinois Central Gulf RR line, abandoned about 40 years ago. One railroad that merged to create that company was the famed Illinois Central, the line represented in the mid-1800s in some cases by a certain well-known railroad lawyer from Springfield.

Standard Oil Gas Station, Odell

Posted on May 5, 2024 by admin

One place to stop between greater Chicago and Normal, Illinois, is the town of Odell. I bet not too many people do, but those that do come for a look at the former Standard Oil gas station that once served motorists on the former U.S. 66.

That’s what we did today. The main purpose of the drive was to fetch Ann and some of her belongings from Normal, where she has completed her junior year. I figured a few minutes in Odell (pop. 1,000) — which is between Dwight and Pontiac — wouldn’t be wasted. The gas station counts as a link in the tourist chain that is Route 66, though still fairly obscure even in the grand scheme of that creation. So much the better.

“In 1932, a contractor, Patrick O’Donnell, purchased a small parcel of land along Route 66 in Odell, Illinois,” the NPS says. “There he built a gas station based on a 1916 Standard Oil of Ohio design, commonly known as a domestic style gas station. This ‘house with canopy’ style of gas station gave customers a comfortable feeling they could associate with home.” (And not Big Oil.)

Later other brands of gas were sold there, and eventually – after U.S. 66 was no more – the building became an auto repair shop and then abandoned. A typical arc for such businesses, in other words. The village of Odell acquired the station around the turn of the 21st century to make it into a tourist attraction. We were duly attracted.

More of a stabilization than a restoration, looks like, at least inside the former garage space, with odds and ends here and there, and souvenirs for sale.

The gas station is one thing, but I couldn’t leave town without taking a look at the Odell water tower.

Started as a town along a railroad, as so many others did, and named after a shadowy figure named William Odell, one of the original owners of the land in the 1850s. Apparently he didn’t stay long, selling his interest but leaving his name.

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.

Robot on Aisle 7

Posted on February 5, 2024 by admin

When I took Ann back to Normal yesterday, I didn’t stop anywhere else in that town. But the last time I was there, we went to a grocery store just off I-55. And who should we meet in one of the aisles? I’d say it was strolling around, but I don’t think inventory robots stroll. Wheel along, maybe. It was puttering along.

That’s Tally, which isn’t precisely new tech, considering that you can easily find an article about the machine from 2016. Then again, maybe the one we saw is a more advanced version or, for all I know, it’s an older one still perfectly fine for its job. Never mind what the tech industry says, tech still has value as long as you find it useful.

“[Tally] can traverse a shop’s aisles for eight to 12 hours on a single charge, counting and checking up to 20,000 individual stock keeping units (SKUs) with greater than 96 percent accuracy,” the PC magazine article reported then.

A robot replacing a human. A human going up and down the aisles for hours holding a electronic wand of some kind. That sounds like the kind of really boring job that robots were going to take in the future, as it was once more optimistically imagined. Were supposed to take.

On the other hand, I asked the check-out clerk about the robot. How long had the store had the robot? She didn’t know, a while. We hate it anyway, she said, but didn’t elaborate.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: US: Illinois