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This post covers the last 176 or so years

Such a gray day on Saturday. It all blends together as big globs of clouds, but the history function at Weather Underground says it has been a week since I’ve seen the sun. I haven’t taken to putting hashmarks on the wall to keep track. Yet. But on the eighth day in a row of this I realized a few things. First, this is well-passed its sell date. Second, you need features in the foreground to make this backdrop pop:

I went to the movies Saturday, saw Logan, and did some other things, and watched the sky.

Sunday was a terrific improvement. The temperature snuck up into the mid-60s and the sun came out to play and it was otherwise, you know, a nice April day:

I went for a bike ride, a 43-miler that started to fall apart around mile 12 or so. There was a lot of up-and-down, and the up is always slower, even more so when you’re having a slow day in general. But the weather was nice and the views weren’t bad either:

And I looked up the first use of the words bicycle and velocipede in the impressive Hoosier State Chronicles — a digital newspaper program which is a terrific read. It isn’t complete, of course, but it is authoritative.

Aside from a few ads, here is the first mention, in The Hendricks County Union, on March 8, 1866:

The Hendricks County Union started out as the Danville Republican in 1846 and took the Union name in 1864 when a returning Civil War colonel, Lawrence S. Shuler bought the rag. Shuler’s unit had fought in the Second Battle of Second Bull Run, Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Spotsylvania and more. So newspapers probably seemed a breeze. He sold it the next year, though, and after a series of name and ownership changes and consolidations, the paper finally enjoyed a long run from 1890 until 1931 under one owner.

Then a World War I veteran bought what was called the Hendricks County Republican. Edward Weesner, who’d learned the business working on the Stars and Stripes, ran the shop until he died in 1974. His daughter, Betty Jean Weesner, had been working there for some time and took over. She was, says a Saturday Evening Post column, a Unitarian Democrat running a paper by then simply called The Republican. She graduated with a journalism degree from Indiana in 1951. She died this time last year. Her obituary says she never retired. The Republican was a two-person shop, a small-town weekly, and Weesner’s longtime assistant Barbara Robertson died a few weeks ago. It was also the oldest paper in the county, with roots back to the James K. Polk administration. You hope it comes back, but it would be a surprise if it did. This is one of the ways old newspapers die.

Meanwhile over in Vanderburg County, at the Evansville Journal, these two mention appear in the same column of miscellany on September 15, 1868:

Already, they were concerned with speed. Perhaps always they were.

The Evansville Journal started in 1834, The location of the original building, which was razed after a fire, seems to be a parking lot today. Apparently the paper had endured three fires over the decades. Finally, the Evansville Journal News building, would survive. It was one of those places built way out of town, until Main Street came to it. The two-story beaux-arts brick building with a limestone facade, circa 1910, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. There’s a deli and ice cream joint in there now. The Journal was sold to the cross-town competition in the 1920s and lasted until about 1936 or so.

Here now is the Daily State Sentinel, with a local notice on September 30, 1868:

Twenty-five miles per hour! Much better than a carriage. Le Maire, of course, being French for “the mayor.” Mississippi Street was renamed Senate Avenue in 1895. Third Street, I am forced to assume, was also renamed. But I’m not sure when or to what. So I’m counting roads and if my guess is right the former site of Le Maire’s shop is not either a condo, a distillery, a parking lot or one of a series of apartment/business buildings. The provenance of the Daily State Sentinel dates back to 1840. The paper that became The Sentinel was originally The Indiana Democrat, and Spirit of the Constitution, this being firmly in the times when towns had more than one publication and representing a variety of political parties.

In fact, you probably remember hearing about the Copperheads during the American Civil War. The people that had this paper during that time — ownership was an almost-fluid thing in most newspapers back then — found themselves wrapped up in the Copperhead Trials. After more owners and changes to the masthead than you can count, the paper closed its doors for good in 1906, when it was known as the Indianapolis Sentinel. I haven’t yet discovered anything about monsieur Le Maire.

Finally this bit, which was published in the Daily Wabash Express on March 13, 1869. It was in rebuttal to something that ran in an Indianapolis paper, and I believe this part was an excerpt of the first piece. Either way, we’re settling on terms and facts here, in 1869, and that’s just charming:

This paper also has roots to 1841, but it became the Daily in the 1850s. A few years after this, the ancestor of this paper would boast one of the first female editors in the state. Mary Hannah Krout is, in fact, credited as the first woman to edit a major daily in the state. She did that for about six years before going to Chicago, and then covered the revolution in Hawai’i and wrote from London and China, as well. She was a prominent suffragist and wrote eight or nine books, too. The paper would stick around until April 29, 1903.

I wonder what the weather was like that day.

adventures / cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off
27
Mar 17

My favorite are the ‘Double Grip Bison Brand’

We went for a bike ride on Saturday. We set out with a bike club friend, who offered us a route south of town or another one that he hadn’t yet written down. And then there were the choices of which hills and which direction you wanted to go. So we chose the southern route, because who has time to write down turn-by-turn directions? And we picked the counter-clockwise route, because there were rolling hills this way or one big hill that way. So we chose what we chose and then our bike club friend realized, oh, yes, there’s this hill, too.

That’s the thing about hills. You never realize them in their intensity or in count when you aren’t actually on them.

So on the last big hill our friend, Stephen, was just in front of me and he said “Oh, yes, this hill, too. This is the worst hill on this route.”

And I said that, at the top of the climb, he would get to explain that to The Yankee, who was just a bit behind me. And after four-and-a-half miles uphill from there … he said just that. Our bikes pointed uphill for about six or seven miles today, according to the map.

Still looked fresh on our way home, though:

Last night I spent the evening hanging out with The Black Cat:

It rained a lot yesterday. I read a lot. It was a good day.

Found this today. In 1897 there was a huge cycling convention in Chicago. The Indianapolis News included this art with their January 23rd story.

There were seven bicycle factories in Indianapolis at the time the story was written, a time when the reporter felt it important to list how many “electric lights” were going to be burning — 25,000. The story ranges all over, talking of upcoming six-day races, a national meeting in St. Louis and objections by the good people of Baltimore to an ordinance outlawing coasting. It also discusses the possibility of a continuous road between New York and Chicago within 10 years. So 1907. That didn’t happen, obviously. Back in Chicago, the biggest turnout of the week was to see the women’s race, a two-hour derby where the racers covered 41 miles on a track. And it mentions the quarter-mile world record. This was a standing start event and, at the time, it was held by a John S. Johnson, who set the record in Iowa in 1893 at 28 seconds.

No one really does this distance anymore. But, the Internet tells me that Francois Pervis set the most recent world record for the 1000-meter distance from a standing start.

Someone calculated his splits and estimated that his 400-meter time would be approximately 25.754 seconds. You figure if he’d set out to do 400 meters that’d change his race and he could perhaps go a bit faster, so maybe he gets down close to 25 flat, let’s say. But, to me, that makes Johnson’s time all the more impressive. He was 120 years behind on the technology — no true aero position or a skin suit or wind tunnel training — and his time is not far off. Shame there’s no video of that on YouTube.

cycling / Friday / IU / photo / video — Comments Off
24
Mar 17

“We’re up! We’re up!”

In the studio, you sometimes find yourself standing in just the right spot with just the right light near just the right piece of glass. I looked up and there was the jib camera, just waiting patiently to be used.

I doubt that is what the jib camera had in mind.

Yes, the cameras think of things like that. If Disney can anthropomorphize all of the animals and Pixar can animate all of the toys, why isn’t one of them doing all of that with the electronics? Especially in this great age of the Internet of Things.

Yes, I imagine it would be a prequel to the Terminator series. So?

In the studio this morning, two cyclists from the Theta team stopped by for an interview and a demonstration. They put their bikes up on rollers and then invited the morning show hosts to give it a try. It was predictable and funny and cute:

Of course I rode one of the bicycles. That means house, hotels and now the workplace. You can never ride a bike indoors enough that the novelty wears off, if you ask me.

Softball game this evening, watched the right team set all kinds of crazy runs records. (They should have us back more often as we are clearly good luck.) Barbecue tonight. A bicycle ride, outdoors this time, tomorrow. Good start to the weekend, that.

adventures / Bloomington / cycling / photo / Specialized / Tuesday — Comments Off
21
Mar 17

Tuesdays, we ride

OK, OK, I’ll stop writing about the eventual oncoming of spring. We’ll just assume that it is here. Until, that is, another cold snap comes through and drops snow or ice or both on us, and then we can all grimly shiver under four layers of blankets. But until then, spring:

I mark it because more trees are now in bloom than not. And also because the almost-warmth in the air has a sense of dedication and staying power to it. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking. Who can say. What I can say is that we went for a bike ride this evening. One of the groups of the 300-strong local cycling club meets near our house for Tuesday and Thursday rides and they are a nice group of people. If the right combination of folks are there it is a challenging group. But this is early in the year and I will need a few more miles in me before I am ready to seek out something really challenging. So today we didn’t even go down the big hill — which required turning around and coming up the big hill.

It kept us fresh for a few late evening photos:

Two of the strong guys from that group were there, and we hung on to their wheels. They’d also gone down the big hill and the people behind us had, too. But I came up a little slope to get to the beginning of the group ride and knew I wasn’t trying that hill today. Sometimes you know, you know? And they say that wisdom is in listening to what you already know.

At least I said that. Perhaps others have too. Let’s see.

No, no one has ever said that. Lhamo Dondrub said something similar, and wiser: “When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new.”

But that’s the Dalai Lama for you.

I’m never this enlightened on my bicycle. Well, almost never. Usually I’m breathing too hard. After the fact, when my legs are resting and my lungs aren’t burning, sure, I can think up all sorts of things about hills. Also, hills are always much shorter in my imagination and memory than in reality, as we’ll soon see.

adventures / cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off
20
Mar 17

Notes that end the winter, and start the spring

It is the first day of spring, when everything should be new and possible, or impossibly new. It has been cold and damp and gray, because we have no respect for meteorological certainties.

But things are blooming on the ground. Last week, in the snow, the carefully installed pansies and daffodils were bent over low by a wet snow. And while that stuff is gone, the dampness is hanging over and clinging to us. The chill is made downright cold because of the damp, and upgraded to demoralizing based on the gray skies, because the gradient suggests it will never ever change.

So, on this, the weekend that prefaces spring, we had a dismaying end to winter. As for the winter itself, mild. Not so bad. A few harsh and cold days here and there and just a few small snow showers to hide from. It was, as they say, a mild one. But it has persisted enough, and the new has not yet begun with the proper zeal required by my discriminating tastes. (Rain today. Pleasant tomorrow. It is a fickle start to the season.)

So, on Saturday, I stayed inside and worked on a puzzle:

I received three puzzles at Christmastime. And I said they would be terrific winter weekend projects. As I am officially over the season, and the season has yet to be over itself, I am puzzling in protest. This is Declaration of Independence. I did the borders first, and then the historically accurate doodles along the bottom — Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams and Franklin. Then I slowed down as I worked on the signatures, because I went back to this book. It was also a gift a few years ago, about the origins and fates of the 56 men who signed the broadside.

And, of course I had a helper:

So that was Saturday. And yesterday, we actually saw the sun. It was the second time in a week, and such an exceptional occurrence that I’m now counting the times it happens each week. And I go outside. So, yesterday afternoon, a bike ride:

First one of the year. Felt like it, too!