For Sale: one ore dock, slightly used

My Beautiful City On The Bay contemplates what to do with the monolithic, 800-foot-long solid concrete ore dock that has sat unused in the Lower Harbor since the Soo Line railroad stopped loading ore into lake freighters twenty-five years ago. Developers propose "dividing the dock into three floors, with the top two floors renovated into about 50 apartments and the bottom floor retained for parking." I'm not sure exactly how they propose to turn the ore bins into apartments, but it certainly would be interesting to see their architectural drawings. The loading chutes might be a convenient way to get rid of unwelcome guests.

Note to Fiend: it's sort of an island....

A superior view, indeed.

From the Yooperrails listserv, a link to the website of Superior View, a business in Da Yoop that has an incredible collection of old photographs of the region and makes them available to anyone who's interested. A good-quality, "suitable-for-framing" reproduction will cost a few bucks, but their subject-categorized image index includes reduced-size images that make for interesting browsing.

A reminder, I suppose, that every once in a while the free market of eclectic individuals throws up a solution to a problem that the public sector is unable or unwilling to address.

The Oxford American : The Southern Music Issue

The Oxford American's 2005 Southern Music issue and its accompanying CD arrived a while back. For me, Sammi Smith's whisky-voiced rendition of "This Room for Rent" is the highlight of the collection. "Jesus Hits Like the Atom Bomb", from the Pilgrim Travelers, is an entertaining piece of Cold War evangelical wackiness, and I was pleased to note that the insightful profile that accompanies it is by Bob Darden, editor of the Wittenburg Door, sometime gospel-music reporter for Billboard, and one of my former professors at Thee University. Zora Neale Hurston singing "Crow Dance", a black folk song with African roots, is of some historical interest, and there's a smattering of good tracks from big names, including a live recording of Elvis Presley's first public performance of "Suspicious Minds", to go along with the usual (for the OA) selection of forgotten bluesmen and eccentric, obscure garage bands and lounge singers.

It's pleasant to listen to, but for some reason doesn't have quite the same eccentric kick as previous iterations. None of the tracks send chills down my spine like the first time I heard, say, King Pleasure's "Swan Blues" or Esther Williams' version of "No Headstone on my Grave" from the 2003 collection, or Wilco and Billy Bragg's "When the Roses Bloom Again", Dolly Parton's "Silver Dagger", or Todd Snider's "Back to the Crossroads" from the 2000 collection. Nor do any of them make me laugh like Earl Scruggs and Billy Bob Thornton's bizarre hick-hop version of "Ring of Fire" from the 2002 version, although the DeZurik Sisters' intricately playful "Arizona Yodeler" comes close. Perhaps I'm becoming jaded.

Don't let me discourage you if you have the slightest curiousity about southern music. It's still better than just about anything you're likely to hear on the radio, it's pleasantly eclectic, and the accompanying articles about the musicians are entertaining and informative. And the OA, which is currently on its third life after relocating to Little Rock, Arkansas, could use the money. (Other online reactions to the music issue, mostly positive, can be found here.)

Recent reads: The Johnstown Flood, by David G. McCullough

The events described here are almost eerily reminiscent of the recent situation in New Orleans, except that they happened over a century ago. Proof of the Eternal Return of human negligence, perhaps?

Engineers had stated for years that the dam at Lake Conemaugh, 15 miles upstream from the steel-milling town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was in need of competent repair. Those with control over the dam insisted otherwise, and performed such repairs as they did see fit to perform in a cheap, desultory and incompetent fashion. The rains came. The dam failed. And on May 31, 1889, a city died.

Some excerpts from McCullough's description of the aftermath of the flood:

Along the Frankstown Road on Green Hill some 3000 people had gathered. On the rim of Prospect Hill and on the slopes above Kernville, Woodvale, and Cambria City the crowds were nearly as big. Chilled to the bone, hungry, many of them badly injured, hundreds without shoes or only partly clothed against the biting air, they huddled under dripping trees or stood along narrow footpaths ankle-deep in mud, straining their eyes and trying hard to understand.
Spread out before them was a vast sea of muck and rubble and filthy water. Nearly all of Johnstown had been destroyed.... (p. 184)

The problems to be faced immediately were enormous and critical. People were ravenously hungry, most everyone having gone twenty-four hours or more without anything to eat, and now there was virtually no food anywhere.... Moreover, there was no water that anyone felt was safe to drink.... There was almost no dry clothing to be had and no medicines.... (p. 188

But by noon things had begun to happen, if only in a small way. Rafts had been built to cross the rivers and to get over to those buildings still surrounded by water. People on the hillsides whose houses had escaped harm and farmers from miles out in the country began coming into town bringing food, water, and clothing.... (p. 188)

That afternoon, at three, a meeting was called in Johnstown to decide what ought to be done there. Every able-bodied man who could be rounded up crowded into the Adams Street schoolhouse. The first step, it was quickly agreed, was to elect a 'dictator'.... (p. 189)

[Arthur J.] Moxham was a fortunate choice. He took charge immediately and organized citizens' committees to look after the most pressing and obvious problems. Morgues were to be established under the direction of the Reverends Beale and Chapman. Charles Zimmerman and Tom Johnson were put in charge of removing dead animals and wreckage....

Dr. Lowman and Dr. Matthews were responsible for establishing temporary hospitals. Captain Hart was to organize a police force. There was a committee for supplies and one for finance....

Captain Hart deputized some seventy-five men, most of whom were employees ofthe Johnson Company sent down from Moxham. They cut tin stars from tomato cans found in the wreckage....

As dusk gathered, the search for the living as well as the dead went on in earnest." (pp. 190-191))

A compelling story told by a skillful storyteller, with enough detail that a reader can understand how the disaster occurred, what created the danger in the first place, and how people worked together to salvage their lives afterward. Highly recommended.

Defining moments

This editorial from the Chronicle of Higher Ed. caught my attention today.

For those who don't have subscription access, I'll summarize. The author, a history professor, asked his students to identify the most important event in their fathers' life. Some listed Big Historical Events like the Vietnam War, the civil-rights movement, etc., that are discussed in typical American history textbooks. Others listed arrival in the U.S. as an immigrant, or some significant event overseas that influenced their fathers' decision to emigrate. But the majority identified, instead, some purely personal event:

In some ways the even greater challenge to the conventions of the field came from the majority (55 percent) of students who listed private matters as most decisive. A few of the answers were self-referential, whether flippant ("having me"), conventionally sentimental ("meeting between him and my mom"), or the opposite ("father not a part of my life"). More responses singled out death -- of parent, sibling, friend -- as a historical influence on their father. (One student elaborated, "death of his mother -- my dad has nine siblings, so he had to help out because they live in Poland and he lives here.") Culinary schooling in Rhode Island, admission to the Chicago Fire Department, entering the Marines, quitting drinking, getting shot, imprisonment in Texas, retirement, divorce and single parenthood, college graduation at age 50, and health and money problems rounded out a long list of life-altering events.

Before even reaching this passage, I had come to the conclusion that this was true of most of my relatives. Although I don't pretend to be able to identify *the* most important event of my father's or grandfathers' lives, I can make pretty good guesses at the two or three most likely possibilities, even after leaving aside the obvious answers like being born healthy, meeting their future spouse, or the general childhood environment that helped form their personality.

For my father, for example, the decision to finish his college education at a state university with a strong engineering program, and his later decision to go to law school after he became dissatisfied with engineering as a profession, seem to have had the most far-reaching effects in determining the course of his life. It got him off the farm and out of the Ozarks and sent him on a peripatetic career, living as far east as Pennsylvania, as far south as Texas, and taking occasional trips to countries around the world.

For my grandfather B., it's a little harder to tell. Perhaps it was his fathers' death of pneumonia when he was twelve years old, leaving him as the primary male support for his mother and his younger siblings. Or perhaps it was a genuine text-book Historical Event, the Great Depression that hit shortly thereafter, making life on a hardscrabble hill farm even more difficult than it was before. Or perhaps it was his stint in the CCC camp where he quickly became a gang foreman due to his hard-work ethic, his stubbornness, his mechanical aptitude, and the burly build that made potential troublemakers reluctant to challenge him. Perhaps the vocational course in sheet-metal working that he took on the eve of World War II, or the job that he was offered working the aluminum-shaping drophammers in an East Coast bomber plant during the war. Again we see economic considerations directing a life: that job took him out of the Ozarks and away from the hardscrabble farm country. Even today he talks about the long, long drive from Baltimore back to Kansas City, where he spent the rest of his working life in an oil refinery before retiring back to the small town in the Ozarks that he had never quite forgotten.

For my female relatives, the choice of spouse seems to have been the most dominant influence on their subsequent lives -- or at least the most obvious one that is apparent to me. (I'm not necessarily privy to all their personal experiences!) Of course, this is largely due to the fact that, whether by their own inclination or due to the prevailing social customs of the time, they had no long-term careers of their own and, to a large degree, followed their husbands and their husbands' jobs around the country.

As for myself -- well, I'm not sure that's quite obvious, even to me. Every move from one place to another, from infancy to the present, could be looked at as a critical event, since it introduced me to new people and places. Every new acquaintance who has shaped my thinking and affected me in both good ways and bad, The loss of freinds who had, over the years, become like a distant but intimate part of myself. The books and movies, etc., that have shaped my thinking. Getting a masters' degree in library science. Every change of job, including the one that took me from Texas to Michigan.

Big news events like the September 11 attacks and the war in Iraq have affected my own life mainly in indirect ways and through the way that observing them has affected my view of the world. I have been fortunate in not having any freinds or relatives who were directly affected by these events. My closest brush with a major catastrophe was a recent interview for a job at a university which was devastated by Hurricane Katrina shortly afterward. I didn't get the job -- thank God for small favors, eh?

Finding out about This Thing Called Blog must also rank somewhere among the defining events of my recent life. Heck, even a long-ago, casual decision to post a comment on the blog of somebody who lived in an entirely different country could have momentous effects....

The Nick Bantock-ization of Sherlock Holmes

Courtesy of "Professor Pangaea" by way of the FictionMags listserv: Sub Rosa, A Correspondence by Wire.

Yarns, ripping and otherwise

After Carlos mentioned the DVD release of Ripping Yarns on his blog a while back, I felt a strange, uncanny compulsion to get my own copy. I remember seeing episodes from this series on the dorm TV while doing laundry years ago at Thee U. -- that is, when there wasn't a mob of frat guys hanging around and insisting on watching MTV's Top Ten or a football game instead. I can't help but wonder whether it's really as funny as it seemed then. Will it be as appealing when I can watch it at my leisure, instead of having to catch precarious and fragmentary glimpses in between trips to the washer and dryer?

Until then, there's Tales From the Vault, the Library of Canada's tribute to Canadian adventure yarns, to tantalize a taste for delicious pulpy goodness.