I have little idea what’s going on here. There’s a message on the back but it doesn’t help. Does it suffice to say there needs to be a story being told?

The card, BTW, is far too expensive for the project budget.

I might have guessed Sammy Davis, Jr. wrote the lyrics for Shirley McLain’s number in “Sweet Charity”, a 1969 film. As yet another birthday peaks above the horizon, retrospection might be expected, especially for someone whose career has been focussed on history. Well, at least it’s supposed to have been. But that’s another question for anther time.

So, it was September, 1951, probably the day after Labor Day; that’s the way we used to do it in the era before T.V. And Marge walks me to the neighborhood school, then only grades one through four, and enrolls me in First Grade. I was in the care of Miss Mary Hletko, who I liked very much. My class might have had a dozen students, really, or at least that’s the way I remember it. O.K., now I’ll cut to the chase.

The rhythm of my life has been regulated by education, multiple sequential levels of it, from there through grad school — a couple of them, and one of those a couple times; I’m kinda slow that way. My point is that I have been at school of one sort or another for seventy years. Those rhythms of class sequence, alternate days (MWF versus TTh); semesters then quarters then semesters; holidays and their variants — we used to get both Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays off; now we get neither — and the irregular flow of time through those lazy summer months (slow at first, then increasingly rapid as Labor Day drew nigh) have regulated my life since that day when Marge dropped me off. [Eighteen months later, by the way, Marge herself packed a suitcase of lingerie and loose cash and lit out, never to be seen again, but that, too, is another story.]

Follow a pattern, any pattern, long enough and it becomes part of who you are. But then what happens, what replaces it, when you’re no longer a part of the pulse? I guess I’m gonna find out.

For Agincourt, the response is simple: I’ve long been aware of the diverse rhythms that can govern our lives and tried in my modest yet anal-retentive way to build them into the story.

[#1524]

Anson Tennant, the reluctant hero of our story, returned to Agincourt from three years of training in Chicago — classes at the Art Institute, some time on the boards with J. L. Silsbee and perhaps some other unnamed offices, the sort of practical experience which was still the rule rather than the exception. While I build a model of his office (scale ½ inch equals 1 foot), it occurred to me that he would have had an open house to celebrate the beginning of his professional life. And that, obviously, requires an invitation. Time to dust off “The Little Guy”, an illustration from a building journal circa 1915. So, I’m fudging three years to make it work for Anson. What font do you think would complement this charming image?

Anson Tennant’s World of Work

It’s almost impossible for me to imagine architect Anson Tennant apart from the studio-apartment where he worked: Suite 205-207 in the Wasserman Block. This quick (i.e., hasty) perspective was my first graphic impression of what I had in mind; the sort of place a young man might begin his career as an architect — at the time, Agincourt’s only resident architect, though not the first to serve the community. [His predecessors have yet to be determined.]

As an enthusiast of the Arts & Crafts movement into which he’d been born, and nurtured in his parents’ architect-designed home on East Agincourt Avenue, the general character of the space — renovated by Tennant in 1912 — would have reflected the ideas of Gustav Stickley, perhaps even inspired by ideas he found in Stickley’s monthly periodical. For the present, I think the time has come to develop this space along A&C lines and make a model as my contribution to ARCH371 this semester. Put up or shut up.

PS (07NOV2021): Looking for A&C inspiration, I ran across this image of an interior by British architects and planners Parker & Unwin — probably one of their houses at Letchworth Garden City.

In the general and ongoing nature of “The Way Things Work,” here is an interesting series of images from Macomb, a fairly large town in western Illinois — home of Western Illinois University, where a lot of my high school classmates went to university.

This building is the A. T. Ewing & Son Automobile Repository, which I take to have been a parking garage and auto mechanic for folks who didn’t have a garage at home; possibly an auto dealer as well. I would gladly appropriate this image for Agincourt (a town of similar size and vintage), though the asking price of $89 is way beyond my price range. Looking for other (cheaper) images, I accumulated the story of the Ewing garage in Macomb.

At some point the business closed and the building was adopted as the Lark Theatre for movies, the new out-of-the-house form of entertainment. That, in its turn, seems to have morphed to a legitimate stage theatre for dramatic production of the community theatre variety. And that in turn was demolished, replaced by a public park — onomatopoetically named Lark Park. Though I would gladly sacrifice the open space for the original building of about 1910.

And so it is with the fabric of our lives, civic and otherwise.

PS: Buildings of this general sort are quite common at the turn of the last century: (see below) clear-span and clerestory- or monitor-lit.