history « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

history

history / IU / Monday / photo — Comments Off
6
Nov 17

The beautiful trouble of autumn, Part II

About two weeks ago I wrote:

It seems like that time of year where you try to catalog the changing of the leaves, because they’re pretty, but because you want them to stay.

Well, this is most definitely that week. So let’s do that this week, let’s document autumn. These are all on campus, and in the Old Crescent:

Franklin Hall, where I work:

The Rose Well House:

Used to be the big thing, you’d take your date to the Well House and get a kiss at midnight. The fronts and ornamental stone fixtures from the Old College Building were built into this structure in 1907 and 1908. It’s named after Theodore F. Rose, class of 1875, who chaired the project and paid for it in honor of his graduating class. He was a lawyer, but made his money in natural gas, after which he became one of those people who sits on the board of this and is the president of that, including the university’s board of trustees, over which he presided. He died in 1919, while working toward the university’s centennial. I’ve been reading about him in an alumni magazine of that year, an almost-100-year-old magazine. We’re going to celebrate the bicentennial soon, and I have the good fortune to work with some of the people in that office in a very small way. From the other side of the Well House:

In the background, you can see Maxwell Hall, which is an administration building.

The Richardsonian Romanesque-style building was built in 1890 and later named after Dr. David Maxwell, who is considered the father of the university. He was a physician and a lawmaker, and another president of the university board. We’re surrounded by history in the Old Crescent. And beautiful trees, too.

history / IU / photo / podcast / running / Wednesday — Comments Off
25
Oct 17

“Have you seen any . . . Martians?”

I produced a podcast today. Actually I just ran the board for it, but some people use those words interchangeably. They shouldn’t — and I’m on a mission to civilize! — but they do. I simply sat behind an Axia console and made sure the levels were consistent and the computer was recording. I did this because the students who normally do it couldn’t join the production today, so I sat with the dean and his two guests from another part of the university:

And they talked about Orson Welles — Indiana University possesses what is believed to be the most extensive collection of Welles performances — and, specifically, the War of the Worlds. You can hear the show here:

And you can find the whole collection here.

After work there was just time enough for a cold evening run:

I’ve found it takes about three-quarters of a mile to run off the initial chill. I’ve found that there’s a particular dip in the path behind the house where the cold air coming off the creek pushes up out of the trees and drops the temperature by about five degrees. And I’ve found that I can run in shorts and a t-shirt, but I’m going to be using gloves a lot.

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.