Chance the Snapper Has Gone Home

Posted on August 25, 2019 by admin

I left for college for the first time 40 years ago today. So long ago that I flew on Braniff to get to Nashville, as I like to say. At least to anyone who might remember that airline.

Nothing so milestone-like happened today. At least I don’t think so. Sometimes you quietly pass by milestones and only realize it in retrospect, if then.

Sometimes that’s literally true. On the Trans-Siberian, I knew that some kind of post is visible from the train marking the “border” between Asia and Europe, as you cross the Urals. I missed it. I think I was concerning myself with lunch at that moment.

One place we went today was the former home of Chance the Snapper. That is, Humboldt Park in Chicago. Chance has been returned from the park’s lagoon to Florida. Presumably Florida Man brought him to Chicago at some point.

Temps today were warm but not too hot, so we took a walk around. Plenty of ducks and geese to see. Lilypads, too.
But presumably no gators to bother the people who rent paddleboats.

We’ve visited the park a number of times, including for a look at its various artworks, but today we discovered a curious snail sculpture near one of the footpaths, but also partly covered by bushes.

According to the Chicago Park District: “In 1999, teenagers involved in a Chicago Park District program known as the Junior Earth Team spent several months learning about nature in Humboldt Park. The JETs developed an interpretive trail and provided sculptor Roman Villarreal with notes and sketches for a series of artworks.

“For this project, Villarreal and the students produced three carved artworks that are scattered and remain relatively hidden throughout the park. The three pieces relate to the theme of air, water, and earth. Among the trio is a two-foot tall snail sculpture located northeast of the Humboldt Park Boat House that bears the inscription ‘breathe oxygen.’ ”

Calvary Cemetery, Evanston

Posted on August 21, 2019 by admin

I’ve taken elevated trains between Chicago and Evanston on and off for years. The CTA Red Line has its north terminus at the Howard Station in Chicago, and from there you ride the Purple Line into Evanston.

For a short stretch just north of Howard, the Purple Line passes Calvary Cemetery, which is also called Calvary Catholic Cemetery on maps. It’s a sizable burial ground, with nearly 40,000 permanent residents, stretching from Chicago Ave. along the elevated tracks nearly to Lake Michigan.

So I’ve seen the cemetery from on high for decades, but never wandered the grounds. I decided to do that on Saturday after visiting the American Toby Jug Museum, since the cemetery is only a few blocks to the south.

The monuments and stones are seemingly spaced more widely than usual for a cemetery of mid-19th century vintage. But among the standing stones are a lot of markers flush with the ground, so it’s hard to appreciate the cemetery’s denseness at first.

There are some mausoleums. This one, strangely, had no name on the exterior that I could find.
Ambrose Plamondon, founder and head of the Plamondon Manufacturing Co. in Chicago, a maker of machinery who died in 1896 of an “obstinate pulmonary trouble of long standing.”

His son Charles is interred there as well. He too was a prominent Chicago businessman, but he and his wife Mary had the misfortune to book passage to the UK on the Lusitania in May 1915.

“The couple celebrated their 36th wedding anniversary, 6 May 1915, while on board Lusitania,” says the Lusitania Resource. “Both Charles and his wife Mary were lost in the sinking. Their remains were washed up on the Irish coast, blackened with coal dust, suggesting that they had been sucked into one of the funnels. Both bodies were recovered and identified.”

Here’s the Cuneo family mausoleum, perched on a modest hill.
I’ve happened across the Cuneos before. They acquired an Italianate mansion, now a museum, from ruined businessman Samuel Insull during the Depression. We visited it nearly 10 years ago.

I presume this is patriarch and printing baron Frank Cuneo (1861-1942) in a niche in the front of the structure.
IMCalvary Cemetery Evanston Cuneo You’d think his wife Amelia (1864-1891) would be the other bust adorning the structure, but this face looks a little old for a woman who seems to have died in her 20s giving birth to her fourth child, or at least soon after.

So this is probably Frank Cuneo’s mother, Caterina Lagomercino Cuneo (1828-1900). Maybe she counted as the tough old matriarch and wouldn’t be denied her place of honor.

Most of the Cuneos are interred in the above mausoleum, but not all of them. Frank and Amelia’s eldest son John, who died in 1977, has his own mausoleum not far from his parents and siblings.

There is some funerary art at Calvary.

Including stones whose wear speaks of their impermanence.
A group memorial to the Religious Sisters of Mercy, who have a long history in Chicago.

A number of Chicago mayors are buried here as well, most notably Jane Byrne, who died in 2014. Charlie Comiskey, the baseball boss, is here. Didn’t see either of them, but I wasn’t looking. I was just looking around.

The American Toby Jug Museum

Posted on August 20, 2019 by admin

Yesterday I spent some time looking into the origin of the word flabbergasted. It’s a fun word, and sometime it fits just so. I would have guessed that it’s an Americanism, and a fairly new one at that, but no. Origin obscure. First attested usage: 1773.

According to World Wide Words, “… flabbergasted could have been an existing dialect word, as one early nineteenth-century writer claimed to have found it in Suffolk dialect and another — in the form flabrigast — in Perthshire. Further than this, nobody can go with any certainty.”

That word came to mind after I visited the American Toby Jug Museum in Evanston on Saturday. The museum, which happily doesn’t charge admission, is in the basement of an office building near the corner of Chicago Ave. and Main St.
I’d known about the place for years, but not much about it. I didn’t do any reading before I went. Sometimes it’s better that way, because the element of surprise can still be in play. I vaguely expected a few cabinets, sporting mugs with faces.

There were cabinets all right.
And more.
And more.
And even more.
I was flabbergasted. I was also the only person in the museum during my visit, except for the woman managing the place. When the extent of the displays sank in, I asked her how many items the museum had. About 8,400, she said.

Toby jugs, it turns out — according to people who collect them — depict a full human figure. Head-and-shoulder or head depictions are “character jugs” or “face jugs.” Though decorative, the original toby jugs were also used as jugs, with their tricorner hats convenient for pouring.

The museum is organized chronologically, so near the entrance are the oldest toby jugs, those of the 18th and early 19th centuries.
Staffordshire Potters, who had easy access to clay, coal and other raw materials, apparently developed the toby jug in the 1760s, as part of the area’s overall ceramic industry.

The form caught on in England and then other parts of the world. Soon character mugs were being produced along with the traditional tobies. They took on an astonishing (flabbergasting) variety of forms, including standard drinking characters, perhaps inspired by Falstaff or local barflies, but also occupational figures (soldier, sailors, bandits), faces from history, literature, myths, the Bible, and folk stories, along with animal figures, fanciful or stereotypical notions of peoples of the world, and — especially in the 20th century — lots of Santa Clauses, musicians, entertainers, sports stars, and more.

Early 20th-century UK prime ministers, made in Czechoslovakia, no less.
There were a lot of Winston Churchills besides these two.
U.S. presidents, too.
Musicians and entertainers of various periods.
And so much more.
Though I didn’t take its picture, I got the biggest kick out of the Col. Sanders mug, which didn’t seem to be any kind of advertisement. Someone simply considered him, as a chicken mogul, worthy of tobyfication.

Why is this collection in Evanston? Like many good small museums, it was the work of one obsessive man. Namely, Stephen Mullins of Evanston, who died only in June at 86, after a lifetime of collecting toby and character mugs. “He built his collection through dealers, private aficionados and eBay,” the Chicago Sun-Times said.

Mullins also had some tobies commissioned, including what the museum says is the world’s largest one, “Toby Philpot,” created in 1998.

Time for Pixar to get to work on a new franchise, Toby Story.

The Chicago Main Newsstand

Posted on August 19, 2019 by admin

Early on Saturday afternoon, I saw that the Chicago Main Newsstand is open for business at the intersection of Chicago Ave. and Main St. in north suburban Evanston. (Various sources style it Chicago-Main, but not the wall outside the store.) I hadn’t been that way in a long time, or thought about the place. So if I’d had to guess beforehand, I would have said wrongly that the Internet killed it off.

The business originally dated from the 1930s. In the early ’90s, the CTA, which owned the property at the time, jacked up the rent so much that the newsstand closed. Later I read, or maybe heard, that the agency believed it could find a tenant to pay more. That was a public-be-damned sort of move, since the newsstand was popular in pre-Internet days as a source of national and international newspapers and a vast number of magazines.

Also, not only that, the move was a blunder, since for eight years, no one else wanted to be at that location at the rent the agency wanted to charge. The City of Evanston eventually bought the site and the owner of a different newsstand in Chicago had the place renovated and re-opened as a newsstand. A 2001 article in the Tribune tells the story.

I remember patronizing the former iteration occasionally in the late 1980s, when I visited Evanston often. In those days, the newsstand featured a mix of out-of-town newspapers and many, many magazines. These days I can report fewer newspapers — an effect of the Internet, certainly — but the same inexhaustible variety of magazines. The market for paper magazines is still alive.

Full Moon Bluegrass, 1986

Posted on August 18, 2019 by admin

Found this tucked away in an envelope the other day, a relic of my Nashville days — post-college days, that is.

I went to one. I think it was the August 19 party, but I’m not sure. They were held on land not far from town that included a barn. I don’t know who organized them or how I knew about it, though I did go with some of my Nashville friends.

People showed up and sang and played their fiddles and mandolins and banjos and whatnot. Being Nashville, the music was good. No admission, but I think hats were passed around; someone had to pay for the schedule cards and the July 4 fireworks. It was a hoedown. Or a shindig. Or my own favorite of these words, a hootenanny.

That’s more a folk music term, but never mind. I like the word so much I’m going to use it: As a young man in Nashville, I went to a hootenanny. Recommended.

The House of Prime Rib, 1973

Posted on August 11, 2019 by admin

I went with my family to the House of Prime Rib on Van Ness Ave. in San Francisco in August 1973, picking up a souvenir postcard at the same time.
I remember the place seemed dark. Low-light restaurants weren’t something I knew except maybe from TV. More exotically, servers carved the meat at a cart near our table. There was a dessert cart as well. Every now and then around the dim room, flambé erupted. Quite a place for a 12-year-old with ordinary tastes.

The House of Prime Rib, which is still open, wasn’t the sort of restaurant we usually patronized. The only place we visited remotely like it (that I can think of) was Old San Francisco — which was in San Antonio, and still is. We went there two or three times.

Except for the fact that Old San Francisco served upmarket beef like the House of Prime Rib, there wasn’t much similarity. Old San Francisco wanted to evoke those giddy Barbary Coast days before 1906; the House of Prime Rib had a Old England vibe. It was a midcentury fancy restaurant.

We were on vacation, hence the indulgence. My mother and brothers and I flew to Los Angeles that August, spent a few days there, drove up the coast on California 1 in a rental car, and spent a few days in San Francisco, flying back to San Antonio from there.

I remember it well: Disneyland in the days of A-E tickets, the Huntington Library, a side trip down to see Mission San Juan Capistrano, perhaps because my mother remembered one version or another of the song, the smoggy LA air, the winding coastline, our disappointment in not getting to see the Hearst Castle, Big Sur, climbing the hills of San Francisco, crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, Chinatown, the Cannery, the cable cars, my brother Jay ordering octopus at a Fisherman’s Wharf restaurant, a boat trip around the Bay (Alcatraz was still closed at the time). A nothing out-of-the-ordinary tourist week in California. What a good time.

Chicagoland’s Most Obscure Statue

Posted on August 8, 2019 by admin

Just south of I-90 in the major Chicago suburb of Schaumburg is a district populated almost completely by small- and mid-sized businesses that don’t have any consumer-facing operations, or if they do, they’re elsewhere. It’s a district of single-story office properties ringed by parking lots and connected by streets that are only busy early in the morning or late in the afternoon.

Since this is a reasonably prosperous suburb, some attention has been paid to landscaping, with trees, bushes and grass growing between the buildings and among the lots. But there’s no escaping the fact that the area is an office space equivalent of the 20th-century residential areas of the village, which are spread out. Fashionably dense, the area is not. You need a car around here.

Not long ago I had some business to attend to in the area, and I happened upon a small street named Penny Lane. If you’re the right age, that’s going to make you smile a little, though on this Penny Lane there’s no barber showing photographs or banker with a motorcar or fireman with an hourglass.

But this is on Penny Lane.
I had to stop for a minute and look at that. Luckily, Penny Lane doesn’t have much traffic. None besides me at that moment, in fact. The plaque on the plinth says:

Presented to
THE AMERICAN FOUNDRYMEN’S SOCIETY
by
THE INTERNATIONAL HARVESTER COMPANY
Designed and sculpted by patternmaker Bob Jones
and cast by the employees of the Louisville Foundry Div.
December 3, 1984

On the statue itself, on the receptacle receiving the molten iron, is the following:

FIRST IRON POURED
JAN 17 1949
LOUISVILLE FOUNDRY

The iron statue is on the grounds of the American Foundry Society’s headquarters on Penny Lane. Formerly it was the American Foundrymen’s Society, which sounds like a workers’ organization, but it is (and always has been, I think), an industry trade organization for metalcasting.

The statue was among the last items cast in the Louisville foundry, which IH closed in 1983. Iron’s a little unusual for such a work, but it looks painted and well-tended by the organization. Even better, it has to be the most obscure statue, at least among those on public view, in the Chicago area.

Riverside Cemetery, Montgomery

Posted on August 7, 2019 by admin

I had a little time to kill before The Comedy of Errors started in Aurora on Saturday, so I consulted Google Maps and found a nearby cemetery to visit. Riverside Cemetery, which is south of Aurora in the town of Montgomery, Illinois, and which is also on the Fox River.

Not bad. Some trees, many upright stones. Not much in the way of land contour or funerary art, though.

I found what are probably the oldest stones: 19th century.
As far as I could see, only one obelisk of any size.
Marking the burial site of one V.A. Watkins. Big fish in this little pond.

Later I read that, according to Find A Grave, there’s one noteworthy person buried at Riverside: Bernard Cigrand (1866-1932). I didn’t happen across his stone. He rings no bells. Not even a slight tinkle. He was a dentist, but his stone also says FATHER OF FLAG DAY.

GAR Memorial Hall, Aurora

Posted on August 6, 2019 by admin

There are a lot of statues memorializing Union veterans, but the Grand Army of the Republic, Post 20, which was in Aurora, Illinois, decided that a building would be a better way to honor the fallen, since it would also be useful for the living. Reportedly the post got the idea from a similar building in Foxborough, Mass.

Completed in 1878, the GAR Memorial Hall still stands on Stolp Island in Aurora.
The octagonal structure is of local limestone and designed by one Joseph Mulvey, who is fairly obscure. Not this fellow (probably), but someone who did other (razed) work in this part of the country. The GAR had meetings there and for a while it housed Aurora’s public library.

These days GAR Memorial Hall is a small museum with limited hours — namely Saturdays from noon to 4 p.m. I arrived at about 3, in time to look inside, and get out of the heat besides. Inside, you can see the tall stained-glass windows.

Plus a few artifacts of the war, such as these medicine bottles. The dark one was specifically for quinine.
GAR artifacts.
A number of exhibits were devoted to the 36th Illinois Volunteer Infantry and the 8th Illinois Cavalry, both largely composed of men from the Aurora area. The 36th fought at Pea Ridge, Murfreesboro, Missionary Ridge, Chickamauga and in the siege of Atlanta, among other places. The 8th was at Williamsburg, Seven Pines, Brandy Station, Gettysburg and Monocacy, among others.

An amusing aside, according to the museum: “The 8th Illinois Cavalry’s first fight was not against people but alcohol. At their first encampment in St. Charles, Illinois, some of the citizens of the town brought liquor to the young soldiers, and this threatened the discipline of the regiment [I’ll bet it did]. Without orders, a group of soldiers from the 8th marched into town and smashed the windows of the offending shops, pouring the liquor into the street.”

The Comedy of Errors

Posted on August 5, 2019 by admin

Went to Aurora, Illinois, on Saturday evening for a performance of The Comedy of Errors, the only one in the suburbs this year by Chicago Shakespeare in the Parks.
The play’s the trope-namer, though I expect the idea is much older even than Plautus, and in fact Errors owes a lot to Plautus. It’s a trope big enough to include comic high points like Fawlty Towers (also a comedy of manners) as well as such excrescences as Three’s Company.

Free Shakespeare in the 21st century packs ’em, I’m glad to report.
The Chicago Shakespeare Company, full of talented young actors, handled the material well, including lots of slapstick and wordplay. I suspect some of the more obscure jokes were removed and other points smoothed out, though I’m not an expert on the play. No matter. It was funny.

The show began when the sun was still hot, so Shakespeare-shaped hand fans were available. By the time Errors ended, it was dusk and pretty comfortable there at RiverEdge Park.

Acrobatics and juggling punctuated the play, which I figure is true to the spirit of the earliest performances. And to the staging by the Flying Karamazov Brothers, for that matter. The goal was (is) to entertain, after all. So it does, in competent hands, 400+ years later.

The biggest laughs came when one of the Dromios described being pursued by the other Dromio’s girlfriend, a kitchen wench.

Dromio: Marry, sir, she’s the kitchen wench, and all grease, and I know not what use to put her to but to make a lamp of her and run from her by her own light. If she lives till doomsday, she’ll burn a week longer than the whole world.

Antipholus: What complexion is she of?

Dromio: Swart like my shoe, but her face nothing like so clean kept. For why? She sweats. A man may go overshoes in the grime of it.

Antipholus: That’s a fault that water will mend.

Dromio: No, sir, ’tis in grain; Noah’s flood could not do it.

Antipholus: What’s her name?

Dromio: Nell, sir, but her name and three quarters — that’s an ell and three quarters — will not measure her from hip to hip.

Antipholus: Then she bears some breadth?

Dromio: No longer from head to foot than from hip to hip. She is spherical, like a globe. I could find out countries in her.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Been There