Eclipse Leftovers

Posted on May 9, 2024 by admin

Time for a second spring break. It isn’t really spring unless you can squeeze in two. Back to posting around May 19.

Today didn’t much feel like spring, anyway. Cold drizzle. Not that cold, really, but it felt that way after a run of warm days.

I’ve read about people who become eclipse followers. There’s a word for it, at least according to Time: umbraphile. (Time is still a thing?) It’s an impulse I appreciate, but I don’t know that I’ll join them.

On the other hand, Pamplona (say) on August 12, 2026 sounds good in all sorts of ways, so we shall see. I’m not counting on being unshuffled when it comes to this mortal coil on August 12, 2045, which is the timing of the next North American total solar eclipse.

Last month, we passed through Farmington, Missouri, which is the seat of St. Francois County.

The courthouse, fourth on the site, dates from the 1920s. “Innuendoes about fraud led to a grand jury investigation; the solution to the architect’s questionable procedure apparently was resolved by closer supervision,” says the University of Missouri about Norman Howard of St. Louis, the architect of the current courthouse.

There’s a story in that line, the details of which may be lost to time.

Who can you see outside an antique store on the main street of Potosi, Missouri? Betty!

Who can you see on the wall of the Laura Ingills Wilder Home in southern Missouri?

A young Rose Wilder Lane, Laura’s daughter and a writer herself, and apparently a foremother of modern libertarianism.

Spotted in downtown Nacogdoches.

That’s a nicely designed memorial plaque. Showing the nine flags over Nacogdoches; the usual six in Texas lore, plus three more localized ones raised during various rebellions.

Did I make note of the landmarked building? It was nice enough, but not memorable. Lone Star Feeds, on the other hand —

A pet food plant, about 50 years old now.

For sale in Logansport, Louisiana.

“Vintage oil tank,” yours for $200, as of April.

One of the murals I saw in Shreveport was prominently signed.

Your tax dollars at work: funding by the National Endowment for the Arts. Actually, that strikes me as a good way to spend a minuscule amount of federal dollars.

A redevelopment opportunity in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

That would take some serious coin, but maybe it could work. Step one, hire that structural engineer to do a report.

If you have the urge for barbecue in Hot Springs, this place will satisfy. Cookin Q since ’52.

The sort of place with license plates on the wall.

All that is window dressing. The ‘cue is the thing, and Stubby’s has lasted so long for a reason.

On the side of the road on highway Arkansas 7, part of a wayside park.

The plaque reads:

Dedicated to the workers of the Arkansas Farmers Union Green Thumb whose efforts made this park possible so that others might enjoy the beauty of the state of Arkansas. January 1966 to December 1969. Lewis Johnson, Jr. State Director.

Green Thumb?

“Green Thumb was the first nonprofit organization to run a jobs program for disadvantaged rural Americans in response to the War on Poverty,” the union says, beginning in 1966, employing low-income rural residents to build things, something like the WPA or the CCC did. By the ’80s, Green Thumb had vanished.

At Uranus, Missouri, off I-44, Yuriko was driving and I happened to have my phone handy. We were too tired to stop.

I’d driven by Uranus a few times, but not stopped. Something like the Snake Farm on I-35 between Austin and San Antonio. Clearly, I need to visit sometime. Uranus, that is. Maybe the Snake Farm, too.

“Beyond the appeal of what [Uranus owner Louie Keen] insisted was very good fudge, Uranus enticed travelers as a kind of dysfunctional, self-contained utopia, like South of the Border and Da Yoopers,” Roadside America says.

“Uranus, said Louie, was the kind of place tourists want to find on a road trip, with life-size dinosaurs, cheesy photo-ops, ridiculous souvenirs, two-headed freaks, the World’s Largest Belt Buckle, and various shops and attractions such as a hatchet-hurling venue named The Uranus Axehole.”

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.

Center, Texas & Logansport, Louisiana

Posted on April 28, 2024 by admin

The town of Center, Texas is in East Texas, while the town of West, Texas is in Central Texas. Just a mild example of Texas naming oddities. This is the state with Cut and Shoot, Dime Box and Jot-Em-Down, after all.

We spent the night in Center (pop. 5,200) and the next morning, April 14, took a look around the Shelby County Courthouse, which also happens to the focus of downtown Center.

It’s a less common style for courthouses, Romanesque Revival, at least in my experience. Impressive brickwork. The story of one John Joseph Emmett Gibson is given in a Texas Historical Commission sign on the site. Originally a brickmaker from Ireland, Gibson ultimately made his way to Texas, in time to design and oversee construction of the courthouse in the 1880s, showing off his skill with bricks.

Older than the courthouse is the nearby former jail. These days home to the local C-of-C.

An assortment of buildings line the square. Mostly occupied. That includes the art deco Rio, open since 1926 as a movie theater, without having been closed or put to any other use since then, which is remarkable in itself.

Not a retro theater, either, but one showing new movies. Such as Unsung Hero and The Fall Guy, coming soon.

“Unsung Hero is a 2024 American Christian drama film directed by Richard Ramsey and Joel Smallbone. The film follows Rebecca, Joel, and Luke Smallbone of For King & Country, and their life journey to become Christian recording artists.”

“The Fall Guy is a 2024 American action comedy film directed by David Leitch and written by Drew Pearce, loosely based on the 1980s TV series about stunt performers. The film follows a stuntman working on his ex-girlfriend’s directorial debut action film, only to find himself involved in a conspiracy surrounding the film’s lead actor.”

I’d never heard of either of them, but now I have. 1980s TV series about stunt performers? That didn’t ring a bell either. So that’s what Glen A. Larson did after the implosion of the original Battlestar Galactica, and Lee Majors did after the Six Million Dollar Man was retired for lack of replacement parts.

How did I miss that? Right, I didn’t have a television in the ’80s.

More buildings on the square.

One that’s small but stately. Farmers of Shelby County, it says, your money is safe here.

It was. Farmers is still an ongoing operation, nearly 120 years after its founding. The bank still occupies the building, and has other locations in East Texas.

Not every building on the square is occupied.

Not every building is even a building any more, but clues remain.

That didn’t take long to look up. Site of a dry goods store for much of the 20th century.

Shelby County partly borders De Soto Parish, Louisiana. That morning, we headed for the border, driving on Texas 7 and then U.S. 84 until we got to a town without any sign noting its name (or maybe we missed it), crossing a river without any identification either. I remembered I wanted to mail a few postcards when I saw a sign pointing the way to a post office. When we got to the p.o., I saw that we were in Logansport, Louisiana. We’d crossed the Sabine River, but as noted, there was nothing to tell us that.

Missed the former international boundary marker, too. I didn’t read about it until later. It’s a few miles out of Logansport (pop. 1,300), and once (and briefly) marked the border between the Republic of Texas and the United States.

No matter. Took a look around Logansport.

Here’s the name we missed. Not on the road we came in on.

Main Street.

Seen in a shop window in Main Street. Do they celebrate Mardi Gras in Logansport?

Yes they do, in the form of a parade put on my an outfit called the Krewe of Aquarius.

We spent some time in a resale store on the main street, Swamp Water Flea Market. I spotted something I don’t think I’ve ever seen at a resale shop.

Yours for $150, an antique leg iron. Not sure I’d want to have it around. Seems like a haunted artifact that might land you in an episode of The Twilight Zone.

Have You Ever Been to Nacogdoches?

Posted on April 25, 2024 by admin

When planning our most recent trip, devising its dumbbell structure of three days on the road, five in place, and four more on the road, it occurred to me that with a little southward jiggering from Dallas, we could visit Nacogdoches, Texas, one of the oldest towns in the state, rife with history: home to prehistoric Indian activity and the establishment of a Spanish mission in the 18th century, base of filibusters and other rebellions in the early 19th, mentioned famously in a late John Wayne movie, and much more.

All that would have been a reason to come, but mainly I wanted to visit my old friend Kirk, resident of the town for nearly 40 years. We hung out mostly in high school, but had known each other as far back as elementary school, ca. 1970.

In exchanging text messages ahead of the visit, we couldn’t remember the last time we’d seen each other, but finally decided, once Yuriko and I met Kirk and his wife Lisa at their home for lunch on April 13, that it was probably in April 1986 at the wedding of a mutual friend of ours in Austin.

That’s a long time. We had a good visit, a good reconnect – I find it good to reconnect – spending most of the afternoon with them, hearing about life in Nacogdoches, his medical practice there, their raising six children, all grown.

Later in the day, Yuriko and I spent a little time in downtown Nacogdoches, which offers a more sizable square than most towns, even in Texas, handsome on the whole, with a scattering of specialty retail in the area, but mostly still professional services, city government offices and other utilitarian activities.

Mural detail a block from the square, facing a parking lot.

We arrived during the 12th annual Nacogdoches Wine Swirl, just by raw chance. I’d never heard of a “wine swirl.” The brick streets around what I took to be the courthouse were closed to cars. People clustered here and there and lined up for wine.

The square doesn’t surround a courthouse, but rather a former federal building, now the Charles Bright Visitors Center. Nearby is “The Gateway,” depicting doughty American pioneers traveling the Old San Antonio Road into Texas, a fairly recent work (2013) of Michael Boyett.

“The ticketed wine event will showcase Texas wineries and local and regional food trucks and shopping vendors along the historic brick streets,” Visit Nacogdoches says regarding the event. More marketing at work, with the goal of furthering Nacogdoches as a day-trip town.

That Texas has wineries is not news. I went with Jay to visit one of the earlier ones in the Hill Country in the mid-70s. But did Central Texas wine makers come all the way to Nacogdoches to sell their wares? Further investigation tells me there’s an established wine-growing biz in East Texas.

“But, what if I were to tell you that East Texas has over 30 wineries and vineyards just waiting to be explored?!” Totally Texas Travel breathlessly says. Even if that isn’t the precise number, I’ll take even a paid travel site as a reasonable source the existence of wineries here.

Moreover, there’s a marketing invention called the Piney Woods Wine Trail.

The Piney Woods Wine Trail? In East Texas? That goes against stereotype, and I won’t have it. They make (and drink) either beer (domestic beer, closer to Texas-made the better) or hard liquor, the closer to homemade the better. That’s what I get for traveling into East Texas, a busted stereotype.

Tyler Rose Garden

Posted on April 24, 2024 by admin

The cliché is to stop and smell the roses, lest you pass your life in drab unappreciation of the delights easily available to you during your short lifespan. It expresses a worthwhile sentiment, almost always meant metaphorically.

At Tyler Rose Garden in Tyler, Texas, smelling the roses is literal. It’s the largest rose garden I’ve ever seen — and according to some sources, the largest such garden in the United States — with some 38,000 bushes representing 600 cultivars on 14 acres.

We arrived late in the warm morning of April 13, the day we left Dallas, on our way to visit an old friend of mine in Nacogdoches, Texas, as well as to (partly) rectify how little time I’ve spent in East Texas, a serious lacuna in my travels. Tyler is just south of I-20 east of Dallas, but not quite on that highway. We headed south on U.S. 69 from I-20 to get there.

Why a rose garden? Turns out Smith County, of which Tyler is the seat, was once the hub of U.S. rose production.

“Large-scale commercial production started in the early 1900s, and in 1917 the first train carload was shipped,” the always informative Texas State Historical Association says. “Droughts, freezes, and disease had destroyed the area’s peach orchards, so the nurserymen were forced to turn to something else. The climate and sandy loams of Smith, Van Zandt, Gregg, Cherokee, Harrison, and Upshur counties proved excellent for this type of horticulture, and large-scale commercial rose growing centered there.”

By the end of the 20th century, domestic and foreign competition had eaten into Texas’ market share for roses, but they are still grown in the area.

The day we came to Tyler was warm and clear, just right for a stroll among the roses of a free municipal garden.

And take time to look closely at – and of course – smell the roses. Watch out for bees, though.

It isn’t all roses.

“Let’s spell out Tyler in big metal letters, but leave out the Y.”

“Why?”

“Right, Y.”

But why?”

“Yes, Y.”

“Huh?”

And so on. A clever idea, whoever thought it.

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.

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.

Pontiac-Oakland Museum and Resource Center

Posted on November 30, 2023 by admin

Not something you see very often: a wall of motor oil.

I’d never seen such a thing until I came across it just a few doors down from the Museum of the Gilding Arts, in the Pontiac-Oakland Museum and Resource Center, which also faces the elegant Livingston County courthouse in Pontiac, Illinois. In the case of the museum, Pontiac refers to the car brand of that name, and Oakland does as well, as the predecessor of Pontiacs. Both brands are defunct now, but not in the hearts of enthusiasts.

The many cans of motor oil happen to be a backdrop for one of the cars on display: a 1960 Pontiac Venture.

Nearby are other cars of roughly the same era.

A 1964 LeMans Convertible and a 1970 Pontiac GTO Judge, respectively. Not sure if that counts as a Little GTO.

The collection on display isn’t that large – not compared to Fairbanks or Reno, say – but it was well worth a look. Before its absorption into GM, and in fact before horseless carriages, Pontiac got its start as a carriage maker.

An 1890s product of the Pontiac Buggy Co. “One of a handful known to exist,” its sign said.

Soon enough, Pontiac Buggy founder Edward Murphy began building 2-cylinder runabouts called Oaklands, and later built more successful 4-cylindar models, as products of the Oakland Motor Car Co. GM bought Murphy out in 1909, and focused on Oaklands for some decades. The GM Pontiac model didn’t exist until 1926, and then the Depression killed off the higher-priced Oaklands.

A 1929 Oakland.

A Pontiac sedan of the same model year.

Also on display: marketing odds and ends that emphasize the Native roots of the name.

Some might object these days, but I can’t help suspect that Pontiac – Obwandiyag – able 18th-century leader of the Odawa – might have liked being associated, however tenuously, with such a solid object of commerce.

Wiki, citing a 2002 academic work, notes: “Their neighbors applied the ‘Trader’ name to the Odawa because in early traditional times, and also during the early European contact period, they were noted as intertribal traders and barterers.”

Museum of the Gilding Arts

Posted on November 29, 2023 by admin

The docent at the Museum of the Gilding Arts, a neatly dressed woman about 10 years my senior, wasn’t sure why the museum is in Pontiac – Pontiac, Illinois, that is, where I stopped on Sunday specifically to visit the diminutive two-room museum.

“I’m going to ask about that, because I’ve wondered as well,” she said. “I’ve only been here three weeks.”

Before that, she said, she hadn’t known much about gilding, but had been reading about it and spending time with the exhibits. For a while, I had a personal tour of the place, as she suggested things to look at, such as the various items that had been gilded, including decorative pieces but also machines.

Visit Pontiac is succinct about the place: “The focus of the Museum of the Gilding Arts is the history, craft, and use of gold and silver leaf in architecture and in decoration throughout a history that dates back to the days of ancient Egypt.

“There are examples of gold and silver leaf, artifacts used in the application of the precious metal leaf, and displays showing how leaf was manufactured.

“The exhibit features items from the Society of Gilders’ Swift Collection. The M. Swift and Sons company manufactured gold leaf in Hartford, Connecticut, and began its operations in 1887.”

The docent seemed most impressed by the story of M. Allen Swift, the last owner of M. Swift & Sons, who died at a very advanced age in 2005. The business died with him, having been founded by his grandfather, Matthew Swift, who emigrated as a youth from the UK in 1864. Before he died, Allen Swift had the foresight to preserve old-time elements of his family’s gold leaf factory, including an array of wooden work benches – which are now on display in the back room of the two-room museum.

Each bench sports one of the heavy hammers that late 19th-century workmen used to beat gold.

The 19th century was full of jobs that required great upper-body strength, and gold beater was surely one of them.

“The process of making gold leaf began with quarter-inch-thick gold bars, 12 inches long by 1.5 inches wide,” notes an article in Connecticut Explored about the redevelopment of the Smith factory in our time. “The bars were rolled to a thickness of 1/1000 of an inch and cut into squares. The squares were then dusted with calcium carbonate applied with a brush — often a hare’s foot — and placed between a thin membrane made of the outer layer of an ox intestine.

“These were then stacked, in as many as 300 layers, and repeatedly struck with a 16-pound hammer. The squares were cut again into smaller squares and the process repeated with a 10-pound hammer; the squares were then placed in a mold and struck with a 6-pound hammer. When finished, a layer of 280,000 leaves stood just an inch high.”

What happened to the residue of the ox intestine? Maybe I don’t want to know. Not only a tough job, then, but probably a dirty one as well, and ill-paying unless you were a Swift. Machines took over most of the heavy beating in the 20th century, but I expect it still was a tedious job. More about the museum, which opened in 2015, is at the Society of Gilders web site.

Before I left, the docent told me that I had been the only visitor that day. I was glad to hear it. I hadn’t gone too far out of my way, stopping after I’d dropped Ann off in Normal, and it was worth the small effort to get a glimpse of an entire industry I knew nothing about.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Small Town USA