Seeing the Elephant

At Dunkard Church - Antietam

My wife has long been after me to read Tony Horowitz’s Confederates in the Attic (1998), and only before a planned visit to the Civil War battlefields at Sharpsburg (Antietam), in Maryland, and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania last fall, did I finally accept her challenge.  I don’t know why it took me so long to read, but it did, and reading it caused me to reflect again on this lamentable chapter in American history.

So you may ask - what does the title of this posting have to do with the Civil War?  Actually, it is 19th century American slang for encountering the unknown with a sense of anxiety and desolation.  Civil War soldiers often “saw the elephant” upon entering combat for the very first time; their eyes opened wide to the very real horrors and blood lust on the field of battle.  I have visited many Civil War battlefields over the years, but two battles - Antietam, fought in and around Sharpsburg, in northern Maryland, and Gettysburg, not far away in southern Pennsylvania - stand out in my memory.  I have wandered both of these battlefields in different seasons and under different circumstances, and I am always struck by their bucolic serenity, which make the past horrors all the more inconceivable.  Yet it was during visits to these particular battlefields in particular, that in some small way, I was perhaps able to see the elephant for the first time.  My eyes were truly opened to the carnage that occurred there so long ago.

The Battle of Antietam, on September 17, 1862, finally spelled defeat for General Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia during its Maryland Campaign of 1862, its  first major invasion of Union territory.   Following his victory at Second Manassas, in northern Virginia, in the closing days of August 1862, Lee and his army crossed the Potomac River with the hope that the Confederacy might convince Britain and France to grant it diplomatic recognition.  Lee also thought that by subduing Maryland, which still sanctioned slavery, and taking the war north and out of Virginia, Maryland might finally throw its support to the Confederacy.  During the first two weeks of September, Lee divided his army which advanced against Federal strongholds at Harpers Ferry, Hagerstown and in the gaps of South Mountain.  The Army of the Potomac chased after the invaders and caught up with them at South Mountain, west of Frederick.  Unable to hold off the Federal counteroffensive there, Lee and his army fell back to the small town of Sharpsburg to take a stand among the swales and valleys along the banks of Antietam Creek. The Army of the Potomac caught up with Lee there on September 15.  Both armies maneuvered into position, and on the morning of the 17th, the bloodshed began.  By the end of the day, both armies had suffered a total of 23,000 casualties, making this battle the bloodiest single day of combat in American history.  The Army of Northern Virginia was forced to retreat across the nearby Potomac River into the Shenandoah Valley of central Virginia to lick its wounds and regroup.  The war would continue to rage in Virginia for another eight months before Lee was able to bring the war once agin to the north.

In June 1863 Lee and his army crossed the Potomac River near Sharpsburg and Williamsport, in Maryland, and advanced north through Hagerstown to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.  Here Lee divided his army with the intention of destroying the key railroad bridge across the Susquehanna River, at Harrisburg, while combing southern Pennsylvania for much need supplies before turning his attention toward Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington.  The Army of the Potomac, now under the command of General George Meade, left Virginia and gave chase, catching up with Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia at Gettysburg on July 1, 1863.  Lee consolidated his forces here and took his stand.  These two great armies would do battle in and around the town for the next three days.  More men (over 172,000) fought here, and there were  more casualties (over 51,000) than in any other battle before or since on North American soil.  The Army of Northern Virginia was forced to abandon its second invasion of the north and it retreated south into Virginia.  Gettysburg would mark the high water mark of the Confederacy.  Still, the war would rage for another two years and countless men - Union and Confederate - would see the elephant before it was all over.  For far too many it was perhaps the last thing they ever saw on this good earth.

After reading Horwitz’s book, I decided it was time for me to revisit these two battlefields with eyes wide open . . . perhaps seeing the elephant for myself for the very first time.  What I know about these battles has been learned from reading history books.  Fact and figures.  It was time to have another look.  So how did I plan to look at the Battle of Antietam and the Battle of Gettysburg with new eyes?.  It would help if I considered what others saw during and in the aftermath of these two great battles.  There are two iconic photographs, what Tony Horwitz properly characterizes as “still deaths,” one from each of these battles, which have come to represent, at least for me, the sad tragedy of the Civil War.  I returned to these battlefields last fall armed with these photographs in an attempt to understand what they show us, what they tell us.

The first of these photographs was taken in the aftermath of the  confrontation in the forest and farmland along the banks of Antietam Creek, in the immediate vicinity of the small German Baptist Brethren, or Dunkard church, on the Hagerstown Pike.  It shows the bloated corpses of the battle dead scattered across a stubbled cornfield near the church. The eve of the battle found Confederate infantry and artillery positioned here.  The next morning  the church served as the focal point of several Federal assaults against Lee’s left flank by General Joe Hooker’s troops.  During the battle, the Dunkard church was used as a Confederate field hospital, and later as a Federal embalming station when the armies gathered to bury their dead.   It is ironic that a church belonging to a congregation that opposed all wars, would become a symbol of the slaughter on this killing field in northern Maryland.

Glass plate photography, which was first introduced in the United States in 1856, quickly replaced the older tintype and daguerreotype silvered copper plate methods.
One of the first American photographers to employ this process was Alexander Gardner, a protégée of Mathew Brady, who operated a studio in Washington, DC and who became well-known for documenting wartime life in and around the capital.  Gardner and his assistant hurried to Sharpsburg with their equipment and arrived in time to make a photographic documentary of the battlefield.  It was this photograph taken near the Dunkard church, and others like it taken in the days immediately after the battle, that brought home to the general public, both North and South, the graphic realities and horrors of the war.  They are the ghost images of the battle, reminding us that battlegrounds are not scenic landscapes scattered with monuments to the units that fought there, that the sole purpose of the weapons on display in museums was to kill and maim.  Casualties were no longer a toting up of nameless numbers in newspaper reports, figures often fudged downward by commanders.  Antietam was the first battlefield to be photographed before the dead could be buried.    

The second photograph, also taken by Alexander Gardner, is perhaps one of the best known images from the Battle of Gettysburg . . and one that has been steeped in controversy since the day it was taken over 148 years ago. My introduction to this image was during my first visit to the Gettysburg battlefield in the summer of 1965, when I became fascinated with Devil’s Den, an aggregation of huge granite boulders at the base of Little Round Top which marked the southernmost extension of the battle lines during the second and third days of the battle, on July 2-3, 1863.  While climbing around these boulders, as a young energetic boy is wont to do, I came across a stone wall erected in a crevice between two boulders.  Nearby was a plaque describing how Devil’s Den had been a Confederate redoubt during the battle and from where Southern sharpshooters picked off Federal soldiers ensconced along the summit of Little Round Top.  And there was the photograph of a dead young sharpshooter crumbled behind that very same wall.  It haunts me to this very day; amidst the wholesale slaughter of that battle, here a single soldier fought and died alone.

After the battle, a Federal artillery commander on Little Round Top rode through Devil’s Den and reported a dead Confederate soldier lying on his back behind a makeshift stone wall.  The story goes that the young lad did not have any visible wounds having probably been killed by the concussion of an artillery shell landing near his position.  Around this time Alexander Gardner and his assistant arrived in Gettysburg to photograph the aftermath of the battle much as he had done some months before at Fredericksburg and at Antietam.  Gardner later claimed in his Sketch Book (1866) that while accompanying a burial party scouting the southern end of the battlefield, he chanced across that dead Confederate soldier who became the subject of "Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter," one of his most famous and enduring images.

Returning to Gettysburg in November 1863 to record the dedication of the national cemetery, Gardner recalled his subsequent visit to Devil’s Den only to discover the bleaching skeleton of the dead sharpshooter.  Some historians have taken Gardner to task for allegedly staging the photograph for dramatic effect, claiming that he had taken another photograph of the same body in a different location before dragging the corpse to the stone wall in Devil’s Den to create a better composition. If true, Gardner was not the first or last photographer to do this.  Still, the image, staged or not, is a haunting one of a young soldier who died alone and ostensibly forgotten. 

Strange how today we are spared the images of death and destruction in Afghanistan, and Iraq where brave young soldiers are seeing their own elephants.  Yet there are very few ghost images of the battles fought in these distant lands; nothing to really show and tell us about the men and women who are fighting and dying there.  They are faceless wars; we have returned to the day when casualties are once again simple statistics.  How easy it is to lose sight of the horror of war.

Ning Dreams of Rockfish

给一个人一条鱼 你可以喂他一天。教人以渔 你可以喂他一辈子。

[ Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.]

 An annual rite of spring is to meet friends on Tilghman Island, on Maryland’s Eastern shore, and set out in search of trophy rockfish (striped bass) on the Chesapeake Bay.  I was under the weather and missed last year’s outing, so I was looking forward to this trip with great anticipation.

We boarded the Nancy Ellen, a 46-footer, at Knapps Narrow Marina and by 6:15am Captain Bill Fish was motoring our party into the Bay and setting a course for a fishing  grounds known as “The Gooses” some 25 miles to the south.  It was a beautiful morning - blue skies and blue water - and the day promised only to get better.

Joining us on this trip was Ning, a lovely 78 year old gentleman from the Hunan province of southeastern China.  He and his wife have been visiting one of our party on the final leg of their first and probably only trip outside of China.  Ning had never been on a fishing trip like this before and we all hoped we could give him an up close and personal encounter with a magnificent trophy rockfish.

Unfortunately, Ning does not speak a word of English nor do any of us know any Chinese, yet we conversed with our smiles and with several ‘thumbs up” and other universal hand gestures.  How I wished I had a chance to ask him about his life in China.  Just imagine the history he has seen in his lifetime.  The beginning of the Chinese republic under Sun Yat-sen and the Kuomintang; Mao’s Long March from Hunan and the long Japanese occupation before and during World War II; the years of xenophobic communism with its Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guard; and finally the gradual opening to the West and its evolution into an economic powerhouse with the onset of market socialism.  I was satisfied just to watch him as he scanned the Bay and the distant shoreline . . . and dreamed of rockfish. 

It was a slow day for fishing; we have had early spells of warm weather this spring and it has interrupted the normal biorhythms of the fish.  They have not been seen where they are suppose to be and in the normally expected numbers.  We tracked several balls of baitfish, mostly menhaden, but the rockfish were few and far between.  Trolling several lines at depths of 25 to 40 feet, we watched and waited for the telltale clicks announcing a fish on the line.  Ning’s eyes seldom left the water save for a short snooze and dreams of a big fish. Watching him made the entire trip worthwhile.

Ning will soon return to China and the life he has always known.  He will probably never return to America, but he will always have some cherished memories of a foreign land, and a day spent on Chesapeake Bay with a bunch of guys who will try again next year.  When we do, we will recall that beautiful day when Ning shared our dream of rockfish.

Our Big Old Buick

I think I have reached that age when nostalgia becomes a chronic condition

In “My Hometown,” Bruce Springsteen sings about sitting on his old man’s lap behind the wheel in his family’s “big old buick and steer as we drove through town.”  Springsteen and I are pretty close in age and so I like to think that he is  singing about a Buick Special which was an extremely popular and big-selling car back in the mid-1950s.  Our first new family car, at least the first one I can remember, was also a big old Buick Special, specifically a brand-new 1954 gray and Tahitian coral (we called it pink) two-tone, four-door sedan my folks bought  as we prepared to move to the Los Angeles area. 

Thinking back on that old car, I did a little digging to find out what I could about the 1954 Buick Special.  Buicks constituted approximately 10% of all automobiles sold in the United States that year, and the Special was one of its more popular models with its V-8 engine, four-barrel carburetor and Dynaflow automatic transmission.  It was a pretty sporty looking car for its day, with lots of chrome trim on the front grill and the front and rear bumpers with their bullet-shaped guards, and the trademark Vent-Ports on the front fenders.  And the Buick Special was reasonably priced at around $2200 (that would be approximately $17,000 in today’s dollars).

My memories of that cross-country trip, my first real road trip of any duration or distance, are spotty, yet there are some that remain quite vivid.  Dad in the driver’s seat and Mom riding shotgun next to him, and I had the back seat all to myself (my sister would not arrive on the scene for another three years).  My folks bought the car in Michigan before we set off from my grandparents’ farm in the southwestern corner of the state (where the above photographs were taken).  Our travel gear was stowed in the trunk and in a makeshift rooftop carrier one of my uncles welded together out in the barn.

Then it was off to the bright city lights of LA.  I am able to cobble together our general route by looking at old family photograph albums with plenty of black and white shots of me standing in front of numerous “Welcome To” signs en route - Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.  I don’t recall many details except the blistering heat as we drove across the desert.  That big old Buick did not have air conditioning, and the air streaming through the front and rear vent windows (remember them?) did not do the trick.  I recall, too, the canvas water bags attached to the rear bumper - to quench our thirst and for topping off the radiator.  We also traveled at night and during the early morning hours, spending our days in an air-conditioned motel room and the pool.   And then there was the orange crayon that melted all over the shelf below the rear window which remained an indelible reminder of that hot trip.  Stevie wasn’t very popular that day! 

 My folks remained loyal Buick drivers through the late 1970s, but the one I remember best and most fondly was that pink and gray Buick Special with its orange accent.  Now that was a car!.

The Boys of Summer

 

Writing about baseball is not as much fun as watching baseball. For one thing, you can't write with a dog in one hand and a beer in the other.

There is something to be said about retirement and being able to sit in a ballpark on a weekday afternoon.  I recently attended a couple early season baseball games . . . the hometown Washington Nationals’ final pre-season game against the Red Sox (there is something to be said about retirement and being able to sit in a ballpark on a weekday afternoon) followed by a regular season game in the home opener series against the Cincinnati Reds.  The Nats won 4-1 behind a brilliant two-hitter by Edwin Jackson.  So the season is off to a pretty good start for the Nats ( I only wish I could say the same for Boston).  The “Boys of Summer” have returned to their respective hometown ballparks for another long slog till October.

This boy has been around for a few years and has cheered along various crews as whim and fancy dictated.  Of course, there are my hometown favorites - the Cubbies at Wrigley Field, on the North Side, since 1916, and the White Sox, at Comiskey Park, on the South Side (1910-1990 at the original stadium, and at its replacement since then).  As a kid, even though I was born on the South Side, and lived briefly as a tyke on the North Side, I was too young to really give a hoot which of the local teams won.  I wasn’t really into baseball yet.  There has always been a crosstown rivalry even though the teams are in different leagues and rarely play one another.  Between the teams meeting in the 1906 World Series, which the White Sox won, and the beginning of inter-league play in 1997, the Cubbies and Sox routinely meet during spring training, and during exhibition games.  These games - usually dubbed the “Windy City Showdown” - do not count except for local bragging rights.  Since inter-league play began, however, the local teams have met annually for six games, two three-game series played at Wrigley Field and at Comiskey. The Sox currently lead this series.  If you ask me, I will admit I favor the Cubbies when push comes to shove.  

I grew up hearing my dad tell of when he and my uncle took me to a game at the old Comiskey Park, in the summer of 1952 (you do the math), but I must confess that I have no memory of who played the Sox and who won.  Dad and my uncle are gone now and so this will remain a mystery.  I do remember Dad telling me the game went into several extra innings and my Mom was beside herself with worry when we finally arrived home.  No cell phones back then.

I guess the first team I really rooted for was the Detroit Tigers.  In the mid 1950s I was living with my grandparents on their farm in southwestern Michigan.  I became a Detroit fan almost by osmosis; just about everyone in Michigan supported the Tigers back in those days. Add to this the fact that my folks and I lived briefly off Six Mile Road, in Detroit, when I was a wee tyke. The Tigers are a venerable charter American League franchise, one of eight major league teams. Tiger Stadium, its home turf, was opened in 1912 and would host the team until its final season there, in 1999 (at that time tied with Fenway Park, which opened the same day, as the oldest major league ballpark).  I saw my only Tigers game in 1958, when Dad and I drove from Toledo, Ohio, where we were living at the time, to the original Tiger Stadium to watch the hometown boys play the New York Yankees. You know, I can’t remember who won that game, but I do remember Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford each hitting homers, and Al Kaline putting one out of the park over the distant left field fence.  Regardless of the intervening years and occasional shifting alliances as I moved around the country, the Tigers have always had a soft spot in my heart.

One of these alliance shifts was to the Milwaukee Braves when we were living in southern Wisconsin in 1956-1957 (see the above photo).  The Braves, who moved from Boston to Milwaukee in 1953, won the 1957 National League pennant against the Cardinals (I was at that game), and went on to beat the Yankees in seven games in the World Series that year.  The Braves won the pennant again in 1958, but this time around the Yankees bested them in the World Series.  I cheered for the Braves and players like Eddie Matthews, Hank Aaron, and Warren Spahn, and my family attended a few games at nearby County Stadium.  Even after we moved to northern Ohio (and closer to Detroit), I was still pulling for the Braves, in the National League, while never truly abandoning the Tigers and American League baseball.   And the Tigers’ Smokey Maxwell remained one of my all time favorite players as he lead the American League in fielding percentages in 1957 and again in 1960, when he made only one error in each of those seasons.

When we moved to Cincinnati in late 1958, my fealty to the Braves quickly faded and I became a big fan of the National League’s Cincinnati Reds and would remain so through most of the 1960s.  I was really into baseball back then as were most of my buddies. After our dads got home from work we would frequently walk up to the nearby Cincinnati Gardens to catch a bus down to Crosley Field to watch the Reds and some of my earliest sports heroes - Roy McMillan, Frank Robinson, Vada Pinson, Smoky Burgess, Orlando Pena and so many others - play ball. In fact, some of the Reds resided in Swifton Village, the same apartment complex where my family lived, and I would occasionally see one or the other during our playtime forays throughout the neighborhood.  We later lived in nearby Richmond, Indiana, in 1966-1967, and I managed to see a few Reds games.  The names of the players had changed, but they were still my team.

What goes around, comes around, and in 1967, my family moved back to the Chicago area during my last two years of high school.  Once again I found myself cheering for Ernie Banks and the Cubbies.  Having neither an interest in the White Sox nor a desire to make the longer trip to the South Side and Comiskey Park, I instead frequented the friendly confines of Wrigley Field over the next couple of seasons, sitting in the bleachers beyond the ivy-covered outfield wall and below one of the last hand-turned scoreboards.  No Jumbo-Trons in those days.  Nor were there stadium lights, which were not installed for another twenty years, in 1988.  Games were still called on account of darkness . . . just like the old days!  So my Cubs games were limited to Saturdays and Sundays . . . and an occasional late spring weekday.

Many of you are probably familiar with the iconic 1986 film “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” in which a young Matthew Broderick, in the title role, masterminds a day on which he and two friends skip classes at their suburban high school and head for a day of sun and fun in downtown Chicago, including a Cub’s game at Wrigley Field.  Ferris and company sit in the outfield stands and cheer the home team (“Heeeeeey batter, batter, batter . . . soo-wing batter!”), and being that everything seems to go right for Ferris on his day off, he even catches a foul ball sent his way.  Perhaps my most memorable Cub games are the few I attended in the spring of 1969 when I skipped classes just days before my own graduation from high school.  I never caught a foul ball, nor was my name flashed across the big red marquee which has hung over the main entrance since 1934.  Otherwise, my days at Wrigley watching the Cubs play the Braves and the Reds were very much like Mr. Bueller’s.  And the Cubs were doing well that season, leading their division until they choked in September and came in second, eight games behind the Mets.

I attended college in Lakeland, Florida in the early 1970s and at that time there were no major league teams in the Sunshine State.  In the meantime, my family had left Chicago for Milwaukee where I would spend my holidays and summer vacations.  Being the fickle fan that I am, my baseball allegiance shifted once again to Milwaukee and the Brewers (even though the Tigers held spring training in Lakeland).  Gone were the Braves who fled to Atlanta for the 1965 season and beyond.  I never forgave the Braves for abandoning a great sports town and leaving its fans with no heroes for whom to cheer.  The Brewers, on the other hand, played the 1969 season as the Seattle Pilots before going into bankruptcy and moving to Milwaukee where the American League franchise was christened the Brewers for the 1970 season.  Unfortunately they were cellar dwellers for most of the 1970s, but baseball had returned to Milwaukee, and the fans returned to County Stadium to cheer on their new boys of summer.  My visits home provided ample opportunity to take in a few games, watching Bernie the Brewer decked out in lederhosen slide down into a large beer stein below the scoreboard every time a Brewer hit a dinger.  Oh yeah, and don’t forget “Beer in a Bucket” sold during the game!   And then there were the tailgaters before and after the games.

Tucson was home in the mid-1970s when I was attending graduate school at the University of Arizona.  The Diamondbacks had yet to arrive in Phoenix and so I continued to pull for the Brewers.  They became a respectable team with a winning record, in 1978, and in 1982, despite a slow start, they ended the season with the best record (95-67) and in first place in their division.  They went on to beat the Angels in the American League Championship Series and defeat the St. Louis Cardinals in seven games in the World Series.  They looked good again in the 1983, but faded late in the season.

Having resided in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC since 1976, it only makes sense that my team allegiance would gradually shift to the Baltimore Orioles.  Washington had been without a team since the Senators left town, first to Minnesota in 1961 to become the Twins, and again in 1971, when the expansion franchise that replaced the original team moved to Texas to become the Rangers.  Since I was a kid I had always hated the Senators.  I can’t tell you why for certain; I just didn’t like them.  Senator baseball cards are what I attached to the spokes of my Schwinn with clothespins to make it sound like a motorcycle when I cruised the neighborhood streets.  The fact that Washington had no team did not bother me much.  Besides, the O’s and Memorial Stadium were just a short drive away, and once the team moved to the new stadium at Camden Yards, not far from Babe Ruth’s birthplace in the Pigtown neighborhood, there was regular light rail service to watch the Birds play.  Not that many folks missed the Senators.  I, for one, was happy to go the extra distance.  Orioles games also introduced my son Ian to baseball and he got into the spirit of it all, even in 1988 when the Os hit bottom and went 0-21 at the beginning of the season and fans were wearing bags on their heads.  But Baltimore backed its Birds until management showed more interest in a buck than the game.  There have been many long, dry seasons over the past two decades.
 
The Nationals brought baseball back to Washington in 2005 after the franchise left Montréal where it had played since 1969 and took a new name.  But like the Senators before them, I have never developed a strong feeling for them.  I still favored the American League.  It was also around this time that I finally lost interest in the Orioles.  It was no longer the hometown team it use to be.  Cal Ripken and all the familiar names were gone or leaving, replaced by a string of unknown and unimpressive players and countless losing seasons. 

Today my team allegiance has fallen to the Red Sox.  I can’t really explain why, but when I go to a Sox game I feel like I use to when the game really meant something.  Still, I go to Nats games when I can, especially when the Red Sox come to town.  There is something about sitting in the stands on a summer day, a beer in one hand and a dog in the other, and watching the Boys of Summer remind us of our love of the game.

Check Out New Postings at "A Flaneur in Washington, DC"

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Nearer, My God, To Thee

Today marks the centennial of the sinking of RMS Titanic. On its maiden voyage with over 2,200 passengers and crew, it departed Southampton, England, on April 10, and after briefs stops in Cherbourg, France and Queenstown (now Cobh), Ireland, it set off across the North Atlantic to New York. At approximately 11:40pm on the evening of April 14, it struck an iceberg off the Grand Banks, some 400 miles southeast of Newfoundland. At 2:20am the following morning, the Titanic sank to its watery grave and over 1,500 souls - the rich and the famous as well as the poor and unknown - perished with her.

A lot is being said and written about this lamentable tragedy and I am not going to rehash it all here. Just a few months ago, however, during a visit to Halifax, Nova Scotia, I was introduced to a chapter of the Titanic saga about which I was wholly unfamiliar. Today I want to share this with you. I was going to write and post this story from Halifax, but I decided it would be more appropriate to share it as we mark the centennial of this greatest maritime disaster in history.

I am reminded of that touching scene in James Cameron’s 1997 film, which was borrowed from its 1958 predecessor, “A Night to Remember,” when the ship’s string ensemble led by Wallace Hartley, having played through the early morning hours as Titanic began to slowly slip below the waves, chose to play one final song - “Nearer, My God, to Thee” - instead of saving themselves. The strains of this lovely hymn play as the audience watches various passengers, realizing their fate, prepare for their deaths while others frantically race about the deck as the icy waters of the North Atlantic wash over them and RMS Titanic passes from the British registry. The playing of this hymn is one of the more popular legends originating with the sinking of Titanic. Some choose to believe it. Others don’t, claiming that the ensemble played “Autumn,” or an Archibald Joyce waltz. I am among the former, probably because I have always loved this hymn and it captures so well the victims’ final hours.

Soon, there was nothing left of the great ship and its passengers and crew other than a few life boats carrying the 705 survivors, some surface detritus, and the frozen corpses of those who were unable to find space in a lifeboat. Less than two hours later, RMS Carpathia, bound from New York to Mediterranean ports, arrived at the site of the sinking, took the survivors aboard, and transported them to their final destination in New York. The dead were left where they died.

Two days after the sinking, and once The White Star Line had finally admitted the full extent of the disaster, it dispatched the first of four Canadian-flagged vessels, three of them from Halifax and one from St Johns, Newfoundland, to recover the bodies. The cable ship CS Mackay-Benett was the first to arrive on site, on April 20, and over the course of the next five days it recovered 306 bodies, 116 of which were, after an appropriate religious service, buried at sea because there were not enough coffins and embalming fluid on board. It returned to Halifax with 190 bodies after being relieved on April 26 by the cable ship CS Minia. Over the next eight days it recovered an additional 17 bodies, two of which were buried at sea. CGS Montmagny departed Halifax on May 6 and returned with three bodies having buried one at sea. SS Algerine sailed from St. Johns on May 16 and located a single body before the recovery was suspended a month after the sinking, having located only 328 bodies of the approximately 1500 people who died. The sea took the rest of them.

The 209 bodies brought to Halifax were unloaded on the harbor waterfront. Those bodies still wrapped in canvas shrouds for the journey, were place in coffins stacked on the wharf, and the grim cargo was transported to a temporary morgue at the former site of the Mayflower Curling Club, on Agricola Street (now a downtown parking facility), the only building large and cold enough to accommodate the bodies. There undertakers from all over Nova Scotia prepared the bodies for burial. Families claimed 59 of the identified bodies. Three local cemeteries are now the final resting places of the remaining 150 bodies recovered and brought to Halifax. They were buried here between May 3 and June 12, 1912 after funerals were conducted in churches throughout the city.

On a cold morning back in early January, as an icy rain fell, I visited the Fairview Lawn Cemetery in Halifax’s North end. Here, on a wooded hillside, is a plot where 121 victims of the April 14-15, 1912 sinking of RMS Titanic are interred under rows of gray memorial stones paid for by the White Star Line. Many of the victims have never been identified, and perhaps the best known of these graves is that of “The Unknown Child.” Only in the past decade has forensic testing made it possible to identify the child as an English boy who perished with his entire family. Even during the winter this singular grave is surrounded by flowers, stuffed animals and various toys. There are an additional 29 Titanic victims buried at the Mount Olivet Cemetery, and others at the Baron de Hirsch Jewish cemetery adjacent to Fairview Lawn Cemetery.

Wallace Hartley and the other members of the eight-piece string ensemble went to their deaths the night they played as Titanic sunk beneath them. Hartley’s body, along with that of his fellow violinist, John “Jock” Law Hume, was recovered by the crew of the Mackay-Bennett, Hartley’s violin case still strapped to his back. His body was eventually returned to Britain for a hero’s funeral at which his favorite hymn escorted him to his grave. I found Hume’s grave at Fairview Lawn Cemetery, in Halifax, far from his home in Dumfries, Scotland.

This morning, at 2:20am ship's time – 0547 GMT or 12:47am EDT – a minister on board the MS Balmoral, a luxury cruise ship which sailed to the site of the sinking this past week to commemorate the Titanic centennial, lead prayers while floral wreaths were cast into the sea and a shipboard band, regardless of the veracity of the legend, played the hymn one more time.

Though like the wanderer, the sun goes down,
Darkness be over me, my rest a stone,
Yet in my dreams I’d be nearer, my God, to Thee.

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This is more than I could have ever hoped for. I had no idea what I was going to do when I launched this site on a whim back in late 2008. What a rewarding experience it has become! I enjoy sharing my random notes with you, and I appreciate all the positive feedback I continue to receive. Please share your comments . . . I always enjoy hearing from you!

I have several new postings going up in the coming days, weeks and months. I hope you will continue to visit this site and share your thoughts and comments with me. I am always interested in any suggestion how I might improve this blogspot and make it more reader friendly.

45,000 Hits As of Today!!

Thank you to everyone from 93 countries worldwide who has visited Looking Toward Portugal since December 2008. I hope you will continue to look in from time to time.

Digging Dandelions

The dandelions are coming up fast and furious in these early ddays of spring. One day nothing is there to suggest their imminent arrival. The next day the lawn is covered with small, yellow flowers. Lots of them! Everywhere!

I am sitting here at the kitchen counter watching my next door neighbor down on his hands and knees carefully trying to dig out each plant in turn and I am reminded that digging dandelions was one of my regular chores each spring. Whenever they appeared on our lawn I was sent forth with a plastic bucket, a garden trowel and an old kitchen knife with directions to dig them out and to make sure I got the entire root. At the time it seemed like a lot of hard work for my weekly allowance. A senseless act since dandelions are virtually impossible to eradicate. If you dig them, you must get the entire root or else they will quickly return; and you have to get them before the yellow flower turns into its familiar white seed-head which can happen while your head is turned. There is an old superstition - if you blow all of the seeds off the dandelion in one breath, your wish will be granted. Well, only if you wish for more dandelions in your yard tomorrow.

Back in the day dandelions were, for me, a source of lucre. In addition to earning my allowance digging then out of our yard, I also attempted to find a more commercial use for them. As a kid I picked them from the lawns surrounding our apartment in Cincinnati, gathered them into bouquets secured by a rubber band, and went door to door through the complex selling them for a nickel each. As I recall, my mom and my second grade teacher, who lived next door, were only too happy to purchase one. Other neighbors were not similarly impressed with my entrepreneurial spirit, frowning as I offered these lovely bouquets for sale. I even had a door or two slammed in my face. One man’s flower is still another man’s weed.

Cats, Democrats, and Miscellaneous Facts

The third time was a charm. Recently I finally accomplished a quest begun almost two years ago - a visit to Poplar Island, in the Chesapeake Bay just a short distance off the Bay Hundred section of the Tilghman peninsula on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. I have been reading about Poplar Island since I first fell in love with this region upon moving to Maryland in 1976. Regulars readers of this blog are already familiar with my strong affinity for islands of any size, and Poplar Island fits the bill. There is something about an island, especially one so close to the mainland, that calls to me. So I have long dreamed of exploring Poplar Island at my first opportunity. I have been patient; I knew I would get out there one of these days. There was only one problem. The island was quickly disappearing, the victim of water and wind erosion. At one time the island covered nearly 1500 acres, yet by the mid 1970s its land mass had been reduced to a collection of small islets measuring 3-5 acres. If I waited too long, Poplar Island would disappear altogether and there would be nothing left to explore. As luck would have, the island has not disappeared and is now rising anew from the waters of Chesapeake Bay. So, after two aborted attempts to visit the island, the third attempt went off without a hitch.

For such a small island, it has a long and fascinating history. The Spanish may have discovered the island in the late 16th century, and John Smith is known to have been in these waters in the early years of the 17th century. The island was surveyed in 1627 by William Clairborne, of nearby Kent Island (the first permanent English settlement in what is now Maryland), and christened Popeley’s Island in honor of Lieutenant Richard Popeley, one of Clairborne’s associates who had come with several men from Elizabeth Citie, Virginia to help defend the early settlement. Clairborne also named a nearby island, later known as Sharp’s Island, after himself. There is evidence that a herd of pigs called the island home in 1632, and these two islands were the first to be cleared and planted in 1634, the same year Lord Baltimore and the founders of the Maryland colony sailed up the Chesapeake Bay.

Ownership of Popeley Island later passed to Richard Thompson who developed an extensive plantation raising corn, tobacco and other crops, as well as livestock. In the summer of 1637, Thompson returned from a trading expedition only to find wife, children and servants massacred by the local Nanticoke indians. Thompson abandoned the island and established a plantation on Kent Island where he remained for the rest of his life. By the mid 17th century a new plantation was established on the island by Thomas Hawkins thereby severing the last connection with Clairborne. It was also around this time that the island came to be known as Poplar Island.

We don’t know much more about the island’s history until the early 19th century when it served as a British base during the Chesapeake campaign in the War of 1812 while the Royal Navy was conducting naval operations farther up the Bay and around Baltimore in 1813-1814. The British found a protected harbor and food for their sailors and troops. By 1815 they had withdrawn from the Eastern Shore although naval squadrons continued to operate throughout the Bay.

Already in the mid 19th century Poplar Island was suffering from serious erosion and was actually three separate islands - Poplar, Cobbler’s Neck and Coaches Neck - although still known collectively as Poplar Island, or the Poplar Islands. It was around 1840 that ownership of the islands passed to the grandson of Charles Carroll, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence who died at age 95 in 1832. Learning that there was a demand for black cat fur in China, the younger Carroll established a fur farm on the island, importing hundreds of cats and contracting with local waterman to supply them with fish. There are very few reliable details about this endeavor, but the legend has it that one winter the Bay froze over and the waterman could not supply the necessary fish to feed the cats. So they struck out across the ice and dispersed throughout the surrounding farms and plantations.

In the 1880s, the Poplar Islands had a population numbering 70-100 people. A small community known as Valliant, named after one of the local families, included a post office, a school (which also served as a church), a general store, and a sawmill (which may have led to the erosion of the islands through the cutting down of the island’s trees). The islanders continued to fish and grow crops which were sold on the mainland, yet by the early years of the 20th century the population had dwindled as families moved to the mainland and the school was finally closed in 1918. Although still privately owned, what remained of the islands was left to Mother Nature and the elements.

New life came to the islands in the 1920s and early 1930s. Bootleggers used the islands during Prohibition, and in 1929 they attracted a group of prominent Democrats from Washington who were looking for privacy and solitude to escape the rigors of the nation’s capital. Coaches retained its present owner while the Democrats purchased Poplar Island and Cobbler’s Neck, which was subsequently renamed Jefferson Island by the Maryland legislature in honor of the first President to break with the Federalist traditions of his predecessors. It was here they constructed a lodge - the very exclusive and males only Jefferson Islands Club founded in January 1931 - which became a favorite wartime getaway for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Vice President John Nance Gardner, members of the FDR cabinet, and other political leaders and industrialists of the day. Here they enjoyed the privacy they sought while taking part in local fishing and hunting opportunities. The club’s glory days were numbered, however, and the main lodge burned down in March 1946. Only the chimney and the front porch, including the concrete ramp constructed to accommodate FDR’s wheelchair remained, and the Democrats left for good.

The two islands were purchased by the club’s former caretaker and his wife, who moved their family from Wickwire, Maryland to the islands in 1948 and built a hunting and fishing operation - the Poplar Island Lodge - on the ruins of the old clubhouse on Jefferson Island. The islands continued to erode. Poplar Island measured approximately 200 acres of trees and marsh while Jefferson Island was around 40 acres and Coaches was 90 acres. The natural harbor formed by the three islands, known locally as “The Pot,” was frequently an anchorage for the large skipjack fleet still operating over the nearby oyster beds (more on this in an upcoming post). This rebirth was short-lived when the lodge closed in 1953 and the owners returned to the mainland.

The islands passed through several owners in the following decades but remained uninhabited as the Bay’s waters continued to wash them away. By the early 1990s only Coaches remained; the other two had dwindled to four remnant islands with a total area of 3-4 acres. They could very well have disappeared forever, the fate of other Bay islands, had it not been for a rather creative effort by the State of Maryland, the Maryland Port Authority, and the United States Army Corps of Engineers to find a productive - in fact a constructive - use for the silt and mud dredged annually from the shipping channel leading to and from Baltimore. For years such dredging material was disposed of at nearby Hart-Miller Island or subtlety dumped in open water around the Bay. Perhaps with Hart-Miller island reaching capacity and simple dumping being an ineffective manner of disposal, the disappearing Polar Island might offer a new possibility?

This is why I finally traveled to Poplar Island. It was a cool and misty morning as I arrived at Knapps Narrows, separating Tilghman Island from the mainland, to board the Terrapin, the utility boat operated by the Maryland Environmental Services which is overseeing the restoration of Poplar Island. Established back in the 1970s, MES is now an independent and not-for-profit state agency responsible for managing Maryland’s numerous land, water, and air resources projects, including the use and management of dredge material as a natural resource. The trip from Tilghman Island took about twenty minutes, passing close to Coaches and Jefferson islands, before we stepped ashore at the Paul S. Sarbanes (in honor of the former US Senator from Maryland) Ecosystem Restoration Project on Poplar Island. Jefferson Island, which still has a scattering of buildings among the trees, and the wooded Coaches Island, are privately owned and not part of the project although they are certainly benefiting from the protection from further erosion offered by Poplar Island.

The restoration of the island began in 1998 when rip-rap dikes were constructed, much like the edge of a jigsaw puzzle, following the original shoreline. After that, a number of additional dikes were erected separating the island into individuals sections, or “cells” - the pieces of the puzzle which also incorporate the last vestiges of the remnant islands - which are now receiving the dredge material. This is collected in large clamshell scoops during the annual dredging season between November and March when traffic and other activities in the shipping channels are at a minimum, and then loaded on barges for the roughly forty mile trip down the Bay to the island. Once it arrives in slurry form, it is piped to one of the cells to a prescribed depth and allowed to dry, what is known as “crust management.” Channels and creeks are also developed to permit the Bay’s water to enter the cells at high tide to create low marshland while the high marsh is planted with grasses to create new wildlife and bird habitat, including diamondback terrapins as well as ospreys, herons, terns, and many other bird species. Old Christmas trees have also been collected and scattered around the island to provide protected nesting areas. Eventually almost 20 million cubic yards of dredge material will be shipped to the island by 2029 when the restoration of the island will be completed; although much work will still be needed before the habitats are finished in 2039.

I returned to Tilghman Island with a good feeling about government and the private sector working together to protect rather than rape our environment. The restoration of Poplar Island is a success story and one can only hope that the lessons learned here will be put to good use in the future. Many of Chesapeake Bay’s islands are quickly disappearing and there is a chance that they, too, can be saved, and with them the endangered wildlife, bird and fish and shellfish habitats they afford.

Spring Has Spring!

We are a few days into spring and this is one of the warmest in memory. Sally Ann spent this past Monday down on the Tidal Basin with friends and enjoyed the cherry blossoms at their peak. With all the warm weather we have been having, the National Park Service had to keep updating when the peak would arrive. Your government in action; it hit the nail right on the head (too bad the rest of the government doesn't work that way)! I spent that same afternoon in a meeting on a 12th floor outdoor terrace on Pennsylvania Avenue and was able to take in the entire vista, from the Jefferson Memorial and the Tidal Basin all the way to the Kennedy Center and Georgetown beyond, with the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial and the White House (just a couple blocks away) in between. Days like this remind me why I love living in the Washington area.

This past week we had days when the temperature reached into the mid 80s! . . . in March!! Just this past Friday we spent a leisurely evening with some of our oldest and closest friends in a backyard on Capitol Hill enjoying good food and drink and trying to remember when we had a spring like this one. We just hope it is not a harbinger of a terribly hot summer. Sally Ann and I are not too worried as we will be heading to the lake in Maine in late June and will stay there until the beginning of October.

The flowers are all up, the grass is green and growing (we have already mowed the yard), and the trees are leafing out more every day. Soon I will be sitting in the ballpark watching a preseason game between my Boston Red Sox and the Washington Nationals (I like living near Washington but I'm still a citizen of the Red Sox Nation) as well as an early season game between the Nats and the Cincinnati Red (OK, I will pull for the Nats in that one). Spring training will be over and the Boys of Summer will be back in town.

So Spring has definitely sprung. Wherever you happen to live, here's wishing you a delightful seasonal rebirth. Let's hope it is here to stay.

A Joyful Noise!

61 years ago today this quiet edifice - Holy Cross Hospital - on Chicago's South Side came alive with the cries of a bouncing baby boy. And he is still raising a joyful noise.

I have mixed feelings about this personal benchmark, but I take comfort in my many friends and loving family. It has been a good life so far, and I look forward to many more years in your good company.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

In keeping with the spirit of the day, I would like to share a poem I wrote forty years ago.


http://ruesansregret.blogspot.com/2012/03/parick-hart.html

Everything But the Oink

Dateline: Keysers Ridge, Maryland
A steady rain was falling when I arose this morning around 5:30am outside Columbus, Ohio. A quick cup of coffee and I was on the road before 7am and drove through the rain until Cambridge, in eastern Ohio. Near Zanesville I was treated to a beautiful sunrise sandwiched between the rolling hills and the slate gray overcast at the leading edge of the bad weather. When the rain stopped, I pulled off the highway for some more coffee, and by the time I resumed my trip the rain had caught up with me and continued as a steady drizzle until I drove out of it as I crossed the Ohio River at Wheeling, West Virginia.

From Wheeling I retraced my route through the Laurel Highlands of southwestern Pennsylvania on US Route 40 - the National Road - which I am now following all the way to its eastern terminus, in Cumberland, Maryland, where construction on this first US federal highway began in 1811. I have stopped here in Keysers Ridge, in far western corner of Maryland, for a late breakfast. I know I am getting close to home when I can find scrapple on the menu.

I never heard of scrapple until I moved to Maryland in 1976, but I have come to enjoy it as much, if not more, than those here in the Mid-Atlantic states, some of whom have been raised on it all their lives. You might not share my taste for it, if you knew what it is and how it is made, but I can assure you it tastes better than it sounds. Scrapple is simple enough - a mixture of pork offal - scraps and trimmings . . . "everything but the oink" - combined with flour or cornmeal (I prefer the latter) and formed into a grayish loaf and refrigerated. Sliced thin or thick, it is fried in just a little bacon grease until the outside is a golden brown while the insides remain soft and juicy. It is frequently served with eggs as a breakfast meat in lieu of bacon or sausage, but I prefer it by itself, drizzled with some local Maryland maple syrup. It doesn't get much better than this.

Well fed, gassed up and in no particular hurry, I will continue east on the National Road through Grantsville, Frostburg, to Cumberland. I should be home in late afternoon, hopefully before the Washington rush hour begins in earnest. Fourteen days on the road and 3200 miles clicked off on the odometer. I never tire of a good road trip.

Going Home

Dateline: Richmond, Indiana
Today my travels have taken me across the Midwest, from Madison, Wisconsin to my day's final destination on the near east side of Columbus, Ohio, where I plan to spend a day of R&R visiting with my sister and her family. It will give me an opportunity to take a breather for a day before I drive the last leg of my trip home to Maryland.

This morning, before departing Madison where I spent the night, I drove around the city and Maple Bluff, the forested enclave on the western shore of Lake Mendota which I called home in the mid-1960s. I drove by our old house on Harbort Drive, on the edge of Burrows Park in the Fuller Woods neighborhood of Maple Bluff. Nearby is Tenney Park where I ice-skated on the lagoon during the winter (there is still some thin ice on it today) and where I fished on the nearby breakwater and at the locks serving the canal that allows boats to transit from Mendota to Lake Monona. I retraced the the streets I covered on my bicycle when I delivered The Capital Times, and I passed by the houses where my friends use to live and the local country club where I caddied and shagged golf balls one summer. It all looks the same.

I stopped and walked around the nearby junior high school where I completed my freshman year of high school (9th grade was still considered middle school back then). Originally a joint elementary school/junior high school named after Roger Sherman, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, the latter retains its original name while the elementary school is now known as the Malcolm Shabazz City High School, in honor of the man we have come to know as Malcolm X and created as "a harassment-free/anti discriminatory learning environment where all people, regardless of previous academic performance, family background, social-economic status, beliefs, abilities, appearance, race, gender identity, gender expression, or sexual orientation are respected." I was attending this school when Malcolm was assassinated in February 1965. Time changes things.

I stood on the athletic field where I ran cross-country back then, and where I watched Siri, my first real girlfriend, captain the cheerleading squad. Last night I learned that Siri passed away in the summer of 2010 at age 59. I knew her a long time ago, but I guess you never forget your first love. While in Madison I also made a meager attempt to determine whether other old friends were in the area. I only found one - my best friend during 9th grade. Ike and I rode our bikes together and hung out at the lake when the weather was nice. He also caddied with me that one summer. After I moved away we lost touch with one another, but I later learned that he had dropped out of school a year after I left, and a few years later ended up on the FBI's list of most wanted fugitives after he and his brother blew up a building on the University of Wisconsin campus in 1970. He was on the lam for several years until he was apprehended in Toronto and extradited back to the United States where he served several years in federal prison. Released, he returned home to Madison where he drove a taxi and owned a delicatessen near campus. He died of lung cancer a couple months before Siri passed away in the summer of 2010.

Leaving Madison, I drove east toward Milwaukee, jumping off the interstate at Lake Mills to make a quick swing past the school where I attended kindergarten and first grade, as well as the hulking Queen Anne-style apartment house on Mulberry Street, and the smaller duplex on Milton Street, where we lived in the late 1950s. They are exactly as I remember them and a flood of memories came back to me.

I also drove through the many familiar haunts along the western edge of Milwaukee, which I considered my home base when I was attending college in Florida. My family moved to this area right after I graduated from high school, and this is where I returned during the holidays and on summer breaks. I passed by our house in Brookfield, and walked through the old nearby cemetery where many of the original settlers to this area - mostly Irish immigrant farmers from County Sligo, are buried. It was during a walk in this cemetery in the spring of 1973 that I asked Sally Ann to marry me. How romantic is that?

Turning south at Milwaukee, I drove down to Chicago on a route I could almost drive blind-folded back in the early 1970s when I often made the trek south to visit high school friends. I swung through suburban Park Ridge, where I graduated from Maine Township High School in 1969 (check out my posting from October 2009 where I discuss my return for my 40th high school reunion: http://www.lookingtowardportugal.blogspot.com/2009/10/you-can-go-home-again-sort-of.html ). I also passed through the neighborhood off Division Street at Humboldt Park, on the near North Side, and the West Englewood section on the city's South Side (not far from President Obama's old neighborhood) where my parents lived when I was just a small tyke. I don't get back to Chicago nearly enough. It really is a wonderful city and I am proud to call it my hometown. I have lived many places, but Chicago is where I come from.

And now I have driven across Indiana to Richmond, hard on the border with Ohio. My family lived here for a year when I was in high school and before we returned to the Chicago area. It was just a short blip on the radar screen of my personal history, but I have fond memories of the time I spent here and the people I came to know. So I have taken a short detour to look at our old house and the my high school. The town has not really changed all that much and I take some comfort in this.

I still have roughly one hundred miles to go before I reach my sister's place outside of Columbus. The sun is setting over the route I have traveled and the many places I have visited today . . . the many places I have called home over the years. I have miles to go before I sleep and I guess it is time to hit the road.

Some Kind of Minnesota Heaven

Dateline: Alexandria, Minnesota
Here I am in Lake Wobegon Country, in central Minnesota about 100 miles northwest of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, the state capital. I left Grand Forks, North Dakota this morning and drove south across the flat, snowy, wind-swept landscape to Fargo before turning southeast and crossing the Red River of the North for the last time on my long journey homeward. The unbroken prairie quickly gave way to rolling hills and rich, black earth farmland and pastures and I lost count of the bison herds I passed. It is going to be hard to leave all this behind.

Before I do, however, it would be a crime not to search out a friendly fish-on-the-wall restaurant that serves a nice, succulent walleye fillet. I fished for them regularly when I was a young boy growing up here in the upper Midwest, but it has been several years - not since I visited a similar establishment in the Sand Hills of northern Nebraska a few year ago - that I have tasted a good piece of walleye. What better place than central Minnesota? The walleye is the state fish both here and in South Dakota, and more walleye are eaten in Minnesota than in any other state in the union..

I found just such an establishment in the small town of Alexandria, Minnesota where there seems to be more lakes than dry land. I knew I was in the right place as soon as I walked through the door and found several curling snapshots of smiling people holding very large fish, most of them walleye. And sure enough, there are several fish, including a record-setting walleye caught in nearby Lake Darling last Fourth of July, mounted on the wall. I figured I did not have to ask whether it is on the menu. And there it is . . . offered as one of the Lenten specials.

My server is a typical lass one would expect to find in this region - blonde, attractive, corn-fed and presumably strong if one is to believe Garrison Keillor - and after bringing me a locally-brewed beer in a wide-mouth Ball jar, we were soon sharing some fishing tales in which walleye figured rather prominently. I enjoyed my beer and it was not long before a sizzling walleye fillet topped off with lemon slices and fresh cilantro was placed in front of me! I am in some kind of heaven!

It is just a shame I do not have room for some of the local homemade bread pudding for dessert. It looks good but I really can't eat another bite. Besides, I still have several miles to drive today and I must keep my wits about me.

A Visit to Whitey's Wonderbar

Dateline: East Grand Forks, Minnesota
During my week here in Grand Forks, North Dakota I have had an opportunity to do a little poking around, and this exploration has led me across the Red River of the North to the smaller neighboring town of East Grand Forks, Minnesota (population 8600). You can throw a fairly good size rock across the river here, yet there is a different feel when you cross the short bridge linking the town with neighboring Grand Forks. Both of these communities were virtually destroyed during a major flood in the spring of 1997. The river runs north, and an early spring that year in the Dakotas and Minnesota sent a rush of snow melt toward Canada where the river was still clogged with ice. These communities have rebuilt and a new system of flood walls, levees and dikes line both sides of the river to prevent future flooding. One of the wonders of survival in East Grand Forks is Whitey’s Wonderbar, which was first constructed near the river in 1925, and became the home of the original stainless steel horseshoe bar, the first ever constructed in the United States.

I stopped in this afternoon when there were very few people around and bellied up to the horseshoe bar and enjoyed a 24 ounce Bud Lite draft for $2.50 while the bartender shared with me a little history of the place. Apparently East Grand Forks was a wide open town back in the early 1920. North Dakota was dry, but Minnesota was not and so the town was home to a number of taverns and casinos where local farmers and lumbermen came “for fun and frolic.” East Grand Forks and Moorhead, across the river from Fargo eighty miles south of here, and other border towns thrived on the nightlife they could offer. Dozens of nightclubs and restaurants lined DeMers Avenue and made East Grand Forks famous throughout the Great Plains as "Little Chicago."

In 1925 a young fellow named Edwin "Whitey" Larson, not yet 20 years old, opened the Coney Island Lunch Room a couple blocks off the DeMers strip. It featured bootleg alcohol, unrestricted slot machines and other types of gambling, and Coney Island hot dogs. Chicago gangsters, including Al Capone, are alleged to have frequented Whitey’s back in the day. Even Clark Gable stopped by, or so the local legend goes. A few years later Whitey moved his establishment to the former home of the Duluth Brewing Company, on the DeMers strip, and built his now famous horseshoe bar in 1930. The tavern was later featured in the Saturday Evening Post and Time Magazine. In 1942 a fire damaged the building, but it was soon reopened as Whitey's Café and Lounge, with a new facade and with a more legitimate clientele. A wise move since gambling was outlawed in 1947, and the local authorities began to clean up the town. Most of the bars closed down yet Whitey's managed to survive the winds of change that blew across the prairie in the latter half of the 20th century. It was a landmark restaurant in the 1970s featuring three bars and a nightclub.

Whitey's had been in business in the same location in downtown East Grand Forks from 1933 to April 1997, when flood waters inundated the building in which it was located. After the flood, the owners salvaged what they could from the 1933 building, including the horseshoe bar and some other Art Deco furnishings, and everything was stored off site until a new building could be found. There was some talk it would move across the river to Grand Forks when the original building was torn down to make way for the new flood wall on the Minnesota side of the Red River. Once the flood barrier had been constructed, however, a building just east of the original building in East Grand Forks became available and Whitey's reopened in September, 1998. The following year the new building was extended westward towards the river with an entrance on the new boardwalk.

Whitey's eventually changed hands, the new owners quickly defaulted and the restaurant closed in February 2011. After being closed for nearly nine months, and sold at auction that May, the new owners of Whitey's Wonderbar reopened in October 2011 with the hope of taking the iconic establishment in a new direction. They have added a separate evening dining area off the original bar area and facing the boardwalk patio and the Red River. As a result, the entire establishment has been given an incredible facelift and almost everything has been replaced and upgraded except for the famous horseshoe bar. New walls were erected and given a fresh coat of paint in addition to other more modern touches. East Grand Forks, which has seen some rough times since the 1997 flood, is happy to see this piece of the city's history kept alive and thriving. And so am I!

I sit here and try to imagine what the place must have looked like back in its heyday when this was still a rough and ready frontier area. My waitress has just pulled another tall draft and a delicious looking meat and cheese plate which will be my light dinner this evening. It would be nice to walk along the boardwalk while there is still some daylight, but the temperature is hovering near 20F and there is a stiff wind blowing down from Manitoba, only a few miles north of here. I am happy to stay right where I am.

Legendary

Dateline: Grand Forks, North Dakota
"Legendary" . . . that is what the "welcome to" signs declare when you cross the border. A North Dakota pundit once declared that there is nothing to see in North Dakota, and nothing to keep you from seeing it. There is some truth in this, yet there is far more to North Dakota than first meets the eye.

I have been calling Grand Forks home for almost a week. It has a population hovering around 56,000 (including the personnel at the nearby Air Force base and the student body of the University of North Dakota) and is the third largest city in the state after Fargo, almost 80 miles to the south, and Bismarck, the state capital. Still, looking out over the landscape surrounding Grand Forks, especially at this time of year, one can look east and almost see yesterday, and turning west, tomorrow is just barely over the horizon. Still, I like Grand Forks. It is a town where one can easily feel at home.

I am presently serving as the visiting spring fellow at the University of North Dakota's Center for Human Rights and Genocide Studies. There have been several days of speeches, radio and television interviews, and classroom visits in conjunction with a visiting exhibit from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on the subject of persecution of Germany's homosexual community during the Nazi regime, 1933-1945. It has been both a fascinating and rewarding experience for me and I am sad to say that I will be leaving in a couple of days for my return trip home to Maryland. Everyone has made me feel at home here and I hate to leave.

During my visit I have had an opportunity to reacquaint myself with an area I first visited briefly in the summer of 1970. I do not remember much of what I saw back then, and so this visit comes as a revelation. I was also in North Dakota in the spring of 2007, traveling the same route I took across the state on my first trip so many years ago, but I did not make it up to this area. Despite my busy schedule and the winter weather that still grips the area, I have done a little exploring here and beyond the Red River of the North, in Minnesota. My visit here has been far too short; North Dakota has a lot to offer, and I look forward to returning again soon. There is much of the legend that still needs to be told.