October 2007 Archives

You'll have to pay admission to Lauritzen Gardens to see the model railroad, but high above to the south are the two largest, most successful locomotives in the world, free to see, Union Pacific's Centennial No. 6900, the most powerful diesel-electric, and U.P.'s Big Boy No. 4023, the world's largest, heaviest, longest steam locomotive, actually used as opposed to experimental, with the highest horsepower.  They sit at right angles to one another in Kenefick Park, named for a former Union Pacific CEO and Chairman, and make a great entry poster day or night, "Welcome to Omaha!"

 

 

 

Below is Big Boy No. 4023, all 1,208,750 pounds (548.2 tons), 132'9 1/2" (40.47 meters), capable of 80 mph, the powerful Big Boy series specifically created for the long, steep grade of the Wasatch Mountains.

 

 

The drive wheels are almost as tall as I am, 68" to my 72", impressive giant that this is for the big and little boys of railroad romanticism, for either the Model Railroad Garden or these huge toys.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the view from the top of the high staircase to Kenefick Park, looking back north to Lauritzen Gardens Visitors Center, Council Bluffs' downtown to the right across the Missouri.  The gardens curve around behind the hilly ridge at the left up a long, wide ravine between ridges.

 

This weekend is the last of the season for Lauritzen Gardens' new Model Railroad Garden.  The photos I'd taken earlier in the summer I had accidentally sent off into the ether; but, after a couple hours' fooling around while the Red Sox beat the Rockies, I retrieved them for sharing.  My 9 August entry is about this haven for big and little boys, with its four train lines in G scale (larger than the usual model trains), including the Big Boy Line symbolizing the Union Pacific's Big Boy Locomotive No. 4023--which I'll show later--in Kenefick Park atop the bluff south of the Gardens.

I also explained earlier that what I first saw as ceramic are really models of all natural materials, as explained in brochure quotes below.  The setting is a steep little hillside between the Rose Gardens above and the end of the Garden in the Glen, set under trees, with cedar trunk sections installed to complete the rustic look.  It's obvious why the caretakers have problems with twigs, funnel-web spiders, the wild turkey flocks, and an occasional raccoon.

Above is the entrance from the southern approach through the Garden in the Glen. The hillside is terraced for the different tracks, and visitors walk under the bridges, as shown below.

At left is the Woodmen Tower.  "The building's base is elm bark, and its exterior stonework is elm and buckeye.  Window trim is . . . bamboo and red twig dogwood . . . lettering is . . . contorta twigs." 

Right next to the tree trunk is our tallest present skyscraper, First National Tower.  "The base . . . is made of locust bark, the stonework is elm bark, window trim is euonymus branches and bamboo reed, and the top trim is made of bamboo."  A bit right of center is Stanford White's Omaha Building, shown closer below with the Rose Theater left of it.  In the far distance is the longest tunnel.  All the landscaping has to be hand-watered.

The exotic-looking Rose Theater, built in 1926 and restored in the 1990s, has a roof of eucalyptus, "the marquee is made of contorta, sponge mushroom and eucalyptus, . . . the columns are banana stems, towers are made of gourds, cinnamon sticks and lichens . . . ." 

The Omaha Building, "Omaha's first skyscraper" from 1888, has ". . . lower floors' stonework through elm bark, tops of columns are cinnamon sticks, trim is . . . burning bush . . . the eagle ornamentation above the entrance is made of pine cones and tree fern stem."

The largest building at the bottom of this assorted group is our extant cast-iron-front building, the J.P. Cooke Building, 1309-1315 Howard Street.  "Molding tops are live oak acorn caps, columns are willow branches, and keystones are long needle pine seeds.  The stoop is made of shelf fungi, and the door handle is grapevine tendrils."  Half hidden behind it is an Old Market Building with its porch at 11th and Howard, with "sidewalks . . . of cedar, arches are long needle pine . . . columns burning bush, and the window trim . . . of willow and red twig dogwood."

The little turreted building to their left in the sunlight is the Anheuser-Busch Building:  "The stair steps and arches consist of sponge mushroom, columns are sugar pine seeds, oak bark and cinnamon sticks, and the flagpole is . . . corkscrew willow."

In my last entry I didn't mean that river otters couldn't/didn't swim on their backs.  My problem photographing them was their speed.  These swift, sleekly supple swimmers can corkscrew through water, easily outdoing human swimmers' choreography, their speed boiling up or splashing water from their strength.  Their powerful back stroke with watery effects is illustrated here.  Easy to understand why the group noun is a romp of otters (like a pack of dogs, a parliament of owls, a murder of crows, a pride of lions).

I had thought in the Zoo Afternoon entry that I didn't have any decent shots of our white tigers, all from our well-known sire, Rajah (Sanskrit for "King").  Most of the ones I saw were too agitated by feeding time to stay still.  But I do have two that aren't bad.

And not all penguins are inside our aquarium.  Besides the little blues outside the aquarium entrance in good weather, the giraffes farther south have company with a colony of little black-footed penguins.  Seeing this group near the giraffes' entrance--two giraffes were actually outside in the background before cropping--I wondered if there was a penguin equivalent of having all your ducks in a row.

I did a charcoal of an otter, which I consider as a Spirit of the Place for me--that's how much I venerate this endearing creature--and have it hanging over Grampa Koftan's rocking chair, my usual reading and TV-watching spot, like a presiding deity.

 

Our pair's curiosity had them speeding toward me, one at the window, the other with the torqued water behind it like a torpedo aimed at me.  They bounced off the window until they were satisfied and then climbed on a log a short distance away. 

 

Their curiosity satisfied, they tore off, enviable swimmers that they are, and raced around the pool and over the logs, visible joy. 

 

 

  

I've just added some photos to the earlier entry about Uncle Forrest except for his postcard of Kootenai Falls, which I'm putting here because I want to juxtapose his card with some travel photos I took on one of my trips, this thundering falls not far from Libby, Montana.  The quote under the old black-and-white postcard is what he wrote, of course.

I discovered that our Doorly Zoo crowds have largely disappeared into the school year recently when I wanted to try my new digital camera on some of my favorite creatures.  Consequently, I had a fine time on a sunny autumnal afternoon, and here are some of the results.  First, the Antarctic penguins in the aquarium in their icy setting, fresh snow falling on the king or emperor penguins of the March of the Penguins documentary fame (the movie filtered in that glowing orange of their collars), the gentoos and, my favorites, the rockhoppers with their feathery crests.  They're behind glass.  In the foreground can be seen the torpedoing swimmers zooming through the water.

Next I'll include two of our four bear types, Ursus horribilis, its scientific name aptly as intimidating as it was to me hiking in Montana mountains, and the smaller Ursus Americanis, less aggressive than its international brothers or its larger cousins.

The grizzly is distinguished not only by its great size, extending down to its 3-5" claws, and exceeded only by the polar bear--the huge Kodiak giants are actually one of the brown or grizzly family--but also by its shoulder hump and, with age, the white-tipped hairs that give it its nickname, grizzled or grey-haired.  Physically and mentally formidable.  One of the most volatile animals we have. 

The American black bear has a reputation for being far more passive so that camping guides suggest fighting back and having a good chance of scaring it off--unless, of course, it is feeding or is a mother with cubs--although climbing a tree to escape it is no good.  It's one of the animal kingdom's best, fastest climbers.  In recent years as the black bear population seems to be growing rapidly, especially back East, this bear has been taking back some of the territory humans have monopolized, bunking down under porches and in back-yard sheds.  Becoming more familiar with humans and, like coyotes, finding dumpsters and garbage cans easy lunches, black bears have become much less docile, though one's chances with them are at least 100 times better than with the grizzlies.  They're the ones caricatured in children's cartoons and Disney movies.

I can't fail to show my zodiac sign from the Asian zodiac, all animals, as the U.S. Postal Service's Chinese New Year stamps have demonstrated.  This one was immediately alert to the sound of my camera.  I couldn't get one of our famous albino/white tigers, being fed, or the new triplets born to a three-legged mother, the too-cute cubs hiding behind a big dead tree from the hordes of children gathered at their window.

I can't resist finishing with the most playful adults, I think, of all the animals,  caught in their favorite milieu in a photo I'm fond of for the light effects.  I'm as fond of otters as I am of wolves! 

Another occupation I would've been far happier at than court reporting or teaching was archaeology.  I've spent the last two Sundays, otherwise a bit glum, following up some favorite interests and weaving some more of that tapestry which binds everything. 

The first Sunday afternoon, September 23rd, was spent with the Chachapoyas, relatively recent discoveries, and the Olmecs, both ancient mysteries.  Most exploration of the Chachapoya sites has been in the last decade or so, though the "Warriors of the Clouds," notably fair-skinned blonds whose present descendants have no European ancestry, flourished mainly between 850-1475 A.D. in the Amazonas area of northern Peru.  They lived on mountain tops, hence their nickname, Warriors of the Clouds, before the Inca, who later absorbed them, and had amazing mountaintop citadels, such as the huge Kuelap fortress that reminds me of the European equivalents like Mycenae in Greece or the castles in western Europe, the stone work like the Anasazis in New Mexico's Chaco Canyon.  (I've been to Agamemnon's fortress, Mycenae, and to Chaco Canyon.)  The Chachapoyas' cliff tombs with mummies especially reminded me of the many little Anasazi cave structures on the cliffs of our Southwestern buttes and canyons, such as I saw at National Bridges N.M., Mesa Verde, Canyon de Chelly, pueblos or storage structures in nearly impregnable caves.  (I spent several trips happily chasing down Anasazi sites such as Hovenweep and Lowry, Aztec and El Morro, the ancestral pueblo culture of 1-1300 A.D. roughly.  Note:  Modern pueblo cultures like the Hopi and Zuni dislike the Navajo name used by archaeologists, Anasazi meaning "ancient enemy.")  Of course, mummification was an Andean rite and is familiar from Egypt and other ancient civilizations.

The Olmec documentary was about their stunning giant head carvings, six to nine feet tall, five feet or so wide, 20-24 tons, individualistic enough to suggest commemorating great ball players or kings, their helmets taken as ball headgear like our football helmets.  The Olmecs (1250-400 B.C.) were already mysterious ancestors to the Aztecs, who named them, Olmec meaning "rubber people," for they lived in a rubber tree area, mainly Veracruz and Tabasco, and apparently invented rubber balls and the notorious ritual ball games of ancient Central American cultures, the victors becoming human sacrifices.  (Some ancient ballcourt sites are in Arizona such as at Wupatki.)  They were also the first of the highly sophisticated Central American astronomical cultures, including the Maya, as advanced as any in Europe or Asia. 

Aside from the artistry, the head feature that most fascinated me was that the huge basalt stones were somehow rafted 40-60 miles from the Tuxtla Mountains southeast to the major Olmec sites where they were then carved.  Of course, the most ancient of European monuments, my wallpaper, Stonehenge, has four-ton blue stones from the Welsh Preseli Mountains 240 miles away and 18-foot, 25-ton sarsen stones from  Marlborough Downs 20 miles away.  The date for the blue stone ferrying across the sea, up rivers, across land was c. 2150 B.C., the sarsen stones across land c. 2075 B.C.  (And Stonehenge is indisputably astronomical, built to register the midsummer sunrise, the midwinter sunset, and the most southerly and northerly moon risings.)  As archaeologists have tried to theorize, the only explanation for how such "sacred" tonnage was laboriously moved is rafts across water, amazing feats for those ancient times, and sledges or, more likely, a number of logs constantly shifted to provide a moving, rolling platform.  We shall never know the why beyond some apparently holy civic meaningful purpose.

The second Sunday, the 30th, I dozed through a long documentary about Helen of Troy being an actual person, which I already knew and you can too, if you read such a recent work as Barry Strauss's The Trojan War:  A New History.  It hasn't been that long since we've learned much more about the Hittites of Anatolia, ancient Turkey, who had an ally called Wilusa, which the Greeks called Wilion/Ilion, our Troy.  The huge library of Hittite correspondence, cuneiform tablets, with such as the Egyptian pharaohs, substantiate the Homeric epics and all those legends who refuse to die, from the blonde femme fatale, Helen, whose face poetically launched a thousand ships, to Achilles played by Brad Pitt to Agamemnon's fateful family with its psychological complexes (check out Orestes and Elektra) to Ulysses/Odysseus, wily inventor of the Trojan Horse, doomed to wander the Mediterranean.  A woman may have had something to do with that prototypical literary war, the first great European literature, but more likely it was strategic and economic, Troy sitting at the entrance to the Dardanelles, hence the Black Sea.  The documentary showed many of the relevant sites, which is why I watched it, having been to some of them in Greece and longing to see the others.

The other documentary was on King Arthur, not quite so historically provable but no less important for our legends and storytelling right down to our musicals Camelot and Spamalot.  Possibly a Celtic chieftan, this ideal Briton was largely created by medieval romances based on earlier tales, chivalric embroidery, as it were.  Such is the power of fiction.  It too featured photographic tours of sites such as Tintagel to Rosslyn Chapel of the recent Da Vinci Code notoriety.

Those were the better parts of the two Sunday afternoons.  Why I was glum will be the next entry.     

The ash were the first to flush their chlorophyll in their annual winterizing, and I noticed the chlorophyll greens of the weeds and grasses along the trail are already sinking into the earth.

I've fallen behind, going through a bad patch, but wanted to say I remembered my little tin submarine from World War II days too, besides my robin-egg-blue aircraft carrier and P-38, and also a peculiar comic strip fascinating me in one of the Chicago Sunday papers called "Gremlins," apparently begun in January, 1943, named for ornery little creatures bedeviling the military, especially aircraft, causing all sorts of glitches and wrecks, odd for a comic strip.  The males were gremlins, the females fifinellas, the children widgets.  Though I had to look them up for the date and names, I do remember fifinellas now and finally have a source for my calling children widgets.  A bit over 40 years later gremlins became larger, uglier, movie monsters, but the wartime ones were tiny, like imps and fairies, thus hard to detect, and blamed by pilots for all kinds of mischief.

I also remember V-E Day, 8 May 1945, and V-J Day, 15 August 1945.  Immediately upon the radio announcements, adults rushed to ring the bells, the school and church bells and one on a short wooden tower, five or six feet high, by Charlie Ellingson's tavern, ringing them long and hard.  That third one--I wonder when it disappeared--was apparently for emergencies like fires, though we had a siren that also regularly sounded the noon whistle.  That third bell's short wooden stand, like a windmill, was so low that for V-J Day we kids tried to beat the adults to it.  A long cafe dining room sits in the area now.    

Remembering various sheet music from the wartime on Grandma Koftan's piano, I went through my collection (which, of course, includes hers) and found several.  Expressly patriotic were "There's a Star Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere," with a man holding his hat over his heart under the flag;"Wait for Me Mary," with a man's hand starting a letter on military stationery; a photo of Kate Smith (whose voice and size Mom was frequently compared to) on "Johnny Doughboy Found a Rose in Ireland," her famous anthem, "God Bless America," never not popular and now used for New York seventh innings; a photo of Bing Crosby superimposed over "The White Cliffs of Dover"; a flag-decorated dancing couple in front of a giant V on Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne's "Vict'ry Polka"; a movie photo of Deanna Durbin and Joseph Cotten on "Say a Pray'r for the Boys Over There."  "Paper Doll" is mentioned and sung in the background during the moving Ken Burns GI documentary tribute, and I have that, with a mention of the Mills Bros. recording and a large photo of a very young Frank Sinatra on the cover.  Similarly, a GI ammo relay line in The War sings, "Little Brown Jug," actually a post-Civil War song made popular all over again by Glenn Miller's big band in that Big Band Era, his the most associated with the war, Miller's being a Major and playing at military bases.  Glenn Miller was born in nearby Clarinda, Iowa, where they have a Glenn Miller Festival, and his music is frequently on the Burns soundtrack, including "Moonlight Serenade," which I have the sheet music for, with a large picture of Miller on the cover, remembering Mom thought it was his most famous song.  Certainly it was her favorite of his many hits ( besides the two mentioned, "Pennsylvania 6-5000," "In the Mood," "Chattanooga Choo Choo," "Tuxedo Junction"), and a later movie with Jimmy Stewart as the musician was tremendously popular.  (Miller's 1944 death remains a disputed mystery.)  I also have "The Shrine of St. Cecilia," with a date of 1940 but six bombers in formation flying off the cover over a bombed-out city. 

Bing Crosby sang several wartime hits which became evergreens, so Gramma had the original sheet music of Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" (sung in the 1942 movie, Holiday Inn), "I'll Be Home for Christmas (If Only in My Dreams)," 1943, with a photo of Bing Crosby, and "Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral, That's an Irish Lullaby," with photos of Rise Stevens and Bing Crosby from the 1944 movie, Going My Way.  I also have "Together," with the topnotch cast of the 1944 wartime tearjerker, Since You Went Away, on the cover, though DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson's song was composed earlier (1928); up for several Oscars, only the music won.  I still remember crying over Robert Walker's death, which the song forever after reminded me of. 

Two other very popular wartime songs I have were "My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time" of 1944, and Cole Porter's "Don't Fence Me In," with the cast of the 1944 movie, Hollywood Canteen, across the cover.  And I very much remember the three songs from the first great Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, 1943's Oklahoma, "Fern Koftan" written on "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'," "People Will Say We're in Love," and "The Surrey with the Fringe on Top."

The wartime also had several nonsense songs, such as "The Hut Sut Song," but the most popular one was a delight to us children, the refrain running, "Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey, a kiddley divey too, wouldn't you?"  And, yes, initially it was a mysterious riddle to me till Mom, laughing, sang it decoded, as it were. 

Until I saw the episode, I had forgotten about the scrap drives for metal, clothes, rubber.  I'd take my little wagon around picking up pots and pans and other items, worn-out kettles, say, in regular collection drives.  (My wagons went from metal to wood during this period and after.)  I don't remember much tinfoil except on candy and gum, possibly cigarette packaging, but I think we were asked to save that, as gum sticks were now wrapped in paper.   For those so much younger, we didn't have aluminum foil until 1947, the year cited for Reynolds' Wrap's appearance, nor did we have anything like Saran Wrap, just wax(ed) paper.  I know that several new plastic products had been created in the 1930s, mostly in our research laboratories; and these became much of the new synthetic reality, from nylon to Teflon.  I've already mentioned that my toys became wood and plastic, not very durable plastic either, such as we have now.  I even remember synthetic tires, rubber hard to come by.

I also remember pinups, not just the Betty Grable one.  (Since I've always considered that Cyd Charisse had the most beautiful legs I ever saw, I never did understand the attraction of Grable, a popular platinum blonde movie musical actress who looks a bit heavy today.)  Every Hollywood actress with big curves posed for such photographs, as Vargas paintings of big-bosomed sexpots in Esquire and elsewhere became GI famous in the days before Playboy and photographic nudity.  I should mention here that I heard the acronyms SNAFU and FUBAR, not very often but enough to ask about, but our well-censored times explained them with the euphemistic "fouled" rather than the obscene F-word so common among the GIs and, today, the rest of us.  It wasn't until college that I learned the authentic GI version.

It's disturbingly curious how Omaha has an enduring place historically on both fronts, a deadly D-Day beachhead in Normandy and the manufacturing home of the Hiroshima Little Boy atom bomb's carrier, the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay.  (The Martin Company's manufacturing plant was where Offutt Air Force Base is today.)  

I remember also FDR, the patrician Roosevelt, as a kind of minor deity.  That's why he was voted in for an unprecedented fourth term and why I nearly filled a scrapbook with magazine and news clippings at his death just before my birthday in 1945, a 7-year-old crying over a dead President, how strange.  While we had famous picture magazines like Life and Look, most of our news came in the newspapers, over the radio (Lowell Thomas being the most famous war reporter), and in the short newsreels preceding our movies, as if I'd ever forget those endless aerial clips of endless bombs falling in fatal diagonals to blossom into silent, billowing smoke and fire, as they destroyed cities and, mostly, civilians.  Bill Mauldin's drawings, wry cartoons, and Ernie Pyle's columns kept us posted about the grunts, our very own hometown heroes. I am heartened that Burns has given the grunts the full credit their sacrifices are due--all those deaths, all those wounds, all those terrible memories--under several poor generals bluntly named.

Thus, it was enlightening that MacArthur's well-publicized wading ashore, when the American Pacific forces started retaking the Philippines, was merely a photo-op used by his propaganda corps, as the documentary put it, when his landing boat got stuck 75 feet out, just like Bush Leaguer's phony staged "Mission Accomplished" shot on the aircraft carrier on the California coast. 

That our servicemen continue to suffer as being expendable, one of their most depressing discoveries according to various veterans in Burns' film, is not only part of the history of warfare and vainglorious politicians and generals but definitely a national open wound of recent history, as demonstrated in blurbs about David Halberstam's last (posthumous) book, The Coldest Winter:  America and the Korean War.  The History Book Club advertises it as "the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist explores the worst American military disaster since Little Big Horn."  Max Frankel writes in The New York Times Book Review (23 September 2007), ". . . MacArthur refused advice that he settle for a defensible line well south of the restive Chinese forces massing at their Korean border . . . . ordered the swift conquest of all North Korea, confident that the Chinese would not dare challenge him.  But hundreds of thousands of Chinese lay in wait to spring American history's greatest ambush.  Halberstam writes:  'The bet had been called, and other men would now have to pay for that terrible arrogance and vainglory.'  . . . 'The Coldest Winter' still venerates the grunts on the ground and damns their feckless commanders."  Korea, Vietnam, Iraq:  "Korea was but the first of three American conflicts of his time that presidents ordered for dubious strategic ambitions, without the comprehension of either Congress or the public.  Korea was where America first revealed its imperial ineptitude and where our military leaders vowed never again to wage a ground war in Asia."