Welcome to Agincourt, Iowa

Some images are just too good to pass by. Such is the image of a very typical single-family house of 1908—or at least the photo carries that date. As an RPPC (real-photo postcard) chances are this is the only print, or, perhaps fewer than a dozen for family and friends. I’ll wager there’s a darkroom in the basement or a shack in the backyard. The explosive nature of photographic chemicals led to more than a few personal tragedies.

This sort of (I’d call it) “Italianate” style house could be found anywhere between the Appalachians and the Rockies, a slight variation on the Prairie Foursquare or “Corn-Belt Box”. “The handwritten “Springer” on the lower left corner could be the street but is more likely the family name. So, I’ve queried the internet for female given names circa during the 1880s, about the time that lady on the front steps was born. Eventually, the Springer family will be properly represented in the Agincourt community but for the time being allow me to introduce Alma (Mrs Carl) Springer.

Oh, and BTW, the card was priced outside my budget, so I hope it finds a safe home.

It seems entirely possible to be both irreligious and spiritual. To have little-to-nothing to do with organized religious activity and, yet, suspect there may be something outside (or inside) the physical world.

There is a curious word in the Old Testament which appears only six time (I’m working from memory), pleroma, which is habitually translated as fullness, as in “the fullness of time.” From another point of view, pleroma has a significantly different meaning: Gnostics understand it as the barrier or boundary between this world and the homecoming we hope to achieve. Gnosticism holds a different, simpler template for us to achieve that homecoming, one which I find hopeful for us all. For the curious, I’ll try to explain my understanding of the task at hand.

In the end which may be closer than I imagine, my current choice of epitaph is this: “Better luck next time.”

A Basket of Puppies

My mom sent me to the FFC Market in Mesopotamia, about eight or nine block from home. I was supposed to pick up a fresh chicken for supper that night but didn’t know that Ms Pirtle’s dog Hester had just birthed four pups a few days before. So I came home with a chicken and a pup.

This foggy image is what the seller ahs posted on eBay, and I’ve not managed to find another.

It immediately caught my eye because its style is reminiscent of work by Chicago architect Lawrence Buck—though I doubt he’d have used those Tuscan columns on the front porch. Still, it is a handsome house which need investigation.

Stumbled on this RPPC this afternoon and was floored.

It’s the Episcopal Church in Webster city, IA. A brief search failed to establish when it was built, though the character of the postcard itself suggests perhaps as late as the 1950s. I want, oh, so desperately, for it to have been much earlier, for its similarity with Agincourt’s Episcopal Church of Saint Joseph the Carpenter.

I have seen two A-frame buildings in eighty years of life, a lot of experience, I believe, as an observer. The first is the Bennati Cabin (probably spelled wrong but in Lake Tahoe) by architect Rudolph Schindler. We’ve all seen A-frames, in builders magazines or Popular Mechanics, and wondered how invention was possible in such a concept. Then, as an undergraduate at the University of Oklahoma in the early ’60s, in Ester McCoy’s book Five California Architects I saw the Bennati Cabin and was convinced it could not be bettered. Until a few years later when Nathaniel Owings’ home on the California Coast appeared in House Beautiful (again, I think) and realized the nature of innovation. So, a few days ago, I happen upon this Episcopal church in Iowa and expanded my appreciation for what may be possible.

See what I mean?

BTW, the building doesn’t appear on the 1915 Sanborn Insurance Map of Webster City.

<more later, soon, I hope>

South Charleston is a village in the Springfield metropolitan area; it has a population of about 1,600. I had never heard of the place until a delightful postcard appeared on eBay showing this delightful small hotel, the Houston Inn. Its “Prairie School” characteristics were unmistakable , so strong that I wondered how it had been overlooked in the exemplary website “The Prairie School Traveler“.

Pork, Pennsylvania native Frank Gieselman founded the Houston Inn in 1911 as what one short news item calls a “fashionable hostelry”. What drew him to South Charleston, Ohio isn’t known but his business model becomes clear in the short social notes of area newspapers: multiple notes during 1912 suggest the inn’s dining room was an objective for autoists from Springfield, Dayton and communities as distant as Cincinnati and Cleveland. Their fried chicken was that good.

Target destinations like the Houston Inn were a frequent phenomenon in the early days of the automobile, when motorists needed an excuse to take a ride in the open countryside. The family outing could have involved a picnic lunch, but larger groups, especially those celebrating an event or intent on impressing friends or visiting relatives used the inn as a destination, where they could enjoy a leisurely meal, a little time for digestion, and then a slow return trip home. I grew up on the southwest edge of Chicago where there was a similar entertainment venue—which in its later stages became an unsavory place of questionable morality.

The Houston Inn’s architect-designer isn’t known, but he or she was clearly aware of the Prairie School idiom, incorporating narrow clapboard siding; broad roof overhangs; bold projections, such at the covered side entry and the rotated oriel second story bay. The restaurant seating capacity or the number of rooms aren’t known, but it is habitually identified as an upscale facility. Advertisements for staff (manager and household) offered $15 per month, plus room and board, during the late ‘teens.

Its life as an hotel were probably limited during the Great Depression. By 1945, the building had been purchased by a grocer; currently it is used as apartments. Apparently upper floors of the building are unused.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

Some time in the early 1970s, I had a long conversation with my dad. That, in itself, was unusual; we didn’t talk very much. But this one was different, though I can’t say why it then took an odd turn.

Roy revealed something that I had never known in all my twenty-five years: that my grandfather had been married twice. That was interesting but not earth shattering. Then Roy told me that she had died in child birth and that he suspected he was that child, which meant that Clara was not his mother. And that she had never been my grandmother, just a stand-in for Nellie Laurine Kemp Ramsey [1889–1912]. If you know me, you know this sort of doubt and uncertainty can’t be tolerated for long. Now, these many years later, I still don’t have the full story.

One source has the Ramsey family living in South Bend, Indiana, plausible but as yet unexplored.

Stay tuned.

“Résumé
Razors pain you,
Rivers are damp,
Acids stain you,
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful,
Nooses give,
Gas smells awful.
You might as well live.”
― Dorothy Parker, Enough Rope

“Killing oneself is, anyway, a misnomer. We don’t kill ourselves. We are simply defeated by the long, hard struggle to stay alive. When somebody dies after a long illness, people are apt to say, with a note of approval, “He fought so hard.” And they are inclined to think, about a suicide, that no fight was involved, that somebody simply gave up. This is quite wrong.”
― Sally Brampton, Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

“Melancholy suicide. —This is connected with a general state of extreme depression and exaggerated sadness, causing the patient no longer to realize sanely the bonds which connect him with people and things about him. Pleasures no longer attract;”
― Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology

“In my view, suicide is not really a wish for life to end.”
“What is it then?”
“It is the only way a powerless person can find to make everybody else look away from his shame. The wish is not to die, but to hide.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Shadow

In the ongoing category of “The Way Things Work,” here is an interesting sequence of images: