The Little Free Library movement is huge in Milwaukee. In some neighborhoods you can’t drive more than a few blocks without seeing one of the little book boxes in a front yard. These boxes can be wildly individualistic, which is part of the fun in paying attention to them. A few years ago, I began taking photos of Little Free Library boxes. I’ve posted some of them on my blog.
It was a year ago December that I first noticed this box.
Driving down a street at dusk, I suddenly saw what appeared to be Snoopy’s dog house, festooned with colorful lights, as it appears in “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” Adorable!
Last weekend I happened to be driving down that street again and, since I wasn’t in a hurry for once, I decided to stop and take a picture. As it happened, the homeowner was outside working in her garden. When I asked if it would be okay for me to take the photo, she told me to please snap away, take as many as I liked.
Then she told me the story behind the box. Her daughter, Makenna, died at age 4 of an epileptic seizure in her sleep. Stunned, I told her how sorry I was.
She waved it off. “It’s okay, we’re okay now.” And she seemed to be. Telling me about Makenna made her smile. In her short time here on earth, Makenna had always been full of life. The term her mom used to describe her was either “spitfire” or “spark plug”—or maybe it was “ball of fire.” I can’t remember which it was, but they all convey an image of a little girl just bursting with energy.
The Little Free Library box had been the idea of her neighbor across the street. He was an architect and created the original design himself. When they installed it, the neighborhood kids went to a ceramics store to paint the tiles that line each side of the post the box sits on.
Makenna’s mom Shelly, installed a solar lighting kit at the base and changes out bulbs with the season: orange lights for Halloween, red for Valentine’s Day, green for St. Patrick’s Day, etc. The box is actually supposed to be a birdhouse, which yes, it does resemble. But even though it’s not meant to be Snoopy’s dog house, I’m not alone in seeing it that way. Several people have told her that’s what it looks like it when she decorates it with traditional multicolored bulbs at Christmas.
I asked if it would be okay for me to do a blog post on the photo of her Little Free Library, along with its story. And Shelly told me yes; the more people who know about the book box and its story, the better. She’d love to spread the word.
A local magazine, M, did a story on the book box in November 2014, about the same time that I first noticed it. You can read that article here (it’s the blue-shaded column in the middle of the two-page spread).
Interestingly, these little book boxes have been associated with the idea of honoring a loved one since the very beginning. The Little Free Library movement got its start in 2009, when Tod Bol of Hudson, Wisconsin, built a little book box and installed it in his front yard as a tribute to his mother. She had been a teacher, so Bol constructed the book box to look like an old-fashioned, one-room schoolhouse. He painted it red, put a glass-fronted door on the front, and put a sign up on the belfry (containing a real bell) that said: “Esther Bol Memorial Library.”
The idea struck an immediate chord with people, and Bol soon was making and giving away more boxes. One thing led to another, and today the Little Free Library is a worldwide phenomenon. You can find out more about this organization (and how to get a box of your own) at littlefreelibrary.org.
Monday’s Wall Street Journal ran an article (read it here) noting the waning days of the department store as anchor in the American shopping mall: “Mall Owners Push Out Department Stores: Fast-fashion chains, restaurants, specialty stores do a better job of driving mall sales and drawing shoppers.”
Today’s post is nothing more than a random, jumbled collection of memories associated with shopping malls and department stores. It doesn’t feel like my usual kind of post, if I even have a “usual” kind of post, but it’s what I feel compelled to write about today. I appreciate your forbearance 🙂
So . . .
I am old enough to remember a time before shopping malls, at least before what I think of as “shopping malls”—that enclosed-under-one-roof collection of stores anchored at each of its opposite ends by a pair of major department stores. When I was very little, shopping meant going downtown. We’d leave the car in a parking structure and—
(Aside: My husband just noted that when he was a kid, his city didn’t even have any parking structures, which prompted me to wonder when the idea of parking ramps really took hold. With a quick Google search, I found a 2009 NPR article about a museum exhibit on the history of the parking garage. In case you also are interested in and easily sidetracked by such arcana 🙂 )
—we’d walk a block to the big department store. And big is what it was! At least six or seven stories. The shoe department, the toy department, the luggage department, the children’s department. Men’s clothing, women’s clothing. Hats. Gloves. Jewelry. Sporting goods. The hair salon. The photography studio. The candy counters. Just huge.
On the top story was the restaurant that took up nearly the entire floor. Tall windows all around. Where dressed-up ladies who lunch would go to eat chicken salad on china plates after a morning spent shopping on the lower levels.
I rather liked department stores. I remember breakfast with Santa and, of course, visiting Santa in the toy department fairyland at Christmas. And speaking of Christmas, I remember my parents taking us to see the department store windows every year at Rike’s in Dayton, Ohio. Magical!
I can’t remember how old I was when I visited my first shopping mall. Under age 10, I believe. I had entered my dog in the Alpo Dog Food dog show at a local grocery store, and when she advanced to the state level (a completely surprising and mysterious victory, which brought me a trophy and a transistor radio that I used for listening to Cincinnati Reds games), my mom drove us to the Eastland Mall in Columbus, Ohio, where the competition was held. According to Wikipedia, that mall was built in 1968, so it was sometime after that, probably 1969 or 1970.
By the early 1970s we had a mall much closer to home. And I thought it was wonderful! As a girl who grew up dreading the slushy slog from store to store in bitter cold during winter shopping trips, I loved that once inside the mall you could stash your coat in a locker! (Some malls still have a few of these; look for them.) And you could walk around from store to store in just your street clothes! All the shopping you needed to do, you could do under one roof.
One memory of that mall stands out because it was such a weird concept: the pay toilet. Anyone else remember this anomaly? Sometime in the early 1970s several shopping mall owners installed locks on their (previously free) restroom doors, so that entering a stall required depositing a dime to open the door. Right. Great idea. People who might never otherwise consider themselves “political” made a point of holding open (and otherwise sabotaging) the stall doors so that others could enter and exercise their basic human rights free of charge.
Pay toilets didn’t last too long.
Huh, I just checked Wikipedia’s entry on pay toilets and discovered that they are actually still a thing in many places around the world. I don’t think I’ve seen one in America in 40+ years. Because, really, charging someone to use the bathroom seems un-American, doesn’t it? However, there must be some call for pay toilets even now because there’s a company in Indianapolis that manufactures restroom security locks.
I moved to Milwaukee in the early 1980s, and one of my first jobs here was (no kidding) selling carpet (in the “carpet department” 🙂 ) at Gimbels Department Store in the old and now-abandoned Northridge Mall. (See an OnMilwaukee article with eerie photos of Northridge as of 2012 here.)
(Further aside: Have you seen the photos of “dead malls”? I did a Google Images search for “abandoned malls” and found all these pictures. There are lots of abandoned malls in the United States and around the world. An interesting collective artifact of a moment in retail history, I guess.)
My position in Gimbels’ carpet department was a seasonal Christmas job. As you might guess, there’s no mad rush to buy and install carpet during the Christmas holidays. I mostly worked evenings and weekends to spell the department’s main employee, with this part-time job added on top of my job as a receptionist at a downtown brokerage firm.
Some (very!) random memories of that job:
The series of “bing” tones I’d always heard broadcast in department stores were actually codes. Especially exciting was the code that meant shoplifters had been spotted. Workers from various departments would zip around to fill each other in on developments.
The mom and her adult son I always saw shopping together (and considered in passing to have a strange relationship because of it) were actually the store detectives.
The boyfriend of a co-worker had a job in New York’s Empire State Building, which to me seemed like the height of sophisticated adulthood.
The employment office was super impressed that I knew my Social Security number off the top of my head (only because it had been my college student ID number) when I filled out my paperwork.
The McDonald’s across the hall from Gimbels, where I sometimes took my dinner break, had the best-tasting fries ever, because they had so many customers that they pretty much sold every batch of potatoes immediately as it came out of the grease. No sitting around under heat lamps. (Plus McDonald’s used to cook their fries in beef tallow, which sounds awful but sure tasted good.)
Sundays were my favorite days to work at Gimbels in the mall. The carpet department was in the basement of the store, wedged into the very corner and bordered on one side by the furniture department and on the other by the (surprisingly very small) electronics department. Sometimes I’d wander over to the electronics department and browse. These were the early days of the Sony Walkman and the RCA VideoDisc, a really odd and short-lived product that essentially was a vinyl LP playing movies instead of music.
But mostly I hung out with Woody Dreyfuss, brother of Wisconsin governor Lee Dreyfuss, who worked in the furniture department. Like carpet, furniture is not high on anyone’s shopping list in December, so Woody was similarly not very busy during the holiday shopping season. On Sundays he and I would sit on a couch at the edge of the furniture department and watch the Green Bay Packers game on a television set at the intersecting corner of the (very busy and very crowded) electronics department.
I felt a bit guilty about getting paid to watch the Packers and listen to Woody’s stories about visiting the governor’s mansion while the poor electronics department folks were so overwhelmed. I tried to help out when I could, but I was no good with the computerized cash registers when anyone wanted to do something more complicated than make a purchase (like return one thing but exchange it for another). Over on Woody’s couch, I could easily keep an eye on my department and run over to talk with any customers who wandered past the electronics department into the rug territory. Which were basically none.
In some ways hanging out in the furniture department with Woody mirrored what the entire mall experience was like for me. Comfortable, informal, homey. Because malls were self-contained centers of commerce and community. In fact, “mall culture” was a thing by the late 1970s and early 1980s (see Fast Times at Ridgemont High). My hair stylist and I still laugh over memories of “mall hair.” (See what my search for that term produced on Google Images.)
(There’s way more info out there regarding malls and free speech, if this is of interest to you. See also, for example, this New York Times article from 1994 discussing protection of free speech:
Declaring that shopping malls have replaced the parks and squares that were “traditionally the home of free speech,” the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled today that the malls must allow access to protesters who want to distribute leaflets on social issues.
When I moved to Milwaukee in the very-early 1980s, the old Gimbels department store downtown on the Milwaukee River appeared not to have been remodeled since at least the 1950s. Walking in through the back entrance off of Michigan Avenue, I felt like I was stepping onto the set of Miracle on 34th Street or something.
The old candy department—with its huge, rounded glass-fronted counters—absolutely enchanted me. Once I’d started working for a downtown law firm as a paralegal/legal investigator, I loved shopping at Gimbels. I’d go there on my lunch hour and be instantly transported into another era. They no longer had elevator operators (although another building in downtown Milwaukee had one well into the 1980s, which thrilled me no end every time I went there), but Gimbels elevator doors still had the multiple gates from the old days.
Sadly (to me) just a few years after I moved here, the downtown Gimbels remodeled. Out went the wide, straight aisles; in came “mall” store design: narrow diagonal aisles that seemingly had no logical starting and ending points. I’m sure the idea was a) to cram more merchandise into the available floor space, b) to mimic the more lucrative “mall” shopping experience, and c) to so disorient shoppers that they’d become lost and, in searching for the exit, notice things they wanted to buy.
Gimbels’ remodel didn’t solve whatever problem it was meant to address, presumably low sales. In the mid-1980s Marshall Fields, the famous Chicago department store, bought at least three of the Milwaukee-area Gimbels stores, both the big downtown store and two of its shopping mall anchors. The Northridge Mall and Southridge Mall Gimbels stores were later sold to the Sheboygan, Wisconsin, department store chain H.C. Prange, which was then sold to an Iowa-based retailer, Younkers. At the same time (mid-1980s) that Marshall Fields acquired their Gimbels stores, three other local Gimbels stores, including the one in Mayfair Mall, were sold to Boston Store.
So . . . what? I really need to wrap up this extremely long post. I’m not sure what my point is except to say
Now, some forty years after they “died,” America’s downtowns appear to be reviving. New York City has certainly come back. There seems to be much more respect for the past. When buildings are “repurposed,” their original character and use often figure prominently in the new design. Check out the TripAdvisor reviews and photos of Marriott’s Residence Inn Downtown Milwaukee, which was once home to the downtown Gimbels. Inside, the building is quite different from its department store predecessor, but to anyone walking down Wisconsin Avenue, Gimbels has never left. Its old ivory-white facade dominates the river at the bend in the street across the bridge just as it always did.
So, finally, getting back to Monday’s Wall Street Journal article, it appears that the large enclosed mall with its department store anchors is evolving into something else. The huge store with something for everyone is being replaced by smaller niche stores and upscale, interesting food courts, among other things. (UPDATE: I just saw a news report, from either today or yesterday, saying that the empty Boston Store space in Southridge Mall may be turned into apartments.)
In many places, in fact, the self-enclosed mall is morphing into an open-air mini-version of yesterday’s downtowns and neighborhood shopping districts. Like stepping into Heraclitus’s river, you can have (but not have) the same retail experience twice. Commerce is change. Like nature, like life—like reality, itself.
But Americans don’t really cotton to the idea of change for change’s sake. We like to think of change as “progress.” I don’t understand why we do this, but it strikes me that seeing the world this way is dangerous.
It’s why we can’t remember lessons we shouldn’t forget. It’s how we lose our history—think 1960s and ’70s “urban renewal,” with all its accompanying arrogance regarding eminent domain and displacement of businesses and homes usually owned by society’s less privileged members. Most significantly, it’s how we lose sight of the end game. We can’t see the forest for the trees—mistaking causes for effects, symptoms for disease, la même chose for ça change. We live in the “moment” (the here and now) instead of in the “present” (the eternal).
And because we think we know it all, we can make some pretty bad decisions.
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Often Little Free Library boxes match the house they sit in front of. I’ve done a post on one of these before (Little Free Library #2, here) but I didn’t think to include a photo of the house.
For today’s post I wanted to show the house, too, but did not want to include the street address, which appears fairly prominently on the side of the porch. Hence the partial view.
I am working on a special Little Free Library post that I hope to get up tomorrow or Thursday.
When I stopped the other day to take a photo of a Little Free Library box that has been catching my eye for several months now, the homeowner was outside working in her garden. Not only does her Little Free Library box have a fun and unique appearance, but it also is inextricably linked with a story that is both heartrending and incredibly uplifting at the same time. (I just hope I can do justice to it.)
No doubt because I watched that BBC show on “The Hunt,” predators and prey seem to be weighing on me. In terms of “life and death,” the topic for today’s post feels mighty insignificant compared with the scope of human tragedy in the horrible shootings and police killings in the news. Yet, I also think this post kind of reinforces the ordinariness and small scale of everyday horror depicted in the epic life-and-death battles among most of the animal kingdom in “The Hunt.”
When walking between buildings on campus today, I noticed that several small tree branches were down and littered the sidewalk and street.
And then I noticed the feathers.
You can see feathers and branches scattered along 50 feet of sidewalk. Not shown are the branches in the street between and under parked cars.
Downtown Milwaukee is home to peregrine falcons, which were reintroduced amid much fanfare about three decades ago. For more background on Milwaukee’s raptors, see “peregrine falcons” at the bottom of the Wikipedia article on the U.S. Bank building; it mentions 1987 as the year the first “hacking” box for a nest was installed. As peregrine families took up residence, closed-circuit video of the nest and chicks could be viewed from the bank lobby (at that time known as First Wisconsin and later as Firstar). Since the internet, streaming video from other downtown falcon nests has been available, too. For example, atop the Milorganite factory next to the sewage treatment plant on the harbor (article here) and atop the We Energies building (article here).
Peregrine falcons eat seagulls for dinner, and after putting two and two together (branches, feathers) I felt confident this was the aftermath of a fearsome battle for life itself between a creature that needed to eat and another that didn’t want to be eaten.
Small feathers scattered everywhere . . .
. . . and larger ones, entangled in the fallen branches . . .
. . . seemed to indicate that a seagull had crashed through the trees, tearing off branches snagged on its wings, in a desperate attempt to save itself.
As nothing more gruesome than feathers were left behind, this gull quite possibly lived to see another day.
I worked from Starbucks at Red Arrow Park for part of the morning and made a quick visit to their restroom before walking back to campus. Maybe because it was a quiet time of day, I noticed something about the floor that I never have before. Doesn’t this photo look sort of like an abstract painting?
Milwaukeeans can probably guess why this post is titled “A Thousand Cuts.” Hint for everyone else: Red Arrow Park is home to the “Slice of Ice” skating rink in winter.
Apparently this is a thing, to have your dead tree turned into a work of art.
I’ve been driving past this guy for several years now. Might he be described as a “wood wizard”? Today I finally made time to pull over and photograph him 🙂
If you have a dead tree and would like to turn it into art, just Google your general location and the search terms “carved tree art” and “stump sculpture” or even “chainsaw stump art sculpture” to find someone who can make that happen.
You could also try using similar search terms in Pinterest or Google Images to pull up inspirational examples of what other people have done.
Just now I was able to find images both beautiful and whimsical:
And my favorite: a tiny little house with steps leading up to the front stoop and an open door where a friendly gnome is waiting to welcome you inside.
If you take a close look at some of Milwaukee’s older neighborhoods, you’ll notice that a hundred years ago (approximately, say 1870-1930) factories were surrounded not only by the modest cottages of workers but also by the mansions of the owners. Today you’d be lucky to find an owner living in the same metropolitan area as the factory, much less somewhere inside the United States.
The university where I teach, Milwaukee School of Engineering, sits on the site of the former Blatz Brewing Co., and in fact, several buildings on our campus were once part of the Blatz complex. So I’ve taken a casual interest in learning more about Blatz’s history, especially as it relates to our own buildings.
Not long ago, I stumbled across a photograph of the mansion Valentin Blatz built within just a few blocks of his company. Beautiful!
Described as a three-story stone mansion that was a blend of Queen Anne, Romanesque, and Gothic styles, the residence was designed by architect Charles A. Gombert and was home to Valentin Blatz from 1884, the year it was built, until his death in 1894.
Blatz mansion photograph taken from an August 9, 1964, newspaper article. Originally captioned: “The old Victorian mansion of Valentin Blatz, Sr., is shown as it appeared in the 1920’s. The pioneer brewer’s structure was razed last week along with an old coach house that stood behind it. “
Interesting aside: Charles A. Gombert also designed Milwaukee’s North Point Water Tower, Wikipedia entry here and a more detailed Urban Milwaukee article here.
Photo taken by Kevin Hansen. Via Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
I’ve seen this phenomenon of proximity repeated across the older neighborhoods of Milwaukee. As recently as the 1930s, in fact, neighborhoods appear to have been developed with walkability in mind. Factories and retail businesses lined the main streets, and residential housing filled in the blocks in between. It’s so intriguing to think about factory owners walking home from their places of business, perhaps greeting workers and their families along the way, who would also have been able to walk to work. What a different kind of community that must have created!
Just to make sure I wasn’t extrapolating too much—that is, building up a theory of historical lifestyle based on the evidence of abandoned/repurposed factory buildings, bowling alleys, banks, and retail shops—I did some quick online research looking for info that would support my mental image of life in those neighborhoods a hundred years ago. And found this, for example.
I also found some rather sad information about the home of Valentin Blatz, Jr., whose mansion was located, a few blocks east and slightly north of his father’s, among the mansions that once lined Prospect Avenue above the shore of Lake Michigan.
First this
MIlwaukee Journal article on Blatz mansion vandalism – dated December 22, 1939 (from Google News)
Which then led me to this
From Page 13 of the Historic Designation Study Report seeking City of Milwaukee Historic Structure status for the George J. Schuster house, 3209 W. Wells Street (no date)
Which led, at last, to a little good news on the historic preservation front. I didn’t recognize the “Redstone Apartments” name indicated as the Schuster House’s alias as of the time of this undated report. But when I Googled “Schuster House” and the address indicated, I found this!
Schuster Mansion Bed & Breakfast (link to website here and to an article on the owners here)
The Schuster House has found new life, and you can stay there next time you visit Milwaukee!
Sadly, turning to the fate of the original Valentin Blatz, Sr., mansion, Milwaukee’s downtown area became a rather downscale place to live during the mid-20th century. By 1939, as noted in the article above, the son’s mansion had become a target for vandals. The old Blatz, Sr., mansion was divided up into rooming-house units, and eventually a storefront addition replaced its front and side yards.
Former Blatz mansion, photo dated December 3, 1963 Former Blatz mansion, photo dated August 9, 1964
Finally, as happened all too often with older architecture in 1960s urban America, the former mansion was demolished in August 1964. To be replaced by . . .
A shopping center.
Those familiar with downtown Milwaukee will recognize the exact site of the Valentin Blatz mansion, at the southwest corner of Van Buren and Juneau. It is now the parking structure for Metro Market, a popular (and quite upscale) downtown grocery.
This seems like an appropriate time to cite one of the most haunting poems I know, “Ozymandias,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Gee, wildebeests at the watering hole two days ago and now this today. I’m sure I’ll post something happier next time 🙂
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A new series is beginning on BBCA (BBC America) tonight, “The Hunt,” originally broadcast last December on BBC One. Narrated by David Attenborough (who also narrated the brilliant “Planet Earth” documentary series), this new series apparently does something I’ve really never seen before in a nature program: sympathize with the predator.
Having grown up watching Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom” and numerous National Geographic specials, I am of course familiar with “the hunt.” Almost a sub-genre of the nature documentary, the hunt is usually set on an African savanna , either on the grassy plains or at the watering hole.
On the plains we see a herd of grazing antelope or zebras, just peacefully going about their business. Until a pair of eyes appears, hidden in tall grass. A lion, or maybe cheetah, lurks, crouched and waiting for the right moment. Suddenly she attacks! A single antelope, young and vulnerable, has wandered too far away from the herd’s protection. The big cat expertly counters the panicked animal’s evasive efforts. Where is the rest of the herd? Separating itself from the unfortunate victim, bunching ever more tightly together. Not us, you can see their tiny brains surmising with relief. Not today.
At the watering hole a group of wildebeests stands at the water’s edge. Surely they know how dangerous it is to drink. And yet the great striped and maned animals lower their horned heads because they must. All is peaceful. Until suddenly, instantly the crocodile springs out of the water! Seizing one of the wildebeests in its jaws, it drags the struggling creature into the water. Do the other wildebeests come to their companion’s rescue? No, they are scrambling up the bank as quickly as possible. Not them; not today.
Whenever terrible things happen to good people, I often think about those nature documentaries. How random and violent and banal it is. Just another day on the savanna. There’s really nothing you can do to prevent a lion from taking down a gazelle. The lion is not evil; the gazelle is not innocent. There is no justice needed. No criminal act has occurred.
To hope that human existence is so very different may be folly. Can predatory behavior really be controlled? When someone commits a crime, it’s interesting how often we either dismiss analysis of motive (he’s evil) or over-analyze and excuse the motive (he was abused as a child). Or we blame the victim for not thwarting the predator’s behavior (what did she expect, wearing that miniskirt and walking home alone at that late hour?) or inflict punishment by projecting our collective fear onto an otherwise innocent scapegoat (human sacrifice at worst; looking the other way at best).
In some ways, we are all just wildebeests at the watering hole, no more and no less. We are at the mercy of a chaotic universe, despite our efforts to elevate ourselves above the animal kingdom. It’s like we think we can intellectualize our way out of the mire: we have laws and complex social rules and education and religion. Civilization regulates primitive impulses.
Maybe that’s why we’re so fascinated by predators? Maybe there’s enough distance between potential threat and immediate threat that we can be intrigued by the danger and power instead of terrified? Because how else can one explain the multitude of “Law and Order” type of television shows and the extensive selection of suspense/thriller novels in bookstores.
I have always sided with the prey in those nature documentaries, even as I must also (reluctantly) acknowledge the thrill I experience in watching a predator at work. Although I personally find wildebeests to be ungainly, unsympathetic, and unintelligent-looking animals, it’s mighty hard to imagine myself rooting for the crocodile.
That’s why I’m looking forward to the first episode of “The Hunt” on BBCA tonight. Empathy is like a muscle, and sometimes the flex is hard. Yet perspective is worthwhile, even if we can never fully identify with a being so very alien to ourselves. (The show is running at 8:00 pm Central Time, which means 9:00 pm Eastern and Mountain and 8:00 pm Pacific. FYI😄)
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That’s how it feels when you board the train: like you’ve entered into a self-contained world that moves, as if inside a tube, through the outside environment.
Amtrak is the only way to go! If I can possibly manage it in terms of time and destination, I’m going by train any time I need to travel in the future. True, I did splurge on a bedroom instead of sitting in coach for 19 hours. That’s something I’ve always wanted to do. Getting a bedroom required planning, though, because there are only a few available on each run. I made my reservation back in January for my end-of-June trip. Usually I’m not quite that organized.
Once aboard, I realized that I probably could have just booked a “roomette” instead of a “bedroom.” The only real difference between them is space and a private bathroom.
The roomette is a quite-narrow, self-contained little room with two reclining armchairs facing each other and a berth above. To sleep, you can pull down the berth and recline the two chairs completely, and you have sleeping accommodations for two, one up and one down. There’s a sliding door that locks, so you can feel secure during the night. Each roomette car contains a bathroom to be shared by everyone on that car.
The bedroom, on the other hand, contains its own bathroom and a sink. If you get up in the middle of the night, there’s no need to run down the hall. There’s not only a sofa and a reclining chair that face each other, but there’s also an overhead berth. The bedroom easily sleeps two people and could possibly sleep three. You’d feel a little crowded during the day, but certainly no more crowded than in coach.
The space! It felt very unnecessary—but completely luxurious—to have that bedroom to myself. As I stretched out on my sofa, read my novel, and watched the green landscape outside my long picture window, I could not stop thinking about how comfortable I was and how miserable I’d be on a plane.
Meals in the dining car were included in the price of my ticket. Pretty good food! And a very relaxing meal. The pace is unhurried and you can enjoy both nice scenery outside the window and good conversation inside the car. The dining booths seat four people. If you’re traveling solo, as I was, or with one or two other people, you’ll most likely be seated with strangers. The conversations are inevitably mostly small talk, of course, but they can turn surprisingly personal, as well.
The small talk can be fun. At dinner Thursday night I sat with a couple from Bay View (a Milwaukee south side neighborhood) who had been on vacation in New Orleans. They had taken a carriage ride and done the cemetery tour, neither of which I’d had time to do. As they told me about the cemetery tour, I was able to glean interesting tidbits like these from their recounting.
Apparently a year and a day after someone is buried, it’s time to make the tomb available to its next occupant. The body, wrapped in a bag rather than placed inside a coffin, has completely decomposed by then and is nothing more than a bag of bones. The tomb is opened, and a ten-foot pole is used to reach inside and break up the skeleton. Then the now-more-compact “package” is pushed down a shaft, leaving the tomb itself vacant. According to my dining companions’ tour guide, these New Orleans cemetery practices are where we get expressions like giving someone “the shaft” and not wanting to touch something “with a ten-foot pole.”
At breakfast yesterday I sat with two sisters, who were probably in their seventies. One doesn’t fly, and although they had drifted apart during the years they were both raising families, they have recently begun traveling around the country by train every year to visit their children and other relatives. They told me a wonderful story about an impromptu reunion that one of them had been able to have with her son during one of their cross-country trips.
At some point after leaving Chicago on the California Zephyr, this sister had looked at the route map in her compartment and realized that the train would be making a brief stop in Ottumwa, Iowa (fictional home of the M.A.S.H 4077’s company clerk, Corporal “Radar” O’Reilly, in case that town’s name sounds familiar to you 🙂 ) .
Her son lived in Ottumwa! She managed to get a phone call through to him: “Quick, come to the station! We’ll be there in an hour!”
When they arrived in Ottumwa, there was her son waiting at the station along with his wife and children. The mom got off the train; she and her son hugged and cried. They hadn’t seen each other in a very long time. By that time, everyone on the train knew what was up, so as mother and son were having their unanticipated reunion, all the other passengers on the train were looking out the windows and applauding.
And then it was time for the train to pull out and head to its next stop. Just like that, as abruptly as it had happened, the reunion had to break up.
Mom got back on the train. Son and family remained at the station, waving goodbye.
Katherine Wikoff 