The original HONY – O.O. McIntyre

Posted on December 8, 2014 by Katherine Wikoff

Everyone seems to know and like the extremely popular “Humans of New York” (HONY) blog by Brandon Stanton.  Intriguingly, another man was putting an equally human face on the people of New York City, both celebrities and ordinary folks, nearly 100 years ago.

O.O. McIntyre (Wikipedia article here) was a small-town boy from southern Ohio who brought America’s faraway big city to the readers of small town and rural newspapers across the country.  His syndicated column featured relatively short slice-of-life essays that captured snapshots of New York’s daily dramas large and small.  “New York Day by Day” was hugely successful, due not only to people’s curiosity about life in New York but also (probably primarily) to McIntyre’s voice.  Whether written about a shopkeeper or baseball legend Babe Ruth, McIntrye’s column read like a daily letter home from a local boy who had somehow turned out to live an interesting life in an exciting place.

I have a collection of 25 “selected” stories of O.O. McIntyre published in 1929 by Cosmopolitan Magazine, which McIntyre wrote a monthly column for in addition to his syndicated newspaper columns.  The book was “not for sale” but was a gift for subscribers.  (Cosmopolitan was a very different magazine in the 1920s than it is today 🙂 )

O.O. McIntyre Cosmopolitan collection

Despite the fact that he was one of the highest-paid writers in the world at the height of the Depression, today McIntyre is largely forgotten.  When McIntyre’s widow died in the 1980s, found among her papers was a statement showing that her husband’s income for the month of December 1937 was $12,204.12.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Inflation Calculator, that would be worth $201,226.45 in 2014.

Imagine: $201,226.45 for the month of December alone!  So times 12 months, if December was representative of McIntyre’s usual monthly income, that would equal $2,414,717.40 for the year.

For more information, if you’re interested, this article on O.O. McIntyre ran in the Smithsonian Magazine in April 2011.  Here’s an excerpt:

By the early 1920s, O. O. (for Oscar Odd) McIntyre was perhaps the most famous New Yorker alive—at least to people who didn’t reside there. His daily column about the city, “New York Day by Day,” reportedly ran in more than 500 newspapers throughout the United States. He also wrote a popular monthly column for Cosmopolitan, then one of the country’s largest general-interest magazines. His annual output totaled some 300,000 words, the bulk of them about New York. In return for all that time at the typewriter, he was reputed to be the most widely read and highly paid writer in the world, earning an estimated $200,000 a year.

[Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/odd-mcintyre-the-man-who-taught-america-about-new-york-2317241/#x2tJ0Uk2odxW6eIQ.99
Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv
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McIntyre’s prose seems very dated today.  But it’s interesting to get a glimpse of New York during the 1920s and ’30s and to get a feel for the kind of newspaper column that Americans liked to read back then.

Given the popularity of HONY, it appears to have been basically the same kind of thing we like to read today 🙂

Posted in Books and reading, History, Life, Popular culture | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

How Ohio State football coach Urban Meyer teaches like a humanities professor

Posted on December 7, 2014 by Katherine Wikoff

As yesterday’s 59–0 Ohio State victory over Wisconsin shows, something is working very well in the Ohio State coaching strategy.  A story in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal provides some insight into what that might be.

“Taking the Buckeyes to School” talks about how Urban Meyer, who has been at the helm of Ohio State’s football team for three years, has a “flipped” coaching technique.  That is, he has players watch videos or study other “lecture” type materials on their own, like homework, outside of team meetings.  And then actual team meetings are devoted to hands-on exercises, drills, and basically “pop quiz” reviews, in which a player is presented with a scenario and asked how he would respond on the field during a game.

The article talks about how this coaching style is similar to the new “flipped classroom” which “turns the traditional-classroom teaching model on its head” by “delivering” lectures/lessons outside of class and using class time for “homework” via individual tutoring.

To which, as a literature and humanities professor, I can only respond: Ho hum.

Of course, classrooms are not for lectures, at least most of the time.  They’re for discussions.  This model is old, old hat for those of us in the liberal arts.  We’ve been teaching the “flipped classroom” way forever.  Students read materials/texts outside of class and come prepared to do their real learning in an interactive group environment.  Classroom discussions are where students (and teachers 🙂 ) create new knowledge in the form of new connections and insights about the basic course material.

Maybe Urban Meyer’s success on the gridiron will inspire teachers in disciplines outside of the liberal arts to try similar strategies in their classes.

Here is a video of Meyer presenting his coaching philosophy and techniques at a 2012 Ohio High School Coaches Association Clinic.

The video is over an hour long, and the audio is not the best.  So here, also, is a website summary of one person’s key takeaways from that presentation.

Update, August 31, 2015: I just noticed that this post is getting LOTS of views today, so I double checked the links (the Wall Street Journal article, video and “website summary”) to make sure they are still current. The WSJ article and the video still look good, but when I clicked over to the website summary of the video’s points (using my phone, anyway), I couldn’t get past an ad wanting me to sign up for newsletter delivery. There didn’t seem to be a way to close it to read the post without signing up. The site is flippedcoach.com and the post is dated February 23, 2012, and titled “Urban Meyers’ Coaching Philosophy” (and a few more words, can’t remember what they are). Maybe you can avoid the ad if you use a pc instead of a mobile device.

I also don’t know what’s bringing you to this page and whether or not the “humanities” classroom model is something you’re finding to be a useful insight. But if so, I’d be happy to talk with you in more detail about how to facilitate productive discussions and interactive learning in such a “flipped” environment. If you leave a comment at the end of this post, I’ll respond here. Otherwise, if you’d like a private response, please see my “Contact Me” page for info.

Thanks for reading, and I hope this post has been worth your time 😄

Update #2: I think I’ve figured it out. Apparently Urban Meyer made students do pushups who wore blue (arch-rival Michigan’s color, BOOOOO!) to his class today. I’m guessing that many people searching for that story have accidentally landed on my page instead. If you stuck around long enough to read my entire post AND this update, thank you! And good luck finding the story you were actually looking for 😄

Posted in Higher education, Learning, Life, News, Teaching | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Christmas at Downton Abbey

Posted on December 6, 2014 by Katherine Wikoff

I try to buy a new CD of Christmas music every December, and here’s my choice for this year 🙂

Buying info and the Amazon description are here (with sample audio clips of all songs).

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The Art of the Fire Escape (Milwaukee’s City Hall)

Posted on December 4, 2014 by Katherine Wikoff

I had to walk past City Hall to a dentist’s appointment yesterday.  For months (actually, years off and on!) the Market Street shortcut behind City Hall has been blocked off by scaffolding erected to preserve/shore up the nearly 120-year-old structure.  I almost automatically walked farther west to Water Street, which would have added a good five minutes to my trip, before I realized the scaffolding was gone.

It was my first close-up view of City Hall’s exterior in a long time.  About two years ago, I took this picture one morning because the fire escape and its shadow looked so much like the spiraling strands of DNA’s double-helix structure to me.  (And, I just noticed, you can see some scaffolding around the base of the building even then.)

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So yesterday, with the scaffolding gone, I noticed how attractive the actual fire escape is up close.  It doesn’t even look like a fire escape.  So ornate!

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One thing I didn’t take a photo of—because I was worried about being late for my appointment and because seeing it was kind of sad—was some of the flaking, gouged and pitted stone around the large Romanesque-looking archways at the front entrance.  (But, actually, I just now noticed that some of the stone up near the fire escape’s second level in this photo is flaking at the corners 😦 )

I love Milwaukee’s City Hall.  And I fear it is doomed.  Here’s a New York Times article from last June that lays out the whole depressing scenario pretty well.  We’ve no sooner finished (for now) all the exterior repairs than we now have to turn our attention to the fact that it is slowly sinking into the swampy soil that underlies our entire downtown.  Downtown Milwaukee’s buildings rest on pilings—mostly wood, in the case of older structures—so dry rot is a major concern.

I have occasionally taken student groups on tours of Northwestern Mutual Life’s massive complex, and NML’s strategy is to measure the water level of  “Lake Emily” and refill the marshy substratum with water when it gets too low.  Lake Emily was an actual lake in downtown Milwaukee a long time ago before it was filled in with dirt and built over.  The soil is so saturated that “Emily” may still exist as a subterranean lake in some form.  (Here is a great feature article about Lake Emily, with lovely photos of Northwestern Mutual’s marble halls, steps to a long-ago outdoor garden, and the basement piling-management system.)

How much is a building worth?  At what point should we stop throwing good money after bad?  City Hall is such a beautiful piece of architecture.  An instantly recognizable landmark.  An icon, really.  Kind of like the Empire State Building or the Eiffel Tower or the Sydney Opera House.

It’s hard to put a cash value on something that has a greater intrinsic worth than merely the sum of its deteriorating parts.

Posted in architecture, Art, Life, Milwaukee, Nature, Science, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Red Arrow “Slice of Ice” (plus “Hank” the Dog)

Posted on December 3, 2014 by Katherine Wikoff

The “Slice of Ice” skating rink at Red Arrow Park in downtown Milwaukee is nearly ready for skaters.  It opens for the season tomorrow (Thursday, December 4) at 4:00.

Yesterday I noticed that the rink’s cement had been covered by a thin layer of ice, almost like a “prep” foundation.  But this morning when I stopped by Starbucks after my first class of the day, I saw that the ice seemed to have assumed its normal winter appearance.  By the time I left campus, county workers were unloading decorated Christmas trees from a truck and installing them around the rink’s perimeter.

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When I was there this morning, park workers were affixing ads to the rails surrounding the ice.  I couldn’t resist snapping my photo of the ice from a position that would also capture the ad for a “Hank” tree ornament.  If you buy two 4-packs of Milwaukee Brewers tickets (great Christmas gift for a baseball fan), you get the free Christmas ornament.

Slice of Ice (and "Hank" the Dog)

As every Milwaukeean knows, Hank (Wikipedia article here) was a stray who wandered into the Brewers’ spring training camp in Arizona last winter.  Adopted by the team as its mascot, Hank arrived in town last spring to an outpouring of hoopla and adoration.  A crowd of people including the county executive and the mayor of Milwaukee (who brought peanut butter dog cookies) waited for over half an hour at Mitchell International airport to greet Hank as soon as his chartered airplane landed.

Above is a cute picture of Hank in his mascot dog house.  (Photo by Gkasica, via Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Indeed, Milwaukeeans love their animals.  For proof, look no further than the story of Samson, a gorilla who lived for years at the Milwaukee County Zoo.  His death warranted front page newspaper headlines for days.  Or Gertie, the Duck, whose brood of ducklings, nested in a piling in the Milwaukee River under the Wisconsin Avenue bridge during World War II, attracted national attention (and a Readers Digest article and eventually a children’s book) after throngs of locals gathered daily to monitor her progress.

But I digress (oops 🙂 ).  The main points to take away from today’s post:

  1. “Slice of Ice,” the skating rink at Red Arrow Park at the intersection of State and Water streets in Downtown Milwaukee, opens tomorrow afternoon.
  2. You can get a free “Hank” Christmas ornament if you purchase two holiday 4-packs of Brewers tickets (@ $60 each, so $120 total) through December 19.  Here’s a link to the Brewers webpage with all the ordering info.
Posted in Life, Milwaukee, News, Popular culture | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Northern Soul Project – Streaming 24/7 Northern Soul Radio (Post #4)

Posted on December 2, 2014 by Katherine Wikoff

A quick post to share my latest Northern Soul find: a radio station that streams classic Northern Soul music online, ad free, 24/7.

A partnership between San Francisco radio station KALW (91.7FM) and National Public Radio, “The Mix: Northern Soul Radio,” can be found HERE.  I opened up the site and am listening right now as I’m working on other things at the computer.

In case you’re new to reading my blog, I started a somewhat casual, but continuing, exploration of Northern Soul a couple of months ago.  Basically it’s 1950s/’60s Motown soul records, which became the soundtrack of an underground dance-oriented club movement in Northern England during the 1970s, and is still going strong today.

You can find my previous posts here if you’d like to learn more about Northern Soul and catch up on the “Northern Soul” series:

Post #1

Post #2

Post #3

In a little twist of karma, the WMSE, the radio station long associated with Milwaukee School of Engineering (where I teach), is also 91.7FM.  Be sure to check out my friend Sonia’s Friday afternoon “Blues Drive” show (3-6 p.m. Central every Friday) if you like classic blues music.

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Posted in History, Learning, Milwaukee, Music, Popular culture, Writing, blogging | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Paths of Glory

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Katherine Wikoff

Actually, that post title came to me just now because I wanted something to do with “paths,” and Paths of Glory, the old Stanley Kubrick film starring Kirk Douglas, is one of my favorites.  Sadly, if you were hoping to read about the film, this post doesn’t have anything to do with it 🙂

Actually, this is sort of a post about our dogs.  Sorry.  (You can stop reading now if you despise this kind of cuteness.)

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This afternoon I came home from work, fed the dogs, put away groceries, and took out the garbage.  All my usual getting-home chores.  The snow  melted over the weekend, although today is quite cold.  So I noticed when I went outside that our dogs’ trails/paths through the yard are quite visible, even now when the grass is matted down and frozen and covered by leaves.  (Yes, we raked, but it snowed before all the leaves had a chance to fall.  Leaves are still falling!) 100_1495[1] 100_1497[1]

If you have pets, you have probably noticed that they like to walk in the same familiar little byways throughout your yard.  Locally, the roads between Milwaukee and other cities like Green Bay, Watertown, and Chicago were originally Indian trails.  When the roads were built over them much later, I guess everyone saw the wisdom of the original footpaths.

Even the planets seem to have an affinity for revolving through eternity along their same old elliptical orbits.

What is it about a well-worn path?  Why is it so attractive?  Yes, Robert Frost decided to take the less traveled road “Because it was grassy and wanted wear.”  But he’s an exception.  For most of us, the myriad complexities of daily life demand simplification.

And simplification requires routine—i.e., the road more traveled by!

 

Posted in Life, Nature, Science | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Countdown to Downton Abbey – Cora’s YouTube Music Video

Posted on November 30, 2014 by Katherine Wikoff

Last year I wrote a series of “Countdown” posts in anticipation of Season 4 of Downton Abbey.  I had not intended to do the same this year, but yesterday I stumbled across something that was too fun not to share.

So, first the “countdown” part.  Season 5 of Downton Abbey is set to premiere in the U.S. on January 4 at 8:00 pm Central Time (9:00 Eastern).  The official PBS Downton Abbey page doesn’t have a countdown clock, as it has in past years, forcing us all to do the math ourselves.  But the page does have trailers and links and all the usual time-wasting stuff 🙂

Now for Cora’s music video.  Actress Elizabeth McGovern, who plays Lady Grantham, has a band in real life called Sadie and the Hotheads.  They’ve just released a cover of “The Little Drummer Boy,” which has a YouTube video (below) and which is also available for downloading at iTunes.

And, of course, the song itself has now put me in mind of two other versions (well, actually just one; the other is an exact replica, with uncanny mimicry) that I also feel compelled to share 🙂   The first features Bing Crosby and David Bowie, an odd pairing if there ever was one—and an excellent example of how innovative it can be to combine wildly disparate elements.

Apparently the creation of this polyphony between the old “Drummer Boy” and the new “Peace on Earth” was a completely unexpected turn of events.  A Washington Post article, “Bing and Bowie,” details the strange serendipity behind the song’s composition.  Apparently Bing Crosby happened to be in England on a concert tour in September 1977 and had lined up some British stars to appear as guests on his annual Christmas special.  David Bowie’s home was near the studio where Crosby was recording scenes for the show, so convenience was one factor in getting him.  But at the last minute Bowie announced that he hated “The Little Drummer Boy” and refused to sing it, so Crosby’s writers hurriedly wrote the “Peace on Earth” song for him to sing in counterpoint instead.  Necessity truly is the mother of invention.

By the way, Crosby died about a month after this performance was recorded.  So “serendipity” may be a very relevant description, indeed.

The second video is a parody of the first, with dead-on accuracy of reproduction by Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly.  I don’t know why this video makes me laugh so much.  Will Ferrell plays it completely straight, which you can see if you compare the two videos closely, but every eyebrow lift and turn of the head is hilarious.  You’ll have to head over to YouTube to actually watch this video: link here.  For whatever reason, Funny or Die (the producers) have set it up so that I can’t embed it for you to view on my blog.  You’ll be subjected to a really long ad at first, but it’s worth enduring in order to watch the video, IMO 🙂

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Black Friday – Spreading Like Retail Ebola

Posted on November 28, 2014 by Katherine Wikoff

I am both mystified and appalled to discover that the Black Friday phenomenon is fast becoming a new international “holiday.”

In scrolling through my Twitter feed last night, I came across a BBC News article describing how police have been called to supermarkets across the UK to deal with unruly “Black Friday” crowds.  My first reaction was to laugh, of course, at the very idea of a Black Friday stampede to get a deal on iceberg lettuce.

But then I read the article, and I suspect that “supermarket” must refer to a different kind of shopping establishment across the pond.  One shopper referred to getting a great deal on a coffee machine, a 70% discount, at a store called Tesco.  Apparently Tesco has said that it expects Black Friday to beat Boxing Day sales in 2014.

Boxing Day sales?  My family used to live in Canada, and what I know about Boxing Day is that it’s the day after Christmas, it’s the day on which Downton Abbey sorts used to give servants their Christmas “boxes,” and it’s a holiday on which all stores are closed.  But now, apparently, it’s a holiday similar to our Black Friday, in which retailers and deal-hungry customers engage in what can only be described as crass commercialism.

Black Friday got its start in the United Kingdom four years ago, according to the BBC article:

Black Friday—historically the big sales day in America that follows the Thanksgiving holiday—has been adopted by an increasing number of shops in the UK.

It was brought over by online store Amazon four years ago after internet shoppers noticed the US got the best deals.

The Black Friday craze has not only infected Europe.  This year it is spreading to Asia, as well.  An article in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, titled “Spreading Black Friday Fever to China’s Shoppers,” says

China doesn’t officially celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas, but American retailers are hoping to convert a generation of consumers in the world’s most populous country into year-end binge buyers anyway.

Apparently, thanks to Alipay, a new Pay Pal imitator tied to e-commerce giant Alibaba, American retailers like Macy’s and American Apparel can make their Black Friday discounts available to Chinese shoppers.

This isn’t really a bad thing, of course, especially for Macy’s and American Apparel.  But the idea of Black Friday becoming a worldwide phenomenon kind of depresses me.  I avoid malls like the plague (to use another disease-related metaphor, which I’ve seemed employ a couple of times in this post already 🙂 ) during the Christmas shopping season.  I dislike the crowds, and there’s something antithetical about the euphoric combination of generosity and abject greed that shoppers seem to exhibit at this time of year.

They are shopping, presumably, to find the nicest gifts they can at the most affordable prices in order to honor people that they love.  But somehow, through an alchemy that is shrouded in magic and beyond my comprehension, that admirable sentiment undergoes a transformation to become pure avarice.  At least that’s what it looks like to me when people are assaulted (at best) and trampled to death (at worst) in the interest of a “deal.”

The most troubling part, and I know that reasonable people can disagree on this, is the fact that Black Friday is becoming seen as a holiday in and of itself.  The day itself is an actual federal holiday, meaning that U.S. government offices are closed, and many states also close up on this day.  Which is fine, as far as giving people extra time off to travel and visit with family.  That makes sense.

What doesn’t make sense is that Black Friday, an American retail phenomenon meant to jump start the Christmas shopping season, should be perceived as and adopted by people in other countries entirely out of context as a representation of an American day of celebration.  On the introduction of Black Friday shopping to China, Jingming Li, U.S. president of Alipay, had this to say in the Wall Street Journal article:

We’re just bringing more attendees to this American holiday.

The definition of “holiday,” to me, is the celebration of some unique aspect of a culture’s history or identity.  It’s both ironic and fitting—while at the same time fairly depressing—that Chinese citizens are about to become better acquainted with “the real America” through Black Friday shopping.

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Thankful for Libby Gaughan’s Pecan Pie

Posted on November 27, 2014 by Katherine Wikoff

For a quick Thanksgiving Day post, I want to share a recipe that we love and that has special meaning for me.  Plus, it’s pretty easy to make 🙂

Libby Gaughan was a friend of my grandmother’s many years ago (she died sometime in the 1980s).  Her son Jack was a famous, Hugo-Award-winning artist who illustrated science-fiction novels.  Libby was an indomitable force, the spine of the Republican Party in Clark County, Ohio; her house was filled with little elephant knickknacks and doorstops and photographs of herself with important Republicans like Richard Nixon.

Libby was also an excellent cook—even though she rarely did it.  Instead she drove clear to the other end of town every day to eat dinner at the Holiday Inn.  It was probably really good for her socially to have that daily connection.  Libby lived alone (her son lived in New York, I believe), and the waitresses at the Holiday Inn were so good to her.  When my grandmother and I went there with her once, it was sweet to see how all the waitresses came over to say hello and make a fuss over her.

Anyway, one of Libby’s special recipes was for pecan pie.  The best I’ve ever eaten!  It uses Kraft caramels, so it probably came from that company and isn’t some family heirloom kind of thing.  But still, it’s easy and delicious.

Libby used to say that the hardest part of making this pie was taking the wrappers off of all those caramels.  And if you use a frozen pie crust or one of those refrigerated ones, I would agree with that statement.  But I make my own crust because, for us, that is the “secret ingredient” that puts this pie over the top.  And for me, that is the hardest part of making this pie.  But so worth it!

Libby Gaughan’s Pecan Pie (makes 2)

Crust – for two 10-inch pies

  1. In a large mixing bowl mix together 3 cups sifted, all-purpose flour, 1½ teaspoons salt, and 1 cup of butter-flavored Crisco.
  2. Using a pastry cutter (or two knives) “cut” the shortening and flour together (mix by slicing) until the pieces of dough are pea-sized.
  3. Sprinkle 7 to 9 tablespoons of ICE water (you want it to be VERY COLD) over the mixture to moisten, in 2-3 tablespoon increments, mixing the dough to distribute the water evenly.  You want to handle the dough as little as possible, so toss it very gently with two forks, like a salad.  Eventually you’ll get closer to a dough than a pebbly mess of flour and shortening.
  4. Form into two balls.  Wrap with plastic wrap and refrigerate until ready to use.
  5. To roll out, spread one sheet of parchment paper (next to the waxed paper and aluminum foil in the supermarket) on a flat surface.  Sprinkle with flour.  Place one ball of dough atop the parchment sheet.  Sprinkle the dough with flour.  Place another sheet of parchment paper on top of the dough.  Use a rolling pin  to flatten the dough between the parchment sheets.  Roll in all directions, until the dough is the shape of a large circle big enough to fill your 10-inch pie pan.
  6. Remove the top sheet of parchment.  Place your pie pan upside down over the flattened dough.  Slip one hand under the bottom sheet of parchment; then, pushing the crust dough upward into the pie pan, flip both the crust and pie pan right side up.  Through the parchment, lightly use your fingers to press the dough into the contours of the pie pan.
  7. Repeat the previous steps with the second ball of dough.
  8. Trim the pie crusts slightly beyond (maybe by an inch) the edge of your pie pan.  Fold the extra under, and then either crimp it with your fingers to make a pleasing edge that undulates in waves OR press down on it with the tines of a fork to create an edge patterned with striped lines.
  9. You can stop at this point if you want and refrigerate (or freeze) the prepared crusts in advance of a busy Thanksgiving day.  Just be sure to let the crusts come to room temperature before baking.

Filling

  1. Unwrap 72 Kraft caramels.  You’ll need at least two bags (check the package count; everything seems to be downsizing these days!).  Place in a large, microwave-friendly glass or ceramic mixing bowl.  I use a really large Pyrex measuring bowl, with a handle and spout, which is convenient for pouring.
  2. Add ½ cup water and ½ cup butter.  Melt caramels, water, and butter in the microwave.
  3. Remove from microwave and stir in 1½ cups of sugar, ½ teaspoon of salt, 1 teaspoon of vanilla.
  4. Beat 6 eggs in a separate bowl and stir into the caramel mixture.
  5. Add 2 cups of pecan halves.

Bake

  1. Fill your two 10-inch pie crusts with the pecan-caramel mixture.  Place on foil-covered baking sheets (to catch drips and make for easy cleanup!).
  2. Bake in a preheated 350º oven for 45 to 50 minutes.
  3. Let cool for at least two hours before eating.
  4. The filling will appear to be very soft right out of the oven.  Don’t worry.  It will firm up as it cools.

Serve with whipped cream if desired.  And then tell me if this isn’t the BEST pecan pie you’ve ever eaten!

Thank you, Libby Gaughan!  God bless, and rest in peace.

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