2016 / 2017

As a boy of ten or twelve, the world looked pretty good. Ours was an aspiring Lower Middle Class family: dad owned a service station (when gas stations still provided actual service); he got custody when my parents divorced; grandmother was a widow, soon to be diagnosed with breast cancer, which she did survive; I was in the fifth or sixth grade. The Korean Conflict had achieved a cease fire; Ike was our President. We read the American newspaper, one of four Chicago dailies and solidly Republican.

A postage stamp was 3¢. A loaf of bread, about 20¢. I shopped for my grandmother and could barely carry a $10 bag of groceries — I was small and the bags were big. I don’t recall who my Fourth Grade teachers were, but I have vivid memories of Fifth Grade math class with Miss Veronica Piper, who much earlier in her career had taught my father, so for an hour each day I answered to the name Roy. I didn’t know it at the time but Miss Piper was to me what Moses Woolson* was to Louis Sullivan.

All of this was sixty years ago when the world — or at least my sheltered portion of it — was a far, far simpler place, when New Year’s Eve didn’t amount to much [remember, I couldn’t drink]. An old guy in a white robe and carrying a scythe passed the hourglass of Time to a kid in a diaper; the imagery of my elders didn’t always make a lot of sense. Oh, and there were fireworks we sometime went to see at a disused drive-in theater.

I liked Ike. He was an elderly man, round-faced and with a soft reassuring voice. His wife Mamie looked like most of the ladies at the Congregational church in Argo, which I attended with our neighbors the Millers — my father being a vehement agnostic. By today’s standards, Ike would have been a Democrat, I suspect. He certainly wouldn’t be his party’s standard-bearer any more than Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan could be. Because the Party Platform in 1956 was downright liberal, supporting stuff like:

1. Provide federal assistance to low-income communities;

2. Protect Social Security;

3. Provide asylum for refugees;

4. Extend minimum wage;

5. Improve unemployment benefit system so it covers more people;

6. Strengthen labor laws so workers can more easily join a union;

7. Assure equal pay for equal work regardless of sex.

Sign me the fuck up!

New Year’s Eve this year will find us comfortably at home, probably sharing some nachos and shrimp cocktail (courtesy of Crazy Richard) and getting to bed early. Hoards of revelers; excessive amounts of booze and noise hold no thrill, and most of the company we might want to keep are either hundreds of miles away or dead. So I’ll simply share a few of my hopes for 2017 with you here and now:

• That you enjoy good health and a modicum of happiness, especially those with a pre-existing condition. You’re going to need it.
• That humankind eventually learn to share this fragile ball in space with Peace and Good Will. What’s it going to take to achieve that, I wonder.
• That we realize “this blessed plot, this earth, this realm,” to borrow from Shakespeare, is the only home we’re likely to have for some time and that we’d better begin caring for it and everything else that’s along for the ride.
• That whatever Creation Myth you accept — I’m fond of the Iroquois story of a muskrat who brings soil from the bottom of the primordial sea to build an island for humankind — that we find the common thread in those stories and knit the goddam human family back together again in a spirit of mutual coöperation.
• That my gain cannot be had at your expense and vice versa. Despite all his bad press, Karl Marx was on to something; too bad the Commies got it wrong.
• That the accomplishments of the last eight years not be thrown away because they happened on the watch of a guy with the wrong skin color. “Race” is a social construct anyway and has very little if anything to do with biology.

If we can address just two or three of these with conviction, I’ll consider 2017 well spent and hope to see you same time next year for a review of our progress.

* Woolson taught at Boston’s English High School while Sullivan was a student there. The architect credits Woolson with teaching to seek rules incapable of exception. I credit Miss Piper, likewise, with teaching me how to think logically.

Max Pusch’s butcher shop might be in any American city. If I could have afforded this postcard, Max would have been an Agincourt resident.

You might be surprised to hear how easy it can be—sometimes—to discover who someone was. Ancestry-dot-com is a good place to start (make sure you’ve subscribed to some of the add-ons) and, sure enough, Max was there: a butcher shop in Chicago on the near North Side.

In the 1910 US Census, he was thirty-three and lived at 1229 Cornelia [I think that was after the Chicago street addresses were renumbered] with wife Alvina and an unnamed adopted daughter. This is two blocks from the Southport station on the Brown Line. He had emigrated from Germany in 1891 and been naturalized. His home was mortgaged but his; he had employees. The 1911 city directory puts his shop at 1444 Wells Street, a long block south of North Avenue in what would have been an upscale neighborhood.

The 1920 census information is slightly different. But—thanks be to Google!—a further search reveals Max had clout. He was, for example, president of the United Master Butchers of Chicago and a frequent contributor to the American Meat Trade and Retail Butchers Journal. And according to The National Provisioner Pusch had been a member of the local organizing committee for the 1914 convention of the “National Master Butchers Association.” No slouch, our Max. One wonders his “Germanity” became a problem during WWI.

Might it have been possible for Pusch to have begun his career in a smaller venue—Agincourt, say—and then have moved to greater glory in the big city? If I owned this card, the answer would be simpler. I could see this as a shop front on North Broad Street.

[#901]

Hard Fairy*

A typical fall day — ektachrome® blue sky (for those who recall film-based photography; anyone under forty won’t have a clue), crispness in the air like the first bite of a golden delicious, an excavated wardrobe of warmer wear stratified since the last spring thaw — Andy loped into the coffeehouse, joined the shortish line, placed an order for latté, without the affectations — no “skim-goat’s-milk-decaf-no-foam” in a voice for others to acknowledge his discernment, thank you very much — left his credit card — “I’m waiting for someone, so add their order to my check, please” — and spied a table in the back left corner as the shop remained busy with late lunching.

Andy’s fashion statement today was neither average nor even median (remember he is a statistician by day); his style, if you could name it, is casual neglect, which only reinforces the geeky stereotype of an actuary. Crouched at the table, chilly fingers wrapped about the cup (but more as a place to put them than as a source of warmth), his hands always seemed to belong nowhere or to someone else.

Parties of two, three, or four chatted, the conversational template of those who do this at least once a week. Andy was alone but not even remotely lonely, though it may have looked otherwise to anyone who noticed — which no one did. For this was a date, a border-line tryst (he hoped) with someone new at the office. After ten minutes passed, then twenty, hope morphed into melancholy.

Then, at his shoulder, there was someone, cup in hand, hoping for a place to sit. “Please,” Andy found himself saying, “Sit here. I feel guilty hogging a table for four.” The guy sat down.

“Someone was supposed to meet me. Guess I’ve been stood up.”

“I’m Chuck, by the way. Do you mind if I take off my jacket?” he said, standing. “It’s stuffy in here.”

He was about six feet tall; chest somewhere between pecs and not-pecs, though you couldn’t tell which way they were trending. As he put the jacket on the back of the chair, Andy gaped. A pair of translucent wings unfolded from Chuck’s back, mosaics of iridescent brown and grey; more moth than butterfly. They emerged from parallel slits on the back of Chuck’s T-shirt — how did he put that on? — and, now fully unfurled, extended above his head and below the buttocks. A barista calling out an order broke Andy’s concentration; his eyes darted from side to side, wondering why he was the only person in a crowded restaurant surprised at the presence of a fairy. Yes, a stout six-foot male with late-in-the-day stubble, resembling a middle-aged biker, but nonetheless a fairy. He expected a guest appearance by Edmund Spencer or more likely Rod Serling to make the appropriate introductions

“Don’t worry. No one but you can see my wings. To them I’m just another guy or they don’t notice at all. You know, that bothers me sometimes,” Chuck admitted. “I’m an S.E.P.: Somebody Else’s Problem,” explaining a bit of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — which Andy had wanted to read but never got around to — where anything inexplicable gets that kind of response. “I could literally hover two feet off the floor and be ignored. You see me because I’m your case worker. Think of me as a fairy-god-brother.”

After an astonished “You’re my wha—?” the rest of the sentence lodged in Andy’s throat. “So do I get three wishes or something?”

“Hey! I’m not some goddam genie. Besides, that m.o. was epic failure,” Chuck explained. “Nearly everyone blows the first two on the way to Number Three anyway. They generate a lot of bling but little long-term benefit. We’ll work together toward something lasting“, adding, “You O.K. with that?”

By now Chuck was sitting. His wings straddled the chair seat and reached well above his shoulders, glowing like Chartres as late afternoon sun reached the restaurant’s corner tables. Andy had a tough time not staring. “You’ll have to forgive me,” he apologized, “I haven’t seen a fairy since ‘Maleficent’ and you’re no Flora!” Then he studied Chuck’s steel grey eyes and the wings took second place.

O-J-T

In the following weeks, Andy didn’t see very much of Chuck but he heard plenty. Throughout the day, during the commute, at the office or the market, in work and social settings of every sort, Chuck became a disembodied voice perched in the vicinity of Andy’s right ear — guiding, reminding, instructing, cajoling, exhorting, inquiring, sometimes laughing, but always limited to a short phrase or even a single word: Listen to his voice; he wants something. — She cares about you. — Why’d he say that?  — Ask her advice. — Trust your instinct. — Smile! “It’s in the eyes,” he said later over coffee at what had become their table. Andy had to agree. He’d invested far too much time studying his own shoes.

Progress wasn’t a straight-line graph, but gradually Andy learned to listen; to hear the discrepancy between what and how something is said. Body language, too. In time he gained confidence, read situations and exercised better judgment. Then one afternoon, back at the shop where it all began, it was Graduation Day.

“I don’t expect any kind of diploma or certificate but there is one thing I’d like to ask, if it’s not too personal.” “Sure,” Chuck smiled. “What’s that?” Andy was suddenly attentive to his coffee. “Could I kiss you once before you go?”

If you’ve never seen a fairy’s blush, it pales the Northern Lights; tangerine-pink washed across his cheeks and Chuck’s eyes surveyed the room for help. There was nothing in the instruction manual about a farewell kiss. But his panic, like snow on water, dissolved as they moved closer.

So did that pair of wings. Andy looked down to see if he was still standing on the floor, fully expecting to find them hovering those aforementioned two feet above it. What he saw, instead, was the pile of silvery dust that had been silky wings only moments before. And this time, other people did notice: strangers in their vicinity approved with smiles.

Later that night, Andy discovered an enormous tattoo on Chuck’s back where the fairy wings had been.

* “Hard Fairy” is a title borrowed from British composer Graham Fitkin, from a work for soprano saxophone and two pianos (which should be played at my memorial service, if there is one).

[#900]

Crispin Creek, named for the Saints Day of the Battle of Agincourt (October 25th), ends near the southwest corner of Agincourt’s original townsite where it joins the Mighty Muskrat. I’d like to think that this view represents some portion of the creek upstream, but the only village out that way—in the northeastern part of Fennimore County—is Grou, but that community doesn’t appear anything like this in my mind’s eye. What’s a body to do?

Perhaps it’s time for Grou (a Dutch settlement) to be re-imagined.

The question of “class” in America today is contentious. My own view has been shaped by having grown up in the 1950s, when Ozzie and Harriet slept in separate beds and father knew best. Our family were definitely middle class, aspirational, upwardly mobile. I was the first member to attend college; and there was no question that I would: my father wanted for me a better life than even he had enjoyed, and his (all things considered) had been better than his father’s.

So “Class” in Agincourt would have expressed itself in several ways: in housing stock and neighborhood; in the school you would have attended; and most certainly in the source of family income. There were capitalists in Agincourt, to be sure — Aidan Archer, for example, owner of a cookware manufactory, who employed many but did no actual “work” himself — but there were many more who worked with there hands, who labored for themselves or for an hourly wage — Nina Köpman, for example, the housekeeper and cook who worked for the Archers. You may be able to detect where my sympathies lie.

These two postcard images will present (for the time being) the range of the middle class: Boone’s Hardware and a yet-to-be-named balcksmith at the southwest corner of town. Each I’m certain has an interesting, even poignant, story to tell, and in time I will. What the images share, it seems to me, is manifest pride in their respective roles in the community; roles compounded by gender, church or lodge membership, public service and political activity, all those things that weave us into a culture.

[Both of these postcards, I should add, are far too expensive for my budget, so the image itself will have to do.]

[#897]

The phone rang Sunday morning. I got nervous as an unfamiliar voice asked if this was the Ronald Ramsay who is an architectural historian. “Now and then,” I hedged. What followed was forty-five minutes of back and forth on a topic of mutual interest: William Halsey Wood. She is an art historian retired from teaching; I can’t afford to retire (for, oh, so many reasons). We are both from Chicago. We were born within four months of each other. But the meaningful link between us is a passion for an American architect unjustly overlooked by history.

Between us, Gayle and I have visited nearly all of Wood’s surviving buildings — of those that are known. She was impressed that the list of Wood’s buildings has grown from thirty-five (in a 1971 master’s thesis) to more than 105, three times as many, on my WHW blog. We discussed the revolution in on-line resources: OCR-readable databases, the Google Books project, genealogical records, and  newspapers. It’s been a research revolution.

After farewells and promises to stay in touch, possibly even collaborate, I took a step back from my interest in Halsey Wood and considered this project as one of many during my academic life. What they have in common, I realized, is research, the addictive quest for information. The accumulation of information, much of it fairly ordinary stuff, gives me greater satisfaction — outright joy — than anything else I’ve experienced, with the possible exception of the classroom.

Research as Refuge

Frankly, I’m not very well equipped for life. Like Lemony Snicket, mine has been a series of unfortunate events. Humankind makes very little, if any, sense to me. Current events bear that out — in spades. From the ballot box to Aleppo, my fellow creatures mystify beyond the point of disbelief. And when those realities overwhelm me, I seek refuge in my very private world of research.

Actually, research and one other activity, sudoku, exist in ordered, predictable worlds; sudoku because numbers behave, and research in architectural history because questions beget either answers or consequent questions. In both cases, the journey is rewarding for a Capricorn devoted to finding order in what appears to be chaos.

The questions are basic and the sources constitute ground I’ve ploughed for fifty years, and during that time I’ve learned two things: 1) the trick is asking the right question and phrasing it properly, and 2) responses aren’t always “answers” while the actual answers frequently come from left field. Well developed radial vision is no bad thing. Patience is a virtue. I prefer to think of it as an exceptionally long attention span.

I work at an institution where not having a PhD is tantamount to second-class citizenship: if we were the good ship HMS Higher Ed, I’d be traveling in steerage (for those unacquainted with the term, it means below the water line). Which makes all the more pleasurable those cases where street smarts have served me well. I think of:

• An internationally-renowned architectural historian (now deceased) who wrote of an architectural drawing by H.H. Richardson as illustrating a building for an unknown location—yet a street adjacent to the plan is clearly labeled “Kneeland”, which is indeed a street in Boston fronting a now-demolished Richardson building.
• Or another HHR drawing in the archival file of a Boston project; the drawing must be an early scheme for the project, because it is “inexplicably” reversed, when that drawing is clearly, to anyone with the skill to read an architectural rendering, the plan of a Richardson building in Washington, DC. The inexplicability is easily dismissed: Richardson sent his Boston client the plan of a recent project in DC to see if its organization might suit the Boston client’s needs.
• Or a Frank Lloyd Wright perspective drawing in the archival file for a series of spec houses that seems to be of an earlier iteration, when it is, in fact, the perspective of another project illustrated four pages later in the same book.
• Or the snooty bitch who refused to believe that “Methodist Episcopal” and “Protestant Episcopal” are not interchangeable among American religious denominations of the early 20th century.
• Or the PhD candidate who transcribed a handwritten letter from someone identified as “Rufsell”, when the “fs” ligature in 18th century orthography continued to be used throughout the 19th century as a convention for double-S, even in printed documents.; an extreme case would be the word “pofsefsion”. Hence the name should have been read as “Russell”.
• Or the Frank Lloyd Wright scholar who wrote that nothing would be known about a client until considerable additional research was done; when actually it took twenty minutes to identify the client and print off ten pages of detailed biography about him. Some people are just goddam lazy.
• Or the same FLlW scholar who doesn’t know what the fuck a drawing for a U.S. Patent looks like.
• Ask me about Gabriel Spat some time.

Do I sound bitter?

The point is that there is one thing I am exceptionally good at — research — and another at which I am constitutionally impotent: writing. Has the time long since passed for the tiger to change his stripes?

[#896]

The Auditorium and its predecessor Harney’s Orpheum were the heart of formal culture in 19th and early 20th century Agincourt. More casual, daytime and summer entertainment, however, was most like staged at the Chautauqua pavilion at the Fennimore County Fairgrounds on the Muskrat’s west bank (just opposite what would become Northwest Iowa Normal in 1919).

Chautauqua takes its name from a village in upstate New York where a summer institute was begun shortly after the Civil War. Intended as both education and wholesome entertainment in a resort setting, it hosted a wide range of music and lectures. Jenny Lind the “Swedish Nightingale” sang there and audiences also heard William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech. Revivalists and religious exhorters were frequent. Popularity of the New York original led to a wave of Chautuaqua-building across America. And their network became a circuit for entertainers, much like its less noble vaudeville counterpart. Agincourt’s pavilion was built some time in the late 1880s on land leased from the County Fair Association.

The Chautauqua pavilion as a building type was everywhere but especially throughout the Midwest “Methodist Belt.” A rectangle with radial or polygonal ends, today a large version might serve as a velodrome. Folding or overhead doors allowed summer breezes to cross-ventilate the building, and afford good sight lines to patrons seated on the verge.

PS: Here are two additional versions of the type:

PS [03FEB2017]: And yet one more, this time actually in Iowa:

PS [17SEP2020]: And yet another:

Lewis Auditorium, Lake Geneva, WI

Even towns of moderate size had a “Y”, especially those with railway workers. From the railroad’s point of view, the “Y” was a stabilizing element for a largely unmarried work force. In addition to clean beds, nourishing meals, and the punctuation of periodic prayer, these facilities provided recreation — billiards, cards, etc. — that kept the men out of pool halls and taverns and got them to work on-time and sober.

The cost of these facilities was borne by two sources: churches (usually Protestant and more often than not Methodist) and the railroads themselves. This is an image of the railway “Y” owned and operated by the Big Four at Mt Carmel, Illinois:

Sometimes they strove for an institutional look; sometimes aping the shapes of overgrown houses — as in this case. But they were usually near the depot, roundhouse, rail yard complex where the men worked, probably for a combination of supervision and convenience.

Agincourt’s “Y” was church affiliated: a joint venture among several denominations, but located immediately north of the Methodist church. Built about 1908, it eventually connected directly with the 1920 church constructed next door.