history « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

history

history / music / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
17
Oct 17

Enjoy some pictures

Back to work today, but we’re kind of dragging after a long weekend. So there’s not a lot going on today, or maybe for much of the week, who knows. So here are some pictures of pictures.

We were out at this hipster restaurant in Louisville on Saturday evening. In the hallway there were several quality prints of old country music acts. Here’s one now:

Merle Haggard knew hard times. He was in and out of jails as a teen and finally a series of prison circumstances convinced him to turn his life around. And then he heard Johnny Cash perform at San Quentin. Haggard returned to music and launched a career that included more than three dozen number one hits. The Working Man passed away just last year.

The restaurant, I’m guessing, was named after him, too.

And here’s Ramona and Grandpa Jones:

They met at WLW, Cincinnati, in the 1940s and were married for 52 years. She was an acclaimed fiddler. He became a legend. They both starred on Hee Haw. Born Ramona Riggins, in Indiana, she remarried after Grandpa died in 1998. She played professionally for more than half a century and passed away in 2015, at 91.

And this is Johnny Cash:

That photo was taken in January 1968, the day he recorded his live record at Folsom Prison. The record was released that May and “At Folsom Prison” was, of course, a huge success and revitalized Cash’s career. It hit number one on the country charts and landed in the top 15 of the national album chart. It climbed to number seven on charts in both Norway and the U.K.

history / Indiana / IU / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
28
Sep 17

Tomorrow, we meet George Jetson

Tomorrow, the town will receive its first automated vehicle. It is said to be a bus. And you can ride in it. They gave away tickets! But if you didn’t get a ticket, there’s still a chance! They are doing walkup tours. All of this reminds me of those old newspaper stories about the first plane in town. Here, it was 1911, and the headlines read “‘Birdman’ with Machine Coming.”

“Take a ride in the air ship, and listen to the band play. Welcome to our city. There will be a hot time … stand on the hub of the wheel of the center of population and feel the world go around.”

That October, the flight crew reassembled their plane (it had to be hauled in by train) in the meadow next to our building. The paper says thousands of people came from all around to see two flights. An uneven field, a barbed wire fence and a stall on takeoff caused a crash.

The locals rushed in and started tearing apart the plane for souvenirs. One of the flight crew threatened to shoot the looters, so much of the plane, and the pilot, Horace Kearney, survived. He flew the plane again that December, but died in a plane crash the following year.

The next summer, there was another plane and another flight in Dunn Meadow, another pilot got his plane in the air. He crashed into a fence trying to dodge power lines and telephone wires.

So maybe that’s the reason they are also closing the roads for the automated bus.

The bus is expected to go up and down one of the main business roads. Today they’ve cleared off the parked cars, too. This is apparently going to be a three or four block ride up a straight street.

So, naturally, we’ve closed all of the intersecting roads, as well.

Blocks of two-lane gridlock.

You don’t want to inconvenience the robotic bus, after all.

history / IU / photo / Thursday / video — Comments Off
21
Sep 17

So your standard Thursday night, then

And now, a nice little sports show you can watch to catch up on all of the local sporting news:

I saw this print in a restaurant last weekend:

We have a running question about whether it is true that Marilyn Monroe came home from that USO tour to her new husband and said “It was so wonderful, Joe. You never heard such cheering.”

“Yes,” Joe DiMaggio said, “I have.”

It’s a great line, because Joe DiMaggio. But it was apparently first written in a Gay Talese essay, so it almost seems too perfect. The nature of quotes is a fickle thing sometimes, but if we will them into being we can sometimes will disbelief into submission.

I don’t know. I wasn’t there. It’s interesting to think that it happened, because it says so much about Marilyn Monroe. But to think that it is just a manufactured line, that she would know better, would say an awful lot more. Which is why I like to think it didn’t happen, that that wasn’t the exchange between an aging ball player and a young starlet.

I do know this. She’s just glowing in pretty much the entire photo collection, and she’s got that little dress on, in Korean, in the winter. All of the troopers are bundled up. It is February and some 30 degrees, at best. But there she was, soaking in that adoration and lust. A shot of home in a place very much not.

And of course I see this photo on the side wall of a hallway heading to a restroom.

You know, it isn’t as easy to track down the photographer of a 63-year-old photo as you might imagine. Surely the rights to that photo belong to an agency by now, but they’re all buying each other up and none of that helps gets you back to the actual photo zapper.

I think she’s singing Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend in that shot. You can see the same gesture here:

And if you watch the whole thing you might have to re-think everything you know about the 1950s.

I don’t really have a way to end this piece. I’ve looked for loops to repeat and curious, out-of-this-world trivia hooks that you wouldn’t believe. But everyone in the story is from somewhere else, or did other things. But I’ve watched that video a few times and I imagine Joe DiMaggio had a … different sort of adoring crowd.

Friday / history / I do not know what is happening. / photo / running — Comments Off
11
Aug 17

I could have used some water out by the river

I did that thing today where you look out of the window of your ninth-floor hotel room and see a nice little park below and think That’s where I’ll jog today. So it was a good thing when I packed my running shoes the night before last, really.

So I put on said shoes and the appropriate clothing and went out to the park. I figured I would do a few laps until I got in my three miles. It’d be a bit repetitious, but I’m in a park in a city I’ve only just arrived in and how badly can you get lost or otherwise out of sorts?

First I ran to the right. I quickly found I ran out of sidewalk space. OK, that’s one boundary. So I turned around, retraced a few steps and set off across the length of the park. The sidewalk in this park didn’t cover one route. There were turns and forks and the like. I managed to take all of the correct turns and, soon, I was down by the river, whereby I remembered my geography. I’m in Omaha, which is in eastern Nebraska. Which means this must be the Missouri River and that, over there, is Iowa.

Down on the river’s edge I met another jogger who told me how to get to the pedestrian bridge and then I ran to Iowa. This is the view on the bridge, over the Missouri. Nebraska is on your right, Iowa on the left:

By now I figure that I have to run at least a little ways into Iowa to make this count, so I did a mile. Here’s some evidence of that:

And at this point I figure, things feel pretty good, I’ll just keep running in the midday sun and make this a 10K. That’s 6.2 miles to you and me. I did that right about here, where the thought occurred to me that, this part of Iowa and Nebraska, looks like a lot of places I’ve seen:

So I’m on this really nice, but ultimately very quite trail, when I see, in the distance and around the bend, the top of a bridge that might be worth checking out. So I figured me and my sweaty shadow would just keep jogging:

I am in Council Bluffs, Iowa at this point. And the rules are, there are no rules:

Finally I round the bend and see the bridge. This is the Illinois Central Missouri railroad bridge. The original Omaha bridge was built in 1893, but what we see today dates to 1908:

And this is a double swing bridge. Each of the rotating spans are 521 feet long. I’m standing on the railroad tracks in Iowa looking back into Nebraska here. The Iowa side of the bridge remains open these days for river navigation. That’s why it is sideways:

The river through here was dredged in the 1940s, and a fire in the 1970s meant the eastern side, the Iowa side, couldn’t operate under its own power. They opened and closed the bridge with a bulldozer and cable after that. Here are some of the gears that would move the Iowa portion:

The bridge was shut down in 1980, but the tracks could be pressed back into service if necessary. Here is a panorama of the Iowa side of the bridge. Click to open the full-sized version in another window.

And this, standing in Iowa and looking west, is the Nebraska side of the bridge and shoreline:

And then, of course, I had to run back to Nebraska. Here’s my view from near the center of that pedestrian bridge I crossed over, this time looking upstream. Nebraska is on your left and Iowa is on your right:

And, finally, the last piece of evidence of my two-state run, the actual map:

I’ve run across a state line before, but that was in a triathlon and by design, not on a 10K impulse. I do not know what is happening.

history / markers / photo / site / Twitter / Wednesday — Comments Off
9
Aug 17

Hurry up, cookie

With this evening’s dinner came this good news:

The obvious reply is … Well?

And the obvious retort is “You got lucky numbers on the next line, pal. This is an American thing, not some ancient mystic wisdom. This is from a factory in Manitowoc, Wisconsin or some place and not from a specifically catered-to-you diving insight. We use a javascript the boss’s nephew wrote to randomize these notes, after all.”

Which is funny in its own way. The last time we ordered Chinese we got four cookies. Two cookies each! My fortunes were identical. So someone in Manitowoc needs to step it up.

In our undying effort to set the record straight, Wikipedia will now tell us where fortune cookies are made:

The largest manufacturer of the cookies is Wonton Food Inc., headquartered in Brooklyn, New York. They make over 4.5 million fortune cookies per day. Another large manufacturer are Baily International in the Midwest and Peking Noodle in the Los Angeles area. There are other smaller, local manufacturers including Tsue Chong Co. in Seattle, Keefer Court Food in Minneapolis and Sunrise Fortune Cookie in Philadelphia. Many smaller companies will also sell custom fortunes.

So be on the lookout the next time you get a fortune cookie. Then maybe you start a spreadsheet and see whose cookies have the highest rate of prophetic accuracy.

Here’s a fine looking building:

Find out more about it on the historic markers site. There are more interesting and important local places you can see right here.

And I think you should read this on Twitter:

Bill Murray sees Broadway's Groundhog Day for the First Time It’s nice to see the public-facing Bill Murray have such a nice year. Seems the least the universe can do.

I hope he didn’t steal my luck, though. The fortune cookie came to me, after all.