Riverside Rambles

I was just drifting off to sleep last night at about 11:00. The phone rang and I reluctantly got out of bed and answered it. Who would be calling so late?

It was commenter Sarah. She was excited:

“You won’t believe what I found at a University of Missouri website, Larry! There are these detailed maps of Hannibal in 1913, and they show the businesses, schools, and lots of other stuff. I sent you a link to the map that shows your building. Take a look; the map shows your Freebie Building — it was a cigar factory back then!”

I replied “How’d you ever find that site?”

“Oh, you know — one link leads to another!”

I should explain that what I call the Freebie building is a brick structure adjacent to the brick building I live in. It is just a shell, and when I bought my main building from Jim, the previous owner, he said to me “By the way, that little building next door is yours now too. It’s really not worth anything, as all of the floors are rotted out. The roof leaked for many years, but I put a roof on it and it’s a sound roof, at least for the time being.”

The Freebie Building is sandwiched between my building and my neighbor Ted’s place. Its storefront entrance faces Market Street and it has a back door which opens onto my courtyard.

Here’s a crop from the 1913 map:

The building on the corner of the pentagonal area delineated by Arch St., Market St., and the alley, is marked “Gro.” So my ground floor was a grocery store 95 years ago! Ted’s building on the corner of Market and Dowling is marked “Drugs”, and a sign is still visible painted on the bricks of his building: “Albert Hoffman Druggist”.

The narrow yellow rectangle shown adjacent to the back of my building is the second-floor back porch. It has a stairway leading down to the courtyard; that porch is my dog Tucker’s domain.

The Freebie Building is clearly shown as a cigar factory. I’ve seen photos of another cigar factory which I think was downtown, closer to the Mississippi. It’s likely that the tobacco for these Hannibal cigars was grown locally. I knew old farmers in Knox County who had memories of growing tobacco as a crop as late as the 1940s.

I don’t know if this was done in Hannibal, but I’ve heard about a custom common to cigar factories in other parts of the US. A reader would be hired to read books and newspapers to the cigar-rollers. The employees would submit suggestions to the reader (who was often a woman) and she would check out books from the library or bring reading material from her home.

I’ve just begun exploring the other maps. It’s just fascinating seeing the schools, businesses, and factories of Hannibal just three years after Mark Twain died. If you would like to take a look at these maps here’s a link to the index site:

Sanborn Maps

Larry

Commenter Dave Thomson, who lives in southern California, has been sending me some quite interesting material lately. Here’s a photo which I received from him today:

It looks like an old photo of Charlie Chaplin, doesn’t it? Here is Dave’s explanation of the background of this posed scene:

Larry -
Since you enjoyed the other dog photos thought I’d send you one of the more unique ones.

Barry Cook (a special effects animator for Disney at this time - 1987 - later would co-direct the Disney animated feature Mulan) used to always come to the Studio on Halloween with a costume his wife made for him. This year he was Charlie Chaplin and his little boy Joe tagged along as The Kid (as played by Jackie Coogan in the movie of the same name made with Chaplin in 1921). I told Barry that our dog Ginger, a good sized lab-mix puppy) looked very much like Chaplin and Coogan’s dog sidekick “Mut” (played by a dog actor named “Scraps”) in A Dog’s Life (1918), and volunteered to take some black and white photos of Barry, Joe and Ginger at O’Melveny Park in Granada Hills. The old barn behind them was lost in a fire that swept through that area several years after we had that photo session in November, ‘87.

Little Joe’s costume wasn’t warm enough for him and he kept protesting:

“Am COLD!”

A respected special effects photographer named Peter Anderson at Disney was a huge Chaplin fan and once made a pilgrimage to Switzerland to see Charlie, who was not feeling well enough to receive him but autographed some things that Peter brought along.

When I showed this photo to Peter he exclaimed,

“Where did you GET this?”

When I explained that this was a re-creation with “impostors” Peter was still amazed.

A poster restoration expert named Igor Edelman in Hollywood was also a Chaplin collector and Igor traded his labor on the restoration of one of my old posters for a print of this photo which he had handsomely framed and hung in his studio.

Dave

The “other dog photos” Dave refers to are several that he has taken over the years of dogs he has owned. I’ll work the photos up into a post before long — they are some of the best examples of dog portraiture I’ve ever seen.

Larry

Commenter Joan has been doing some autumnal yard clean-up, and here’s an illustrated essay she sent me:

Brentwood is a typical older suburb. Some more modern ones, having ceded their lives to the auto, have no sidewalks at all. Ours has sidewalks, punctuated by driveways, and between the sidewalk and curb lies the standard 6 foot wide band of grass containing trees. After 30 years, I finally decided to look up the name of this area. It’s called a “parkway.” I don’t know if that means you park next to it or that it’s supposed to look like a park. If it’s the latter, we apparently fall way short.

I was always a little fuzzy about who owned what. If the city owned the grassy part, they surely were not doing their share of mowing. They certainly seemed proprietary enough about the trees, though, industriously trimming the street side around lampposts using cherry picker and chainsaw. Conversely, we home owners seemed to be in charge of the distaff side. We live on a terrace, so by employing a long handled pair of loppers I could usually snip a few lower hanging branches after they have been made heavy with rain, or snow, or sleet or gumballs. Or maybe I’d just wait for a strong wind if I wasn’t all that motivated. Of course we had to rake whatever they dropped, or we’d eventually hear from the city.

Now, someone in City Hall back in the day must have gotten “such a deal” on Sweet Gum trees. When we bought our home, they were arrayed like little soldiers in neat rows all the way down our generously wide, WPA era street. Since then, the soldiers seem to have gone a little AWOL. Although beautiful, the Sweet Gum tree turned out to be the tree from hell for both city and owners.

My first hint that all was not copacetic between the street guys and my large, fluffy, “Street” Gum was when they arrived unannounced to cut it down. It seemed it was uncomfortably close to the lateral sewer pipe. More on that later. Faster than a speeding chain saw, the city’s termite people felled my 25-year-old tree and replaced it with a spindly teenaged Burr Oak. Said oak, quickly became a large burr under my saddle. Like most teenagers it was really messy. It must have felt crowded, and not happy with the older generation trees, because It immediately began to shed enormous catcher’s mitt sized leaves all over the yard, in mid summer. I, in turn, became a burr in city hall’s saddle when I requested they remove it and put in a smaller Red Oak. I finally got my dainty oak, but earned the considerable ill will of the street crew in the process. Trust me, you don’t want to know.

I had a back-up Sweet Gum tree in my backyard. It is a nice enough tree. Shiny green leaves of summer are replaced in autumn by a few sprinklings of multicolored leaves. Each red, orange, yellow clown leaf is a vanguard of future attractions before the tree mainly goes for the gold. It can be a beautiful sight.

During the summer, however, our ‘female’ tree develops quarter sized prickly orbs that hang like threatening green Martian cherries biding their time before their descent. Leave it to us to have a perpetually pregnant tree. Sadly there is no way to have ours ‘fixed’ without great expense. Its limbs bend like inverted u’s from the weight of its pale green ‘gumballs’. By shedding time, not at Fall but the following Spring, the green Martian pods have morphed into dry spiky brown missiles. These porcupine balls then drop to the lawn where they either lie Velcro’d firmly to the grass, or burrow stealthily into mini foxholes waiting for their chance to attack.

Raking gumballs is a horrible chore. Unlike leaves, they cling tenaciously to the grass, resisting all attempts at being corralled for the bin. In addition they seem to reproduce over night. Manna from Heaven. Gumballs from Hell. An enterprising inventor does market a cage-like orb, resembling a rolling wire whisk with handle. Its advert says it will pick up pecans, walnuts, and gumballs. I have never been tempted. In the first place instead of its modest basketball size it would have to be the size of a medicine ball to do any good in our yard. In the second place, having to open the cage and spring the inmates into the garbage cans is just another time consuming step.

If I have not already been left gimpy from turning my ankles stepping on the undercover guys I am always re-introduced to them at mowing time. Gumballs are geniuses at avoiding the rake but these hangers-on are immediately sucked into mower blades. Here they are shattered into sharp shrapnel, accompanied by the smell of burning wood. At least I think its wood. I am hoping it’s not my mower’s motor. It’s obviously a good idea to mow with goggles, but there is only so much humiliation one can take. My looking like a crazed WWI fighter pilot in cutoffs affords a little too much free laughter to my neighbors.

Over the years, I have gotten used to the drill, and just look at it as good cardio. I figure all this above-ground work is not going to kill me. Sadly, what is going on underground is more ominous. Sweet Gums, I have been told, are mainly a Southern tree, requiring more swampy land in which to thrive. Well nobody told our Sweet Gums that they could not thrive. They snake their roots close to the surface greedily sucking any extra moisture they can find. One minute you had a great looking lawn, and the next a sinewy cobra root is crawling along the top threatening mower blades and rotary shafts.

If one manages to mow while avoiding the woody root labyrinth there is another big caveat lying a little deeper. We have old-fashioned ceramic (clay) sewer pipes connected by overlapping joints. A Sweet Gum can sniff out a clay joint like a narc dog at a hippie fest. It’s an on-going invasion of the sewer snatchers. One tiny tendril inserted into sewer crevice, and in no time at all your entire lateral is filled with zillions of angel hair pasta roots. I have seen one of the pipes excavated and broken open. It is not a pretty sight. You get an exact mold of your length of pipe composed entirely of evil root babies. At this point, I am firmly convinced that the original Sweet Gum planters got a large kick-back from Roto Rooter.

And so it goes. Each year one hears the soothing outboard motor hum of chainsaws felling another Southern tree, which ventured too close to Yankee sewers. Still, there is something very resilient about these trees. They do seed very well, and one never knows when the South shall rise again. Meanwhile, there are enough left in the parkway to display beautiful fall foliage. Following are some pics. I am glad I took them. Yesterday the distant hum of the tree people indicated that another Sweet Gum had bitten the dust.

Gumballs nestled at the base of our Sweet Gum. Note crocodile textured roots.

In Spring, gumballs cause anxiety for our Crocus family.

Sweet Gums shedding leaves on Rosalie Avenue.

Shy Sweet Gums Peeping From Behind Tree Trunk.

Harbingers of Sweet Gum Autumn.

Sparse leafed Sweet Gum with stubborn bumper crop of gumballs.

Joan Ryan

Early this morning I was listening to some YouTube clips of Dick Dale, the “King of the Surf Guitar”. Surf guitar instrumentals were popular during a few years in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This music was before my time; I may have heard it on the radio when I was six years old but it didn’t make an impression on me. I first heard this genre of electric guitar music during the 1990s. So many of the electric guitarists I listened to cited various surf guitar groups as early inspiration that I bought an LP compilation — “Surf Guitar Classics”, or some such title.

The Ventures, Britain’s The Shadows, the Chantays — all of these groups played twangy instrumentals which were very simple. Mostly played in the lower registers, these tunes were accessible to guitar beginners. “Hey, cool, I can play Pipeline!”

Duane Eddy, with hits such as “Rebel Rouser”, was among the more minimalist of these guitarists.

It’s hard to imagine a time when rock instrumental tunes could make it into the Top 40. All pop tunes must have vocals these days in order to have any commercial potential.

Listening to surf guitar on YouTube revived a memory of an incident from my childhood. Let’s rev up the time/space machine and pay a visit to a boy scout camp, Camp Saukenauk, which is about 25 miles from Quincy, Illinois. The year is 1966. I’ll cut the time-dynamos and we’ll silently glide in and park the machine near a cluster of khaki-colored tents. Let’s peer into one of them:

Four 12-year-old boys are sprawled out on their sleeping bags, listening to a portable transistor radio one of them has brought along on the camping trip. I was one of those boys. We were listening to a late-night rock and roll station. The DJ said “And now for a great song from a few years ago, listeners! It’s the Trashmen, and the song is “Surfin’ Bird”!

What a strange but funny song! Before it was over the four of us were rolling around and just laughing our heads off. The vocals seemed to have no apparent meaning — what do “B-b-b-bird’s the word” and “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow” mean? It didn’t matter. The song was sung in a nasal, affected voice and it had a driving beat. Have a listen:

Surfin’ Bird

I got such a kick out of hearing this song again after more than forty years! In a way, YouTube is the Wikipedia of pop culture. I’ve plugged in the most obscure and esoteric names into YouTube and nearly always get matches.

Another tune by the Trashmen:

Bird Dance Beat

The Trashmen borrowed some of their material from an R&B group called The Rivingtons:

Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow

After a while we turned off the radio. I pulled an envelope from my knapsack and said “Hey, guys, look what I got in the mail!”

One of the other scouts shined his flashlight my way. I pulled a glossy brochure from the envelope and handed it to the other three guys. “Take a look at this!” I said.

The three boys gasped and their eyes got wide as they examined the color brochure.

“Man, Larry, I’ve never seen anything like this! So that’s how it’s done!”

The brochure was from a Swedish purveyor of pornographic photos. Blonde robust-looking Swedes were shown in tiny thumbnail shots performing a variety of sexual acts.

“Gosh — this came in the mail? How come I don’t get mail like this? All I get is letters from my grandmother and Boy’s Life magazine!”

I replied “I saw this ad in a comic book. It said “Interesting Photos! Send us an SASE and we’ll send you a brochure!” I was just so curious — I had to see what was so interesting about their photos.”

As the three boys eagerly pored over the brochure I heard a rustling at the tent’s entrance. One of the scoutmasters poked his head in.

“What are you guys doing staying up so late? Hey, what’s that?”

He rapidly snatched the brochure from us and examined it.

“Oh my gosh! Who brought this piece of filth?”

“It’s Larry’s.”

“Larry, I’m disappointed in you! Now you guys get to sleep! Tomorrow we’re going to practice righting an overturned canoe!”

I noticed that the scoutmaster didn’t tear up the brochure, but instead carefully tucked it into his shirt pocket, for whatever reason.

Larry

One of my favorite science-oriented blogs is Jennifer Ouelliete’s Cocktail Party Physics. Engaging, amusing and informative essays are par for the course at her blog. Recently I stopped by the blog to see what was new and found that it has morphed into a collective, with several other writers contributing.

Lee Kottner is one of the new contributors, and he (actually she; see the comments) wrote this fine overview of ambient and electronica music; it’s worth a look if you have even the faintest interest in the topic. The post includes many links to examples of these musical genres:

I Hear the Mermaids Singing

I’ve heard this sort of music for decades but I never bought any CDs; it’s not really music as I define the term. Nothing really happens in it. There is little linear chord progression or melody, just subtly shifting sound textures. It’s dreamy background music which some have dubbed “sonic wallpaper”. Kottner in the above-linked post mentions that he has found that such music is ideal music to listen to while writing.

I generally don’t listen to music while writing. Either I get distracted and listen rather than write, or I don’t hear it at all. Perhaps such static music as ambient, etc. would be an unobtrusive backdrop for writing.

Following one of Kottner’s links I came across the music of Tomoko Miyata. How fascinating! This woman fills common glazed ceramic bowls of varying sizes with water, tuning the note the bowls will produce by adjusting the water’s volume. She produces musical notes by running a finger around the rim of a bowl, meanwhile stirring and swirling the surface of the water with a pair of wooden kitchen spatulas. This produces shimmery vibrato effects. I was reminded of Ben Franklin’s glass harmonica.

Here’s a video:

Tomoko Miyata

Ambient and electronica music can often be heard in film scores; such music can be very effective in establishing or suggesting a mood.

Larry

How’d you like to read something which is guaranteed to depress you, and as a bonus will cause you to doubt if there is any essential goodness in the human race? No?

I can sympathize with you! The literature of genocide is grim reading. Personally, I’ve read enough books and articles on the Nazi genocide, and the photos I’ve seen are burned into the “Atrocity Corner” of my brain. I’m not looking for more such material.

But I encountered a new book at the Hannibal library which aroused my curiosity. The title is “The Devil Came On Horseback”. It was written by an ex-Marine named Brian Steidle and his sister Gretchen Steidle Wallace. Brian spent a year working for the African Union; the year was 2004, during the peak of the genocidal massacres, which have been (and still are) sponsored by the Sudanese government. He was the head of one of four monitoring groups which were charged with documenting and photographing the aftermath of the destruction in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Brian came to Sudan excited at the prospect of adventure. New people to get to know! New landscapes to see! A chance to possibly do some good and help people! The observer he was replacing wryly said to him “Welcome to hell!” Brian thought he was joking…

It was a frustrating and dangerous year for Brian. The monitoring groups were unarmed and couldn’t really offer much immediate assistance to the truly pathetic refugees and villagers.

Here’s a typical scenario:

It’s early in the morning in the arid Darfur scrub-lands. A ragged band of Arabic-speaking Muslim nomads approaches a village of grass huts. The militia raiders are mounted on camels and horses and they are armed with Chinese weapons. The villagers are black Christians and animists. They are sedentary agriculturists and stock-raisers, and their cattle and goats are penned at the edge of their village.

The predatory nomads, known as Janjaweeds, open the livestock pens and drive the animals out, then a few of them round up the livestock and drive them to a stockade up in the hills. I should point out that the villagers don’t use banks; their livestock is their savings, their accumulated capital.

The next step is looting the village’s storehouses and gang-raping the village women and girls. Villagers begin to flee out into the scrub and form a straggling procession, hoping to reach a refugee camp before they die of hunger and lack of water.

The Janjaweed militia fighters dismount and enter the village with pop bottles of gasoline and proceed to torch the very combustible grass huts. Villagers who haven’t fled, perhaps the old and infirm, are burned alive. What remains is a cluster of charred black circles, each one showing where a hut once stood.

The strategy is a bit different when medium-sized towns are targeted. The Sudanese government provides air support; helicopter gunships and fighter planes bomb the town and strafe the inhabitants with machine guns.

The aircraft also use a diabolical type of ammunition, the flechette shell. Ever heard of these? “Flechette” is French for “little arrow”. Imagine a six-penny nail with barbs along the shaft and tiny stabilizing fins instead of a head. A flechette shell typically contains 8,000 of these little projectiles and a small explosive charge disperses them into a thirty-foot-wide cone. A victim is more-or-less flayed alive and death is slow in coming, a death of a thousand cuts, you might say. The Israelis have used such shells against the Palestinians. It’s difficult to avoid hitting civilians with these weapons.

Suggestions have been made that flechettes should be banned under the Geneva convention.

The Sudanese government helpfully provides trucks to transport the loot. They sanction these raids. These militia bands aren’t paid by the government; the implicit message is “Your loot is your pay.”

The situation in Sudan is complicated by the existence of at least two organized rebel forces in the southern part of the country. It’s just a mess. I would have appreciated a bit more background on why Sudan ended up in this plight, and an index would have been useful, but after all the book is basically a personal account, a sad and compelling one.

I was glad to learn something about Sudan, Africa’s largest country. It’s about one third the size of the continental United States. I mentioned Chinese weapons above; Sudan supplies 10% of China’s crude oil needs as well as many minerals. Saudi Arabia also supplies weapons to the Sudanese government.

Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir was in the news yesterday:

Darfur Ceasefire

He has been indicted by the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide. The despicable man is just stalling by announcing a ceasefire. The statistics are sobering; 300,000 people have been killed and over 2,000,000 people have fled. Not all of them made it to a refugee camp, some of which are in neighboring Chad.

Larry

The Golden Age of hitchhiking in America was the period between the end of WW2 and the first oil shock in 1973. Before WW2 the road system was relatively sparse and traffic was light. Hobos and tramps “rode the rails”, while few ordinary citizens traveled coast to coast. It was the Great Depression era and most people were just trying to feed their families and keep a roof over their heads.

After WW2 and the economic stimulus it brought there were many returned soldiers out on the side of the highway; they were either trying to hitch a ride home or trying to get to some part of the country where they could find work. Many people picked up hitchhikers even when they weren’t war veterans. It was a more trusting era, in part because the mass media was in its early days and local crimes weren’t broadcast coast to coast.

After 1973 people in general became suspicious of hitchhikers and it became much more difficult to get rides. It just wasn’t fun anymore and I reluctantly gave up hitchhiking long distances.

I did quite a bit of hitchhiking during 1972 and 1973. There’s a German word which I just can’t recall right now; its meaning is “that period of a person’s life between the end of schooling and the beginning of a settled life, a free-form period of travel and concomitant exposure to a variety of people and cultures.” The years 1972 and 1973 were that period of my life.

Here are two anecdotes which collectively could be called “Out In the Middle of Nowhere”.

It was August of 1972 and I was trying to get back to Quincy. I’d been on the road all summer and I was out of money and had little food. I was standing by the side of a highway in eastern Montana. There were no signs of human habitation or agriculture, not even so much as a fence. Just wind-rippled grass and the vast blue dome of the sky. I grew up in mid-sized cities and this was very novel to me; I felt small and insignificant, the only sentient mammal for miles and miles.

The traffic was very sparse. I could see an approaching vehicle far off in the distance, and it seemed to take forever for it to reach me, then it would take minutes, it seemed, for it to dwindle to a speck on the horizon.

During the long intervals between vehicles I would let my mind drift into some sort of meditative or contemplative state. No use fretting! Sometimes I would grope for a book in my backpack and sit crosslegged reading for a while.

It was very quiet; just the scarcely audible susurration of the breeze rippling through the grass. But then I heard the sound of an approaching vehicle. I stood up and extended my thumb. A blue car slowed a bit when the driver saw me. The car came to a stop a hundred feet past me and I trotted towards it. Just as I reached it the driver accelerated abruptly, burning rubber as it shot away.

I was angry. How rude, to trifle with me in such a manner! I extended my middle finger to the departing driver, “flipping him the bird” in the common parlance.

The driver abruptly braked and, with the tail end of the car slewing, turned around and cruised back towards me. As the car slowly passed before me I could see that the driver was a man in his early twenties with a ducktail haircut, the sort of hair-style which requires the aid of Brylcream or similar products. The man gave me the evil eye and scowled ferociously.

The black kitten which clung to the top of my backpack looked over my shoulder and hissed. I said “Hey, what’s your problem? Want another one? Here!” and I gave him the finger again. No, no, I’m kidding, I didn’t say that! I was quaking in my boots. As for the kitten, that’s another story!

The man in the blue Chevy cruised past me, then burned rubber making a U-turn and cruised by me again, still scowling. Then he floored the gas pedal and, burning rubber again, shot away and was soon a speck in the distance. I resolved that never again would I be so free with my middle finger!

I sat down again and returned to my book. Half an hour later I saw and heard a pickup truck in the distance. I stood up and stuck my thumb out. The truck braked and I walked up to the cab. A man in his sixties wearing a Stetson hat regarded me dubiously.

“Son, I don’t pick up hitchhikers, generally.” he said. “You look hungry to me, though… here, you can have my lunch!”

The man handed me a sack containing a couple of tuna salad sandwiches along with a pint of milk.

“Why, thanks so much! I really appreciate it!” I said.

He said “Guess it’s my good deed for the day.” As he pulled away he waved and said “Good luck!”

I finally got a ride and a couple of days later I was back in Quincy.

Let’s fast-forward a few months. I was living with a couple of friends in an apartment on the South Side and I had a factory job. I had been corresponding with my future wife Betsy. She was helping an old farmer in southern Vermont in exchange for room and board, and we decided that I should come out there for a visit.

It was December and I brought along plenty of warm clothes. I had never hitchhiked during the winter, and I soon found that if a ride wasn’t forthcoming I needed to walk in order to keep from freezing to death. Walking kept up my body temperature.

After a series of rides which got me through Illinois I got a ride at an entrance ramp somewhere in Indiana; I was trying to get back on I-80. A man in his sixties and his grown son pulled their pickup truck over and I stowed my pack in the truck’s bed and climbed into the cab.

As we cruised down the interstate I found that I had much in common with the father and son and we just talked up a storm. I didn’t notice when the father, who was driving, turned off I-80 and headed north into Michigan.

During a lull in the conversation I looked out and realized that we were on a two-lane highway.

I said with alarm “Where are we, anyway?”

“We’re in Michigan, heading north.”

“Oh, man, I need to get back to the interstate! Why don’t you let me out here!”

The father pulled over and I grabbed my backpack. I said “Thanks for the ride! I enjoyed talking with you two!”

As the pickup disappeared into the distance I belatedly realized that I should have waited until we got to a town before getting out. It was pitch dark and very cold. There were no lights visible and the sky was glorious; the Milky Way and Orion were as bright as I had ever seen them. There was no traffic. Once again I was out in the middle of nowhere, an insignificant speck on the globe of the Earth.

I walked all night just to keep warm. As impending dawn lightened the eastern sky I came to a brightly-lit truckstop. I was so grateful to see that place! I went in and ordered some breakfast. After eating and getting warmed up I found a trucker who was willing to give me a ride south to I-80.

More stories to come!

Addendum: After “sleeping on it” the German word which I couldn’t recall last night came floating into view this morning:

wanderjahr (plural wanderjahre)

   1. A year-long period of travel; especially succeeding one’s
education and prior unto seeking  employment.
   2. (historical) A year spent by an apprentice travelling and honing
his skills prior unto the professional practice of his trade.

Larry

I’m no fan of Sarah Palin, although she did provide great fodder for comedians and commentators during the recent campaign. I think she’s being scapegoated by certain Republicans, though, in an attempt to shift the blame for McCain’s loss to her shoulders. I find it unlikely that she thinks Africa is a country, and I think those who make such accusations should identify themselves. I think the news media is to blame for broadcasting such statements from anonymous sources.

Recently a commenter on a blog I frequent wrote that there is an internal struggle in the Republican Party between intellectual Republicans and (here’s the new coinage) the TheoCons. Great neologism, and I’m surprised no one has thought of it before. The TheoCons are those Republicans who are Rapture Ready and in the meantime would like to have a theocratic government.

Palin, being rather politically naive, made a mistake in making her beliefs so public. Cannier Republicans who hold such beliefs have been more subtle, not wishing to drive away the moderate and rational Christians.

Larry

A continuation of yesterday’s story:

My curiosity was aroused by that ceiling hatch in the long-abandoned apartment’s closet. What could be above that hatch? An attic perhaps?

A few days after Kevin and I discovered that apartment I ventured up the dark stairway again. I climbed the closet ladder and pushed on the hatch. It wouldn’t give, but I was persistent and finally managed to get one side to rise slightly. More pushing and the hatch reluctantly gave and I pushed it up and out of the way. It had been tarred down, which meant that I was the first person in probably a decade or more to emerge through that hatch opening.

I was on the roof of the building, and a block-wide expanse of tar-black roof lay before me. Various ventilator ducts punctuated the slightly-pitched surface of the roof, as well as other hatch-covers, one for each building in the block.

I once removed one of those hatch-covers on the Maine Street side of the block, two buildings down, and found a ladder, then a stairway. I eventually found myself at street-level, behind a locked glass door. I felt like a fish in an aquarium! It was late at night and no one saw me. An interesting experience!

It was exhilarating being able to walk around this asphalted acreage and peer over the edge at the Maine Street and Fifth Street traffic. I walked eastwards above Maine Street. At the Sixth Street corner of the block there was an impressive old building with a mansard roof. I believe it was the Opera House at one time. At the back side of that building’s roof was an impressive wood-staved water tank. It was about twenty feet tall with a diameter of about twelve feet. In various lights that tank was a thing of beauty. It was torn down years ago and the building has since received a new facade.

I took friends up to that roof (including Mark, as he mentioned in a comment on the previous post). The view of downtown Quincy and the Mississippi was impressive, and there was just something about being elevated above the usual street life which was so very appealing.

I especially liked going up to the roof on a summer night. Mournful barge and train whistles echoed through the humid air, and there was always a breeze. A nice place for contemplative thoughts.

Larry

Late last night I was doing some routine computer file maintenance — deleting unwanted files and rearranging others. While I worked I listened to a great childhood memory story in an episode of “This American Life”. Three men recall an adventure they had experienced as eleven-year-old boys; they had discovered an old house which had been mysteriously abandoned back in the 1930s. Personal possessions had been left in the house such as clothing and a wallet containing a man’s ID and a single dollar bill. It’s a good boy-detective story and you can listen to it here:

House On Loon Lake

The story reminded me of an incident from my checkered past.

It was the spring of 1973 and I was eighteen years old. Three friends of mine and I were living in a second-floor apartment above Nelson’s Men’s Wear, a long-defunct store in downtown Quincy, Illinois. It was a novelty to live in such a place, located as it was in a downtown block of storefront buildings. This was a typical hippie-commune apartment of those times, with many parties and many visitors. I was working nights at a rather gritty-and-oily factory which employed many local bikers.

One of my co-renters was a sardonic and flamboyant guy named Kevin. He was (and is) very openly gay. One day Kevin and I were returning to the apartment from some errand or excursion. We ascended the stairs to the landing and while Kevin was opening the apartment door I noticed another door on the opposite side of the landing.

“Hey, Kevin, where do you think this door leads to?”

“I dunno — is it locked?”

I tried it and the door readily opened, revealing a dark and dusty set of steps leading up into the gloom.

I said “Let’s check it out!”

Leading the way, I started up the steps with Kevin close behind me. There was another landing at the top of the stairway and another door. I tried it and it too was unlocked.

Kevin and I entered another apartment. The atmosphere was spooky. The dust of decades was undisturbed. It was apparent that no one had been in these rooms for many years.

There was no electrical wiring and gas-light sconces protruded from the walls and the ceilings. The wallpaper was age-yellowed and some of it was hanging away from the walls in lazy curves.

The rooms were competely empty, it seemed, but then I noticed a camel-back trunk in a corner. The light was dim, so Kevin and I dragged the trunk over by a window. I raised the lid and found the personal effects of a man named Moses. These effects consisted of neatly-folded clothes, a razor, a hairbrush, and even some pots and pans. It was just so intriguing! The name (which we found on some legal papers and letters bound up with a string) suggested that he might have been Jewish. Perhaps a storekeeper who had lived above his shop?

While Kevin investigated the antique clothing I opened a closet door. At the back of the closet a crude ladder fashioned of 2×4s led to a hatchway in the ceiling. I resolved to come back later and investigate, but that’s material for another post!

Kevin was something of a clothes-horse and he’d found some shirts he liked in the trunk. We descended the stairs and found that there was a bit of a commotion on our apartment’s landing. A cop was there, and an irate father held a girl by the shoulder; she was distraught and it was evident that she was his daughter. It seems that he had come to fetch her from the house of iniquity.

“Oops!” I thought. The landing was only about five feet square and the cop had to step aside to let Kevin and I get the door open. We tried to look nonchalant, as if to say “Oh, we’re just coming from the other apartment!”

It turned out that the girl, who had been hanging around recently, was an underage runaway. As the scowling father escorted his errant daughter down the stairs the cop shot Kevin and I a sharp look. We tried to look innocent. He started to say something, but cut it off and followed the father and his daughter down the steps. Kevin and I heaved sighs of relief!

Larry