Category Archives: History

On ira pendre notre linge sur le ligne Siegfried

Posted on by

Another very warm, practically hot day. Sure, you can use the air conditioner in your car on days like today, but when I was driving along around 1 p.m., I kept the windows down and blasted myself with warm air. Pretty soon driving will be complicated by snow and ice, so I want to feel the warmth, even the sweaty heat, right now.

Ah, these warm days of September. Makes you think about the Sitzkrieg, doesn’t it? No? I might not have either, but not long ago I happened across the bilingual “On ira pendre notre linge sur le ligne Siegfried” (“I’m Going to Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line”), a song I wasn’t familiar with. I like finding moment-specific songs — in this case, the Sitzkrieg — that have been lost to time. (Like this one and this one.)

This version was by French band leader Ray Ventura. Irish songwriter Jimmy Kennedy wrote it. His 1984 NYT obituary noted that “Mr. Kennedy’s songwriting career spanned 50 years. His familiar songs included ‘The Hokey-Cokey’ (which was popular as the Hokey-Pokey dance in the United States) ‘Teddy Bear’s Picnic’ and ‘I’m Going to Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line.’ ”

Odd to think that someone actually wrote “The Hokey-Pokey” and “Teddy Bear’s Picnic,” (Bears’?) though of course someone did. Someone named Jimmy. Songs like that just seem to emerge from the woodwork.

More on the Farnsworth

Posted on by

Our tour of the Farnsworth House on Saturday took us inside its floor-to-ceiling glass walls, where photography isn’t permitted on weekends. We heard about the mechanical aspects of the house — all those pesky practical items like electricity and water — the guest bathroom, Dr. Farnsworth’s bathroom, the kitchen zone with its long stainless steel prep area, the history of the curtains, the placement of the few lights, and the back-and-forth between client and architect about whether there ought to be at least one closet. Architect said no, client said yes, so ultimately a freestanding wardrobe was fashioned by one of Mies’ employees for the house.

Previously I hadn’t bothered to find out much about how the house came to be. Not to worry, a video at the visitor center and the guide filled us in on some details, such as initially warm (maybe very warm) relations between the unmarried Dr. Farnsworth and the free-with-his-affections Mies, which eventually grew acrimonious. Especially when Mies presented her with a bill she considered inflated. Less might be more, but not when it came to his fee.

Outside again we went to the “back” of the house, that is, the side facing away from the river.

This is a fuller view.

The row of kitchen-counter-like shapes under the brown interior structure are in fact kitchen counters, with the “bedroom” off to the left. The black cylinder-like thing under the main level — the other columns are white — is where water goes in and out, and electricity comes in.

Got a good look under the house, too.

Another bit of the house’s history involves the land to the west. Lord Palumbo built a boathouse there, and just beyond it is a road: Fox River Dr., which crosses the river within sight of the house. In the late 1940s, the road and bridge were small. In the late ’60s, Kendall County took two acres by eminent domain to widen the road and build a bigger bridge. Dr. Farnsworth fought it, but lost. With the increase in population over the decades since then in this part of the state, the road’s now pretty busy, at least on a Saturday afternoon. Quiet isn’t something you get on the Farnsworth grounds these days.

From the back of the house, the property slopes upward to a small hill, which would have been the rational place to build a dwelling, considering its location above the flood plain. But as suggested about some of Frank Lloyd Wright’s works, perhaps it’s best to think of this Miesian creation as a work of sculpture rather than a house. And a right interesting sculpture it is.

The Farnsworth House

Posted on by

I can’t say that I know architecture, but I know what’s interesting. The Farnsworth House is definitely that. Built over 60 years ago in rural – and now exurban – Illinois, it’s a glass-and-steel, but most notably glass, house designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, famed Chicago architect (which he became later in life, another unwitting gift to America from the Nazis), and one of the panjandrums of Modernism. It’s also hard for amateur photographers like myself to get a good image of the place.

This is the “front,” facing the Fox River, illustrating the fact that the house is all about the horizontal: a “deck” (my term) accessible by stairs, a main level accessible by more stairs, and then the flat roof, presumably accessible by ladder. The deck is wide open to the elements, though shaded by trees in our time, and the main level is either outside or inside, as delineated by glass walls. Except that, as I understand it, one of the purposes of the glass walls was to help obviate the distinction between exterior and interior. Unless you close the curtains, which I understand the residents did with some regularity, and which the National Trust does when it isn’t giving tours.

For a while we stood in front as our guide filled us in on the building’s origin and other details of the site, such as its propensity to flood. Mies knew that, of course, and raised the structure to avoid the worst of the Fox River’s periodic rampages. Turns out that because of development upstream, rainwater and snowmelt drain faster into the river than they used to, so the river rises higher than it did in the early 20th century. Oops. Such torrents flooded the house in 1956 and 1996. Not sure that’s what Mies had in mind when he talked of integrating the built environment with the natural one.

Apparently the ’96 flood was especially vicious, popping one of the floor-to-ceiling windows and washing away some of the artwork belonging to Lord Palumbo, the property’s second owner.

We went up the stairs to take in the view from the deck…

…and then to main level. Both levels are floored with Italian travertine, a wonderful stone hand-picked by Mies. According to the guide, so far the National Trust hasn’t been able to locate any exactly like them, so there aren’t any replacements. It’s wonder we were allowed to walk on them at all.

Up on the main level’s “porch,” (my term again) our guide gave us the rules for going inside: no photos, no shoes, and no sitting around on the furniture. We were free to take pictures of the interior through the window-walls which, of course, offer an expansive view of the inside.

Something you appreciate after standing around for a few minutes on the main level, at least I did, is the lack of handrails. That is, in fact, a code issue that would prevent the house from being built in our time exactly as it was in the late ’40s (among a few other things). The drop is only a bit more than five feet, of course, but even so it could be an injurious crash to the ground, or worse, into the narrow space between the deck and the main level. I don’t know if the matter of rails ever came up between the original owner, Dr. Edith Farnsworth, and Meis, but I feel certain any such thing would have been ruled out for aesthetic reasons.

Happy Birthday, Dom

Posted on by

August began today warmer than the end of July, which saw a string of oddly cool days. The whole month was punctuated with cool days. Been that kind of Northern summer so far.

That was confirmed when the electric bill came the other day. Total kWh we used were higher in July than June (actually June 26 to July 26, compared with the preceding 30 days, but close enough): 873 kWh in July vs. 711 kWh in June. But we had a week or so of normal heat in July, so no surprise.

The difference in electric usage between this July and last July was a lot more: 873 kWh compared with 1601 kWh. Last year was hot and dry. Helpfully, the bill also includes average daily temps for the two months: 75 F this month, 81 F a year ago. That means the average for this July was lower than where I set the thermostat during a summer day, which is 76 F or 78 F when I can get away with it.

There’s a holiday near the beginning of June – Memorial Day – and one near the beginning of July — Independence Day – and one near the beginning of September – Labor Day. You can see the missing one in that pattern. What this country needs is a holiday near the beginning of August. Too bad George Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.  both happened to be born in the winter.

I took a quick look at notable Americans with August 1st birthdays whom we could honor with a national holiday, say on the first Monday of the month. Maria Mitchell had a Google doodle today, and strange to say, I knew who she was because I saw her telescope at the Smithsonian a couple of years ago. It’s good to remember pioneering female astronomers, for sure, but I doubt she rates an entire holiday. No more than other notable Americans born this day, including explorer William Clark, songwriter Francis Scott Key, Lt. Col. William Barret Travis (who died a Texan, of course), authors Richard Henry Dana and Herman Melville, presidential son Robert Todd Lincoln, and entertainers Jerry Garcia, Jim Carroll and Dom DeLuise.

Dom DeLuise Day? No. Maybe the holiday doesn’t need to honor anyone or anything. National Mental Health Day, or the Just Because Long Weekend.

Up in the Air, Junior Birdmen

Posted on by

Today I know more about “Up in the Air, Junior Birdmen,” than I ever have before. I read the Wiki page, of course, but that isn’t very meaty. A page on a site devoted to aviator Walter Lees is better, including bits of primary source material, or at least reprinting some.

Yesterday I wrote a short item about a trio of volunteers who helped build bicycle-powered pedal planes for an aviation museum. Non-flying planes, that is, the kind that kids tool around in for amusement and edification. I needed a headline. That request went to my synaptic warehouse, that sprawling place with an idiosyncratic and often infuriating filing system, overflowing with jumbles of memories, images, and logical reconstructions — or is it big ideas, images, and distorted facts? — and out popped “Up in the Air, Junior Birdmen.”

Perfect. I’m rarely so good at headline writing. But where did that come from? I wasn’t in the Junior Birdmen demographic, considering it was aimed at boys of the 1930s.

Later it occurred to me. I might have heard about it earlier, but I definitely remember Tom Lehrer mentioning it as a gag on one of his records, before he sang “It Makes a Fellow Proud to be a Soldier.” The early 1960s audience clearly understood the reference, because it got a laugh.

“Some of you may recall the publicity a few years ago about the Army’s search for an official Army song to be the counterpart of the Navy’s ‘Anchors Away’ and the Air Force’s ‘Up in the Air, Junior Birdmen’ songs. I was in basic training at the time…”

So today I did a small amount of checking on line about the Junior Birdmen phenomenon. Added a bit of information to the otherwise incredibly minor Junior Birdmen file somewhere in my synaptic warehouse. And no visit to the Internet for useless information is complete without a stop at YouTube, in this case to hear the song itself – which I don’t think I’d ever heard before.

Well, I can’t say completely useless information. I got a headline for a paid piece of writing out of it – one that the editors kept.

Rainbow Over Diamond Head

Posted on by

A headline that Google News pulled up for me this morning: “Comic-Con Fans Get World of Warcraft Teaser Trailer. You Don’t.” The implication is that that’s some kind of bad thing, but I don’t see it.

Heat much of last week, then rain in the form of more than one short nighttime thunderstorms rolling through to cool things off. By the next day, most everything had dried off. The pattern: rinse, dry, repeat.

This photo has been captioned many times, but one recent caption is, “Only one human being alive on July 21, 1969 is not in this picture.” Never thought of it that way. Makes me want to read Michael Collins’ memoir, Carrying the Fire.

I have to be content with taking earthbound photographs, and mostly I am. I’ve always liked this one, taken on Oahu in July 1979. The transition from photographic negative to slide to print to digital scan to web page doesn’t really do it justice, but the image retains a bit of the original flavor. I’ve got three boxes of slides made in Hawaii that year and two more made in East Asia in the early ’90s, which are a little hard to appreciate in that format. One of these days, I might convert them directly to digital, but buying the equipment and taking the time are a fairly low priority among all the other demands on my money and time.

For some reason, I didn’t visit Diamond Head State Monument and climb to the rim in 1979. I can’t remember what went into that decision. I hear the view is worth the climb.

Red Bird

Posted on by

And just who was Red Bird? An early 19th-century warrior of the Winnebago, or as they call themselves, the Ho-Chunk. To my ear at least, that double naming works out well, since Winnebago is a fine name for the major lake in Wisconsin, and Ho-Chunk is a fine name for the tribe’s 21st-century casinos, which are in Wisconsin Dells and other places (and which advertise a fair bit in the metro Chicago market).

There’s a large statue of Red Bird facing Lake Winnebago at High Cliff State Park.

Its plaque says the statue was “designed by Adolphe E. Seebach” and “executed by Sculpture House, New York.” Seebach was apparently a Wisconsin sculptor who died in 1969, but a cursory look for him doesn’t uncover much more.

The Banta Company Foundation paid for the work; information on Banta isn’t hard to find. It was a large printing company based in Menasha, one of the Fox Cities, in business for over a century until R.R. Donnelley swallowed it in 2006. Why the company foundation decided to sponsor a statue of Red Bird in 1961—the date on the plaque—I couldn’t say. But there he stands, supposedly depicted as he was in 1827.

The Wisconsin Historical Society says of Red Bird: “Wrongly informed that the U.S. had executed two of their warriors, and thinking other tribes would support them due to widespread white incursions on Indian land, a party of Ho-Chunk from LaCrosse [including Red Bird] attacked settlers near Prairie du Chien in the last week of June, 1827. They killed two men and assaulted a child before returning to their village. On June 30th, a keelboat passing that village was attacked because the Ho-Chunk believed it was the same one whose crew had recently abducted and raped several Indian women.

“In response, the U.S. Army moved troops up from St. Louis, local militia units were hastily formed, and a total of ca. 600 soldiers assembled at Prairie du Chien. Another 100 militia were gathered at Green Bay, where 125 Menominee, Oneida and Stockbridge warriors joined in support of them. In late August these two forces converged from different directions on the assembled Ho-Chunk near Portage. On Sept. 2, 1827, Ho-Chunk tribal leaders surrendered the warrior Red Bird and five others, and further bloodshed was avoided. Red Bird died in prison and the other warriors were tried, sentenced to death, but ultimately pardoned.”

Elsewhere I’ve read that Red Bird dressed in his best finery to surrender – which is how he’s depicted in the statue – and expected to be put to death immediately, as he might have been by another tribe. To his bewilderment, he was chucked in prison, the sort of place in which you might die of dysentery, rather than experience a warrior’s death.

Return to Cana

Posted on by

Leaving Sturgeon Bay, we headed up the Green Bay side of the peninsula on County Highway B, which later merges into County G and takes you into Egg Harbor. It’s a pleasant, two-lane highway, with bayside property on one side, mostly waterfront houses, and less-developed land – sometimes rising bluffs – on the other. All of it was lush. It’s been a rainy year in Wisconsin, too. I was expecting more traffic, this being the high season in Door, but most of the time no one was visible ahead or behind.

Until we got to Egg Harbor, that is. It might be quaint not to have any streetlights in your town, but Egg Harbor needs one at the juncture of County G and Wisconsin 42, the main road through town. The town seemed to be even more touristed than Sturgeon Bay, but with less space to put people. I asked if anyone wanted to get out and look around, but no one did, citing the early-afternoon heat.

We pressed on across the peninsula, via County Highway E, which passes mostly through farmland. The road also comes within sight of Kangaroo Lake, the peninsula’s largest inland lake. Kangaroo? I wondered. That’s the kind of name that makes me wonder. Maybe one of the pioneers of Door County imported kangaroos to see if they could be raised for meat. That failed, but some escaped, and their descendents live around the lake. They’re wily and hard to spot, in case you were wondering.

On the Lake Michigan side of the peninsula, we made a return visit to the Cana Island lighthouse. Most of us were back, anyway. Ann didn’t exist the last time we were there, almost exactly 12 years ago. Lilly of course didn’t remember being there, but in 2001, I took her picture wandering down the path to the lighthouse.

So I decided to do the same this time around, in roughly the same place along the path leading to the light. As I occasionally tell people I meet with small children, if you keep feeding them, they get bigger.

The grounds and the light are pretty much as I remember them. In his remarkable web site specializing on lighthouses of the western Great Lakes, Terry Pepper writes of the lighthouse: “Cana Island is somewhat a misnomer, since it is only an island when the lake levels are high. The majority of the time, there is an exposed rocky sinew of land which connects to the mainland.

“Congress appropriated funds for construction the spring of 1869 and a crew immediately undertook the task of clearing a three-acre station site. Leveling a rock foundation, a buff-colored cream city brick tower began to take shape. Eighteen feet in diameter at the base, the tower rose 65 feet, gently tapering to a diameter of 16 feet at its uppermost… Spiraling within the tower is a gracefully spiraling set of cast iron stairs, with 102 stairs.

“The cast-iron lantern atop the tower was likely prefabricated at the Milwaukee Lighthouse Depot and transported to the site by Lighthouse tender. Equipped with a Third Order Fresnel lens with the focal center of the lens situated approximately 75 feet above the tower bottom, the lens boasted a focal plane of 82 feet above mean lake level.” (Visible for 16 miles, according to the docent, and lighting the waters near Door to this day.)

Ann wanted to climb to the top of the tower, which was open by extra admission. The top was accessible via the aforementioned 102 steps.

Her mother and sister didn’t want to go up, so I went with her. Before we went, and even after we’d climbed to the top, I was certain that we hadn’t gone up last time, probably because it was closed. But now I’m not so sure. You’d think I’d remember climbing a spiral of narrow cast-iron steps and taking in a sweeping view of the greens of the peninsula and the blues of Lake Michigan, with a constant wind blowing in my face, but maybe not. Memory’s a trickster.

Looking for Tail-Gunner Joe

Posted on by

A funny thing happened to me yesterday, late in the afternoon, as I scoured through St. Mary’s Cemetery in Appleton, Wisconsin, looking for a particular tombstone. I wasn’t having any luck finding it. But I did enjoy the graveyard’s handsome grounds, which are near the Fox River.

On Independence Day, we’d set out for northeastern Wisconsin – to see Appleton and the other Fox River cities, plus take a jaunt up to Door County.  I enjoyed parts of Appleton last year without my family, and I thought they’d like some of the places I’d been. As for Door County, we paid a visit in 2001, but it was too short and we’d long wanted to go again. This visit was also too short – I figure we’d need a week to do Door right.

Yesterday was our last day, and I headed out for St. Mary’s Cemetery by myself, since no one else cares to visit cemeteries. Specifically, I wanted to see the place’s most famous – infamous – resident, Sen. Joseph McCarthy. I couldn’t find him for a while. Find-a-Grave wasn’t exact enough. There were other McCarthys – even other Joseph McCarthys, since the cemetery is well populated with Irish names – but the Senator was elusive.

Then I spotted a man and his small daughter riding through the cemetery on something like one of those drivable carts you see at grocery stores. Eventually, they came fairly close to me, and I had to ask, since we were the only (living) people in the cemetery, and no guide signs or other clues pointed the way.

“Excuse me, do you know where Joseph McCarthy is buried? You know, the Senator.” Even in Appleton – he was from nearby Grand Chute – I can’t assume anything.

The man, about 10 years younger than me and with close-cropped reddish hair, looked at me for a moment. “We’re not supposed to tell people that,” he said. “He was my great-uncle.”

“Oh.”

“But I will tell you he’s at one of the corners, near the river.” And then they started on their way again. I guess he decided I didn’t want to harm the memorial, which of course was true. I just wanted a picture. Soon I found the stone and took one.

What are the odds of running into a grand-nephew of Joe McCarthy? (Assuming he wasn’t kidding about that.) I checked, and McCarthy was from a family of seven children, so in Appleton, the odds wouldn’t be that bad.

The Mighty F-1 Laid Low

Posted on by

I hadn’t heard until today about the expedition that found some Saturn V first stage engines – the mighty F-1 — on the bottom of the Atlantic. The Bezos Expedition site is careful to note that “many of the original serial numbers are missing or partially missing, which is going to make mission identification difficult. We might see more during restoration,” so they could be from any of the missions that used the engines, though I believe they were looking for Apollo 11 relics.

There might be less headline glory in finding something from (say) Apollo 16, but I think it would be just as cool. The expedition site goes on to say that whatever their origin, “the objects themselves are gorgeous.” Bet they are. They’ve gone to the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center for stabilization, so maybe they’ll stay there for display. That place would be worth going to that corner of Kansas to see, F-1s or not.

Seems that Amazon boss Jeff Bezos paid for the expedition, or at least much of it. Good for him. It’s the kind of thing that billionaires should spend some of their money on. That and the 10,000-Year Clock.