One dozen destinations #2: Mitchell Corn Palace

     I'm on vacation. But no worries; I've planned ahead, and am leaving you with visits to a dozen disparate places, their only commonality being they're in America and I visited them and took photos. Yesterday we hit the Spam Museum and today we visit another popular tourist spot, continuing to use as a guide my unpublished and probably unpublishable travel memoir, "The Quest for Pie."  

     The Mitchell Corn Palace is not a palace made of corn — they tend to fudge on that fact, so I want to be clear, since the three of us were all deceived by the name, gulled into expecting a structure made of corncobs. 

     “Why’s it called the ‘Corn Palace?’’ Ross asked, as we sat on metal chairs, waiting for the introductory film to begin. 

     “Because it’s made of corn,” I said. He looked around the room. 

     “The walls aren’t.” 

     “Well, I hope the load-bearing walls aren’t, but outside…” 

     It isn’t much of a palace either, more of a grange hall with delusions of grandeur. Outside, an elaborate square brick building, festooned with Moorish onion domes and minarets and columns, yellow and green pennants snapping from the roof and murals installed on its façade — a new crop every year — made of 275,000 ears of dried corn. The murals are keyed to local attractions and dramatic national events such as the Bicentennial and the Moon Landing. This year’s theme was “America’s Destinations” with the Statue of Liberty and the Seattle Space Needle and Mount Rushmore dutifully highlighted. The overall effect is of a flattened Rose Bowl Parade float, in wall form and well executed in light beige to dark brown Indian corn hues. 

     The introductory movie was professional, history-based, with a subtle undertone of good old-fashioned prairie Calvinism. The Corn Palace, “a majestic, unique American folk art icon” also “lifts the mind above the humdrum duties of life” and is “a celebration of who we are and what we do and how we spend what little time we have in this world.” 

     After the movie, we were taken into an upper balcony, where we received a brief talk on the place by a young volunteer, who pointed out the corn tributes to the Native-Americans who once called this area their home, as if that changes anything, then shunted us into another enormous gift shop, even bigger than the Spam Museum’s. We gazed limply at a staggering expanse of Corn Palace crap—the place had not worked its magic on us, so the idea of memorializing our visit with a Corn Palace commemorative spoon or snow globe or shot glass repulsed us, and we bolted out of there, into a large concession area. Here Kent’s interest was piqued. He demanded a snack — maybe a hot dog? Some kettle corn? 

     “It’s 10:30 in the morning,” I said, “Why don’t I get your picture with the giant ear of corn?” Some poor schleb in a corn cob suit was posing with small children — a deal breaker for the boys. Too sophisticated and mature to associate with the giant ear of corn crowd. They turned the tables — why didn’t I pose with Mr. Corn? Yeah dad, you pose with him! I was about to call their bluff  — having explored the sub-cellars of public shame, the small potatoes stuff doesn’t embarrass me anymore — but kids were gathered around, waiting their turn, and while I could easily hug a guy in a corn suit, on a dare, I couldn’t push ahead of toddlers to do so.

One dozen destinations #1: The Spam Museum

     My wife suggested — okay, urged — that I take a "real vacation," meaning: don't think about the column, the blog, or anything else related to work for a protracted period of time. Say two weeks. Since she is typically right about everything, I am taking her advice. But, having done this blog for nearly a decade, every goddamn day, and with a book based on it just coming out now, and wanting to honor the implicit promise of its name, I made preparations, and am leaving you with visits to a dozen disparate places, starting with the Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota, plucked from my unpublished and probably at this point unpublishable travel memoir, "The Quest for Pie," written a dozen years ago about a 2009 trip out West with my boys, then 12 and 13.

    Feel free to comment, though it might be awhile before I get a chance to vet and post those comments. Thank you for your patience.

     The Spam Museum is flashy, colorful, new — a gem of the museum-crafter's art — with George Segal-like white plaster figures recreating key moments in Hormel history, a faux butcher shop and lots of interactive displays that challenge visitors to fill and label Spam cans or compete as contestants on the set of a Spam TV trivia quiz show.

      We eagerly took part, testing our skill against timers and each other. The keys to a good corporate museum are honesty, humility and humor — The Three Hs — and the Spam Museum nails all three. Though “Spam" is a contraction of "Spiced Ham," I expected them to soft peddle the killing pigs part of their operation. 

     But there is no groveling to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals; the doors to the theater are designed to look like pig snouts, and a glass case displays a “hog splitter” from a 1940s killing floor, a brutal cleaver that could have been lifted from a slasher movie. The employee magazine on display is titled “Squeal.” 

     Candor is a sign of character in a company, because the weak-minded, knee-jerk approach would have been to whitewash the museum of anything but a few cartoon pigs with curlicue tails. As far as humility, well, I've never been to a corporate museum that says so many unenthusiastic things about its own product, such as “I’d rather eat Spam than bugs,” uttered by a life-size video of a fatigue-clad soldier (Spam, it seems, practically won the Second World War for the Allies. “Spam played a critical role during World War II” visitors are told). 

     Or “It’s not steak, but it’s good meat and fills you up” and, of course, the exasperated blurt of “I don't like Spam!” in the famous Monty Python sketch, with Viking chanting “Spam Spam Spam Spam” in a café offering more Spam items than even the menu at Johnny’s Spam-o-Rama. 

     The Monty Python display — they re-create the cafe set from the sketch — suffers a common corporate museum lapse, one also seen at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, where exhibit design trumps the antique notion that people ought to learn things at museums. The Spam Museum shows the Monty Python sketch on a monitor, but without any background or explanation — a true oversight, given that the skit is the source of the not-insignificant Internet term for unwanted bulk commercial email. 

     Were it my museum, I'd assign a staffer to spend an hour reading over the many minutely-detailed histories of Monty Python to find little background about how the Spam sketch came to be, perhaps making the obvious connection to the early 1960s black-and-white commercial playing in the next room at the museum, whose chant of “Spam Spam Spam” is echoed by the Vikings in the Python routine. 

     “I wish it were more factual,” Kent agreed, as we wandered together. Ross has a habit of reading every word of every display in a museum, so he tends to lag behind. Every so often I would drift backward, to find him standing alone, stock still, hand on his mouth, studying a placard Kent and I had breezed past. We were nearly alone; there were hardly any other visitors. 

     After an hour crawling around the Spam museum — playing its mock TV game show, pressing the buttons, working as fast as possible at a pretend Spam canning line — we were shunted into the enormous gift shop, where we pawed over Spam sweatshirts and Spam shot glasses. Kent selected a bright yellow and blue Spam foam football. I bought four cans of Spam; two regular and two exotic flavors: garlic and “Hot & Spicy.” I figured they’d come in handy on hikes.

Northshore Notes: Birthday

     An important theme sounded in my work at the Sun-Times is to remind the intolerant, the haters and would-be totalitarians who would impose their practices upon others, unwilling, that they are not in fact the only sort of people in the world. There are all manner of people, different than yourself, who do and believe a wide spectrum of different things. It's their world too, a lesson most of us pick up in childhood. Though, tragically, many never do. Thus I'm glad to walk the walk, and on Saturdays turn my personal blog over, not just to someone else, but to the inimitable, vibrant and energetic Caren Jeskey. Her report:

By Caren Jeskey

     This week I celebrated my 53rd birthday.
     A group of friends and family were kind enough to brave a stormy night and meet up for a celebratory dinner on Tuesday night. I chose Good To Go , a Jamaican restaurant on Howard Street, for several reasons. It's located near my folks' place and I did not want them to have to travel far. It's also not too far from friends who were coming from Chicago, Park Ridge, Vernon Hills, and the North Shore. Also, it boasts a covered rooftop. We are still COVID conscious, and Tom Skilling predicted rain. Thanks Tom. A couple of hardy storms pummeled down during the night, but we were safe.

     Watching my family and friends from high school, college, and later in life mingle was heartwarming. As a gift, I received a book created by an ex, Accra Shepp. This led to a phone chat with him later in the week — him in Queens, and me on a walkabout in Wilmette. The world became small thanks to our iPhone (me) Android (him) connection.
     A college friend who's now a high school teacher burnt out by these COVID years (and leaving her role in 9 weeks time, after decades of teaching) gave me a copy of a book about "returning home" by Toko-pa Turner "on exile and the search for belonging." I see myself as a passionate person, and often on a quest for meaning, so this book was spot on.
     Snežana Žabić also showed up. She's a writer and musician who encouraged me to pursue my musical talents, and for a short time we formed a two woman band called The Adaptations. We'd play weekly at the now-defunct Café Mestizo in Pilsen. Snežana had us rehearsing on a regular schedule, and was the coach I needed. I'd like to be a Renaissance Woman but often lack the drive to make it happen.
     On Snežana's blog Spurious Bastard, she notes "at my core, I'm a stranger to passion. I've seen it in others: a passion for soccer or partying, for example. I've messed around with passion myself. Passion is another word for despair. Commitment is what I know more intimately. I recognized it even as a child whenever I saw pensioners playing bocce or chess in the street. On that patch of dirt in the otherwise leafy park, heavy balls hardly moving, the players were calm and focused. On that folding table covered with a plastic tablecloth with a garish floral pattern, the only pattern the chess players saw was the checkered board and black and beige figures. That has always made sense to me."

     From her memoir Broken Records: "in 1991, Snežana Žabić lost her homeland and most of her family’s book and record collection during the Yugoslav Wars that had been sparked by Slobodan Milošević’s relentless pursuit of power. She became a teenage refugee, forced to flee Croatia and the atrocities of war that had leveled her hometown of Vukovar. She and her family remained refugees in Serbia until NATO bombed Belgrade in 1999." She landed here and now lives in Rogers Park. She’s had quite a life, and has taught me about the power of resilience.
     When we played at Cafe Mestizo, fellow musicians in the audience asked me to record my flute on their projects. I was flattered. It gave me a sense of accomplishment, and purpose. Snežana drew me out of my insecurities and stage fright and into expression. Once, I was so nervous that I did not play my flute at all during a show. I held it to my lips, afraid to blow. Even though I knew the notes, my frightened brain convinced me that if I blew, I’d fail. Afterwards, the always cool and collected Snežana simply asked "what happened?" without any judgement or shaming. She had proceeded with the show, without missing a beat. No stranger to adapting to uncertain situations.
     The owner of the group practice I work for also showed up at the party. A harm reduction therapist who's an artist also came, with a gift of a sketch he'd made of a character in a Jerry Springer show. He explained that a good friend of his loved the show, so he’d entertain himself by sketching the characters when she had it on. I appreciate that he studies humans and took it a step further, to sketch and also present as a gift. In homemade wrapping paper, I must add.
     As I watched friends and family enjoy each other’s company, I truly felt that everything was OK.

Underneath my outside face
There's a face that none can see.
A little less smiley,
A little less sure,
But a whole lot more like me
        — Shel Silverstein

Can I chop down this oak tree?

An oak on the banks of the branch of the Chicago River in Northbrook.

     Northbrook boasts a park in the heart of its downtown, with a ballfield and a playground, a gazebo and a river — the West Fork of the North Branch of the Chicago River. A person could, theoretically, with a shallow-draft kayak and about 12 hours effort, paddle to Marina Towers.
     Too much work for me, more given to meandering through the park, my wife’s arm tucked snugly in mine. All is right in the world as we stroll under the towering old oaks, past younger trees planted to comfort future generations.
     But what if all weren’t right? Let’s say I take offense at one of those saplings. Perhaps I decide there are too many oaks already. Perhaps I bear some grudge against the person honored on the bronze plaque. Perhaps I am worried an inept village child could be tempted to climb this tree, because of a low branch, say, and, in doing so might fall and be injured. Even killed. The reason doesn’t matter.
     So I take it upon myself to go to the park with a chainsaw and cut down the offending tree.
     How do you think passersby would react? Would they say, “There’s old Steinberg, responsible citizen, exercising his constitutional right to live in a community free from the menace of perilous trees”? Or would they call the police, who’d haul me away for destroying public property?
     The second scenario is a sure bet. And I think we can all agree: They would be right. The park is for everybody, not to be defaced by irked individuals following the random dictates of their disordered minds.
     Given that, why do we tolerate people plucking books out of public libraries? Unlike trees, which really do occasionally cause injuries to careless climbers, no child has ever been hurt by a book. The damage imagined by alarmed parents is purely notional and, when you think about it — someone should — quite ludicrous.

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Tossing the Selectric II

     I didn't keep many of the books lining my office off the third floor newsroom at 30 North Racine when I closed it up two weeks ago. But I held onto a few. Some I intended to read, like "Freak Kingdom," by Timothy Denevi, a 2018 look at Hunter S. Thompson's personal war against American fascism — which I did indeed begin a few days back, and am finding a truly excellent book that is sadly topical.

     Others were so odd I just couldn't part with them, like "Direct Line Distances" by Gary L. Patrick and Marilyn J. Modlin, which is exactly that: a book of tables of the mileage between various American cities. The plan is to ask my grandchildren, when they finally arrive and are sufficiently grown to consider the question, how such distances were determined before Mr. Google instantly served up the answer, and then display the book, to their amazement (okay, to their complete indifference). I just knew that if I got rid of it I could never find it again. (True. Plugging the title into Amazon and eBay comes up with nothing. Maybe I'm the only person to save a copy).
     The rest of the books I piled along the metal shelf off the newsroom where the few staffers who still had books were piling theirs, in advance of our move to a more stripped down, spartan newsroom at the Old Post Office, to be taken away by notional colleagues who have need for them. Most likely they'll be trashed quietly or, one hopes, donated. There's a Goodwill next door.

     Otherwise I mustered an uncharacteristic lack of sentiment toward the move. Maybe closing down my parents' house in Boulder last February helped me see such physical burdens with a clear eye. So much crap. Why hold onto it? For what? So even award plaques went into the trash. (For the lesser awards, that is; a few I kept, to be disposed of in some future culling). 

     I impressed myself by actually throwing away my IBM Selectric II with a minimum of interior drama. Yes, it was the machine of my youthful dreams — well, in blue, because it was prettier and rhymed, "a baby blue Selectric II." And it had that magical correcting button on the lower right corner of the keyboard, which would put the machine into the correcting mode, backing up the ball so your mistyped letter could be lifted off the page by white correcting tape, a marvel greeted by wide-eyed gratitude by anybody who'd spent years daubing Wite-Out on the page — too heavy a hand and it would leave a little puddle that the proper letter would be almost embossed in, drawing attention to your blunder instead of concealing it. Or by tucking a little white correcting square in and striking the key, which often took more dexterity than I could muster. Those little squares had a tendency to fall into the type basket and had to be fished out among the keys. 

     This Selectric was beige, and had been expropriated from my in-laws' basement. I didn't write columns on it—when I joined the paper we had those chunky ATEX terminals with their green cathode ray screens. But it was handy for typing envelopes and letters, before it broke some time in the early 21st century and was never repaired, though I remember once inquiring of the executive editor whether the paper would foot the bill for fixing the machine at one of the increasingly rare typewriter repair shops. 

     Transporting the heavy device home, to sit in my basement for another few years, seemed not just sentimental, but unhinged, maybe insane. I set it on my desk chair, gave it one long, lingering look.

     Before I pitched the machine, I did remove the typeball, the spherical aluminum element embossed with the letters of the alphabet. That's what made the Selectric so radical when it was introduced in 1961. All typewriters had a carriage that conveyed the paper, one letter at a time, past a fixed basket of type bars — hitting a bunch of keys all together so they jammed was a childish joy, for some reason.

     It was far more efficient for the type, spangled like stars in the celestial sphere around this cool metal golf ball, to move across the page instead. The element seemed the seat of wonder, and that I detached and kept, as a far more portable token. Kept for now anyway. I reserve the right to throw that away too at some future moment of clarity.

     Then I seized the typewriter with both hands—the thing is heavy—carried it over to one of the large trash cans in the kitchen and tipped it in. It landed with a loud and quite satisfying crash.

Waiting out the storm in the UP

     Last weekend I drove about 700 miles. On Thursday, 350 miles, almost due north, through Wisconsin to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Then 350 miles back on Sunday. Quite a long way, really.
     Why? The 60 hours in between. The company: I drove with my brother, reunited with old friends there. We’ve been meeting in the UP for more than a decade. Nature: the deep woods, the ever-changing, frigid lake, the wild turkeys. The food: tomahawk chops from Peoria Packing. Beef jerky picked up at Held’s in Slinger, Wis.
     You’ll note that we brought our food. UP cuisine — pastiescq and doughnuts — not so hot. Though the town where we stay, Ontonagon, now has a juice bar, The Squeeze on Main, and I grabbed a salad there for lunch Friday. Not bad, if a little short on lettuce, more like a bowl of chicken, cheese and sliced apples with some greens mixed in. A Yooper salad. At least there were no Beer Nuts in it.
     A six-hour-plus drive, but that was also part of the fun. Usually the car ride is seen as a necessary evil to get from Point A to Point B. Wasted time. But on this trip, the 700 miles was an unfolding diorama of beauty, the rolling vistas of farmland, shrouded in mist in the morning, glorious in the midday sun. Undulating fields of corn, yellow-tasseled and ready to harvest. Alfalfa in big round bales, each weighing a ton, either left to dry or because the farmers haven’t had time to collect them yet. The raw forest pushed back from the highway — deep green pines and white-trunked birches.
     A lot of industry up there too. Even the town names suggest products: Winnebago, Land O’Lakes, Oshkosh. The vast Harley Davidson plant. Just passing through, I don’t see how you can feel anything but hopeful about America, despite our deepening problems. When didn’t we have problems?
     Sure, there were scatterings of Trump flags, and “Let’s Go Brandon” signs. At least they’re concise. “I’m a dupe in thrall to a liar, bully, fraud and traitor,” is a lot to fit on a sign. I did sincerely marvel at yard signs plugging Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, which made me want to stop and ring the doorbell and earnestly inquire. “Really? Ron Johnson? The guy who tried to shrug off his sedition because it only lasted ‘a couple of seconds’? The man’s an idiot.”

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'Waken to a hummingbird'

 

     "Yet by some object ev'ry brain is stirr'd," Alexander Pope writes in Book 4 of the Dunciad. "The dull may waken to a humming-bird."
     While I'm not quite ready to lump myself in with "the dull," it's true that I wasn't thinking of anything in particular when my attention was snagged by this hummingbird, spied through our bay window as it dined on the nectar within the clematis in full glory on our front porch. 

     I happened to have my phone in my hand, and immediately brought it up for a shot. Hummingbirds do not stay in one place for long, and I got off five images before it helicoptered out of sight. I'd never come close to photographing one before. 
      Only one of the shots is halfway decent, and I immediately wished I had simply stared at her (it seems to be a female) in appreciative wonder, admiring a bird that can fly backwards and even upside down, instead of trying to document our encounter. Though having a shareable picture did give me a reason to read up on hummingbirds, which are exclusive to the New World — the Oxford English Dictionary makes that almost sound like a flaw.

     "They are peculiar to America," it sniffs, "ranging from Alaska to Patagonia." 

     Performing my due diligence, I was charmed to learn that hummingbirds build their nests out of spiderwebs, decorated with lichen. As to which of the 320 or so species of hummingbird this might be, the choice is pretty much limited to one: the ruby-throated hummingbird, the only hummingbird found in the Midwest, though solitary strays of other species do get blown off course and wind up here. 
    Unlike this grey gal (lack of color indicates she's a female) most male hummingbirds are bright — Kenn Kaufman called them "flying jewels" in his Birds of North America. Their bills are often shaped to match the particular flowers they feed upon. They are also aggressive — a hummingbird will attack a hawk. Although the Encyclopedia Britannica, when making this startling claim, does not address the obvious follow-up question: "And how well does that work?"