Independence, Interurban Trolleys & Nellie the Nudist Queen

Plenty of meat and colorful explosions over the Fourth of July weekend this year for us, but not so much beer. I don't have what it takes to be a problem drinker, I guess, because I forget to drink alcohol. Days and weeks and months sometimes go by before I remember to take a drink. During the whole of the long weekend, it didn't occur to me once, despite my previous posting.

As for the meat, I prepared that, but the explosions weren't of my own making, due to the misguided ban on recreational explosives in Illinois, which means that I'd have to drive further than I'd like to obtain fireworks. Still, the Westmont municipal fireworks, shot off last night over Ty Warner Park in that suburb, were worth the time and effort to get there.

During the day we drove to South Elgin, Ill., to take a ride on a small remnant on the Aurora, Elgin and Fox River Electric Line that's now known as the Fox River Trolley Museum. It's a museum in the sense that it has artifacts -- train and trolley cars, mostly. It also has about two miles of track. Rides can be had on weekends and holidays during the summer, and on July 4 the rides are only a dollar.

The AE&FRE was once an interurban line. Naturally that brings to mind the line in "Nellie the Nudist Queen" (Stuart Ross & John Sargent, 1933) -- the only song I know that uses the term "interurban." What, that's not the first thing most people would think of?

Nellie was a city gal, more than nine-tenths pure,
Till a country guy came riding by on a ten-cent trolley tour!
His eyes were mean, his heart was black, and this interurban tramp
Beguiled poor Nell and took her back to his nearby nudist camp!

Not to worry, since Nell thrived in her new setting, becoming the nudist queen of the title. Listen for yourself.

The Sparklers of '10

As a firework, sparklers are underrated. Maybe because there's no explosions. I'm all for recreational explosions, but that doesn't exclude sparkler-play now and then. We still had some left over from the summer of 2009 (we bought a lot) and lit a number of them up in the darkened back yard recently.

Or maybe sparklers are dismissed as not XTreme! enough, though of course people manage to burn or otherwise harm themselves every year with sparklers. Mostly little kids, sorry to say. Adult supervision is required, as the package says. It's a task I don't mind doing.

Things That Glow Briefly in the Dark

I was curious today if there were any statistics on the cancellation of municipal July Fourth fireworks displays in this aching year, but I was only able to find anecdotal evidence of the trend after a total of about five minutes at Google News, so I decided the question wasn't worth any more time. The first thing I put into the search was "fireworks" (instead of "fireworks canceled" or "fireworks cancellation"), so naturally all the fireworks accident stories from the holiday weekend popped up, including this ghastly one: "Long Island man blows off left arm while trying to light fuse on fireworks." It seems he was fooling around with an unforgiving mortar. As mortars tend to be.

Northwest suburban Wheeling, Illinois, canceled its Fourth of July fireworks this year. We went there last year and during the mid-2000s for good shows in a spacious park that has a nearby neighborhood in which to park your car. Last year's show was probably already in the Wheeling budget before the Panic of 2008, but when the time came to consider the expense for 2010, shooting off 'works lost out.

West suburban Westmont, Illinois, on the other hand, went ahead with its show at Ty Warner Park, named for the Beanie Baby mogul who donated $3 million for its creation in the late '90s. Ty Inc. headquarters is in Westmont, so maybe he ponied up to help pay for the display this year. In any case, the show was on in our former town, so we went.

We had our Coolpix S200 and for some reason Lilly was possessed to take pictures during the display. Maybe because, astonishingly, the camera has a setting for fireworks. Most of the images look like fuzzy pics of fireworks. But some of them are light traces that cry out for the addition of bogus captions. I'm just the man for that job.

Deep in the Tonga Trench lives a eerily bioluminous Narcomedusa Jellyfish -- only its hair-like protrusions glow against a pitch-dark body -- believed to be a new genus and species discovered and photographed by Japanese scientists in 2002 by remote submersible but not seen since. Jellies happen to be among the least understood groups of animals on Earth.

Captured at the Very Large Tevatron Collider near Stuttgart, Germany (Größtenpartikelgeschlammer), is this image of two Higgs bosons, types W and Z, colliding in a recent test. A supercomputer turned the invisible tracks of the particles into a color-coded graphic representation for further study.

Another computer enhanced image, this one is of X-ray emissions from Eta Carinae, a Peculiar star, taken by NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Other stars are in the background.

Pyrotechnical Interlude

It's been a bad summer for celebrities at all levels of fame, dying as they are in multiples of three, it seems. Who among us will ever forget what we were doing when we heard about Billy Mays' untimely passing?

Few outside Chicago may have heard of Dempsey Travis, who also died last week, but I met the man once. I went down to his South Side office late in the winter of 1989 to interview him for the commercial real estate magazine I edited at the time. Our meeting was one of the better interviews I ever did, but not because of much that I did. Travis was interesting. More than interesting. He told fascinating stories of times and places I would never see myself. So RIP, Mr. Travis.

The Fourth of July began around here with rain, but by twilight's last gleaming the skies were clear. We made our way to Wheeling, Illinois, for that town's fireworks, as we did in 2004 and '05, and we weren't disappointed. The pyrotechnicians put on an excellent show, one without someone else's idea of a patriotic soundtrack, and including some wiggling displays I'd never seen the likes of, plus a number of teasingly false endings.

The professional shows need to keep innovating, I figure, because amateurs can get a hold of some sophisticated little rockets and shells these days. Besides the usual bottle rockets and so on, people were shooting off small peonies and loud explosive shells before the professional show.

I also have to wonder whether old fireworks pros can look at a tape of a display, and pin it down to a particular decade or even year. Fashion comes and goes in much else; fireworks too?

Item from the Past: Summer of ’99

July 8, 1999

Had a good Fourth of July weekend hereabouts. High point was the fireworks by the towns of Westmont, Woodridge and Downers Grove. Which means, being a taxpayer in Westmont, I paid a bit to put ’em on, and it’s a fine way to spend public money, too. We watched the show from a large parking lot; us and a lot of other people, sitting out side their cars on folding chairs. Even Lilly paid some attention, though she was a little scared of the noise.

The day before, we spent some time the day before at Navy Pier, an excellent public space that juts into Lake Michigan downtown. Lilly had the best time of all, finding short sets of stairs to climb up and down (a current favorite of hers). There was a band, and Lilly danced -- wobbled, really—to their tunes, which was a seriously cute activity.

About my recent to Grand Rapids, never mind the town itself. The best parts of the trip were the flights over and back, on Jetstream 31 propeller airplanes, seating about 20. It was a little like being inside a flying lawnmower, but the view was splendid, especially on the return, when there were few clouds. We flew at about 8,000 feet, according to the pilot, and generally followed the coast of southern Lake Michigan, so I could see some of the parklands, the lakeside towns, and, in Indiana, the active and inactive steel mills.

Later I went to Columbus, Ohio, was to conduct a Columbus roundtable, which I did—14 or so local real estate types, sitting around a conference room, eating breakfast, responding to my questions and often, each other.

Currently, there’s a quarrel between the owners of an older mall (a Cincinnati company) and a Columbus developer who wants to build a new one using tax-increment financing, which is essentially a local tax break. Of course, it’s really a quarrel between competitors, but it’s being portrayed as a matter of public interest by both sides.

Columbus seemed pleasant enough, a Nashville-sized city. Before I went, I only knew a few things about it -- it’s the capital of the state, and Thurber’s hometown (I had to tell my young associate editor who that was). Also, Wendy’s started there. The Ohio state capitol isn’t impressive. It, like Tennessee’s, is Greek Revival, but not nearly as elegant.

Even the inside was spare, with a few monuments to obscure pioneers of Ohio, heroes of the Great Rebellion, moldy governors, etc. Some of the statuary outside was well done, however: a good Spanish-American war memorial, and a prominent larger-than-life of President McKinley, erected a few years after his assassination, with words to the effect that such a man’s fame would shine through the mists of time. Uh-huh.

Glow-Stick Envy

I don’t care one way or the other that New York didn’t get the ’12 Olympics, but my reaction to London besting Paris: heh-heh-heh. Just a touch of Francophobia echoing down the centuries for me, a member of the Anglo-diaspora, but actually I enjoyed both cities, and believe both are great cities of the Earth. I just enjoyed London more.

I wrote a lot last year about July fireworks (see July 7, 8 & 9, 2004), so I won’t bother with it so much this year. Last year we went to Wheeling, Illinois, to see its municipal fireworks. This year we went back. It was a fine display last year. This year’s was too.

The main difference this year was rain. It rained most of the day on July 4, from mid-morning to late in the afternoon. In fact, it was still raining at 6 p.m., and we concluded that there would be no fireworks show for us this year, at least on the Fourth. But at 8 p.m., I looked outside and noticed that the rain clouds had vanished. In an instant we decided to go.

In a way, it worked out better. Instead of leaving at about 6, eating a Taste of Wheeling’s overpriced food and then waiting around for the sun to go down, we ate at home and arrived just before dusk. Some waiting around was involved, but not too much. We brought foldable camping chairs, and that helped make the wait easier, especially considering the wet grass.

Last year, I wrote this: “Lilly was a little miffed that I wouldn’t buy her a glow stick, and asked every few minutes when the show was going to begin.” Guess what happened again. I should have re-read my posting before going again this year, and saved myself aggravation by buying her a glow stick (loop, really) before reflexively declining to do so. Once I’d committed to not buying one, I didn’t want to back down. The glow-stick situation was made even worse by a couple of girls nearby, who had glowing necks, wrists and ankles, and who were running around making all kinds of light trails. This inspired some glow-stick envy in my eldest daughter.

But in end, she got her glow stick. As we were walking back across the park after the fireworks, Ann picked up a blue-glowing loop. Ann was holding Yuriko’s hand most of the time, Lilly and I were in front, and no one noticed her pick it up. She just had it suddenly, to our mystification. But that doesn’t mean that she shared it with Lilly. Just the opposite. A fierce sense of ownership set in very quickly, but I told Lilly not to worry -- Ann will fall asleep en route home, and you can have it then. Both of them fell asleep, but Lilly woke up when we got back, and removed the ring from around Ann’s neck, and squirreled it away somewhere. Ann, still of memory short, didn’t complain about it the next morning.