Category Archives: Presidents

St. Vincent de Paul Parish & Ascension Lutheran Church, Milwaukee

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The church participants in Doors Open Milwaukee typically provided visitors written descriptions of the church and the church’s history, on actual sheets of paper. Good for them, in this over-digital age. I picked them up for future reference – as in, right now – and the one for St. Vincent de Paul Parish was rather long on the various priests associated with the parish (and two Congressmen who went to church there), with less about the church building, though it does say that the current one was completed in 1900 in a Renaissance Revival style by architect Bernard Kolpacki (d. 1900, so this was probably his last project among a number in Milwaukee).

This church, too, was originally for a Polish congregation.

The sheet offers information about Rev. Wincenty Lewandowski (d. 1900), who founded St. Vincent de Paul Parish. He had felt it expedient to leave the German Empire in the 1870s due to Kulturkampf and all that jazz, making his way to Ohio at first. When he got there, he got to work. The sheet notes the following glimpse of something that could use a little more detail:

Bishop Richard Gilmore sent him to Toledo, Ohio, where he would found St. Hedwig Parish in October 1875, and St. Anthony Parish in 1882. For reasons unclear in the surviving records, many were opposed to Lewandowski at Saint Hedwig, his multiple reassignment requests to the bishop were denied, and the situation devolved in June 1885 into a bomb being discovered under the rectory and a riot breaking out between parishioners. Lewandowski resigned and departed for Milwaukee.

Other sources mention the 1885 church riot in Toledo, and the fact that St. Hedwig in that city was torched the next year. Religious-inspired violence is one thing, but church riots are considerably rarer on these shores. Yet Toledo isn’t the only one I’ve encountered while visiting churches – there’s also the story of the former Cathedral of All Saints of the Polish National Catholic Church in Chicago, which not only involved an ecclesiastical riot, but schism thrown in mix for that extra volatility.

Impressive stained glass.

For the items below, I had my AI program remove the glare. This is one of the genuinely useful things that it can do, but I have to be careful to tell it not to change anything else in the image, because it has a tendency to “improve” things. Sometimes it does so even if I tell it not to, but for these two, nothing was changed.

Next door. Probably the rectory. An ivy-covered rectory.

The last church of the day was Ascension Lutheran Church.

Services in English and Spanish, as you’d except. And that third one? Hmong, it turns out.

On the door.

I don’t know that DHS goons would specifically be looking for Hmong – which would be an act of base ingratitude, among other things. Probably just the usual brown folk. Raiding churches: what a good way to win hearts and minds.

Ascension Lutheran dates back to the 1850s, in this case founded by Norwegians. The current sanctuary dates from 1923.

The church sports a number of memorials, as churches often do, but this pair was a little unusual.

Good to see a presidential site, however minor. United Spanish War Veterans: not an organization one hears much about anymore, but it lasted until 1998, a few years after the last veteran member passed, namely Nathan Cook, U.S. Navy, who died in 1992 at 106. A successor org, Sons of Spanish American War Veterans, is still around.

Nor’East ’26 Scraps

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The run of days from Juneteenth to July 4 at least, and even better to Nunavut Day (July 9), would be a fine time to slow down, like between Christmas and New Year’s Day, only warmer and without the mad runup to December 25. Back to posting around July 6.

Thousands of impressions flitter by on the road, most instantly forgotten when literally on the road – driving, you need to be in the moment, or else – or quickly forgotten, when “on the road” means you’re out and about somewhere that isn’t home. Still, a handful of details stick, even without photos. But photos help.

Maine

I call it “Self-portrait with Goth Prom.” Poster spotted in downtown Bangor.

In the Maine Statehouse, a flat-ish object of a different kind.

Lincolnville, on the coast of not far from Belfast.

Lincolnville, Maine

Carnivorous whelks. I was frankly ignorant about carnivorous whelks, and glad to learn a little about them. Because what a great name for a snail.

Too bad I wasn’t hungry in Belfast. I’d have had tacos.

The Penobscot River and the Penobscot Narrows Bridge. A literal and scenic highpoint on that part of US 1 as it winds through near-coastal Maine. The bridge includes an observatory, unfortunately not open in April. Driving over the bridge itself was another pleasure of coastal Maine.

Helen’s Restaurant in Ellsworth. Tasty fish and chips. Haddock, specifically. What do you take for a haddock? “Well, sometimes I take-a aspirin, sometimes I take-a calomel.” It was some years before I learned that calomel was something I’d never take in a million years.

Massachusetts

Our Lady of Czestochowa Parish, Turners Falls.

The church was closed. So was Poet’s Seat Tower.

As the tower appeared more than 100 years ago.

Shelburne.

Massachusetts 112 (Route 112) in Hamilton County. Car commercial driving.

Goshen Cemetery, just off Route 112.

Ohio

A solid bank building in Niles, across the street from where William McKinley was born. The Dollar Savings Bank Co. sounds like the kind of place that George Babbitt would mention, but distain in favor of a bank with longstanding ties to the best business men in Zenith.

An Admiral Dewey clock at the McKinley Birthplace Museum. A textbook case, that Dewey, of how fleeting fame usually is.

Passing through northeast Ohio intrigued me greatly about that part of the state. Akron, Canton, Youngstown, Austintown — all places I can imagine going, and enjoying the visits. See ’em before the reverse migration really gets underway.

Further west, the drive on the Lincoln Highway (US 30) was a pleasure: mostly four lanes, rarely crowded. The flat farmlands don’t qualify as conventionally scenic, but the budding springtime fecundity has a lot to recommend it, even as a strictly visual pleasure: the bright greens of new leaves, the brown and grays of the fields recently plowed, small roads heading off usually at right angles to the main road, a run between Upper Sandusky and I-75 near Lima with few buildings of any kind, except distant farm structures.

Downtown Lima: the Allen County courthouse, seen from North St.

Looks like my kind of breakfast place. Closed on Sunday anyway.

Another North St. detail. Spiderman sitting on — something. A large scoop of strawberry ice cream?

Saint Rose Church in the hamlet of Saint Rose, not far east of the Ohio-Indiana line. A Cross-Tipped Church.

Pennsylvania

The hills at the edge of Punxsutanwney.

The drive west across Pennsylvania began across the Delaware River from Port Jervis, NY, taking US 209 southwest through part of Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. Bet the straight-ish, two-lane road is busier in peak recreation season in the Recreation Area, but in April, I booked along without encountering much in the way of traffic. Trees were still budding, but it wouldn’t be long before some stretches of the highway would pass through green tunnels. The sunlight was already casting green leaf shadows on the road.

Watch Groundhog Day, and the impression is that the festivities are held in the center of town — which they are, in the Punxsutanwney stand-in of Woodstock, Illinois. Go to Punxsutanwney itself and learn that the February 2 fest is a few miles from town in a place called Gobbler’s Knob.

Gobbler's Knob

One more Phil. Iron Phil.

The clerk at the Gobbler’s Knob gift shop took pains to let me know that the site, and the festivities, were overseen by a nonprofit, not the commonwealth. Outside is the nonprofit’s bus, or at least I assume that, probably used to ferry people from town to GK and vice-versa, to help deal with the popularity of the event.

I like a good local festival as much as anyone, but February 2 is a deal-breaker. Can’t Phil come out again on August 2 to predict how much longer summer is going to last?

One More (Indiana)

Miami Chief Francois Godfroy stands at the corner of Main Street and Huntington Street/Indiana 18 in Montpelier. Well, maybe it’s supposed to remind passersby of the chief more than actually depict him.

A Daughters of the American Revolution historical marker says: Reserved by U.S. to Chief Francois Godfroy of the Miami Nation of Indians by treaty at St. Mary’s, Ohio, 6 October 1818. 3,849 acres on Salamonie River at La Petite Prairie, Harrison Township, Blackford County: reserve lands sold 1827, 1836.

Waymarking says: “The statue was made in Venice, CA in 1960 for the Tom Wood Pontiac dealership in Indianapolis. Later it was in front of the Indian Museum at Eagle Creek Park In Indianapolis. After the museum closed, the statue (of more a plains Indian than a NE Indiana tribe) was obtained by Chief Larry Godfroy — a descendant who presented it to the City of Montpelier and they erected it as a monument in 1984.”

The National McKinley Birthplace Memorial

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Recently in Niles, Ohio, I had an encounter with one of the four assassinated presidents. If you go to the right place in that town (pop. 18,400), you can’t miss him.

Not just him either. Note the busts surrounding President McKinley, who are men associated with him in one way or another. Hay I knew; Bliss I had to look up.

The most direct route between Punxsutawney, Pa. and Lima, Ohio, passes pretty close to Niles. I had a little extra time, by design, on the second-to-last day of my recent trip. Niles happens to be the birthplace of William McKinley, and in our time, home of the National McKinley Birthplace Memorial and the McKinley Birthplace Home and Research Center – that’s two entities, a block apart.

The Birthplace Memorial is imposing and grand, another edifice designed by McKim, Mead & White.

The memorial has two wings, one a public library, the other an auditorium sporting McKinley artifacts, and a collection of flags.

William and Ida dressed, I believe, for his second inauguration in 1901.

As mentioned, the McKinley Birthplace Home and Research Center is a block from the memorial. It’s considerably more modest.

It’s also a replica, and apparently not a very close one, the original house having burned down almost 90 years ago. Still, looks are free (like at the memorial), so I had a look.

On display are a number of McKinley-adjacent artifacts. I liked the plates especially. One features the president himself.

Another features Admiral Dewey. How often do you hear about him any more? Even less than McKinley.

The president’s maternal grandmother’s gravestone is propped up against a wall. I suppose it was at risk of completely falling apart wherever it was, and (I hope) it was replaced in situ.

I liked this as well.


I looked up James Stevenson McKinley (d. 1847) on Find a Grave and that inspired me to look a little further into the McKinley ancestry. James’ father was David “The Patriot” McKinley (d. 1840). David’s father was John “The Wagonmaster” McKinley (d. 1779). John’s father was David “The Weaver” McKinley (d. 1760). That David’s father was James “The Trooper” MacKinlay (d. 1760), back in Ireland, at which point the nicknames peter out.

Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site

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A lot of museum artifacts are behind glass. Some really old, brittle and famous items are encased in an atmosphere of nitrogen, the better to extend their existence, I understand (and nitrogen anoxia sounds like an unfortunate accidental way to die). That might have been the case with the underwhelming display of the overwhelmingly historic Book of Kells. But in any case, glass interferes with our right as iPhone-carrying tourists to take really good pictures with almost no effort.

An example: a stuffed bird I saw in April.

The picture might be lousy due to the glass, but the artifact – and some other stuffed birds in the same case – did something a history museum ought to do: teach. I learned, looking there at a bird dead more than a century, that as a boy in the early 1890s Franklin Delano Roosevelt pursued a taxidermy hobby.

I’d come to Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site in Hyde Park, New York, the flush of spring, on my way home from the Northeast. I made time for the site because a visit had been impossible in October.

I understand that during FDR’s boyhood, the place wasn’t quite as wooded, but even so the trees (and thus birds) must have been plentiful. One of the paths on the grounds.

Views from the second story of the mansion.

Though the greenery obscures the splendid Hudson River, even a short look around gives you some idea why James and Sara Roosevelt thought building a residence here was a good idea, and why Franklin was deeply attached to the place all his life.

Is it important to know that boy FDR shot and stuffed birds (though he later had them stuffed professionally)? In and of itself, maybe not. I’ve heard about him all my life, read books about him and seen documentary films, and visited the FDR D.C. memorial, and somehow that detail never came up. Knowing about his short-lived taxidermy hobby doesn’t help me understand the New Deal or World War II any better, in as much as I know about those big-picture events.

Still, it’s a humanizing detail, and I believe that’s good to know about figures as famed and studied and lionized as FDR. It also allows for a bit of informed speculation about Franklin, a rich only child with an overbearing mother. By the time he was old enough to tote a gun, he probably needed to get away periodically from the mansion and its familial confines. Shooting birds out on the sprawling grounds of Hyde Park on the Hudson was just the ticket.

Also, it’s simply fun to learn something like that – like when I found out that Chester A. Arthur played the banjo. I’m odd that way.

The Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site, which is the official National Park Service designation for the place, includes the mansion (Springwood, by name) and grounds, but also a presidential museum and library. The mansion is a mansion without being a Gilded Age exercise in ostentation.

It’s a big place, lots of rooms and some elegant décor (and stuffed birds), all original artifacts, so there’s no doubt it was a wealthy household. Still, even though it’s literally a museum in our time, in FDR’s time I doubt it felt like a museum at all, unlike some Gilded Age exercises in ostentation – and I’m thinking of the Vanderbilt mansion nearby, more about which later.

Best not to jump to too many conclusions based on the vibe of the mansion, but it does dovetail with the generally understood notion that FDR was self-assured and at ease in the upper class. No need for him to show off, any more than James and Sara did.

Speaking of James and Sara.

Note: the tour guide – you need to be on a tour to see the inside of Springwood – was perfectly forthcoming about the well-known fact (to historians) that the Delano fortune was built on opium.

Other artifacts of note included some of the president’s coping mechanisms — literal mechanisms — for his handicap.

The historic site also includes many, many depictions of FDR, as one would expect. Such as Franklin and Eleanor in bronze. Or just Franklin in bronze, or other materials.

Campaign material and other laudatory items are well represented in the museum.

Editorial cartoons. The president as a sphinx was especially amusing.

A chilling artifact: a fragment of a slug meant for FDR, fired at him on February 15, 1933 by Guiseppe Zangara.

“One of the wounded was William Sinnott, a detective who had frequently acted as Roosevelt’s bodyguard in New York City,” says In Roosevelt History. “Sinnott had just moved to Miami earlier that week when he was called to assist FDR’s security staff.

“The bullet fragment pictured above was removed from Mr. Sinnott’s wounded head. Ten other fragments from the bullet that struck him remained in his body. When visiting Sinnott in the hospital, FDR said, ‘You couldn’t hurt him, bullets just bounced off his skull.’ Mr. Sinnott was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1940 in recognition of his service that day. In 1946, Mr. and Mrs. Sinnott donated the bullet fragment in this specially designed presentation case made by Lambert Brothers Jewelers to the FDR Library.”

Historians don’t generally adhere to the Great Man school of history any more, but it’s nevertheless a fertile source of speculation to imagine how different things might be for the nation and the world had it been Roosevelt and not Anton Cermak who died in 1933.

Though he eventually died away from home, in Georgia — ah, another presidential site I must see — FDR came full circle to Hyde Park. First, the bed in which he was born.

Ultimately, his final resting place is on the grounds, along with Eleanor. Gardening had just begun when I paid my respects.

RIP, Mr. President and First Lady.

Mount Hope Cemetery, Bangor

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It’s one thing to see Hannibal Hamlin’s bronze in downtown Bangor, but true vice presidential enthusiasts can’t leave it at that. The 15th Vice President of the United States also happens to repose in Bangor, along with a number of other Hamlins, at Mount Hope Cemetery.

He’s in the company of a lot of other Mainers, too.

Including a lot of 19th-century Maine politicos and nabobs, and silent screen actor Ralph Sipperly. Of course I had to look him up, even though I didn’t see his stone.

Wiki notes, ultimately citing the NYT for the theater anecdote: “Ralph Sipperly [d. 1928] was a comic and character actor who appeared in ten films (mostly silents) between 1923 and 1927. His most notable portrayal was as the barber in the Academy Award-winning film Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927).

“During one theatrical performance of Six-Cylinder Love in New York in 1921, Sipperly, who played a high-powered car salesman, accidentally drove an actual automobile off the stage and into the first row of seats. No one was injured, though screams erupted in the sold-out hall, and one woman ‘became hysterical’ as people scrambled out of the way. The incident made The New York Times the following day, but apparently had no effect on Sipperly’s career.”

Mount Hope is credited with being the second U.S. cemetery of the rural cemetery movement. The cemetery organizers picked a partly wooded bluff whose slope rolls down to the Penobscot River. The first such rural cemetery was, of course, Mount Auburn in Massachusetts, which opened in 1831.

“At Mount Auburn, a large tract of land was converted into a romantic park with ponds, bowers, grottos, and a great variety of planting. It was consciously designed for the living as well as the dead,” the cemetery web site says.

“The City of Bangor was not long in following suit. Bangor became very much alive with the settlement of the Penobscot River Valley in the years preceding the Revolutionary War. In 1834, Bangor was declared a city. Among the citizens of Bangor came a strong sentiment for the creation of a new cemetery grounds for the burial of its dead.”

The new cemetery was opened in 1834, along the aesthetic lines pioneered in Boston. Climb the slope – I’ll admit, I drove on the road that snakes up that way – and you’re rewarded with a vista peppered with memorials.

Views of the river and the road that parallels it for a while, the epic US 2.

The cemetery extends further inland, all together totaling about 300 acres.

Aged and crumbly stones in mix, as usual.

Not a lot of large memorials, but some.

More modest memorials.

Actually, that isn’t the only memorial for Harry Merrill (d. 1924).

You have to wonder what the decision-making process was like among Harry’s family. Maybe they couldn’t agree on a fitting memorial, and one group went with a ground plaque, the other with a plaque-on-boulder?

Downtown Bangor

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“If you’re taking pictures of buildings, you should take one of that building over there,” an old man said to me, pointing at a building partly obscured behind the curve of the street. I had been taking pictures of buildings. A spring day had come to Bangor: the air was a pleasure, so was the friendly warm sun, and I was out and about among the short downtown blocks.

“Thanks,” I said, adjusting my position on the sizable downtown plaza, so that the building came into view.

Wow. As I often do, I looked into the building later. A little gem of the brick arts known as the Circular Brick Building, a no-nonsense Maine sort of name, or the Merchants National Bank building, after a long-time occupant. Part built in the 1900s, part in the 1920s, a bank till the 1980s, a mix of apartments and ground-floor retail since the 2010s, after some decades vacant.

A random old man’s recommendation was a winner. He was idling on a bench in the plaza, so I went back and told him I agreed that it was an impressive building. The man could have been from central casting: Get me an old Mainer in ordinary but not shabby clothes, and don’t forget the bushy white beard and pale pink face. It was a missed opportunity when I asked him whether he’d lived in Bangor his whole life. The comic Mainer answer would have been, “Not yet.”

Instead the old Mainer told me he had. Wouldn’t live anywhere else. Couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. Didn’t want to go anywhere else. He implied he’d had enough of that during his time in the Army, exact years unspecified, and I didn’t ask when, though there’s a distinct chance a shooting war was going on then. That doesn’t mean he was anywhere near it, however. For all I know, he could have been a PFC excrement sanitation specialist (PFC-ESS) in Louisiana, to put it in the way the cinematic Patton didn’t, but the ’60s Army might have.

Anyway, he asked me where I was from, and long experience has taught me to say “Chicago,” and not something in any detail like, “Texas, but I haven’t lived there in a long time, and then I lived some other places like Nashville and Osaka, yes, the place in Japan, but it’s been Chicago for a long time now, except I actually live in the northwest suburbs.” Few people would hear any of that. Everyone pays attention when I’ve said Chicago (or Texas, the times I’ve said that). Somewhere years ago, I think it was a pudgy middle-aged Briton – you know, he looked a little like Benny Hill – who asked me where I was from. At hearing “Chicago,” he pantomimed shooting a Tommy gun.

When old man Mainer heard Chicago, he told me that soon after his discharge from the Army, he found himself in Chicago, in fact at the lakefront. He threw his Army ID into Lake Michigan. “Felt great to be out, but it was a problem, since that was the only ID I had right then,” he said. Obviously he made it back to Bangor.

The city’s got some fine streetscapes.

Some other handsome Bangor blocks and buildings.

Early examples of the art of the steel-framed highrise.

Paul Bunyan isn’t the only mural subject. This one is bees.

Because Bangor is known for honey production? I had to check and probably not much, the sort of thing that gets lumped in with “other” in the ag census for Penobscot County. These bees are bees for the sake of being bees. (Try that three times fast.)

“Bangor Beautiful partnered with Bangor Greendrinks to create a large bee-themed mural in Downtown Bangor during the summer of 2023,” notes the nonprofit Bangor Beautiful. “The artist Matt Willey is the founder of The Good of The Hive, a global mural project with the goal of hand-painting 50,000 honey bees, the number in a healthy, thriving hive. He has painted bee murals all over the world, including at the Smithsonian.”

I knew I got out of bed for a reason today: to find out that there is an artist whose obsession is bee murals. More than 11,780 painted bees so far, according to the artist. Eccentricity of the first order, and I salute it.

You can’t call Bangor bustling, but I’ve seen plenty more vacant downtowns. Business details, former and existing.

Temple of the Feminine Devine, eh? Not to be confused with the Temple of the Devine Feminine, an outfit in Seattle. I could make a Life of Brian reference here, but if you know that reference, you’ve already thought of it.

The unofficial Maine flag, and variations.

That flag failed to become official in the last election in a ballot question. No one in Maine cares what I think, but I think it should be made official again, but without disestablishing the current flag. Co-official, you could say. Maine would be unique that way. Also, no fixed pattern beyond a single pine tree and a single star to the upper left. Let a loose a proliferation of lone pine flags begin.

Bangor as a whole hugs the Penobscot River, but downtown clings to the much smaller Kenduskeag Stream, a tributary of the Penobscot.

A small island in the stream is a park.

The park sports a cannon captured at Fort Toro, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in 1898.

It so happened that Rep. Charles A. Boutelle was the chairman of the Committee on Naval Affairs in the U.S. House at that moment, facilitating the war prize cannon’s permanent move to Bangor. Quite the career Boutelle had, per Wiki: “American seaman, shipmaster, naval officer, Civil War veteran, newspaper editor, publisher, conservative Republican politician, and nine-term Representative to the U.S. Congress from the 4th Congressional District of Maine.”

That’s not all. Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, Bangor favorite son, stands in bronze not far from the cannon.

“After Lincoln took office and even with the outbreak of the Civil War, however, Hamlin had almost no role in the administration, as was common for this period in history. Hamlin despised his new position as vice president. He missed being part of the political process and controlling patronage but felt it was his duty to serve. He also found presiding over the Senate boring and was frequently absent. Still, he was disappointed when the Republican Party dropped him from the ticket in 1864.” A curious, but all too familiar quirk of human psychology, in that last sentence.

The “diplomat” on the plinth refers to his posting to Spain in the early 1880s, named to the job during the brevity of the Garfield administration.

GTT ’26 Details

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Time for spring break. Back to posting around April 26, when it might actually be spring in northern Illinois. There have been a few days recently when I’ve been able to sit out on my deck comfortably, which is my idea of spring, but not that many.

The recent trip to Texas seems like a while ago now. As usual, though, there were many details. A lot more than I can convey, but here are a few more.

Faces

At the National Funeral Museum in Houston, one display featured, chronologically, 20 photographs of Abraham Lincoln. The third to last one, from February 1865, is one you don’t see much.

On a wall in downtown Nacogdoches, familiar figures from Texas.

I didn’t work out who this was supposed to be, in downtown Houston. Better that way, I think.

Signs

This place in Austin, well known to Tom, serves most delicious tacos.

Bastrop: Cobbling runs in the family.

Belton.

Structures

A re-creation of an ancient Caddo home.

Durst-Taylor Historic House & Garden in Nacogdoches.

The Old Stone Fort Museum in the same town, which is made of stone, but was never a fort. On the campus of Stephen F. Austin State University. Recommendation to the university: if you want people to visit the place, provide just a little unrestricted parking. A little visitor parking anywhere on campus would be good.

Then again, the university seems determined to move the structure anyway — which might mean taking it apart, and then not putting it anywhere where because such a move would cost too much.

A place that has seen better days in Houston.

Downtown Lockhart.

The Southwest Museum of Clocks & Watches is permanently closed, alas.

Items

Cosmic in Austin is a bar and a collection of food trucks that surround an informal plaza with a lot of tables and chairs and shade. It’s a very pleasant place, and within walking distance of Tom’s home.

Houston manhole covers.

An artifact at the Old Stone Fort, but from San Augustine, and a hyperlocal soda bottle.

The New Mexico flag near Carlsbad NP.

Landscapes

Not just any landscapes, but within the Sierra Madera Astrobleme in West Texas. US 385 cuts right through the ancient crater for about eight miles, on the way to Marathon. You’d never know but for signs telling you that you’re entering the astrobleme, and one telling you that you are leaving it.

Memorials

The Houston National Cemetery.

RIP, Richard Allen Wilson. I don’t think that I’d ever seen an infinity symbol on a national cemetery stone. That, of course, made me curious, and I checked: it is one of the 98 various symbols that the National Cemetery Administration allows. The list is here.

I’m familiar with most of them, but not quite all of them, such as the Church of World Messianity, which is a Japanese new religion – it’s hard to keep track of all of those – and the Aaronic Order Church, which may or may not be part of the LDS movement, but in any case is an American sect. Hard to keep track of all those, too.

The NCA says: “No graphics (logos, symbols, etc.) are permitted on Government-furnished headstones or markers other than the available emblems of belief, the Civil War Union Shield, the Civil War Confederate Southern Cross of Honor, and the Medal of Honor insignias… Emblems of belief for inscription on Government headstones and markers do not include social, cultural, ethnic, civic, fraternal, trade, commercial, political, professional or military emblems.”

So (for example) symbols for the Loyal Order of Moose or some odd emoji or maybe a grawlix will not be considered, though as a comment about the Army, the latter would be funny.

Finally, a less formal memorial, but I’m sure just as heartfelt.

A memorial for Francisco Lin Herrera happens to be near the Giant paintings outside of Marfa. He died in an accident along that stretch of US 90. RIP, Francisco.

The National Museum of Funeral History

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One place I didn’t go in February was Ghana, the west African nation. If I had to pick a place to visit in that part of the world, I might well pick Ghana, for various reasons. One is that the coffin shopping is unlike anywhere else.

Rather, I stopped by the National Museum of Funeral History in northern Houston, which has a connection to Ghana. I was expecting a display of coffins maybe, but the museum has so much more: many hearses, horse-drawn and automobiles; items from the funerals of U.S. presidents and popes, including a large display about the funeral of President George Bush the elder; entire sections on cremation and embalming from the earliest times to now; Victorian death memorabilia in its macabre (to us) variety; a Day of the Dead exhibit; and, to my surprise, Ghanaian coffins, which the museum calls the largest such collection outside west Africa.

My favorite, though it’s a hard choice: the Duracell coffin, with its distinct copper top. Guess those batteries are sold in west Africa. You’d think Energizer would be the better choice.

The museum, founded in 1993, occupies more than 30,000 square feet in an unassuming building in a neighborhood of unassuming buildings. Had it not been for the billboard advertising it on the highway into Houston, I might have missed it. Or not. I have a way of ferreting out smaller museums. One important advantage of the NMFH: it’s open on Mondays. Many Houston museums are closed on Mondays and Tuesdays — the two days I was in town.

As with many specialized museums, NMFH is the legacy of a single person with a driving interest in a single subject and, in his case, access to many of the relevant artifacts. The subject just happens to be death adjacent, so when I mention the museum, people get a little weird.

“The idea for the Museum grew from Robert L. Waltrip’s 25-year dream of establishing an institution to educate the public and preserve the heritage of death care,” the museum says. Waltrip, a Houston mortician born to an undertaker father, didn’t need death care himself until recently, dying in 2023 at 92.

The hearse collection is impressive, making the museum count as a carriage and auto museum. Not all automotive hearses, at least in earlier times, looked like the stretch postwar hearses one thinks of now.

A vehicle the likes of which I’d never seen: a 1921 Rockfalls Hearse, built in Sterling, Illinois, the museum says. The hearse’s hand-carved body is composed of six types of wood.

Some horse-drawn hearses.

A children’s hearse from, of course, Victorian times.

Some coffins and caskets, too. “It’s not the cough/that carries you off/but the coffin/they carry you off in.”

Including an oddity known as the Money Casket, which is on loan to the museum, and was never meant to be put into the ground.

A section about presidential funerals. I spent a while there.

Prominent is a replica of President Lincoln’s casket.

There was a model of Lincoln’s funeral car, probably the most famous such in American history.

Other methods for carrying Lincoln when he wasn’t on the train.

Other presidential funerals got their due, such as those of Washington, Grant, Garfield, McKinley, TR, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford and as mentioned, an entire small room about the elder Bush. He had a funeral train as well, though relatively modest: from Spring to College Station, all within east Texas.

Papal funerals, as you’d think, involve a highly precise set of rituals, told in some detail by the museum.

There is much more.

All in all, a first-rate museum about coping with finality.

The Harry S. Truman Little White House

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Nightmarish human faces weren’t invented by demented AI, but have long been with us. Case in point.

There’s Harry Truman in there somewhere. This particular wax dummy watches patrons in the small gift shop at the Harry S. Truman Little White House, which we toured on our second day in Key West.

The property belongs to the state of Florida these days, but of course was once a federal facility. Specifically, used by the Navy as officers’ quarters for the base at Key West. Truman took a cotton to the island early in his presidency, and visited often, and this is where the Navy put him up. He came to relax and play cards and fish and drink, naturally, but also to be president somewhere besides Washington in winter, since by the 1940s communication tech could facilitate such a thing.

The museum has been restored to its appearance in the late 1940s, and damned if it isn’t like walking into my grandparents’ time, entering an ordinary sort of American house of the period. The president might have stayed there, but Harry and Bess weren’t the sorts who went in for the latest expensive styles, but rather the sort of things available at a department store or via mail order: couches with some color but not too much, wooden coffee and end tables, mid-century lamps, etc.

Except, that is, for the handsome custom-make card table. That wasn’t available from Montgomery Ward.

“The poker table was a gift to Truman in 1949 by three civilian contractors working in the U.S. Naval Station cabinet shop,” says Wood Shop News. “The table is a marvel of craftsmanship and one of the most popular pieces at the Key West facility. Measuring 58” in diameter and 28” high, according to Little White House executive director Bob Wolz, it is based on a poker table that was used on the U.S.S. Williamsburg presidential yacht. The piece is made of mahogany with built-in chip holders and ashtrays crafted from recycled brass shell casings. A solid tabletop can be used to cover the poker table to turn into a dining space.”

The limo parked on the grounds of the Little White House wasn’t standard mid-America either.

A nearby sign says that it is a 1950 Lincoln Cosmopolitan Presidential Limousine. One of nine that the Truman administration used, since in those days presidential vehicles weren’t transported by air, as they are now, so the government had them stationed in various parts of the country, ready to use.

The car is a museum piece, but no mere museum piece, since I understand that the current owner, the Key West Harry S. Truman Foundation, rents it under specific conditions. Namely, you pay some large fee, and are driven around Key West for a while. I learned this when we saw an elderly couple get in the back seat, followed by a uniformed driver, and off they went.

One more thing about the Little White House: the grounds are a small arboretum.

Flora includes well-known varieties, such as avocado, coconut, date palm, mahogany and mango, plus less-than-household names, such as Fiji fan palm, soapberry tree, and my own favorite name, gumbo limbo, whose “wood, though soft, was used in the past to carve carousel horses,” the museum tells us.

I Like Ike, And Abilene Wasn’t Too Bad Either

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In Abilene, Kansas, not long ago, I found myself wondering, whatever happened to Manus Hand? That’s because I stood at that moment near the graves of President and Mrs. Eisenhower, Ike and Mamie.

Eisenhower

The 34th President of the United States and the First Lady repose in a chapel-like structure on the grounds of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum and Boyhood Home in Abilene, pop. 6,400 or so, the town where the president came of age.

Eisenhower

I’ve been told I visited before, with my family during a trip to Kansas when I was a wee lad, but I don’t remember that at all. So I count this as a new visit to a presidential sight, including a grave site, which makes 21 presidential graves all together. But for the federal shutdown in October, there would be four more at least: Adams père et fils, FDR and TR.

I thought of Manus Hand because, back in the Neolithic age of the Internet, he had a web site featuring photos of him at presidential grave sites. In my own dead presidents days, I found Hand’s site at some point. He had visited almost all of them by then, 36 by his count. His site is still in existence, without much change, except an update to note that George H.W. Bush had died (2018), but not Jimmy Carter.

The Eisenhower Boyhood Home, moved to the site. No tours available when I came by.

Eisenhower

The Eisenhower Museum.

Midcentury, and what could be more fitting for Eisenhower? It’s chronologically organized: early Ike in Abilene; his Army career before WWII, including his cross-country epic; during that war and right after the war; his presidency and post-presidency, and a gallery about Mamie. Well organized, interesting artifacts, but (for me) none more interesting than a titanium sphere.

Eisenhower luna 2

The sphere is a replica of the pennant sphere that traveled to the Moon in 1959 aboard the Soviet spacecraft Luna 2, which was the first manmade object to reach the lunar surface, or any celestial body. The sphere was a detail that I remembered from long-ago reading about space exploration. I didn’t realize one existed any more, even in replica form. Khrushchev presented it to Eisenhower during his famed visit to the U.S. that year (Khrushchev’s due at Idlewild!).

Luna 2 carried two spheres filled with liquid and an explosive charge, designed to burst apart on impact and scatter pentagonal pennants, the Moon Registry says. The pennants were imprinted with: 1) Sentiabr 1959 (September 1959); CCCP… ; and the state seal of the USSR, a wreath of grain around the hammer and sickle. It is theorized that the medallions vaporized on impact.

Russia is still shooting Luna missions to the Moon. The most recent, Luna 25, crashed near the lunar south pole in 2023 but, unlike Luna 2, not on purpose. Oops. More about the many pennants the Soviets sent into space is here. On display next to the sphere is a lunar rock, which must have been a posthumous gift, since Ike didn’t live quite long enough to benefit from astronauts rock-gathering on the surface, though he was still alive during Apollo 7, 8 and 9.

A close second excellent artifact was a dagger Marshal Zhukov presented to General Eisenhower on the occasion of the defeat of Germany, a good-looking blade with an ivory hilt and gold decorations. I picture an exuberant Zhukov, as in The Death of Stalin, handing the knife to Ike and saying something earthy. Apparently the two, Ike and Zuke, got along well in the early months of the joint occupation of Germany. Differences aside, they had job experience in common. I don’t remember seeing anything about that in the museum, but there was a lot of material, so that could have been easily missed. That and any reference to Kay Summersby.

It was hot that day, September 24, but after visiting the museum, I took a look around Abilene anyway. The town hasn’t forgotten its most famous native son. Also, Donut Palace was closed.

Eisenhower luna 2

A lot of the detail would be different, but I’ll bet Ike would still feel at home with the scale of Abilene. Small town, small buildings, but some solid touches.

Abilene< KS

Including at least one building Ike would have known.

Abilene< KS
Abilene< KS+

Chicago had cows, Abilene has cowboy boots.

The Hotel Sunflower. Former hotel, that is, now apartments.

The Sunflower State. The flower looks a little ominous, peering down at the settlers.

Kanzas

Structures that aren’t grand, but stately even so. Petite stately, you might call them.

Abilene
Abilene
Abilene

The third one is a Carnegie library. Though the Carnegie grant was large, other fundraising for the library’s erection had been done in the early 1900s, including a benefit lecture by William Jennings Bryan.

Out near the highway: truth in naming. But note also, the bowling alley is closed. I could go either way on the reopening of an alley in that location, but I really want the sign to stay.

One more thing Abilene is known for, at least since 2022.

The World’s Largest Belt Buckle. Says so right there on it. How large would that belt have to be?

“Designed by local artist Jason Lahr, Fluter’s Creek Metal Works, the buckle features Dwight D. Eisenhower, Wild Bill Hickok, Abilene & Smoky Valley Railroad, Historic Seelye Mansion, C.W. Parker carousel horse, C.L. Brown telephone, a racing Greyhound and Chisholm Trail longhorn inlaid with blue quartz,” says the city of Abilene, Kansas.

“The buckle is a project of the Abilene Convention and Visitors Bureau which hopes the new roadside attraction will entice travelers to stop and visit the Best Historic Small Town.”