The Duke in Winterset

Posted on July 30, 2014 by admin

The thing to do when heading out of Des Moines in a southerly direction is to detour into rural Madison County, southwest of the capital, whose county seat is Winterset. If you have time. I decided we had time, since how could I pass up a look at a bronze of Winterset’s favorite son, Marion Robert Morrison?

JOHN WAYNE

Born Marion Robert Morrison

In Winterset, Iowa

May 26, 1907

Sculpture donated to the

People of Madison County

By the John Wayne Family

The statue of John Wayne is a short block from his birthplace house, now a museum that (like the capitol) happened to be closed when we arrived. No matter. A good look at the bronze was enough for now, and we weren’t the only ones doing so. A few other families pulled up for a look-see while we were there. Wayne’s fame has some staying power.

Next to the statue is a Chevy van, detailed to honor Wayne. According to the birth site museum web site, “Several years ago, an anonymous person from Arizona donated a full-size 1980 Chevy van that has been extensively customized for the true John Wayne fan….

“This one-of-a-kind vehicle is covered with $50,000 of artwork from John Wayne movies—even the windows are etched to continue the design! The interior boasts hardwood floors, carpeted walls, a wet bar, TV and VCR (this was 1980, remember?), a souped-up sound system, and saloon-style swinging doors that lead to the queen-sized bedroom [sic] in the back.”

I didn’t realize it when we were there, but the statue usually resides at a corner of Washington St. and John Wayne Dr. – one of the main drags through town – but has been moved a block away, so it won’t be damaged during construction of the John Wayne Birthplace Museum. Work started in 2013 on the new museum, which is slated for completion for the 2015 John Wayne Birthday Celebration (and it’s convenient that baby Marion was born pretty close to Memorial Day). Last year my old friend Kevin, quite the fan of the Duke, went to the birthday fest. He said he had a large time.

One more thing: there are other John Wayne bronzes out in the wider world. You have to go to California to see these two.

The Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center

Posted on July 28, 2014 by admin

Why Kansas? Even the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center web site asks that question in its FAQ page. Why is a first-rate spacecraft museum – absolutely the best I’ve ever seen, except for the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum – in Hutchinson, Kansas, a town of about 42,000 northwest of Wichita? The answer: that’s the way the cookie crumbled. Right place, right time.

“The Cosmosphere began in 1962 as nothing more than a tiny planetarium on the Kansas State Fairgrounds,” the page says. When the planetarium outgrew its original facility and moved to its current location, Patricia Brooks Carey and the Hutchinson Planetarium’s board of directors sought business advice from Max Ary, then director of Ft. Worth’s Noble Planetarium. “Interestingly, Ary was also part of a Smithsonian Institution committee in charge of relocating thousands of space hardware artifacts to museums throughout the U.S. The Cosmosphere was granted many of the artifacts.”

These days the museum measures over 105,000 square feet and includes a large exhibit space for rockets and spacecraft, plus a planetarium, dome theater, and more. We arrived in the mid-afternoon of July 13, too late to catch a planetarium show, but in plenty of time to look at a lot of space stuff, expertly and chronically organized for display.

“Most everything you see in the museum was either flown in space, built as a back up for what was flown in space, built as a testing unit for what was flown in space, or was the real deal, but was never meant for space,” the museum continues. “Only a few artifacts are replicas, and those that are replicas, are for good reason. For example, the lunar module and lunar rover in the Apollo Gallery are replicas (though built by the same company that produced the flown modules), because those that went in space, stayed in space. No museum in the world carries a flown lunar module or rover. In fact, they’re all still on the Moon.”

The displays begin at the beginning of modern rocketry – Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Robert Goddard and on to Nazi rockets, including a restored V-1 and V-2.

Then on to Soviet and U.S. rockets and capsules that ventured into space, plus a lot of ancillary items. It’s an astonishing collection, including a replica of the X-1, a flight-ready backup for Sputnik 1, a backup version of the Vanguard 1, a Russian Vostok capsule – the only one outside Russia – Liberty Bell 7 (pulled from the ocean floor and restored), a Redstone rocket and a Titan, too, the Gemini 10 capsule, a Voskhod capsule, the Apollo 13 Command Module, a Soyuz capsule, various Soviet and American rocket engines, an Apollo 11 Moon rock, and a lot of smaller artifacts.

I took a particular interest in the Russian equipment because I’ve seen so little of it. In fact, I’d never seen a Vostok, and there it was. Looking like a large bowling ball behind glass. “Hop in, Comrade, and we’ll shoot you into space.”

The American equipment was impressive, too, though more familiar. It’s always an impressive thing to stand under a rocket like a Titan, which used to deliver Gemini into orbit.

Ann seemed to enjoy herself, and probably learned something. But to really appreciate this museum, it helps to have been an eight-year-old boy in 1969. You find yourself turning the corner and saying, “Wow, look at that!” a lot.

Fifteen Days, Seven States, Nearly 3,000 Miles, and the Blue Hole

Posted on July 27, 2014 by admin

Our drive to San Antonio and back started on the morning of July 12 and ended a few hours ago. I actually remembered to set to trip meter as we were leaving, so I know that between backing out of the driveway and returning to it, the car had been driven 2,952 miles and change. Except for when my brother Jay used the car in San Antonio, I drove all those miles. Ann was in the back seat almost all of the time.

Our route southward wasn’t as direct as it could have been, passing from metro Chicago to Des Moines to St. Joseph, Mo., the first day; to Hutchinson, Kan., by way of Topeka the second; and Dallas by way of Wichita and Oklahoma City on the third. After some days in Dallas, travel resumed: to San Antonio via the most direct route, which turned out to be a mistake (more about which later).

Our return northward was more straightforward: San Antonio to Dallas to Lebanon, Mo., and then home, three days’ driving spread out over four days, with a jag into extreme northwestern Arkansas. More about that later as well.

We were caught in two storms so intense that we waited them out beside the road. I saw two suitcases broken open, and their contents spread on the road, on two different Interstates. I’m pretty sure I saw a guy pulled over on the shoulder of yet another Interstate, changing his pants outside his car. We listened to a lot of radio. As hard as corporate interests try, terrestrial radio isn’t quite homogenized.

When I wasn’t driving, I was working (that’s the self-employed life). Or visiting with family members and friends: my mother, two brothers, two nephews and one’s wife, my aunt, first cousin and his family, two friends from high school. Or eating. Some chains, of course, but I did my best to support independent eateries in places like Wichita, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, and Mt. Olive, Ill.

Besides all that, we squeezed in visits to three museums, the outside of two capitols (closed, unfortunately), a mall, an enormous bookstore, a couple of wooden bridges, and a cemetery with an historic figure buried in it. I also watched a number of early episodes of Treme, an addictively good show.

And I saw the Blue Hole.

I lived within 10 minutes’ drive of the Blue Hole for more than a decade, and every time I visited San Antonio after that for 35 years, I was equally close. Yet I never saw it before this visit. All I can say is, it was about time.

Tri-State Leftovers

Posted on July 2, 2014 by admin

Cool for July 2, but I know the heat will return. Such are Northern summers. Tomorrow isn’t a holiday, but it ought to be. Back to posting on Sunday.

The bridge that crosses the Mississippi from Savanna, Illinois, to Sabula, Iowa, is exactly wide enough for two vehicles, and no wider. It’s a steel truss bridge, and more than 80 years old. These facts alone make it a thrill to drive across, but a conscientious – make that sane – driver isn’t going to take in the view of the Father of Waters while crossing; he has to leave that to his passengers.

The main steel structure on the Iowa side eventually gives way to a much longer and slightly wider causeway that passes through high waters and lush green islands. At that point it’s Iowa 64, and also US 52. The last time I drove over such watery lushness was in Louisiana bayou country.

North from Sabula to Dubuque is also US 52, and a branch of the Great River Road. At this point, Illinois 84 (and a bit of US 20) is the branch of the Great River Road on the opposite bank, in Illinois. We spent a fair amount of time on both roads the weekend before last, and I can say one thing: bikers are fond of the Great River Road. We saw a lot of them on the roads and parked in various towns along the way. They weren’t usually young men, but mostly wizened fellows, probably out for the weekend.

The Great River Road is actually a chain of state and local roads passing through 10 states from Louisiana to Minnesota, or vice versa if you travel the other way. It’s a National Scenic Byway totaling over 2,000 miles, according to the Federal Highway Administration. Signs along the way look like this (and in fact we drove past this exact place).

We stopped for a moment in Bellevue, Iowa, on US 52 to take a peek at Lock & Dam No. 12. There’s a small roadside park that offers a nice vantage of the structure. As I got out of the car to look at the dam, I noticed a young family – husband, wife, child of three or four – also standing in the park, seemingly admiring the structure with more intensity than people usually devote to infrastructure. Odd. (My own family members were in the car.) Maybe they were a couple of young engineers. For the record, the dam creates Pool 12, with a total capacity of 92,000 acre ft. The US Army Corps of Engineers completed it in 1939 and still operates it, and the structure’s been on the National Register of Historic Places since 2004.

The campgrounds at Mississippi Palisades State Park are well-designed and expansive. They don’t cost that much, either: $10 per night for a tent site. But the wet spring and early summer, and probably the close proximity to the Mississippi and many smaller pools of water, also meant we were in close proximity to a lot of bugs. This bothered Lilly and Ann in particular – you should have heard the commotion when they discovered a spider hitchhiking a ride in the back of the car. In the vicinity of the campground itself, mosquitoes mostly weren’t the problem, or maybe our DEET kept those away. Gnats were the biggest nuisance.

By night, they’d all calmed down and the fireflies were out. Gnats = nuisance. Fireflies = joy to behold. They don’t get in your face and they put on a show.

Things You See in Mount Carroll

Posted on June 30, 2014 by admin

Somewhere or other at some time, I read that Mount Carroll, Illinois, had enough things to see to recommend a short visit (how’s that for source amnesia?). Wherever I got it, I can pass along that recommendation. It’s a small place, with only about 1,800 people, but it has a sizable concentration of historic structures. We took a look at a few of them on the afternoon of June 20.

That includes a fine courthouse, the Greek Revival part of which dates back to before the Civil War. Elsewhere on the courthouse grounds are a few monuments – but not quite as many as some courthouses I’ve seen – including a tall one dedicated to Union veterans. Turns out that Lorado Taft sculpted the cavalryman at the top of the monument, which is formally called the Carroll County Civil War Soldiers And Sailors Monument.

Writing in the short-lived blog Larado Taft: The Prairie State Sculptor, Carl Volkmann says, “Lorado Taft was a member of a team of artists who was commissioned to create the Carroll County Civil War Soldiers And Sailors Monument. George H. Mitchell designed the monument, and Josiah Schamel constructed the foundation. John C. Hall designed the annex that was added later when county officials determined that there were many names missing from the original honor roll list.

“The monument consists of a fifty-foot vertical shaft with a Lorado Taft-sculpted soldier holding a flag at the top. Lewis H. Sprecher of Lanark posed for the statue and made several trips to Taft’s Chicago studio to model for it. Two additional statues are attached to the base of the monument, one an infantryman and the other a cavalryman.”

Not far from the town square is a genuine, honest-to-God Carnegie Library that is, in fact, still a library. We went in for a look around. It seemed like a nice facility for a town the size of Mount Carroll. We were the only ones in the library except the librarian – it was about 30 minutes ahead of closing time on a Friday afternoon – and I spoke briefly to her, telling her that I wanted to show my daughters what a Carnegie Library was. I also wanted to come in because they aren’t exactly common sites.

Later, I checked, and my feeling wasn’t quite right. At least according to this Wiki list, some 60-odd Carnegies are still functioning libraries in Illinois alone, out of more than 100 originally built. Seems like most of them are in small towns away from metro Chicago, so unless you frequent that kind of small town, you won’t see them much.

Just before we left town, we came across something that’s presumably not always near the courthouse in Mount Carroll: this unusual car.

Unusual for American roads, that is. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Morris Minor in this country. It’s so unusual that besides it being a Morris, I didn’t know anything else about it.

Naturally, I had to look it up. Through the marvel of Google images, I was able to pin it down to a Morris Minor 1000 Traveller. In its pages on Morris Minor history, Charles Ware’s Morris Minor Centre Ltd. in Brislington, Bristol, says “there is only one other car on British roads today which is as familiar as the Morris Minor, and that’s the Mini. That both were designed by the same man is no coincidence, and indeed Sir Alec Issigonis is one of the very few car designers whose name is recognised by the man or woman in the street and not just by enthusiasts or fellow engineers. [This might be true in the UK, but I have no way to judge that.]

“The products of Sir Alec’s genius have had a profound and highly beneficial influence on the British motor industry, so it is hardly surprising that it is his first car, the Morris Minor of 1948, which has become the subject of this proposal for a long-life car.”

More about Sir Alec here. I’m not sure I’d want to own a Morris Minor myself, but it’s a distinctive design. Good to see one loose on the roads of North America. I’m glad there are enthusiasts in this country. Any fool with money can buy a snazzy new sports car or a Lexis or the like, but it takes some imagination to invest in a Morris Minor.

The Dickeyville Grotto

Posted on June 25, 2014 by admin

Writing for PBS, cultural anthropologist Anne Pryor says that, “In Dickeyville [Wis.], one of the area’s small towns, is Holy Ghost parish, the home of a remarkable piece of folk architecture. Situated between the rectory, church, and cemetery is the Dickeyville Grotto, a structure so amazing that I have seen unsuspecting drivers come to a full halt in the middle of the road to gape. What stops them short is a 15-foot-tall false cave, decoratively covered with colored stone and glass, dedicated to Mary the mother of Jesus, to God and country.

“Although the name implies a singular structure, the Dickeyville Grotto is actually a series of grottos and shrines. It includes the grotto dedicated to the Blessed Mother, the structure seen from Highway 61; a shrine dedicated to Christ the King; a shrine to the Sacred Heart of Jesus; and a Eucharistic Altar in the parish cemetery, formerly used for annual outdoor Corpus Christi processions. The large Patriotic Shrine depicts the history and love of country represented by Columbus, Washington, and Lincoln.

“All of these creations display decorative embellished cement ornamentation achieved by placing patterns of colorful materials in the concrete when it is still damp: shells, stones, tiles, glass, petrified moss or wood, geodes and gems. Iron railings with the same distinctive decorations border the walkways between the different shrines and grottos, unifying these separate structures.”

We arrived at the Dickeyville Grotto late in the morning on Sunday, when it was already sunny and very warm. The Blessed Mother grotto is striking indeed, and in case there’s any doubt, the site proclaims itself to be about RELIGION and PATRIOTISM. (And another sign mentions the gift shop.)Here’s the back of the Marian grotto. Virtues are literally written in stone.

Most of the surfaces are as colorful as can be. Under strong sunlight’s a good way to see it.

Father Mathius Wernerus, priest at Dickeyville’s Holy Ghost Parish, and his parishioners built the grotto during the late 1920s. It was renovated in the late 1990s. The timing of its origin must account for the aforementioned and odd (to us) Patriotism Shrine, with Columbus, Washington, and Lincoln. The patriotism of U.S. Catholics was widely and openly questioned at the time, so it makes sense.

Also worth seeing at Holy Ghost Parish is the cemetery, which fulfilled my informal requirement of at least one cemetery visit per trip. While my family poked around the gift shop, I strolled through the cemetery. Not a lot of fancy funerary art, but still a handsome array of gravestones in a bright Midwestern setting. The most interesting stone I saw was a large one depicting a large farm, which presumably the deceased had owned and operated.Also worth seeing, and not just for the air conditioning, was the church building. Its stained glass is nice, and tucked away in the landing of the stairway that connects the basement and the nave are a couple of statues with themes you don’t see that often (at least I don’t), such as St. Sebastian, whom I’ve seen depicted more often in paintings.

And this pietà. Maybe I’m not up on my Christian symbolism, though I have heard of broken vessels standing in for us sinners. But I’ve never seen a statue quite like this.

I didn’t see anything to identify the work or the artist, so I’ll have to leave it at that. Enough to say that Holy Ghost Parish and its vernacular grotto were well worth detouring a few miles into extreme southwestern Wisconsin to see.

The Hide Vendor of Giddings

Posted on May 21, 2014 by admin

One more item from Central Texas in late April. En route to San Antonio, Jay and I were at a stop light in Giddings, seat of Lee County, when we saw something neither of us had ever seen anywhere else.

It wasn’t the road sign marking the way to Dime Box, which I saw to the right, from the passenger’s seat. I’ve never been to Dime Box, but I remember the peculiar name — and the neighboring town Old Dime Box — from maps and because (I think) it was the capital, or at least the seat of power, in post-nuclear war Texas in the little-remembered SF novel The Texas-Israeli War: 1999.

From the driver’s seat, Jay saw something entirely more remarkable. I handed him my camera and he was able to take a shot just before the light turned green.

The van at the gas station is selling Quality Hides, and you can see some hides hanging on display. But that’s not the strange thing, even though I’d never seen van-based hide selling before. This is central Texas, after all. Lots of cattle around. A hide-seller’s no big deal.

Look a little closer, between the Texas flag and the Quality Hides banner.

BITCOIN Accepted Here.

Oh, really? What’s the story here? A dealer in hides so libertarian in his sympathies — so anarchist maybe — that he takes, or wants to take, the famed cryptocurrency? What are the odds that someone driving along in Giddings, Texas, on a fine spring day will be in the market for a hide and just happen to have a Bitcoin or two burning a hole in his virtual pocket?

Or is this just the vendor’s idea of a joke? Guess I’ll never know for sure.

Independence Hall & The Brazos

Posted on May 20, 2014 by admin

The main attraction at Washington-on-the-Brazos State Historic Site, as far as I’m concerned, is Independence Hall. Texas Independence Hall, that is, a much more modest and lesser-known structure than the one in Pennsylvania.

Actually, it’s the second replica of the original building, dating from the 1950s, which replaced a 1910s replica put on the site. There’s something to be said for replicas or even hasty copies. After all, much of what survived the golden age of Greek civilization was through Roman copies.

The display inside is refreshingly informal. Go in through the open door and there you are. There are no roped off areas, probably because everything inside’s a recent copy. Not that there’s much inside. Just a few long wooden tables, some straight-back wooden chairs, and a couple of jugs, maybe to represent the hard cider on hand to steady the delegates’ nerves. The small obelisk just outside the door says On This Spot Was Made the Declaration of Texas Independence – March 2, 1836.

There isn’t much else, at least in the way of structures, near Independence Hall. Various paths lead off from it through the rest of the historic site, including one to the Brazos River. The scenery along the way looks like this, at least in late April in a non-drought year.

Before long you arrive at the banks of the Brazos. It seems like an under-appreciated river. For a moment I thought I’d never been to its banks before, but of course I have – and not that long ago, when I walked along the Brazos in Waco in 2009, and even crossed it on a footbridge. But it hardly seems like the same river, even though maps tell me that it is.

Something I didn’t know about the Brazos before today: it’s the 11th longest (source-to-mouth) river in the United States, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, and for that matter the longest within Texas. It used to be navigable as far north as Washington-on-the-Brazos, but its career as a river of commerce didn’t really take off. Finally, no less an authority than Hank Hill says that Alamo Beer is “from the lukewarm headwaters of the mighty Brazos River.”

The Bonfire Memorial

Posted on May 14, 2014 by admin

Besides a few buildings and a WWI exhibit at a campus library, Jay and I also took a look at the Bonfire Memorial on the campus of Texas A&M. It’s located on the edge of campus, on the site where 12 students and former students were killed, and 27 more were injured, when the Aggie Bonfire collapsed during construction in the wee hours of November 18, 1999.

Passed the entranceway to the memorial, there’s a walkway to the ring – the Spirit Ring, it’s called. To the right of the walkway is a north-south line of cut stones that represents each year that the Bonfire burned from 1909 to 1998, with a black stone marking 1963, when the event was cancelled because of the assassination of President Kennedy. The names of three students who died during their involvement with pre-1999 Bonfires are also marked, each on the stone for the year he died (in logging and traffic accidents).

These are three of the 12 granite “portals” of the ring, as they’re called. I wondered about their orientation on the ring; later I read that each points toward the hometown of the person they memorialize. Connecting the portals are 27 stones to represent the injured.

Inside each portal is a bronze interior that gives the name, likeness, and a written reflection about one of the dead.

This one happens to be Bryan Allen McClain, Class of ’02, all of 19 years old, who happened to be from San Antonio. All of them are listed here, including their inscriptions on the bronze.

Usually when I see a new or newish memorial, I can’t help the sneaking suspicion that in a century, even half a century or less, the memorial will be disregarded, and the event hazily remembered at best. This comes from seeing too many neglected memorials of that age, though it’s just a feeling, and completely untestable.

Not the Bonfire Memorial. Texas A&M pays an unusual amount of attention to its past, mostly in the form of revered traditions. I don’t have any reason to think the 1999 Bonfire’s going to be forgotten as long as there’s an A&M.

A Small Sample of Aggieland

Posted on May 13, 2014 by admin

Texas A&M University is a big place. I looked it up: the main campus currently occupies 5,500 or so acres, and accommodates 56,000+ students. Systemwide – because there are other campuses – the school boasts an endowment of $7.6 billion. It also seems like a lot of construction is going on, so those figures will probably be outdated in a few years. A&M’s pretty much the main industry in the twin towns of Byran and College Station, Texas, which also have the distinction of not being on an Interstate, though I-45 runs fairly close.

Jay and I took a stroll around campus for an hour or so, which is time enough to see a small fraction of the buildings, as well as a lot of Aggies. They look pretty much like college students anywhere in North America, except for Corps of Cadets members mixed in, who are easily distinguished by their uniforms, which have a remarkable resemblance to WWII vintage U.S. uniforms, in as much as I’m familiar with them. Membership hasn’t been mandatory in 50 years, but the Corps is still a defining tradition at the school. But of course there are many Aggie traditions, some of which are common knowledge among Texans.

If we’d done much planning, we might have been able to see a building or two dating from the time our grandfather attended A&M (again, he was Class of 1916). Mostly, though, we came across buildings dating from the 1920s and ’30s – there seems to have been a large building boom then – as well as some remarkably brutalist structures from more recent decades. Of the structures we saw, I most liked the Civil Engineering Building, built in 1932.

The plaque on the building describes it this way: “A classical revival two-storied stone structure is faced in brick, with cast stone and ceramic tile ornamentation.”

Note the ornamentation here: two Hermes figures, a cow, a couple of horses, and a couple of dogs. Elsewhere, pigs.

The reason for all of those animals on the Civil Engineering building? The plaque again: “Originally used as a veterinary hospital with two additional buildings in the rear, used as [a] stable and anatomy laboratory.”

Not far away we happened on the Cushing Memorial Library, where there’s an exhibit for the centennial of the opening of WWI: “The Great War: Memories of Service and Sacrifice, A World War I Exhibit Featuring the Aggie Experience.” Just the thing to see – free, not too large, and connected to our family’s experience. Class of 1916 meant that it wasn’t long before Grandpa was in the Great War. We told a woman behind the desk at the entrance about him, and she seemed pleased to hear it.

The displays featured some material from Aggies who’d been in the war, but the exhibit had more than that, including wartime posters, photos, letters, everyday items, and more, and not just from American soldiers, but also British, French, German and Italian. (What, nothing from little Montenegro?). The material is from the Ragan Military History Collection at the library.

“A enlarged image of the tattered Gold Star service flag that most prominently captures the World War I Aggie experience will also be exhibited,” notes the A&M release about the exhibit. “Part of a national tradition that began with World War I, the service flag contains approximately 2,000 maroon stars honoring those Aggies who served, and 50 gold stars memorializing those Aggies who gave their lives in the war.”

Fortunately for him and his 13 descendants (so far), Grandpa came back from France, though as an engineer, unexploded ordnance — and the Spanish Flu — were likely the main dangers he faced.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Small Town USA