SIU and Buckminster Fuller Too

Posted on October 20, 2020 by admin

On October 10, Ann and I tooled around the Southern Illinois University campus a bit, agreeing that it isn’t the aesthetic experience that some college campuses are. Visitor parking proved hard to find, so we didn’t take a walk on campus.

We did spot the Wham Building on Wham Drive. Ann suggested that the donors were the British pop duo, now about 35 years passed their heyday. Though as a matter of style, it ought to be the Wham! Building. Their connection to SIU? None that we knew, but never mind. Maybe they decided they had enough money to fund a building on a college campus, and they threw a dart at a map to determine where it would be.

Not long after that conversation, we heard a local station playing “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go.” Coincidence or synchronicity? Coincidence, I’d say.

Not far from campus is a residential neighborhood with a fair amount of student housing, marked by some genteel seediness. Parking was easy around there, so we stopped for a short walk down a residential street.

Some of the residences stood out more than others. Some for their décor. It might be hard to see in the picture, but there’s a neon sign in the window of this Halloween-ready house: PALM READER.Other properties stand out for more fundamental reasons. The R. Buckminster Fuller and Anne Hewlett Dome Home is at the intersection of two small streets in an otherwise unremarkable location in the neighborhood.

The dome is fenced off and closed. But someone used to live there. Bucky himself, as it happens. A sign on the fence says: “Buckminster Fuller is considered one of the leading visionaries of the 20th century. He patented the geodesic dome in 1954 and it is his most enduring legacy. In April 1960 he assembled this dome home (The Fuller Dome) and lived in it with his wife Anne until 1971.”

How long had it been since I’d thought about Buckminster Fuller? Before finding out about the dome, that is, which was a few days before our visit to Carbondale. A long time, that’s how long. I suspect much of the world can say the same. Whatever Fuller’s contributions to civilization, and I’ll be the first to say geodesic domes are pretty cool, he’s headed for obscurity as surely as Ernie Pyle.

Reading about Fuller made me think of Lucy Kulik, a sixth-grade teacher of mine. She taught us math and I believe also led our participation in Man: A Course of Study almost 50 years ago. I hadn’t thought about her in a long time, either, and checked to see whether she was still among the living. Possible, but not likely, though it turned out she died only last year at 97, and now has a stone at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery next to her husband, an Air Force lieutenant colonel — something I didn’t know about her.

RIP, Mrs. Kulik. The details have faded after a half century, but I remember you were a good teacher.

In class one day Mrs. Kulik mentioned Buckminster Fuller as the fellow who invented a dome made of triangles and who wanted the world to give up the words “sunrise” and “sunset.” I’d never heard of him at the time, or if I had, I’d forgotten.

Fuller suggested the words sunsight and sunclipse to replace sunrise and sunset, arguing that the common words reflect an incorrect understanding of the way the Earth and the Sun move. You could argue that they do, of course, and the words he suggests are perfectly fine, but to object to sunrise and sunset on those grounds itself reflects an excess of literalism in understanding language. That might be a reason his suggestions didn’t catch on.

His domes might be cool — you can’t stand in front of the Expo ’76 Fuller dome in Montreal and not feel a little awe — but I also have to add that a few of them go a long way. In the case of Carbondale, one is probably enough.

Jeremy Rochman Memorial Park, Carbondale

Posted on October 19, 2020 by admin

During the early planning for our recent trip, I didn’t give Carbondale, Illinois, much thought as a possible destination, but then Ann mentioned a park there she’d heard about from a friend who used to live in the area. After a little further investigation, I worked Carbondale, especially the park, into our plans.

“A vocal fan of the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, Jeremy ‘Boo’ Rochman was tragically killed in a car accident at the young age of 19,” Atlas Obscura says. “To honor his memory, his father bought a parcel of land across the street from their home in order to build a memorial park. His late son’s passion was for the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, so his father decided to turn the park into a fantasy land that his son would have been proud of.”

Jeremy Rochman Memorial Park is on the outskirts of Carbondale. When you arrive, various painted concrete creatures greet you.

Including an enormous dragon, good for climbing, if you’re agile enough.
The “castle” — the whole place is sometimes called Castle Park or Boo Castle Park — is a wood and stone structure with an elaborate set of passageways and stairs for kids to climb around.

With plenty of figures of its own.

The park wasn’t overrun with people, but we did notice a birthday party off in one corner.If ever there were a good place for a children’s birthday, this is it.

Shawnee National Forest ’20

Posted on October 18, 2020 by admin

During my break from posting, Arlo Stribling was born to my nephew Dees and his wife Eden in Austin. Congratulations to the new parents, here’s hoping the boy is a joy. Best regards to little Arlo, an emissary to a future my generation will not see.

On the afternoon of Friday, October 9, Ann and I went southward for a visit in and around Shawnee National Forest, which stretches in large patches — in typical national forest style — from the Ohio River to the Mississippi, or vice versa, occupying a lot of extreme southern Illinois. We looked around the east part of the forest. The weather turned out to be flawless for such a little trip, warm and partly cloudy.

We spent the first night in Mattoon, Illinois, continuing southward the next morning. The first place we went on Saturday morning wasn’t in southeast Illinois, but further west: Carbondale, visiting Castle Park, or more formally Jeremy Rochman Memorial Park, on the outskirts of town. Afterwards, we looked around Southern Illinois State University, and saw the nearby Buckminster Fuller House. A domed house, of course.

Heading east on Illinois 13, we eventually made our way as far east as that road goes, Old Shawneetown, a husk of a formerly much more populous place on the banks of the Ohio, and home to the Shawneetown State Bank Historic Site. We spent the next two nights in Harrisburg, Illinois, which bills itself as the Gateway to the Shawnee National Forest.

On Sunday, we drove the roads of the southeast part of the forest, climbed a modest flagstone path to a grand vista — the Garden of the Gods — hiked along a small lake surrounded by trees approaching their peak coloration, climbed a bluff via a CCC staircase, and visited a large cave entrance facing the Ohio River at Cave-in-Rock State Park.

Small, winding roads pass through the national forest, rising and falling, flanked alternately by walls of trees and expanses of flat farmland, post-harvest but before a winter freeze. Towns come in the sizes small, smaller and hamlet. In that part of Illinois, sometimes known as Little Egypt, small white churches are a common sight, more Baptist than any other denomination. Not quite as common, but enough in evidence were abandoned structures: farmhouses, gas stations, motels, restaurants and shops. If it were up to the people who put up political signs in that part of the country, the president would be re-elected by a wide margin. A smattering of Confederate battle flags were flying here and there.

Traffic is at a trickle on those roads most of the time. That made for easy, and sometimes picturesque, driving. Car commercial driving, I told Ann.

On Monday, Columbus Day Observed, that lightest, most gossamer of all national holidays, we headed home, with one major short detour into Indiana, to visit the town of New Harmony. The 19th-century utopian colonies there might have failed (two! count ’em, two utopian experiments), but the town has succeeded in being highly pleasant and intriguing everywhere you look in our time. Also, a famed theologian is buried there, in as much as theologians get fame.

As mentioned above, we didn’t spend much time in Mattoon. But early on Saturday I got up and looked around for a few minutes. The town looks frayed, buffeted by the contraction of U.S. manufacturing and the vagaries of the farming industry and the rural economy as a whole.

The town’s relatively greater prosperity in the early 20th century is reflected in its cemetery. A sizable place, the Dodge Grove Cemetery measures about 60 acres and has 20,000 permanent residents, including three Civil War generals and 260 soldiers from that war, one of whom is an unknown Confederate. There’s a story in that last detail, probably lost to time.

Blazes of fall color rise in places.

According to Find a Grave, only one of those Civil War generals counts as a notable burial in Dodge Grove, James Milton True, commander of the 62nd Illinois Volunteer Infantry. I like the other major item on his CV: U.S. consul in Kingston, Ontario in the 1870s.

That hints at some pull with the postwar federal government, probably based on connections he made during the war, or because he became a local politico who could deliver votes. Or both. Seems like a plumb diplomatic assignment in the 19th century: no language skills necessary, close enough to home that you can visit periodically, and no danger of catching malaria or some other dreaded tropical disease.

I didn’t see his grave. I didn’t know he was there till later. I did see the Pythias obelisk.

Erected by
Palestine Lodge No. 46
Knights of Pythias
In Memory of
Deceased Members
1929

I’ve encountered vestiges of the Knights before, such as in Atlanta, Illinois. I associated them with an earlier time, the sort of organization that George Babbitt might have mentioned in passing as having a chapter in Zenith. But no: the Knights of Pythias are still around, though at much diminished numbers.

Still around, and up with the times. “The Summer 2020 Edition of the Pythian International is now online,” the fraternal org’s web site says. “It includes information on the rescheduled Supreme Convention, Oct. 1-6.”

As I was about to leave, I spotted this stone.
A heartbreaker of a stone. Though I’m sure combat deaths didn’t quite stop exactly at 11 am on the 11th, since even modern armies with good internal communications can’t stop on a dime. Still, the day before the Armistice. Damn.

I don’t know why I’m surprised any more at anything online, but I was surprised to find a local newspaper account of Lawrence Riddle’s last days, though it doesn’t specify how he died (and this too: a niece that he never knew). In the article, the most attention is paid to Riddle’s participation in combat during the days before his death, charging a German machine gun position with four other men. They seized the position and brought back prisoners.

I wonder whether the Germans, eager to surrender at this point in the war, were making it easy for the raiders, or whether the Americans faced bitter-enders who were still playing for keeps. Either way, a clear act of bravery on the part of Riddle and the others.

Hickory Street Parade, Denton, Texas, 1967 (Probably)

Posted on September 20, 2020 by admin

I have a photo book holding a scattering of images made when my family lived in Denton, Texas, which was from 1965 to ’68. There are perhaps two dozen pictures. Photos were only made on special occasions, such as my birthday or when family visited from out of town.

Three of the pictures are of the Denton High School band, of which my brother Jay was a member, marching down Hickory St., which is the street our house was on, in 1967. The edge of the photos says Aug 69, but that only means we didn’t get around to developing the film for almost two years.
That is not me sitting on a car in the first image. My mother must have taken the shots with our Instamatic 104, since I don’t think she would have been interested in fiddling with the more complicated cameras that my father left behind. Provided we had our Instamatic by then, which seems likely.

She stood on the sidewalk on Hickory St., probably near its intersection with Denton St.
At least, the angle of the third picture makes me think that’s where she stood. One the houses not far west of that point is still there, though deeper blue.

I must have watched the parade, but I have no memory of it. At the time I was six, and had just started first grade at Sam Houston Elementary School in Denton. I walked to school, so it wasn’t far away. There’s a school of that name still in the Denton ISD, but it’s far from where we lived and has a late 20th century look to it.

Thinking about it now, I suspect the school I went to was already old when I went there — maybe built in the ’20s to update whatever rudimentary facilities the town had before that. I expect the building I knew is long gone.

Also: here’s the house where we lived. The house is a different color now, but the enormous tree is still in the front yard! It seemed so vast to my boyhood self. Then again, it is pretty big. An old maple that produced huge leaves. Or was it an oak that produced huge acorns? Both kinds of trees were in the neighborhood and I would collect their scatterings.

I digress. Why was there a parade on that day in Denton, Texas? One possibility is that it was part of the September 13 publicity celebration for the regional premiere of Bonnie and Clyde, which was at a movie theater near the courthouse, only a few blocks to the east of where we lived. Parts of the movie were filmed in North Texas, near Denton, in places that could easily pass for 30 years earlier. The University of North Texas published an article a few years ago about the filming and the regional premiere.

Some of the stars of the movie rode in a small motorcade down Hickory to the courthouse square, and naturally the high school band had to be part of it. If my mother took any pictures of the movie stars, they’ve been lost. But I seriously doubt she did. Taking pictures of her son’s band is one thing, but actors in a movie (I suspect) she had no interest in seeing? Naah.

Oglesby Sights

Posted on July 29, 2020 by admin

Sizable towns cluster around the Illinois River in north-central Illinois like so many stones on a necklace: Morris, Ottawa, LaSalle, Peru, Spring Valley, Princeton. Then there’s Oglesby, which isn’t so sizable, at about 3,500 people. The place is named after the long-ago Illinois governor, whom I’ve encountered before in Decatur and Chicago.

We became acquainted with Oglesby last weekend because we stayed overnight in a motel in the town, to take advantage of its proximity to Starved Rock SP and Matthiessen SP, though we decided not to visit the latter.

To become acquainted with the town, you can drive down the east-west Walnut St. for about two miles. On Sunday morning, I went out for gas early, which also meant looking around. Lilly joined me.

The town post office on Walnut looked about as WPA as can be. Being Sunday, we couldn’t go in and look at the 1942 mural, “The Illini and Pottawatomies Struggle at Starved Rock” by Fay E. Davis, which is said to be quite something.

Soon we arrived at this structure, which would loom over Walnut St., except that it’s set back a few hundred feet and behind a fence. The fence is pretty new.
An old enough ruin to sport fully grown trees in its midst. An interesting enough ruin to be fenced, though I figure local teens have no problem getting in when the mood strikes.

The blackened sign is just barely legible.

LEHIGH PORTLAND CEMENT COMPANY OGLESBY

That’s all I needed to find out more about this industrial ruin. For decades, Oglesby lived by the extraction and processing of minerals, especially the manufacture of cement and concrete.

The Chicago Cement Co. started operations on the site in 1898. Lehigh, a Pennsylvania company, acquired Chicago in 1916 and ran the plant until 1963. Apparently Lehigh decided at that time that modernization of the plant wouldn’t be worth the expense, and so closed it.

I have to report that cement and concrete production in the area isn’t dead yet. Illinois Cement Co., which is across the river in LaSalle, still seems to be in that business, and related hard-stone entities dot the map: the Mertel Gravel Co., Ladzinski Concrete Finishing Co., Lafarge Aggregates, Wenzel Concrete Works and Ruppert Concrete, to name a few (and those last two are in Oglesby).

The above image is only a part of the ruin.
Even that doesn’t depict the whole of it. Note how far it goes back when you look on Google Maps. We were looking at the property from about where I’ve put a blue dot.
“This looks like the most interesting thing in Oglesby,” I told Lilly. Too expensive to tear down, I figure, so there it stands, letting the decades take their toll.

Down Walnut to the east was something almost as interesting, and cement related, too.An intriguing bit of work in a small public park — Lehigh Park — donated by the company to the town in 1945 (the side plaque says that). Turns out the work is one of a genre of memorials, awarded by the Portland Cement Association, with examples wherever cement is or was made. They’re made of cement, of course.

“Cement ‘Safety Follows Wisdom’ monuments, first presented in 1924, for perfect safety records at cement plants,” says the Historical Marker Database. “The winning design came from an Art Institute of Chicago team directed by sculptor Albin Polasek.” (I’ve happened across his work before.)

Do a casual search and you’ll find Safety Follows Wisdom stones all over the country. It’s something I had no inkling of until I drove down a main street in a small town and — more importantly — got out of the car and looked around. The devil might be in the details, but I find that the joy of traveling is in the details.

Ottawa Sights (Not the One in Canada)

Posted on July 28, 2020 by admin

We arrived in Ottawa, Illinois, on Saturday in time for lunch. We decided on carry-out from Thai Cafe on Columbus St., which seems to be the only Thai joint in town. At a population of 18,000 or so, maybe that’s all Ottawa can support.

We took our food to Allen Park, a municipal park on the south bank of the Illinois, and found a picnic shelter. The river’s large and on a weekend in July, home to a lot of pleasure craft.
Sometimes, the river must be angry, such as on April 19, 2013. Got a lot of rain in northern Illinois about then, so I believe it.

Downstream a bit is the Ottawa Rail Bridge, which rates a page in Wikipedia. The current bridge dates from 1898, though it was modified in 1932.

Two large metal sculptures rise in the park, both by Mary Meinz Fanning. The red one is “Bending.”
The yellow one is “Reclining.”
“Fanning was the driving force behind the creation of the red and yellow steel sculptures at Allen Park by the Illinois River in Ottawa,” says a 2010 article in The Times, which seems to be a local paper.

“The 40-foot-tall sculptures, which weigh 17 tons each, were erected in 1982 and 1983 from parts of the 1933-built steel girder Hilliard Bridge that was demolished in 1982 to make way for the present-day Veterans Memorial Bridge. Fanning died of illness Nov. 4, 1995, in Ottawa at age 48.”

Just as you enter the park, you also see a wooden sculpture: one of artist Peter Toth’s “Whispering Giants,” which I’d forgotten I’d heard of till I looked him up again. The one in Allen Park is Ho-Ma-Sjah-Nah-Zhee-Ga or, more ordinarily, No. 61.

Looked familiar. I realized I’ve seen one before —
That one is Nee-Gaw-Nee-Gaw-Bow or No. 59, and we saw it by chance in Wakefield, Mich. about three years ago. Apparently the artist has put up at least one in each state.

Ottawa has a place in U.S. history mainly for two things. One that the town is happy to celebrate: the first Lincoln-Douglas debate in 1858. The other is the awful story of the Radium Girls, poisoned by luminous paint at a clock factory in Ottawa in the early 20th century. For a long time, there was no public acknowledgment of that incident. Now there is. But I didn’t know the Radium Girls have a statue in town (since 2011), so we missed that.

We didn’t miss the site of the Lincoln-Douglas debate, which is in the shady, square-block Washington Park.
Lincoln and Douglas are there as part of a fountain to memorialize the event. They were cast in bronze in 2002 by Rebecca Childers Caleel.
It would have been more pleasant if the fountain were on, but maybe it was dry for public health reasons in our time. The noontime heat was oppressive, so we didn’t have a leisurely look-around the area as much as we might have otherwise. There are other memorials in the park, and plenty of historic structures nearby, forming the Washington Park Historic District.

Those buildings include the Third District Appellate Court Building (1850s), the Reddick Mansion (1850s), the Ottawa First Congregational Church (1870), Christ Episcopal Church (1871), and a Masonic Temple (1910). A few blocks away, the LaSalle County Courthouse looked interesting, too, but we only drove by.

I managed to take a close look only at the former Congregational Church building.

Gothic Revival in brick. These days, the church is part of the Open Table United Church of Christ.

Wednesday Water & Fire

Posted on May 20, 2020 by admin

Back to posting again on Tuesday. It’s an early Memorial Day this year, five days removed from Decoration Day, and in fact May 25 is as early as it can be under the Uniform Monday Holiday Act. Next year the holiday swings to the latest possible position, May 31, and then in 2022, it’s square on Decoration Day.

Warmish day today, this Wednesday, a relief from a too cool Tuesday. Pleasant enough to have lunch on the deck. The grass is still squishy underfoot.

Many places in this part of the country have had a lot of rain. Too much in some places. I read today that downtown Midland, Mich., flooded because the rain-swollen Tittabawassee breached a dam not far away. Of course, rain was only the immediate cause. Looks like a whole lot of negligence on someone’s part. Boatloads of litigation, dead ahead.

The story caught my attention mainly because we visited Midland only last year, on September 1, taking a stroll in places that are now underwater.

This evening I went outside to take a few things to the garage. Returning, I noticed a bright object in the sky off to the northwest. It looked like a fire balloon. A single one, drifting along. I was astonished. I’m pretty sure I’ve only ever seen pictures of them before, not the thing itself.

Who launched it? Why? Who thought that was a good idea in a suburban area, with rooftops to catch fire? The risk is probably fairly small, but still — that’s not something I want landing near me. On the other hand, the balloon made a pretty sight as it wandered along. I watched it as it went from being a small flickering light to a very small flickering light in the sky, finally disappearing in the distance.

Springtown Cemetery

Posted on January 14, 2020 by admin

Near the entrance to Marengo Cave in Marengo, Indiana, is a patch of land called Springtown Cemetery. Some of the cave runs further underneath, I think.

A sign outside the cemetery fence says: This cemetery, one of the first in this area, dates back to the early 1800s, when Marengo was known as Springtown. Oris Hiestand, one of the discoverers of Marengo Cave, is buried here. The land for the cemetery was given to the town by Mr. Samuel M. Stewart, the first owner of Marengo Cave.

The rain had just slacked off when I took a look around. It isn’t overcrowded with stones.
The stones might or might not represent everyone who’s buried there. Someone may know for sure. Or not.

A few unexpected touches of green in late December.
Mossy, wet stones honoring obscure people in an obscure corner of the world.If that’s not a momento mori, I don’t know what is.

Marengo Cave

Posted on January 13, 2020 by admin

Here’s something in the category of Things You Find Out Later: the Marengo Warehouse Distribution Center. It’s in Marengo, Indiana, and according to its web site, it’s “one of the largest underground storage facilities in the United States… The complex is located 160 feet (49 m) underground in a former limestone quarry and comprises nearly 4 million square feet of space.”

Elsewhere on the same page, its total storage capacity is said to be “more than 3 million square feet,” but never mind. Sounds like an impressive underground storage facility. About 20 years ago, I visited another such place, SubTropolis in Kansas City, Mo., which at 6.5 million square feet is king of the underground storage facilities, at least the ones we know about.

When we visited Marengo Cave on the afternoon of December 29, I had no idea about the nearby Marengo Warehouse Distribution Center, a complex of storage chambers and roadways carved out of the same Indiana limestone as the naturally forming cave. I found out about the warehouse later, when looking for further information about the cave. Reportedly the U.S. Defense Logistics Agency stores vast numbers of MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) there.

Marengo’s a small town in Crawford County, population somewhat over 800, and about 40 miles from Louisville. If that city someday becomes more robust in its growth, Marengo might be exurban or even an outer suburb, but for now it’s a small Indiana town with one main attraction: a show cave discovered in the late 19th century and measuring about five miles of known passages.

We took the mile-long Dripstone Trail walking tour, by spots with fanciful names, such as Sherwood Forest, Looking Glass Lake, Washington Avenue, The Masher, Music Hall and Penny Ceiling. That last one features a muddy roof to which pennies, or other objects, will stick if you throw them hard enough. The guide invited us to throw pennies up to the ceiling, noting that cave management would eventually remove them to donate to charity, something like pennies in a fountain, so many of us heaved our coins ceiling-ward. Me too. Mine stuck.

The place has some nice features.

Including historic graffiti. Unlawful to do now, but not for much of the cave’s history after its discovery.

According to our guide, the deepest point of the tour was 200-plus feet below the surface. But, she said, we might have noticed that we hadn’t descended very far on our walk. Indeed we hadn’t — after the initial climb down some stairs, and a few other drops, most of the trail was level. At the same time, she said, the ground above was rising. It’s hilly terrain, after all.

Divers Southern Indiana Courthouses &c

Posted on January 12, 2020 by admin

Bloomington is the county seat of Monroe County, Indiana, and sports an impressive downtown courthouse, a 1908 Beaux Arts design by Hoosier architects Wing & Mahurin.

The building was closed for the weekend, but I took a look at the exterior just before dusk. While I stood there, strings of lights lit up.
What’s a county courthouse without some allegories?
Or a war memorial? At first glance, it looks like a Civil War memorial only, but it specifically honors veterans of the war with Mexico, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War and World War I.
While in Nashville, Indiana, I took a quick look at the more modest, but also handsome Brown County Courthouse, a structure from the 1870s.
Nashville has some other interesting buildings as well, such as the Nashville United Methodist Church.

This looks to be a former Masonic building, though I’ve only looked into the matter enough to know that the Nashville, Indiana, Masonic Lodge #135 isn’t in that building, but a newer-looking one. But the older building does say LODGE on the front facade in large letters, along with Masonic symbols on either side.

Nashville isn’t a very large town, but there are streets away from the main tourist drag, Van Buren St. On just such a street we happened across a tree-carving studio.
Besides Elvis and a bear, you can also find Willie Nelson in wood there.
And one of the popular ideas of a space alien.
One more courthouse: a good-looking structure in Paoli, Indiana, county seat of Orange County. We passed through town on the way to West Baden Springs, but didn’t stop in the intense rain. Even so, the courthouse caught our attention.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Small Town USA