The Funnies - Quite Likely (1909)

Minnie Mermaid - Don't you wish you could go rowing with a Summer man?

Bessie Mermaid - No, I don't; men are lazy things. He'd probably make me scull over the stern with my tail!

Cold Springs Resort, Hamilton, Indiana

Combining two things you love can be a fickle affair. If you read many of my posts, you're aware that I'm into local history. I spend hours dabbling in the subject: thumbing through old books and magazines, reading accounts of the past, and condensing them into what I hope are pithy little blog posts. You might not be aware that I'm also into dancing. I picked it up from my love of old movies. The first time I saw Rick's American Cafe in Casablanca with smartly dressed couples taking a turn on the dance floor while Sam hoarsely crooned Shine I knew I had to learn to dance. Eventually I did, though Vernon and Irene Castle won't be calling me anytime soon for pointers. It wasn't long after I'd learned to dance that I started seeking out historic venues where I could cut the proverbial rug. I've traveled as far as Salt Lake City to find an interesting dance floor where I could kick up the dust of bygone centuries, and most of the time it's come off really well...most of the time.

Like anything else, there are times when you attempt to combine two good things and they wind up creating something much less than the sum of their parts. Sometimes, the past is the past and there's probably a good reason it's nearly been lost forever. Consider our recent trip to visit a historic, Indiana dance venue that'd been in operation in one form or another since 1895.

Cold Springs Resort started out under the moniker Watkins Grove. It wasn't much more than a campsite in the northern Indiana plains, a place where sportsmen fishing the Black River could build a fire and bed down for the night. Fishermen could supplement their catch with produce purchased from the surrounding farmsteads or, if the fish weren't biting, buy a hot meal to dull the pangs of failure. Watkins eventually built a concession stand to cater to campers and even offered boat rentals to capture more revenue. In 1898, the same year "Remember the Main" became a rallying cry, Watkins opened a hotel and bowling alley on the site and Watkins Grove started to become a weekend destination.

At the turn of the century, cottages and boathouses were built along the shores of what then was called Fish Lake attracting renters came from across the Midwest. It was an escape for the ever-more-urban American population, a chance to get out of the city and away from the daily cares of your job and experience nature. At the resort you could start the day with a little fishing followed by lunch at the hotel restaurant and a little Sousa music, then you'd retire to your room to rest, write letters, and eventually change into your evening clothing and emerge for dinner and dancing. Entertainment ranged from speeches by key religious and political figures of the time (William Jennings Bryant spoke from the hotel porch, possibly during his 1908 presidential run) to baseball games between local teams such as the Hamilton Leaders, Edon Boneheads, Auburn Blues, and Ashley Grays. It was mentioned in the 1899 issue of the Indiana Dental Journal in glowing terms:

Indiana Dental Journal, 1899

This is where I always get myself in trouble, I forget that the past is the past and frequently doesn't reflect the present in any ways, shape, or form. In my mind they're still lighting Chinese lanterns in the dance pavilion while the band tunes up. Patrons file in, murmuring with the day's news and filled with happiness at having their cares drift away. If I close my eyes I can almost hear the music intermingling with the sounds of crickets and the baritone of bullfrogs down by the lake. Somewhere off in the distance the lonesome whistle of the St. Louis Flyer passing by the Hamilton station is a gentle reminder that summer isn't forever. Let's not get caught up in the dream just yet, though.

Success brought improvement and the hotel was rebuilt in 1914, becoming three stories high with twenty five rooms and electricity. In 1917 jazz supplanted the sound of clattering pins and the bowling alley was converted into a dance pavilion. Dancing in the early twentieth century, especially at a resort, was a seasonal thing. Like spring peepers, dance orchestras arrived when the weather warmed up and during the summer months you could dance at Cold Springs every night except Mondays from June 16th to Labor Day. In its heyday the Cold Springs dance pavilion played host to Woody Herman, Glenn Miller, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, and Artie Shaw and as the baby boom and rock and roll reverberated across the American landscape bands like the Beach Boys, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny and the Hurricanes came to the shores of Hamilton Lake.

With the fifth generation of the Watkins family running Cold Springs Resort, I expected to find a love and reverence for the past that preserved the hotel and dance pavilion in its prime, but you know what they say about assumptions. I guess a legacy can be a tough thing to carry on: if you cleave too closely to the past you wind up becoming a poor man's version of a theme park and too kitsch to be taken seriously, if you let things go they degenerate into a sort of half-preserved decrepitude like a patient clinging to life with the help of an iron lung. Unfortunately, the ladder applies to Cold Springs.

Looks like a place Norman Bates
would drink, doesn't it?

We arrived on Friday afternoon to find the hotel abandoned. Not a figure of speech, we couldn't find a soul in the hotel when we arrived. We tried the doors and found both the restaurant and bar locked. Some of the cabins near the hotel were falling down and the dock that ran out from the tiny beach listed uncomfortably to the port. The longer I stood in the drizzling rain taking in the scene, the more I began to wonder if I'd just wandered into the zombie apocalypse. Thoughts of arming myself and finding a defensible position started to pervade my thoughts. Worse yet I couldn't get a cell signal at all, meaning I couldn't try to look up the resort's number so I could call to make sure we were in the right place.

Before irrational fear could take over, we got back into the car and drove into Hamilton where we could make a call. It took a few minutes to find a gas station with a phone book, but that wound up doing us no good since the resort wasn't listed. Now we had two choices: we could turn around and start the two hour plus trip home or give the hotel one more try. We decided to give the hotel one last go, and when we got there we found that neon bar sign was lit. I descended the dank staircase half expecting to find Norman Bates and Michael Myers talking over their week over a beer at the bottom, instead after about five minutes of politely making "we're down here" noises  a woman appeared from upstairs, checked us in, and gave us the key to our room.

It was a room in the most rudimentary sense of the word. Yes, it had four walls and a ceiling, it contained a bed and a television, and there even was an attached bathroom. On the other hand we had no chair, coffee maker, extra pillows, toilet paper, shampoo, or wolfsbane to repel the lycanthropic attack I felt was sure to come once the sun went down. The mattress apparently had been de-boned by the last fisherman who'd stayed there and when you lay down on it you sank to the bed frame. The television had five or so television stations two of which were 24 hour weather and two others devoted to some fly-by-night televangelist and the signal constantly broke up due to bad satellite reception. In the spirit of respecting the past, though, we made the best of things. After all, back in the day there was no television to pass the hours, people socialized, wrote letters, and generally made the most of being together. How spoiled we'd become! That was the frame of mind I tried to adopt as we settled in as much as possible for a good night's sleep after a whole day of travel.

My good intentions failed about an hour later. That was when the bar directly below our room really started hopping. By hopping I mean singing Redneck Girl at top volume and by singing I mean they knew most of the words. We sat awake and listened as the locals, none of whom I saw while the sun was up, came out to make their revels. There was yelling, laughing, arguments, failed romantic trysts, loud discussions of the resort's storied history, and all manner of general noise. With each passing hour the room seemed to get smaller and the bed less comfortable. Finally I lost consciousness, not sure what time of night that happened, I'm just glad it did. The following day we resolved to spend as much time away from the room as possible and to forfeit our second night at the hotel for a late night drive back to Indy. We went to Angola, Indiana, visited a couple of wineries, and shopped at an outlet mall, returning just in time to prepare for a night of dancing at the pavilion. I'm glad to say where the hotel disappointed at just about every turn, the dance did not. 

Don't get me wrong, if you're looking for a fine example of well preserved turn of the century architecture the Cold Springs pavilion is not for you. Unless the management makes a concerted effort and does some serious maintenance, the lakeside dance hall will fall apart and be lost forever. At the moment it's balanced between shabby chic and depressive death spiral. The space itself is huge by modern dance floor standards; a broad expanse of hardwood surrounded by a gallery of tables for the wallflowers. The night's entertainment was The Junkyard Dogs, a fifties revival band that played hits by everyone from Chubby Checker to the Beatles. We danced until dripping with sweat and then bugged out before eleven to make the two-hour plus drive home to a comfortable bed.

The summary? Well, as a place to stay I don't recommend the hotel at the Cold Springs Resort. The price is cheap, that's for sure, but in my opinion, it's because the accommodations aren't really any better than sleeping out in a tent. It lacks too many things and is in too bad of shape. I hope that the owners will invest in returning it to its former glory and making it a destination, but at present it's a no go for me. On the other hand, the pavilion is definitely worth visiting. I recommend dropping in for dancing or spending a night in a nearby hotel and then driving over to swing the night away to the sounds of the fifties. One tip, get there early. Doors open around seven o'clock and seating is limited, if you show up late you could wind up standing the entire evening.

Happy Labor Day - Goodbye Summer 2014

Labor Day Crowds, 1938 Indiana State Fair

It's that time again, summer's had its splendid hour and autumn is waiting in the wings with her bright colors and bitter frosts. Kids are back to school and the holidays too far off to worry about. Time for the final cookout of what's considered the "official" grilling season, a cold one on the deck, and maybe a swim before the pools are drained.

The image at the top of this post comes from the 1938 Indiana State Fair, crowds of people strolling (I believe) in front of the Coliseum on a bright sunny day, enjoying the weather while they still could. Having strolled in that same spot, I hear the scene in my head - the distant music of the midway, the sounds of animals in the exhibit barns, the jumbled conversations, and the excitement of children. It's a time machine of the most effective sort, no chance of stepping on the odd butterfly, but all the emotional impact.

To say a final so-long to summertime 2014, I'm going back to 1905 and the master of summertime music, Philip Sousa's In the Good Old Summertime. Take it away, Phil!

The Funnies - Captain Kidd (1914)

Life Magazine, 1914

Quote for July

"Tis now the summer of your youth: time has not cropped the roses from your cheek, though sorrow long has washed them."

- Edward Moore

Quaint 16th Century Islands

Summer vacation season has arrived again, bringing with it warm tropical breezes, long lazy days, and the urge to wander. Since I spend a lot of time looking at the past, I figured this would be a good time to peruse the exotic travel offerings our grandparents and great grandparents might have considered when planning their summer holiday.

I'm kicking things off with a 1920 ad from Travel Magazine. Bermuda had been a British colony since 1609 and in 1920 celebrated the tercentenary of Bermudan parliamentary government. That year also marked the first royal visit to the island when Albert Edwards, Prince of Wales and soon to become King Edward VIII arrived aboard the HMS Renown where he was a serving Royal Navy officer. Prince Edward's official duties during the trip included opening the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital, visiting St. Geroge's Island where he was principle guest in celebrations marking the 300th anniversary of the Bermudan State House as well as the completion of St. Peter's Church, and officially opening Somers Gardens.

That same year the UK-based Furness Withy shipping company began investing in Bermuda by taking over the Quebec Steamship Company and renaming it the Furness Bermuda Line. Furness Bermuda ran a three week service, bringing mail, freight, and passengers to the island from New York. Bermuda had a major attraction for American tourists - alcohol. The drought that was prohibition settled over American on January 29, 1920 and would remain in place until December 5, 1933 and during this thirteen-year period American tourists sought the warm waters and cool drinks of the Caribbean as a remedy to their moralistic problem. Furness Withy made the best of the prohibition era, investing in Bermudian holiday facilities such as the Mid Ocean Golf Club, the St. George, Bermudian and Castle Harbor hotels, and two tenders to ferry passengers from ship to hotel.

During the 20's Furness's Bermuda Line consisted of three ships: the Victoria, the St. George, and the Forts Hamilton and the ad featured here focuses on this last ship. It took some digging to unravel the fate of the Forts Hamilton and this is largely due to Furness' poor advertising. In 1923 the Hamilton still appeared on the covers of Furness' sailings brochures, but she no longer was a part of the line's fleet. In 1921 Furness sold her to the Bermuda and West Indies Steamship Company and this began her slow decline. She was sold again in 1926, 1930, 1931, and finally in 1932. In 1933 she was laid up in Trieste Italy where she was was eventually sold for scrap and broke up. Strange to think that the steel which went into building a pleasure vessel for British and American tourists probably went into the war effort which would kill so many of their children.

Let's not leave on that somber note, though. After all, this is a post about vacationing not the cruel ironies of history. So, I'll close with a couple home movies of Bermuda gleaned from the YouTube archives. Note the guy holding up the bottle of booze in the first clip. Spitting in the eye of prohibition, I like his style!

The Funnies - Buried Treasure (1914)

Life Magazine, 1914

Ford Trip Top Shape

Not so much a car ad for the first Sunday in June, but a car service ad. This little missive advising dad to tune the old jalopy up before hitting the vacation highway struck a chord with me. Not sure why, my dad never golfed or smoked a pipe, we never brought a picnic basket to the beach, and I certainly never had a striped talking duck water toy as a sidekick. Nope, the plan was to go to some low-budget camp ground, go fishing, and get sunburned to the point of blistering before everyone complained so much the whole thing ground to an awful halt. Still, the American vacation is a little like the American Thanksgiving - something that is aspired toward and never achieved.

Anyway, Summer begins in June and so does my annual trawl through all things vacation. From cars to campgrounds to food to destinations, you'll be seeing an assortment here on the blog. There isn't a rest stop until Labor Day, so here's your last chance to do whatever's necessary. I'm not stopping this car until we can put our toes in the sand.

Waterman's Ideal Fountain Pen

Here's another ad for Waterman's Ideal fountain pen touting what in 1911 was a big selling point, its portability. Imagine how freeing it must have felt to no longer have to dip a pen into an inkwell in order to write. Suddenly writing on the hotel veranda while enjoying the sea air was a real possibility, not a cumbersome contrivance that could only be managed at the risk of ruining everything you were wearing. 

The mention of the extra amount of letter writing that takes place over the summer struck me. Ah, for the time when correspondence wasn't a dashed off email, twitter hash-tag self centered, or fake-book account filled with selfies and skewed accounts of reality with a bias toward witty sarcasm. Sorry, just indulging my inner Luddite.

Indiana State Fair - 1943

Technically this isn't an ad for the Indiana State Fair, but it is a fair themed magazine cover. The Billboard Magazine eventually shortened its title to Billboard and shifted its focus to music, but back in the 40s and 50s they ran an annual Fair Issue which featured ads for fairs and celebrations from across the country. The two ads I've featured so far came from Billboard and I'm sure I'll be posting a few more before the state fair's run is over.

Like everything you find in magazines published during World War II, this cover has a war theme. Soldier and sailor testing their manly shooting skills on some boardwalk or midway during leave and all for a fistful of cheap cigars and the adoration of a lady. Note the targets in the shooting galleries - little Hitler, Hirohito, and Mussolini heads. Judging from the soldier boy's take, that carnie better bend the sites on that rifle a little more.

Dog Days of Summer

Welcome to August and the Dog Days of Summer. Does that phrase bring to mind a panting pooch? Well, here's an Old Farmer's Almanac piece on the true origin of the phrase.

The Full Buck Moon

Ah, July, one of my favorite months. It’s the month of thunderstorms and fireworks. Thunder in the sky and thunder on the earth! I can remember many a July 4^th sweating in the July heat and returning to the blessing of air conditioning smelling like sulfur and black powder. There’s nothing like a good hot dog and some salty chips after you’ve spent an hour lighting up the night in honor of your country.

Though we didn’t have a full moon for fireworks this year, here’s a little on the Full Buck Moon, July’s full moon (caution, I had to go through some acrobatics to get this one embedded - you may get Old Farmer's Almanac's whole video play list from YouTube).
 

Summer is Barbecue Time

One day after summer starts and I’m about to say something sacrilegious. So you might want to usher the children out of the room, close the blinds, and make sure a government drone isn’t loitering overhead before you continue reading. Prepared? Are you sure? Okay, here goes, the great American institution that is barbecue isn’t American at all.

Alright, I apologize. I know that the revelation one of our beloved summer traditions didn’t originate here in the US isn’t quite as shocking as I made it out.  To be honest, nobody really knows where the term barbecue comes from, though there’s speculation that it derives from the Spanish term for a cooking method they witnessed native peoples of the Caribbean using. Due to the abundance of pork in the American south the technique became established by the 1800’s.

To start things off, it’s important to talk a little about the distinction between barbecue and grilling.

Grilling is a method of cookery where food is placed directly on the rack or grate of a grill which uses a heat source such as wood, charcoal, or gas. The best kinds of foods for grilling tend toward meats and poultry (although fish, seafood, and vegetables grilled with the right accessories).

Grill is a high-temperature/dry heat cooking method which means that the meats cooked on a grill should tender and many cooks utilize marinades to help retain moisture.

On the other hand, Barbecue utilizes indirect heat to perform cooking and many smokers designed for barbecue will have a separate firebox to help keep the heat applied to the meat between 200 and 220°F. Cooking times for real barbecue can be as long as 18 hours which helps retain moisture and allows for the use of relatively tough cuts of meat with large amounts of fat and connective tissue (such as pork shoulder).

There are four basic styles of barbecue in America: North Carolina, Kansas City, Texas, and Memphis. Each of these differ in the choice of meat and the way it's prepared for cooking. In North Carolina the preferred method is to slather pork with a vinegar-based barbecue sauce during the cooking process. In Kansas City a combination of dry spices and sugar, commonly referred to as a dry rub, is used to season the meat before cooking. Texan barbecue artists also use dry rubs, but they lean toward choosing cuts of beef for their smokers. And in Memphis sweet and spicy tomato-based sauce sauce mopped over pork is king.

My preference? Well, I'm born and bread in the Midwest so I have a fondness for Memphis and Kansas City barbecue. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing like a properly smoked and seasoned beef brisket and I won't hesitate dig in when I get a chance, but my meat of choice is pork and with a good dry rub and a smoking-hot sauce to finish things off.

Barbecue holds at its smokey heart a kind of roadhouse romance. It's the alchemical art of mixing love with what geography provides poverty allows to create food for the soul. The best pit masters create rub recipes which they guard jealously and pass down through generations. I’m still working on my personal combination, a blend that expresses who I am, my history, and where I come from. It's a journey of discovery that started with a recipe for a ‘foolproof’ rub that I stumbled across on the web and still is evolving to this day and I highly recommend you begin your own exploration. Dig back into your history for flavors and mine your memories and in the end you might cook up something that speaks to your soul.

 

Welcome to Summer

Today kicks off a season that meant a lot more in the days before year-round school, summer internships, and making up every snow day. I remember the run up to the end of school and the fluttering of lightning bugs in my stomach as I looked out the window. Summer seemed to stretch out as an endless series of possibilities. Maybe some of you went to summer camp or your parents had a summer house somewhere near the beach – or maybe you played the Cruel Summer role and stayed home while everyone else went away. Summer was an event, even in the life of a kid summer stood as a sign that the great wheel of the year was slow turning.

I have a vague memory of canoeing at Chain of Lakes state park. I must have been seven or eight, all I remember is seeing lily pads for the first time and the fields of aquatic weeds wafting in the current just below the surface. It seems like there was some falling in the water, but I’m not sure. Early in my childhood we frequented state parks and would spend a week at a time baking on the beach or fishing. I brought back a lot of memories; the ones that are most vivid are the mosquito bites, poison ivy, sunburn, and raccoon raids on our supply of Hostess snack cakes. There were good times too: hikes, thunderstorms rolling across the lake, fishing with my grandfather and listening to his stories, riding bicycles faster than seemed humanly possible down the rolling hills of southern Indiana (and winding up with skinned knees), and lying in a canvas tent listening to katydids scratching their summer love songs to the night.

I hope you’ve got plans to make better memories than these this summer and that those memories won’t simply be the periodic table. Everything school can teach you is written in a book, but learning how to tie a clench-knot from your dad or that your old grandpa was a little bit of a hell-raiser in his youth can only be learned one way and during such a small window of time. Go out and roast a weenie, make s’mores, and tell a tale or two around the camp fire.  Have a happy summer, the kind that will stay with you long enough that you’ll tell your grandchildren about it.

100 Years Ago: June Breezes

There are a lot of things that we’ve come to take for granted. Take what’s considered a staple of modern life: air conditioning. Central air has become so common for Americans that when I talk about how I grew up without it I’m reminded of the “walking twelve miles to school barefoot” stories my dad used to drag out. It isn’t fair how time makes codgers of us all, even those of us who’ve taken a vow never to engage in finger-shaking lectures about appreciating what you’ve got. Anyway, I come to bury my youth, not praise it.

100 years ago, General Electric ran this ad for its hot and relatively new gadget, the oscillating fan, in Popular Mechanics. Reading the copy makes me realize how much the world has changed in a century. A modern commercial for air conditioning bombards its viewers with terms like “sub zero”, “arctic”, and the like while the GE ad talks about bringing the breeze into your office or home. Maybe the hyperbole is a symptom of a world where everything is branded. We no longer have the Polo Grounds, Candlestick Park, or the Hoosier Dome and I’ve even seen rumors of a corporation buying the rights to name newly discovered species. It makes you feel a little like the Grinch – all the noise, noise, noise, noise!

Its days like this, when din gets so loud that it seems to become one big featureless sound-scape of self aggrandizement that I disconnect. I put on some old jazz and retreat to my detective’s office. I open the window and turn on my little oscillating fan and listen the soft whirr and the sounds of the birds outside.

Doldrums

Dear Reader,

Summer is long, hot, and listless. It's only just begun and already the days seem to stretch out, hazy morning becoming humid day before transitioning into steamy night. Only the thunderstorms that roll across the Midwest break the stagnant routine. They keep a regular schedule, showing up around five and working a shift that any vampire could be proud of. Late at night I wake to the staccato taps of the first raindrops on my windowpane. The bedroom vibrates with the light of distant lightning and I count—one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi before the sound arrives. The seconds between flash and boom are breathless, alive in the way only the mysterious life of nature can be alive. I lay in bed torn between two halves of myself.

The kid inside me wants to run outside, feel the breath of the approaching storm on his face and the yearning warm grass under his feet. He wants to stare up into the roiling clouds and wonder at the arc light that flickers in their bellies. He wants to feel those raindrops, cool and refreshing, striking his face and driving back the heat of summer for an hour or two.

The adult worries about things like whether the surge protector in the UPS connected to his computer would stop a power spike. He obsesses over the gutter that the maintenance crew hasn't fixed, the one that will spill rainwater on the deck and send waterfalls streaming down the siding. He thinks about the National Geographic special on lighting strikes, how more people are killed each year by lightning than tornadoes, and how dangerous it would be to go outside to gawk at the storm even though he'd secretly like to.

We all lay, having this convoluted discussion among ourselves while thunderheads sail across the land. Their billowing sails reach for the stars and they eclipse the moon as they set an easterly course. It's as if the pilgrims arrived, took a tour of the country, and decided they were better off in the old world. They head for the dark and boundless Atlantic firing goodbye salvos as they go.

When the storms pass the night is still and ripe. Droplets catch the light of the moon's freshly washed face and lightning bugs scale grassy masts, blinking their intent to the darkness. The retreating lightning is nothing more than an electric postcard, sent from the east filled with memories of times gone by and finished off with a rumbling signature. I sink into my pillow and close my eyes, thinking about tomorrow and the tomorrows that will follow and all of their deadlines, disappointments, and challenges. But I dream about riding the wind on a hot summer night.