RIP, Charlie Watts

Posted on August 24, 2021 by admin

I heard about Charlie Watts’ passing on the radio today, appropriately, as I was driving my car, in between men telling me more and more useless information that’s supposed to fire my imagination.

Actually, I would have been hard-pressed to name the drummer of the Rolling Stones, in their heyday or their more recent geriatric selves. Which turned out to be Watts the whole time. Not that I dislike the band, just that those kinds of details never captivated me.

“The news comes weeks after it was announced that Watts would miss the band’s U.S. tour dates to recover from an unspecified medical procedure,” the BBC reports. “Watts was previously treated for throat cancer in 2004.”

U.S. tour dates? This far along in the 21st century? Another thing I didn’t know about the Stones. They’ve got staying power, that’s for certain. I expect no one would have predicted such a thing in 1965.

RIP, Mr. Watts.

August Twilight & Pink Flamingo

Posted on August 23, 2021 by admin

That sounds like a lesser-known Faulkner story or the code name for a NATO Cold War exercise just on our side of the Fulda Gap — August Twilight.

But it’s what I see most evenings out in the back yard.

Sometimes I turn on the fence lights, installed this summer for my June event.

Install might be too involved a verb; I draped them over the fence. The only hard part was making sure the extension cord didn’t become an underfoot hazard in the garage, a setup I facilitated with duct tape.

One more addition this year.

My dollar-store pink flamingo. It occurred to me recently that no suburban back yard is complete without one.

Arlington National Cemetery, 2011

Posted on August 22, 2021 by admin

Ten years ago this month we went to Washington, DC, which was the entire focus of the week-long trip. That had some advantages, especially since DC has a decent network of subway lines. We went everywhere by subway, including Arlington National Cemetery. Once there, shuttle buses run a loop around the grounds. Good thing, since the cemetery covers 639 acres.

President Kennedy drew a crowd.

Robert Kennedy isn’t far away, marked with a small stone and a cross.

President Taft, the other U.S. chief executive buried in the cemetery, did not draw a crowd.

The memorial to the crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia. An elegant design.

The memorial to the crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Not an elegant design.

Mainly because of the faces. The more you look at them, the worse they become.

Remember the Maine.

Audie Murphy. I hadn’t remembered that he died that young; airplane crash.

Other noteworthy stones we happened across. Ones I did, anyway. Not sure anyone else noticed as I took pictures.

Army brass. Among others, Gen. Alexander “I’m in control” Haig in the foreground, and Gen. Omar Bradley, with his five stars, not far away.

The Tomb of the Unknown Solider.

Here are the girls, goofing around at the nearby amphitheater.

Hope the trip made some kind of impression.

Summerlude

Posted on August 19, 2021 by admin

About as picture-perfect a run of summer days as you can imagine this week. Hibiscus days.

Cicada days, cricket nights.

Ann Goes to College

Posted on August 18, 2021 by admin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Far North Leftovers

Posted on August 17, 2021 by admin

I got a couple of concerned text messages after the 8.2 magnitude earthquake off the Alaska Peninsula late on the evening of July 28. Did I feel it? Was I all right? Didn’t feel a thing, I answered. Alaska is big.

During the quake — which is thought to be largest affecting Alaska since the Good Friday disaster of 1964, but nothing like it in terms of damage — I was in Fairbanks, not too far from the words United States on the USGS map I clipped.

Curious, I got out my physical atlas and a ruler, and measured the distance between Perryville, the town on the Alaska Peninsula closest to the epicenter, and Fairbanks. As the crow flies. A tough old crow, used to the freezing temps.

Total, about 1,200 miles, very roughly. But the point is, I no more felt the earthquake than someone in Texas is going to feel a California earthquake, unless it’s really big.

Near the main building of the Museum of the North is a blockhouse that used to be part of the Kolmakovsky Redoubt.

The museum explains: “In 1841, the Russian-American Company (RAC), seeking to obtain the rich beaver and land otter furs of the Interior of Alaska, set about the construction of Kolmakovsky Redoubt on the middle Kuskokwim River in Western Alaska. As the only redoubt (fort) deep in the Interior, it became the major trading center along the river for the next 25 years…

“Relations between the RAC and the local Yup’ik Eskimos and Athabascan Indians was amicable and instead of acting as a means of defense, the building served other purposes, including at one time a fish cache and during the gold rush, a jail. The blockhouse stood at the site for over 80 years before being dismantled and shipped to the University of Alaska in Fairbanks in 1929.”

More recently, the museum restored the blockhouse, including the replacement of rotten timber and putting tundra sod on the roof, “complete with blueberries, Labrador tea, and all manner of tundra flora.”

A building of a difference sort, but also Alaskan, near the auto museum: Joy Elementary School.

One look and I thought, 1960.

Sure enough: “Construction of our original circular school began July 21, 1960. It was completed and dedicated as Louis F. Joy Elementary on November 9, 1961. Louis F. Joy was Fairbanks City School Board President and a member for over 25 years. Lee S. Linck, the school’s engineer and architect, received an award for the school’s unique and beautiful design at the 1962 Seattle World Fair.”

A quick peek at the first place I ate in Fairbanks.

Bahn Thai. Had a good massaman curry.

Another lunch place in Fairbanks.

Soba. A Moldovan restaurant. That was the main reason I went. Glad I did, since the dumplings I had were wonderful, though massively filling. I asked the waitress, whose English I took to be Moldovan flavored, how she came to be in Fairbanks. She said she came with her husband and members of his family, which no doubt was true, but didn’t quite answer the question.

Speaking of immigrants to the Far North, this is the last place I had lunch in town, The Crepery.

Had a delicious salmon crepe there. I sat way in the back, and instantly noticed a wall covered with photos of Sophia, Bulgaria. I asked the girl who brought me the order about that. The owner’s from Bulgaria, she said. People get around.

The Nenana River.

At this point, it forms one of the borders of Denali NP. I was on the non-park side, looking into the park.

As I was driving southward on the highway Alaska 3 after my stop in the town of Nenana, I passed by a military installation without noticing it. No signs point the way, and while the place isn’t precisely hidden, it is off the main road. It’s the Clear Space Force Station.

Not only that, the facility only recently became part of the Space Force.

“Clear Air Force Station, a remote military installation outside of Fairbanks, Alaska, was officially renamed from Clear Air Force Station to Clear Space Force Station during a ceremony on June 15, 2021,” the Air Force reports.

“Clear will continue to serve as home to Arctic Airmen and Guardians assigned to the 13th and 213th Space Warning Squadrons, providing 24/7 missile warning, missile defense, and space domain awareness…

“The history and mission of the base began in 1958 when the U. S. Air Force acquired the site to set up a Ballistic Missile Early Warning Systems and became fully operational in November of 1961 as the second detachment of the 71st Missile Warning Wing. The detachment became the 13th Missile Warning Squadron in January 1967. The unit was re-designated as the 13th Space Warning Squadron and reassigned under the 21st Space Wing at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado.”

With any luck, the nation will endure, its current political dyspepsia forgotten, and in 100 years the only thing people will remember about the Trump administration is that it founded the Space Force. That might be more important than we can know.

On my last day in Fairbanks, I took a walk along some of the trails at Creamer’s Field Migratory Waterfowl Refuge, on the outskirts of town. Formerly a diary farm with a lot of surplus land, the place is now devoted to keeping birds happy and providing a place for people like me to walk.

There are buildings.

But mostly it’s undeveloped, except for the trails themselves.

Revealing scenes like this.

Looks remote, no? I parked my car only about 20 minutes’ walk away, so the place is close to the infrastructure of Fairbanks. Then again, Fairbanks is a manmade place surrounded by wilderness, so what I drove and then walked to was merely the leading edge of something vast.

One more thing.

Alaska makes 50.

Fountainhead Antique Auto Museum

Posted on August 16, 2021 by admin

Usually it isn’t a good idea to quote promotional material too much, since it has a tendency to exaggerate. But for Fountainhead Antique Auto Museum in Fairbanks, I’m going to borrow an entire paragraph from its site, so fitting is it.

This “living museum” is home to over 95 pre-World War II automobiles, with 65 to 75 stunningly lit and staged rare automobiles at all times. This expansive collection encompasses horseless carriages, steamers, electric cars, speedsters, cyclecars, midget racers and ’30s classics.

Not just stunningly lit and staged, but each vehicle is described by a concise and expertly written sign. Also, the museum displays period clothing on mannequins, artfully interspersed with the autos, so that the two kinds of artifacts complement each other to evoke their precise period in the history. Yet another array of period detail is found in the large photographs from early 20th-century Alaska on the walls.

As if that isn’t enough, popular music of the period — from roughly the first four decades of the 20th century — plays not quite in the background. Unobtrusively at first, but then you begin to hear it as a worthwhile background. Once I started listening to the songs, I found the variety remarkable: the popular jazz tunes you’d expect, but also other kinds of hits from the period, such as a few opera or opera-inspired songs.

The museum entrance gives no hint of what’s ahead. But the place doesn’t need a fancy, name-architect structure; it’s got content.

Once inside, the museum’s sizable scope becomes clear.

Most of the vehicles have been restored to factory appearance, or at least to highly presentable, and according to the museum, all but a handful are functional. There were many vehicles I’d never heard of.

A 1901 De Dion-Bourton.

A 1903 Toledo. “This is the only gasoline-powered Toledo known to survive.”

A 1917 Owen Magnetic.

Plus others, such as an Argonne, Auburn, Grant, Heine-Velox, Hupmobile and Oakland. The display also included a 1911 EMF. Nickname: “Every Morning Frustration.”

Plus plenty of models I knew, but maybe not much about their early models beyond the names: Brush, Cadillac, Lincoln, Packard and Rambler.

Plus at least one celebrity car. Mostly the museum doesn’t go in for that sort of thing, but it does have Wallace Reid’s 1919 McFarlan. It was a speedy car to suit Reid, whose motto seems to have, “die young, stay pretty.” He did.

I could make a entire long posting from the hood ornaments, nameplates, horns and lamps I saw.

Let’s not forget the period clothing. Tended to be on the posh side, but what else survives?

The fur set in the second picture is described as men’s wear. This is early 20th-century Alaska, after all.

This displayed not so much the bonnet or the dress.
But rather the eyeglasses. Nearby was a glass display case of glasses from the period.

The Museum of the North

Posted on August 15, 2021 by admin

The flight from Seattle to Fairbanks actually isn’t that long, only three hours or so. I expect getting to Anchorage is even shorter, something to keep in mind for the future.
I could see parts of Vancouver Island not long after takeoff, including the city of Victoria from on high. Only a few days earlier, I’d seen it from a vista in Olympic National Park, far away but distinct on the shore of the Salish Sea.

Soon, however, British Columbia and whatever I might have seen of southeast Alaska were obscured by clouds. Closer to Fairbanks, the clouds thinned, and in places I got to see just how undeveloped the interior of Alaska is. A structure here, one there, a place that looked like cultivated land (maybe giant cabbages), but not much else manmade.

I arrived in Fairbanks on July 26 to find partly cloudy skies and comfortable temps, in the low 70s. It was mid-afternoon, with a lot of light ahead, so I made my way to the Museum of the North, which is on the campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and thoughtfully open until 7 pm during the summer. Seemed like a good choice for the first place I went in Alaska. Not much else looks like it in Fairbanks.
“Joan Soranno and the GDM/HGA architectural team designed the building to convey a sense of Alaska,” says the museum web site. Hm.

A sign inside the building expands on that idea: “The design is a composition of four abstract forms. Angled, curved, tipped and cantilevered, these forms reflect the lines and shapes found in Alaska’s coastlines, mountains and glaciers.”

The exhibits cover a lot of ground. “The museum’s research collections — 2.5 million artifacts and specimens — represent millions of years of biological diversity and thousands of years of cultural traditions in the North,” the museum says.

The university began exhibiting artifacts as long ago as 1929, with various places for its displays, but the current building wasn’t completed until 2006.

“The collections are organized into 10 disciplines: archaeology, birds, documentary film, earth sciences, ethnology/history, fine arts, fishes/marine invertebrates, insects, mammals, and plants,” the museum says.

Let’s start with one of those mammals. He greets you at the entrance to the first-floor gallery.

Followed by plenty of other sizeable creatures of a stuffed nature.

Along with prehistoric relics.

The first-floor Gallery of Alaska is organized geographically, with sections for the Southeast, South-Central, Interior, Western Arctic Coast and Southeast. The exhibits include much more than large stuffed animals.

The Native presence is well covered.

Nods to the Russian period.

And the early U.S. years.

If genuine, there’s a 19-oz. gold nugget in there among others nearly that large. I assume the display is wired against theft.

On the second floor is the Rose Berry Alaska Art Gallery, which includes an eclectic mix. The only thing all the works have in common is that they were created by Alaskan artists.

“Arctic Winter” by Theodore R. Lambert, 1936.

“Iron Eskimo” by T. Mike Croskrey, 2002.

“Great Alaska Outhouse Experience” by Craig N. Buchanan, 2005

That one has an interactive element. You can enter the structure and sit down. You’ll then be up close to the walls and something of a ceiling.

All in all, the museum turned out to be a pretty good way to start my visit to Alaska.

Immaculate Conception, St. Matthew’s & Other Fairbanks Churches

Posted on August 12, 2021 by admin

On the Chena River across from Fairbank’s Golden Heart Plaza is Immaculate Conception Church, built by Father Francis Monroe, S.J. early in the city’s history (1904) south of the river, but moved to its present position (north of the river) across the frozen Chena in the winter of 1911-12. Modern moving techniques weren’t available, so townspeople were taking bets as to whether the building would actually make it across.

The view of downtown from the church.

Nice flowerbeds, too.

Immaculate Conception is the oldest Catholic church in the interior of Alaska, and at one time counted as a cathedral. That title and the seat of the Diocese of Fairbanks is elsewhere these days, at Sacred Heart Cathedral, which I drove by but didn’t stop at.

I was glad to find the church open.

That was the only Fairbanks church I ventured inside of, but I did stop for a look at a few other exteriors, such as First United Methodist, just outside downtown.

The more modernist First Presbyterian, not far from city hall.

And the Episcopalian St. Matthew’s, founded in 1904.

“St. Matthews is one of the three oldest churches in Fairbanks, located on First Avenue, across the street from the Chena River,” the church web site says. (South of the river.) The view of the Chena at that point:

“The original church building burned in 1947, but the great wooden altar and other carvings were saved, and were replaced with the present St. Matthew’s Church building. First services in the new church were held Christmas Eve, 1948. Its congregation numbers about 1,200, over half of which are Alaskan Native. The Lord’s Prayer is prayed nearly every Sunday (if a speaker is present) in the Gwitch’in, the Athabaskan language, as well as in English.”

The church also has a deep and unexpected (to me, anyway) connection with the first ascent of Mt. Denali. The Episcopal Archdeacon of Alaska and the Yukon, Hudson Stuck, held the first service at St. Matthew’s on October 16, 1904.

Less than nine years later, in the spring of 1913, Stuck led the first expedition to summit Denali, or McKinley, as it was known at the time. Three other men were with him: “Walter Harper, the youngest at age twenty, half Alaskan Native, fit and confident; Harry Karstens, thirty-four, calmly competent from his years in the Alaskan backcountry; and Robert Tatum, twenty-one, the greenest member of the team,” the Daily Beast notes.

The final push came on June 7. “They had launched this expedition eight weeks earlier, enduring bitter cold, severe altitude, and the loss of key supplies to a campfire…

“How did an Episcopal Archdeacon, well into middle age by the standards of the time, come to find himself in the freezing final summit push on the highest, coldest peak on the continent? The answer lay in two equally potent forces, woven into his being. Just as strong as Hudson Stuck’s belief in doing good — “I am sorry for a life in which there is no usefulness to others,” he once wrote — was his love of wild places.

“For Stuck, Alaska was a place where his physical and spiritual aspirations, his goals for himself and for his mission, could be united into a single purpose. ‘I would rather climb Mount McKinley than own the richest gold mine in Alaska,’ he claimed. He was not alone in his desire.”

A fascinating tale about someone I’d never heard of. Stuck was not, however, the first to the summit that day. He tapped Walter Harper for that honor.

“Harper was born in late 1892 and was the son of a Koyukon-Athabascan mother, Seentaána, and a legendary gold prospector father, Arthur Harper,” the NPS says.
“Walter was raised by his mother and was fluent in Koyukon-Athabascan. Tanana was his home village and he eventually attended the Saint Mark’s Mission school in Nenana before becoming a guide for Missionary Hudson Stuck. Stuck’s faith in Harper as a skilled guide and outdoorsman eventually led to his participation in the Denali summit expedition.”

Harper might well have become an important figure in the Alaska Territory, but he had the great misfortune to be aboard the Princess Sophia in October 1918, which sank en route from Skagway to Vancouver after striking Vanderbilt Reef, with the loss of all 350-plus souls — another story I’d never heard.

Two Fairbanks Cemeteries

Posted on August 11, 2021 by admin

Bound to miss the Perseids again tonight. A thunderstorm is supposed to roll through tonight — third night in a row here — and besides, metro Chicago is no place to see celestial phenomena very well, except maybe a bright moon or planet.

I visited two major Fairbanks cemeteries during my late July visit, in reverse chronological order. First I went to Birch Hill Cemetery, founded in 1938 as an alternative to Clay Street Cemetery closer to downtown, which was founded simultaneously with the settlement itself in 1903.

As the name implies, Birch Hill is on a hill. In our time, the hill overlooks the Steese Highway, where it meets the Johansen Expressway. At that particular junction are such major retailers as Home Depot, Costco, Fred Meyer, REI and Walgreen’s, so the traffic is relatively heavy and the cemetery relatively noisy. You get used to that.

Though they aren’t on this interesting list, I imagine that those Home Depot and Costco locations are the northernmost of the respective chains.

I tromped around Birch Hill for a good half hour.

The cemetery included a number of special sections, such as Pioneers Plot 1.

In that section, there (unsurprisingly) are old stones.

And newer markers for people who came to Fairbanks in its pioneer years, such as one Joseph Landers, who died “About 80” in 1936. He might have come when he was about 50 already; couldn’t have been too much earlier. Must have been a tough old bird.

The memorial, which is obviously newer than 1936, says it was put there by Igloo No. 4. Eh? I looked it up. That’s the Fairbanks lodge of the the Pioneers of Alaska.

The Pioneers’ web site says: “[The organization was] first organized in Nome on February 14, 1907, with the mission:

To preserve the names of Alaska’s pioneers on its rolls;
To collect and preserve the literature and incidents of Alaska’s history;
And to promote the best interests of Alaska.”

That seems to include fixing plaques to Alaska pioneer graves, presumably unmarked or whose markers had been ravaged by the northern climate. There were others besides Mr. Landers in Pioneer Plot 1.

Loyal Order of Moose are on the hill, too.

Along with unusual gravesites whose honorees may or may not have belonged to a fraternal organization, such as A.A. Zimmerman, whom the plaque says donated the land for the cemetery.

A few days later, I made my way to the Clay Street Cemetery, which is tucked away in a residential neighborhood near downtown Fairbanks.

It’s a flat parcel, but not without its charms.

Igloo No. 4 put in a few memorials here, too.

Other individual graves. Pioneer women, in these cases.

This plaque, dedicated in 2002, lists 89 men, mostly buried in the cemetery, who died in gold mining accidents near Fairbanks from 1905 to 1918.

“Underground mining was dangerous during this pioneer era,” the plaque says. “Most died from cave-ins, falling down shafts, being struck by material while in a shaft, and gas asphyxiation. The miners were often young, single, foreign-born ‘pick and shovel’ laborers. They were far from home.”

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling