The General 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 General 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.

A Little More Rockford

Posted on April 19, 2016 by admin

The gardens outside the Nicholas Conservatory in Rockford would be worth a trip back in a month or two, when they’re in full flower. On Saturday, the floral exuberance of spring was just beginning. Even so, there were a few other things to see, such as a statue of a man taking a picture.And, at that moment, an actual man taking pictures.

The statue, by the way, is by Seward Johnson, whose work I’ve seen elsewhere. This one is called “Sight Seeing,” and dates from 1991. The camera depicted would have been old fashioned even then. I have an inkling that Johnson isn’t popular among art theory specialists, for being shockingly derivative, or not smashing any paradigms, or something.

After the conservatory, we repaired to the Stockholm Inn, an enormous restaurant in Rockford. Word is — relayed by the Internet — that it too is very popular, though its offering of superb yet standard Swedish food at reasonable prices might put off some foodies.
After all, the place doesn’t offer farm-to-table fair-traded locally sourced artisanal Swede-tastic regional cuisine, guaranteed to be authentic, massaged and sublimated to gastro-perfection. Try the Nordic fusion gravlax tacos; they’re to die for.

No, the thing to order — the thing that I ordered — are the Swedish pancakes, a close cousin of the humble crêpe, infused with butter, vivified by syrup. Thin, smooth, sweet, wonderful. What they had for breakfast in the mead halls of yore, since one has to eat as well as drink.

Rockford Flora

Posted on April 18, 2016 by admin

Like any good conservatory, the Nicholas Conservatory near the banks of the Rock River in Rockford, Ill., is lush with greenery, and complete with winding paths and a water feature.

Some of the greenery vaults toward the glass ceiling.

That tall specimen, incidentally, is a Carpoxylon Palm (Carpoxylon macrospermum), which is indigenous to the Vanuatu archipelago. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anything native to Vanuatu before.

Other palms reach out in all directions with their enormous ears.

Naturally, there are also plenty of flowing plants.

The conservatory featured a wall of orchids that was a particularly popular place to take people’s pictures.

I took a few myself.

The Nicholas Conservatory & Gardens

Posted on April 17, 2016 by admin

As a destination from the northwestern suburbs of Chicago, Rockford has a number of advantages. For one thing, it isn’t that far. It’s easy to drive there, visit one place at least, maybe eat a meal, and then come home. But it’s far enough not to be in the northwestern suburbs. There are still wide-open farm fields between here and there, and some smaller towns. Someday metro Chicago and metro Rockford might well conurb, to make up a verb, but that hasn’t happened yet.

None of that would matter if there weren’t a few interesting places to see in Rockford, but there are. Such as the Klehm Arboretum, a fine warm-weather destination, or the Anderson Gardens. The Rock River is also worth a look, with its various pedestrian-oriented amenities.

I wrote in 2003 about our visit to the riverside, “We drove a short ways north of downtown, looking for a more expansive park at which to finish off the afternoon. We found it on the other (west) bank of the Rock River, at the Sinnissippi Gardens and Park, which had a greenhouse that was already closed…”

These days, the greenhouse is permanently closed. It was replaced by the Nicholas Conservatory, which opened in 2011. I’d read about its development and opening, but didn’t get around to taking a look at it until Saturday, when we drove to Rockford exactly for that reason. Saturday, April 16, 2016 here in northern Illinois was as warm and pleasant as a spring day can be, the complete opposite of only a week earlier, the miserable cold April 9. That was an impetus to go.

We weren’t disappointed by views of the Rock River (more lyrically, the Sinnissippi River) from near the new conservatory. People were out along the riverside trail, but not a throng of them.

Waterfowl were out too.
A stone’s throw from the river — if you’re inclined toward that kind of mischief — is the conservatory.
The facility’s web site is a little thin on facts, but it does say that it’s “the third largest conservatory in Illinois, offering an 11,000-square-foot plant exhibition area complete with water features, seating areas, and sculptures, all in a tropical plant setting.”

I’d guess that the Lincoln Park Conservatory and the Garfield Park Conservatory, both in Chicago, are both larger — I’m fairly certain of that — but whatever its relative size, the Nicholas Conservatory is an elegant construction, and LEED Gold besides. More about its creation here.

Wisconsin, Home of Funny Hats

Posted on April 5, 2016 by admin

Various presidential candidates have been stumping just north of here recently, and when I opened Google News this morning, a Washington Post item, complete with Mars Cheese Castle photo, was prominent. I’ve never seen the junior Senator from Texas in person, but I have seen that cheesehead mouse.

The Senator reportedly declined to wear a cheesehead. Wearegreenbay.com quoted him as saying “there is an ironclad rule of politics which is no funny hats… And any hat is by definition defined as a funny hat.”

This from the man who wants to (ultimately) be in charge of the Bureau of Funny Hats, which is part of the Commerce Department, along with the Silly Walks Administration. I don’t think Ronald Reagan was afraid to wear funny hats.

Miyajima (Itsukushima) During Cherry Blossom Season

Posted on April 3, 2016 by admin

Here in northern Illinois, the grass is greening, small buds are budding and birds are making more noise. A few new-generation insects are in view. It’s even warm and sunny on some days, such as today, which followed a miserable, dank, cold Saturday. Such is the seasonal seesaw.

As this map and chart explain, early April is peak cherry blossom season in the Kansai and a few other parts of Japan. That’s when I saw the blossoms in Kyoto — the first year I was there — plus in parts of Osaka, including the crowded National Mint grounds but also the little-known but strikingly beautiful Osaka Gogoku Shrine in Suminoe Ward (which everyone simply called Suminoe Shrine).

In early April 1993, we went to Hiroshima for a weekend, and visited Miyajima (宮島), an island in the Inland Sea near the city. Formally called Itsukushima (厳島), it’s home to a Shinto shrine complex and best known for its monumental torii out in the water, which happened to be behind scaffolding when were were there.

Fortunately, the cherry blossoms were in full, unencumbered view. Temple deer were around, too.

I didn’t know until recently that Itsukushima is a World Heritage Site, put on the list after we were there, in 1996. UNESCO notes: “The present shrine dates from the 12th century and the harmoniously arranged buildings reveal great artistic and technical skill. The shrine plays on the contrasts in colour and form between mountains and sea and illustrates the Japanese concept of scenic beauty, which combines nature and human creativity.”

The Krannert Art Museum

Posted on March 29, 2016 by admin

Time to praise university art museums: generally unpretentious, inexpensive and not so large that you can’t have a good look-see in a short time. One of the places Lilly and I visited at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign was the Krannert Art Museum, which has ten galleries and art ranging from ancient Egypt and Pre-Columbian to much more recent items.

One so recent that it was created using an iPhone: “A Lexicon of Dusk.”
Over the last six years, a Houston artist named Ruth Robbins took her iPhone out and took pictures at dusk. From these, she made a series of 26 different postcards, copies of which were on a long shelf at the gallery. That’s the artwork.

“Printed as postcards for the viewer to take away — a distributed work of art in line with conceptual art practices — the images show richly colored ambiguous skies and whatever else she happened to have seen at the time: lights low on the horizon, an electricity pole, a snow-covered landscape, an equestrian statue,” the sign near the cards says. “Longitude and latitude coordinates are documented on each image…” That, and an exact date and time when the image was made.

The best part? Postcards are free to take, adds the sign. I took one of each. I’ve already mailed a few.

In the room adjoining the postcard exhibit was an amusing series called “The First and Last of the Modernists,” by Lorraine O’Grady, pairing images of Baudelaire with Michael Jackson.

I’ve had a soft spot for Baudelaire since an entertaining acquaintance of mine recited “Be Drunk” — I think it was this translation — at a party at our house late in my college years, ca. 1982. As for the King of Pop, I can’t claim to be a fan, but I respect his reach. I heard his songs walking down the streets of the 10 European countries I visited in the summer of ’83, even East Germany, but maybe not the Vatican City, and even then I might have heard something from a transistor radio someone was carrying at the Piazza San Pietro.

Another room sported some African art. Not just pre-Scramble works from lost states and misty kingdoms, but more modern items. These are two of a particularly striking series, “Seven Lines From Djwartou” by Yelimane Fall.

I appreciated these visually, not as someone who can read Arabic. The artist-calligrapher hails from Senegal, and is a devotee of one Sheikh Amadou Bamba, founder of the Sufi brotherhood Mourides in that country, and who wrote the poem “Djawartou” in the early 20th century, among many other things.

As the BBC notes, “Senegal’s most powerful men are not politicians, but the leaders of the country’s Islamic Sufi brotherhoods, to which a very large proportion of Senegalese belong, and whose influence pervades every aspect of Senegalese life.”

Seems that the Mourides are a very big deal in their corner of the world and, from what I can tell from a brief look, eschew the poisons of Wahhabism, and stress hard work among their members (work hard, make money, support the sect). And there are enclaves of them elsewhere. According to Religion News, “Their dictum, ‘pray as if you will die tomorrow and work as if you will live for ever,’ has brought the Mourides economic success wherever they have settled. In New York, the Mourides established their own community, Little Senegal, and July 28 has officially been designated Sheikh Amadou Bamba day.”

Remarkable the things that go into making an image on the wall. I never knew any of that. I don’t expect to make a detailed study of Senegal, but it’s good to be reminded that there are whole other worlds here on Earth yet beyond one’s experience.

The University of Illinois During the 2016 Spring Break

Posted on March 28, 2016 by admin

On the afternoon of March 18, Lilly and I drove down to Champaign-Urbana, and on the next day, we took a look at the University of Illinois flagship campus, which happens to sprawl across both of those small towns. Since our visit, Lilly has decided to attend there in the fall. She’d been leaning toward it anyway. We’d only been there once before, briefly, during our return from the Downstate towns of Arthur and Arcola in the spring of 2007. So it was as if we’d never been there before, especially for her.

Spring break had just started at the university. That meant only a handful of students were around, including some who were clearly leaving. On one street on campus, buses were lined up and ready to take students to specifically marked destinations, mostly in the Chicago area. Spring break also meant, happily, that parking was free and easy.

Even so, we spent a lot of time on foot. Without much of a plan: sometimes new places call for the old random walkabout. Lilly will certainly learn all she needs to know about the place and more in the fullness of time. The campus has a lot of fine buildings, especially fronting the Main Quad, and I was especially taken with Foellinger Auditorium and its green dome at one end of that quad, though I didn’t quite get an image of its full domed glory.

The building dates from 1907 and was designed by Clarence H. Blackall, a Boston architect who did a lot of theaters, and if you read a list of them, very many didn’t survive the great age (that is, regrettable age) of knocking down old stuff, whose apogee came in the 1960s. The Foellinger has clearly endured, though I’ve read that it wasn’t up to stuff acoustically at first, and needed a lot more work. We didn’t pop inside for a look. Next time, maybe.

Not far away was the 185-foot McFarland Carillon, which dates only from 2009.
A Missouri firm called Peckham, Guyton, Albers & Viets, which seems to do a lot of higher ed work, designed the tower, which has 49 bells. We noticed bells ringing at half hours and quarter hours, sometimes, but I’m not sure it was the carillon.

Elsewhere we peeked inside the chapel at St. John’s Catholic Newman Center, which is part of a complex that includes Newman Hall and the Institute of Catholic Thought, and is the largest Newman Center in the country, according to Wiki. Dating from 1926, the chapel has a splendid interior. I explained to Lilly that it was named after Cardinal Newman, not Alfred E., but she didn’t know either of them.

Nearby is the Episcopal Chapel of Saint John the Devine, also a part of a campus ministry. I wanted to take a look in there too, but it was closed for the day.

Heading back to our parking space, we encountered one of the many pieces of public art on campus.There was no plaque nearby that I saw, but information is online. It’s full title is “Tree of Life Fantasy: Synopsis of the Book of Questions Concerning the World Order and/or the Order of Worlds,” by Alice Aycock. As we approached it, I figured it might be a massive sundial, as I’ve seen recently, but no.

This description lacquers on the art-ese pretty well, but it does rhetorically ask, “can we not comprehend the sculpture solely as an interesting, if baffling, assemblage of disparate elements?” Yes, we can. Interesting, but in my amateur opinion not baffling, because it’s mainly an interesting assemblage of disparate elements, though I’d say an interesting “combination of shapes,” since disparate is a ten-dollar word best saved for special occasions.

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 Oblates in San Antonio

Posted on March 23, 2016 by admin

The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate run the Oblate School of Theology on a sizable campus on the North Side of San Antonio, not far from where I grew up, and near some former regular haunts of mine. Even though the campus is on Oblate Dr., and I drove by that street often for years, I had no notion of its existence until this year.

On March 12, another pleasantly warm day, I went with Jay, my nephew Dees and his girlfriend Eden to take a look around the campus. A gilded St. Eugene de Mazenod greets you at the entrance, in front of the handsome Gayle and Tom Benson Theological Center.
Eugene de Mazenod founded the Oblates in post-revolutionary France 200 years ago. Tom Benson is best known as the billionaire owner of the New Orleans Saints, but anyone living in San Antonio in the last 50 years or so knows him as the owner of Tom Benson Chevrolet. In any case, he gives a lot of money to Catholic causes.

According to the school’s web site, “the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate came to Texas in 1849, at the urgent request of Texas’ first Roman Catholic Bishop, to preach Christ’s message and to serve the People of God, especially the poor and marginalized.

“The Oblate School of Theology was founded in San Antonio in 1903 as the San Antonio Philosophical and Theological Seminary. The School’s initial goal and mission was to educate young men to serve as Oblate missionaries in Texas, New Mexico, Louisiana, Mexico and the Philippines… Today, Oblate School of Theology prepares men for priesthood from many dioceses across the United States and a number of religious communities.”

I have to add that in the early 20th century, the part of San Antonio that’s now home to the Oblates wasn’t part of San Antonio. Assuming they founded their school where it is now — and I haven’t found any information to suggest otherwise — the land the Oblates bought lay in the countryside, with the city to the south. There were no housing developments or highways nearby; all that would come in the 1950s, when the campus and the land around it were annexed by the city, as shown on this interesting growth-of-San Antonio map (which also shows the curious fact that the pre-1940 shape of the city was square).

As nice as it is, we didn’t come just to see the Benson building. Rather, we were intrigued by a grotto on campus patterned after the famed grotto in Lourdes. A full-sized replica, I read, made of concrete.
The San Antonio grotto’s been on the site since the early 1940s. In fact, according to its plaque, the Oblates dedicated it on Sunday, December 7, 1941. I’m sure that the date had been picked in advance, and events in the wider world weren’t going to call it off. Then again, maybe the Oblates were up early that morning Central Time, before any ill-tidings came from Hawaii.

Built on top of the grotto, accessible by stairs, is the Tepeyac de San Antonio, dedicated on July 25, 1999, depicting the Virgin of Guadalupe appearing before St. Juan Diego in December 1531. This isn’t the first depiction of that scene that I’ve run across.

Here’s the Virgin.
And Juan Diego.
The Oblate campus also features a chapel, some business offices, places for visiting scholars, a gift shop (no post cards; I’d have bought some saint cards) and a fair amount of public art, such as a freestanding metal structure with a frieze of Oblates on horseback — “The Cavalry of Christ,” who were 19th-century missionaries in South Texas. ‘Ot and sweaty business, no doubt.
A garden behind the Benson building.
A place for Oblates who’ve passed on.
Stations of the Cross in a style I’ve never seen.
And “missions on a stick.”
There were five of them, depictions of the five Spanish missions in San Antonio. That includes the best known of them, the Alamo.