South Texas ’23: Kerrville & Bandera

Posted on October 29, 2023 by admin

Last Tuesday, my brother Jay and I drove from San Antonio to Kerrville, Texas (pop. 24,200) to visit an old friend of his, who has a separate small building in his back yard to house an extensive model train that he’s building. We got a detailed tour. Cool.

That was part of a larger trip that took me to Austin and San Antonio to visit friends and family. I flew to Austin on October 18 and returned from San Antonio today.

Rather than take I-10 west from San Antonio to Kerrville (though we returned that way), we drove Texas 16, which is mostly a two-lane highway that winds from exurban San Antonio and then into the Hill Country. Always good to drive the Hill Country, even on a rainy day. It was a rainy week in South Texas on the whole, but still quite warm for October. Had a few sweaty walks in San Antonio last week as well, more about which later.

Besides visiting Bob and his wife Nancy and his HO model train construction, we also stopped by the Glen Rest Cemetery in Kerrville (my idea). The recent rains had made it a muddy cemetery. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, but also mud to muddy?

A curious figure. At least for a cemetery.

Glen Rest – which is incorrectly noted as Glen Rose on Google Maps – dates from 1892, according to the Texas Historical Commission plaque on site. “Glen Rest Cemetery is the final resting place for many pioneer and historic families of Kerrville and the surrounding Hill Country,” it says.

En route to Kerrville on highway Texas 16 is the much smaller burg of Bandera, pop. 829 and seat of Bandera County. That means a courthouse, and we stopped to take a look.

The courthouse itself isn’t unusual, but it is positioned unusually. Instead of being the focus of a square, it’s simply facing the highway. So are a handful of memorials. This one honors “All Cowboys” because Bandera is “Cowboy Capital of the World.”

This stone oddity honors a Bandera pioneer named Amasa Clark, giving his birth and death dates as 1825-1927.

More about him is at Frontier Times magazine, which annoyingly doesn’t say when the text was written, who wrote it or where it was published. Internal evidence, along with the style of writing, puts it in the early 1920s, probably in a local newspaper. Clark came to the site of Bandera in 1852, not long after serving in the war with Mexico, and stayed until his death in 1927 as a very old man.

Also along the highway in Bandera is a strip center including a store the likes of which I’d never seen before. Neither had Jay.

We had to take a look inside.

I should have asked to woman behind the counter how long the store has been in business, or whether the man himself gets a cut, or some other questions, but I was in vacation mode, not interview mode. So all I know is what I saw, which was enough. For the record, and this is no surprise, Trump overwhelmingly carried Bandera County — 79.1% to 19.7% for Biden — in the 2020 election.

Along the Rock River, Janesville

Posted on July 24, 2023 by admin

On the first two days of July, we spent some time in southern Wisconsin, staying the night at a hotel near the Rock River in Janesville, a burg of about 65,000 and seat of Rock County.

Late on the afternoon of the 1st, I took a stroll along the river in downtown Janesville. As urban riversides go, it’s drab, an echo of a time when cities generally ignored their rivers, except for purposes of commerce.

Even Rockford, Illinois, downriver from Janesville on the Rock, has a more pleasant downtown riverside, so small industrial-decline Midwestern cities can refurbish their riverwalks. So can the likes of Waco, Texas. The Rock, incidentally, is a direct tributary of the Mississippi, meeting that river at Rock Island, Illinois.

Still, the riverside isn’t completely without its interests. A fairly new pedestrian-bicycle bridge crosses near an equally newish riverside plaza, or at least an open space.

The bridge sports a boulder, too. It’s hard to see, but there’s an inscription on it: The Mick & Jane Blain Gilbertson Family Heritage Bridge.

Jane Blain Gilbertson is CEO of Blain’s Farm & Fleet, a big box chain with 44 stores in the upper Midwest and headquartered in Janesville. The stores carry, among many other things, agricultural supplies and equipment. I remember visiting the one in Montgomery, Illinois, years ago to see what there was to see inside.

Downtown Janesville was eerily empty that late Saturday afternoon. There were a few kids – and I mean junior high or high school kids – hanging out near the bridge, making giggly noises. A small party of adults was having a cookout in the yard of one of the apartment buildings near the river. A few cars passed through the area, but not many. Then there was me.

Every town has one of these. Oddly, it was tucked away in a cul-de-sac.

Why visit Janesville? Why stay there? I’d passed by many times, but not spent any time in the town. I guess when it comes to Wisconsin, I’m something of a completist.

Janesville has some handsome older buildings within a few blocks of the river, most still occupied, but some not, such as a one-time First National Bank.

The McVicar Bros. and Helms buildings. Part of a larger block.

Other buildings.

Evidence of a more robust downtown life in the past: an old Kresge building. Kresge, of course, was the ancestor of Kmart, and a mighty retail chain. Once upon a time.

I had to check: As of more than a year ago, there were only three U.S. Kmarts still open.

That means that this 1987 reference in Calvin & Hobbes will be lost to time. Is already lost to time. I’m sure if I mentioned “blue light special” to either of my daughters, it wouldn’t register.

Calvin: Dad, how do people make babies?

Calvin’s Dad: Most people just go to Sears, buy the kit, and follow the assembly instructions.

Calvin: I came from Sears??

Calvin’s Dad: No, you were a blue light special at Kmart. Almost as good, and a lot cheaper.

I never went to Kmart much, but I did go occasionally, and I remember being in one once, probably in Nashville in the mid-80s, during a blue light special. I heard “Attention, Kmart shoppers!” They did say that. I didn’t buy whatever it was.

That’s the kind of thing that came to mind wandering the empty streets of Janesville.

Buckhead From on High

Posted on November 7, 2022 by admin

Two days after I returned from the West last month, I went to Atlanta for a work conference for most of week. Atlanta and I go back a ways; I first went there by bus in ’82, but also later. Still, my most recent visit was in 1999, so it’s been a while.

This time, there was work to do, of course, and events to attend, and I got to spend time with colleagues I hadn’t seen in a number of years, or ever, except for Zoom. That was good.

I also had a few excellent meals not at my expense, especially one at The Consulate, a restaurant in Midtown that rates its own Atlas Obscura page.

I stayed in an upper floor of the conference hotel in Buckhead, which is like a second downtown for Atlanta, something like the Galleria district in Houston. I enjoyed some good views from the room.

Including much of the rooftop of a major regional mall. Not something you see every day.

Sure, the property’s mechanicals need to be up there. But isn’t there also the opportunity to use at least part of the roof for games that might attract hipsters and their always at-hand cameras — to promote the mall on social media — such as ax throwing, bocce and shuffleboard?

Virginia Street, Reno

Posted on October 25, 2022 by admin

Before I left Reno on October 4, there was one more thing I wanted to do: take a walk along Virginia Street, a major thoroughfare. In the end, I walked two sections of it, one downtown and featuring the well-known Reno sign, the other in Midtown.

Might as well begin with the sign. The structure across Virginia Street is actually called the Reno Arch. To split hairs even more, this is the third Reno Arch, installed in 1987 to replace the 1963 version, which itself replaced the 1926 original.

The daytime Arch.

Plenty of bulbs on the underside. Quite a glow come nighttime.

What’s that on the side of the Whitney Peak Hotel, overlooking Virginia Street? A climbing wall.

A set of climbing walls, actually, some toward the upper reaches of the tall building. When I first walked by it, a man was climbing on the lowest wall, but by the time I returned to take a picture, he was gone.

Downtown Reno has a clutch of what you might call Las Vegas-class casino-hotels, though diehard Reno partisans — are there such? — might chafe at the comparison.

Such as the Eldorado Resort Casino.

More modest gaming ventures populate much of the downtown Virginia Street, such as Cal-Neva, Horseshoe and what must be the first fully robotic casino, Siri’s Casino. Or is that name just a (happy?) coincidence?

South from that point are some examples of municipal Reno. Like the Washoe County Courthouse.

The Pioneer Theater Auditorium. If you guessed 1967, you’re right.

Back at the Truckee River.

The stretch of Virginia Street through Midtown Reno is a different animal: smaller buildings, local nongaming businesses — though entertainment focused, some of them — and a number of murals. New-looking for the most part, because we’re in an unacknowledged age of mural painting nationwide, commercial and otherwise.

Some you might call vernacular murals, if you’re in an academical frame of mind.

Every block, there were more pro murals.

Just a small sample, but they made for a good walk. That and the fact that few other people were around in the late weekday morning — Midtown’s prime time is clearly weekend nights — and even few cars, owing I suppose to the little in biggest little city.

Virginia City

Posted on October 24, 2022 by admin

Bonanza started each week with a map on screen, and that was probably the best thing about that TV show. Not just any map, but an idiosyncratic depiction of the Cartwrights’ vast ranch Ponderosa, which straddled Lake Tahoe at some inexact moment in the 19th century.

Set illustrator Robert Temple Ayres (d. 2012) designed the original, “Map to Illustrate the Ponderosa in Nevada,” in 1959. I wasn’t a regular watcher of Bonanza, either in prime time or afternoon repeats, but I did know that map.

That show might have been the first time I ever heard of Virginia City, Nevada, which is featured prominently on the map, toward to top, because it is more-or-less oriented with the east to the top. Maybe Ayres was trying to tell us all something about the importance of Jerusalem. More likely, he needed to fit the map on horizontal TV screens.

Also, if I remember right, the Cartwrights were always going to town — to Virginia City — for one reason or another. After leaving Carson City on October 3 to return to Reno, I decided to go by way of Virginia City myself, which is on Nevada 341. The drive climbs into the Virginia Range, and the city sits on what used to be the Comstock Lode.

At less than 800 residents, the city is a town, nothing like its silver boom heyday in the 1870s, when there was a population of more than 25,000. The town you see now mostly dates from after 1875, when the original V. City burned down.

Local boosters haven’t forgotten that a young Samuel Clemens lived here for a while.

The main street is C Street.

You can stroll down C Street and visit the likes of the Fourth Ward School Museum, Cafe Del Rio, Virginia City Jerky, Wild Horse Gallery, Comstock Firemen’s Museum, Tahoe House (a hotel), Washoe Club Museum & Saloon, Garters and Bloomers, Grant’s General Store, Virginia City Mercantile, Red’s Old Fashioned Candies, Comstock Bandido (clothes), Palace Restaurant & Saloon, Silver Queen (another hotel), Bucket of Blood Saloon, Priscilla Pennyworth’s Emporium, Red Dog Saloon, The Way It Was Museum, Buzzard Creek Collectibles and much more.

The name of this place was particularly apt.

I hadn’t come to Virginia City to shop. Rather, I sought out St. Mary’s in the Mountains Catholic Church on E Street. Considering that the town is built on the side of a slope, it was a walk downhill to get there.

Completed in 1870 and rebuilt after the fire in ’75. I was glad to find it still open for the day.

Nearby is the more modest St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. It wasn’t open.

Nice view from next to the church, though. Note the gazebo. What was it Mark Twain said about gazebos? They’re the mark of civilization, even in rough-and-tumble Nevada? Well, maybe he didn’t say that.

Soon I visited Silver Terrace Cemetery, which is on the edge of town. You don’t have to go far to get there, but it is a bit of a walk once you’re at the entrance.

Worth the effort. Finally, a cemetery with a distinctive local name. I’m glad its organizers didn’t pick Greenwood or Woodland or something else completely at odds with Nevada geography.

Not a lot of large memorials, or many trees, but the place has character. And some contour.

“Very few of the adults entombed here are native to Nevada, which offers a window into the cultural melting pot that was drawn to the glamour of the largest silver strike in U.S. history,” Travel Nevada notes. Glamour? More likely, they wanted to get rich.

“Most of who worked the Comstock were immigrants… nobody famous is buried here, just those who devoted their lives to developing Comstock Lode.”

North Pole, Alaska

Posted on August 9, 2021 by admin

Here’s a question I’ve never considered at all before, for any reason: Where is the world’s largest Santa Claus statue? Guinness World Records and other sources put it in Portugal, where the municipality of Águeda erected a 69-foot Claus made of aluminum and iron and LED lighting in time for Christmas 2016.

Yet other sources assert that the 42-foot-tall, 900-pound fiberglass Santa statue in North Pole, Alaska, deserves the honor, as a more permanent fixture. It is definitely older, having graced the Fairbanks suburb since 1983 after making its way up from the Lower 48 (Seattle, specifically) in a tale told by Roadside America.

I don’t have an opinion about the champion Santa statue. I did see the North Pole Santa, though, not long before I drove down to Denali NP.

Santa stands at the Santa Claus House in North Pole, pop. 2,090 or so. I couldn’t come to greater Fairbanks and not see that. The establishment dates from nearly 70 years ago in the early days of the town, which supposedly renamed itself North Pole to attract a toy factory that never materialized (“Made at North Pole” could be stamped on such toys.) One Con Miller and his wife Nellie capitalized on the name, however, by calling their trading post Santa Claus House.

These days the place isn’t particularly a trading post, but most definitely a tourist attraction, still owned by the Miller family. I came myself exactly because it is a tourist attraction.

Santa-themed murals decorate the exterior walls.

Inside, as you’d expect, is a large retail store devoted to Christmas decorations and other holiday paraphernalia.

Not as large as the Bronner’s Christmas Wonderland in Frankenmuth, Michigan, but pretty impressive all the same. In one corner, a Santa and an elf were standing by, waiting for children to visit. I understand that a Santa always stands by at the store, no matter what time of the year it is.

Santa Claus House might be the main tourist attraction in North Pole, but other parts of the city play to the theme. For instance, visible from the highway is Universal Welding, and its locally themed sign. Local street names include Santa Claus Lane (what else could that be?), Snowman Lane, Mistletoe Drive, Kris Kringle Drive and Donner and Blitzen drives.

Then there’s the North Pole post office.

I had lunch at a diner in North Pole, Country Cafe. A nice ham and cheese sandwich. The place didn’t have a Christmas theme, but rather model military airplanes. No surprise, really. Eielson Air Force Base isn’t far down the Richardson Highway (Alaska 2) from North Pole. Santa Claus House and its tourist draw is nice, but I’m sure it’s Eielson that supports the local economy.

Seen at Walmart

Posted on March 30, 2021 by admin

People of Walmart has been around a while, but I don’t go to Walmart enough to see anything that strange. Until I did. Not long ago, I spotted a fellow sitting at the post-vaccination waiting area in a Walmart, paying attention to his phone. Nothing odd about that.

He had a swastika tattooed on his face (right-facing 卐), and I have to say that’s just a little odd. I didn’t have my good camera with me, so it’s a little hard to see. But it was there.

He might claim that it’s an ancient symbol of spirituality, and of course he’d be right. Except that it was so completely shanghaied by the Nazis that the symbol in our time comes with, let’s say, some insurmountable baggage. Yeah, he said to himself at one point, I want that inked on my face.

Machines Come, Machines Go

Posted on December 1, 2020 by admin

About a month ago, our long-serving toaster oven gave up the mechanical ghost after how many years? No one could remember. Eventually, its heating element refused to heat, so we left it out for the junkmen at the same time as the standard trash, and sure enough it vanished in the night.

We replaced it in the modern way, ordering another one online. A brand I didn’t know, but since toaster ovens aren’t a major outlay, research was minimal.

Soon a Mueller brand device arrived and was put into service toasting wheat-based edibles. It was not a smart machine with a wifi connection to send data on our bread usage to the National Association of Wheat Growers, the Wheat Foods Council or the North American Millers’ Association, or a machine equipped with AI to encourage us to eat more toast. Just a box with a heating element and knobs to make it go.

For about a month, the new box worked without problem. Except for a squeaking from the veeblefetzer that keeps the oven door shut, every time we opened and closed it. The squeaky part is circled. The noise got worse as time went on.

Soon the squeak came with resistance by the part, and on the Monday before Thanksgiving, as I opened the door I heard a loud snap. The part broke and the door would no longer close, as seen in the photos above.

Inquires were made and arrangements arranged, and before long I ventured into a retail store, all masked up, to return the item at an online return point and then pick up a replacement elsewhere in the store. Hadn’t been in that particular store in a long time, since early 2020 at least. Not many other people were around.

The online retailer wouldn’t or couldn’t replace it with another Mueller, so I took a refund and bought a Black + Decker replacement. That was the brand we had before the Mueller, so I hope it will last a while. Certainly more than a month. So far so good — no suspicious veeblefetzer noises.

Nihil Aeternum Est, Shoe Edition

Posted on June 24, 2019 by admin

Rain and more rain. Lush grass. But at least the temps now seem to be 70 F or higher all the time, as befitting summer. Not that this weekend was “the beginning of summer.” Just the solstice.

Saturday was clear and warm, and I picked out these shoes for the day.
I’d acquired them in March at a resale shop, where they looked only a bit worn, but had forgotten about them until I was looking through a pile of shoes on Saturday, finding them in a small bag with the receipt still inside (the only reason I knew when I bought them). Most of the shoes in this house — the vast majority — are not mine. If I could acquire two pairs of shoes, one formal, one for comfortable walks, that would last the rest of my life, I would do that.

Of course, I can’t do that because shoes wear out. Sometimes I buy new, sometimes at resale, though that’s tricky, since my size is a little large. Anyway, I wore the pictured shoes during a drive to another suburb and for a little walking around. Not far at all — maybe half an hour walking all together, if that, plus time sitting.

As I drove home, the bottom of one of the shoes felt a little odd. Since I was driving, I couldn’t inspect them closely. When I got home, I did.

The sole of one had almost completely separated from the rest of the shoe.
Just like that. I didn’t kick anything violently or bang the shoe on a table Khrushchev style or do anything else that might account for a sudden separation.

I neglected to check the brand, but I did note that the shoes were made in Portugal. Make what you will of that. For all I know, Portugal has a reputation for the worst shoes in the EU. Or maybe it just exports the weaker product out of the euro-zone.

The person who owned the shoes before me probably wore them exactly to their natural limit and then, luckless me, I bought the one-hoss shay the day before it fell apart. Then again, I think I spent all of $4, so the loss wasn’t vast.

Austin Color by Night & Day

Posted on July 18, 2016 by admin

If it hasn’t been published already, a sharp photographer needs to do a coffee table book about Austin’s neon signs. There are many. Some are striking. Neon’s underrated anyway.

The Austin Motel on South Congress, where we stayed during the first days of July, has a distinctive one.
The hipster coffee shop attached to the Austin Motel has a sign with that mid-century neon vibe. It might even be a rehabbed version of a period sign. Neon was disdained then as commercial light pollution, if I’ve interpreted the likes of “The Sound of Silence” correctly.
The following are more examples of SoCo neon, the only neon zone I took pictures in during this visit. But we saw plenty more elsewhere in Austin.

On the morning of July 4, before the heat cranked up, we went to see the graffiti’d walls on Baylor St. just of Lamar Blvd. in Austin, formally called the Hope Outdoor Gallery. It’s a series of walls and other surfaces on a hillside that have been painted and repainted over the last five years.

The place is an accident of the recession, since the raw space was provided by a failed condo development. A lot of condos failed after 2008, though not so many left behind half-completed walls.

Atlas Obscura tells us that “the failed condo walls were at first a magnet for both street artists and vandals. However, around 2011 Andi Scull Cheatham, with the support of the two primary owners at the time, Vic Ayad of Castle Hill Partners and architect Dick Clark, cleaned the space up and turned it into a semi-official outdoor gallery space.

“Scull Cheatham then enlisted world-famous street artist Shepard Fairey, who posted a number of large pieces on one of the biggest exposed walls for the initial launch. Since then artists from all over the city, and world, continue to cover every inch of exposed concrete…”

Such as this fellow, at work on one of the walls when we were there.

“Currently HOG is organized by the HOPE Campaign, SprATX and, the now sole owner, Vic Ayad,” continues Atlas Obscura. “The art changes quickly and you’ll often get a chance to see artists in action so multiple visits are recommended. Mr. Ayad continues to support HOG, but its long-term future is uncertain so see it while you can.”

The place attracts a lot of photographers, too.
And climbers on the higher walls.
The place has remarkable visual texture, whichever way you look.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Tag Archives: retail