Now and then I try my hand writing poetry. The results are inevitably disastrous. Happily, the worst poetry in the universe is not yet mine. That honor belongs to Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex. Any of you who know Douglas Adams will also know of whom I speak.

Does anyone even read poetry these days? As a subscriber to Poetry, 101-year-old journal founded by Harriet Monroe, I enjoy each issue, yet still find it difficult to identify what makes a poem good. Whatever you do, don’t read Understanding Poetry by J. Evans Pritchard, PhD.:

To fully understand poetry, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme, and figures of speech. Then ask two questions: One, how artfully has the objective of the poem been rendered, and two, how important is that objective. Question one rates the poem’s perfection, question two rates its importance. And once these questions have been answered, determining a poem’s greatness becomes a relatively simple matter.

If the poem’s score for perfection is plotted along the horizontal of a graph, and its importance is plotted on the vertical, then calculating the total area of the poem yields the measure of its greatness.

So says a character in “Dead Poets Society”. In fact, you can’t read it: the book, its author and the analytical tool are themselves works of fiction.

The problem du jour is simply this: I need a poem about “home”, surely one of the most abused words in the English—and probably most others. But I need that poem, one that explores that breadth of meaning in bitter-sweetness. Find one for me please—preferably one that is free of copyright restriction.

In artistic terms, I’m hoping for something more gemütlichkeit than “Thomas Kinkade”.

The Northwest Iowa Traction Company formed as an interurban railway to connect Fort Dodge with Agincourt, Storm Lake and some western terminus like Sioux City or Council Bluffs. Construction began in 1909 and reached beyond Agincourt before financial problems halted any further progress. Part of the challenge for this project is finding source material that “confirms” what appears in the story line—no easy job. So we imitate the style of an actual history of interurban railways in the U.S. and fabricate an entry in similar style for NITC.

The classic from 1960 on this subject—The Electric Interurban Railways in America by George W. Hilton and John F. Due—has this to say about the NITC:

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, 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 Chatauqua Grounds northwest of the city; another, the resort communities at lakes Sturm and 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 during the Depression and improved somewhat through 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.

Russell Olson’s The Electric Railways of Minnesota (1976) is also a good source for track diagrams [which I’ll post here as soon as I draught one].

The folks in the photo above don’t look any too happy, do they.

Well, not entirely nothing.

I believe that art, religion and most other institutions our kind have created are performing their best service when—never better put than by my fellow Chicagoan Finley Peter Dunne—they “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

With that thought foremost in mind, I would gladly attend and pay attention to a religious service at Christ College, Cambridge, when next I find myself in the U.K. Why? Because the rector there is likely to be Progressive (i.e., not Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson). I am not a Christian, nor am I a card-carrying member of any religious persuasion, so save your energy by not trying to “save” me. I’ll get by. But I must also add that I find great Truths in religion, as well as the greatest pile of crap passing for wisdom ever conceived by the mind of man or woman (because that’s where it came from).

Why Christ Chapel, Cambridge, you ask? Because, when the sermon tended toward the arid (which I’m hard-pressed to imagine it would) I could look at the altarpiece by artist Tom de Freston. And in doing so, I would be both comforted and afflicted. And I would be a better person for the encounter.

[Used here without permission from the artist’s website]

Anson Tennant is more like me than I care to admit. He and I are both great fans of Chicago architect Louis Sullivan. And despite that admiration, neither of us is a sufficient draughtsman to create ornament in Louie’s style, this being one of the rare places where “inimitable” really applies. Anson has one advantage that I don’t: He not only met Sullivan, but may have worked in Sullivan’s Auditorium Tower studio for a few months in 1912. I’m jealous. He also became an architect, while I did not.

There is another important parallel between us: To achieve his vision of Sullivan-inspired ornament for the 1914-1915 pubic library design, young Tennant (he was twenty-five at the time of the competition) needed a collaborator. With luck he knew a young blacksmith only four or five years his senior—Anton Kraus, Jr., a.k.a. Tony Kraus, brother of Klaus and son of Anton Sr. The Kraus family of four had emigrated from Thuringia in 1887 and opened a smithy on the city’s west side just beyond its limits at the foot of Louisa Street. That imagined creative collaboration meant little without an actual counterpart here and now.

Enter Christopher Meyer, third-year student in architecture. Since Chris and I spoke early this semester and I discovered his talent at the forge (being a fourth-generation blacksmith), he’s been at work when time permitted on his part of our own artistic collaboration. And I have to admit it was a challenge to maintain some distance and a hands-off attitude while he worked. With luck (I depend on that a lot), his forge is on the family farm about fifty miles from Fargo—lucky for him, ’cause you know what a noodge I can be. The wreath is complete now and nicely patinated. We’ve found some storage space (in Milton’s garage) so it may be delivered this weekend. It’s exciting to think of it being here and simply waiting completion of the column it will adorn.

This is obscure and came as a great surprise when we (my friend Crazy Richard and I) drove past it ten or twelve years ago. Some clues:

• It’s in the U.S.;
• It was built in the 1920s (late, I think);
• The architect was unknown to me at the time, but…
• The architect who influenced this is a household word.
• And there are bonus points for a secondary influence associated with the first.

Any enlightened speculation?

Not every building in Agincourt is “old”, nor would I wish it to be so. And while I myself am old and have the perspective of multiple years, I am also facing forward, however reluctantly these days, to what lies ahead. “The past is prologue,” as they say.

Agincourt’s original fire station, or rather its most recent facility, was part of the 1938 city hall (contributed to the 2007 exhibit by Prof Steve Martens). As the city grew northward—the river and creek inhibiting growth to the south and west—Fire Station #2 would have probably been sited north of Highway #7 along the extension of Broad Street. By the 1950s #7 had already responded to suburbanization with its increasing commercial and other developments: a drive-in movie, fast food (a la Tastee Freeze and A&W), car and implement dealerships, a motel, etc. Given my age, imagining The Strip should be child’s play, but it hasn’t been; it’s the issue of forests and those pesky trees. The hospital probably relocated there for easier access to major roads, and so did the high school in the 1960s for similar reasons. Some of these building types responded to federal initiatives, like the Hill-Burton Act, others to local whim. I have a scheme for addressing these issues, but it involves luring others into the vortex. Be forewarned.

In the meantime, a little cleansing seems in order. So I’m working on a smaller southside fire station, a “now” project for change of pace. The site isn’t precise yet; I wonder, for example, which side of the railway tracks is better, given the infrequency of trains these days. As these work themselves out, Howard has a few words on the history of fire fighting in Agincourt, the dark side of the light.

Agincourt after dark…

A COLUMN OF LOCAL INTEREST AND INTROSPECTION

by Howard A. Tabor

Blessed Curse

When commissioned to write corporate history, what’s an author to do. Sugar beets? Taconite pellets? Motel 6? Hardly the stuff of Nobel laureates. But food must be put on the table; utility bills paid. No one has yet asked for those services, so until then I’ll just wonder. In the meantime…

Firefighting is a vital service. It was required in Agincourt from the beginning, testified in early issues of The Plantagenet, which record preservation of both property and lives.

For twenty years, firefighting was voluntary. Hose or Hook-and-Ladder companies depended on subscribers, and we’ve seen the consequences of such a system: A house fifty yards outside a municipal boundary recently burned as firefighters watched, because the homeowner had not paid a required annual fee; literally, “the check was in the mail” but until it was cashed, sorry. Garry Wills writes about Abraham Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg, where a pivotal textual moment shifts from the plural to the singular; from collective “us” as several States to unified “us” as a Nation. Agincourt reached that point about 1880 when city government assumed firefighting as a municipal service underwritten by taxation. Sorry, Libertarians. The fire department was municipally funded, while the firemen (also sorry, ladies) were still volunteers. How our firefighters today (both men and women) became trained paid professionals and more recently cross-trained as law enforcement is a story yet to be written—happily, by me, and the topic is a lot more fun and less mercenary than Motel 6.

Casting my nets for input, I’ve spent a few afternoons at the History Center awash in news clippings, photographs and diaries. But I also posted some queries on the internet and twitter-verse (though that one still creeps me out) and been the recipient of many replies—one of them troubling.

Prometheus

Since Prometheus stole fire from the gods, it has been a cursed blessing. Without its warmth, for example, brewers and distillers would be unknown professions; but unchecked, it has also burned those breweries and distilleries to the ground. Not all fires, however, are accidental.

Last week the mail brought invitations of several sorts: new magazines, medicare supplementary insurance, hearing aids, foreign travel with my alma mater. It also included a note postmarked Sioux City and the brief message “Unexplained Agincourt fires? I can help.” I was invited for coffee on Sunday in a back booth of Perkin’s Restaurant in Council Bluffs. The sleuth that I pretend to be uttered a cautiously enthusiastic “yes.”

“Something ventured, something gained” isn’t the flip side of a familiar coin. It’s a different coin altogether.

In today’s economy, it seems to me, there’s a whole lot of gain without any venture whatsoever. And I don’t mean venture capital.  Contrarily, I also know from personal experience that (ad)ventures on my part—stepping outside my comfort zone, into unfamiliar and even uncharted territory—have often made significant gains, though not always in the direction that I might have hoped. A couple “case studies” come to mind: reaching out to a renowned composer, for example, to create “Agincourt Fanfare” for the 2007 exhibit, or a casual conversation with a third-year architecture student about my desperate quest for a blacksmith. Each venture, each extension of my metaphorical hand, has had a happy consequence.

That’s even been the case with the New Yorker art critic, for example, whose father was a North Dakota native and recipient of an honorary NDSU degree. He didn’t say “no”; he said nothing. If he had responded with comments (what a waste of time it had been, reading my opening gambit; the ludicrousness of the project or his disdain for North Dakota) I’d have learned something. Feedback isn’t always what we’d like to hear, but it’s feedback nonetheless and helps our learning curve. And, yes, at sixty-eight I still have one.

So yesterday I reached out again, to Dr Elena Ruehr, professor music at MIT. [Who knew they made joyful noise at MIT! Shows my ignorance.] Professor Ruehr’s name may not be a household reference in your neighborhood. I learned of her through an obtuse connection with the movie “Cloud Atlas” because she has written a cello concerto with the same name. Listening to several of her recordings, I became convinced she would be a good fit with Agincourt. Time will tell.

“Be careful what you ask for. You just might get it.” I’ll deal with that when the time comes. But whatever the outcome, I will have both gained and learned something.