Texas ’25

Posted on January 21, 2025 by admin

One way to deal with January, the grimmest month here in the frozen North (today’s high, 2° F.): adjust your latitude southward. Not everyone has that option, or really even that many people do. Humans get around, but we aren’t a migratory species. Anyway, I managed to travel recently from around 40° North to around 30° North and stay there for 10 days.

I flew from Chicago to Austin on January 9: from clear and chilly to overcast and not quite chilly enough for any precipitation to freeze. The flight path took us up and over an enormous winter storm passing south of Chicago at that time, whose southern edge expressed itself as cold rain in Austin. The storm made for spots of unnerving turbulence and some flight cancellations that day at places in between, such as Dallas, and a long descent into Austin Bergstrom through a gray soup. Hurray for radar.

On my return flight on January 19 out of Dallas — where I’d driven by then — I saw remnants of the earlier storm on the ground below. Somewhere over Missouri or southern Illinois that day, the ground still appeared white miles below, as far as I could see from my 737-800 perch.

Back in Chicago, there is very little snow on the ground. Dry January, indeed.

This was a family and friends trip, visiting more old friends than expected in Austin and San Antonio, including some I knew well in elementary school, meeting them in person for the first time in 40+ years, though I was on a zoom with one of them a few years ago. I’ve been making an effort to visit old friends for a few years now, because of mortality. Mine and theirs. People get a little weird if you say that part out loud, but I believe everyone feels the quiet ticking of the clock.

Also an Austin-San Antonio-Dallas trip, with a day in Corpus Christi thrown in for fun. Some places are like old friends you haven’t seen in decades, and so it was with Corpus, as Texans often call it. Not exactly a favorite destination from the old days, but I do have memories of high school speech tournaments at CC Ray and CC King (two Corpus high schools) maybe as recently as early 1979. I’m fairly sure Corpus was the first city except for San Antonio that I drove a car in, though that might have been Austin.

My brothers and I had lunch in the North Beach neighborhood of Corpus.

Seafood. The thing to eat on the Coast.

It was mostly an urban trip, but one fine day (nearly 60° F), old friends Tom and Nancy and I went to the suburban outskirts of Austin for lunch at the Round Rock location of the Salt Lick.

That too was visiting an old friend, in a way, though my fond memories are of the original Salt Lick in 1993, further out from metro Austin, in Driftwood, Texas, which is about as Hill Country as you can get. Still, the branch in Round Rock, with its long dining room and long tables and stone construction, seemed true to my memories of the original location. More importantly, the barbecue was just as good.

Afterward, we took a walk in the historic district of Round Rock – our Round Rock Ramble – near the intersection of Main and Mays, among the finely restored late 19th- and early 20th-century stone edifices with names like the Old Broom Factory, the Otto Reinke Building and the J.A. Nelson Co. Building. Businesses of the 21st century seem to be doing well in these old two- and three-story stone commercial buildings, including the likes of Fahrenheit Design, Organica Aesthetics (a plastic surgery spa), Gharma Zone Korean Food and the Brass Tap.

Nearby stands an impressive old water tower in a small park (Koughan Memorial Water Tower Park, according to Google Maps and Wiki).

The tower is yet another legacy of the WPA. Even better –

– you can stand right under it, something that isn’t always possible when it comes to public water infrastructure.

Winter Break #2

Posted on January 9, 2025 by admin

Time for another winter break. Back to posting around January 21, including time off for MLK Day.

Till then, the Eggman.

Its actual title is “Egghead,” a work by Kimber Fiebiger, an artist from Minneapolis. The sculpture, at least as of September, is in Sheridan, Wyoming.

Kokomo Opalescent Glass Co.

Posted on January 2, 2025 by admin

Sounds of the northwest suburbs in the seconds after midnight, New Year’s Day 2025.

A little way down our block, a knot of school-aged kids were in a front yard just after midnight, yelping and whooping and tooting horns as the fireworks popped all around the neighborhood; you can hear them on the third recording. The father of the house stood in the front door, up a few steps. Soon the kids headed up the steps to go inside, and I noticed gold-colored crowns on all of their heads, including the dad.

On the Monday before Christmas, we found our way to Kokomo Opalescent Glass Co., which is housed in an unpretentious complex in an unpretentious neighborhood in that town.

It’s another legacy of the Kokomo Gas Boom. A French glass chemist named Charles Henry found his way to Kokomo in the late 1880s, taking advantage of free natural gas to set up a glassmaking factory. That arrangement didn’t last, since Henry was more a technical man than a manager, and a heavy drinker besides, so he lost the factory and thus didn’t become the glass baron of Kokomo. But under other management the company has endured. KOG abides, you could say.

Three of the maw-of-hell furnaces for melting glass. There were others.

“Founded in 1888, KOG is the oldest producer of hand cast, cathedral and opalescent glass in the United States… known worldwide for our high-quality, hand-mixed sheet glass. KOG… has hundreds of color recipes, documented color combinations and numerous textures and densities,” the company web site says, with an illustration of handling molten glass better than I could photograph.

Not that I didn’t try.

Out it comes.

After the molten load has been dropped off at a suitable table-like surface to cool and be shaped, other glass experts do what they do.

Such as this fellow.

Our knowledgeable guide told us about the chemistry and the process and the history of the place.

I didn’t understand a lot of it, especially the finer points of the process, but remained fascinated. As a glass artist herself, she also conveyed a sense of artistic wonder at the multitudes of glass, the colors and textures, which are both hard and fragile. All that came through a device to boost her voice, since a glass factory can be a noisy place.

Note the glass at her feet. Among other stipulations that we agreed to before taking the tour was no open-toed shoes. In fact, that was stressed the most. When moving globs of molten glass around, a little is naturally going to drop and harden on the floor. Then break. In the fullness of time, the factory workers remove the glass, perhaps to be remelted, or sold as random pieces by weight to artists who use it. But there’s always going to be some glass underfoot. Fortunately this wasn’t a problem with standard footwear.

Another thing the company tells you is that the factory has no climate control. So while it was just above freezing outside, the factory was warmed by the furnaces. In summer, of course, the effect would be additive, and so devilish hot on the factory floor. Away from the furnaces, in the spaces used for processing and storing and packing all that glass, temps were low in December.

Such as in the cullet barrel room.

Cullet. How did I get this far and not know there is a word for shards of glass, thought of collectively and probably destined to be remelted?

Most of the company’s product isn’t broken, and so is stored in an impressive array of racks and shelving.

Hues galore.

Toward the end of the tour, we passed through a studio where artists employed by KOG work on custom projects. It being just before Christmas, only one was around, though I’m sure it’s a livelier place most of the time. And it is climate controlled.

Most of the complex is newer than 1888, but even so glass has been made on this site for nearly 140 years, using fuel unknown to the ancients. By ancient I mean really ancient: man-made glass from about 3500 BC has turned up in Egypt and eastern Mesopotamia, and it has been made ever since. So we visited a modern gas-power glass factory last month, but also experienced a vivid link to the heat and work of millennia.

The Seiberling Mansion

Posted on December 31, 2024 by admin

In my 7th grade Texas history class back 50+ years ago, I’m pretty sure the prickly Mrs. Carico taught us about the 1901 Spindletop oil gusher in what’s now Beaumont. Could be that not even Texas students learn about that any more, though I couldn’t say for sure. We did not learn about the Indiana natural gas boom of the late 19th century. Maybe Hoosier kids of my age did. I hope so. Anyway, I had to go to Kokomo to learn about it.

Or rather, go to Kokomo to hear about it. I read more about the gas boom after I got home. I might as well stay home if I’m not going to occasionally follow up on the intriguing things I’ve seen and heard elsewhere.

“[Eastern central Indiana’s] industrial characteristics were brought about by one of the great booms of the late 19th century in the Midwest: the discovery of natural gas,” writes James A. Glass, an architecture prof at Ball State Muncie, in “The Gas Boom in East Central Indiana” in the Indiana Magazine of History (2000).

“The eruption of real estate speculation, industrial development and commercial expansion and population growth transformed a… portion of the state from a landscape of farmers, forest and agricultural villages into a territory in which cities and boom towns dominated, each teeming with factories, neighborhoods and commercial districts….”

There was so much natural gas under Indiana that for a while new towns burned it simply to show off. Gas flambeaux heated the day and lit up the night.

Image from Leslie’s Illustrated Magazine, January 18, 1889.

Hindsight has only one ending to this story: the region had run out of gas by the turn of the 20th century. We tell ourselves that a “this resource will never run out mentality” is particular to the industrial revolution, as if we didn’t really believe it ourselves.

Not far from central Kokomo, you can stand right next to a physical legacy of the Indiana gas boom – the gas boom-era Seiberling Mansion.

The porch. The dome. The gables and arches. The brick and stone. Probably not to everyone’s taste, but it looks like a handsome assemblage to me. We arrived only about 20 minutes before the house museum closed – off-Interstate travel, while rewarding, can be a time suck, and besides, Eastern Standard Time had snatched an hour away from us. The desk volunteers were good enough to say we could look around without paying admission, though I did make a modest donation.

No surprise to find Christmas at Seiberling in full flower.

We would call Monroe Seiberling a serial entrepreneur, though I expect in his time he was simply a business man. He was a shooting star in the history of Kokomo. From Akron, Ohio – where his nephew Frank Seiberling stayed and cofounded Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. – the elder Seiberling turned up in Kokomo during the gas boom to take advantage of the lovely free gas to set up a few businesses, including a glass factory. He also stayed long enough to commission a mansion, designed by short-lived Hoosier architect Arthur LaBelle and completed in 1891.

After gas ceased to be so available or cheap in Kokomo, Seiberling moved on to Peoria, Illinois, according to one of the mansion docents, who provided us a quick informal tour of the first floor, probably because we showed some interest in the place. Also, she said, Seiberling’s wife didn’t much like Kokomo. As an incentive for him to leave above and beyond mere economics, that has a ring of plausibility to it.

Kokomo Dash

Posted on December 30, 2024 by admin

Besides having a fun name, Kokomo, Indiana, is off that beaten path officially known as the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. The closest highway to Kokomo in that system is I-65, which I have driven so many times I’ve lost count, except I never kept count. I also had never diverted to Kokomo.

One way to get from metro Chicago to Kokomo is to take I-65 to near Remington, Indiana, and then head east on US 24 to the burg of Dunkirk near the somewhat bigger burg of Logansport. From there, heading south on US 35 takes you to Kokomo. This is what we did on December 22, spending the night in that town (pop. nearly 60,000) and then returning home late the next day.

I’ve wanted to visit the Kokomo Opalescent Glass Co. for years. How did I hear about it? I don’t remember, but the sticking point has long been that the company, a major maker of art glass, only gives tours on weekdays. I checked and it turned out that the company was indeed open for a tour on December 23, so that clinched it.

We arrived before sunset on the 22nd, in time for a walk-around the Howard County Court House.

That instantly says 1930s. As it happens, the building was dedicated in 1937, built as a replacement for an 1860s Second Empire courthouse that burned down. Postcards, such as the one below, depict that long-lost structure (source).

The buildings surrounding the courthouse are mostly older, some dating from the late 19th-century natural gas boom that put Kokomo on the map.

Details.

Union halls: Operating Engineers and Carpenters.

Some buildings retain their names, which doubtless reflect local real estate entrepreneurs as long gone as the old courthouse. Such as the Riley Vale Building. Nice brickwork.

If it hadn’t been about freezing and a little windy that day, I might have done some closer images of its elaborate front.

The Wilson Block.

The tallest of these buildings says Garritson, with a date of 1911.

Though it’s hard to see in this image, there’s a barber pole in front of the building to the left of Garritson. It so happened that my old barber has retired, or died, and I’ve been looking for a new one. Till then, I’ve had my hair cut in various places. I peeked inside and saw the sole barber idling in his chair. I asked if he could cut my hair sometime that afternoon and he said that his most recent appointment hadn’t shown up, so he could right then.

So I got a haircut from the barber right then. One of the younger barbers I’ve been to recently (in his 30s, probably), we chatted some, and I learned that he was the last barber standing at that shop – which had three other chairs. Not because of a population exodus from Kokomo or anything so abstract, but because two other barbers had been caught with their hands in the till, he said. I’m not sure how that could have happened, considering the economics of a barber shop, but I guess if someone wants to steal, they’ll find a way.

The Port Huron Blog Post

Posted on October 24, 2024 by admin

Every time I visit Ontario, or at least a beach in that province, I scratch a message in the sand for Geof Huth, and promptly send it to him electronically. This time it was from the sandy beach at Bruce Peninsula NP. Why? Why not?

My knowledge of the New Left is fairly sketchy, I must admit. As long ago as my own student days, in the early 1980s, it didn’t seem new, but old hat. I’ve never even read more than a few paragraphs of the Port Huron Statement, though I could get around to it, since it’s easy enough to find. Such a tract doesn’t need to be mimeographed to reach an audience anymore.

At least I’d heard of it when the Dude mentioned his connection to it. As I understand it, there was no second draft, compromised or otherwise. But the Dude inhabits the Coen Brothers universe, where surely there was one.

As for my knowledge of the actual city of Port Huron, Michigan, that’s a little better than it used to be, informed by a short visit on the way home from Ontario earlier this month. It’s one of those places I stopped because I’d never been there, but had long seen it on maps. There’s an endless supply of places like that.

Downtown, especially Huron Ave., made for a pleasant walkabout.

Huron Ave. crosses the Black River – one of a number of rivers called that in Michigan alone – at a drawbridge, just before the river flows into the St. Clair. As we wandered along the riverfront, bells went off.

When you see a drawbridge in motion, watch it if you can. Again and again. Just another of the little maxims I live by.

There are hints that hipsters have discovered Port Huron. Maybe a scattering of them who have been priced out of Ann Arbor.

We spent some time in a sizable, multi-room antique shop on Huron Ave. Not quite as entropic as Reid’s Corner, but nevertheless stocked with all sorts of interesting stuff, including vinyl records (more evidence of hipsters about).

The First Family was first in a bin, offered for only $2. I didn’t buy it. I have a copy that my brother Jay gave me, and he said that he paid about 80 cents for it. I’m glad to have it around, though we have no record player any more. It functions as a reminder about eggs and baskets.

Two dollars might have been the nominal price in 1962, or a dollar or so more. As a collectible, First Family hasn’t even kept up with its original price in inflation-adjusted terms (nearly $21 now), though if you look at eBay or the like, people are trying to get ridiculous prices for the album. The supply of disks is vast, with 7.5 million units reportedly sold before the president’s death.

1962. The same year that the Port Huron Statement was published. Is it a mere coincidence that I saw this record in Port Huron, or is the universe trying to tell me something? I’ll go with mere coincidence.

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.

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.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Small Town USA