Wright in Dwight, But Also Odd Fellows, Cobb, and a Relic of Quackery

Posted on December 1, 2021 by admin

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.

I didn’t notice IOOF on the building until after lunch, so I didn’t think to ask the waiter about the building, though I did notice that the restaurant space, whose walls were large and colorfully painted, had a gray ceiling that evoked the late 19th/early 20th century. Maybe once upon a time it was a meeting room or bar for the Odd Fellows of greater Dwight.

Even if I’d asked the waiter, I’m not sure he would have known. Got the impression he didn’t grow up in these parts. He was eager to upsell me a margarita, however. I declined. Had the enchiladas verdes, which were quite good, and a classic teetotaler beverage, water.

The IOOF building is across the street from the back of Dwight’s historic railroad station, now a museum. This is the front.

About the depot, more info is easily available. “As with other neighboring central Illinois towns, Dwight began as a locomotive watering stopover,” explains The Great American Stations (now that’s an interesting web site).

“The Chicago and Mississippi Railroad sent surveyors in the early 1850s to this prairie location, and while the stop was just two small buildings and a water tank, James Spencer, Richard Price Morgan, John Lathrop and the brothers Jesse and Kersey Fell of Bloomington participated in laying out a town that they would name for Henry Dwight, who had funded most of the building of this section of the railroad.

“Dwight began growing rapidly in the 1870s, with significant railroad traffic through to Chicago from St. Louis, and the town hired Henry Ives Cobb to design their larger, grander railroad depot.”

Jesse Fell, by golly. Him again. He was definitely a big fish in the little pond of central Illinois.

As for Cobb, he designed the wonderful Newberry Library in Chicago and the phallic but interesting Yerkes Observatory in southern Wisconsin, among many other things.

But for big-name architecture, Cobb’s work isn’t Dwight’s star attraction. That would be the modest Frank Lloyd Wright bank building facing the front of the station. FLW was trying to smash that pre-FDIC paradigm of grand bank buildings, it seems.

Known as the Frank L. Smith Bank when built in 1905, it’s now the Dwight Banking Center of Peoples National Bank of Kewanee. I like the old name better: Frank’s Bank. How many of us get to have our own banks?

Next to the bank is the Fox Development Center, a state-owned facility for treating people with various unfortunate conditions.

Pretty spiffy for a government structure, eh? Originally it was one of the buildings owned by the Keeley Institute, built in 1891 and rebuilt after a fire in 1902 in its current brick-and-stone Greek revival style.

I wasn’t familiar with the Keeley Institute. Here’s the long and short of it: there was a patent medicine for everything in the late 19th century, and the product of one Leslie Keeley, a small town doc, promised to cure alcoholism with injections and liquids to drink. His cure containing a substance whose exact formula was a secret, though Keeley asserted it contained the element gold in one form or another.

Not too many people believed that, but a lot of people believed the Gold Cure might just work, enough to make Keeley a fortune and open up locations around the world that lasted well into the 20th century. The institute’s international HQ was in Dwight.

Curing alcoholism with injections might seem odd to us, but actual medicine was only just beginning to separate itself from patent medicine in those days.

“I will take any liquor habitue there, soddened and saturated by twenty years of alcoholic debauch, sober him in two hours, cut short his worst spree in four hours, take him from inebriety to perfect sobriety without nervous shock or distress, and leave him antipathetic to alcoholic stimulants of every sort and kind inside of three days,” Keeley said of his treatment. He also developed “cures” for opium addition and nervous exhaustion. Ah, if only it were that easy.

Note the slogan on this ad for the Gold Cure.

We Belt The World. Though it’s a little hard to see, that same slogan is still above the entrance of the Fox Development Center, wrapped around a globe in the pediment.

More about Keeley and the Gold Cure is here. Fascinating the things you find on the road.

Ambler’s Texaco Gas Station

Posted on November 30, 2021 by admin

The National Park Service takes more of an interest in the former U.S. 66 than I would have thought. On this page, the NPS lists dozens of historic sites associated with that road, including 12 in Illinois plus a listing on “Illinois Road Segments.”

One of the sites is Ambler’s Texaco Gas Station in Dwight, Illinois, which is about half way between the northwest suburbs and Bloomington-Normal. On the way back to take Ann to ISU on Sunday, we stopped there.

Though called Amber’s by the park service, the name on site is the Ambler/Becker Station, and the NPS does mention the facility’s other designations over the decades it was a gas station (1933 to 1999): Vernon’s Texaco Station and Becker’s Marathon Gas Station.

After the place ended its existence as a car-care facility, it became a tourist attraction. Sure enough, we’d been attracted for a look, though it was closed on Sunday afternoon.

“With the help of a $10,400 matching grant from the National Park Service’s Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program, the Village of Dwight painstakingly restored the station to its former glory, taking the main office and canopy area back to the 1930s and the service bay area back to its 1940s appearance,” the NPS says. “Today, the station serves as a visitor’s center for the Village of Dwight.”

La Salle Churches

Posted on November 29, 2021 by admin

After our walk at Matthiessen State Park on Friday, we went to the town of La Salle and found a mid-afternoon lunch at a sandwich shop called Obee’s. Good sandwiches and chili, too.

Rather than head home right away, we stopped to look at a few of La Salle’s sizable church buildings. None of them were open, but the afternoon light illuminated their exteriors nicely.

First stop: Queen of the Holy Rosary Memorial Shrine.

Once a parish church, these days Queen of the Holy Rosary is a Diocesan Shrine dedicated to Mary in memory of all U.S. veterans. Designed by Arthur F. Moratz of Bloomington, it dates only from the 1950s. A late work for him. I’ve run across Moratz before; he did the Normal Theater.

Not far away (nothing is too far away in La Salle) is St. Patrick’s, a much older church, completed in 1848 to serve the Irishmen working on the I&M Canal. One Patrick Joseph Mullaney did the design.

According to a plaque on the front, St. Patrick’s is the “oldest living parish church in Illinois.” With a resplendent interior, from the looks of these pictures.

Elsewhere in La Salle is a church building that had the look of being closed. Permanently closed, that is.

St. Joseph’s, according to a stone in the wall, dedicated in 1907.

More remarkably, the cornerstone lists the architect: Henry Schlacks, whose work I’ve seen before. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an architect mentioned on the exterior of a church, but he was a pretty big bug among church designers more than 100 years ago.

In any case, St. Joseph’s isn’t listed as an active parish by the local Catholic church, and there isn’t any evidence that any other denomination occupies the place.

On the other hand, St. Hyacinth looks active. Just not open when I happened by.

St. Patrick was originally for Irish immigrants, while St. Hyacinth was for Polish immigrants, a later wave to this part of Illinois. It was completed in 1892 to replace an earlier church that burned down, and was also designed by another prolific church architect, George P. Stauduhar.

I could see other steeples off in the distance, since La Salle is still a low-rise town, and steeples are often the tallest structures around. But the light was fading and the afternoon getting chillier, so we called it a day after Hyacinth.

Matthiessen State Park

Posted on November 28, 2021 by admin

Thanksgiving dinner this year wasn’t quite as conventional as other years: lamb shank with homemade macaroni and cheese (a complex mix of cheeses by Ann) and barbecue-flavored beans. The bread was traditional: the cheapest brown-and-serve rolls I could find. I didn’t forget the olives.

Last summer, on the way back from New Buffalo, Michigan, we bought some grape juice at St. Julian Winery, and had one of those bottles to drink with our Thanksgiving food. All in all, a pleasant meal, not a vast feast.

On Friday, we drove down to Matthiessen State Park, just south of the Illinois River in La Salle County and not far from the better-known Starved Rock State Park. The 1,938-acre Matthessen is a more modest park, but has a good set of trails along, and down in, a winding ravine formed by a creek.

To get to the ravine, you need to go down.

Those stairs lead to a bridge over one part of the ravine. Nice view from the bridge. For perspective, note that there are people at the bottom.

The bottom is accessible by another set of wooden stairs.

Though a few degrees above freezing, there were patches of thin ice here and there on the surface of the creek, which I poked with my walking stick, watching it break into fragments.

On to the other part of the ravine, which we reached by taking this path, then a different set of stairs.

A short section of ravine wall is marked by generations of carvings in the sandstone.

The trail sometimes meant crossing on stones over the shallow creek. A misstep into the creek would have meant uncomfortably wet shoes, at least.

Before long, there’s another bridge and a waterfall formed by a dam that creates Matthiessen Lake. Another set of stairs, not visible in the picture, leads up to the bridge. We did a fair amount of stairclimbing at the park.

Still, a good walk, even on a chilly day, especially since there was little wind down in the ravine.

The park is named for Frederick William Matthiessen (d. 1918), whose land it used to be, with later additions by the state. He was the other zinc baron of 19th-century La Salle County, along with Edward Carl Hegeler, whose house we toured a few years ago.

Thursday Adds

Posted on October 14, 2021 by admin

RIP, Laura Ford, mother of two friends of mine in high school, Catherine and Melanie. I remember her fondly from the times we hung out at Catherine’s house in the late ’70s. She’s pictured here in May 1979.

More recently, she would comment occasionally on something I’d posted on Facebook — she really liked pictures of our dog — though I can’t remember the last time we met in person.

I didn’t know her exact age until I read the obituary, and was slightly startled to realize that when I met her, she wasn’t even 40 yet. Of course, from the vantage of high school, that seemed vastly old. Now, not so much.

One more pic from Normal, Illinois, last weekend.

As we drove toward Normal, Yuriko asked what kind of bird the ISU mascot was supposed to be — a cardinal? I told her I didn’t think it was supposed to be any particular species, though it does look something like an angry cardinal.

Later Ann said she thought “redbird” was picked since too many other places used cardinals. The dictionary definition of redbird (Merriam-Webster) is straightforward enough: “Any of several birds (such as a cardinal or scarlet tanager) with predominantly red plumage.”

I had to look further into scarlet tanagers. Only some of them are actually scarlet, it seems. Not sure that would be such a hot mascot name anyway. If you want an unusual bird mascot name, I’d go with the Andean cock-of-the-rock. Funny name, funny-looking bird.

I noticed that Dick Cavett had a small part in Beetlejuice. I don’t think I’d ever seen him in a movie in which he didn’t play himself, such as in Annie Hall or Apollo 13, which was a TV clip of him joking about sending a bachelor astronaut to the Moon.

In Beetlejuice, he played Delia’s agent, attending a dinner party she held. Delia was the story’s cartoonish antagonist, and among other things an artist who produces bad sculpture. Leaving the party, Cavett’s character got in a good parting shot:

“Delia, you are a flake. You have always been a flake. If you insist on frightening people, do it with your sculpture.”

Illinois Wesleyan University

Posted on October 13, 2021 by admin

College campuses, at least when the weather is temperate, have a lot to recommend them as walking destinations. Green space with expansive trees, good-looking or at least interesting buildings, the possibility of public art, inexpensive museums sometimes, a youthful vibe but also historical tidbits, and overall no admission charge.

And the certain knowledge that you (I) don’t have to show up for class, finish assigned reading or write papers. That’s all done.

Before we dropped Ann off at her dorm on Sunday and returned home, we all took a stroll through Illinois Wesleyan University, which is in Bloomington, though not to far south of ISU. I’m glad to report that its motto is still in Latin.

Even better, I knew what it meant without looking it up because of the long-ago Latin teaching efforts of Mrs. Quarles and Dr. Nabors. But I have to say that even a little knowledge of the etymologies of the English words “science” and “sapient” would be enough to guess “knowledge” and “wisdom.”

Illinois Wesleyan, which as far as I can tell is only tenuously connected to the Methodist church, is pleasantly green though not quite the arboretum that is ISU.

A good many buildings were newer-looking than I expected for a college founded in 1850.

But not all of them.

There was a scattering of artwork, such as “Aspiration” by Giles Rayner (2015), a British artist specializing in water sculpture.

For whatever reason, no water flowed when I was there. It would have been cooler, literally and figuratively, had it been.

Elsewhere is “Family With Dog” by Boaz Vaadia (also 2015), a Brooklyn-based artist.

That second picture is my own composition, “Daughter With Dog With Family With Dog” (2021).

The Normal Theater

Posted on October 12, 2021 by admin

One of the things Ann wanted to do when we were visiting was see a showing of Beetlejuice at the Normal Theater, a single-screen moviehouse of ’30s vintage only a few minutes’ walk from her dorm. Since Yuriko didn’t want to see the movie, she stayed in our room with the dog and I went to the show with Ann.

As it happened, I’d never seen that movie. Neither had Ann, but she didn’t have the opportunity to see it when it was new. Not sure why I didn’t. I saw a fair number of movies in my late ’80s Chicago bachelor days — first run, foreign and arthouse — both highly memorable (e.g., The Princess Bride) and much less so (e.g., the ’87 movie version of Dragnet).

It’s a fun romp. A good example of a movie that doesn’t take itself that seriously, entertainment by a talented cast working from a good script that also includes all sorts of interesting visual detail. Tim Burton certainly has a gift for the visual, which you’d think would be mandatory to be a director, but apparently not.

Lots of weirdness, bright and dark, all mixed in effective ways. For a few moments, I’d swear the look of the afterlife owed a lot to German Expressionism, but also Brazil and Kafka, with B horror movies and screwball comedies and Fellini and Saturday morning cartoons and who knows what else thrown in to the rest of the movie.

Now I believe I need to see some of the other Tim Burton movies I’ve missed, such as Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Big Fish, Sweeney Todd and Big Eyes, and maybe re-watch Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and Batman, which I haven’t seen since the decade they were made.

Better yet, I saw Beetlejuice‘s rampant weirdness in a real movie theater. Not a multiplex, either. The Normal Theater is one of the scant few survivors of another age of moviehouses: a neighborhood theater from that time when a lot of neighborhoods had them.

It isn’t a movie palace, but its Art Moderne style is charming to modern eyes, which are inured to bland interiors.

“The architect was Arthur F. Moratz, youngest sibling of Paul O. Moratz, another prominent local architect,” the theater web site says, which also includes some good pictures. “In Bloomington, Arthur Moratz buildings include the acclaimed Art Deco-style Holy Trinity Catholic Church at the north end of downtown, and his own residence, 317 East Chestnut Street.”

When it opened in 1937, the theater had 620 seats (these days, 385). First movie: Double or Nothing, with Bing Crosby and Martha Raye. Soon it found its niche in the world of Normal moviehouses.

“The Normal, generally speaking, did not screen the just-released prestige pictures and big budget epics,” the web site says. “Those were shown instead at the Irvin (and sometimes the Castle), which were both owned by Publix Great States Theatres. After all, why would the chain compete against itself? For its part, the Normal was known for genre and B pictures, especially westerns and musicals, as well as second-run fare.”

Of course, after its heyday, the theater followed the usual course for such places, with the 1960s and ’70 being unkind to it, though the Normal limped into the ’80s, surviving as a discount theater (dollar tickets and later $1.50).

I remember paying $1 at the Josephine Theatre in San Antonio ca. 1974 to see a Marx Bros. double feature, two of their lesser-shown works, Out West and At the Circus (I think, though one of them might have been The Big Store). Later in the ’70s, that theater showed X-rated pictures, which were advertised in small print in the newspapers, and no one I knew ever went there. I’m glad to say that the Josephine was later restored, and until the pandemic at least, was open.

As for the Normal, I don’t know whether it ever showed dirty movies (the web site is silent on the matter), but in any case, it closed in 1991. “The reason we closed it is that nobody went to it,” the owner said at the time. No doubt.

Amazing to relate, the town of Normal then bought the place, and a combination of federal grants, donations and local tax dollars was used to restore the theater, with a re-opening in 1994. It’s been showing old movies, foreign films and art pictures ever since — everything a nonstandard, nonchain theater should show. Admission: $6. A bargain these days.

This month is devoted to various horror and horror-adjacent movies, serious and not. Besides Beetlejuice, on the bill are Halloween (1978), PG: Psycho Goreman, The Witch, The Brood, Nightmare on Elm Street and its immediate sequel, Destroy All Monsters, Dead of Night (Ealing Studios), Mad Monster Party and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

I encouraged Ann to take advantage of the theater, and I think she might. The movie theaters I had access to in college, especially Sarratt Cinema at Vanderbilt and the Texas Union Theater at UT, were an entertaining part of my education — something I didn’t appreciate until some years later.

ISU Quad Walkabout

Posted on October 11, 2021 by admin

Heavy rain for a while today and cooler temps, but not till afternoon, so there was time for one more lunch on my deck.

Ann invited us to visit her over the weekend, which we did, heading down to Normal on Saturday morning and returning Sunday afternoon, spending the night in a motel near I-55. Daytime temps were nearly as warm as when I dropped her off at ISU in August.

Toward the end of the day on Saturday, it had cooled enough for a short walk — including the dog, whom we brought — around the prettier parts of campus. Mostly that meant the ISU Quad. What’s a university without a quad or two?

As mentioned yesterday, most of the foliage is still green. An eastern approach to the Quad.

“The Hand of Friendship,” which honors Robert G. Bone.

Bone (1906-1991) was the ninth president of Illinois State Normal University, which was renamed Illinois State University during his tenure. Though only president for 11 years (1956-67), he oversaw a lot of construction, including the tower where Ann lives. Later, the school’s student center was named after him.

The Quad also counts as the heart of the arboretum that spans the campus — the Fell Arboretum, to cite its formal name, honoring one Jesse Fell.

Fell (1808-87) was the sort of businessman that America spawned in the 19th-century — lawyer, real estate speculator, newspaper publisher and sawmill owner. Specific to Illinois, he was a friend of Lincoln’s. He founded towns in central Illinois and helped organize counties there as well, and is considered a founder of ISU.

As for the arboretum, apparently Fell not only profited from cutting down trees, but was a fanatic when it come to planting them, so ISU named it in his honor.

Elsewhere, we saw a plaque on a rock honoring the horticulturist who designed the original landscape for the campus, William Saunders (1822-1900), who also happened to be a founder of the National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, an organization I had only scant knowledge of before. That is to say, little that I remember, though I’m sure heard about the Granger movement in a U.S. history class. Always good to learn or re-learn something.

In the middle of the Quad is a lush garden.

The centerpiece is the Old Main Bell, dating from 1880.

Old Main was the campus’ first building, which stood from 1857 to 1958. A memorial honors the building not far from its bell. Unusually, it depicts all four elevations of the building.

We wandered on. This is Cook Hall.

“One of Illinois State’s most interesting buildings and the oldest one still standing on the Quad, Cook Hall was originally built to be a gymnasium,” ISU tells me. “It was completed in 1897 and was named after John Williston Cook, the University’s 4th President (1890-1899). He earned his diploma in 1865 from Illinois State Normal University and in 1876 he became a Professor of Mathematics.

“The building has also been known as the ‘Old Castle’ or ‘The Gymnasium.’ The governor at the time, John Altgeld, had a great liking for medieval castles and insisted all new state construction during his term in office resemble castles. You’ll find a Cook Hall look-alike at many other state schools; they are called ‘Altgeld’s Folly.’ ”

Really? I had to look into that more, and found this Wiki item about Altgeld Castles. It does indeed seem that a raft of crenellated, or quasi-crenellated buildings at Illinois state schools dates from the 1890s. I remember seeing Altgeld Hall at UIUC, but didn’t know it was part of a pattern. An eccentric pattern. That’s two things I learned (or relearned) today; makes for a good Monday.

Ann Goes to College

Posted on August 18, 2021 by admin

Ann is now a student at the Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois. From now on, August 14, 2021 will be the day she went to college. Such dates seem to be creeping further into August, but I only have a small sample. My own such day was August 25 and Lilly’s August 18.

ISU is a little closer than UIUC, only about two hours on the road to Springfield and St. Louis. As completely normal for August in Normal, it was hot. That didn’t keep anyone from moving in.

The oddest thing I saw this time wasn’t a TV or bottled water, but a fellow with a turntable and a vinyl record collection. State-of-the-dorm gear in — 1979, as I recall (I didn’t have one).

Her building, Watterson Towers, is enormous, and looks old enough for me to have lived there as a student. Yep, it opened in 1968.

The tallest building in Bloomington-Normal and, according to some sources, the tallest between Chicago and St. Louis.

A nugget I found about the building reported by WGLT, the school’s NPR station, last summer: “Illinois State University said Thursday it will rename floors in the Watterson Towers residence hall in the wake of nationwide upheaval and a renewed dialogue on race and history.

“… every five floors in both towers are called a ‘house.’ The university named those houses for the nation’s first 10 secretaries of state: Van Buren, Clay, Marshall, Madison, Adams, Pickering, Monroe, Randolph, Smith, and Jefferson. Eight out of the 10 were involved in slavery. Several would be elected president after serving as secretary of state…”

Guess which two didn’t own slaves. That would be Adams, as in John Quincy, and Van Buren.

“The entire Watterson Towers complex was named for a beloved professor on campus and that name will not change,” WGLT concluded.

As far as I can tell, the “houses” are now North, A through E, and South, A through E.

Ann found her room and we moved all her stuff in.

It’s a tiny room that she shares with a roommate. Again, the way a dorm should be.

Further Considerations About Sock Monkeys (And Long Grove Community Church & Cemetery)

Posted on July 8, 2021 by admin

Rockford, Illinois, is generally credited with creating the modern sock monkey, and more recently fiberglass sock monkeys were put on display there. There are even sock monkeys at the Midway Village Museum in Rockford.

So how is it Long Grove is getting a sock monkey museum? I’ve only done cursory research, the kind the subject deserves, and I haven’t found a connection. I like to think the Long Grove museum will be run by a breakaway sock monkey faction, rivals of the sock monkey orthodoxy in Rockford, but that’s just me amusing myself.

A short distance from Long Grove’s historic downtown is Long Grove Community Church, which is historic in its own right, built by Evangelical German immigrants in the 1840s.

“With a new century, came many changes,” the church’s web site says, referring to the 20th century. “The church widened her circle of ministry to include local people who were not German-speaking. Two denominational mergers took the church away from her Evangelical roots.

“By 1950, the church had grown so small that the denomination recommended the doors be closed. But God gave the people a vision. Instead of closing their doors, they built Sunday School rooms for children. As people migrated from the city to the suburbs, the area grew and so did the church. By the late 1960s, we had transitioned from a small rural church into a suburban church.”

The Long Grove Cemetery is next to the church.

There isn’t much information on line about this cemetery, despite its clear historic aspects.

But I don’t need a web site to tell me it’s another of the many cemeteries in the Chicago area with immigrant German stones, many dating from the 19th century.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: US: Illinois