We’ve come to it, finally, a day of nothing but filler. It was cold and dreary and I didn’t go outside much and inside I probably reflected the same mood and so maybe it is for the best if we just jump to this stuff and then see how we feel about tomorrow. Don’t worry, this is quick and informative and fun!
So we go back 103 years to see what was in the local paper on May 14, 1917. Because it’s worth it to remember our struggles are not our own, seldom unique, and they’re going to get looked at like this one day. So be mindful.
The Bloomington Evening-World, imagine picking up this big smeared piece of ink in the morning and wondering what they’re going to be preaching to you about today. Food juggling:
Jugglers most harmed.
Oh, they’re preaching at me about food. How exciting. How things never change. Thankfully things did change in newspaper technology, photograph and layout software. But the didn’t any better in 1917, so this was the standard look. All that writing. So many words. So much of it vague as to be useless, or at least that’s the read from our far remove.
When I started looking for a paper to study today I considered fish wraps from all of the places I’d care about. I wanted it to be something at or on this date. And I didn’t want to look at a 25 page paper. But I didn’t want it to be dense, either. So, naturally, I chose a dense four-pager. Anyway, let’s dive in.
They were going to be a part of the famed ambulance service:
Stella Belmont appears in a couple of different newspapers in the teens, but then she disappears. I assume it means she married, or retired to a quieter life, and didn’t have some horrible aeronaut accident. Surely that would have been covered. Nevertheless, this sounds fun. Watch for it:
We got this war on, stop making things!
And now for your straw hat.
You think those could make a comeback this year? I figure if we keep asking for enough years we’ll eventually get it right.
Page two has your reminder that the same people have been making the same argument for more than a century. And it’s always the same sort of vague and ill-formed argument. The construction peters out after the premise: You shouldn’t. Why? Well, that’s not really important. What’s important is you shouldn’t!
The reasons are pretty simple, really, someone doesn’t want you to have what you have, or what they have, or what they can’t have. And then they try to couch it in some moralistic terms. I wonder if it was as tiresome then as it is today.
In the column right next to that:
On page three, while you’re still rolling your eyes from that bit on page two, there’s something else I’m sure they don’t want you to have. But the advertisers certainly do, and so does every woman or man who was remembering how they heated water the old way:
Corn substitutes work for feed in a pinch, at least through the war. And better for you to eat the corn than your livestock. Life has always been about compromises in the moment, I guess. It’s easy to forget that when things are going well.
Western Union by now was doing lifestyle advertisements. Gone were the days of telling you about how telegrams delivered the news from here to there as a miracle:
And, on page four, a lot of briefs. It’s always nice to see the local campus doing it’s part:
Jordan Field was said to be where the Union’s parking lot is today. And I’ve put that lot on the bottom of the frame, so that would have been right in here. They planted corn and spuds. Look at all of the things that have sprouted up:
Arbutus is the campus yearbook, by the way. I guess everyone in town knew that. It’s interesting that the town’s paper felt the need to include the applications in their copy.
Kenyon Stevenson would leave school, go to the war as a lieutenant in an artillery unit, the 21st Field Artillery and Fifth Division. He fired his guns in France and Luxembourg, in heavy fighting near the end of the war. He came home, got married, finished school, raised a family, wrote two army unity histories and some other books. He worked as a copywriter in Pennsylvania, a director of advertising, got caught up in the Great Depression and went into sales in Ohio. His last child just passed away in 2018.
I found an Edwin Sellers, but the dates don’t quite add up, so I believe it’s the wrong man. Ditto Margaret Munier, who probably married and had a fine Roaring Twenties. Joseph A. Wright, now there’s another individual from here by that same name in the 19th century. The older one has some things named after him around here. (Indeed, it seems he was one of the first 10 students at Indiana Seminary, the first iteration of IU.) He became a governor and he, understandably, sucks up all the search engine oxygen. No idea if they are related.
Joseph Piercy retired in 1938, and passed away in 1943. His wife and daughter both taught at IU.
A congressman, and a judge, and he respected a man’s gardening needs:
Can’t let the university’s potato and corn crop outpace the local bar!
One of our god-nieces will soon celebrate her birthday. Her big sister — and I think they have the dynamic where they work and play well together, while also each delighting in pushing the other’s buttons, but if one of them gets picked on by someone else there will be H- E- double-hockey-sticks to pay — asked us to make a video. It was a sweet thought by an older sister, and so we made a little video.
We would have made the video anyway, because the kid can’t have a proper birthday party under stay-at-home orders, but mostly I want to point out how awesome the pre-teen is in all of this. They’re both swell, really. Cool kids, except for the pushing-each-others-buttons part, but I understand that’s part of the sibling deal.
Anyway, all of that to say there were multiple takes of this video. And there were outtakes. Here is one clip, and to honor the motif of multiple takes, I have uploaded and deleted and re-uploaded several different versions of this, which is brilliant in a meta-sort of way.
Right after this The Yankee says “I didn’t know which key to start in.”
Kazoos, y’all.
And then she asks if I want to start the video over again, because she’s considerate like that. I got to use one of my most recent trusty throwaway lines. I can handle it; I’m a professional.
It was funny and we’re still giggling about it and I could watch her laugh all day.
Besides, if you don’t emerge from their stay-at-home orders without at least a half-dozen new stories and three traditions and 15 new inside jokes then you’re just not enjoying your time.
Let’s look at the paper. We’re falling through a rift in the Internet’s space-time continuum, which intersects with so many rabbit holes, and we’re falling out, oddly enough, in this same town, on this same date, 111 years ago, 1909.
Yes, friends, people read the newspaper, even when it looked like this. And, for 1909, and for a very basic rag such as the Evening World, this has a lot of design elements on the front page. And front page ads! ¡Qué horror!
People were starved for information, as you’ll see, or they just wanted to take a break from whatever else they had to do, so they pored over every word. Like … the only sports story, and one of the few news pieces in the whole paper.
It goes on like that for a while. Coach Roach didn’t say the victors, in-state rival Purdue, were better at baseball. His players were just distracted, see. Wommins. Perfume. Fluffy clothes. Have you seen their corseted figures? And also the fans, including the “girls,” which are fine enough for a university, should have been there to cheer his men on the diamond. His lovestruck, distracted men.
Skel Roach played professional baseball for 10 years, including one game in the bigs, for the Chicago Orphans, which was three years prior to a newspaper re-nicknamed them the Cubs. And, you know, baseball is wild about statistics … let’s see if we can take a quick detour … Orphans beat the Washington Senators 6-3 in his one game. Roach was the winning pitcher. He threw a complete game, which didn’t even merit mention back then, he allowed three runs on 13 hits and was never seen again. Couldn’t agree on a salary with the club. He got shipped to the Orphans because their star pitcher was hurt. He was 27 at the time, and he played for six more years, but that was his high water mark as a player, a career that tallied 133 wins in the minors and across the prairie leagues. He coached throughout the midwest, studied the law and practiced in Chicago.
He got married just two months after this story about lovey dovey players not being hardened enough for matters of sport was published. It was his first year on campus, and he’d stay for three seasons, practicing law in Chicago around the demands of baseball. Apparently his time at IU marked the Hoosiers’ first success on the diamond, this criticism notwithstanding. He’d go on to practice law for 35 years and serve several terms as a judge in Illinois. He died in 1958.
Edwin Shelmadine was fighting for himself, and everyone like him. And he wasn’t going to give up.
Congress approved the increase for Shelmadine the previous March alongside a host of other veterans and widows. He was upgraded to $30 a month. His obituary talks about how he was hanging on to sign that first pension check, taking medicine he didn’t like to live for that happy moment, and he did, but only just. He went out for a buggy ride that same day with a friend and died.
His unit, the 48th Regiment of the Indiana Infantry, fought at Vicksburg, Chattanooga, Missionary Ridge, was a part of Sherman’s March to the Sea and the Carolinas Campaign. I wonder how many of those he was a part of.
Curious thing: the roster for the unit lists an Edward Shishmadine, who mustered in as a private in December 1861 and left as a sergeant in 1865. His obit, where he’s Edwin Shilmade, (just like the paper and the Congressional record) says he mustered into the service in October 1861. What’s a few months and a completely different name at a remove of 58 years?
Shelmadine was a shoemaker. His obit tells us he had three wives. His first died during the war, then came a separation and his last wife survived him. Apparently he met all three in the same house. Presumably not at the same time.
I wonder what people from 1909 would think about the steps you have to undertake to offload a house these days:
Here’s that spot in the summer of 2014:
I wonder if it is any of those houses. Probably not.
Anyway, more from this paper after an advertisement from … the same paper …
Royal merged with Fleischmann’s and a few others to create the giant Standard Brands on the way to becoming the modern version of Nabisco in 1981. Royal is still marketed today.
Those are the most interesting things on the front page. Told you it was a rag. Well, there was a criminal conviction. A gentleman found his wife and another man in a hotel, which probably means a rough shack just off the road in 1909. He killed the other guy and pleaded insanity. Six of the jurors agreed, but the other three weren’t buying it and manslaughter was listed as a compromise conviction. His name was Good, even if neither he nor his wife particularly were at the fateful moment. But I don’t know what happened to him after his conviction and his wife isn’t name. No story, no clipping. And, really, that completes the interesting portion of the front page.
Let’s go inside!
Page two is a serial part of a feature following Theodore Roosevelt’s African safari. It’s literally history in the sense that, if you’ve read Roosevelt, or about him, you know that material. (If you haven’t, I recommend Edmund Morris’ Roosevelt trilogy. There aren’t many people, even presidents, who deserve that much copy from one author, but Roosevelt may, and Morris is the man for the job. Terrific work.) Moving on!
Page two also had a piece about a princess of Prussia who had to soon decide on a husband. Her family was going to be out of power soon anyway and she spent the rest of her days making socialite-style appearances and I’m sure it was all very lovely and worthwhile to the people in this area as there were a fair amount of German immigrants, but it seems a bit odd and gossipy, today, to speculate on a 16-year-old girl’s marital ambitions.
But this … There must have been some story here.
There’s just something so precise about this little brief. Not just the chairs, but the 114 of them. And there’s something so declaratively stern about that. It’s almost like the paper is saying “We’re too chuffed to bring it up again, but you know what happened, dear reader.” Surely people read about this in a previous issue.
It’d be a fool’s errand to try to figure out what happened, or whatever became of the chairs.
I’m not that foolish.
Page three had a serial installment of a book that was published in 1902. Why people are reading about it here, in the paper, in 1909 escapes me. They could just as easily order it from Amazon. The chapter in this edition of the paper is about a guy loading up a board of directors. And the book is called The Minority, so I just assume it goes on and on for pages about proxy votes and what not. None of the dialog is particularly interesting, so I won’t quote it. But, if you’re intrigued by my description …
The back page of the paper has a lot of those society listings which just seem to grow more odd to our modern eyes with every passing year. This note was one of them.
No idea what became of St. John, but I am sure she was a proud mother. Regester graduated from law school in 1905, ran for judge a few times and finally sat on the bench late in his career. He was also a state lawmaker and just had the look of an important man.
I wonder if you had to pay extra for all of that stuff around your ad:
Several new stores had recently opened. Most of the proprietors only shelled out for the brief text mentions. Not these guys.
No idea how long their store lasted. They had a great spot though, two blocks from the courthouse at the center of it all. There’s an auto parts place there now.
Did someone say biscuits?
If that illustration makes you uncomfortable, welcome to the precursor of General Mills! Gold Brand started after they won some big flour awards in 1880, so the label still had a meaning, perhaps. So grand is General Mills’ reach that on Wikipedia the subhead “Aeronautical Research Division and Electronics Division” comes before the diversification subhead.
All of it started with a guy who was a soldier and a businessman and a politician and had a great name, Cadwallader Colden Washburn, who worked alongside a businessman with a very regular-sounding name, John Crosby. They built something big. One of their successors, a Minnesota man named James Ford Bell, got the job the old-fashioned way, nepotism. Bell started working there in 1901. When his old man died in 1915 he became the vice president. In 1928 Bell started General Mills. He’d also play a part in Herbert Hoover’s European Hunger Relief Mission in 1918, worked in the FDA and perfected the look of a gangster. There’s a library and a museum at his university named after him. Big duck hunter too.
You know what sounds like a duck call, if you work at it a great deal? Kazoos.
Last night I held another IUZoomington meeting with a true television legend, Rick Karle. The man won 24 Emmy awards in sports and then decided he’d go over and try some news. There’s more to it than that, there always is. But he’s one of those people students need to hear from. He’s been doing it longer than they’ve been alive, after all.
I told the story about the first time I met him was on the phone, when I was in undergrad. I was calling in scores from a women’s volleyball or basketball game or something. It was a big deal. An OMG, Rick Karle, kind of deal. But, then, he’s from a place where, as a colleague of ours put it, the people on the local news are among the community’s celebrities. And it’s true. Also, the guy’s just good at what he does. Always has been.
So it was nice to see him last night. He talked about what he sees from interns and new reporters coming into the business, and what our gang should be doing to show off the right sorts of things.
Most of the people in the session tonight were sophomores and juniors, but they, and the seniors, all lost a lot in having their campus experience shut down in March. The next four or five weeks of TV would have been really valuable for them, so I’m trying to make it up to them some kind of way.
It’s really nice that so many of the people I know in the working media are so generous with their time to talk with them. (This is the third or fourth one of these I’ve done in the last few weeks, and some of my colleagues in the school are doing others, besides.) It’s a small business, and no one ever forgets where they came from, which is a nice perk.
Let’s look at the paper. We’re going back to this day 103 years ago, which seems apropos, in some respects given our particular moment in time. And this day 103 years ago, it was getting serious.
The sub chaser was the Smith, and it escaped the night. Sub chasers, I’ve just learned, were small, light and fast vessels. They built about 300 of them for U.S. service, and more for France. And there isn’t an easily found repository of what each did. But I did find one reference to the Smith, which sailed on an Alaskan patrol in 1923, so it survived the war.
The subhead of that story talked about the 20,000 Germans killed along the front at Rheims, 10,000 captured and 50,000 injured. Europe was about to enter the third year of this thing, and that’s the second item on the American story. It was a war brutal on a scale we can scarcely understand today. This would have probably been the beginning of the Second Battle of the Aisne, the Neville Offensive. This part was meant to be a 48-hour effort. It launched on April 16th, and lasted into the second week of May. The idea was an entire push across the lines in France, trying to knock back the Germans. Tactically successful, but without reaching its objectives. The Germans had something like 163,000 casualties from this push. The British, French and Russians had something like 350,000.
Of course no one could see that on April 17th, and certainly not from this far away. Across the way there was a message from President Wilson. War was coming. There was no escaping it now.
In between, a student got picked up, and written about in a way that would never happen today. Also, he wore his hair in a pompadour, which is really how you knew something was the matter with the guy.
There’s also a note that the high school was going to show a film, “How to Garden.” And the Republicans and the Democrats couldn’t get along in Indianapolis. There’s a note from a murder trial in a neighboring county, and a piece of propaganda about signing up for the Army and a railway man hurt his hand. But this brief talked about a really bad day.
On the second page there is finally a photograph. It’s showing you how they load lumber in Kentucky.
There are two fashion photos on that page. Then, as now, it probably only applied to a thin slice of the readership. There’s far too much worry about the war, about growing things, about how trains work, for people in their readership to spend time with handsome frocks of satin, georgette sleeves and satin collars and cuffs.
This is across the street from our building at campus.
In 1928 the Ritz Theatre was built in that spot. Later renamed the Von Lee, it had three screens. They played movies there until 2000. Now there are campus offices and a restaurant in the shell of the building. It is, quite literally, a facade.
Fred Bates Johnson did it all.
Really, all of it. He was a school superintendent, a journalist, a disgruntled journalist …
He felt this was still not enough and thought journalism was a “chancy” profession and that courses should be offered to train people in the field. He suggested to the late Dr. William Lowe Bryan, then president of Indiana University, that the university start a school of journalism.
After a faculty study of the proposal, Dr. Bryan asked Mr. Johnson to return to the I.U. campus to be the university’s first journalism professor.
Although a course in instruction in news gathering was taught in the English department for a short time during the 1890’s, Fred Bates Johnson succeeded in getting “The Course in Journalism” added to the curriculum of Indiana University during the year 1907-1908. Also at that time the university published a suggested four-year liberal program as a preparation for journalism.
So he became a journalism professor. Then a lawyer, a soldier, a judge advocate and a member of the Public Service Commission. So he basically started the journalism program that would, in 107 years or so, become The Media School. Thanks, ‘fessor.
And finally, remembering this is 1917 …
Two decades prior, the G.A.R. had hundreds of posts all over this state, and more than 400,000 members across the country. Three years after this notice Indianapolis hosted the national encampment, one of several Indy hosted, but the numbers were falling away fast. There were just 103,258 members remaining by 1920. In 1949, also in Indy, the G.A.R. held their last reunion.
Earlier in 1949 the last Hoosier soldier, 102-year-old John Christian Adams, passed away. (Adams was from West Virginia and moved to Indiana well after the war, but they count him.) The Harry Truman White House sent a wreath.
At that last encampment in 1949 six old men showed up, including James Hard and Albert Woolson. There was a parade. They reminisced. The Marine Corps Band played Retreat. Hard was the last combat soldier. He apparently fought at First Bull Run, Sharpsburg, Chancellorsville, and Fredericksburg. And it is said that he met Abraham Lincoln at a White House reception. Hard died in 1953. Woolson was a drummer boy, but his unit never saw action. He lived until 1956 and was briefly eulogized by Dwight Eisenhower.
You have to move forward a long way before the past is really the past. It’s always been that way, we’ve just never been really keen on accepting it.
If you unpack that tweet as a thread, you’ll see a collection of marquees around the country. The Buskirk-Chumley’s signage is pretty terrific, and that is a wonderful quote.
Fun fact of trivia: I walked in there Thursday of last week to pick up some Will Call tickets for a show last Friday night as the show was being postponed. Sometimes you can only smile, and so that’s what I did. The woman working there at the moment didn’t know anything yet. She said they hoped to know something soon about make up dates. I said that’d be nice, and hopefully so, but I think we both knew it wouldn’t be tomorrow or the next day, like she said. I wished her well, and good luck with all of the other customers I was sure they’d hear from, and gave her a smile as I walked back outside.
That’s not being a helper in the sense that Mr. Rogers taught us about, but I’d like to be a person who doesn’t cause other problems, which is one of his less well-known quotes, I’m sure.
At the moment, their website says they plan to reopen on May 11th. Wouldn’t that be nice? Maybe the first movie in May, or whenever they get back, will be Home Alone.
If I may sum up a convoluted website I just read about the place, it was originally built as the Indiana Theater and used for vaudeville entertainment and silent movies, in the 1920s. It lived on as a movie theater until 1995, when it became a performing arts center, so a little bit of everything these days. (We were supposed to see Guster last week.) It is also on the National Register of Historic Places.
Let’s fall back in time and look a little more at this place. May as well, we’re homebound anyway, right?
The time was 1917, the paper was the Bloomington Evening World, a paper that dates back to 1892, and ran under this name until 1943, when it merged with the coolest paper name in town, the Bloomington Telephone. A few mergers and name changes later, and it’s lineage is loosely still found in the modern Herald-Times, which is being almost stripped for parts today.
I’m looking at this issue for the first time as I create the screen captures, so I’ve no idea where this is going or what we’ll find … but on this day in 1917 …
The Campbell’s ad, which is so scandalously run on the front page — it isn’t a scandal, and it wasn’t a few years ago when some papers returned to that historic trend — invites you to come into their shop on the west side of the courthouse. Actually, the ad doesn’t say where it is. Everyone just knew. A man named Noble Campbell ran that concern. He was an IU graduate, sat on the library board, married well and eventually retired to Florida, where he died in the 1950s. I see on one site that he “was also connected with the motion picture business.” Whether that means he made wardrobe or just liked movies, we don’t know.
It’s fun to imagine though. I’m going with the silent, silent investor type. The guy the organized guys were afraid of.
They just put all your news in the old papers:
Another front page ad, where most assuredly people gathered for batteries and to gossip about that front page brief:
The Willard franchise was about 20 years old, but already a national concern. I’m not sure why the character is shooting his own sign there. Anyway, by the 1930s there were more than 5,000 shops under their banner. They’d eventually buy a radio station, built batteries that powered submarines and some of the sort you could hold in your hand. Things dried up in the 1950s and 1960s. A few years after this ad J.W. Farris also got into plumbing, heating and air. That was probably a booming series of career choices for a man in the 19-teens. Where it led him next, we don’t know.
Where that store was then? Condos today, just a few blocks from the theater, above.
There are four pages of the paper, and a lot of it points to the agricultural audience of the time, and some what we would today call syndicated content, or sponsored content, or “there weren’t a lot of people involved in writing this thing, perhaps.” You’ll be happy to hear there’s advice for how women can remove any corn, and a “Write Now” to receive the secret to masking gray hair. It’s not a new concern.
There’s also this, just hanging out on the bottom of the third page:
It’s just a hundred years ago, but they were still looking for people to settle land. In that time the building they wanted you to write to, the Traction-Terminal Building in Indy, came and went. It was the train station, and then a bus station. They razed it in the 1970s. Today there’s a Hilton on that spot.
At the student building on campus you could settle in for a play with a legitimate silent film star:
She was about to turn 21, so her audience looked a lot like her. She’d been in 125 movies and shorts by then, too. She acted regularly until 1930. This was one of her last films.
She got married, got divorced, different than the one above, and then the talkies came. She only appeared in three of them before moving to radio and Broadway. She worked in retail and then showed up in two television shows and one movie from 1958-1960. This was her last appearance, on The Many Loves of Doobie Gillis.
Arrivederci, Mrs. Dowell! It’s a quick part, and how it came to her is probably one of those small non-mysteries from 70 years ago we’ll never know, meaning a quick glance of the Internet didn’t have an essay or comment from a great-niece. In the late 1960s film scholars and, eventually, documentarians, rediscovered her career. She lived long enough to see all of that and died, at 90, in 1986.
The society notes tell of us a student recovering from appendicitis, a man who had lung fever, various family visits, and the return home of Howard M. Tourner, a jeweler. He had been out of town in Washington D.C., where he saw the second inauguration of Woodrow Wilson. He had a shop downtown, though it might not have been downtown back then. He played and taught the flute. He passed away in 1941.
On the front page there’s a paragraph about the signs of spring. The university’s baseball team had taken the field for practice, and boys could be seen playing marbles in the streets. On the back page there was the weather forecast: “Generally fair tonight.”
Got it a little present last night at the hardware store. We needed parts, and this was one of the next things I was going to acquire anyway.
It was this or a router. And I think I’ll use a Kreg jig kit more often. Because, having spent more than a few minutes on Pinterest, I have come to realize that the entire DIY industry is entirely a front to prop up sales of Kreg products. But now I can make pocket joinery and there’s a custom drawer build in my future. (When I finish another pre-existing project or two.)
This morning I repaired two panels of my folks’ fence that were felled in Monday’s storm. It seems as if this fence has been there a while. It was, in fact, in the yard when they bought the place. And it seems that if a determined wind blows through the neighborhood one or more of the brackets holding one or more of the panels is going to fail. So they are replacing the thing bit by plastic bit, basically.
These two will, hopefully, be some of the last repairs required on this fence before they replace the whole thing. We’re down to spare part repairs, otherwise. As with anything, you get better at it over time. That first panel, on the left, took a long while. The second one went much faster because I knew what I was doing. Not, necessarily that I knew how to do it right, mind you.
Still, I’m not going to become a fence installer when I grow up.
While we’re standing in line at the concessions stand — where you buy tickets now because box offices are for oldz, and movie theaters are full of cost efficiency consultants these days — we saw this. Two of the three kids working working behind the counter were fussing with one, and off to the side I saw the price. Someone said something snarky. Probably it was me. The Yankee, always ready for a joke, gave me the I-have-a-reply look and her line let me say “Of course I’m not going to buy one because I’m a grownup.”
The guy in front of us looked back over his shoulder and smiled: Ha! Good one! And then he bought one.
He also asked them to not fill it with popcorn and his drink.
I bet he could have purchased the same thing at Bed Bath & Beyond for half the price. (It’s in the Beyond section, if you were wondering.)
We visited a downtown Italian restaurant for dinner this evening. We’ve been there before, and it hasn’t let us down yet. You’d think, Italian? In small town Alabama? Yes, my friend, but this is Florence.
An Italian immigrant named Ferdinand Sannoner, of Livorno, surveyed all of this land 200 years ago and he named it after Florence, which is just 50-some miles from his hometown. Part of his payment was in land. He died and is buried in Memphis, where his grave sat unmarked for almost 120 years. Today his old property, here, is home to the public library, and a very short walk away is the restaurant where we had dinner. Maybe he’d like that. Maybe he’d like the food. Who can say what a man born in 18th century Italy who lived in the 19th century American southeast would like today.
He’d probably think this was cool, though:
Well, once you explained who Hemingway was. Elvis? Transcends time. That’s the only way we can keep the artful graffiti honest. The restaurant was established in 1996.
I wonder what was there before that. Someone break out the ouji board. Let’s ask Sannoner.
