On the Waterfront

Presumably, the Mississippi River waterfront.


Photo from packet of negatives marked "Henderson County", undated but circa 1910-1920, developed in Galesburg, IL, and purchased by me at auction in the fall of last year.

I don't know where on the river this photo was taken -- the packet of negatives was not clearly labeled, photo by photo. All I know is that many of the pics were described in the accompanying packet's note pages as "Henderson County", and that the packet design was patented in 1910. I don't know if there was anything like this industrial center in Henderson County, IL, during that time frame (the county seat was Oquawka, aka Yellow Banks, and it was something of a hub, then), but there were pics from other areas of the state, as well, so this may be as far-flung as Saint Louis or Rock Island.

My toes disqualify me

I don't think I can work at this place on North Main Street in Monmouth, IL.



I have irregular toes.

Wells bin 'splodin

One of our local landmarks suffered another indignity, yesterday, and I missed it because I was coughing up a lung...

The Wells Elevator, a grain elevator a few blocks outside the center of Monmouth, IL, had, for a decade or two, been celebrated by having the college student arts publication named after it. Some years back, somebody managed to put a star and a flag atop it, so it became (in spirit, if not in actual fact) the highest spot in town. It's been a cultural fixture, as well as an architectural... lump.

And, yesterday afternoon, the grain dust got to it, it seems. It's likely that the company will have to take down the old bin, since it's top has been rather dramatically cracked, and its structural integrity will have been compromised.

Bummer.

Monmouth's Living Windows draws good crowds

Thursday night we in Monmouth were hit with a couple of inches of snow

so conditions were pretty good by Friday evening, when Downtown Monmouth had its Living Windows Festival. I got a call from my friend, Janet, asking me if I'd like to join her in exploring events at the downtown extravaganza, so I agreed to meet her about an hour before things were to start.

I got there just a little early, so I took a few pictures of some of the bigger, better buildings in the downtown area, like the Court House

and the Colonial Bank, in full Christmas regalia

and a shot of the barber shop near the old theater.

My friend Marsha's store window was filled with fun -- Santa and his elf, Eric were getting wild and crazy

On the square, Ronald McDonald greeted cookie-buyers and cocoa-hunters

while, in the Christian book store, sweet songs wafted across the shelves, a cappella

and an electric piano accompanied three members of a barber-shop quartet (with surprisingly good results!), at the Wells Fargo bank.

But the big draw is always the Buchanan Center for the Arts/Warren County Library corner. Crowds outside were, sometimes, ten bodies thick, to see

the kids performing in the windows of the BCA.

From the inside, you could see how much magic was in the air

Ghosts of Degas

Past and present

Back out on the street again -- rides in horse-drawn carriages were available for a small fee.

Santa's helpers were following in Hermey's footsteps

To cap off our evening, Janet and I made our way to Turnbull Funeral Home, where, each year, the Monmouth College bagpipers have come to perform in the main parlor...

Following a rousing performance of Scotland the Brave, Janet and I went to the Maple City Baptist Church a block away, where members of the congregation were serving a hot supper -- coffee, cocoa, choice of chili or hot dog, and a variety of deserts. We ended our evening at the door, after having our fill. We said our farewells, I drove home and collapsed, falling almost instantly to sleep, with visions of sugarplums dancing in my head (or, maybe it was sugar-Clydesdales?).

Doll show a modest success

Members of the Warren County Doll Club had their Doll and Toy Show and Sale today. Mom and I shared a table, selling off those dolls we'd picked up over the years and recently decided we didn't need any more.

The two of us had three eight-foot tables full of dolls and toys -- and ours wasn't the largest selection. Other members had four tables stacked with shelves, to serve double-level or more. The funny thing is, for having only a half-dozen members actually showing and selling, we had a truly wide variety of items.

Mine tended toward the mid- to late-twentieth century, with plenty of Christmas-related dolls and figurines, and a few cars and tractors and the like (I had an Ertl John Deere for dirt cheap). But Mary Sullivan had plenty of sweet new porcelain babies, plus quite a cache of action figures, including all the members of KISS, in their original blister packs, and a couple of STNG 9-inch dolls (hard to walk away from Captain Picard, even when he's teetoncey!). Maxine Hiett had about forty of her kewpie dolls, plus a number of lovely portrait dolls and a careful selection of magnificent antique bisque ladies. Karen Ruggles brought to the show several dozen pieces of doll furniture, many fit to use with the 18" American Girl Series, as well as some simple play furniture, a passel of beanie babies, and an assortment of other lovelies. Jan Speer laid out everything from a boxload of little 10¢ dollies to a few seriously collectible kids' books (and some guidebks to collecting dolls) to a charming pair of portraits of Jack and Jackie Kennedy in wedding attire, and, like the Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat, side-by-side on the table sat Dubya and Rosie. Esther Diehl featured an array including plush monkeys and Cabbage Patch Kids.

Mom & I didn't make a killing, selling off our little things, but we made some space in her guest room, and had a great time in the company of some spiffy people -- plus, we may have persuaded at least one -- and possibly two -- more people to come to our meetings, perhaps to join the club.

As far as I'm concerned, that was the primary purpose of the events.

We likes making our new friends, almost as much as we likes our old friends. And we likes playing with toys, even in public.

This week is Illinois Arts Week

This is Illinois Arts Week. It started on Sunday, and ends this coming Saturday at whatever time we go to sleep.

I just learned of this, today, while reading about some of the goings-on in Galesburg. I realize that a large part of the reason Monmouth isn't in on this stuff hugely is because our arts community just suffered a sudden, shocking loss, but I can't help but wonder how I missed it.

I, who used to live by the paintbrush, did not know that there was a state-tax-dollars-supported week, and a Federally-promoted month of art. Further, I didn't have a clue that this had been going on in my home state since I was finishing high school!


I should be ashamed.

But I've marked it in my calendar for next year, and I'll be discussing with the new director of the Buchanan Center for the Arts, pursuing ambitions for next year's events. We can't let Galesburg get the upper hand in the arts, darn them! ;-)


And now, to atone for my sin, I include a fine example of Illinois art, from my postcard collection, including the description from its back:

"Big Daddy," the tallest totem pole east of the Rockies, stands on North Main Street in Abingdon, Ill. Designed and hand-carved by Steve Greenquist, it has a 17' wingspan on the upper wings. Its 10 carved figures reflect Abingdon's history.

Gratuitous Postcard: Getting squared with the day

The Buddhist Patriarch Bodhidharma(Daruma) seated in meditation. Painted by Hashimaho Gaho, 1834-1908. Japanese, Kano School. Ink and slight color on paper. 43 5/8 x 20 inches.
Freer Gallery of Art, Washington 25, D.C.

Did you ever get out of bed in the morning, and within only a few minutes come to the solid conclusion that it was a bad idea to do that?

I have. Fairly frequently, in fact, I've regretted arising to meet the day.

Take, for example, today.

Let us begin with the gigantic, purple big toe on my left foot. Yesterday, while I was trying to prepare an early supper, before the Bat and I went off to our monthly Doll Club meeting (yes, I still collect dollies. You should see some of them), I watched as a package of frozen pork chops slid off the top shelf of the refrigerator-freezer, landing -- on its edge -- on the knuckle of my left big toe, Crunch! right on the point where proximal phalanx meets first metatarsal, with all the force of a six-pound slab of ice dropping unobstructed from 1.5 meters up. Nothing was broken, but my girly shoes don't fit, and a cat pouncing on toes 'neath covers is no longer cute and funny....

So, there I am, gimping around the house this morning, and, while attending to the beasties, I dropped the litter-box lid on... you guessed it... the sore foot. If cats could learn to repeat the words they hear, I don't think I'd be cited as the "good mommy" the neighbors think I am.

I soaked the foot in a cool bath for a few minutes before showering.

Getting dressed wasn't too bad. I put socks on before I slid my feet down the legs of my good jeans (I'm dressing in a civilized fashion because I have a memorial gathering* to attend this evening at 5, and I don't want to have to keep changing clothes just because I'm pyjamaheddin and respectful of customs of the locals). Everything after that was unexceptional -- except that I don't usually wear these shoes, since they're slightly large, and usually require winter-weight socks, but today they're okay with the thin cotton ones.

So, I'm dressed and trying to figure out how to slip out the door without TiGrr making a successful break for the door, when the Bat calls -- she mis-heard me cite the time of the memorial tonight, and thought it was mid-morning, so she wanted to know if I was going to make it over in time....

Upshot of this distraction was that I had to make haste to stuff my pockets in the ritual fashion -- keys, wallet, phone, lip goo, wrist watch with broken band, pen, reading glasses. I got out to the car (without TiGrr's escaping) only to discover that my keys were not in their appropriate pocket. I checked the other side -- sometimes I've put it in the jeans pocket with the lip goo and watch.

No dice.

I dug in the bottom of my Ugly Bag (aka the purse from aytch -ee- double-toothpicks).

Not there.

Went back inside. TiGrr got out. I caught him and brought him back in, gaining three new deep scratches along the way.

Looked for the keys. Hey, they share a ring with a glow-in-the-dark plastic frog-sans-toes. How hard can it be to find a big, ungainly thing like that? But they're nowhere near where I place them each evening (and I always put them in the same spot, to avoid moments just like this morning's).

I walked over to the folks' house, hrrrmmmpfff into my favorite chair, and take off my shoes. I called the hostess of last night's meeting, asking if, perhaps, I may have lost them in the nice, big comfy chair I'd been using. Esther, the hostess, checked, and, no, there were no keys attached to a toeless glow-in-the-dark plastic frog. I thanked her, hung up, and grumbled to myself about cats stealing keys and burying them under the gigantic bed, where I can't reach without serious assistance.

After a while, I made my way up here to the computer, where I tried to take my mind off my woes by answering e-mail, editing my weekly column, and otherwise losing myself in cyberia.

More than three hours later, I am in the kitchen, standing at a fair distance from the freezer and contemplating preparing a largely inedible lunch for myself involving no pork chops, when my backside begins to itch. I scratch, and my pocket scratches back.

Poking out from my thick tri-fold wallet, stuffed incautiously into the back pocket of my jeans, are my keys.

Dang, but those toeless glow-in-the-dark plastic frogs can do some neat pocket-hopping tricks!


I'm thinking of staying in bed tomorrow, until things improve. But knowing my luck, that will happen sometime around AD 2037. So, bad idea though it may be, I'll probably get up and get cracking, anyway.


*If you are in the general vicinity of Monmouth, IL, this evening around 5, please join me, the Bat, and our friends and colleagues, for a gathering at the Buchanan Center for the Arts, to honor the memory of Mike DiFuccia.

Soggy parade (part deux)

So, the rains came in earnest, and the folks in the parade were real troupers

Sticking it out, hoping for the next break in the rains to be the one long enough for everybody to finish the show...

Even IL State Representative Rich Myers bore with it in fairly good humor...

But I'm betting these kids wished their church had built an ark, instead of this float.

Still, my favorite part of any parade in town is

always going to be the Highlanders...

er, rather...

the Monmouth College Pipe Band (I don't know if I can adapt to all the changes since my antediluvian terms of scholarship).

At least the WCPBF Princess court had appropriate transportation:

and Jane Lovdahl handled the moisture with considerable grace

But I'm not so sure about the rest... they had bumbershoots, the cheaters! ;-)

Harding Elementary School, I think, was tossing out mardi gras beads from the back of a soaking wet truck bed...

And the IL home Extension groups were pretty soggy, as well...

As was the 4-H float.

But the crowds, and the participants, seemed to thin out as the rains became progressively heavier.

I stayed long enough to see the Monmouth College Marching Band finally stomp through... Nice to see they no longer have to march in their jammies.

Not the most flattering, but perhaps the more appropriate "majorette" uniforms...

These guys really rock, for a group still new to the college. The music department should be proud.

And with the arrival of these twirlers came the heaviest of the rains.

I was sopping wet, and I was afraid my camera -- not designed for immersion -- would give up the ghost if I let it stay out in the worst of it, so I went home. I hope I was one of a very few... but the pouring rains didn't stop until 6:00, a full hour after they started.

Some day, I will invest in a rain suit, maybe one like the Gorton's Fisherman wears. For the camera. Me, I like getting soaked to the skin. Even on parade day.

A few updates on the storm

Update on the update: I've added a couple of pics.

For those who watch the weather, last night and this morning, we were that funny little pinkish-white dot in the middle of all that green, yellow, red, purple, etc. over the Mississippi Valley. I don't know how much rain we got between 12:50 p.m. yesterday and so far today, because Pop's 7-inch rain gauge was topped out. Whatever it was, it was flash flood stuff.

I'm not building an ark, yet, though, even though I've gathered ma wee beasties over here at the folks' place. The city's drainage system, installed over the past decade or so, appears to have worked very well. The streets flooded temporarily, and there were the rare blocked drains, but overall, the only real damage to Monmouth was from the wind bringing down trees. And power lines... and poles.


(The police officer who sent in the report on the tree in front of my house said they were answering a lot of calls about "smelling gas", and a number of meters had been detached from pipes by falling tree limbs, but otherwise, there had, by 3:00 yesterday, still been no reports in town of serious injury or massive flooding).

Meanwhile, Kirkwood, just a few miles to the west of us, is closed to all but the lawful residents. 20 homes were completely destroyed, over 200 homes were damaged, and they'll be digging out for a very long while. I'm thinking my friend Anna and her husband are going to be very glad they sold their Kirkwood house and moved south two weeks ago....

It's still chaos out here -- In Monmouth, most of the houses and businesses have electricity again, but they're sawing away branches, trees, and other scrap. A couple of lighter buildings and garages have gone belly-up, and folks are still a little nervous.

In Galesburg, things are a little worse than in Monmouth. There's been one storm-caused death confirmed already, and a number of injuries reported at the hospitals. A lot of property is damaged, power is still out for multiple pockets of houses, and it will be a while before the streets are cleared there.

We all had been hit hard economically a couple of years ago when the bulk of Galesburg's major industries left town (following the Maytag cut-and-run), but it looks as though we'll be able to pull through. Kirkwood is a tight-knit community, with lots of relatives in the region, so we're all pulling together to the best of our abilities.



Meanwhile, my neighbor whose truck was crunched is filing a claim against my homeowner's insurance company... We have one angry mother and a couple of stunned men...

And it's raining again (just a sprinkle!).



This corn field doesn't look so bad, if you don't know what you're looking at -- but from another angle, farther up the road...



For further information, see Monmouth's Daily Review Atlas, the Galesburg Register-Mail, and the Burlington Hawk Eye.

Come for the annual felling of the tree!

Last year, when the large tree limb fell on my house, I begged the tree removal expert to remove that tree. He argued that it still had several good years left in it, and he hated to bring down a perfectly good tree before its time -- especially as we are the "Maple City" and the tree in question was a century-old sugar maple.

Well, my fears were more founded than his, I'm thinking.

Our neighborhood had some pretty rough weather yesterday. Just up the road, in Kirkwood, IL, some accounts clock the straight-line winds at anything from 95 to 128 miles per hour (or, if you work metric, it comes to roughly 153 to 206 kph). It came with about 1.4 inches of rain in the first half-hour of the storm. Just up here in Monmouth, we got slightly less severe winds, but still an inch of rain in about 25 minutes, and it came down horizontally.

I was over here at Mom & Pop's place, working on this here computer thingy. In the middle of the storm, the power went out. Call me paranoid, but the first thing I did when the conditions allowed was to get into my car and get over to my own house.
This was visible from my car, directly in front of the folks' place.

But below was what waited for me at home.


The pick-up truck belongs to the son of the neighbors directly across the street from me. He had just received the call to come to work, right before the storm hit. He's lucky -- we're lucky -- he was running a little late.


The irony here is, he had parked his truck in what is normally my space -- so I can have easy access to my own sidewalk, and not have to walk on uneven ground. I'm usually up and gone by noon, so if he'd parked in his normal space, ten feet forward, his truck would have been fine.



My house will be without power for a few days, they guess. I'm one of only a few thousand whose lines went down in the storm.

I may bring TiGrr and Peanut over to the folks' place a week ahead of schedule.