South Dakota Dash ’24

Posted on September 13, 2024 by admin

The first day of the trip was a slog from Illinois through Wisconsin and most of southern Minnesota. The second day, August 19, we woke up in Luverne, Minnesota and went to bed in Sundance, Wyoming. Less of a slog, mainly because we stopped a few places in South Dakota along I-90.

First of all, Sioux Falls. How can you stop in Sioux Falls and not see the falls?

Hard to believe, if you crop things right, you’re in a city of around 200,000. Sioux quartzite, it’s called.

Once a hub of water-power industries — the ruins of a mill are on the grounds — these days the falls travel through the municipal Falls Park. Sioux Falls has thoughtfully erected an observation tower on top of a rise in the park, for better views.

Naturally, we went to the top, for the view of the falls, downtown Sioux Falls, and – off in a different direction – a major Smithfield meat processing plant. Sioux Falls isn’t just about credit card HQs, the result of a race-to-the-bottom concerning usury laws. It still has industry, too.

Before leaving town, we sought out the Cathedral of St. Joseph, a work by Emmanuel Louis Masqueray (d. 1917), another of those famed architects mostly lost to time. Among other things, he was chief of design at the 1904 St. Louis world’s fair (one of the four fonts of the modern world).

It was open. Not all city churches can say that on a Monday.

Nice. Westward on I-90, at one of the rest stops, we found a much smaller religious structure, though elegant in its simplicity.

It too was open.

Lunch that day was in the burg of Kennebec, SD (pop. 281), which happened to have a place, Benji’s Diner, with a distinctive ag-town vibe, and serious meat on the menu.

It’s a little hard to tell, but there’s beef under that sea of gravy, and I found it mighty filling. Signs on the highway promote the SD beef industry and beef eating on principle, and they get no argument from me.

We took a look around town. When I saw this, I concluded that every town, no matter how small, has one of these murals as a little expression of civic pride. Seems that way, anyway.

Kennebec is the Lyman County seat.

The built environment isn’t just buildings.

Despite our large lunch, we managed to stay awake for the drive to Wall, SD, stopping for a few minutes at Wall Drug and then Badlands National Park, where we spent a few hours. That decision factored heavily into what happened next in Wyoming, more about which later. Enough to say that by the end of the day, we were in Sundance, Wyo.

But we weren’t done with South Dakota. For reasons I won’t bore anyone with, especially myself, we had to backtrack the next day to take care of a minor issue with the car, so it wouldn’t be major later on. For that, we went to Rapid City, which we had bypassed the day before. I’m glad we got to go, because the mechanical issue didn’t actually take long to deal with, which left us with time to see a bronze James K. Polk.

Plus U.S. Grant, Franklin Roosevelt, and Calvin Coolidge, among other U.S. presidents at street corners in downtown Rapid City that I managed to see.

“When a local man noticed people interacting with a temporarily placed statue of President Lincoln outside the Hotel Alex Johnson [in downtown Rapid City], an idea sparked. This man was Don Perdue, and he came up with the idea to put a president on every corner in Downtown Rapid City,” explains Visit Rapid City.

“It took a lot of convincing, a lot of fundraising, and hours of research before it started. In 1999, Perdue proposed the idea to the city as a way to honor the legacy of the American Presidency. The project was approved and in 2000 the first four presidents were unveiled: George Washington, John Adams, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush… Over the next ten years, a group of local artists worked to create and place all 40 of the remaining statues.”

I didn’t have time to see all of them. Or the inclination. It was in the low 90s F. that day, so I only wanted to spend a few minutes seeking them out, while Yuriko more rationally waited in our air conditioned car.

She was willing to get out and look at Rapid City’s older attraction a few minutes later, however: Dinosaur Park. I later checked with my brother Jim. He said he does indeed remember, a little, our family’s visit to the park in 1960, before I was born.

There’s a good view of Rapid City from atop the park’s hill.

But you’re up there to look at wire-mesh-frame dinosaurs with concrete skins, originally dating from the 1930s but obviously maintained into our time and (maybe?) tinkered with a little to more closely match current thinking about dinosaurs.

Even better, I learned that the park was originally a WPA project, consciously designed to draw tourists to Rapid City with something distinctive. Of all the various WPA projects one can encounter, this has to be unique among the lot.

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.

Somehow the Bernie Bros Missed This One

Posted on March 20, 2024 by admin

A few weeks ago, I went again to Ollie’s, whose appeal is the randomness of its merchandise, and there he was, among the packaged foods and housewares and small appliances and furniture and bric-a-brac, no other stuffed politicos around, no tag or bar code.

“This the funniest thing I’ve seen all day,” I said to the clerk. “How much?”

I was only kidding. It was the funniest thing I’d seen all week, maybe all month. He spent a minute or so tapping into a laptop near the register, but soon gave up the chase. “How about $3.99?” he said.

Sold.

A product of Fuzzu, a Vermont designer of pet toys. I’d say maker, but for Bernie at least that occurred in China. Bernie isn’t alone — well, he was when I found him, but had he been separated, a la Toy Story, from the rest of the Fuzzu stable? Joe, Kamala, Donald, Mike, Hillary, Bill and Rootin’ Tootin’ Putin.

Mike? The former Mayor Bloomberg, it seems, since on his back is “Pop Cop.”

Now Bernie joins my small collection of presidential ephemera: postcards, a few buttons, my Franklin Pierce bobblehead and William Henry Harrison Pez dispenser and Eugene V. Debs ribbon. My definition of presidential is pretty broad, and certainly includes serious if quixotic candidates for the nomination.

Thursday Cha-Chings

Posted on March 7, 2024 by admin

Ann came home for spring break today. I offered to subsidize her expenses on a romp somewhere, even a mild sort of romp like my spring breaks of yore, such as to cloudy St. Petersburg, Florida, where we stayed at the condo belonging to the grandmother of one of our party (she wasn’t there) and found one of Vaughn Meader’s Kennedy records stashed away in her record collection. But Ann preferred to come here.

Remarkably, the fellow who produced The First Family in 1962, one Bob Booker, is still alive at 92, at least according to Wiki. Of course, he was only 31 then.

Saw this phrase at a supermarket recently, on banners hanging from the ceiling. Cha- ching!

The point in this case was to persuade shoppers that the store offers low, low prices. Save some cha-ching here or some such. I think most people understand that the phrase refers to cash register noise, and thus hard cold cash in one way or another, but it made me wonder how many people any more have even heard a cash register make a sound like that?

Because I am of a certain age, I have. I’m pretty sure the dime store I patronized ca. 1970 still had mechanical registers. But that was long ago, and even then the sound was a little old-timey. Now even the smallest stores in the nation’s remote backwaters use electronic registers, whose signature sound is a muffed beep-beep-beep that’s weak tea when it comes up to conjuring up images of drawers full of money. And yet cha-ching! lives on. Just another shiny bit in the jewel cave of English.

One more pic from Devon Ave. in Chicago on Sunday.

The mural is just outside the entrance to Cary’s, the bar I went to. As far as I saw, this was the only reference to Alice in Wonderland around. Why is it there? Why not?

Street View tells me that this small mural is a recent addition, too. It wasn’t there the last time the All-Seeing Eye passed by in November 2022. The bar’s wonderful neon sign has been there longer, appearing sometime between August 2007 (the first image available) and May 2009. That was a period of economic disruption, so maybe the bar did well enough to spring for the sign.

This from the NYT today: “President Biden has selected his education secretary, Miguel Cardona, to be the so-called designated survivor during Thursday night’s State of the Union address, a grim moniker meant to ensure at least one decision maker survives if a calamity were to wipe out the nation’s leadership assembled at the Capitol for the speech.”

Grim moniker, huh? Journalism might be a sickly industry, but journalese turns of phrase live on. Hard to imagine anyone actually saying that.

As for the office, the Secretary of Education is 15th in line to become president (vice president being first), which means that “designated survivor” is probably the only ghost of a chance of succeeding to the top spot, without the usual rarefied politicking of a presidential run, that the Secretary of Education has.

How long has that been a cabinet-level position? Right, the first one was during the Carter administration. Carving Education out of Health, Education and Welfare was, in fact, a campaign promise that he was able to keep, for what that was worth.

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.

Billy Goat Tavern & Grill ’23

Posted on December 7, 2023 by admin

I can’t say whether Billy Goat Tavern & Grill looks exactly the same as it did in the ’80s, but it sure felt the same on Monday night. The walls of photos, neon, beer taps, rows of bottles, knickknacks and basic restaurant tables and chairs, and plenty of worn red bar stools. The vibe is Chicago tavern clutter, comfortable as an old shirt.

Now that I think about it, I had the most Greek experience I’ve ever had at the Billy Goat, having never yet made it to Greece. Shortly before the 1988 presidential election, the Dukakis campaign staged a campaign parade on Michigan Avenue, and after work I went to watch, on a spontaneous quasi-date with a fetching Greek-American woman I knew. Was it a torchlight parade? In my memory, there were torches, but probably no: that seems like a 19th-century thing.

We were within feet of the candidate as he walked by, his expression a little stiff and discouraged. Later we repaired to the Billy Goat, which was wall-to-wall packed, including many Greek Americans – wearing the colors of the Greek flag, some of them — with everybody feasting on cheeseburgers and beer, the place alive with talk, and the clank of spatulas on the grill, and the hissing burgers and onion air, and the clouds of cigarette smoke still common in bars and restaurants.

I’m pretty sure the workers called out Cheezborger! Cheezborger! in those days, which might be an example of life imitating art, or more likely, life and art reinforcing either other.

Rumor was that Dukakis himself would make an appearance, and well he should have, but he never did. He should have shown up in his tank helmet, shaking hands and mugging for cameras. Rather than be embarrassed by it, he should have leaned into it, but no.

Back here in the 21st century, there are reminders of goats at Billy Goat. How could it be otherwise?

You can see a wall of bylines at Billy Goat. Once upon a time, both major Chicago newspaper buildings were within easy walking distance, even in winter, so newspapermen hung out there.

Best known was Royko, who worked the place into his column from time to time. From there, the place went on to wider notice, sort of.

I expect the number of journalists is fairly low these days, outnumbered by other kinds of downtown residents and workers, plus tourists. On Monday night at least, no one called out when you ordered your cheeseburgers; they just went to work at it.

Except for the vegan in our group – she was a good sport about it — we had cheeseburgers and chips and beer. What else? In theory, a few other things are on the menu, but we didn’t test it. No fries, either.

We also sipped from a single glass of Malört. It’s a Chicago thing to do.

Around the corner from the entrance of the Billy Goat, directly facing Lower Michigan Ave. and just north of the Chicago River., is a mural and a tavern sign.

The mural is a work by Andy Bellomo, “a self-taught artist who began her creative interest as a young teen studying the color, light, shapes, and lines of traditional stained glass in churches,” according to the the Magnificent Mile Association, as part of a number of murals known as Undercurrent (at least to the Mag Mile Assn.).

It’s been there about a year, which would account for me never noticing it before. Haven’t been down to Lower Michigan Ave. in a some years, but I can assure the world that it’s still the hard urban space it’s always been.

There’s more of the Undercurrent mural on the other side of the tavern’s entrance, not captured in the below image.

But I did capture, without realizing it, part of a different mural, one that’s been there for decades, by an artist mostly lost to time in Chicago, even though his heyday was only about 50 years ago. It’s on the extreme right edge of the image: a rainbow goat.

“Many people ask about the rainbow goats painted on the walls outside of The Goat,” notes the tavern web site. “They were painted in 1970 by Sachio Yamashita, known as Sachi… Billy [Sianis, original owner of the tavern] made a deal with Sachi. Every day after Sachi and his helpers finish their work, beer and borgers are free! Unfortunately Billy Goat Sianis passed away on October 22, 1970 just days before the paintings were complete.”

I might have noticed the goats before, but didn’t give them much thought. I didn’t notice them this time, or I’d have taken a full image, since how many rainbow goats could there be in the world? On walls, that is.

Fort Sheridan Water Tower

Posted on October 3, 2023 by admin

Where are those copy editors, anyway? A Washington Post correction from today.

Much of the former Fort Sheridan in Lake County, Illinois, is now a residential neighborhood, which is only reasonable. Even when it was an Army base, it was mostly residential. The officers’ houses are now refurbished single-family houses and the enlisted men’s quarters are now refurbished multifamily.

Time was short on Saturday, so I didn’t have all the time I wanted to look around the post-military neighborhood, but we did take a stroll on the former parade ground, which is now green space looped by Leonard Wood Ave.
Leonard Wood. Ask people driving on Leonard Wood who that might have been and his obscurity would assert itself in the form of blank stares and wild guesses.

I don’t know the details of all of his lengthy military career, but I do know that TR theoretically reported to him in Cuba in ’98 and that, in some alternate reality, Wood captured the Republican nomination for president in 1920 and went on to be 29th President of the United States, rather than the office going to a newspaper publisher from Ohio.

In that case, Wood would surely be remembered. Maybe about as much as Harding. Which might not be that much.

We spotted the fort’s former water tower on the other side of the grounds.

I had to see that up close, so we stopped by before we headed south for our lunch appointment.

Impressive. A design by noted Chicago architectural firm Holabird and Roche, who did many of the fort’s buildings.
Per Wiki: “Built from 1889 to 1891, the tower was among the first structures completed in the fort. It was built with bricks made from Lake Bluff clay and designed to resemble St. Mark’s Campanile in Venice.”

Springtime Thursday Musings

Posted on April 20, 2023 by admin

Warm again early in the day. Thunderstorms rolled through in the morning and again in the afternoon. Cool air came back late in the day.

Ahead of the rain, we walked the dog around a pond, where a good many red-winged blackbirds flitted around. Hardly our first encounter with them, though there don’t seem to be as many after spring is over.

Moths are back in the house. How did this happen? There’s no lasting victory over moths, looks like. So I put out fresh glue traps, and some dozens have been caught. I still see a few flitting around, and slap them when I can, but I hope they too will either die in the traps, or die mateless and without descendants.

Rabbits are back in numbers too, often in the back yard, but I leave them alone. The dog does too, seemingly not interested in chasing them any more. Such is old age.

Completely by accident, and speaking of rabbits, I learned that today is the 44th anniversary of a swamp rabbit attacking President Carter’s boat (which wasn’t known till later in 1979). Even better, I learned that the photo of the incident is in the public domain, being the work of a White House photographer. This copy is via the Carter Library, though I don’t remember it being on display there.

With the looming deadline for renting more Netflix DVDs in mind, I watched part of the disk I currently have at home, Judgment at Nuremberg. I don’t remember why I put it in the queue, except that I’d never gotten around to seeing it, and Spencer Tracy and Burt Lancaster are always worth a look.

I didn’t realize that William Shatner was in it until I saw his name in the opening credits. As it happens, he plays a captain. In the U.S. Army, but still a captain.

I also didn’t know that Werner Klemperer played a part, one of the defendants. Naturally, I had a silly thought when he entered the courtroom: Col. Klink was put on trial at Nuremberg? No! His incompetence consistently aided the Allied cause. Call Col. Hogan as a character witness.

I’m reminded of something I once heard about Klemperer on stage: “Kevin D. told me that, during a production of Cabaret at the Chicago Theatre in the late ’80s, Werner Klemperer played [a Jewish merchant not in the movie version], and got the biggest applause of the night. ‘Everyone knew it was because he played Col. Klink,’ Kevin said.”

In the staged revival of Cabaret I saw in 2002, Hal Linden played the same part, and likewise got a vigorous round of applause on his first appearance. For playing Barney Miller, I figure. Such is the power of TV.

The Ohio Statehouse

Posted on April 12, 2023 by admin

Through much of 1999, I visited a fair number of Midwestern cities on editorial business of one kind or another. At some point, that included Columbus, Ohio. I was staying downtown, so during a lull, I popped over to the Ohio Statehouse, which occupies a prominent 10-acre block.

I went in and looked around back then, but thinking about it last month, what I remembered most was the statue of William McKinley near the street. He’s still there, of course.

With verbiage about the immortal memory of President McKinley. That’s what I remembered, how memorials speak to those who already remember, at least among Americans. Later generations do not remember, or much care, except in certain lightning-rod cases. I suppose that isn’t a good thing, but there is the upside of mostly forgetting to hold historical grudges.

The president isn’t alone at that part of the capitol grounds, with some bronze allegories to keep him company.

The back entrance.

We’re used to seeing a dome on such a structure, but state capitols mostly started using that form, patterned after the current shape of the U.S. capitol, after that building took shape in the 1860s. The Ohio Statehouse is older than that.

We arrived late in the morning of March 25, the last day of the trip, after spending the night in suburban Columbus. I would have similar shots of the front, but as innocently spring-like as the pictures seem to be, there was a wicked strong wind blowing. Not terribly cold, just incessant and sometimes so energetic that you could feel yourself tipping one way or another, especially as a gust passed without warning.

Much calmer inside. Under the rotunda.

Nice detail work. I’m impressed by the Spirograph floor. The Spirograph-ish spirit of democracy, maybe.

The design is much less spare than in West Virginia, but not the work of any single designer. It’s the Greek Revival creation of a series of architects beginning in the 1830s and not finished until 1861, just as the nation fell apart.

Perry, hero of Lake Erie, isn’t forgotten. Not at least on the wall.

Nor Vicksburg. Many Ohioans were there.

Nor Cleisthenes, ancient democratic reformer.

I can’t say I’ve ever seen him at a capitol before, and he isn’t known as a native of Ohio, but it’s a good choice. No less than Herodotus called him “the man who introduced the tribes and the democracy” to Athens, “tribes” being the 10 groups organized by residence in Attica, rather than clan or other kinship.

The seal of Ohio in glass.

The visitor entrance, and the information desk, closed gift store and some museum exhibits, are in the basement, itself fairly handsome.

I didn’t know who founded the 4-H Program. Now I do, but sadly I am likely to forget.

I like this a lot: the counties of Ohio, each in a different stone.

Finally, words of wisdom –

Not because Lincoln had a special connection to Ohio or the building. Just, I think, on general principles.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Presidents