The Andy Warhol Museum

Posted on July 15, 2019 by admin

The earliest memories I have of Andy Warhol are probably him being mocked by comedians, which I must have internalized somewhat. I didn’t give him much thought in my youth, and if I did, he was the weirdo who painted soup cans and oddly colored portraits of movie stars. Later I regarded his work is stuck in ’60s, as dated as go-go dancing or Hair.

More recently his work has grown on me. Maybe in part because he didn’t stick in the ’60s. That was his heyday, certainly, but half a century later, and more than 30 years after the artist’s death, Warhol is still packing ’em in at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, which originally opened in 1994.

But I’ve come to appreciate him for more than enduring popularity. I’m no authority of any kind on his art, but I understand a little about its context now, and see that he was doing new and intriguing things, or sometimes just odd or strange things. Taking his considerable talent as an illustrator in all sorts of curious directions. Making things that are still interesting to look at and think about, which is one of my crude baselines for judging an artist.

Though footsore from a day of tourism, we joined the crowd at the museum on the evening of July 5. The extra Friday hours and half-price admission helped attract us, but we probably would have gone anyway. Pittsburgh has a number of worthwhile fine arts museums, as do a lot of other places. Nowhere else has a museum devoted to Andy Warhol.
Richard Gluckman, who is known for his museum work, redesigned the building to be a museum. Originally built in 1911 as a multistory warehouse, the structure now sports seven floors of galleries and exhibition space, with the permanent Warhol exhibits taking up the top four floors.

Warhol’s early and student work, as well as his time as a commercial artist in the 1950s, takes up the seventh floor. On the sixth floor are ’60s works; the fifth floor features ’70s works; and the fourth floor exhibits works from the ’80s.

In some ways, his early works are the most interesting, simply because they are less familiar. On display on the seventh floor, for instance, are ink drawings of women and produce trucks (1946), “Seven Shoes” (third image down), which Warhol did for a shoe brand in the 1950s, and the risque “Female in Corset and Stockings,” which probably wasn’t for a client.

Equally interesting are items about Warhol’s childhood and youth. Such as a large, blown-up photo of his high school graduation picture. The face is him, and yet not any Warhol you’re used to seeing. Turns out Andrew Warhola of Pittsburgh had a childhood and an adolescence, as opposed to the comedian-fodder artist who appeared fully formed in New York with frizzy white hair, painting Brillo boxes.

Also interesting to learn about Warhol: he was the son of Lemko immigrants and he remained a practicing Ruthenian Catholic all his life.

The sixth floor displays the most familiar Warhol output: soup cans and other consumer product-inspired items, celebrity portraits in assorted hues, and clips from his early movies, all 1960s vintage. Most of these are so well known — so absorbed into the tapestry of 21st-century American culture — that I don’t feel the need to link to any images. Even so, I look at the soup cans now and think, interesting idea for 1962. Also, who eats Pepper Pot?

Google Image “soup can” and one of the things high in the results offers a silk screen of “Tomato Soup” for sale. For $500. Not even a limited edition. Presumably the Warhol Foundation is getting a cut. Warhol was an astute businessman as well as an artist, and I think that would make him smile.

All that said, I’m not paying that much for an open-edition silk screen of “Tomato Soup,” however interesting the original concept might have been.

The ’70s and ’80s galleries sported such interesting, or amusing, items such as the “Vote McGovern” (1972) and “Space Fruit: Lemons” (1978). An entire gallery wall featured “Mao Wallpaper,” which he created in 1974 but which the museum reprinted a few years ago, probably to put on the wall. Anyway, it’s there, along with “Skulls” on the same wall (individually, not in a group of six). I like to think that’s a comment on the millions Mao murdered, but I’m not sure the museum would say that.

One gallery display of late-life Warhol output was a complete surprise: computer-generated art. Specifically, Amiga generated.

According to the museum: “In the summer of 1985, Warhol was given his first Amiga 1000 home computer by Commodore International and enthusiastically signed on with the company as a brand ambassador.

“For their launch, Commodore planned a theatrical performance, which featured Warhol onstage at Lincoln Center with rock ’n’ roll icon and lead singer of Blondie, Debbie Harry. In front of a live audience, Warhol used the new computer software ProPaint to create a portrait of Harry. He later made a series of digital drawings including a Campbell’s soup can, Botticelli’s ‘The Birth of Venus,’ and flowers.”

These images are on display in the gallery, though for most of the past decades, they languished on obsolete Amiga floppy disks. “In 2014, we collaborated with Carnegie Mellon University and Carnegie Museum of Art to extract the saved files from Amiga floppy disks held in our archives collection,” the museum notes.

That was something I knew nothing about, since I wasn’t paying attention to Warhol or the Amiga in 1985, though I knew a fellow in my office who still had one of the machines in the mid-90s that he said was still working.

Warhol died in 1987. The Amiga display made me wonder what he would have done on the Internet, had he lived only a few years longer. Probably odd and maybe interesting.

After we left the museum, we walked across what used to be the Seventh Street Bridge, which is mere feet away. In 2005, it was renamed the Andy Warhol Bridge. Dating from the ’20s, it’s a self-anchored suspension bridge that has held up better than the original Silver Bridge, which was of a similar design.

I don’t know how Pittsburghers feel about that name; maybe hardcore Yinzers didn’t take to it. But it’s a fine name for a bridge — goes somehow with the neighboring bridges, named for Roberto Clemente (Sixth St.) and Rachel Carson (Ninth St.) — and I was happy to walk across it.

Point State Park & Pittsburgh Walkabout

Posted on July 14, 2019 by admin

RIP, Patricia Deany, mother of our dear old friend Kevin Deany, and a kind and gracious lady. She passed last week at age 90.

At the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers is Point State Park, a 36-acre triangular patch of land that may well be featured in every bit of tourist literature ever published about Pittsburgh since the park’s creation nearly 50 years ago.

But that’s no excuse not walk over to the park from downtown Pittsburgh and make a circuit around the fountain at the tip of the park, which is what we did after lunch at the Oyster House on July 5.
That image makes it look like no one else was there, which wasn’t true at all.
The park offers views of various other parts of Pittsburgh, such as Mt. Washington and the Duquesne Incline.

Or Heinz Field, home of the Steelers. There ought to be a giant ketchup bottle in there somewhere.

Away from the fountain, there’s a view of the Fort Pitt Bridge, which carries I-376 across the Monongahela. It replaced the Point Bridge, which was destroyed, along with the Manchester Bridge, to make way for the park.

Besides being a pleasant green space with views, the park makes various nods to the early history of Pittsburgh. An irregular path of sidewalk follows the outline of Fort Duquesne, the French outpost. Elsewhere other sidewalks mark the outline of the somewhat larger Fort Pitt, the succeeding British outpost, also in the classic star (Bastion) shape.

The U.S. flag is a little unusual. Not in having 13 stars, but in that they aren’t the circular arrangement you usually see. Then again, no one specified how the stars in the canton should be arrayed in those days (and maybe we should go back to that).

On one edge of the park is the Fort Pitt Block House, Point State Park’s only surviving structure from colonial times, built in 1764 as a redoubt of Fort Pitt. It has endured since then in its original spot, for many years as a residence, more recently as a relic.

Our walking tour of downtown Pittsburgh started at the Block House, led by an energetic young woman, native to Pittsburgh and eager to talk about various places and buildings, though less about design and more about history.

Naturally, the names of Pittsburgh robberbarons Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick came up a lot, including the story about a dying Carnegie writing a letter to the estranged Frick asking for a meeting, presumably in the spirit of reconciliation.

Les Standiford tells the story, via NPR. A man named Bridge, who delivered the letter, was Carnegie’s assistant.

“Frick’s ire was, after all, legendary. He’d gone toe-to-toe with strikers, assassins, and even Carnegie himself, and had rarely met a grudge he could not hold. Long before Frick had constructed the mansion that would dwarf Carnegie’s ‘Highlands’ up the street, he had gone out of his way to purchase a tract of land in downtown Pittsburgh, then built a skyscraper tall enough to cast Carnegie’s own office building next door in perpetual shadow.

” ‘Yes, you can tell Carnegie I’ll meet him,’ Frick said finally, wadding the letter and tossing it back at Bridge. ‘Tell him I’ll see him in Hell, where we both are going.’ ”

Whatever else you can say about the steely-eyed bastard Frick, at least he had no illusions about his benevolence, as Carnegie seemed to have had. Our guide also mentioned the taller Frick building next to Carnegie’s, and in fact pointed them out. They are both now overshadowed by more recent Pittsburgh buildings, of course.

At one point, we passed by a building associated with both Carnegie and Frick, along with a lot of other Gilded Age and later tycoons: the Duquesne Club on Sixth Ave.
Founded in 1873 and still a social club for the wealthy, its current home, a Romanesque structure designed by Longfellow, Alden & Harlow, opened in 1890. Just in time for Carnegie and Frick to discuss, possibly over brandy and cigars, the busting of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers.

Speaking of labor history, not far away from the club, I noticed this historic marker.
The founding convention of the AFL was in a Turner Hall. Our guide didn’t mention that, and I asked her about the Turner Hall. She hadn’t heard it. To be fair, I’d never heard of Turner Halls until recently either. To be extra fair, I’m not guiding walking tours of a major American city, so I consider that a small lapse on her part.

The Turner Hall in Pittsburgh, unlike that in Milwaukee, is no more. The site is now called Mellon Square, a 1950s park-like creation paid for by the Mellons to go with the development of Alcoa’s new headquarters building at that time.

Alcoa isn’t there any more, and the building is now known as the Regional Enterprise Tower, but it still has its distinctive aluminum skin. The New York modernists Harrison & Abramovitz designed it.

I’ve read that a Beaux-Arts palace of a theater, the Nixon, was destroyed to make way for Alcoa, causing some consternation even in the tear-it-down midcentury.

Another historic marker that I noticed (that also wasn’t on the tour).
Why Pittsburgh? I wondered. I looked it up later. NPR again: “Slovak culture is everywhere in the Steel City. It’s home to the Honorary Slovak Consulate, a handful of social clubs, cultural centers and annual holiday festivals dedicated to maintaining and celebrating Slovak traditions.

“ ‘Allegheny County has the highest percentage of all of the counties in the United States, not just Pennsylvania, of people who claim Slovak heritage,’ said Martin Votruba, head of Slavic studies at the University of Pittsburgh.

“Slovaks and Czechs formed a group called the Czecho-Slovak National Council of America. Because there were so many Slovak immigrants living in Pittsburgh, Votruba said it seemed like the perfect location to have a big meeting on Memorial Day in 1918.”

Along the way, we looked at a work of public art in Pittsburgh, a 25-foot bronze fountain centerpiece at Agnes R. Katz Plaza by Louise Bourgeois, completed in 1999. The eye-like smaller bronzes are actually benches, though it’s hard to tell from this angle.

By the time we got to the U.S. Steel Tower, the tallest building in Pittsburgh, a light rain was falling. It would continue at varying strength through the rest of the walk.

No aluminium for this behemoth, rather steel and lots of it. This too is a Harrison & Abramovitz design. The company made steel for its own building, a newish product at the time, corten or weathering steel, which ends up with a dark brown oxidation over the metal to protect the structure from the elements and obviate the need for paint. (The steel still has many surprising uses.) According to our guide, however, until recently the building skin had an unfortunate habit of spitting granules of this rust onto the sidewalks and people below.

Aluminium, steel and then glass. Fitting for the HQ of PPG, also a stop of the tour. Founded in 1883 as Pittsburgh Plate Glass, these days PPG is a supplier of paints, coatings, optical products and specialty materials.

The complex is actually six buildings, all opening in the early 1980s as part of the effort to revive downtown Pittsburgh. By that time, Johnson/Burgee were the go-to NY architects, so they designed the PPG. Rain prevented me from making a good image, but the tallest of the buildings towers over a plaza that features an ice rink in colder weather. It looks like this on a sunny day.

Toward the end of the tour, we made a stop at a place on Smithfield St. that has no marker of any kind and in fact isn’t distinctive in any way, except for one thing: it was the site of an early nickelodeon, thought to be the first theater anywhere devoted exclusively to movies, as opposed to a live theater with a few machines tucked away to separate patrons from their coins.

“The first exclusive moving pictures theater in Pittsburg and the world was opened in 1905 by Harry Davis and John P. Harris in the Howard Block, west side of Smithfield street, between Diamond and Fifth avenue,” one E. W. Lightner wrote in 1919.

Diamond St. is no longer called that. Oddly enough, the change to Forbes St. was made as late as 1958. I’d imagine that would have been hard to do.

Lightner continues: “Curious to say, the second exclusive picture theater of the world was opened in Warsaw, capital of Poland, by a Pittsburg Polander, who saw the Davis-Harris adventure and recognized the possibilities of presenting so wonderful and profitable a development in his native country.”

“The original and only ‘Nickelodeon’ was opened at 8 o’clock of the morning and the reels were kept continuously revolving until midnight. A human queue was continuously awaiting the ending of a performance and the emptying of chairs. Inside an attendant would announce, ‘show ended,’ and spectators would be hustled gently to the street and new spectators welcomed, seated as quickly as possible, and the picture would again respond to the magic reel.”

As you can see, it was pretty much a nothing site when Google Images came by.

Still looks that way in July 2019. There ought to be a marker there at least, or maybe even a hipster bar with a nickelodeon theme.

The Heinz Memorial Chapel

Posted on July 10, 2019 by admin

Chapel has a cozy connotation: little chapel in the woods, wayside chapel, goin’ to the chapel and we’re gonna get married, etc. That doesn’t mean you can’t find some sizable edifices that are chapels all the same, such as the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel at the University of Chicago, or the Heinz Memorial Chapel at the University of Pittsburgh.

Late on Friday morning we arrived on campus to see the sizable chapel, funded by condiment money in the 1930s.
More specifically, the will of ketchup baron Henry Heinz (d. 1919) vaguely provided for the development of a building for religious training and social events at the university. His children and the university administration ultimately decided on a soaring neo-Gothic structure, designed by Philadelphia architect Charles Klauder, who was known for his university work. Apparently the chapel was nondenominational from the get-go.

Looking toward the sanctuary.
Toward the back of the nave. The organ has 4,272 pipes, and when we were in the chapel, an organist was filling the space with soft practice notes.
Both transepts feature dual banks of some astonishingly tall stained glass windows: 73 feet tall, designed by Charles J. Connick’s Boston studio.
I found a pamphlet that tells me that the four tall windows each have a theme: Temperance, Truth, Tolerance and Courage. Some of the characters depicted in those windows are religious figures, as you’d expect, such as the Virgin Mary, Moses, King David, St. Francis, St. George and Joan of Arc.

Others are less expected, such as Sir Isaac Newton. With Edmund Halley down in the corner, helping prove Newton’s laws of motion.
Or President Lincoln.
Or Dorethea Dix.
That’s just a small sample. “The windows, which highlight an equal number of women and men, contain sacred and secular figures from history, literature, and science,” the chapel web site says. There are 391 figures in all.

Pittsburgh ’19

Posted on July 7, 2019 by admin

Independence Day fell on a Thursday this year, creating a four-day window of opportunity to go somewhere. So late on the afternoon of July 3 we headed east, spending the night near Toledo, Ohio. On the 4th, we drove on to Pittsburgh, where we spent three nights and two full days, returning after an all-day drive today.

We stayed at a hotel in the pleasant Moon Township, Pa., not far from Pittsburgh International Airport. The days were hot and steamy and punctuated by vigorous rainfall in the afternoons — supposedly typical for western Pennsylvania in July, though it was a lot like home this summer. Anyway, even occasional heavy downpours didn’t slow us down much.

The road from metro Chicago to Pittsburgh, if you take the Indiana East-West Toll Road and then the Ohio Turnpike, takes you smack through the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. We spend a few hours walking its trails on July 4 as a stopover on the way to Pittsburgh.

Getting up early(ish) on July 5, we first went to the Duquesne Incline, one of Pittsburgh’s two funiculars, and rode it up and down. At the top we took in the hazy morning view of the city and the meeting of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers. My thinking about funiculars: when you find one, ride it. My thinking about the Monongahela: that’s just a damned fun name to say.

Next we drove to the Oakland neighborhood and spent time at the University of Pittsburgh. Specifically, the Heinz Memorial Chapel — the church that ketchup built — and the Cathedral of Learning and some of its highly artful, internationally themed rooms, unlike anything I’ve seen before.

Lunch on the first day was at the the Original Oyster House on Market Square, which is known as Pittsburgh’s oldest bar and restaurant, and which serves up a mighty fine array of seafood. From there we repaired to Point State Park at the meeting of the rivers, site of a French and then British fort in the days before American independence, and the seed of modern Pittsburgh. That’s also where our lengthy guided walking tour of downtown Pittsburgh began, which took up the rest of the afternoon.

That should have been enough for the first day, but our momentum carried us on to the Andy Warhol Museum for a few hours in the early evening, taking advantage of its longer hours on Fridays. A suburban location of Primanti Bros., a local chain, provided a hearty dinner that night.

The second day, July 6, wasn’t quite as busy, but we got around. Late in the morning, we took an extensive tour of Carrie Furnace, a hulk of a former blast furnace complex on the Monongahela. It reminded me greatly of the Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham, Alabama, though the scale was even larger. After all, Birmingham was the Pittsburgh of the South, not the other way around.

After lunch in a nondescript but decent Chinese restaurant, we visited the Frick Pittsburgh, whose grounds include his mansion, a museum with his art, a greenhouse, and a carriage and antique auto exhibit. We saw the greenhouse and the auto exhibit.

After treating ourselves to some hipster ice cream late in the afternoon, we went to one more place, despite thunder and rain: Randyland.

It’s the kind of outsider art phantasmagoria beloved by the likes of Roadside America or the Atlas Obscura. For good reason. As Roadside America puts it, the place is a “circus-colored oasis of sunny vibes on Pittsburgh’s formerly grim North Side.”

Two East-Central Illinois Memorials As Different As Can Be

Posted on June 19, 2019 by admin

Our recent short trip to east-central Illinois and west-central Indiana found us spending two nights in Champaign, last Friday and Saturday. During the day on Saturday, we drove east on U.S. 150 and a short way on I-74 into Indiana. Then we headed south on Indiana 36 to Terra Haute, stopping in Dana.

Returning from Terra Haute, we took U.S. 150 westward — that road jogs oddly to the south from Danville, Illinois — and caught Illinois 133 in Paris, Illinois, a town that sorely needs a replica Eiffel Tower or Arc de Triomphe or some such to distinguish it. That road takes you to Arcola, a town we’re familiar with. From Arcola it’s a straight and not too interesting shot back to Champaign on I-57.

So it was a rectangular driving course (roughly east-south-west-north), good for a day trip, despite the heavy rain at times. It’s been a rainy spring and early summer, which we noticed must be damaging crops, since a lot of corn and soybean fields were covered by large puddles (an item from Ohio about the problem).

The sites associated with Ernie Pyle and Eugene V. Debs, honoring Hoosiers of somewhat different cast, were our main destinations. But I had a couple of minor destinations in mind as well. One was an obscure memorial in the obscure town of Oakland, Illinois, which is Coles County. I had passed that way 12 years earlier. Here’s what I said then about the Oakland town square:

“The place was gloomy. Maybe it was just the overcast skies… Still, I wanted to see the monument in the middle of the square. It was Memorial Day, after all. Someone had decorated the edges of sidewalk leading to the monument with small flags, forming a spot of color in the square, so that was something. The monument consisted of two statues sharing one plinth, one of a soldier and the other sailor, clearly World War I vintage, with the names of locals who had participated in that war carved in the plinth. All of it was weathered and dark.”

I wanted another look. In 2019, the square’s a little better looking (officially it’s the Oakland Centennial Park). The monument, a lot better looking. The darkness this time was from the recent rain.
Maybe it was refurbished for the centennial of the war or its own centennial, since carved in stone is the memorial’s dedication date: May 30, 1919 — the first Decoration Day after the Armistice.

I’d forgotten about this item in the town square, a 77mm Feldkanone 16 German artillary piece. A local prize of war, I guess.

In Arcola, I wanted to see something we’d overlooked last year: the Hippie Memorial. How we missed that, I don’t know, since it’s less than a block away from that town’s Raggedy Ann and Andy sculptures, which we saw.

The Hippie Memorial is a very horizontal structure and an example of vernacular art. Better still, a vernacular memorial, which isn’t that common.

Hippie Memorial Arcola Illinois

Just how much recognition does ☮ get these days? I wonder.

Hippie Memorial Arcola Illinois Nearby, a sign offers the dedication speech, made by the widow of the creator, local eccentric Bob Moomaw, almost exactly 20 years ago. The text seems the same, but the background is a lot more psychedelic than it used to be.

Hippie Memorial Arcola Illinois Sure, why not honor the hippie movement? It’s been subject to retroactive derision all out of proportion to its risibility. You can argue that hippies were yet another flowering of bohemianism, a periodic occurrence that’s helped keep things interesting since the Romantic movement at least.

The Eugene V. Debs House

Posted on June 18, 2019 by admin

Tucked away among the buildings and open fields of Indiana State University in Terra Haute is a structure from the Gilded Age, but also associated with the golden age of socialism in the United States: the Eugene V. Debs House.

We arrived in the mid-afternoon on Saturday, in time to take a detailed tour from an exceptionally knowledgeable guide, but not for an event earlier that day in honor of the 125th anniversary of the Pullman Strike.

Debs led the strike, of course, and for his trouble was tossed in the McHenry County Jail in Woodstock, Illinois, for six months — an event that radicalized him. After he got out, his commitment to socialism never wavered.

The museum’s event involved a book signing of a new volume about the Pullman Strike — The Edge of Anarchy: The Railroad Barons, the Gilded Age, and the Greatest Labor Uprising in America by Jack Kelly — and a reading of “Liberty,” the speech that Debs delivered to a crowd of thousands of supporters in Chicago after his release from Woodstock Jail, on November 22, 1895.

It was a speech I’d never read, so I looked it up later. Credit to Debs for giving good speeches in an era when political discourse hadn’t yet been dumbed down to semiliterate 280-character bursts. A couple of selections:

“Out of range of the government’s machine guns and knowing the location of judicial traps and deadfalls, Americans may still indulge in the exaltation of liberty, though pursued through every lane and avenue of life by the baying hounds of usurped and unconstitutional power, glad if when night lets down her sable curtains, they are out of prison, though still the wage-slaves of a plutocracy which, were it in the celestial city, would wreck every avenue leading up to the throne of the Infinite by stealing the gold with which they are paved, and debauch Heaven’s supreme court to obtain a decision that the command ‘thou shalt not steal’ is unconstitutional…

“I remember one old divine who, one night, selected for his text George M. Pullman, and said: ‘George is a bad egg, handle him with care. Should you crack his shell the odor would depopulate Chicago in an hour.’ All said ‘Amen’ and the services closed.

“Another old sermonizer who said he had been preaching since man was a molecule, declared he had of late years studied corporations, and that they were warts on the nose of our national industries, — that they were vultures whose beaks and claws were tearing and mangling the vitals of labor and transforming workingmen’s homes into caves.”

The museum staff was giving away souvenir ribbons, replicas of the ribbons worn by supporters who greeted Debs when he got out of Woodstock. We got one.

The house is both a house museum of the period, with many of the Debs’ possessions, as well as a museum about labor organizing, American socialism — Debs was adamant that the ideology wasn’t some imported Euro-virus — and the fight against government overreach, as expressed by siding with the bosses in the ’90s and the sedition laws of the First World War.

It was a pretty nice house for its time, vintage 1890. I understand that Debs caught some flack for living in a comfortable house. Comfortable with a few touches of affluence, since his wife Kate brought some money to the marriage. Some of the fireplaces feature cobalt blue porcelain tiles imported from Italy, the mahogany dining and parlor furniture is pretty nice, and a display case sports the Debs’ set of Haviland china.

Of course that’s the kind of lightweight criticism that politicians and activists of all stripes receive. The house was clearly upper-middle class for the time, but so what? The Debs were supposed to live in a shotgun shack? Besides, bread and roses.

Also on display are a number of depictions of Debs. This one is by Wisconsin sculptor Louis B. Mayer (not the movie mogul).

LM could also be Louis Mayer. In any case, this is also a sedition trial-era work.

Plus plenty of buttons from Debs’ many runs for president.
In the house’s attic, which was once merely storage, all of the walls are covered with murals. The centerpiece is Debs in campaigning mode.
One of the smaller details on the mural walls, but one I liked best, is a campaign button from 1920. Debs received 3.5 percent of the popular vote, more than any other socialist candidate for U.S. president, before or since. While in federal prison.
The museum notes: “The murals were painted by John Laska, former Professor of Art at Indiana State University and active Foundation member. Completed in 1979 after three years of hard work, the murals depict Debs’ life and time in chronological order…”

The Ernie Pyle museum reminded me of a long-ago English teacher of mine, Mr. Swinny. The Debs museum reminded me of another long-ago teacher, Mrs. Collins. She taught us freshman U.S. history. About 60 at the time, she grew up in Buffalo and — I think I remember this correctly — had been a Wobbly as a young woman.

That would have been during the Depression, after the heyday of the Wobblies, but still. Mrs. Collins wasn’t shy about throwing in some labor history and using texts sympathetic to socialism, most notably The Jungle. Naturally, Debs came up as well.

Indiana Dash ’19: The Ernie Pyle World War II Museum

Posted on June 17, 2019 by admin

I have a sneaking suspicion that the later 21st century is going to be completely indifferent to war correspondent Ernie Pyle. Like almost everyone else, he’ll join the ranks of the obscure. The items now collected at the Ernie Pyle World War II Museum in rural Indiana will scatter to archives or private collections or landfills. Only occasionally will anyone read his writings, as found in libraries or odd corners of the Internet.

The process is already underway. The museum used to be the Ernie Pyle State Historic Site, owned and run by the state of Indiana. When the recession came 10 years ago, state budgets suffered. I doubt that anyone put it down officially in a memo or the like, but I’m sure the decision to close the Ernie Pyle SHS came down to, “Who’s heard of him anyway?”

A nonprofit, the Friends of Ernie Pyle, now owns the site and carries on the struggle against obscurity. The organization renamed the museum nearly a decade ago. Yet Randy McNally, in its 2017 Road Atlas, still calls it a state historic site. So does Google Maps. It isn’t a place that gets a lot of attention.

We arrived in the hamlet of Dana, Indiana, early in the afternoon on Saturday. Rain had dogged us most of the way from Champaign, Illinois, where we’d spent the previous night. The museum includes the house in which Ernie Pyle was born in 1900, relocated from the nearby farm fields.

Next to the birth house are two Quonset huts, World War II vintage but never used for military purposes, that house displays and Ernie Pyle artifacts. It continued to rain while we were in the huts, with drops drumming on the metal in their distinctive way the whole time.

I probably would have heard about Ernie Pyle later anyway, but I like to think that the reason we came was that Bill Swinny, one of my high school English teachers, planted the seed by telling us about him during class one day. Mr. Swinny, who taught us a good deal more than high school-level literature, managed to convey how upset the nation was at the death of Ernie Pyle, coming as it did right after the death of President Roosevelt.

We were the only visitors at the museum. An informative woman in her 60s took our admission. Also on staff was a much quieter young man, perhaps as young as 20 and perhaps a relative of the older woman, who was doing his bit to help out, though that’s just a guess on my part.

The larger displays, including Pyle-like mannequins standing in for him, evoke Ernie Pyle’s wartime circumstances. That is, living with the GIs he wrote about.
A good number of his columns are posted for visitors to read. You can also listen to excerpts from the columns by picking up telephone receivers. There are a few videos. One is devoted to a single early 1944 column, “The Death of Captain Waskow.” As well it should be, since the column is a masterpiece of reportage.

Good to know that Ernie Pyle got a Purple Heart, by act of Congress in 1983. A rare honor for a civilian.
The birth house was interesting, though less compelling. But I did learn that Ernest Taylor Pyle was born poor. At the time of his birth, his parents were tenant farmers.

The museum isn’t quite all there is when it comes to commemorating Ernie Pyle in that part of Indiana. A few miles to the east of Dana, on U.S. 36, is the Ernie Pyle Rest Park, essentially a wayside rest stop. One feature stands out, and got me to stop despite the rain.

It’s a replica of Ernie Pyle’s memorial on Ie Shima, the small island on which he was killed by enemy fire.

At This Spot
The
77th Infantry Division
Lost A Buddy
Ernie Pyle
18 April 1945

This is a replica of the original built at Ie Shima by the 111S Engineer Combat Group United States Army.

I can’t speak for Ernie Pyle, but I imagine that the thought of being forgotten by future generations might not have troubled him. I get the sense that he would have preferred that the men he wrote about be remembered instead.

Southern Loop Debris

Posted on June 6, 2019 by admin

When were driving through LaGrange, Texas, on the first day of the trip, I began to wonder. What’s this town known for? I know it’s something. Then I saw a sign calling LaGrange “the best little town in Texas.” Oh, yeah. Famed in song and story.

On the way to Buffalo Bayou Park in Houston, we took a quick detour — because I’d seen it on a map — to see the Beer Can House at 222 Malone St., a quick view from the car. Looks like this. Had we wanted to spend a little more time in Houston, I definitely would have visited the Orange Show. Ah, well.

We enjoyed our walk along Esplanade St. in New Orleans, where you can see some fine houses.
Plus efforts to thwart porch pirates. We saw more than one sign along these lines during our walk down the street.
We spent part of an evening in New Orleans on Frenchman St., which is described as not as rowdy or vomit-prone as Bourbon St., and I suppose that’s true, though it is a lively place. We went for the music.

At Three Muses, we saw Washboard Rodeo. They were fun. Western swing in New Orleans. Played some Bob Wills, they did.

At d.b.a, we saw Brother Tyrone and the Mindbenders. Counts as rock and soul, I’d say. Also good fun, though they were playing for a pretty thin Monday night crowd.

Adjacent to Frenchman St. is an evening outdoor market, the Frenchman Art Market, which we visited between the two performances. The market featured an impressive array of local art for sale, though nothing we couldn’t live without.

Something you see on U.S. 61 just outside of Natchez, Mississippi: Mammy’s Cupboard, a restaurant. More about it here.

In Philadelphia, Mississippi, Stribling St. is still around. I don’t know why it wouldn’t be, but after nearly 30 years, I wanted another look.

So is the local pharmacy run by distant cousins. Glad the chains haven’t spelled its demise.

During our drive from metro Jackson, Mississippi, to Montgomery, Alabama — connected by U.S. 80 and not an Interstate, as you might think — we passed through Selma, Alabama. I made a point of driving across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, though we decided not to get out and look around. Remarkably, the bridge looks exactly as it does in pictures more than 50 years old.

In downtown Montgomery, you can see this statue. I understand the bronze has been around since 1991, but was only recently moved to its current site not far from Riverfront Park, the river of course being the Alabama.
I’d forgotten native son Hank Williams died so young. Some singers die rock ‘n’ roll deaths, some die country deaths like Hank.

Speaking of death, early in the trip, I was activating my phone — whose dim algorithm always suggests news I seldom want to see during the process — and I noticed the name “Doris Day” in the feed. I figured that could mean only one thing. Sure enough, she became the first celebrity death of the trip.

I hadn’t known she was still alive. In fairly rapid order during the trip after Ms. Day, the reaper came for Tim Conway, I.M. Pei and Grumpy Cat. I didn’t know that last one, but Lilly did.

I remember a time that Tim Conway described himself as “the funniest man in the universe” on the Carol Burnett Show. We all took that as a comedian’s hyperbole. But what if he was right? What if some higher intelligence has made a four-dimensional assessment of human humor and come to that exact conclusion?

As for Doris Day, I will try to park as close to my destinations as possible in her honor for the foreseeable future (a term I remember hearing as long ago as the ’80s in Austin).

Also in Montgomery: the Alabama State Capitol. The Alabama legislature had been in the news a lot before we came to town, as the latest state body to try to topple Roe v. Wade. That isn’t why I visited. I see capitols when I can.

From a distance.
Closer.
The capitol was completed in 1851, though additions have been made since then. The interior of the dome is splendid.

Actually, the Alabama House and Senate don’t meet in the capitol any more, but at the nearby Alabama State House, something I found out later. When we visited, the capitol’s House and Senate chambers seemed like museum pieces rather than space for state business, and that’s why.

Seems like hipsters haven’t discovered Decatur, Alabama, yet. But as real estate prices balloon in other places, it isn’t out of the question. The town has a pleasant riverfront on the Tennessee and at least one street, Bank St., that could be home to overpriced boutiques and authentic-experience taprooms.
Of more interest to me was the Old State Bank, dating back to 1833 and restored toward the end of the 20th century. It is where Bank St. ends, or begins, near the banks of the Tennessee River.

Even more interesting is the Lafayette Street Cemetery, active from ca. 1818.

It’s more of a ruin than a cemetery, but I’m glad it has survived.
During the entirety of the trip, there were plenty of random bits of the South to be seen along the way.
We also listened to a lot of Southern radio on the trip — something Lilly plans to avoid on future trips, Southern or not, with her Bluetooth and so on — and we had a little game whenever we tuned into someone discussing some social problem in earnest on a non-music, non-NPR station. The game: guess how long will it be before the discussion turns to God. It was never very long.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice & The Legacy Museum

Posted on June 3, 2019 by admin

As you enter the National Memorial for Peace and Justice on a hill in downtown Montgomery, Alabama — as we did on May 17 — it’s hard to see what’s ahead.
The path passes “Nkyinkyim Installation” by Ghanaian sculptor Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, erected with the memorial when it opened only last year. The work speaks for itself.

The memorial structure includes over 800 corten steel (weathering steel) monuments, one for each county in the United States where a lynching took place. Engraved on the columns are the names of the lynching victims documented for that county.

Here are the victims in Wilcox County, Alabama, to pick one of the first steel monuments you encounter: Riley Gulley, William Lewis, Arthur Stewart and Ephreim Pope.
Visitors enter the memorial at one corner of the square shape. On the first side of the memorial, the steel monuments are flush with the floor, with the names at eye level or lower.

On the second side of the memorial, the floor begins to slope downward in the direction of travel, but the steel monuments continue to be at the same level.
In the third side of the memorial, the floor slopes even more and the effect becomes very noticeable. The steel monuments are hanging.
You need to look up to see the county names.

The fourth side. The effect is practically tunnel-like by now.
The writing on one wall says:

For the hanged and beaten, for the shot, drowned, and burned, for the tortured, tormented, and terrorized. For those abandoned by the rule of law.

We will remember.

With hope because hopelessness is the enemy of justice. With courage because peace requires bravery. With persistence because justice is a constant struggle. With faith because we shall overcome.

Water flows down the other wall.

The text:

Thousands of African American are unknown victims of racial terror lynchings whose deaths cannot be documented, many whose names will never been known. They are all honored here.

Outside the memorial structure are smaller versions of the steel monuments arrayed in long lines, lying with their text face up. I understand that if a county named on one of them wants to use it as part of a local memorial to lynching victims, it will be given for that purpose. So far no county has taken any of them.

The Legacy Museum, developed by the same organization as the memorial — the Equal Justice Initiative — is also in downtown Montgomery, pointedly in a building where enslaved black people were imprisoned, near the site of the city’s 19th-century slave market. By the mid-1800s, Montgomery was the focus of the slave trade in Alabama.
In full, it is The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration. It’s a small museum, 11,000 square feet, but a powerful one.

The EJI web site for the museum says: “Visitors encounter a powerful sense of place when they enter the museum and confront slave pen replicas, where you can see, hear, and get close to what it was like to be imprisoned awaiting sale at the nearby auction block. First-person accounts from enslaved people narrate the sights and sounds of the domestic slave trade. Extensive research and videography helps visitors understand the racial terrorism of lynching, and the humiliation of the Jim Crow South.”

The museum also illustrates that the more recent (and ongoing) war on drugs, a toxic interplay of political calculation and moral panic, has made black Americans “vulnerable to a new era of racial bias and abuse of power wielded by our contemporary criminal justice system.”

A quote from the all together remarkable EJI Director Bryan Stevenson, who lead the effort to build the memorial and create the museum:

“Our nation’s history of racial injustice casts a shadow across the American landscape. This shadow cannot be lifted until we shine the light of truth on the destructive violence that shaped our nation, traumatized people of color, and compromised our commitment to the rule of law and to equal justice.”

Natchez &c.

Posted on June 2, 2019 by admin

When we left New Orleans to drive to Natchez, Mississippi, on May 15, the uninspired route would be have been I-10 to Baton Rouge and then north on US 61. Instead I wanted to drive across Lake Pontchartrain, because I’ve seen that crossing on maps for years. Better yet, it’s no extra charge, since the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway collects no toll northbound.

The morning was bright and traffic light on the causeway. It’s actually two bridges, one each way, so you don’t face miles and miles of unavoidable oncoming traffic mere feet away. An enjoyable stretch of road under those conditions. Uneventful enough driving to ponder the engineering marvel that’s the causeway while still on it.

Before going, I wondered if there would be a few minutes on the causeway when we would be out of sight of land. I’d read claims to that effect. But the answer is no, not that I saw. I spotted the north shore of the lake in the distance before the south shore had completely vanished from my rear-view mirror. Once you get to the other side of the lake, you’re in Mandeville, Louisiana. I-12 from there connects with US 61 in Baton Rouge.

By early afternoon, we were in Natchez, Mississippi. The town has some good views of the Mississippi River from a park on the bluff.
The local gazebo.
It was too hot to wander around in the noonday sun for long. We decided not to tour one of the local antebellum homes, but rather spend the afternoon heading further north on the Natchez Trace Parkway to seek out antebellum ruins instead.

Lilly drove part of the way on the Trace and I played with my camera.

Others might find the driving dull, but I like driving the Trace for its lush greenery, and also its sparse traffic. No trucks at all.

We took a diversion off the Trace before going to Port Gibson and on to Jackson, along a winding country lane called Rodney Road. Go far enough on that road, and you’ll come to the Windsor Ruins.
I can’t remember where I read about the ruins, but the place has been filed under my Possible Minor Destinations for a good while. That’s such a sprawling, unorganized mental catalog of places that it’s a wonder that I ever remember to take the right detours at the right time.

We were the only ones there once another car left a minute or two after we arrived. Considering that the ruins used to be the heart of an enormous plantation, it’s remarkable how lonely the spot now feels. History has passed it by.

The view from the ruins.
“Windsor, built between 1859 and 1861, was the home of Smith Coffee Daniell II, a wealthy planter who had extensive properties in the Delta and in Arkansas,” the NPS says. “Completed in 1861, the home was the largest house built at that time [in Mississippi], the plantation once covering over 2,600 acres.

Curiously, Daniell died on April 12, 1861. The mansion survived the war, probably because the Union army used it as soon as the area had been captured, but it burned down by accident in 1890.

The fence is fairly new, added by the state, which now owns the site. Guess the state of Mississippi doesn’t want any of the 23 massive Corinthian columns coming down on any hapless visitors. They’re looking a little dodgy.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: US History