Beautiful day - blue and not painful. To go outside and not experience immediate pain is a nice thing. A March thing. I decided to walk around, skyways and streets, looking for column ideas, or just to clear my head so a column idea could magically appear. Called up a playlist for brisk striding, and was halfway into the groove of the first song when ping! a note from Daughter in Brazil. I had sent her a link about an interesting controversy in Brazil, which is a bit like saying “a story that happened in the United States” - doesn’t quite nail it down. But I was faintly familiar with the cities in the piece, since she’d been there and I’d explored them both on Google Street View for quite a while.

Then she sent me a picture of a tattoo and said “look what I did”

Annnnnd I stopped, and typed, uh, “Permanent?”

Yes!

Annnnd I looked at it again, and it wasn’t very good at all. “What is it”
The slogan for the state she’s in. And I mean “Minas Gerais,” not “heedless of future consequences.” Fighting screams, and lacking anything good to say, I asked her hosts had given her permission, and she said “Yes!” and now I’m boiling. Mood shot. Dismayed. Really not a good move.

Voicetext: ha ha ha got you it’s my friend’s

Huge exasperated sigh of relief. She added that there really wasn’t anything I could have done about it, anyway.

“I have no power except money and judgment,” I texted back.

Thus relieved, I continued on the walk, taking a different tack that wound up through the Hilton. En route I paused by the old Let It Be record store.

This dismayed:

LADD CORNER, I knew. Why had the letters been chipped off?

When had I ever seen them on? I thought back. The building is part of the Target complex now. It used to be a great record store that had a permanent wet-carpet smell exacerbated by the hygiene of the fanatical record collectors. Hit google street view - ah. Hmm. Right. For a few years it was the rental office for a building that never went up.

It reminded me that the Let It Be facade had some old details I'd snapped, a few years ago. (Eighteen, as it turns out.) I found what the old window used to look like.

Well, let's get t' googlin'!

AH CRAP

I hate it when the first search result is something I wrote.

At the risk of this turning into a Clippings update, I do have more research material now than before, and discovered some interesting things.

1929:

It's just a shoe store, c'mon. But look you can see the faint markings where "Ladd Corner" was bolted to the side of the building.

Now, the rest of the story: Googling Ladd, I discover that he built a historic house in Loring Park, and I lived one block away back in the 70s.

The real surprise was learning that C. M. Stendal lived in my neighborhood, and I know his house because it has a bas-relief of a galleon on the front.

It's a small town. They're all small towns.

Repeating: I should have all the emails out by now, BUT IF YOU HAVE NOT RECEIVED ANYTHING, send me an email with the subject line “Dillweed.” Since I’m going to Paypal for the emails, the notifications don’t come from you, but from Paypal, so there’s no visual sign in my email box that I’ve responded.

For fun, there's a new promo site.

It's 1919. The front page:

Pancho Villa wants all Yanks hanged; Poles invade Ukraine; feminist leader Anna Howard Shaw dies. It’s different, but it’s not unrecognizable.

About Anna: her wiki bio has an interesting kicker.

Shaw was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, United Kingdom in 1847. When she was four, she and her family emigrated to the United States and settled in Lawrence, Massachusetts. When Shaw was twelve years old, her father took "up [a] claim of three hundred and sixty acres of land in the wilderness" of northern Michigan "and sent [her] mother and five young children to live there alone.”

Her mother had envisioned their Michigan home to be “an English farm” with “deep meadows, sunny skies and daisies,” but was devastated upon their arrival to discover that it was actually a “forlorn and desolate” log cabin “in what was then a wilderness, 40 miles from a post office and 100 miles from a railroad.”

Here the family faced the dangers of living on the frontier. Shaw became very active during this period, helping her siblings refurbish their home and supporting her mother in her time of shock and despair. Shaw took on several physical tasks such as "digging of a well, chopp[ing] wood for the big fireplace, [and] fell[ing] trees.”

Seeing her mother's emotional suffering, Shaw blamed her irresponsible father for "ha[ving] g[iven] no thought to the manner in which [their family was] to make the struggle and survive the hardships [now laid] before [them]." While her invalid mother was overburdened with household chores", her father in Lawrence could freely dedicate "much time to the Abolition cause and big public movements of his day.”

Every era, every cause, there’s a few of those guys. She lived with Susan B. Anthony’s niece for 30 years, and died a few months shy of seeing the suffrage amendment passed.

Drownings:

The second story is interesting. I googled Charles Hough Philly, and found an obit:

Charles S. Hough, 89, of Whitemarsh Township, an architect in Philadelphia for 45 years, died Wednesday, March 9, of complications from leukemia at Foulkeways in Gwynedd.

Mr. Hough came from a family with a long-standing interest in architecture. His father, William J.H. Hough, was founder of the well-known Center City architectural firm of Harbeson, Hough, Livingston & Larson, now called H2L2.

Mr. Hough had a fraternal twin brother, William J.H. Hough Jr., who was a partner in his father's firm. The family business designed the Philadelphia Electric Co. Building and refurbished the Bourse, another Philadelphia landmark.

There was a famous architect named William J. W. Hough, whose son was a famous architect. Poking back in the clippings, I see this on a google link that goes elsewhere.

William Jarrett Hallowell Hough was born 1888 in Ambler, Pennsylvania, the son of doctors Charles B. and Mary Paul Hallowell Hough. While an architecture student at the University of Pennsylvania, he won the Stewardson Traveling Scholarship.

Found a Philly obit that has the wife’s name as Mary P. So the connection's solid.

Is this the Philly Electric Company?

BTW, the Philly paper that broke the news of his death . . . said nothing about dropping from shock.

They . . . embellished things, then.

Metropolitan was one of its names. Also the Pillsbury HQ for a while.

If by chance you're interested, there's much more on the building here.

After all those bullets, there will still more to dodge:

		That would be the Spartacist Uprising or Rebellion or Revolution.

It ended poorly for leading German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg:

In January 1919, a second revolutionary wave swept Berlin. On New Year's Day Luxemburg declared:

"Today we can seriously set about destroying capitalism once and for all. Nay, more; not merely are we today in a position to perform this task, nor merely is its performance a duty toward the proletariat, but our solution offers the only means of saving human society from destruction."

It failed; she was captured and shot.

Was it ever built?

I don’t think so. And that Hays fellow? Responsible for making Hollywood cover up and clean up. Therefore, let them play golf:

Oh, say, what was that US Railroad Administration? People have forgotten all about this.

The United States Railroad Administration (USRA) was the name of the nationalized railroad system of the United States between December 28, 1917, and March 1st, 1920.[1] It was possibly the largest American experiment with nationalization, and was undertaken against a background of war emergency.

Did it end with a complete return of liberty, you ask?

Congress passed the Esch-Cummins Act (Railroad Transportation Act) in February 1920, which substantially increased the ICC's powers over the railroads, and the USRA's authority ended on March 1, 1920.

The ICC was given powers to approve or reject railroad mergers, to set rates, to approve or reject abandonments of service, and additional oversight responsibilities.

The government also made financial guarantees to the railroads after control was handed back to them, to ensure their financial survival after the restoration of control.

A letter to the editor takes the League of Nations to task. Again, nothing changes.

The man who gave you “Birth of a Nation” - the story of Our Nation.

It’s lost; no prints exist. Wikipedia:

The Greatest Thing in Life is a 1918 American silent drama film about World War I.

This film was released later in the same year as Griffith's more famous World War I film, Hearts of the World, which also stars Lillian Gish and Robert Harron. The Greatest Thing in Life was renowned for two main aspects: the groundbreaking portrait photography style of Henrik Sartov, and a "new and daring" interracial kiss between a white officer and a black soldier (both male).

1919. A hundred years ago. Why, it’s absolutely unrecognizable.

You could fit in, if you had to. Someone from 1919 would have a harder time in 1819.

That'll do; enjoy the update, and I'll see you around.