Handcuff Harry and Tailgunner Joe

 Sept 10, 2012

I knew this was coming up, but I'd forgotten that Saturday marked the exact day when Jimmy Carter bested Herbert Hoover as the president with the longest life after his presidency. As the Atlantic article points out, September 8, 2012, was President Carter's 11,544th day as former President Carter, or nearly 32 years. Here's hoping he has some more post-presidential days.

The History Museum at the Castle in Appleton, Wisconsin, started out as a Masonic Temple, but now focuses on local history. Such as the previously mentioned Harry Houdini, master of escape and self-promotion, who has a whole floor devoted to him and his illusions. How is it that the former Erik Weisz (Ehrich Weiss) called Appleton his hometown? "Houdini came to America as a four-year-old boy in 1878," the museum web site says. "His parents moved him and his brothers to Appleton because of a job opening. Houdini's father, Meyer Samuel Weiss, became the community's first rabbi."

But the young Ehrich Weiss left Appleton with his family when he was only seven, after his father lost his job, moving to New York. So "hometown" is a bit of a stretch, but apparently Houdini claimed the town as his own, even asserting that he'd been born there instead of Budapest. Still, Appleton's a good place for such an exhibit, and the museum does well with it, featuring photos of Houdini during his performances, but also more casual shots; handbills and posters; and plenty of Houdini equipment, such as handcuffs and shackles and confining spaces, like a milk can and a simulated Chinese water torture box.

Various exhibits discuss how some of the escapes were done, which apparently upset some current illusionists -- such as David Copperfield, who owns a lot of Houdini artifacts himself -- as if all the information was somehow not on the Internet. There was also an exhibit, complete with seance table, explaining how some of those tricks were done, just as spiritualist debunker Houdini did during his lifetime.

The museum isn't all Houdini. The lower floors feature exhibits about local history, including an assortment of machines made or used in the area. One was a genuine early 20th-century Linotype machine. Considering how ubiquitous they once were, it's odd how few of them I've run across. Maybe I'm not looking in the right museums.

Right at the foot of the stairs in the basement is a bronze bust in a clear display case. "People ask us why we keep a bust of Joseph McCarthy," our guide said, anticipating the question. "Like him or not, he's part of our history." Sounds reasonable; he was born in Grand Chute, near Appleton, and is buried at St. Mary's Parish Cemetery in Appleton, which wasn't on my press tour. No point in pretending he didn't exist.

Bergstrom-Mahler and Its Paperweights

Sept 9, 2012

Whenever I see glasswork that's a few centuries old -- and that's always in a museum -- I wonder, how could those items survive that long? Maybe they could under the care of a museum, but the likes of  enameled beakers, covered goblets and engraved tumblers from 17th- and 18th-century Germany (for example) were made to be used, even if they were expensive items in their time. Gravity has been continuous every moment since then, and so has the unpredictable motion of people, animals or waves of energy, such as when your city is bombed.

The Bergstrom-Mahler Museum in Neenah, Wisconsin, has some fine examples of centuries-old Germanic glassware, all clearly survivors of time and random motion. It also features interesting newer glass as well, plus temporarily exhibits. And then there's the paperweight collection, which includes more than 3,000 objects: whirls of color and shapes embedded in glass globes.

I've only ever seen its like once before, the Arthur Rubloff paperweight collection at the Art Institute of Chicago (1,500+ objects). I understand Rubloff gallery has been expanded recently after some years mostly in storage, but I remember when some of the paperweights were exhibited near the front of the museum.

Paperweight collecting sounds eccentric, and maybe it is, but there are some astonishingly beautiful paperweights in the world, if the Bergstrom-Mahler collection is any indication. Click on the
thumbnails for a better view, but photos displayed on line really don't do the three-dimensional, well-lit objects much justice.

Items From the Past: DDR Relics

We've been having a South Texas summer lately. The last time the Fourth of July was so hot in metro Chicago, I've read, was 1911. The high for Independence Day was 101° F., and for some days afterwards it was almost as hot. But not today: only about 80°, which felt positively cool.

On July 9, 1983, my friend Steve and I crossed into East Germany at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, and spent most of the day there. For one thing, about four hours at the extraordinary Pergamon Museum, which remains one of my favorite museums anywhere. We had a large map of Berlin to guide us in those pre-Internet, pre-GPS days.

This is only part of the map, but it shows the Berlin Wall snaking through the heart of the city. It's the heavy red-dash line, with the shading on the east side of the wall, which must have represented the "guards will shoot you zone" that caught up with Alec Leamas, for instance.

Next is another set of relics of my time in East Germany: passport stamps. They don't make 'em like these any more, and the world is better for it. I have two DDR stamps, there on the same page of a passport long expired, one acquired on the train between Hamburg and Berlin, the other at Checkpoint Charlie.



I didn't have a camera. Steve did, and later sent me a few prints. The pic below is the Berlin Cathedral (Berliner Dom) as it appeared in '83, with the East Berlin main TV tower in the background. The original dome took a hit in '44 and collapsed to the floor of the church. The dome had been rebuilt by the time we got there, and visitors could enter the building, but only peer inside, because the floor was still littered with rubble.

Since then, I see that the interior has been restored, as befitting a reunified Germany.

Gas For Less

Not long ago the girls and I went into the city on a hot Saturday afternoon. We ate lunch at Elly's Pancake House, which is a busy place at the corner of North and Clark -- something else used to be there, but I can't remember what. Then, to escape the heat, we went across the street to the Chicago History Museum, which I still think of as the Chicago Historical Society.

I wasn't in a picture-taking, note-taking mood.



So the only picture I took inside the museum was of a neon sign that caught my eye. It was pretty hard to miss.

Fermilab Sights

We didn't get to go inside the Lederman Science Center at Fermilab a week and a half ago, but we did spend some time on the grounds outside. Clearly the architect was influenced by the Prairie School.

Much of Fermilab is undeveloped and -- I read, since we didn't see them -- there's a small herd of buffalo residing on the grounds. We took a short walk that took us past scenes such as these, taken from a small pedestrian bridge over a creek.

The rush to spring is all of a month early this year, including the throaty sounds of frogs looking for mates.

Boilerplate Apollo With a Sounding Rocket on the Side

I've posted about the Cernan Earth and Space Center before, but that was some years ago. The planetarium still has its modest collection of space artifacts, many of them associated with Gene Cernan, including the spacesuit he wore on the Apollo 10 mission, but also some spare hardware. Inside the building is a never-used lunar module ascent engine and a Gemini retro motor (Cernan flew on Gemini IX-A), among other things.

Outside the building is an Apollo test capsule, which is the white cone-shaped object in the photo.

"Having the same size, weight and weight distribution of an operational Apollo capsule, test capsule like this one were used by NASA and the U.S. Navy to practice ocean recoveries during the 1960s," notes a nearby sign. The space program argot for such a capsule is a "boilerplate," a term I learned reading about the Apollo program as a kid. It wasn't until later that I heard other uses for the word, including the paragraphs near the end of a press release that describe the company for whom the release was issued, and which are reused many times.

According to A Field Guide to American Spacecraft, this particular boilerplate Apollo is BP-213, one of a number scattered around the country. Most are at museums, as you'd expect. But one is (fittingly) at the Apollo Middle School in Hollywood, Fla., while another is (strangely) at a Dairy Queen in Franklin, Pa. At least it was as of 2007, says Roadside America.

Next to the test capsule is a Nike Tomahawk sounding rocket -- first stage Nike, second stage Tomahawk. The Directory of U.S. Military Rockets and Missiles says that "the first Nike-Tomahawk flew on 25 July 1963. The rocket could lift a payload of 45 kg (100 lb) to 370 km (230 miles) or 115 kg (255 lb) to 215 km (134 miles) altitude. The USAF launched 38 Nike-Tomahawks between April 1967 and November 1983, mainly on aeronomy and plasma physics missions. The last of almost 400 Nike-Tomahawk launches by any user was a NASA flight in November 1995."

More Cantigny Tanks

Lilly and Ann climbed on four or five of the 11 tanks at the Cantigny Tank Park yesterday. One of the smaller ones is the M5 Stuart, a mere 16.5 tons. Cantigny's web site says, "The M5 Stuart was the Army’s standard light tank at the beginning of World War II. It was primarily used in reconnaissance, flank security and infantry support roles... Originally designed as a light battle tank, its role was limited because its 37mm main gun and thin armor could not stand up to German tanks in direct combat. The tank did prove effective in an infantry support role, where it knocked out machine gun nests and other enemy strong points, supporting soldiers as they advanced."

Below is the M41A3 Walker Bulldog, during a rare moment when no one was climbing on it. A Cold War-era tank, Cantigny notes that "the M41 tank series never saw combat with the US Army, but was exported to over 18 countries."

Finally, this is the turret of an M24 Chaffee, with daughters no. 1 and 2 perched on top. It replaced the M5 Stuart as the Army's light tank in World War II. "Along with mechanized infantry support and reconnaissance missions, the M24 was also able to destroy enemy bunkers, buildings, and other strong points," Cantigny explains.

More on the Tank Park is here.

An Afternoon Among the Flowers and Tanks

Today was one of those increasingly rare warm days -- clear and nearly 70° F. during the afternoon -- so we decided to visit Cantigny Park. The last time we were there was during the full blaze of summer, more than a year ago.

Fall coloration is far along, as it is everywhere else, but the gardens are still lush with flowers. We haven't had a hard freeze yet, and the Cantigny horticulturists must see to it that the gardens feature plenty of late-season bloomers.

Besides the flowers, we also went to Cantigny to see 11 tanks permanently parked on the property, such as this one.

All of them belong to the First Division Museum at Cantigny and are exhibited on the grounds outside the museum building. According to the sign, that's a 48.5-ton M46 Patton. On a day like today, kids (and some adults) were all over the tanks.

The National Gallery of Art

The old copy editor within me is always looking for mistakes in news stories. CNN published an article this morning called "Luxury, horror lurk in Gadhafi family compound," the gist of which is the shocking (shocking, I say) revelation that families of tyrants tend to live in gaudy palaces and abuse whomever is handy whenever the urge strikes, which is often. Anyway, the vanguard of the current Libyan regime change reached one of these palaces, and CNN was there to film it. "We filmed them quixotically studying the labels of Cristal champagne and fine St. Emilion Bordeaux, apparently not realizing each bottle is worth hundreds of dollars," the author wrote, referring to rebels ransacking the palace.

Quixotically studying? In the manner of Don Quixote? Waving the bottles at windmills, maybe? I think "quizzically" is what the writer needed here. I won't be too hard on the writer, because I do this kind of thing often enough -- think of one word and then write a similar one that's completely at odds with the meaning I wanted. But I will be hard on CNN because it's supposed to have someone to catch that kind of mistake. Then again, I checked the same story a few minutes ago, and an editor had removed "quixotically" all together, so someone caught it.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, isn't part of the Smithsonian. Yet it's housed in two large buildings on the National Mall and doesn't charge admission, so for tourist purposes, it might as well be. The museum also has a feature that many other large institutions of its kind should have more of: places to sit in the galleries with backs. Maybe it's a mark of my increasing age, or just that we walked a lot in DC and appreciated the National Gallery's seating more than backless benches, which seem more common in museums. Of course, the benches can be too comfortable. In one room I noticed a well-dressed middle-aged woman sitting on a bench, fast asleep. A few minutes later, a guard wandered in and gently woke her up.

Comfy benches or not, we didn't spend quite as much time at the National Gallery as we wanted (a persistent theme on this trip), but managed to take note of some noteworthy works, including items I remember seeing before, such as David's "The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries," and others I must missed before, such as "Ginevra de' Benci," which has the distinction of being the only Leonardo da Vinci painting in the Americas. No albino dwarfs in the service of Opus Dei attacked me while I was looking at the painting.

"Gallery of the Louvre" by Samuel F.B. Morse is also currently on loan to the National Gallery, and I spent a while looking that. Morse's backstory is just as interesting as the canvas. Not long ago I read "Henry, Morse and the Telegraph," a chapter in The Heroic Age of American Invention by L. Sprague de Camp (1961), which mentioned Morse's career as an artist, which was notable but not tremendously successful. So he made a career change. As an inventor, de Camp wrote, "Morse was not so much an outstanding inventor as a promoter of an invention and a manager of inventions." There's something to be said for that. It's Morse code, after all.

Done in the 1830s and newly restored, " 'Gallery of the Louvre' depicts masterpieces from the Louvre's collection that Morse 'reinstalled' in one of that museum's grandest galleries, the Salon Carré," says the museum web site. That is, he painted the salon like he wanted it to be, not like it was, and stacked it with paintings he admired.

It's an odd subject to modern eyes. Why paint a painting of paintings? But we're awash in instantly copied and transmitted images. They were not. Paintings of galleries weren't so unusual then, a time of greater scarcity of manmade images, and neither was the hanging of paintings floor-to-ceiling in a gallery, or for that matter, in private homes that could afford them. That was a detail that made me smile, the cluttered museum wall. We imagine that our way of doing things -- such as the spare, uncluttered formality of an art museum -- are timeless practices, but it isn't so.

Also temporarily on display at the museum, in its spacious West Building rotunda, is "The Capitoline Venus," on loan to the United States for the first time. I was glad to see her. She had her own guard, looking a little bored there in the rotunda because mostly people were wandering past the statue and not showing any interest, much less an urge to deface it.

For a statue 1,800-plus years old, the Venus in fine shape. Usually on display at the Capitoline Museums (Musei Capitalolini) in Rome, the work made me ponder certain questions, such as why the hell didn't I visit the Capitoline Museums? Just look at the "Gallery" section at the Wiki page. I've seen most of those works used to illustrate histories or other works about Antiquity, but not with my own eyes. I was right there in the Piazza del Campidoglio, surrounded by the Capitoline Museums, although that was during the evening and I guess they were closed. I did notice that the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius wasn't in piazza; air pollution had been eating at him, I think, and he had been taken inside the museums.

Just another reason to go back to Rome, though I suspect the clock might run out on me before I can make it. But if I do go back to the shores of the Mediterranean, maybe Leptis Magna will be easier to visit too, provided things have settled down in Libya. Mrs. Quarles, my Latin teacher in high school, told us of visiting the site in the days before Gadhafi came to power, and somewhere in my head ever since has been a synaptic-based index card reading LEPTIS MAGNA: GO THERE IF YOU CAN.

Grazing at the Smithsonian

I seem to remember reading, or hearing, years ago that if you spent 10 seconds looking at each item the Smithsonian has in its collection, to the exclusion of doing anything else, you still couldn't see everything in a normal lifetime. Of course, that mass of holdings probably includes warehouses of specimen boxes collected during long-ago decades that no one has looked at since they were hastily cataloged -- after all, who would want a long look at 100,000 kinds of beetles?

Still, even the items on display stagger the imagination. How come there's so much stuff in the world? Do philosophies either ancient or modern deal with this important question? Well, maybe. In any case, the Smithsonian seems to have a sizable fraction of all that stuff.

That was a long-winded way of saying that despite the hours we devoted to the Smithsonian last week, I came away with the feeling that we'd only grazed on a negligible sample. The fact that we were roaming the Smithsonian halls with children added to that feeling. It's good to take your children to such places, but you can't to expect them to appreciate much of it in quite the way you do. They will weave what they see into their own selves according to their own lights. They will also pull you onward through the exhibits whether you're ready or not to quit examining those rare beetles.

"Lilly, look at this," I said. There in front of me at the National Museum of Natural History was some rai money from Yap -- the enormous stone doughnuts from that island that prove that just about anything can be a store of value. "It's stone money from Yap. Yap's a little island in the Pacific. They used to use these big stones as money."

Uh-huh, she replied. But I have to be fair about this. I'm not certain that a rai would have impressed me much in the summer of 1974. I would have gone looking for the collection of gold and silver coins. It helps to have heard about stone money occasionally over the years, to know someone who's actually been to Yap and sent you a postcard with a rai on it, and to have read about them -- including an article that told me that even though one such stone had fallen into the ocean near Yap, it still counted among the wealth of the owner, because everyone else still accepted it as a store of value (note to Ron Paul: that's how all money works, even gold).

Anyway, I'd never seen a rai before. I was impressed. Nearby was a smallish moai from Easter Island. I'd never seen one of those in person either, unless I saw the one at the British Museum and had forgotten about it. That's another thing about stuff. A lot of it gets lost in the tangled byways of memory.

The Hope Diamond is also at Natural History. Yuriko was keen to see that. Apparently it's famed among the Japanese for having passed through the hands of Marie Antoinette and maybe being cursed, though I suspect that Pierre Cartier made up the curse for marketing purposes. Whatever the truth of that, it was a lovely stone and surrounded by admirers the day we visited. We stuck around to see other gems as well, including the world's largest flawless quartz sphere (242,323 carats). Marie Antoinette could not have worn that.

Years ago I made the mistake of visiting the National Air and Space Museum on the day after Thanksgiving. The crowds were enormous and completely distracting. This time around we went on a Friday, and the crowding was significant but tolerable. Exciting things have been added in 20 years! (I told my family). Old friends are there, of course, such as the Wright Bros. plane, The Spirit of St. Louis, Friendship 7, the Apollo 11 CM Columbia, and a spare LM that never went on a one-way lunar mission.

But look! An SS-20 Soviet missile. Next to a Pershing II. Those couldn't have been there in the 1980s, since in those days they were probably fueled up and awaiting orders to destroy the world. There's also SpaceShipOne, the gondola of the first nonstop balloon flight around the world (Breitling Orbiter 3), and a lot of other machines of exploration.

I can see why the place is always so crowded. The collection is beyond cool. And while the rest of my family might not have been quite as impressed as I was, I'm sure they took something important away from the experience.

At the National Museum of American History I got to see another old favorite. One of my favorite presidential statues anywhere, in fact.

Yes, it's the 12-ton, 1841 Horatio Greenough marble of George Washington in Classical garb, offering his sword -- his military power -- to the people after his victory, as Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus did. People find the statue strange, but they haven't read their Livy. Actually, it's still a little strange. All the more reason to like it.

Elsewhere in the museum is a presidential history display, so I had to see that. Ann was much impressed, maybe even more than me, by the top hat Abraham Lincoln wore to Ford's Theater. The exhibit had a lot else besides, such as Lincoln's rifle (not something you picture him carrying around, but he surely did at times), a trout fly that belonged to Grover Cleveland, a bowling pin from the Truman White House bowling alley, part of Eisenhower's coin collection, Bill Clinton's sax ("on loan," the sign said) and much more. None of these things are elegant enough to be on display at the White House, but they are just as presidential as the paintings and marbles there.

Another intriguing object at American History, a floor below the toga'd Washington, is the Vassar Telescope, a fine example of the 19th-century telescope-maker's art. It could also be a feminist icon, for any feminists who concern themselves with the history of science. "On view is the telescope used by Maria Mitchell (1818-1889), the first professional woman astronomer in the United States," says the museum's web site. "She gained recognition in scientific circles through establishing the orbit of a new comet in 1847. The following year, she became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and from 1865 to 1888 she served as professor of astronomy at Vassar Female College." More about her and the telescope is here.

We left American History to find lunch -- the Smithsonian cafeterias always looked crowded and expensive -- but before going I made sure everyone saw the Star-Spangled Banner. "Why is this flag so important?" Yuriko asked. A fair question. Because it's the Star-Spangled Banner, that's why. That wasn't quite a satisfactory answer, not if you didn't grow up hearing "that our flag was still there." But she has heard the National Anthem, and I told her that Francis Scott Key wasn't writing about flags in the abstract or in some poetic sense, but about this flag right here.

The flag is no longer hanging on a wall behind glass. I think it was the last time I saw it. I know that since 2008, it's been behind a new glass wall, dimly but visibly lit, at a slight angle. No rocket's red glare, but it is a luminous presentation.

The Incredible Three-Headed Lincoln

In the mid-1800s, Lockport, Illinois, was an important town on the Illinois & Michigan Canal, which was nearly 100 miles of 19th-century engineering prowess that connected Lake Michigan with the Illinois River and thus the Mississippi. Aside from a spontaneous visit to a Lockport Sonic a few years ago, we hadn't been to the town or its historic district in a long time -- since Lilly was very small, maybe the late '90s. We went again on Saturday. Since our last visit, a plaza called "Lincoln's Landing" has been created. It was dedicated on Lincoln's bicentennial birthday in 2009, in fact.

Lincoln's Landing is next to the canal and also near the handsome limestone Gaylord Building, which used to house the headquarters of the canal. Renovated in the late 20th century, the Gaylord Building now is owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and houses a restaurant and a museum about the canal. We took a look around the museum, which isn't that large and charges no admission (so I was happy to put a little in the donation box). Of particular interest to me was a room devoted to Lincoln and the I&M Canal. As a Whig believer in internal improvements, he was a supporter of the canal throughout his political career, though I imagine that once he became a railroad lawyer, his attachment wasn't quite as strong.

The room displayed a map of Lincoln's circuitous route back home to Springfield after his single term in Congress. If I'd read about the trip before, I must have forgotten it, but the way home in 1848 for the future president took him on a speaking tour of New England on behalf of presidential candidate Zachary Taylor and the Whig platform; then along the Erie Canal to Buffalo, where he met VP candidate Millard Fillmore; then by steamer to Detroit and afterwards to Chicago, which took him through the Straits of Mackinac; and from Chicago to Springfield. The trip can be reviewed in the September and October 1848 pages of this astonishingly detailed web site, the Lincoln Log.

So did Lincoln come to Lockport in 1848 or any other time? Make at speech at the site of the Lincoln Landing in Lockport? Do anything in Lockport? Well, maybe. He got around a lot, especially in Illinois. Search the Lincoln Log and "Lockport" comes up twice, neither mention in the context of the man visiting the town, but surely not every place he went was recorded. No matter; every town in Illinois needs a Lincoln site, so Lockport now has one.

Complete with its own odd Lincoln statue as a centerpiece. I've seen a few Lincolns in my time, but none quite like this. I took to calling it the Incredible Three-Headed Lincoln.

Three-Bodied would be more like it, since the bronze Lincoln bodies are joined. It's the creation of by a Brooklyn-based artist, David Ostro, for his first major commission. "Unlike the 200 or more existing statues in the U.S. which showcase the former president in formal propriety, the life-size bronze at Lincoln Landing offers a surprising change from the usual expectations," says the press release issued on behalf of the artist. (One quibble: former presidents are those men who have held the job in the past but who are still alive. Two Bushes, a Clinton and a Carter at the moment.)

"The artwork depicts Lincoln as a young Illinois legislator on his visit through Lockport in not one, but three interlocking poses," the release continues, without being specific about that visit. "The work is installed on a reconstitution of the old I&M Canal wall. The base of the statue captures a seated Lincoln dangling his legs off the edge of the wall, reaching a hand into the depths of what was once canal water, though now only earth remains. A second figure draws out of this seated form, pushing upwards, contemplating a discovered object closed in hand. With the third figure, Lincoln finally stands. Determined to gain his balance on the landing, he tears upwards and outwards from his former selves and pockets the mysterious object."

Pocketing a "mysterious object"? Is that really part of Lincoln lore? What did he find, one ring to rule them all?

The One & Only Shabbona's Rock

On the way to Starved Rock State Park, we made an impulsive stop at the LaSalle County Historical Society & Museum in Utica, Illinois. That's the kind of impulse I get, anyway. It's a fine little museum, replete with artifacts of local interest, such as items from the clock manufacturer that used to be in Utica, and 19th-century buttons made from shells found in the nearby Illinois River. The museum also sported the kinds of items people, or their heirs, give to such museums, such as a genuine Japanese rifle and bayonet picked up at some point during the Pacific War and brought back to the heart of the Midwest.

The museum building is a handsomely restored sandstone structure that was once a granary and warehouse along the Illinois & Michigan Canal. The building is still on the canal, of course, and as inviting as a stroll along the banks of the canal looked, we didn't do that. I didn't take a picture of the building, either. Instead, I pointed my camera at a large rock in the museum garden.

It's none other than Shabbona's Rock. Only so many rocks have proper names, and this is one. Profoundly obscure, but that's all the more reason to like it. Everybody's heard of Plymouth Rock, the Blarney Stone, the Stone of Scone and so on, but only a select few know Shabbona's Rock.

A plaque near the rock says, in full: This large stone was a favorite resting place of the Indian chief Shabbona, who was renowned as the white man's friend. It was originally located in Ophir Township on the property of Abner Westgate. Chief Shabbona would visit the Westgate homestead for two or three days at a time, but he always stayed out-of-doors. He preferred to eat the food which was offered to him while seated on this rock. After being moved from the Westgate property, this rock was relocated twice more before being donated to the LaSalle County Historical Society in 1969 by Westgate family heirs.

Returning from Starved Rock, I couldn't resist a brief stop at the "Agricultural Crash Monument," which is a few miles outside the town of Norway, Illinois.

It's a vintage '40s passenger plane, from the looks of it, beaten up, positioned nose down, and missing its tail. A helpful sign in front of the pseudo-wreck says, in full: Dedicated to all farmers and ag-related business folks that have lived thru the "Agricultural Crash" of the 1980's. Mervin & Phyllis Eastwold, Norwegian Impl. Co. Nearby there's also a more standard sign, quite weatherworn, advertising the Norwegian Implement Co., which appears to be a going concern in Marseilles, Illinois.

The Yabba-Dabba-Doo Virus

We spent the last few days of April recovering from a virus on the loose in the house. Last week, Lilly had it, then Ann, then me. Ann had to stay home from school on Friday, then I felt crummy on Saturday. While I was on the couch for much of that afternoon, Ann, mostly recovered, decided it was time to watch a lot of the fourth season of The Flintstones, a DVD set that was given to us some time ago.

I appreciate its spot in the annals of TV animation, and like it for the most part, but the show was never a top favorite of mine. A half-dozen or so episodes is more than enough at one sitting. Still, the season premiere that year, which guest stars Ann-Margret more or less as herself, is an exceedingly charming cartoon. Maybe that's because the show's husband vs. wife antics are toned down for the episode, with the addition of a musical score that's aged a lot better than the premise of the show. I don't ever remember seeing this particular episode in repeats, and I don't know whether my family would have been watching on the original airdate, September 19, 1963, but I wouldn't remember it from then anyway.

I'm mostly recovered from the virus now, and back at the word mill. So I saw the May Day Google Doodle featuring the anniversary of the opening of the Great Exposition of 1851, including the Crystal Palace, a steam locomotive, and the Koh-I-Noor Diamond, among other marvels of the fair and the age.

Does "doodle" seem the right term, considering how much planning probably goes into them? My own choice for today's doodle would have been dandelions, which have sprouted in great number on my lawn, other lawns, vacant lots, roadsides and other green patches that I can see. But that's just me being narrow-minded. The Great Exhibition is well worth remembering.

Among other things, The Guardian notes that, "the building and the original show helped create the English euphemism 'spend a penny,' meaning go to the toilet, after sanitary engineer and plumber George Jennings created the first public loos. The so-called Monkey Closets were located in the Retiring Rooms, and visitors, who were also offered a shoe shine, were charged a penny to use them.

"The first show was a big success and the profit made was used to found London's Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum." Full article here.

Those are all fine legacies of the expo. Never heard of "spend a penny," but it seems to count as old slang. Any museum that has full-sized copies of Trajan's Column, as Victoria and Albert does, is all right by me. Though overshadowed by other London attractions, I can attest that the Natural History Museum and Science Museum are also excellent.

The Puelicher Butterfly Wing

More rain. The lawns are greening up nicely, though some parts of them are under puddles right now. Yet the urge to mow is strong among some householders, though not so much in my case. A neighbor's back yard -- visible from the park next to Ann's school -- features a couple of mower-tracks, obviously cut the other day in the process of discovering just how soggy the grass is.

While we were visiting the Milwaukee Public Museum, we toured a small but popular exhibit called the Puelicher Butterfly Wing. It's a warm, humid room full of free-flying butterflies. As I said, the place was popular.

It's hard to see any butterflies in that picture. But they were in the air, on the plants, on the walls, and sometimes on the visitors. None liked me enough to land on me. Lilly, on the other hand, attracted more than one, for reasons only known to the butterflies.

I asked a docent, an elderly gent in a t-shirt that said BUG SQUAD (or was it BUG PATROL?) whether most of the species in the room were tropical. Most are, he said, except for some Monarchs the museum happened to have handy. Grand as they are, Monarchs are positively dowdy compared to some of the iridescent-hued bugs flitting around that room.

Still, I wondered, what's the evolutionary value in being so colorful? It must work, but how? I guess I could look up current thinking on that point, but I'd rather it be a minor mystery.

The Milwaukee Public Museum

Heavy rains last night and some later in the day, and even better, it was warm for a few hours today. Better than last Saturday in Milwaukee, when it wasn't pleasant enough for an outdoor romp. So we did an indoor romp at the Milwaukee Public Museum. We made the acquaintance of this creature while we were there.

It's the Herbior Mammoth, discovered in southern Wisconsin in 1994 and acquired by the museum in 2007. Imagine being in the vicinity of such a beast, more than two stories tall and sporting those wicked-looking tusks, while you are armed with a stone spear and maybe a stone knife or two, and you have no horses. Of course, you're with the rest of the hunters in your clan, but still. The mammoth will be angry when you start poking it with your sticks.

According to the museum, the mammoth died about 14,500 years ago -- and has evidence of being butchered. So people ended up eating the thing, whether they hunted it or scavenged it, which is less dramatic but also possible. I prefer to imagine paleo-Indians poking it with sharp sticks; that would have been quite an achievement. More importantly for paleoanthropologists, the bones are older than the Clovis site, and thus among the oldest evidence of human habitation in North America. Cool.

Elsewhere in the museum was the big-ticket exhibit, "Mummies of the World," which apparently displays dried dead people not only from Egypt and Peru, but also lesser-known mummification spots, such as "part of a group of 18th-century mummies discovered in a long-forgotten church crypt in Vác, Hungary," says the press release associated with the show. Imagine that discovery: "Say, Béla, what's in stone box over there?" "Dunno, let's find out."

Interesting, but I didn't want to shell out for it. Instead we wandered through the halls of the museum, looking at whatever caught our interest. Much of the place is given over to re-creations of one kind or another, such as Old Milwaukee, which features storefronts with large windows, inside which are various artifacts of old-time businesses. My own favorite item in that part of the museum was a poster at the late 19th-century drug store advertising Paine's Celebrated Green Mountain Balm of Gilead Cedar Plaster, which you can see here (with the wry note, "Advertisements often depicted the natural sources of proprietary medicines rather than the factories in which they were bottled.").

The Milwaukee Public Museum is also fond of traditional, full-sized dioramas: nature scenes, scenes featuring Indians, scenes depicting far-away cultures. One diorama has fish and other sea creatures hanging by strings from the ceiling, with a watery background, which is something I'd never seen before. I have to like a museum that's hanging onto its dioramas in our time, when digital imaging is state-of-the-art in simulation. But until we get holodecks, even computer-generated 3D imaging isn't quite going to replace the diorama.

Not all dioramas are in museums. Such as this odd contest I'd never heard of before: the Pioneer Press Marshmallow Peeps Diorama and Video Contest.

Evening at the Art Institute

I didn't want to over-program our visit to the Art Institute of Chicago last week, so some of the time I let Ann decide what we were going to look at. Sometimes she surprised me. In the lower level is an exhibit area always given over photography, and she wanted to see that.

My reaction was, really? You want to look at these pictures? She did. The gallery sported a kind of photos that I like: Depression-era B&W. Prominently on display were images by Margaret Bourke-White, including a good many shots of factories. One shot immediately caught my eye -- Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936. I recognized it as the picture used for the first cover of Life magazine. Another image of hers looked familiar, but maybe that was because it resembled a still from Metropolis, even though it was not. The image depicted three enormous gears of a stamping press at a Chrysler plant in the mid-30s, and one worker off in the corner, dwarfed by the machinery.

Elsewhere, Ann was intrigued by displays of East Indian artifacts. For my part, I didn't know that 18th-century India produced such aesthetic daggers (katar), which tended to be of steel and gold in the case of the Art Institute's examples, one of which featured a tiger feasting on an ungulate of some kind. Not quite as compelling as some of the southeast Asian kris collections I've seen, but well worth their place in the museum.

I did direct her attention to a few places, such as Chagall's "America Windows," which I was glad to see has been re-installed toward the east end of the museum. We spent some time sitting on one of the benches facing the windows, taking a longish look. The windows seem to be an international favorite, since I overheard other groups of people on the benches having conversations in French and German. I asked Ann what she saw, and she said a sun, a moon, a hand holding a wand, a man blowing a "flute-whistle-telescope," a city, a ghost lady flying, the liberty [Statue of Liberty], a bird flying in the sky, candles, and a turtle jumping. If we'd spent more time at it, I'm sure she could have come up with more, since the texture of the work is that rich.

I wanted to see the new(ish) Modern Wing, which I hadn't visited before. Mostly this meant wandering along its vaulting atrium rather than inspecting its galleries, since by that time both of us were getting tired. Being a free-admission Thursday evening, the place was swarming with museum-goers (note to the AI: $18 is steep admission for adults, though kids under 14 free almost makes up for it). The Modern Wing is a Renzo Piano design, and much complimentary prose has been written about it. Maybe I wasn't in the mood for it, because I kept thinking that I was in an airport. Just add some gate signs in the atrium, open a few airport restaurants and give the museum-goers some carry-on luggage, and the place would be a terrific replica of a well-designed airport terminal.

Back in the older part of the museum, just before we left, we took note of an installation called "Public Notice 3," by an artist named Jitish Kallat. It's notable because Kallat installed LED text in five colors on each of the risers of the museum's grand staircase.

Later, I looked up the basis of the text, which was a speech by Swami Vivekananda at the First World Parliament of Religions, which was held at the Art Institute concurrently with the Columbian Exposition of 1893. "Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful Earth," he said, among other things. "They have filled the Earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now... I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honor of this convention may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen."

Item From the Past: The Lizzadro Museum of Lapidary Art

November 16, 2002.

Today we went to Elmhurst [Illinois], which is very close to Westmont, too close for us to visit much. Mainly we wanted to see the Lizzadro Museum of Lapidary Art, which we've heard about for some years (at least I have) but never have been to. It’s a small museum, one room on each of its two floors, just about the right size for seeing most of the objects, namely a lot of Chinese jade, plus other carved stones and some precious-metal sculptures.

The Lizzadro is home to some truly remarkable carvings, some of which must have taken years to create. Mr. Lizzadro seems to have collected them in the Orient in the early 20th century, back when China was open and foreigners got while the getting was good. One ten-panel screen, adorned with all sorts of stones -- jade, amethyst, agate, coral, amber, turquoise and more -- stood beside one wall. Made for an 18th-century Chinese emperor, it apparently it left China in 1939 for the world's fair in San Francisco, the Golden Gate International Exposition, but never returned.

A dodgy time in China, for sure. Somehow Lizzadro acquired it. Probably the only reason that the current Chinese government hasn’t made a big beef about getting it back is the obscurity of the Lizzadro Museum. How many Chinese apparatchiks make it to Elmhurst?

Lincoln's Clutter

Writing in Slate, which I linked to yesterday, Andrew Ferguson recalled talking to Bob Rogers, head of BRC Imagination Arts, the firm that designed the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield, about one of the exhibits in the pre-presidential wing of the museum. One that I liked, in fact. Reading this, I like it even more.

"The museum is heavily weighted toward depictions of Lincoln's family -- on the assumption that this will be appealing to families of tourists," Ferguson asserted. "That's why they devoted an exhibit room to the Lincoln boys raising hell in their father's law office.

" 'We got the scene from [Lincoln's biographer and law partner William] Herndon, and we're true to his account — up to a point,' Bob said. 'What Herndon really says is, when he walked in the office once, he caught one of the boys pissing on the hot stove in the middle of the room. So I asked the people in Springfield, "Hey, can we do this? It's true to history!" I begged 'em. I said, "We can do it tastefully. We'll have the kid's back to the visitor, we get recirculating water going so you see the piss spraying out, we use colored water, we get a fogger so we see the steam rising from the hot stove, you hear the sssssss, we get an aromascape so you can smell it." Jesus! How great would that be!' "

As you might think, the museum did not depict one of the Lincoln boys pissing on a hot stove, as funny and contrary to our notions of the 19th century as that might have been. Or how universal to it is for boys, for that matter. I have vague recollections of my mother saying that certain lads made the radiator hiss when my family lived in a place that had them in the early 1960s. Anyway, the decision not to portray that little-known moment in Lincoln history is probably a wise one, since people tend to fixate on things like that to the exclusion of everything else: "Guess what we saw at the Lincoln Museum!"

Instead, the boys are in the office, arranged as if one were about to throw something at the other, who was swinging a broom in his hands. One of them, a small Tad Lincoln I think, is standing on a large table. Their father is lying on a nearby couch, reading a newspaper and ignoring their shenanigans.

But I didn't like it so much because of the boys. They could have been elsewhere. What I liked was the extreme clutter of the Lincoln-Herndon law office, as depicted by the museum. Papers, some loose and some tied in bundles, are everywhere -- on the table, on the floor, jammed into a desk, stuffed in the pockets of Lincoln's coat. Books and newspapers are piled here and there, and scattered around are quill pens and ink wells and other mid-19th-century office equipment.

I believed it instantly, more than the bland depiction of things at the Lincoln-Herndon Law Offices State Historic Site, which I visited in 1997. There's too much tidiness there (see this good collection of pictures). Lincoln had better things to do than spend his time organizing things. Namely, read. On the couch. Herndon said in his biography: "When he reached the office, about nine o'clock in the morning, the first thing he did was to pick up a newspaper, spread himself out on an old sofa, one leg on a chair, and read aloud, much to my discomfort. Singularly enough Lincoln never read any other way but aloud."

The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum

Fall returned today to northern Illinois after a string of summer-like days, including all weekend during our visit to Springfield and environs. In fact it nearly touched 90° F. each day, making it like a summer trip. So ducking into the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum in downtown Springfield on Saturday turned out to be a good way to avoid the heat.

The museum has both attracted the ire of some Lincoln scholars and others for spiking an educational venue with entertainment, while simultaneously attracting an enormous number of visitors -- reportedly more than 2 million since it opened in 2005. Someone's coming to town to see it; the Springfield MSA has a population of a little over 200,000. While Lincoln scholars are a house divided on the subject of the museum, tourists have voted with their admission-paying feet.

Much has been written about the place. A lot of interesting commentary, in fact, far above my poor power to add or detract. The museum web site itself has a lengthy list of articles, and there are these two (July 4, 2007 and July 5, 2007) by Andrew Ferguson in Slate. Roadside America, as usual, has an interesting description.

I can only speak as a middle-aged presidential history enthusiast when I say that I thought the place was... not bad. Pretty good, in fact. The subject of Lincoln is a deep well, and even the most text-skinny Lincoln museum ought to be able to teach me something, which it did, and show me some things I'd never seen before, which it also did. But the museum isn't really for me. I'm fine with a more traditional museum approach, because if I have time I'll read some text and linger over objects. Sometimes the noisy razzmatazz at this museum drove me away from an exhibit.

Still, there was much to like. The decision to use life-sized figures throughout the museum probably sticks in the craw of academics more than anything else, but the figures get your attention in a way other items do not. Sometimes they were arrayed in remarkably effective ways, especially in a re-creation of the 1862 Cabinet meeting during which President Lincoln sprung the Emancipation Proclamation on the other members ("By the way, gentlemen...") and the presidential box and its occupants at Ford's Theatre on that infamous night in 1865.

A short video called "The Civil War in Four Minutes" (One Second = One Week) was hypnotic as it depicted the ebb and flow of Union- vs. Confederate-controlled territory on an electronic map, punctuated by pops of light and sound to mark major battles, with a counter for the dead on each side spinning ever higher as the casualties mounted.

In some ways, the museum drew inspiration more from an old-fashioned vernacular approach to historical presentation than a (post)modern academic one, to put it in a way that an academic might. I thought of that standing in front of a large, semicircular painting depicting Gettysburg. At the left was a scene from the battle, Pickett's men reaching the Union lines just before they had to retreat. In the center was the burial of the dead, and on the right was Lincoln speaking to the crowd at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863.

Not the most skillful painting I've ever seen, but it evokes the place and time. I imagine that this kind of panoramic painting used to be fairly common, at least in pre-movie days. Maybe some would travel around with a circus or other show in the 1890s, say. "Step right up, ladies and gentlemen! See a world-famous re-creation of the immortal Battle of Gettysburg!"

Next came a series of smaller paintings, done in a near-photorealistic style, depicting events in late 1864 and early 1865: Lincoln's re-election; the passage of the 13th Amendment by Congress; Lincoln's second inauguration; Lincoln's astonishing visit to Richmond on April 4; Lincoln asking the band to play "Dixie"; the surrender of Lee at Appomattox; and Lincoln's last speech, made from a White House window on April 11. These evoke the rush of events, but also inspire dread. A sign that says "Ford's Theatre" points the way to the next room.

A room called Treasures featured a traditional display of objects with descriptive text -- and it was the only room of its kind in the museum. I liked it. Among other things, there was an effigy Lincoln doll from the election of 1860 that somehow survived being burned. I like to imagine that a little girl, not caring about politics, took a fancy to the thing and hid it. There was also a campaign biography of Lincoln, a drawing of the Wigwam (the temporary structure in Chicago in which the Republicans nominated Lincoln), a life mask of the president, and one of his stove-pipe hats. He wore a size seven and one-eighths.

The museum could have used a little more of this kind of display. Also, I'd like to have seen an entire third wing to complement the two main wings that deal with Lincoln before he was president and Lincoln while he was president, respectively. I want to see displays about Lincoln after he was president -- his apotheosis, to use a word that the museum probably would not use.

Such a wing might include montage of many the monuments and places named after him. Or a hundred depictions of him in art. Or a wall of books, each about Lincoln, because there are that many. Or continuous clips from movies and TV, including both the good and the ridiculous (remember his appearance in the original Star Trek? He died by spear that time). Or Lincoln used for commercial purposes. Or the way foreigners use Lincoln, from his statue in Parliament Square in London to Lincoln pachinko parlor paintings in Japan. (I swore I saw that; it's entirely plausible; but maybe I was dreaming.) Better yet, some of all of these.

Noisemaking at the Witte

I went to San Antonio's Witte Museum just last year, but that was without kids. This year I took Lilly and Ann for a slightly different experience, and not only because the two exhibits I remember from last year (SA parks, wild west shows) had been replaced by other exhibits. With kids, you spend time at the H-E-B Science Treehouse, actually a multistory complex out behind the main building that towers over the San Antonio River. It also offers some good views of the river and Brackenridge Park beyond.

"The H-E-B Science Treehouse offers four levels of fun and experimentation with Energy, Air Power, Simple Machines, Eco-Science, Weather, and Sound Waves," gushes the Witte web site. "Try out the hands-on exhibits and see how science is used in the 'real world.' Small World Science offers a chance for young children (with adults) to explore science too!"

If you've ever been to a children's museum, you've seen places like this. Ann had a good time with it -- she's in the target demographic exactly -- but even Lilly, who's crossing out of childhood, enjoyed some of it. Who doesn't like making balls float on a current of air, after all?

Up on the roof of the complex is an opportunity to make a lot of noise by beating hanging metal objects with sticks. Steel, iron, aluminum: you could really get a fearful racket going. Lilly and Ann had their turns on it, of course, but pretty soon I decided that the opportunity wasn't just for kids.

I was right.