A Reg Manning Travelcard — No. 15

Posted on September 15, 2016 by admin

Lately, thanks to the Special Collections & University Archives of Wichita State University, I’ve learned that “Reginald Manning was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on April 5, 1905. He moved to Phoenix, Arizona, in 1919 and studied art in high school. Shortly after graduation, Reginald began working for the Arizona Republic, starting work on May 1, 1926. He worked there for the next 50 years.

“Manning’s job at the newspaper originally was a photographer and spot artist. Before too long, he was drawing daily editorial cartoons and a weekly full-page review of the news called ‘The Big Parade.’ He quit drawing the ‘Parade” in 1948 in order to devote more time to his editorial cartoons. In 1951, Manning won a Pulitzer for ‘Hats.’

“In addition to his lectures, Manning has published many books. Some of the books that he produced are A Cartoon Guide to Arizona (1938), What Kinda Cactus Issat? (1941), From Tee to Cup (1954), and What Is Arizona Really Like? (1968).

“Reg Manning was one of the most prominent conservative voices in cartooning and has won numerous awards for his work. Besides winning a Pulitzer Prize, he has also won the Freedom Foundation’s Abraham Lincoln award two years in succession.”

He died in 1986. Somehow I missed knowing a thing about him until recently, when I was looking through some cards I’d bought at a resale shop. Seems that he did gag postcards, too. At least 15 of them.

His style seems familiar. Probably I’ve seen his work without attaching a name to it. The card I have, copyrighted 1942, was mailed from Flagstaff in March 1946, addressed to a Master Georgie, so I’ll assume it was from a relative or family friend to a child — no one signed the card.

He or she did check off some of the lines on the card, which is amusing. Guess that was the intention. Wonder whether Georgie — later George — kept the card his whole life from the age of around 10 (say) to much more recent times, when it wound up in a box of cards at a resale shop. Maybe George, lately around 80, passed on not long ago, and his heirs had no use for gag cards from the 1940s. All speculation, but sometimes that’s just the thing for a found object in your possession.

Queen Elizabeth Cake, NW Suburban Style

Posted on September 14, 2016 by admin

A recent birthday cake in our house.

One candle because no one could be bothered to come up with some other combination. “It’s for your first half-century,” I told Yuriko.

It’s called a Queen Elizabeth Cake, a creation of the always-talented Deerfield Bakery here in the northwest suburbs. The bakery’s web site tells me that it’s “yellow cake filled with strawberries, Bavarian cream and sliced bananas.” That jibes with my experience of eating some of it.

Also, “a single strawberry crowns this dessert, created by Henry Schmitt in honor of Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Chicago in 1959.” That would be part of the Queen’s tour along the spanking-new St. Lawrence Seaway that year. (A bit of major infrastructure that should be better known; I’d bet that only a small number of kids in Lilly’s dorm, just to pick one sample of people that age, know what it is.)

Henry Schmitt, coming from a line of bakers from Germany, founded Deerfield Bakery in metro Chicago in the 20th century. Apparently his QE Cake was an idiosyncratic take, since elsewhere (such as allreipes.com), I’ve read that the term refers to “a date nut cake… crowned with a broiled coconut topping.”

That sounds good too, but it isn’t anything like the Deerfield Bakery creation.

Which is very, very good.

Schaumburg Town Square, Augmented

Posted on September 13, 2016 by admin

Before she left for school, Lilly told me that people spend time at Schaumburg Town Square on warm evenings — all of them, this time of year — playing Pokemon Go. Not long ago I took a look myself, to see if she was pulling my leg.

She wasn’t.

Among other things, Schaumburg Town Square, which includes the township library and some retail space, features a small grass-surfaced amphitheater, and the game seemed especially popular there. I watched for a while to make sure that’s what they were doing, and confirmed it for certain when I heard a couple fellows talking about it. These guys.

As The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy said about Earth, “mostly harmless.”

I Went And I Believe

Posted on September 12, 2016 by admin

Still green, still summerish. I even saw people practicing baseball in the park over the weekend, though most evenings it’s now peewee footballers. Goldenrod has made its appearance in vast thick waves in some places, but only as a few sprigs in my back yard. Even so, that’s the first time I remember seeing goldenrod in the back yard.

Spotted in a big box retail store parking lot recently: a Jetta with a license plate frame that said on the bottom, “I WENT AND I BELIEVE.” From a normal standing position, the top part of the frame wasn’t visible, so I bent down to see just what the first part of that terse declaration might be. “Delphi” seemed unlikely.

Digression: According to Paths from Ancient Greece by Carol Thomas (1988), the last Delphic oracle was given to Julian the Apostate in 362. Wonder what that could have been. Maybe, “Dude, you’re hosed.”

The top of the plate frame said, CREATION MUSEUM. Must be the place in Petersburg, Ky., that also recently opened an interpretation of Noah’s Ark elsewhere in the state. I had to look into that a little further, and the owner of the car paid $30 to get in, or $60 for the “museum” and the Ark combo ticket, and who knows how much for the license plate frame.

I was a little surprised to discover that the Creation Museum also includes a planetarium. The CM web site says, “Sit back and be amazed as the planetarium projector displays vividly realistic images upon a 30-foot-diameter dome, allowing stargazers to travel anywhere in the universe. Enjoy learning from scientists and astronomers who affirm young-earth creation and explain how what we see in the night sky confirms God’s Word in Genesis.”

I can’t be civil about this any more. Morons. Does God in His wisdom want wide human variety? Including morons? I have to wonder.

Scenes of Post-People’s Republic Mongolia

Posted on September 11, 2016 by admin

The part of rural Mongolia that we saw in September 1994 — in and near Gorkhi-Terelj National Park, 20 or so miles from Ulaanbaatar — looked a lot like this. Ulaanbaatar wasn’t a sprawling kind of place in those days, unless you count the large neighborhoods composed of thousands of ger (yurts).
In places the trees were fairly dense, with streams flowing through the land. Most of all, though, it felt remote. Even more remote than the arguably further-from-absolutely-everything Cape Leeuwin in Western Australia, because the infrastructure was so much more developed there, as far SW as you could go on the entire continent.

Ulaanbaatar didn’t feel so remote, though in ’94 sometimes livestock were seen wandering the streets. I wonder if that’s now a thing of the past for the Mongolian capital, as traffic inevitability increases. How do I know that traffic has increased in 20-plus years? That’s just one of those things that happens.

These prayer wheels were at the Gandantegchinlen (Gandan) Monastery in the city.
From the looks of more recent pictures, some restoration work has been done since then. At least, I’m fairly sure that the stock photo I linked to was taken at about the same place I stood; it certainly looks like it, taking into account various renovations and additions over the years.

In the city, we also visited the Mongolian Natural History Museum, known the world over for its dinosaur artifacts. “The museum is particularly well known for its dinosaur and other paleontological exhibits, among which the most notable are a nearly complete skeleton of a late Cretaceous Tarbosaurus tyrannosaurid and broadly contemporaneous nests of Protoceratops eggs,” Wiki says. I remember those eggs.

And, of course, the big skeletons. You could go up on a balcony for a look at them.

Photography involved paying an extra fee. Or so the museum staff told us at the entrance. None of us paid such a fee, and pretty much everyone in our group took pictures, though as you can see, the light was lousy. I don’t even think any staff were in the big dinosaur room with us, keeping an eye on us. Things were lax. Hope nobody over the years took advantage of that to take anything besides pictures.

The Wheeling Superdawg ’16

Posted on September 8, 2016 by admin

More than six years ago, I wrote, “What to do after touring a mansion exuding poshness, if you happen to be hungry? Go to a hot dog stand.

“Not just any hot dog stand, but the drive-in Superdawg. Not the original, which is on the Northwest side of Chicago, but the Wheeling, Ill., iteration that opened in January. It was on our way home.”

On Saturday, I noticed that the Wheeling Superdawg was on the way to the Chicago Botanic Garden, more or less. So we went again, the first time in more than six years. Before we got there, Yuriko said she didn’t remember any such place. But as soon as we arrived, she did. It’s hard to forget these characters.

Those are the rooftop boy and girl dogs — awfully heteronormative of them, some nags might say — but they’re also featured in a lot of other places, including on the packaging and the napkins. They’re also on the sign that faces the road (Milwaukee Ave. in Wheeling). These anthropomorphic hot dogs rotate slowly, unlike the static ones on the roof.
This time I had the original Superdawg. I forgot to order it without mustard, but other than that I liked it. Yuriko enjoyed her hamburger.

Back in ’10 I noted: “Each order station also has a sign that says: ‘We’re super sorry, but we’re unable to accept credit cards because of our unique drive in/carhop service…’ We went inside anyway, and they don’t accept cards there either. Retro indeed.”

I can report that in 2016, inside the restaurant at least, all manner of credit and debit cards are now accepted. Guess they figured the all-cash model was losing them some customers.

One more thing today: I’d be remiss if I didn’t note the 50th anniversary of Star Trek, though I have only the vaguest memories of it as a prime-time show in the late ’60s. One of the stations in San Antonio started showing it in the after-school slot in 1973, when I was in junior high. That I remember. The first episode the station aired was “Devil in the Dark.”

The series, and all its successor iterations, have been hit or miss over the years. Its starting concept — the pitch Roddenberry supposedly made — was “Wagon Train to the Stars.” Does anybody remember Wagon Train any more?

My own fondest memory of the show I’ve written about before: “More than 30 years ago, I spent a few days camped out in a dorm room at MIT. I noticed a few things while there, such as that everyone on the hall went to the common room to watch an afternoon showing of Star Trek, and everyone knew the lines. (The original series; because this was 1982, the only series. Patrick Stewart was still just a Shakespearean actor who’d played Sejanus for the BBC.).”

Non-Plants in the Chicago Botanic Garden

Posted on September 7, 2016 by admin

I thought of “Manmade Things in the Chicago Botanic Garden” as a title, but in a real sense everything in a highly cultivated garden is manmade, even if the raw materials of the displays are descended from naturally occurring plants. Artificial selection invented the tea rose, after all.

The Chicago Botanic Garden includes many things besides plants. Such as this sculpture in the Heritage Garden.

It’s instantly recognizable as a Robert Berks bubble-gum statue, in this case dating from 1982. Based on a casual search, his statues seem to be esteemed these days, especially now that he’s dead, but I’m with the art critics who were upset about the Einstein statue in DC when it was new. They’re ugly. That’s my two-word critique.

Anyway, the subject is fitting for a garden, since it’s Carolus Linnæus. In fact, I’ve seen his carved face before in such a place, but a long way from metro Chicago.
That’s Linnæus at the Adelaide Botanic Garden in 1991. A much more conventional bust, certainly, and maybe not that interesting. But at least it isn’t ugly. More about the Chicago-area Linnæus statue is at the always delightful Public Art in Chicago.

This is “Boy Gardener” in the Rose Garden.

By an Oak Park sculptor, Margot Mcmahon. Straightforward, unpretentious.

In the Japanese Garden, a yukimi lantern.

Supposedly it looks elegant covered with snow, and I’ll bet it does. I don’t think I’ll visit the gardens in winter to confirm that, though.

Also in the Japanese Garden, the Zigzag Bridge, with a selfie in progress, and a woman taking pictures of carp.

The explanation for its shape is that evil spirits can only travel in straight lines, and thus can’t follow you onto the island. What is it about evil spirits? They’re scared of noise, can’t follow a slight zigzag, and seem to have a lot of other handicaps to keep them from their malevolent work.

Here’s one of the bridges between the main part of the garden and Evening Island. Not so distinctive by itself, but it is shaded by enormous willows.
The other bridge to Evening Island has a name, the Serpentine, for obvious reasons. With more willows.
On Evening Island itself, there’s this structure rising from the flora.

The Theodore C. Butz Memorial Carillon, to give its formal name, installed in 1986. A sign at the base of the structure says, “Crafted in Holland, the Garden’s carillon is one of a few hand-played carillons in the United States. The cast bronze bells have a range of four octaves, and are played using a large keyboard. The smallest of the 48 bells weighs 24 pounds, and the largest weighs two and a half tons.”

No carillonneur seemed to be on duty, but we did hear it ring the hour, so I guess it can be set for automatic as well as manual.

The Chicago Botanic Garden

Posted on September 6, 2016 by admin

The Chicago Botanic Garden is actually in Glenco, Illinois, but it would be nitpicky to insist that it be called the Greater Chicago Botanic Garden, or even the Chicagoland Botanic Garden, though that has a ring to it. Glenco is a northern suburb, as far north as you can get in Cook County. The road that leads to the garden’s entrance is in fact Lake-Cook Road, more or less the border between Lake and Cook counties.

All of the gardens’ 385 acres are south of that road, and are property of the Forest Preserve District of Cook County (just like Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery, but far away geographically and otherwise). On Saturday, Yuriko and I went to the garden because we’ve long been fond of it, because it was a warm, pleasant day, and because we couldn’t remember the last time we went. So long ago, I think, that we pushed Ann around in a stroller (later than 2004, maybe, but not much). This time Ann stayed home.

It’s a large garden, offering a multitude of plants in a variety of settings, including 27 display gardens, such as the Crescent Garden.

And the three-acre Rose Garden, whose flowers surround a popular lawn.
“The Rose Garden — one of the most popular spots at the Chicago Botanic Garden — also gives context and history to the storied flowers, while celebrating the best among them,” the garden’s web site asserts. “Consider the old garden roses (also called antique or heirloom roses), which were cultivated before 1867… The History of Roses Bed, which tracks the development of the rose from the earliest wild rose to the modern hybrids, also provides context. And, for inspiration, the Rose Garden features All-America Rose Selections winners, along with the best rose varieties for Midwest gardens.”

Is 1867 particularly important in the history of roses? Turns out it is. Again, I quote from the Chicago Botanic Garden, which has a brief history of roses on its site. “To bring order to the wild world of roses, the American Rose Society has classified all roses into two major categories: old garden roses (sometimes called antique or heirloom roses) and modern roses. The old roses are those that were cultivated in distinct classes prior to 1867, and the modern roses are those that followed. The year 1867 is an important one in rose history, since it marks the debut of the hybrid tea rose.” Ah. Just another thing we inherited from the corybantic 19th century.

Among the many blooms evident even in September at the Chicago Botanic Garden:

Bourbon RoseRosa Champlain
And one of those thoroughly modern hybrid tea roses (Rosa Medallion) Elsewhere in the garden is the shady Waterfall Garden, whose centerpiece is a 45-foot cascade.
The Japanese Garden could stand alone as a destination. Part of it is an inaccessible island (at least to casual visitors) called Horaijima, or the Island of Everlasting Happiness. It’s fitting that no one can go there.
Another part of the Japanese Garden includes a Shoin (書院) House, patterned after the studies of priests and scholars, with antecedents as far back as the Muromachi era (ca. 1336 to 1573), though this particular house was finished in 1982.
Among many other plants, the Evening Island sports enormous grass.

“Evening Island is an example of the New American Garden style of landscape design, which features vast naturalistic sweeps of low-maintenance grasses, perennials, and roses to create a living tapestry,” the garden says. “The garden is sited, appropriately, between the formality of the English Walled Garden and the wildness of the native Prairie.”

The English Walled Garden was the site of a wedding on the afternoon of September 3, so it was closed to other visitors. I remember that it’s a lovely place, though.

We wandered through a number of other sites at the garden as well, such as the Sensory Garden, Spider Island, the Circle Garden, and bonsai collection and the greenhouses. We didn’t see many other places. It’s like a major art museum in that way: too much for any single visit.

I did start taking notes of some of the plant names that interested me. With a digital camera and a lot of signs identifying plants, that was easy. Some examples of common names, not scientific names, just to keep things simpler: Siberian Bugloss, Virginia Waterleaf, Mountain Bluet, Columbine Meadowrue, Southern Blue Monkshood, Fairy Bells, Chocolate Dragon Smartweed [sounds like something you can buy in a shop in Seattle], Black Adder Hyssop, Cranberry Cotoneaster, Venice Masterwort, Purple Rain Jacob’s Ladder, Floss Flower, and Art Deco Zinnia.

I have to publish a picture of that last one.

Wish I had a memory for plant names and characteristics.

Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery (Or, I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghost)

Posted on September 1, 2016 by admin

By the end of August, summer’s a little tiring, but I’m also not glad to see it go. Odd how that works. Back to posting again on September 6.

As if I hadn’t seen enough cemetery grounds for the day last Saturday after I visited the Oak Woods Cemetery, I decided before going home to fulfill a longstanding ambition and see Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery in south suburban Bremen Township. Going all the way to the south suburbs just to see Bachelor’s Grove has always been a stretch, but I was already further south than I usually go, making the cemetery relatively close.

Bachelor’s Grove is known for one thing locally, and maybe even in the wider world: ghosts. Graveyards.com’s Illinois page, which usually includes fairly sober assessments of burial grounds, says the following:

A small, abandoned graveyard in the southwest suburbs has been called the most haunted place in Chicago — and one of the most haunted places worldwide.

This is Bachelor’s Grove.

WARNING: Do not go in or near Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery at night. Do not go in or near Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery at Halloween, or for several weeks before or after that date. You will be arrested and charged with trespassing.

The author of graveyards.com recommends that you don’t go to Bachelor’s Grove at all.

How do we know the place is haunted? Same way we know anywhere is haunted: people say it is. If I sound skeptical, I am. Not necessarily about the reality of noncorporal beings, but about the tales of Bachelor’s Grove. It’s easy to tell stories about an abandoned graveyard in the woods, especially if those woods happen to be in a suburban area where teens are looking for places to hang out undisturbed.

On the other hand, I’m not skeptical that forest preserve police — Bachelor’s Grove is on forest preserve land in our time — might go looking for nighttime visitors. The cemetery has an indisputable history of wankers showing up to vandalize the stones. Otherwise I can’t see that visiting the cemetery counts as trespass, since the point of a forest preserve is public use.

To get to Bachelor’s Grove, you park at one of the Rubio Woods Forest Preserve parking lots on the north side of the Midlothian Turnpike (143rd), and then cross that road not far to the west. A trail leads into the woods from the south edge of the turnpike. A sign on a chain between two posts says NO ENTRY, but I took that to mean vehicular traffic, since the path is wide enough for a car.
I’ve read that this is the former route of the Midlothian Turnpike. If so, that would have taken traffic next to the cemetery, which is about a fifth- or a quarter-mile walk away. The cemetery itself presumably predates any modern paved road, having been founded, according to Graveyards.com, in 1864. The most recent burial was supposedly in 1965, but in any case it never was a large or populous necropolis. Instead of a city of the dead, more like a hamlet of the dead.

Older pictures of the cemetery, such as at Graveyards.com, depict a unkempt place, but on August 27, 2016, I found a well-maintained graveyard, at least in terms of undergrowth control, surrounded by a tall, newish chain-link fence, but with no gate. There are no signs telling you the name of the place or anything else.

Could be that the forest preserve is now taking a “broken windows” approach to discouraging vandalism. That is, if the grounds look cared for, people are less like to do further damage. There’s still plenty of evidence of earlier damage, however, such as tumbled-down tombstones.
Evidence of wankers with spray paint, too.
Many of the stones merely look old and weather-worn, some of them beyond deciphering any names or other information.
Others have held up better, or maybe are more recent replacements.
The cemetery clearly has living visitors who do the opposite of vandalism. People have left items for the “Infant Daughter” at the largest stone in the graveyard, with the name Fulton on the other side. According to Graveyards.com, a descendant of these Fultons was the last trustee of the cemetery, turning it over to the forest preserve district in 1976.
I was the only living person at Bachelor’s Grove early that afternoon, but as I was leaving the forest preserve, I saw a man and a woman headed in the direction of the cemetery. So I guess there’s often a trickle of curious visitors. Unless I saw a couple of really life-like haints, down to the sunglasses and baseball caps.