The Ulysses S. Grant Memorial Highway & Lundy Lundgren

Posted on April 20, 2016 by admin

If you have time, US 20 is the best way between metro Chicago and Rockford. I-90 is faster but not as interesting, and a toll road besides. We went to Rockford on the Interstate for speed, but returned at our leisure on the US highway, which is sometimes four lanes, sometimes two, along that stretch.

US 20 is also known as the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial Highway in Illinois, honoring Gen. Grant, who spent some time in western Illinois. In fact, the highway runs by his house in Galena. (US 20 itself runs cross-country, from Boston to Newport, Ore., or vice versa.)

The honorary designation has been in place since 1955, but most of the original signs were lost or fell apart. In 2007, the Illinois DOT started replacing them with brown-lettered signs that include a portrait of Grant. The route passes very close to where I live in the northwest suburbs, and I remember starting to see the signs appear nearly 10 years ago. I thought the designation was new as well, but now I know better.

One of the places on US 20 between Rockford and the northwestern suburbs is Marengo, a burg of about 7,500 in McHenry County. Oddly, it seems to be named after the battle of that name, which did so much to solidify Napoleon’s top-dog status, at least until Waterloo. Maybe some of the town founders included Bonapartist sympathizers, but well after the fact, since it was established in the 1840s.

For years, I’ve been driving by a sign that points to a historical marker just off US 20 in Marengo. High time I took a look, I thought this time. The marker is a few blocks north of US 20 on N. East St. This is what I saw.

Carl Leonard Lundgren (1880-1934) hailed from Marengo, and behind the sign is the very field where he perfected his pitching skills, at least according to the sign. As a young man, Lundy Lundgren pitched for the Cubs from 1902 to ’09, and in fact pitched for the team during its most recent appearances in the World Series — 1907 and ’08.

He’s buried in the Marengo City Cemetery across the street from the plaque.

I took a look at the place from the street, but didn’t venture in. Most of it’s modern-looking, or at least 20th century, but there’s a small section whose stones look very old, older even than Lundgren’s, wherever it is. That bears further investigation someday.

GTT Spring ’16 Leftovers

Posted on March 24, 2016 by admin

A good Easter to all. I’ll post again on Easter Monday.

Not long after posting about the moon tower at 41st and Speedway on Monday, I happened across this vintage image of that tower. The handwriting on the photo asserts that it was the first of the Austin moonlight towers.

Tom and I had occasion to visit a trendy, non-chain coffee house in Austin. Tom said it was trendy, anyway. I noticed the quiet. Everyone was focused on a laptop or hand-held device. No one was talking, even though the joint was full. That’s not an exaggeration.

Did Samuel Pepys and John Dryden keep to themselves at the coffee houses they frequented? Did Washington, Jefferson, or Hamilton stay mum at Merchants Coffee House in Philadelphia? Didn’t the beats yak it up at Greenwich Village coffee houses? There ought to be talk at a coffee house, regardless of how advanced communication tech becomes.

As long as I’m in a judgmental mood, the fellow in the seat next to me on my return flight from Texas was using his iPad during most of the trip to watch golf. The very picture of a Millennial, with the full beard and flannel shirt, he sat there and watched people play golf. Playing golf is one thing, but what’s interesting about watching people play golf on an itty-bitty screen for two hours? My judgmental mood recedes with a shrug; it takes all kinds.

On a hill off US 281 not far from Johnson City, Texas, is the Arc de Texas.
The structure offers lodging — with a patio and pool in back — and a room to taste local wines, as well as Hill Country views from the roof, available to any passerby during normal business hours.
Arc de Texas is part of a larger entity called Lighthouse Hill Ranch, whose acreage offers a number of posh places to stay for the night.

Walking along Main Street in Fredericksburg near the former Nimitz Hotel, you’ll find Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz (1885-1966) in bronze. You have to look on YouTube to find the “Chester Nimitz Oriental Garden Waltz” by the Austin Lounge Lizards.

In the George H.W. Bush gallery of the National Museum of Pacific War, you’ll find a painting of a less-expected figure from the history of naval conflict, though completely fitting, in one of the rooms about the buildup to the war: Marshal-Admiral Marquis Tōgō Heihachirō (1848-1934).
As noted before, Texas is important in marketing goods in Texas. Need more evidence?
These eggs were obtained at a San Antonio HEB grocery store.

The Moon Tower at Speedway and 41st, Austin

Posted on March 21, 2016 by admin

The Cathedral of Junk in Austin isn’t the easiest tourist attraction to see. For completely understandable reasons, since it’s in someone’s back yard, and the householder and creator of the pile, one Vince Hannemann, doesn’t want people just showing up. You have to call first, and hope he picks up to let you make a reservation, which he does only when he feels like it.

How do I know that? When I called, I heard the message on his answering machine, which said all that the likelihood of him answering in person was a “lottery” — and not to bother leaving a message about visiting, since he would not reply. He didn’t say it, but I also got the sense that he really was trying to avoid having the thing take over his life.

So Tom and I didn’t see the Cathedral of Junk on March 5. We did other things, such as walk along Lady Bird Lake. After dinner that night, I expressed my desire to see an Austin moon tower, also known as a moonlight tower. See one again, since I’d seen one at least 30 years ago during a visit. I don’t remember which tower that was, but it might have been the very one he took me to this time around, at the corner of Speedway and 41st in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Austin, to look up at the lighted hexagon in the night sky.

A couple of the six lights were out. What’s up with that, Austin Energy?
The moon towers have a long and well-known history, at least to Austinites and non-Austinites who care about such oddities. Before modern street lights were developed, there was a late 19th-century vogue for tall towers that illuminated their surroundings at night via carbon arc lights: moonlight towers, or moon towers. When there was no natural moonlight, the hand of man could provide it.

A Machine Age notion if there ever was one. A number of municipalities had them; Detroit reportedly had a lot. The only survivors now are in Austin, which acquired its towers in the 1890s.

Apparently carbon arc lights are very bright, but also high maintenance, so the moon tower lights were replaced with incandescent lights in the early 20th century. Currently there are 17 Austin moon towers, each 165 feet tall. The towers were restored in the early 1990s and a simulation of one figures in Dazed and Confused, a movie I’ve never gotten around to. In this image, a barely visible bilingual sign warns one and all not to be a tower-climbing moron.
I don’t think the towers count as Austin weird, but they are odd. That might make a better slogan: Keep Austin Odd. Just the kind of thing I like to see anyway: unusual, unpretentious, with an interesting back story, and easy to see. Here’s an excellent podcast at the usually excellent 99% Invisible series about the Austin moon towers.

The National Museum of the Pacific War

Posted on March 16, 2016 by admin

The National Museum of the Pacific War is a complex of structures at a short distance from each other in Fredericksburg, including the restored Nimitz Hotel, which now houses a museum about Adm. Nimitz; the George H.W. Bush Gallery, which focuses on the war in the Pacific; and more: the Veterans’ Memorial Walk, the Plaza of Presidents, the Japanese Garden of Peace, the Pacific War Combat Zone, and the Center for Pacific War Studies.

The Nimitz Hotel building used to include the war exhibits, but now they’re in the much larger (32,500 square feet) Bush Gallery, open since the 1990s, and expanded in 2009. Outside its entrance is the conning tower of the USS Pintado, a submarine that conducted a number of a patrols against the Japanese.
The museum, organized chronologically beginning before the war and ending at the USS Missouri, is incredibly detailed, and home to a large array of impressive artifacts. That includes some impressively large artifacts, such as a Ko-hyoteki-class midget submarine that participated on the attack on Pearl Harbor, which actually seems pretty large when you stand next to it.
The pilot of this particular vessel, Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki, survived its beaching and became the war’s first Japanese POW, having failed at suicide. According to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in 2002, “When the war ended, he returned to Japan deeply committed to pacifism. There, Sakamaki was not warmly received. He wrote an account of his experience, titled The First Prisoner in Japan and I Attacked Pearl Harbor in the United States, and thereafter refused to speak about the war.” (He died in 1999.)

Also on display were a B-25 — as part of a exhibit about the Doolittle Raid — a Japanese N1K “Rex” floatplane, an F4F Wildcat fighter, and a replica of Fat Man, just to name some of the larger items.
The exhibits also included a lot of smaller weapons, tools, posters, uniforms, model ships and airplanes, military equipment, and sundry gear and items associated with the fighting and the people who were behind the front. Plus a lot to read. Campaigns and incidents both well known and obscure were detailed, such as the effort to salvage the ships in Pearl Harbor in the months after the attack, which was often dangerous work. Other Allied efforts weren’t ignored, such as the Australian advance on Buna-Gona, a campaign that incurred a higher rate of casualties than for the Americans at Guadalcanal.

All in all, a splendid museum. But exhausting. If I’d had time on Sunday as I went from Austin to San Antonio, I would have gone back (the tickets are good for 48 hours). It’ll be worth a return someday.

USS Arizona 1979

Posted on December 6, 2015 by admin

It won’t be too many years before the living memory of the attack on Pearl Harbor is as gone as the assassination of Franz Ferdinand or the shelling of Fort Sumter or the Shot Heard Round the World. Does it matter whether such events make it into a collective awareness beyond actual memory? I think it does.

According to the Park Service, about 2 million people visit each year, so it’s unlikely that the awareness will fade too soon. This image dates to July 1979, which I took on the approach to the memorial. That was almost closer in time to the attack than to the present (not quite: 38 years vs. 36 years), which itself is a sobering thought.

Inside are a list of the Arizona’s dead. The inscription also says: To the Memory of the Gallant Men Here Entombed and their shipmates who gave their lives in action on 7 December 1941, on the U.S.S. Arizona.

Greater Tuna at Ford’s Theatre

Posted on November 29, 2015 by admin

Will Reagan-era Washington DC ever evoke the kind of nostalgia New York of various decades does, or London of the ’60s, or the once-removed nostalgia for Paris or Berlin of the ’20s? The Americans doesn’t really trade on nostalgia for the time, even though it’s set then. Who knows?

All I know is that I visited DC a number of times during the mid-1980s. During a late ’86 visit, I went to Ford’s Theatre for a performance of Greater Tuna.

I don’t remember a lot about Greater Tuna, except that it was a somewhat dark, two-man farce about a fictional small town in Texas. According to Samuel French, which licenses the play, Greater Tuna was originally produced in 1981 in Austin by its authors, Jaston Williams, Joe Sears and Ed Howard. The play’s stars, Williams and Sears, played all 20 characters, and Howard directed.

Greater Tuna was first presented Off Broadway at Circle in the Square in New York City on October 21, 1982. It ran for over a year Off Broadway, and “went on to tour major theatres all over America and spots overseas for the next 30 some years, and became one of the most produced plays in American theatre history,” notes Samuel French.

I think Joe Sears and Jaston Williams were still the two men doing all the parts in 1986, but I wouldn’t swear to it. All I have left is a ticket stub and a recollection of it being entertaining.

Ford’s Theatre, of course, has a doleful history of its own. The president’s box is still draped with flags, though it’s actually a 1960s reconstruction of the original, as is the entire theater space, with more changes made in a 2008 renovation. During the most recent renovation, the Washington Post ran an article containing a brief history of the place:

“Ford’s Theatre was a Baptist church until it was taken over in 1861 by entrepreneur John T. Ford. The venue was destroyed by fire the night of Dec. 30, 1862, but was rebuilt and reopened in 1863.

“After the assassination… when Ford sought to reopen for business, there was a public outcry. The government bought the theater from Ford and used it over the years as a museum and as an office and storage building.

“On the morning of June 9, 1893, the building was packed with 500 government clerks, occupying several floors of jury-rigged office space, when the interior collapsed, according to a Washington Post account the next day. Scores were killed and injured, and the theater’s already altered interior was destroyed.

The government rebuilt it again — and again used the building for storage. In the 1950s, the government decided to restore the building as a historic site and theater venue, and Ford’s reopened in 1968.”

It just occurred to me that I’ve visited three of the four sites of presidential assassinations: Ford’s Theatre, the National Gallery of Art’s West Building (built on the site of Baltimore & Potomac Railroad station where President Garfield was shot, though unmarked), and the Texas School Book Depository building. Guess that means I need to visit Buffalo.

John F. Tracy’s Plaque

Posted on October 8, 2015 by admin

I’ve seen some plaques in my time, such as ones commemorating the high-water mark of Hurricane Ike, a vintage Dairy Queen sign, the 25,000th 7-11 franchise, the site of Huey Long’s assassination, an outstanding civil engineering achievement of the 1980s, a Civil War veteran who died in 1947, Bill Murray’s footprint, even Addison Mizner’s pet spider monkeys. Guess I’m a sucker for words carved in metal trying to beat forgetfulness, though I think forgetfulness will eventually overcome such efforts.

Saw another plaque on Sunday, behind the Ridge Historical Society in the Beverly neighborhood of Chicago. A curious thing, this plaque, placed right next to the back entrance and mounted on a short block. Though made of metal, it was well worn by years of weather — close to a century, it seems.

There was no one was around to tell me about it, but my guess would be that it had been moved there from somewhere else nearby. It said (in all caps, actually, but I’m capitalizing the lines that are particularly large on the plaque):

1852 1922
ROCK ISLAND LINES
Seventieth Anniversary
October Tenth
The memorial tree planted nearby
is dedicated
by the Rock Island in affectionate memory
of
JOHN F. TRACY
Who by industry courage and loyalty
through every vicissitude signally
aided in the development of the
CHICAGO ROCK ISLAND & PACIFIC RAILWAY
into a great transportation system
DEVOTED TO THE PUBLIC SERVICE

The Rock Island is remembered in later decades thanks to Alan Lomax and Leadbelly and others, though that’s fading too, and it was an important railroad in its day (and a client of Lincoln’s in its earliest years). It was also a link in the Grand Excursion of 1854, which is known to us Millard Fillmore fans.

John Tracy’s not so well remembered. My guess would be that he lived somewhere in Beverly, and was long dead by 1922. A small amount of checking reveals he was an executive of the railroad, including its president from 1866 to ’77. A Gilded Age railroad tycoon! His story is probably in an out-of-print volume somewhere, maybe at the Ridge Historical Society. A book that’s no one’s read in years, and a story that probably doesn’t involve diamond-tipped walking sticks and lighting cigars with $100 banknotes, alas.

Nuestra Señora del Espíritu Santo de Zuñigais & Presidio Nuestra Señora de Loreto de la Bahía

Posted on July 29, 2015 by admin

Nuestra Señora del Espíritu Santo de Zuñigais is on the San Antonio River, but it’s well downstream from the SA metro area, in the modern town of Goliad. It’s been there since 1749 in one form or another, at first doing what missions did in the early days, such as convert the natives, engage in ranching, and be a part (along with the nearby presidio) of Spain’s claim to the region against French and English inroads.

By the early 20th century, it was a ruin. But not forgotten completely, because the CCC rebuilt it in the 1930s. It isn’t as well known as the chain of missions in San Antonio, including the Alamo, which were tapped by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site earlier this month. That agitated a few simple-minded crackpots, since it’s always something. So the NPS felt obliged to include the following sentence in its press release about the honor: “Inclusion of a site in the World Heritage List does not affect U.S. sovereignty or management of the sites, which remain subject only to U.S., state and local laws.”

Ann and I made our way to Mission Espíritu Santo in the late afternoon of July 11. Only one other group was visiting at the time, and in fact the interior was already closed for the day. But we got a good look at the mission and its grounds.
Some parts are still ruins. It adds a certain something to the site.
Other parts are open to the sky.
A short drive away is Presidio La Bahía, the fort that protected the mission. In full, Presidio Nuestra Señora de Loreto de la Bahía, it was the place to go to when Apaches were coming. During the Texas Revolution, Fannin and his men were imprisoned there before they were killed not far away. In our time, that means people tell ghost stories about the place.
We got there after closing time. The presidio, being a fortress, has a wall all the way around — also rebuilt, I assume — so no peeks inside. That just means I’ll have to come back someday for a longer look.

Fannin Battleground State Historic Site

Posted on July 28, 2015 by admin

The easy way to get from the greater Houston glop to San Antonio is via I-10. That route has its interests, such as Flatonia and Schulenburg and not far away, the Painted Churches, a few of which I’d like visit someday. But on the 11th, I had other things in mind, and followed US 59 southwest out of town.

Or rather, the future I-69. Every 20 or 30 miles, a sign told me that the current route of US 59 — which is already mostly a four-lane highway between the outskirts of Houston and Victoria — would someday be a bone fide part of the Interstate system running all the way to Laredo. For ordinary drivers like me, I’m not sure of the value, since on an Interstate you can’t use turnarounds in the medians, as you can — and as I did a few times — on a large US route. But looking at a map, I can also see the advantage of an I-69 through Texas for trucks barreling up from Mexico to points east: they can bypass San Antonio and its traffic.

Just southwest of Victoria is the Fannin Battleground State Historic Site, where Col. Fannin surrendered to Gen. Urrea after the Battle of Coleto not long after the fall of the Alamo. An obelisk marks the site.

Soon after the surrender, of course, Fannin and most of his men were murdered on the orders of Santa Anna, in a move that wasn’t just a crime, but a blunder. The Texas State Historical Association posits: “The impact of the Goliad Massacre was crucial. Until this episode Santa Anna’s reputation had been that of a cunning and crafty man, rather than a cruel one. When the Goliad prisoners were taken, Texas had no other army in the field and the newly constituted ad interim government seemed incapable of forming one.

“The Texas cause was dependent on the material aid and sympathy of the United States. Had Fannin’s and Miller’s men been dumped on the wharves at New Orleans penniless, homesick, humiliated, and distressed, and each with his separate tale of Texas mismanagement and incompetence, Texas prestige in the United States would most likely have fallen, along with sources of help.

“But Portilla’s volleys at Goliad, together with the fall of the Alamo, branded both Santa Anna and the Mexican people with a reputation for cruelty and aroused the fury of the people of Texas, the United States, and even Great Britain and France, thus considerably promoting the success of the Texas Revolution.”

A little further to the southwest is the town of Goliad, seat of Goliad County. It has a handsome courthouse, as many counties in Texas do.
Alfred Giles, a British immigrant who did a lot of work in South Texas, San Antonio in particular, designed the Goliad County courthouse in 1894. A hurricane knocked down the clock tower in 1942, but it was finally replaced in 2003.

On the courthouse grounds is the Hanging Tree.
According to a State Historical Survey Committee plaque near the tree: “Site for court sessions at various times from 1846 to 1870. Capital sentences called for by the courts were carried out immediately, by means of a rope and a convenient limb.

“Hangings not called for by regular courts occurred here during the 1857 “Cart War” — a series of attacks made by Texas freighters against Mexican drivers along the Indianola-Goliad-San Antonio Road. About 70 men were killed, some of them on this tree, before the war was halted by Texas Rangers.”

More on this little-known incident here; it isn’t to the Texans’ credit. Even so, across the street from the Hanging Tree is the Hanging Tree restaurant. How very Texas.

The Strand, Galveston

Posted on July 21, 2015 by admin

I can’t pin down the last time I went to Galveston. It was sometime in the early 1970s, probably as an appendix to a visit to Houston from San Antonio. Little memory remains, and for whatever reason we didn’t return when I was older. My brothers remember visits in the 1950s, during the time when my parents lived in Houston, but that’s before my time.

I suspect we never went to the Strand on any family visits to the city, because the area, which is a part of the city near Galveston Bay, didn’t begin its revival until the 1970s. The always-informative Handbook of Texas Online tells me that the Strand — formally called Avenue B in Galveston — was included in the original plat of the city in the late 1830s, with the origins of Avenue B’s nickname unknown.

“While the avenue extends throughout Galveston, the Strand has usually referred to the five-block business district situated between Twentieth and Twenty-fifth streets,” it says. “Throughout the nineteenth century, the area was known as the ‘Wall Street of the Southwest,’ serving as a major commercial center for the region.”

Some of the 19th-century buildings still stand on Avenue B, the Strand. With a 20th-century tower to the south.
Naturally, the Hurricane of 1900 put the kibosh on the Strand’s career as the Wall Street of the Southwest. I’ll bet after the storm a common enough sentiment among businessmen was, To hell with this, we’re going to Houston. Galveston didn’t have the space to grow into a megalopolis anyway.

“In the rebuilding process, businesses moved off the Strand and away from the wharfs,” the Handbook continues. “The area became a warehouse district. In the 1960s amidst widespread deterioration of the Strand, the Junior League of Galveston County restored two buildings sparking interest in the area. In 1973 the Galveston Historical Foundation initiated the Strand Revolving Fund, a catalyst in subsequent years for dramatic restoration and adaptive use in the Strand Historic District.”

These days, the Strand is a Galveston tourist zone, populated by ordinary visitors, and when a cruise ship’s docked near the zone, probably even more people, though I didn’t see any ships nearby when we were there. As a tourist zone, it has two distinct advantages. One, the sidewalks are covered, so that strolling along in mid-summer doesn’t mean walking under a hot and copper sky. Also, the clothiers, geegaw shops and other venues are universally air conditioned.

Ann and I did our share of ducking in and out of shops, eventually buying a single key ring and a few postcards. I can report as a matter of historical interest — that is, for future historians of 21st-century minutiae — that Confederate battle flag-themed merchandise hasn’t died out in the souvenir shops of Galveston as of the summer of 2015, though I can’t say its presence was overpowering.

Sad to say, the eccentric Col. Bubbie’s Strand Surplus Senter has closed. The sign is still there.
“Col. Bubbie’s was the longest-running, single-owner business on the Strand,” the Houston Chronicle reported last December after the shop closed. “Since 1972, it sold military equipment — gas masks, camouflage pants, canteens, mess kits, medals and insignias, you name it — encompassing 60 countries and conflicts from the Civil War to Iraq.

“The shop helped outfit the TV show MASH and war films as diverse as Saving Private Ryan and 1941, among others. Until a few months ago it was the go-to spot for local theater productions to get period uniforms, but that stock has dwindled.”

We also stopped in at La King’s Confectionery on Avenue B. We were glad we did. The place makes excellent ice cream. Ann’s pistachio was particularly good. Ice cream jockeys and soda jerks in white were on hand to serve whatever you wanted.

A neon sign says Purity Ice Cream, and I thought that meant a product of Tennessee’s Purity Dairies, but no. According to the Austin Chronicle, “Ice cream on an industrial scale arrived in Texas in 1889 when the Purity Ice Cream Company opened in Galveston.” The ice cream that La King’s serves is a direct culinary descendant of that ice cream, and La King’s is the only place it’s served.

In the back, you can watch a fellow making taffy, which the store also sells.

One other thing I spied on the Strand: a public chess set.
It was a little too hot to play, but still. That’s what parks need more of, public chess sets.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: US History