It’s been busy across the alley from our house: two older homes and a one-car garage have just been demolished. I miss one of them already–just because I was used to seeing it from the kitchen window–but the other couldn’t disappear soon enough. We knew it as “the crack house”, not because actual drug manufacture was going on, but because more domestic disputes than I can count spilled from its side door into the alley. And most of those seem to have been driven by altered consciousness of one sort or another. 

I’ve lived in this neighborhood since about 1981–long before living downtown was trendy; in fact you couldn’t give property away down here in the 80s. So my neighbors were enthusiastic when I moved in and upped the owner-occupant ratio. The pattern hereabouts had been absentee landlords and rental occupancy, so I was bucking that trend. Not being one to ring doorbells and introduce myself, I met Marcella Depute and Minnie Renquist as many neighbors do, the old fashioned way: we became garbage can buddies on Tuesdays, commiserating about traffic, power lines and what was then a general disinterest in the welfare of inner city single-family homes like ours. I attended a public presentation once where someone from the City Planning office spoke of our neighborhood as “Oh, those are just some sub-standard houses we want to get rid of.” Happily, there’s been a change in staff since then.

Minnie and Marcella must have been Catholics, because I often ran into them at the former Hardee’s restaurant across from St Mary’s Cathedral, part of an after-Mass coffee klatch. Minnie’s house is still standing–temporarily–but Marcella’s has become splinters, as has her garage. The Crack House followed suit after the weekend. The Claw parked for a day or two, until the dust had settled, and then the foundations disappeared. As of Thursday, several new loads of black dirt have topped both lots. I wonder what will replace them, come spring.

FOOTNOTES

I mention these neighborhood changes so that I can make a simple observation: my landscape (and yours I suspect, as well) is peppered associations. I can’t walk from here to there without memories bobbing to the surface. And most of those memories are not the stuff of Steven Spielberg movies. Marcella was a fine human being who did me no harm and was, no doubt, loved by her family and friends (I count myself only an acquaintance). But she never swam the English Channel or disappeared while flying across the Pacific or hid Jewish children in her attic during WWII. Yet each day that I brewed a pot of coffee and looked out my kitchen window, Marcella’s name invariably came to mind.

Last week I met with my friend AnneMarie Fitz. She works at Touchmark, a senior residence center in South Fargo. We’re strategizing an oral history project with her residents, asking them to reminisce and consider the narrative of their lives as it relates to that elusive “sense of place” we all desire. Just now, AnneMarie and I are exploring how to open those doors with them and get the stories flowing. You might be wondering what the hell this has to do with Agincourt.

Earlier in this blog, Howard wrote about a local history project¹ sponsored by Toni Benedetti, CEO at Kraus Foundry (still known to most of us as Kraus Bridge & Iron). KB&I are celebrating their 125th anniversary and working with history students at the college to do a similar oral history project. Antonia’s idea (she’s the great-granddaughter of company founder Anton Kraus and, in a sense, bears his name) is to summarize these stories that link people and place and make them a semi-permanent part of the environment as manhole covers–footnotes. The city will be peppered with “footnotes”, making the stories of our lives place-specific.

When AnneMarie and I have gathered similar stories and edited them, we hope to turn art students loose on their interpretation. We won’t ask the students to cast 36″-wide disks of iron. Instead, we’ll shoot for 8″ maquettes. But imagine as part of the next Agincourt Exhibit (in the fall of 2013 at the Plains Art Museum) a display of a dozen or more collaborations. It will be interesting to invite the Touchmark residents, to have them meet their artistic interpreters and watch their reaction to being a part of the show.

¹ This link was inoperative for several years. The blog had originally been on Posterous and I’d forgotten to change the link when we migrated to Word Press. It’s fixed now.

Robert Preston’s portrayal of Harold Hill in “Music Man” didn’t do the image of traveling salesmen any favors. But by the movie’s release in 1962, there weren’t all that many of them plying the back roads of America.

At the turn of the last century, traveling salesmen (there were only a handful of women in the business) might better and more appropriately have been called “commercial travelers”. Whether hawking personal grooming and household tools (the “Fuller Brush Man”), spices (the “Watkins Man”), home remedies, insurance, encyclopedias, or brass instruments for the high school band, men like Harold Hill–well, not actually like Harold Hill, because he was a shyster–were a common sight in small-town business life.

Arriving by train (or interurban, in Agincourt’s case, after 1909), they had already annouced their arrival by mail to local businesses. What the weary commercial traveler required was an inexpensive bed and a room to lay out their sample cases, where retailers would inspect the goods and place an order. In Hill’s case, that order would never be fulfilled, which is one reason the United Commercial Travelers organized at Columbus, Ohio in 1888. The UCT badge was an assurance of business integrity, and the organization also provided its members with affordable insurance and a widows and orphans fund to compensate families before the social safety net of the Roosevelt years.

Even before they were identified as a “UCT Hotel”, some hostelries had already served as the most likely base of operations for this fraternity of commerce. And throughout the 90s, new hotels were purpose-built to serve this growing clientele. So when the Northwest Iowa Traction Co. incorporated in 1909, it was very likely that a UCT-oriented facility would be part of their package.

I don’t know what may have been on the South Broad Street lots the company acquired for their headquarters. That’s the interesting thing about inventing a community; you can always go back and “fix” that. But what I did envision was a multi-purpose facility to balance the risk of their investment: 1) a ticket office and waiting room for the NITC trains and the local trolley system that spun off from it; 2) a cafe (the “Bon-Ton”) to capitalize on the departing passenger or the people waiting for their arrival; 3) rental shops on valuable street frontage; and 4) a UCT hotel.

Set circa 1910, the design was likely to be influenced by recent innovations in building construction–steel or iron frames clad with brick or terracotta–and a progressive style drawn from both historical precedent and the more recent Arts & Crafts imagery of the Edwardian Age. These are those pesky elevations I’ve mentioned before. But organizationally, the building took shape in my mind in about a half hour watching CSI re-runs one night. I hope you might approve my solution, at least to this point.

By the way, on the plans, north is to the right.

Plans are effectively patterns, and my brain is wired to detect and draw from those patterns that surround me. So finding prototypes of early 20th century inter-urban depots was no sweat. And synthesizing what I found and adapting it for a corner site in Agincourt a block south of The Square was relatively quick.

Imagining the NITC (Northwest Iowa Traction Co.) happened very naturally, since the pattern of similar formations has been beautifully set out in George Hilton and John Due’s exemplary treatment The Electric Interurban Railways in America. If you look on page 364 of their book (in my alternate universe, that is) you’ll find the following:

NORTHWEST IOWA TRACTION COMPANY

When the Milwaukee Road threatened reduction of passenger service on it’s Agincourt branch in late 1908, the Northwest Iowa Traction Co. quickly incorporated and projected an ambitious route from Fort Dodge to Sioux City, a distance of 131 miles that would link the city with the largest regional rail hubs. Building westward from Fort Dodge (where the Ft Dodge, Des Moines & Southern had established a terminus in 1906¹), the line reached Agincourt by fall and Storm Lake the following spring. Hourly service began in November 1909. When right-of-way beyond Cherokee proved too costly, the extension to Sioux City never materialized.

A syndicate of Agincourt investors held more than fifty percent of company stock, and several of its board also served as directors of the local electric utility, the line’s major power source. NITC operated on city streets in Agincourt to reach the station-headquarters at Broad Street and First Avenue South (later Louisa Avenue). The company also operated a commercial hotel and restaurant adjacent to the station. A short branch seasonally served the Fennimore County Fair and Chautauqua Grounds northwest of the city; another, the resort communities at lakes Sturm und Drang.

Connection with the Fort Dodge, Des Moines & Southern Railway at Fort Dodge provided transfer service to the capital and other points in central Iowa, including the Iowa State College at Ames. NITC sometimes used combination cars to carry passengers and freight, a profitable sideline during the 1920s. Passenger traffic stabilized through the Depression and improved somewhat during World War II. Operations ceased in 1948; the seventy-six-mile right-of-way was abandoned and the rolling stock sold to the Fort Dodge, Des Moines & Southern, which itself survived only six more years.

Scattered around these preliminary drawings for the depot’s first and second floors, there are several news clippings from The Plantagenet that document the building’s emergence from April 1909 until March of the following year. Who said my high school journalism class wouldn’t pay off!

But plans are easy. It’s elevations that freak me out.

¹ See: Ames History

The arts of medicine in Agincourt and vicinity are at least partially delineated in the lives of early practitioners like Doc Fahnstock (our answer to Doc Adams from “Gunsmoke”) and Sissy Beddowes, the Sac and Fox medicine woman whose knowledge of herbs and roots got her a gig at the College of Homeopathy in Chicago.The larger picture of orthodox medicine, however, is yet to be told. For me, the obvious beginning is to imagine a building.

Our earliest hospital was called “Luke, the Physician.” [Strange name for a hospital, but you should also know that I was born in a suburban Chicago facility named The Little Company of Mary. So back off.] Luke’s origins are murky at present. But the project for a Depression era replacement occurred when Luke moved beyond the original townsite to Broad Street north of Highway 7. The architecture of the Great Depression intrigues me, so this is as good a time as any to engage the odd criteria for solving architectural problems circa 1936.

Designing the Medical Arts Building will put me in the era of Art Deco and the Moderne, neither of which I understand in practice. Yes, I can recognize one when I see it, but making one is another story. Any suggestions?

Insofar as programme is concerned, I’ll have to understand the number of medical practitioners in a town of Agincourt’s size in the 1930s and how broadly based they might have been. Would there have been a homeopath in their numbers? Would dentists have been welcome tenants? And just how large was Agincourt’s service area? The Fahnstock clan was still around (Howard had a brush with Death when Forrest Fahnstock caused a car wreck five or so years ago), though I’ll bet the second and third generations of that family have frittered away their social capital and become little more than eccentrics and hangers on. There’s certainly a story there but not the one I want to tell at present.

Incidentally, I hope you enjoy the two-page spread from my sketchbook (volume 4).

For one hour each day in fifth grade I answered to the name of Roy.

Miss Veronica Piper [1895–1967] taught mathematics at John Walsh Elementary School in Summit, Illinois, one of three schools where I was bussed long before bussing became a dirty word. Miss Piper was also just one of the many unmarried teachers in the pubilc school system of the 50s and 60s. A gaunt woman who might have been sculpted by Alberto Giacometti, Miss Piper had taught my father, so for an hour each day I became Roy Ramsey her pupil of nearly thirty years previous. I’ve wanted for some time to weave her into the Agincourt story, since Miss Piper had played a pivotal role in my own education. Look for her—or someone very like her or someone even you might have known—in one of Howard’s brief series “Ghosts of Christmas Past.”

It was eighth grade before I encountered a male teacher and prior to that time only a handful of the women had been married. The vast majority were what I call “secular nuns”—women forced to choose between marriage or career. They might have become teachers or nurses or secretaries or salesgirls—or wives and mothers; the latter precluded and of the former. Those of Veronica’s generation strode in long black dresses and the sensible shoes worn by nuns. Giacometti sketched her a hundred times without setting foot in America.

Mathematics was so much more than a “subject” in Miss Piper’s classroom; it was a world view. Under her tutelage, I came to know the discipline of numbers; their impartial, unprejudiced behaviour, so unlike the teenager I might have become.

Formulae (pardon the proper Latin plural) flowed from the tip of her chalk. Solutions solicited; hands raised; names called—mine, of course, was Roy—and answers acknowledged, without shame and embarrassment, which were unwelcome in her classroom. One can nurture beyond the bounds of motherhood. Now, these forty-five years later, I credit Miss Piper with anything approximating mental discipline in my problem-solving repertoire. 

We may not be numbers. Patrick McGoohan’s character in “The Prisoner” passionately resisted being labeled as “Number Three.” But there are moments when I envy the order of numbers; the way they behave. Numbers, shapes, patterns of all sorts are the stuff of my life. Seeing them—everywhere—has been one of my greatest gifts. Yes, those abilities were in place long before I sat in her classroom, but one of the greatest teachers in my experience helped bring them to the fore.

Depressives like me tend toward early awakening; fitfull sleep in bouts of an hour or so, interrupted with SuDoKu, at least a half dozen each night. And the successful completion of any, especially those labeled “fiendish,” brings Veronica Piper to mind. I can only hope the Great Clockmaker of the Universe has put her to keeping it in good working order.

The recent campaign tells me that we’re weary of war.  

Lots of sabre rattling was heard from the Right. So I hope we can read the presidential margin as a vote against inviting conflict with other nations—excepting, of course, those countries with the technical ability to create nuclear weapons and the childlike naïvete to think they can resist the temptation to use them. There is a difference betwixt a readiness for war and the wanton craving to start one. 

As our troops come home from Afghanistan and other theaters, I wonder how they will be welcomed home. Better, I hope than the veterans of Vietnam who suffer yet from the long-term consequences the follow from killing. Agincourt will, I know, welcome home her sons and daughters with open arms and thankful hearts. And will also have, in the meantime, cared for their families at home during their sacrifice. Such was not always the case, however. 

The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (P.L. 78-346, 58 Stat. 284m) helped the “greatest generation” rejoin the post-war peacetime economy and adjust to the world that they, in effect, had made. All service men and women since have enjoyed those benefits. (Or at least they should have. In the present recession, I wonder how secure those benefits will remain.) But what of earlier generations?

How, I wondered, would Agincourt have acknowledged the personal sacrifices of soldiers and sailors in World War I, the Great War, the war to end war, the war they wrote songs about. Howard has been writing this piece for several years and it is still unfinished. But I can tell you this much: Agincourt’s citizens collectively honored their doughboys (and girls) with a substantial reward.

The Commercial Club took the lead, forming a “Veteran’s Committee” which created a stock company. Shareholders received one point below current interest rates (a comparable sacrifice on the home front) to build housing for returning servicemen. A block in the southeast quadrant, with few existing houses, was purchased and replatted. Twelve lots became twenty-seven, and thirteen duplex homes were constructed in the 1919-1921 building seasons. Veterans were able to purchase these homes at below-market rates. The modest lot sizes were balanced by shared garden space in the center, a place for family activity and a safe haven for children; a place to build community. A small grocery at the corner of Fifth and Alcott served the surrounding neighborhood and also became a trolley stop for the NITC cars.

Howard has been trying to interview families who settled there, especially children who had grown to maturity in such a nurturing environment. Perhaps I can nudge him to get the piece written at last. 

Any Methodists in the room will know the Epworth League, the youth component among followers of John and Charles Wesley. Somewhere in every Methodist church building—at least the ones I’ve visited—there is a room used by the League for its meetings, and prominent in that room will be (or, tragically, will have been) a stained glass window showing Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. He kneels in prayer at a boulder, as a brilliant beam of light bears witness to Jesus’ conversation with his Father. Even non-Christians (and Christians who’ve been raised in a cave) will understand the strong message presented here.

Am I wrong to think that each of us has had such moments—not necessarily any direct communcation from the Big Guy, though as an atheist I’m cautious to admit that I’ve had one of those myself. No, I mean other occasions when we feel intimately aware that something is going on around us, something special and, perhaps, even unique, that others in the vicinity seem not to see or understand as intensely as we do.

I remember, for example, exactly where I was (in a shower in my freshman dorm) and what I was doing (waking up after an all-night studio project at the University of Oklahoma) when someone down the hall shouted something muffled. I turned off the water, said “What?” and heard the news of President Kennedy’s assassination.

I remember the evening that Victor Christ-Janer spoke in the lobby of the School of Architecture at OU, opening his remarks with the news that Rev Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated in Memphis.

I remember Neil Armstrong’s walk on the Moon and also the death of Frank Lloyd Wright (I was fourteen). And I remember being told in third grade to add the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, something that seemed curiously wrong to an eight-year-old and which I have never said.

I remember being given by my father one of his pithiest and most pointed lessons: “The world” my father said, “is full of assholes. You should try not to be one of them.” I also remember the phone call telling me he had died. He, by the way, had not been an asshole, while I, on the other hand, cannot make that claim for myself.

I remember having drinks one evening with Cecil Elliott at the old Northern Exposure when conversation turned to degrees and levels of “success” and being given one of the meatiest pieces of wisdom ever bestowed on me or anyone else, I suspect. “Success?” Elliott intoned. “Success is not being recognized as an absolute failure by too many people you’re not married to.” Somewhere in my files, there is a signed and dated cocktail napkin attesting to this event.

In each of these cases, the metaphorical clouds parted, a ray of light shone down around me and I understood that these were moments of witness. And now I can add another moment to those vivid memories: 10:12 p.m. EDT when MSNBC announced that President Obama had been declared the winner of the ugliest electoral campaign in my recollection. I will savor that moment forever.

Howard needs to write something about this ability—this responsibility—to bear witness and what that might mean for Agincourt.