If ever you’re in the San Jose area and looking for a unique experience, the Winchester Mystery House may fill the bill. Sarah Winchester, the firearms heiress, left Connecticut after her husband died and settled in California.
Apparently, she was worried that all those people who died on the wrong end of a Winchester gun might cause bad karma, so she communed with the spirits, and was told that, as long as construction never ceased, she was good. So there was continual work done 24×7, with new rooms, wings, additions being added and torn down all the time.
When the 1906 earthquake hit, the part of the house that was already constructed at the time was sealed up and abandoned. Yes, this place is an example of project creep at its worst.
The interior is a maze of corridors, secret passageways, rooms that were never finished, and even rooms that were finished but never used. If you have a couple of hours, it’s worth a look.
An exterior shot of the Winchester Mystery House. Note how the wing on the left just ends abruptly. Once she died, all the construction stopped.
Several years ago, Aunt Omega and Uncle Howie traveled to visit their son, who lives overseas. Since they lived in western Kansas, about four hours from Denver, it made the most sense for them to travel across two states (and past six cities with commercial air service) to fly out of St Louis. They were probably inspired by what is now the main terminal, designed by Minoru Yamakasi to evoke images of the great railway stations of the time, and dedicated in 1956. It has been under construction ever since.
Even if they could have flown nonstop to their destination from St Louis at the time, they wouldn’t have. One was to savor the adventure of air travel one segment at a time, and two of those many segments involved multiple airports in Montréal.I don’t remember what airport(s) they connected at to get from St Louis to Montréal, but I’m sure it was somewhere in the U.S. or Canada. I know this, because they flew into Dorval, and at that time, only domestic and U.S. flights flew into Dorval, since renamed Trudaeu, and all Transatlantic flights (and Transatlantic flights only) flew out of Mirabel International Airport, Montréal’s airport of the future, which closed in 2004. (That whole sordid tale could be the subject of another blog post, which I will gladly leave to Montréallers to discuss, but it was 30 miles from the city, and Aéroports de Montréal’s maxim was, if you build an airport, ground transportation will follow.)
I recall nothing about their return journey, except for their arrival in St Louis. Their previously arranged ride was missing in action in the baggage claim area, so Uncle Howie asked Aunt Omega to wait with the luggage while he looked for their nephew. I’m sure his primary concern was not so much theft as it was a general fear that construction workers would have walled in the luggage.
Aunt Omega remarked that she had to wait 15 minutes, and in that time, she never saw anyone she knew. Several family members scoffed at that, my mother pointing out that Aunt Omega couldn’t realistically expect to see anyone she knew in an airport hundreds of miles from her home. In fact, my mom added that even though the Little Rock Airport wasn’t that far from her home, she wouldn’t expect to see anyone she knew there.
Of course, the next time my mom went to the Little Rock Airport, she did run into someone she knew. I doubt she told Aunt Omega. To further add to the irony, a few years later, I flew through the St Louis airport myself, making a connection, and ran into someone I knew. She wasn’t from St Louis either, but we were catching the same flight to Boston. Of course, the airport was under renovation at the time, where they had split the concourse down the middle and put temporary buildings that flanked it. It was to achieve an industrial-chic look-ma-no-ceilings look to the place. They hadn’t bothered with Jetways, either, and it was -20 degrees Fahrenheit.
I’ve since run into other out-of-towners in Berlin and New Orleans, all because of Aunt Omega and how we laughed at her.
The main terminal at Lambert-St Louis International terminal, from the airport’s official website.
This is a very interesting books that discusses the history of our nation’s highway infrastructure, from the late 18th Century, when there was none, to today. The idea of actually driving from one city or town to another on a marked road, much less a paved one, was a novel concept.
The several iterations of coming up with a uniform national highway system are explored in depth. The idea of building the roads for speed came later, starting with the Pennsylvania Turnpike in the 1930s. As part of the New Deal, the Roosevelt Administration toyed with the idea of building a national system of superhighways, but it didn’t get off the ground then because of more pressing domestic issues at the time, along with the uncertainties of war looming on the horizon. Coincidentally, Hitler had built his system of Autobahns in Germany.
After World War II, the Eisenhower Administration revisited the idea of a national system of superhighways, but still for long distance travel. Because of the complications and expense of urban land-taking, urban stretches of freeway came later, and, in fact, some of us are old enough to remember driving merrily along in the countryside, only to be dumped on a city street as soon as one got close to a population center. Sometime in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the idea of using the Interstate Highway System for urban commuter traffic took flight. In several cities, commuters who had moved to the suburbs after the war started making use of parkways, which were never intended for daily commuter traffic, to get to the city center.
This actually shaped many of our cities. Dallas, Detroit, and LA built extensive freeway networks, oftentimes all but dismantling public transportation systems (which, at the time, were run by the private sector–falling ridership made profitability out of question, as well as any reinvestment in new rolling stock or route expansion. The private sector was even threatened on the intercity front. As more and more of the New York Thruway was finished, New York Central rail executives watched their ridership plummet.)
Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland rose to prominence because of her activism in the freeway revolts in Baltimore. The book discusses the havoc wreaked on Leakin Park by the proposed route, the plummeting of property values, and how, despite the freeway not having been built, how the neighborhood declined. (Actually, a 1.39-mile section was built, but it isn’t connected to the Interstate System at all, and now carries US 40 through Baltimore.)
Similarly, in Boston, Frederick Salvucci rose to fame and became Governor Dukakis’ transportation secretary because of his work in the freeway revolts. The 1948 plan called for an extensive network of freeways in and around Boston, and many of the outlying roads, as well as I-93 and the Mass Pike through Boston, were built in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1970, Governor Sargent ordered the Boston Transportation Planning Review, which revisited all the highway projects and replaced many of them with public transportation projects. As far as I know, Massachusetts was the first state that asked to have Federal Highway money reappropriated for public transit projects instead.The I-93 that Boston was left with was a state-of-the-art 1950s hulking elevated highway, which was replaced 40 years later with an even more expensive (but more aesthetically pleasing) underground highway. To this day, the exit numbering has a gap on I-95 near Canton, Mass., where it follows Route 128 to Peabody and the elevated section of I-93 in Charleston still has stubs for “future” ramps that were never built.
There were many others, of course: New York, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco/Oakland, LA, Milwaukee, South Florida, Tampa, and even the extension of I-84 through eastern Connecticut to Providence (it was instead rerouted to use the old I-86 toward Sturbridge, Mass.)
There were a few freeway revolts many of you have probably not heard of. One was in New Orleans, where people were against having tree-lined Claiborne Avenue destroyed to build an elevated I-10. While the revolt was unsuccessful, later efforts to build a freeway along the riverfront through the French Quarter were successful.
In Memphis, I-40 was to go straight through the city, from east to west. Not only would it have divided the city in two, it would have divided Overton Park in two. That case went to the Supreme Court (Citizens to Preserve Overton Park v Volpe) , ruling that the Department of Transportation had not followed the “feasible and prudent clause” disallowing appropriation for new highways if an alternate route already existed.
And in Little Rock, the Eighth Street Expressway, now I-630, planned in 1955, was finally completed in 1985 following legal review and mitigation efforts, including rerouting the freeway to avoid MacArthur Park and depressing it below grade level.
Both sets of my grandparents were from northeast Arkansas. My mother’s parents were from Randolph County, and my father’s parents were from Lawrence County, but they were probably no more than 10 miles apart, as the crow flies.
My mother’s parents always served Cokes if they were serving carbonated beverages, which wasn’t really that often. It was always Coca-Cola because, well, things went better with Coke, as the jingle went.
The first time I remember being offered a soft drink at my dad’s parents house, which again, wasn’t that often, it was a pop. It was also a Pepsi-Cola. I couldn’t read yet, but I knew my alphabet, and Pepsi started with a “p.” So, I probably went around for a year or two thinking that Coke was Coca-Cola (as is the case legally), and that pop was Pepsi.
At some point, I heard someone refer to Pepsi generically as Coke. In fact, I think I ordered a Coke and was served what I thought was a Pop instead. At least no one tried tinkering with my Coke floats — I would not have been amused to have gotten a Pepsi float instead.
Now, if you were to drill down on the handy-dandy map of the Pop vs Soda page, you would see that Lawrence County, Arkansas, is about as much into soda country as Arkansas gets.In fact, I had a difficult time understanding why the dialect why the dialect in the Greater Imboden, Arkansas, area varied so much for what turned out to be the same thing. I then learned that my dad’s parents lived in the Chicago area during the war, and two of their daughters and their kids still lived up there at the time. (Actually, it was Aurora, in Kane County, Illinois, if you must know, but this was long before Wayne’s World made Aurora such a hip place.)
At some point, I got used to calling it soda, and then I moved to Chicago. Apparently the whole Great Lakes runs on pop! They even have pop machines. I went to Minneapolis for a week and restaurants listed pop on their printed menus. But they didn’t always serve Pepsi. It was just as likely to be Coke or RC.
Of course, Chicago has its own linguistic oddities. People don’t wear sneakers — they wear gym shoes. And their homes don’t have living rooms — they have front rooms, pronounced “French rooms.” And although one of the larger chain of markets is Jewel, people say they shop at Jules.
And here in New England, everything makes sense. A milkshake is a frappe. If you ask for a milkshake, you’ll get a flavored milk. In Providence, it’s called a cabinet, where they also server grinders instead of subs.
Philadelphia has their steak sandwiches, which most of us know as Philly cheesesteak sandwiches. The terminology is fairly unambiguous (although the types of cheese used vary from place to place), but how you order it is intimidating. You order at one of two windows, and it’s important that you do it at the correct one. The “other” window is for beverages only, and if you want something to wash that steak sandwich down with, you’ll be stopping there, too, but you can’t get your beverage in the sandwich line, either.
If you want to really play up the part of out-of-town tourist, may I suggest you order a pop with that sandwich?
A graphical representation, by county, of a non-scientific study as to what term the local denizens use to refer to carbonated beverages. “Coke,” “Soda,” and “Pop” are the most common choices, but “Other” catches such terms as “Tonic” (used in the immediate Boston area by people of a certain age), “Cold Drink” (in some parts of the South), etc.
Tonight the Boston Globe, through its Globe Insiders program, hosted a Globe Talk event with Barney Frank. The host was the political editor of Boston.com, the Boston Globe’s online news portal. The auditorium only held 160, so others at the ticketed event had to sit in an overflow location where the question-and answer session was piped in.
The program started with Frank explaining his status as a recent newlywed, and how DOMA was really unnecessary, since each state can set its own marital laws anyway. (For example, half the states have laws prohibiting first cousins from marrying each other, and the age of consent varies from state to state.)
He had mentioned that his wedding was, of course, a private affair, and the various papers who were covering the wedding as a society feature had agreed to embargo their coverage for a week, so people would read about it online before it even happened. As a news item, however, The New York Times did not honor the embargo, and sent photographers to cover the wedding as a news event. He was not amused.
A recent vote was held in the House regarding DOMA. The law was, of course, sustained, largely on party lines, and one Republican who had given them a nice gift had his gift returned to him after the vote. The other Congressman couldn’t understand why. “Did I offend you?” he asked.”The vote wasn’t meant to be personal.”
He then talked about working for Mayor White. This was in 1967, and race relations were becoming a serious issue. He related a story about people from Beacon Hill who had complained about a couple of sub par teachers at their neighborhood school. He suggested that they call the School Committee. They reported that they had in the past, but whenever they did, they just transferred the teachers to Dorchester, and that only made them feel guilty.
After that, he moved on to the freeway revolts and Frederick Salvucci, an anti-freeway activist who later became the state’s transportation secretary under Governor Dukakis. At the time, there were plans to have I-95 go through the middle of town, and an inner belt go through East Cambridge, the Fenways, and other urban neighborhoods. It got scotched, of course, but not before some initial land-taking. To this day, exit numbers on I-95 in Massachusetts skip several numbers because of the rerouting of I-95 along part of Route 128. I’ll write more on the freeway revolts later.
At about that time, he ran for Representative to the General Court, and served there until Father Drinan resigned his Congressional seat when Pope John Paul II demanded that all priests exit politics. In his introduction, he was credited for being the first Congressman to come out as gay, in 1987, but that honor actually belongs to Gerry Studds.
The financial crisis covered the rest of the evening.
These events are sometimes at the Boston Athanæum. That location is a bit more convenient, and they serve beverages. The Globe’s auditorium is a bit more comfortable, although it is a walk from the T.
Barney Frank being interviewed at a Globe Talk event.
My first foreign language was French. The choice was simple, really. My high school offered one foreign language. I wanted to take a foreign language. So I took French.
At the timne, one taught French using dialogs. To this day, if someone were to ask me “Ou est Sylvie?” I would automatically answer “A la piscine” without giving it a second thought, because everyone knows that Sylvie is at the swimming pool.
I had really wanted to take German, and was disappointed that my high school didn’t offer it. As a consolation, it did teach English in a manner that required us to diagram our sentences. I thought, “Great! I’ll be all set to do this in German!” because some of the German textbooks I saw at a college library near me had people doing the same thing.
There were two other tie-ins to French that my high school had, which seemed to work to its advantage. The Canadian Consul General visited my high school when I was in the ninth grade to present several books about Canada and by Canadians. Almost half of them were in French. As a consequence, I could actually try reading some French that wasn’t a dialog. I could expand my horizons beyond whether Robert had two brothers or a sister. Life was looking up.
The second tie-in was our having to read A Separate Peace by John Knowles during which Gene writes “Je ne give a damn pas about le français” during a study session. So, French was a natural offering.
When I went to college, I had a chance to continue French. Fortunately, we were reading monologues and essays initially, expanding into literature and current events. I also had access to French language periodicals, so I could read l’Express and Paris Match. We also had a language lab where we listened to radio plays and could listen to ourselves doing oral exercises.
My first practical use of French was a visit to Montréal. (I actually got to go to Toronto during high school, but all I could really use French for there was to read product labels and Canadian banknotes.) In Montréal, I got to meet real, living Francophones. Announcements on the Métro were made in French, and I got to explain to my grandmother that “Merci” was not the French word for trash any more than “Thanks,” “Push,” “Pitch In!” or “Keep America Beautiful” were English words for trash, and that “Sortie” is not a station stop on the Métro but is the word for “Exit.”
My second practical use was in St Louis. There were several people making the same connection I was, and our originating flight was delayed leaving Boston — so much so that we were to miss our second flight and would have to spend the night in St Louis. As I was chatting with a seatmate, I realized there were a bunch of us that would be spending the night together in St Louis. Somehow, the fact that I knew some French came up, and he lit up like a Christmas tree. A woman from Paris was making the same connection, and she didn’t speak a word of English. While we were all standing in line at Hotel Voucher Central, people on the flight kept asking me to ask the woman various questions, and she would give me answers that I translated back to English. I was getting so good at this that, on the way to baggage claim, one of us had to make a call and was waiting for a call back at a pay phone when a guy starts to sit down at it to make a call himself. One of the women for whom I had been translating asked me to ask the guy to please leave the phone clear for an incoming call, so I walk up to him and ask him, very politely and in French, if he would mind using a different phone. I got a very strange look.
In college, I also had the opportunity to start my study of German. They had stopped teaching sentence diagramming, much to my consternation, since that was my primary motivation for putting up with studying it in English. I won’t say much about German here, since Mark Twain has written extensively about the German language. At this point, let me just say that, if you’re shopping for a German dictionary, look for the declension tables. If you don’t know what those are, you don’t need a German dictionary. If you do know what they are, and there are fewer than 30, keep looking. Remember, you have three genders and four cases to work with.
My first language in a post Me Talk Pretty One Day world is Portuguese. And if someone asks me “Onde està o cachorro?” I am ready.
You probably know the photograph that defined the Little Rock Crisis. Elizabeth Eckford, whose family did not have a phone, didn’t receive the message to meet up with the other eight of the Little Rock Nine, so she took the bus to Central High School on the first day of integration — alone. Rather than receiving a warm welcome, hecklers followed her on her walk from the bus stop to the school. One Hazel Bryan, egged on by the crowd, was immortalized on film, and in newspapers around the world, as she was suggesting other places that she thought Elizabeth should go that day, like Africa. (The shutter caught her mouth in mid-word, contorted, making her face look particularly sinister.) Fast forward to the future, when Heckler’s Remorse hits Hazel, and she seeks to reconcile with Elizabeth.
She does, by telephone initially. A face-to-face meeting wouldn’t happen for several years later. And the point of this book is to say that reconciliation doesn’t always come easy, and it certainly doesn’t with these two. I found it difficult not to get impatient with both women at different points as I read this.
This is an interesting book for anyone who enjoys 20th-century history as much as I do. The events of the Little Rock Crisis narrate much of the book, and questions such as, “Why Little Rock?” are answered. (Little Rock was considered to be a fairly liberal city for the South, and the governor was actually a moderate before he decided to become pro-segregation.)
The book, though scholarly, is an easy read, and several reviews appeared when it came out. I am linking to a review from The New York Times.
Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock, by David Margolick. Yale University Press, 2011.
The iconic photo of the Little Rock Crisis. (Will Counts, as appeared in Vanity Fair in October 2007)
I visited Berlin in March 1985, and at that time, you would have had a difficult time convincing me that the Berlin Wall and a divided Germany would end anytime soon. Taking the U-Bahn (subway or metro) beneath East Berlin, I encountered darkened platforms at abandoned stations patrolled by East German soldiers wielding machine guns. It seems that the Berlin transit ancestors had not laid out the system with easy partition of the city in mind. The one station still operated was Friedrichstraße, which had a full customs and immigration hall, and was the only crossing between East and West Berlin that could be used by both German nationals and foreigners. (Germans could not use Checkpoint Charlie.)
For my day trip to East Berlin, I memorized the information I needed to know from my Baedeker’s, since Western travel guides and maps were contraband, left my camera in my room (since cameras could be confiscated), and took the S-Bahn (regional/suburban train) over the Wall to Friedrichstraße. Although I had read that the Wall was actually several walls with a no-man zone between them, it was quite an eye-opener to see it.
Once I alighted the train at Friedrichstraße, I went downstairs into the immigration hall and waited in the set of lines for non-German nationals. The immigration officer started with me as he was finishing with the person ahead of me. He scrutinized my passport and me several times over, filled out a visa, and the only thing he said to either of us was, “Fünf Mark, bitte!” I would have believed that the five Marks was the most important part.
When I received my visa and my returned passport, he unlocked the door letting me into the customs hall, where I immediately had to buy 25 Marks in East German currency at the inflated rate of 1:1, even though you could buy 8 or more per D-Mark on the black market in West Berlin. Needless to say, I couldn’t have spent the 25 East German Marks if my life depended on it. None of the Soviet Bloc cities were known for their shopping. I suppose I could have stood in line and added my name to a 20-year waiting list for a refrigerator or something.
Most of the museums were in East Berlin, and it was nice to see them. It was interesting seeing all the Trabants on the street. Most were either white or pastel yellow. The pastel blue ones must have belonged to senior party officials, since they were rarer. Maps posted on the street pretended that West Berlin didn’t exist. Postcards took longer from East Berlin, too. As I recall, it took 6 to 8 weeks for a postcard to make it back to the States, whereas it was a week or so from West Germany.
German reunification was a good thing, but some people who grew up under the old system have a nostalgia for East Germany. Goodbye Lenin is an amusing film set during the fall of the Berlin Wall that came out at about the time that Ostalgie (the German word for nostalgia of East Germany) became a phenomenon. I recommend it.
In case it wasn’t obvious, you were now entering the Soviet Sector.One of those “Life goes on” shots.
If you look at the top of the new Massachusetts State House, you can’t miss the gold dome. It wasn’t always gold — when the building was first built, about 230 years ago to replace the Old State House, shingles covered the dome. Atop the dome, there is a cupola, and on top of that cupola is a pine cone. The pine cone has an important historic significance to Maine (“the Pine Tree State,” which, until 1820, was part of Massachusetts) and to Massachusetts itself. The pine tree appeared on the reverse of the state flag until 1971, and still appears on the state naval ensign.
