Consumption of meat in America is much higher than most other countries and that was even more true in the 19th century. But it was the era before refrigeration, so every city, Agincourt included, would have had an abattoir or slaughterhouse for the daily processing of beef, mutton and pork for local consumption.

There are four fundamental ways that meat can be preserved: drying (jerky), smoking, salting (brine), and corning. Fresh meat required a daily supply and even a modest community of 5,000-7,500 would have generated a great deal of offal—everything that’s left over when the process is complete. Meat, organs (liver, kidney, testicles, etc.), brain, tongue, even hooves (“pickled pigs feet”) left some pretty foul stuff for disposal: the remaining skeleton, horns, skin, and guts. Where do you suppose all that stuff went?

Fargo and the story of Long Lake

There is a true story that played itself out in the early years of the 1880s, one which illustrates all too clearly the awareness of public health as a matter for general concern.

On Fargo’s near west side, just south of the university, there is a paved drainage channel currently straddled by the soccer fields. But during the 19th century that was a natural seasonal watercourse called Long Lake, one of several coulees part of the Red River drainage system. Just outside the city limits, it was unregulated and therefore available for dumping, including the offal from Fargo’s multiple meat markets. Imagine wagons driving the mile or so from the CBD the make the days deposit. One especially hot August, in 1882, the “lake” transformed into a toxic soup, surely as organic matter settled to the bottom and decomposed.

That fall, two families resident on North Fourteenth street (it had a different name then) were struck with some sort of fever which especially affected the children. Several became ill, including at least one of the parents, but it was the children who succumbed, four of them, as I recall. Two were in the Frank Irons family; I don’t remember the other name.

The deaths occurred in October and early December by which time winter had set in a roads to the cemetery were impassable and the children couldn’t be properly buried. Since at least one of them sang in the choir of Gethsemane Episcopal church, Father Cooley volunteered the church grounds for quick interment, Oddly, though the scandal of Long Lake was completely unregulated by any ordinance, the city itself had enacted strict control of human burial within city limits. So the situation which effectively killed the children, came down on Fr Cooley with a $50 fine. I’ve always intended to set the story down in much greater detail but this serves my purpose for the time being. And I raise it only because Agincourt would have endured a parallel situation, but much earlier and possibly more egregious.

In the meantime, if you’d like to read about a British instance of large-scale meat production for an urban population, take a look at this story of The Shambles, a street in York, England, famous for its concentration of meat markets.

By the way, that’s where we get the word “shambles”.

James Daly was an actor from the ’50s. Those of a certain age would recognize him from films but especially from early television. He was a year younger than my dad, but died two years before Roy did; very sad in both cases. My most vivid recollection of Daly is from Episode #30 of “The Twilight Zone”, Rod Serling’s gift to American culture, an episode Serling ranked as his favorite story from Season One.

Serling’s introduction to each episode had the elegance and efficiency of haiku. This is what he said for “A Stop at Willoughby”:

This is Gart Williams, age thirty-eight, a man protected by a suit of armor all held together by one bolt. Just a moment ago, someone removed the bolt, and Mr. Williams’ protection fell away from him, and left him a naked target. He’s been cannonaded this afternoon by all the enemies of his life. His insecurity has shelled him, his sensitivity has straddled him with humiliation, his deep-rooted disquiet about his own worth has zeroed in on him, landed on target, and blown him apart. Mr. Gart Williams, ad agency exec, who in just a moment, will move into the Twilight Zone—in a desperate search for survival.

Mechanical problems interrupt one of character Williams’s habitual commutes from the two-martini-burbs to his high pressure advertising job. The train will be at the unfamiliar Willoughby depot for a few minutes. Why doesn’t Mr Williams stretch his legs? Harried by work and family responsibilities, he finds an idyllic small town, the antithesis of his work-a-day world, then re-boards the train for the remainder of his commute.

Some days later, harried and harassed, the train slows as it arrives once again at Willoughby. Williams decides to abandon family and job, to alight at Willoughby and begin anew. The people he’d met during his first visit are there to welcome him. Meanwhile, in the world the rest of us inhabit, the train has made an emergency stop: one of the passengers has leapt from the speeding train and been killed.

Dr Bob warned me. Agincourt was a worthwhile endeavor, he believed, because it allowed me to work through several personal issues in the course of developing a community and its denizens. But, “Call me,” he said, when United Van Lines starts packing for the trip. Well, I’m starting to gather empty boxes.

Arthur Machen (born Arthur Llewellyn Jones) has become Agincourt’s new cause célèbre — not that he’ll ever replace Frederick Rolfe, a.k.a., Baron Corvo; there’s room in our community for two esteemed writers held in high regard. Coincidentally, they were born just three years (1860 vs 1863) and 135 miles apart, though outside the British Isles you could add a zero to represent the likely cultural distance between them. I’ve bought a number of Machen books in original editions and have begun to understand why his reputation is deserved: he is, indeed, a master of supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction.

And then I wondered if any Machen works had been adapted for the stage. These seem exactly the sorts of story-line that would have attracted Rennie Gleason or, especially, Seamus Tierney. Had others seen their potential? Google provided an interesting answer: in 1917, during some of the worst of WWI, a Machen short story “The Terror” was adapted as a radio drama. You can listen to a 1981 reenactment on youtube.

What this means for Agincourt is anybody’s guess. I’m no playwright.

The Carousel

Yes, there’s a carousel on The Commons and it has been there since the last years of the Depression—the story behind that claim and the Ruffini Brothers Circus is elsewhere—and it was restored for the city’s 150th birthday, operated by volunteers every Friday and Saturday night. In style, ours is somewhere between these two examples, both of them anonymous; it’s certainly humbler than the “…Mitchell’s Electric Racing…” model. [I paid a bundle for that card, which obligates me to use it somehow.]

David Rock designed a braced-frame shelter for Agincourt’s carousel but I destroyed the model, when the wind took it from my grip on the way to the first exhibit in 2007. I wonder if he’s forgiven me. David’s solution was far more nuanced and elegant than the basic polygon shown at the top, and it has been my goal to reconstruct it from memory.

So fond are mortal men
Fall’n into wrath divine,
As their own ruin on themselves to invite,
Insensate left, or to sense reprobate, 
And with blindness internal struck.

— Milton, “Samson Agonistes”

Private Life

It’s discouraging to think social media have practically eliminated the quaint notion of “private life”.

Hanging our laundered unmentionables on a line in the backyard merely exposes them to a handful of passersby taking a shortcut through the alley. Fine. But there are three things wrong with that observation: #1) our undies are old and shredded; even Miss Havisham wouldn’t have them; #2) they probably haven’t been laundered; and #3) the clothes lines stretch across the front yard, not the back, in such a way that anyone walking past is likely to be garroted. FaceBook and Twitter are hard to avoid. And they aren’t pretty.

Antonio Aspettati’s small but disconcerting work “Woman in a Park at Evening” brings inward-oriented private life sharply to mind this afternoon; it is

a small Impressionist, borderline Symbolist work in a palate of melancholic secondary colors against a manic blue sky. A lone woman muses in a scruffy park. Two stone pines—also known as umbrella or parasol pines, a tree characteristic of the Mediterranean—divide the composition into what is a nearly-proportioned Golden Section. All is ennui.

What brought her to this pensive place where thoughts were unlikely to be disturbed? I know a few people inclined to similar strategies. And a good thing, too, because there aren’t many places left for such inward-directed conscience.

Private Life in New Kingdom Egypt

Lynn Meskell’s 2002 study of private life in ancient Egypt is currently on the night stand; not a “page turner” but I never expected it to be. The Introduction—like the opening pages of practically every book I encounter—reveals what I don’t know in the outline what I might. Good thing, too, because I’m disinclined to face late 20th century French social theory; her digestion is more than sufficient, thank you. Among Meskell’s points, however, is one that had long since crossed my mind: be wary of projecting your values and social expectations onto past generations; they don’t deserve it and wouldn’t understand anyway.

My principal difficulty these days valiant but futile attempts to project these on the present. I am after all, an aged man who was raised by an even more aged woman, such that my world view has no traction with my own generation—ask member of the ACHS Class of 1963 how successfully I meshed with them—and claim to be situated somewhere among the Edwardians. So whatever you think of our Agincourt enterprise, be kind if you detect a pervasive set of antiquated values; they’re mine.

It has been far easier, for example, to create characters like Hal Holt, because he is both a reflection of a former department chair (invoked several times in these pages), whose religiosity did not exist as far as any of us know, and only indirectly of my own which slant toward the ancient Egyptian [viz. Jan Assmann’s Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt; do you detect a theme here?]. In a similar way other characters are stand-ins for the family I might have had—but didn’t. Martha Corwin Curtiss Tennant may be the mother I misplaced, and her son Anson is the person I’d like to have become.

On the flip side, Mary Ellen “Rooster” Lehr and Edmund FitzGerald Flynn are each reprehensible models simultaneously written into and out of the story, as they have been from the list of my real-life acquaintances; removing them was an act of mental healthfulness. It is one thing to forget regrettable people; quite another to bump them off. So if Agincourt lacks a virtue, it is the binary nature of her denizens: they are thoroughly familiar and compatible with their creator, or they are antithetical and anathema.

My dad was an early but reticent character in the emerging narrative, remembered differently by others, because our relationship was distant at best; a dance around the ring, sizing the other up. and anticipating the first parry. Our exchanges were few and faint and fragile. Like our actual physical encounters—similarly few, and for that rarity distinctly recollected four decades after his passing.

<more to come as the spirit moves>

Hand-colored postcards are just that: watercolored by a roomful of women with tiny brushes held by tiny fingers using a palette of basic colors. Most of the artists would never have seen the actual building or scene, so there can be significant variation beyond the simple intensity of color. Witness these two offset-printed images of the DelMar Gardens Amusement Park formerly in Oklahoma City, OK.

The buildings seen here, by the way, were designed by William Abijah Wells, a Kansas-born architect who spent a short time in Chicago attending the AIC; his registration card there reads “c/o Frank Lloyd Wrights, Oak Park”. Tantalizing. Hence my interest beyond having lived in Oklahoma for the seven years it took to get through a five year curriculum. Do the math.

I would love to appropriate these for the Fennimore Co. Fairgrounds in Agincourt.