Missouri Mines State Historic Site

Posted on April 18, 2024 by admin

Funniest thing I’ve heard in a while, at least in the category of unintentional comedy. The narrator of a video about The Wire that I watched today – just finished the third season, watching once a week or so – broke narrative for a commercial.

“If Omar is coming for you, you’ll need the perfect shoe to get away,” he said, holding up a pair of some running shoes.

Drive about six hours from metro Chicago, south past St. Louis on the state of Missouri side of the Mississippi River, go almost as far as Farmington, Mo. (pop. 18,200) and leave the main road, but only a short distance down a side road, and you’ll find a place to ruminate on time and decay and poisoning. If you’re the ruminating sort.

Another day, another day exposed to the elements for the former industrial structures at Federal Mill No. 3, which processed zinc and lead ore from 1906 to 1972 and became property of the state shortly after its closure. It’s now Missouri Mines State Historic Site. Smelting does what it does, leaves slag and moves on. The weathered, rusty structures should count as a kind of slag, but one you can look up at in some awe.

We’d arrived about an hour before the grounds closed on the afternoon of April 5. Except for one state park service employee, no one else was around, though there were signs advertising an upcoming eclipse event, since this part of Missouri was in the path of totality. Bet the place was overrun for that.

Before coming to the Lead Belt of Missouri, I’d vaguely thought that lead mining was only an historic phenomenon, something like the copper mining in the UP that left behind relics. Missouri Mines didn’t do anything to correct that impression, at least at first. Later I found out was wrong.

“Lead and fur were the most important exports from Missouri during its early years as a Spanish, French, and then United States territory (Burford, 1978),” wrote Cheryl M. Seeger in a monograph called, “History of Mining in the Southeast Missouri Lead District and Description of Mine Processes, Regulatory Controls, Environmental Effects, and Mine Facilities in the Viburnum Trend Subdistrict” (2008).

“Southeastern Missouri, with the largest known concentration of galena (lead sulfide) in the world, was the site of the first prolonged mining in the state and has produced lead almost continuously since 1721,” Seeger notes. Largest in the world? Who knew? (Besides Cheryl Seeger, that is.)

Wiki published a map to illustrate the point, posted by one Kbh3rd, who is duly acknowledged here under the terms of Creative Commons 3.0.

Looks like all the mining action migrated to the west, but not far west, in the 20th century. In the monograph, I also learned that Moses Austin was a lead miner in the region – more about him later.

Most of the buildings at Missouri Mines SHS were roped off, and probably for good reason. But large windows were open, allowing a look inside the largest of them.

Mighty ruins are one thing, but I also like the smaller pieces.

An oddity, but one dug up nearby.

A giant fossil thrombolite, a nearby sign said. Fossilized creatures, if you can call them that, from a billion years ago.

Next to the state historic site is St. Joe State Park, with a path leading into that park. The day was warm, but not too warm for a walk. It was then we realized the thing we’d forgotten for the trip, because there’s always something: hats. But we managed.

It was like walking straight into one of the more desolate parts of the West instead of lush, springtime Missouri.

Another legacy of lead mining: ruined land, considered fit only for off-road vehicle tracks these days. Look at enough maps of the Lead Belt, and you’ll find the Superfund maps, too – which cover most of the area.

Is there Superfund site tourism? There must be. No? Now there’s an opportunity for some gritty tours, believe me.

Or maybe infrastructure tourism.

Sign me up for that one.

Spring Break Bits

Posted on April 4, 2024 by admin

It might not feel like spring out there, but no matter. Time for spring break. Back to posting around April 18.

Not long ago, an entire movie on YouTube called First Spaceship on Venus came to my attention, and I decided to watch a few minutes to see how bad it might be. Soon I realized, this isn’t that bad. For what was clearly a pre-manned spaceflight depiction of spaceflight, not bad at all. I didn’t have time to finish it, but I will at some point.

I’d never heard of it. But I have heard of Stanisław Lem. I read His Master’s Voice years ago – nearly 40 years, so I don’t remember much – and saw the 1972 movie version of Solaris, ditto, though I’ve read it’s rather different from his novel. Turns out First Spaceship on Venus is the American title of Silent Star (Der Schweigende Stern), an East German-Polish production from 1960. Lem wrote the source book, The Astronauts, a few years earlier. The American version is dubbed into English and, I understand, cut in length.

Also, if you want, you can listen to the original soundtrack of Der Schweigende Stern. YouTube’s quite the place.

More idle curiosity for the day: checking ticket prices for Billy Joel and Stevie Nicks, who are appearing the same night at Soldier Field in June. The closest ticket for sale is pretty close indeed: front section, third row. For resale, actually. There are a scattering of resale tickets available in that section, with those on the third row listed for $3,791 + fees. Oddly enough, fourth row seats list for $2,794 + fees. At least for now. So one row ahead, where you can catch a slightly better glimpse of Mr. Joel’s shiny pate, is worth about a grand more?

I expect that represents dynamic pricing of some kind, facilitated by soulless algorithms in the service of maximized shareholder value, and varies from moment to moment. But I was never one for front row seats anyway, or even third or fourth. Checking further, I found that you can bring your opera glasses and sit way back for $179. As it happens, I’ve seen both of those entertainers; separately, in 1979 and 1980. I don’t remember what I paid. A handy inflation calculator tells me that $179 now is the equivalent of $47 back then. I’m positive I didn’t pay that much, total, for both tickets.

Visiting Queen of All Saints Basilica in Chicago last month, I took an image of carved text that puzzled me a bit, but then I forgot to look it up.

“Ecumenical Year?” I remembered to look into that more recently, and realized that it must refer to the first year of Vatican II, which was indeed 1962. Formally in English, the meeting was the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican.

Naturally, when one hears of Vatican II, it’s time to listen to “The Vatican Rag.”

The council might have been 60 years ago, but that song never gets old.

Gone the Way of Columbia Wearing a Phrygian Cap

Posted on March 24, 2024 by admin

A few years ago, a meme about Presidents Day came to my attention. The text: Think you should have Presidents’ Day off work? Name this man.

The image was that of Warren Harding. For me, that was easy. Maybe not so much for a lot of people, though I suspect no survey about President Harding’s enduring fame has ever been done.

A better obscure president for the meme would have been, say, James Garfield or Rutherford B. Hayes or Benjamin Harrison, since Gilded Age chief executives tend to merge into a single hazy gray-bearded visage, except of course for the moustachio’d rotundness of Chester A. Arthur and Grover Cleveland.

Fame wears thin. That came to mind this time last year at the Harding library and museum in Marion, Ohio. Among a number of other interesting artifacts, the museum posted newspaper reactions to the president’s unexpected death on August 2, 1923.

Note that Columbia is wearing a Phrygian cap. Whatever happened to Phrygian caps? Whatever happened to Columbia in editorial cartoons? They just faded away. Something like the memory of Harding, so vivid once upon a time.

Newspaper editorial cartoons don’t necessarily capture public sentiment, but I understand Harding was a popular president in his lifetime. In terms of reputation, then, he got out while he still had a good one. Not long after, the scandals of his administration came to light, along with allegations of an illegitimate daughter (which were true). A hundred years later, he’s obscure enough to meme-ify, except among historians, who don’t like him.

Monday Moonery

Posted on March 18, 2024 by admin

Why should we start sending people back to the Moon? Because it’s still there? Besides that. Rather, because the ranks of those who have flown to the Moon are getting pretty thin – something I thought of when I learned that Tom Stafford (Apollo 10) died. Now only seven of them are left, four who landed on the surface and three who got really close without landing.

At 88, the youngest of this rarefied group is Apollo 16’s Charles Duke. Three have passed just in the last few months, including Ken Mattingly (also Apollo 16) and Frank Borman (Apollo 8) and now Stafford. It wouldn’t be right somehow to have the experience of being close to the Moon slip out of living memory. The plan is for these astronauts to go next year on Artemis 2; we shall see.

If Artemis 2 does come to pass as planned, it would include among its crew one Jeremy Hansen, who happens to be a Canadian astronaut and would be the first non-American (non-citizen of the United States, to nitpickers) to pay a visit to the Moon. Assuming a knot of taikonauts doesn’t surprise the world before Artemis’ flight by appearing on the lunar surface hoisting the flag of the PRC.

Hansen, as Wiki succinctly put it, “Canadian astronaut, fighter pilot, physicist and former aquanaut.” If that’s not an action hero’s resume, I don’t know what would be.

Lots of rabbit-hole material here: Canada currently has four active astronauts (one of whom is Hansen) and a number of retired ones, including the dude astronaut who played “Space Oddity” on the ISS about 10 years ago. They work or worked for the Canadian Space Agency, which has been around since 1989 but I’d say is fairly low profile. Canadians have been going to space since before then, since Marc Garneau went up on a 1984 Shuttle mission. He happens to be a Québécois and until recently fairly highly positioned in the current Trudeau government.

Here’s a question for Moon landing deniers: how come some other nation (say, you know, China) hasn’t faked going to the Moon by now? Certainly Xi Jinping would be able to marshal the resources, by various carrots and sticks, to get the filming and other fakery done.

If someone (say, you know, Kubrick) could fake it using late ’60s video tech, wouldn’t the vast improvements in digital image creation since then mean a higher quality fake by the Chinese government? One so good no one would question it? Except of course for brave Moon-landing deniers.

I&M ’21

Posted on March 10, 2024 by admin

This is the day of the year, at least here in the U.S., when people get mildly irritated at the change of the clocks, because it is mildly irritating. (And traffic death stats are trotted out.) By late in the evening, everything’s just a little askew, but that goes away as the week progresses. Maybe early March is too early to switch, but do away with it all together? I’d still rather have those long summer days not end till 9 or 10 p.m. Even better, not have them ever begin at 4 a.m. or earlier. Call me picky that way.

A path I walked along about three years ago, during my visit to the storied Archer Avenue.

To the left in the image is the Illinois & Michigan Canal, relic of 1830s canal mania.

A rail line ran nearby too.

I’d make some comment about how the railroad made I&M obsolete, but that’s only partly true. The nearby Sanitary & Ship Canal eventually took its place, and is no relic. Rather, it’s a legacy of the heroic era of civil engineering (let’s put that between the Civil War and WWI), and is a waterway of commerce to this day. I&M is recreational.

21st-Century Leaps

Posted on February 29, 2024 by admin

Another February 29. If I counted right, my 16th. That got me to thinking, just how many February 29ths have there been? As in, ever? Not as simple a question as all that, first of all because the day Caesar inserted into the calendar was an extra one after the equivalent of our February 24, a situation that persisted for a long time. So a different question might be how many intercalary days have there been since the Julian calendar’s first (let’s say first one after the extra days tacked on 46 BC, the longest year in history).

I feel like I’m staring into a pretty extensive rabbit hole. So, I’m backing away.

2020

Last time around on February 29, no entry. I attended an exceptionally pleasant dinner party at an exurban San Antonio ranch house, on flat land in the direction of the Hill Country. Six of us, I think, eating and drinking a few glasses of wine and conversing. People wonder whether the art of conversation is dying, and I doubt it. But it might go underground.

Also, that was the last social gathering I attended until April ’21 counting ones with family members, and June that year that for groups of friends.

2016

“The saying represents something exceptionally easy, of course, but even so I’m not sure it would be.” I wrote. ”Let’s assume the barrel is full of water as well as fish. Unless we’re talking about really large carp or some such, you might disturb the water and scare the fish, but I’m not sure how many small fish would actually be hit. Also, you’d think that shooting would soon destroy a wooden barrel and cause a dangerous amount of flying debris. Or if it were a metal barrel, such as a steel oil drum, the danger of ricochets might be high.

“This is something for the Mythbusters fellows to investigate, but I suspect that shooting fish in a barrel never was anything but a metaphor, and by now a hackneyed one at that. So I’m reluctant to say that making fun of a press release I received recently — especially the first line — is like shooting fish in a barrel. But it cries out to be mocked.”

2012

“I’m sure that I learned about Leap Year at an early age, like most people. But I never knew the details — Caesar and Sosigenes, the longest year in history (46 BC), Julian and Gregorian calendars, etc. — until I read The Clock We Live On. [I forgot to mention that Isaac Asimov wrote it? I’m rectifying that now.]

“The inside cover has an example of my father’s handwriting, something I don’t have too much of, so I wanted to save that too. Apparently he bought it in 1963, the year before he died.” [Sixty years and a day ago. RIP, dad]

“I first read it in 1977. Besides the story of the western calendar, there was plenty of other interesting topics — why days have 24 hours and hours 60 minutes, the development of clocks and chronometers, the establishment of meridians and time zones, and so on. The calendar chapter formed the basis of an oral report I did in high school Latin class.”

2008

“Battlefield gore is a necessary ingredient in any war movie of our time, as well as soldiers’ profanity, and understandably so. My own preference in historical fiction runs to verisimilitude, but that isn’t to say that I didn’t like The Sands of Iwo Jima.

“The most effective horror-of-war scene in Flags involved off-screen gore. At one point, one of the men (Iggy) goes mysteriously missing from the hillside. Later, his comrades discover that the Japanese pulled him into one of their caves and killed him in a way the American soldier who found him would only describe as, ‘look what they did to the poor son of a bitch.’ At that point one of the characters is looking at whatever remains of Iggy, but we don’t see it, and it’s much more horrible that way.”

2004

“Leap Year brings to mind the lore of King Numa reforming the early Roman calendar, Julius Caesar (and Sosigenes) replacing lunar with solar, Caligula trying to name a month after Germanicus (at least according to Robert Graves), Pope Gregory ordering his change but the Protestant parts of Europe ignoring it, and so on.

“When I was a kid I was fascinated by calendars, and would draw my own sometimes. In high school, I read about the history of the calendar on my own time, because it wasn’t part of any class. Even now I have some interest, though not as much as a fellow I know who spent time calculating the dates of Easter in the far distant future — thousands of years further than the standard Easter tables. I think he even wrote a computer program to do that for him.”

Spring Valley Farm Oddities

Posted on February 27, 2024 by admin

Sunday wasn’t quite as warm as yesterday, or today, whose unseasonably high temps came to a crashing end amid thunder and lightning and wind. The condition at about 7:30 pm. Sirens wailed from before then till 7:45.

A very spring-like event. Glad it’s over.

But it was warm enough Sunday to stroll a while at one of our default walking places, Spring Valley. We made it to the former farm, where no animals were to be seen. Pigs, cows, chickens, nowhere, though the barnyard odor lingered. No oinks or moos or the flapping of chickens. On vacation? I mused out loud. Off to a meat processing facility? I mused to myself. Kidding, but best not vocalized.

But my quest to see new things, even in very familiar places, and on a granular level, kept me busy. Or if not new things, a new look a them. Such as the wagons.

These look like work wagons. That can lead to a number of musings, such as, what a damn lot of work was involved in running a 19th-century farm. The vehicles are labor-saving devices in their own way, of course, but only so much labor.

It’s not so remarkable that the elderly in our time are in better shape than previous generations, a fact noted from AARP to ZDNET. Nutrition and healthcare are decidedly better now, but the long and short of it is that much work wore people out.

I’m sure I’d seen this bit of farm equipment before. But I’m not sure I’d looked at it. The more I looked, the odder it got.

Someone knows what that is. Locally, maybe someone at the park district. Further away, farmers. Or maybe it’s obvious, and I’m dense. Maybe, but it’s still a puzzler.

I fed the image into TinEye, a reserve image search engine. The results: TinEye searched over 65.7 billion images but didn’t find any matches for your search image. That’s probably because we have yet to crawl any pages where this image appears.

I also took a look at the windmill. Their artistry underappreciated, I believe.

Something was different. Whatever you call that part – the blades? They’d vanished. I was sure of it, and sure enough, when I looked at the picture I took of it in 2012, the difference was clear.

Out for repairs? Stolen for scrap or by a slightly demented collector? Blown down on windy day and wrecked beyond repair? We get those gusts sometimes, see above.

Barely Winter Thursday Assortment

Posted on February 22, 2024 by admin

Another warmish day and a not-so-cold evening. We walked the usual path around Lake V. well after dark, taking in the Moon in the cloudless sky now and then. It’s nearly full. Then I remembered that an unmanned American spaceship was due to land near its south pole; Odysseus, which might not be the most auspicious name for a traveler, but at least a noble one from classical antiquity. Maybe the next one will be Penelope or Telemachus.

When I got home, I learned that the landing was successful. Good to know.

A leftover image from “Presidents Day.”

Recently Jay sent me two of those buttons: McGovern and Carter. The others have been hanging there a while.

The Hoover button was created for a Halloween party that a company down the hall from us in the Civic Opera Building used to throw many moons ago. The event wasn’t in that building, but rather the Rookery, whose common areas are excellent for a corporate events. The Harding one I picked up at the Harding Museum in Ohio last year, and the Grillmaster button has nothing to do with U.S. presidents. It was a souvenir of St. Petersburg, Russia.

Spotted at the Schaumburg Township Library not long ago.

It used to say 2023.

“On Saturday, Sept. 23 [2023], more than 850 people gathered at our Central Library (with another 300 joining us online) to watch as we unveiled the contents of a time capsule that was placed in the cornerstone of our Library when it was built in 1998,” the library’s web site says.

I wasn’t one of them. I went to Milwaukee that day instead for Doors Open. The contents of the ’98 capsule are mildly interesting, but one of the Westinghouse Time Capsules, it isn’t. (And no horny toads or cartoon frogs.)

Still, I like the idea of time capsules, enough to bury a few myself once upon a time, including one late in the summer of 1974 in our back yard, which I wasn’t able to retrieve five years later as planned. I dug a few holes in an effort to do so, damaging some grass, which annoyed my mother, if I remember right.

First in War, First in Peace, and First in the Heart of Generative AI

Posted on February 18, 2024 by admin

The “Presidents Day” weekend has rolled around again, but it’s an ordinary weekend for some of us followed by an ordinary Monday. Including me. Still, I can’t let it pass without a mention. If it were up to me, it would still be widely known as Washington’s Birthday, as it was when I was young.

The state of Illinois, for its part, calls it Washington’s Birthday, and has separate holidays for Lincoln and MLK. It has not, as yet, changed Columbus Day to anything else, which surprises me a little, but I’ll chalk it up to legislative inertia and a still distinct Italian-American population.

With Washington on my mind, I went to the first free AI image generator I could find and had it spit out some images of the Father of Our Country in various art styles. Such as – and these are my exact prompts – “George Washington Manga.”

“George Washington Cubist”

“George Washington Dadaist”

That last one has a tinge of nightmare to it. Come to think of it, they all do. Still, while I’m not art expert, I don’t think these quite fit the bill.

Kentucky Flea Market Finds

Posted on January 25, 2024 by admin

Many of my postcard agglomeration are blank, of course. Couldn’t say a percentage, but it would be substantial. I add to it regularly, so I expect the agglomeration will outlast me, if only by a little.

One of the places we went on our last full day in Louisville recently was a flea market. Not just any flea market, but the Kentucky Flea Market New Year’s Spectacular at the Kentucky Expo Center. A sea of tables in a vast structure and – wait, there’s another sea of tables in another, connected vast structure. Safe to say it was big.

One of the first tables we encountered offered postcards for sale, which didn’t turn out to be that common at the Spectacular. I spotted what turned out to be promotional cards for a radio show called Breakfast in Hollywood, hosted by one Tom Breneman. I wasn’t familiar with it.

The man at the table made me feel a youthful spring in my step by comparison: gnarled, he was, as they used to call old men. Full head of white hair and a shaggy white beard and wrinkles that often come from a lifetime of hard work just to get by.

“Do you know that show?” I asked.

“No, it was a long time ago.”

The old man was right – a long time ago, longer even than his lifetime, or possibly he was a small child when the show was on, and it was nothing a child would listen to. Fifty cents each, that’s not bad. Not particularly rare or valuable as a collectible, as far as I can tell. I bought a handful.

Breneman pictured with the famous.

And the less famous. They weren’t even in the same room, these two.

Uncle Corny, huh? I’d look further into him, but for now I’d rather wonder about him. A character brought to the show by its actor from years of honing in vaudeville?

Breakfast in Hollywood was a chat show, with host Breneman an experienced radio hand by the time he started the show in 1941. In the waning days of World War II he opened a restaurant in Hollywood from which to broadcast. The show had a large and loyal following among listeners, but in 1948 Breneman died suddenly.

Or, as a headline at the time put it, Tom Breneman, Famous Radio Star, Drops Dead

Later I read about the show, its high fame long evaporated. Got me into a mild counterfactual frame of mind. Breneman wasn’t that old when he dropped, only 46. Wife and youngish children. Television wasn’t far off – would he have made the transition successfully (many did), hosted a show or run of shows into the ’60s or even a little later, and be remembered among my cohort for some last semi-retirement gig like a regular square in the Peter Marshall Hollywood Squares?

It wasn’t to be. Sure, that isn’t one of the ponderous issues that counterfactuals usually spend their time with: What if Lincoln had lived longer, what if Germany won the Great War, what if Ronald Reagan had played Rick Blaine, that sort of thing. So what?

A man calling himself Korla Pandit (d. 1998) appeared regularly on Breakfast in Hollywood. If this article is even half accurate, he was one of the hardest working men in U.S. show business in the mid-century and later, and a lot else surprising besides. He’s had a documentary made about him. You can listen to his organ recordings, right now. There’s a biopic about this guy just waiting to be made.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: History