Post-lunch mood: the great gape of the afternoon yawns. I just remembered I am supposed to meet my Personal Banker at 12:30 to pick up some documents. It appears I have a Wells Fargo banker who is dedicated to helping me with my CD. It looms much larger in his mind than mine, since he also sent an email about it.
I might roll it over. I might do something else.
We’ll have to sit down and discuss the possibilities.
My previous Personal Banker was a great BSer with whom I had many a sprightly conversation. This one, from our phone call, seems much more earnest, and sticks to the helpful professional tone the company mandates. I’m sure he’s fine. I prefer bluff bonhomie and affectionate insults, the result of a professional relationship easing over time into something more relaxed and expansive. Don’t know if I have the time or the energy to do that again. The previous guy just vamoosed without a word.
Now I’m thinking he might’ve been canned. Maybe too much BS.
LATER He was indeed young and earnest. Nice fellow. Anything we can do for you in terms of investments? No. Never. Sorry; never. But he gave me the forms I had requested and showed me where to sign.
On the way back I took a cut through the new Northwest Center, described here a while ago. The food court had some customers, which is nice to see. Not a lot. But some. One of them had her head in her hands, though, as though going through great struggles. There’s no other way to describe that posture; no one puts their head down and grabs their noggin so the hair spills through splayed fingers if you’re just thinking idle thoughts. I moved on to the strange hall that connects the food court to the hotel . . .
. . . and noticed that an area of the lobby has now been designated the Business Center.
At least we’ve dispensed with the idea that Business Centers in hotels have PCs and printers. That was always the saddest part of the hotel. You could just imagine someone at 3 AM faxing papers to London once upon a time.
The books have been stripped of their colorful jackets . . .
I confess to liking this spare aesthetic.
There are shelves of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books.
"A Palm for Mrs. Pollifax." Wikipedia: "Mrs. Pollifax is a widow and senior citizen who decides one day to leave her comfortable apartment in New Brunswick, New Jersey and join the CIA." Okay. There were 14 books in the series. They made one movie, and Lalo the Schiff did the score, doing his best Elgar impersonation before going to the conventions of the genre. You can see they're aiming for the Pink Panther vibe:
There's probably a story like that for every story on every book on every shelf.
We had some of those in the home where I grew up. Never saw my parents read one. Never tried, myself. Couldn’t quite figure out how they did that. Quite popular:
A 1987 New York Times article estimated annual sales of 10 million copies. Despite this popularity, old copies are notoriously difficult to sell, and scholarly attention has been sparse.
If you really enjoyed a condensed book, wouldn’t you feel as though you’d missed something, and that you could not recapture the experience of enjoying the book because you knew how everything went? Or would you enjoy it more, like an Extended Director’s Cut of a movie whose theater cut was shorter?
The area, like the rest of the hotel, is hardcore about its Midcentury Modern look.
But I don’t think homes of the era looked like that, exactly. There needs to be a ceramic cat, or maybe a hobo, or a clown.
Well, snow due on Thursday in large amounts. Hope the snowblower starts. If not, it's two shifts of shoveling so I don't keel over when lifting six inches.
Our weekly recap of a Wikipedia peregrination. Expect no conclusion or revelations, but if you've been with us since this started last year, you know . . . sometimes we learn interesting things.
So! How do we get from here . . .
. . . to there?
Random paper, random date: Macon GA, 1976. Lots of campaign ads for guys wearing glasses, and promising not to consolidate the garbage collection department, for reasons I cannot understand and do not care to know. I mean, it could be interesting, but there’s absolutely nothing I’ll ever do with the knowledge. As usual, the ads catch my eye. Even the boring newspapers 1976 ads.
A La-Z-Boy ad had this building:
Can I find it? Probably still there . . .
It is:
On the side, a ghost sign:
Dannenberg, eh?
It’s residential now, and the site says it was built in 1875 as a department store. You can see that from the website:
Old department stores, over time, have lots of peculiar jerry-rigging and reconfigurations.
The Dannenberg Company was founded in 1867 in Macon, Georgia, by Joseph Dannenberg. The first location of the store was on Cotton Avenue. Joseph’s son, Walter, went to work for the store at 16 years of age and was the first in the area to introduce ready-to-wear skirts to its customers. Walter remembered that the ladies’ favorite was “a skirt made of near silk that was loved because they said it swished as they walked.” The store became the largest enterprise of its type in Macon. It closed its doors in 1965.
There’s a lot in between the penultimate and final sentence.
Here’s an oral history of the founder’s great-grandson, who of course went to work in the family business. The site notes:
During the 1960’s, Walter was on a committee that dealt with integrating Dannenberg’s as quietly and peacefully as possible. Thanks to the committee, Dannenberg’s was integrated with no problems, the whites only and colored only signs disappeared in the store, the soda fountain counter was open to everyone in town, and Dannenberg’s African American employees were allowed to work in the store as full time clerks for the first time.
Walter served in the United States Army and worked in the Army’s scout dog platoons. He trained war dogs at the Fort Robinson War Dog Training Center in Nebraska, and he was training for the invasion of Japan as a part of the Fourth Infantry Division.
At the height of operations in 1944, Fort Robinson had 1,353 dogs on hand and had deployed 3,565. The people who donated the dogs often wrote to see how their dogs were doing. The staff usually responded to the letters. One eleven year-old asked “if I can put a star in my window because I gave you my dog.” The program was ended after war came to a close.
People sent their dogs to war.
The spot today:
If you zoom out, you see outlines of an abandoned camp. What was the purpose of that area? Chariot races?
Fort Robinson was a base of US military forces and played a major role in the Sioux Wars from 1876 to 1890. The Battle of Warbonnet Creek took place nearby in July 1876. The war chief Crazy Horse surrendered at the fort along with his 1,100 followers on May 6, 1877, and on September 5 that year, he was killed there while resisting imprisonment. A historic plaque marks the site of his death.
And that's how we got from there to here. Or vice versa.
Back to Newark for take two. Many interesting things for a town of 50k.
This is not one of them. I don’t know what to call this style.
I’m not sure it actually is a style. It’s just a thing.
If the previous example was Transitional Corporate, this is the style that came after - a shinier, more techno-looking Corporate design.
Early - mid 80s, or perhaps later; the style hung around for a long time.
A few ornamental bricks fall, they take out the rest.
You wonder what it looked like and why it had to go.
It was, presumably, fun to stay here.
OUMB with one hell of an overbearing sign:
It's not great, but I like it. As a historical artifact.
Ah. Gorgeous. A bit overscaled on top, but it probably looked better with the signage.
Federal Eagles in the WPA style.
Wow. Or perhaps, Huh.
This one got hit hard by time, and it takes a little imagination to reconstruct what it must have looked like. Was the central portion all glass? Was the entire facade sheated with red brick?
Also, WHY?
Everyone knows that one couple that’s been together forever even thought they’re both so different.
When the third Courthouse was destroyed by fire in 1875, residents had begrudgingly put up with the out-of-date building for several decades, and many were relieved to see it go. Colonel Charles H. Kibler, at the dedication of the fourth Courthouse, described the old building as an “unhygienic nuisance” and publicly declared that he “approved the accidental destruction.”
The cornerstone was laid a year later. It's quite old, but American standards.
One of those odd shots that caught my eye for a moment.
The town has that frozen-in-time look, and I approve:
You have a sense of time, of time passing, of the weight of the years. Or, you don’t, and you just think it’s a bunch of old buildings and so what.
If it’s the latter, I’m sorry for you. But if that's you, you're probably not reading this page.
Oh, we can’t end here, not with another 70s craptastic gummint building.
We can’t! And so:
Restored by the heirs to the local basket fortune. You know, the people who made this building. Alas:
At its peak in 2000, it had $1 billion in sales, employed more than 8,200 people directly, and had about 45,000 independent distributors (called Home Consultants) selling its products directly to customers.
As of April 2016, there were fewer than 75 full-time and part-time employees; about 30 of those still made baskets.
