HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
The scary part would be me, of course. The fun part is courtesy of Photofunia. 😮
I have posted about this site twice before and it continues to be a good draw for this little ole blog. I think that my blogger brethren should try it out. It is easy to use. There is no signing up required and there are dozen of other templates available. 😉
Happy Birthday Dr. Alice! 🙂
JACK’S BACK!
I haven’t ridden my bicycle since Sunday. I had my big meeting on Tuesday and that kind of consumed my life. Since then it has rained buckets here for days. I haven’t ridden my bicycle to work for at least a few months. Today was no exception, but when I eventually do bike to work again there will be a few more obstacles in my path than there were before.
Anne, Rey and I discovered the first detour last Saturday on our walk to Kayak’s Coffee. A block long alleyway that has always been closed to cars is now also closed to bikes and pedestrians too. This is in one of the wealthier neighborhoods in Clayton. The neighborhood is right across the street from Wash U., so maybe it was the students the drove the hoighty-toighty homeowners to gate their community. Anyway I did not take this obstruction personally. Many pedestrians and cyclists used that alleyway everyday. I never used it all that frequently. Besides this roadblock is close enough to home I have workarounds.
The second roadblock was at work. This one I feel is personal. When I do bike to work, I have always biked through a pedestrian door onto the plant’s tarmac, inside the inner fence. In addition to the pedestrian door, there is also a pedestrian turnstile. There is also a vehicle gate, but that is not really pertinent. All of these entrances are controlled using employee badges. In between now and when I last rode into the plant, my badge was deactivated from the pedestrian door. It still works on the turnstile, but for weeks now I thought that the door was just broken. This week I saw another employee badge through the door. I rechecked my badge, but still no joy. It was then and there that it all fell into place. I have a work around for this obstruction too, but it is not very bike friendly behavior from a company that purports to be bike friendly.
Yesterday, this year’s World Series began again with a Phillies win. The Yankees are playing, but the Cardinals are not. So let’s look backward to the 1926 World Series. I realize that this isn’t exactly late breaking news, but it is still a good story. It was also a central part of the baseball exhibit in the museum under the Arch. Here is the story:
In September 1926, the Cardinals clinched the National League pennant while on the East Coast. Without coming home, they took on the New York Yankees in the World Series. Tied after two games, the rivals headed for Saint Louis, where Cardinal fans held a parade to cheer the team for their earlier pennant win. In three games here, the Cardinals couldn’t get ahead of the Yankees. They went back to New York down by one.
In a blowout Game 6, pitcher Grover Cleveland [no not the President] Alexander held the Yankees to two runs against the Redbird’s ten. The winner take all seventh game was more closely fought. By the bottom of the ninth, the Cardinals were defending a one-run lead. With two outs, Babe Ruth was caught trying to steal second. The Cardinals were the 1926 World Champions.
Of the 106 World Series that have been played, the Yankees have won 26, the Cardinals 10 and Athletics 9. 1926 was the first time that the Cardinals were World Champions. Eighty years later in 2006 the Cardinals were again the World Champions. That time it was the Tigers that they faced, not the Yankees. Afterwards the Cardinals had a parade. That Sunday was a beautiful afternoon in Saint Louis. I biked downtown to watch the parade. The Clydesdales were out. All of the players and their families were in the parade. It was a great day to be a Saint Louis Cardinals baseball fan.
Pictures with this post include a 1926 Cardinal’s pennant, a score card from the series, the seventh game’s scoreboard on the final play of the game and a knothole eye’s view of the Cardinals Sportsman’s Park where the Saint Louis side of the series was played. These are all photographs of the baseball exhibit under the Arch. Rey pointed out to me that this park was actually the third so-called Sportsman’s Park built here in Saint Louis. When Anheuser-Busch took over the team, it was eventually renamed Busch Stadium. That would have made it Busch I. The current stadium is effectively Busch III. Time will tell if Cardinal stadiums continue to run in threes. Today’s header shows the ten years in which the Cardinals have won the World Series.
Rey got the job and even though I didn’t hit a homerun, I at least hit safely. Rey starts work next week. Today, I have the action item to arrange another meeting. Rey will be a Group Sales Representative for the Smokies. Rey wanted to take us out to dinner Tuesday night, to celebrate, but I had to go out with my work guests. A half-dozen of us engineers decided to go to Blueberry Hill for dinner. When we arrived we were surprised to see a dozen more people from work already there.
Blueberry Hill is a restaurant/bar that has a lot of character. It has long been associated with Chuck Berry. He still occasionally plays there. It is decorated with gobs of memorabilia. One of the first times we took Danny there, it was with Anne’s folks. It was a winter night and it was snowing. I pulled up to the curb to let everyone else out and no sooner does Dan see the place, then he exclaims, “Your not taking me to another cowboy bar?!?” Later when Dad thought to bring a roll of quarters to facilitate playing all the many arcade games there, all objections ceased.
Blueberry Hill is in an area known as The Loop. The Loop is so named, because back when Saint Louis use to move by street cars, the terminus to one of its many trolley lines was in The Loop. The street cars would loop around to head back downtown, hence the nickname, The Loop. The owner of Blueberry Hill is Joe Edwards. There is a smiling holographic portrait of him in the entrance. In addition to the Hill, Joe Edwards is the proprietor of the Tivoli Theater, the Pageant nightclub, the Pin-Up Bowl cocktail bar, the Moonrise Hotel and is the founder of the St. Louis Walk of Fame. In addition to these properties, he owns more than twice that number of lesser notoriety, in The Loop. Have I mentioned shopping? He has almost singlehandedly restored The Loop to its gilded age prosperity. Joe Edwards’ current project is to restore a trolley line that runs from The Loop to Forest Park. This project will bring back the original meaning of the nick name, The Loop. He started all this work with the Blueberry Hill.
Joe Edwards has done a lot, but by starting in The Loop, he didn’t start from nothing. The Loop is in University City. This city is so named because that is where Washington University resides. In addition to Joe Edwards’ endeavors U-City can boast two other Hollywood celebrities, Harold Ramis and Bob Gale. Harold Ramis (from Ghostbusters fame) used his college experiences at Wash-U to write Animal House. Bob Gale who grew up in U-City wrote the Back to the Future movies. The U-City Lions are referenced throughout those movies. So LA may have its Universal City, but Saint Louis has its University City.
The picture with this post is of the so called No Sweat Lodge. It is really more beach art then sweat lodge. It was taken at the Big Pine picnic area in the Hiawatha national forest, this last summer on the day that Anne and I and UKW biked from Point Iroquois lighthouse to the fish hatchery and back. As sort of an aside, if you haven’t been to Big Pine for a while you should go again. There was a lot of renovation work going on last summer while we were there.
Tuesday is a big day around our place. I have my talk to do and Rey has a phone interview with the Smokies. Wish both of us good luck, it can’t hurt. I have been practicing and I believe improving. If I can get past my first slide (It has a major land mine in it), I’ll be on easy street. Rey has his interview all planned out. Rey is on in the morning and I’m on in the afternoon.
All this consternation and turmoil over work reminds me of Anne’s Uncle Duke and his term, WETSU, or We Eat This S*** Up. Since the phrase is all over Wiki, I’m guessing that it is not really attributable to Duke, but why let the facts get in the way of a good story, as I always say. Duke was a full bird colonel in the air force. When I met him he had retired. During Vietnam he flew C-130s for the transport command. I guess that made him sort of a flying Mr. Roberts? Whether he coined the phrase or not I don’t know, but somehow it came to be attached to him. The acronym WETSU must have appeared in writing, because at some point a visiting general appeared and asked what it was all about. Quick on his feet, Duke replied, “It means, We Exist To Serve U, Sir!”
So here is my prayer for today:
If we can’t always get what we want, let us get what we need
May I please just glide through my presentation, without a single ah or um
Rey will step forward to a position with the Yankees Cards (Oh, come on Rey!) Mariners
May today, we both be able to turn S*** in to Service
Children in Saint Louis have the word arch in their vocabulary, at an unsually early age …
We took Rey to see the Arch on Sunday. The Rams versus Colts game was just getting underway when we arrived downtown. Consequently, the Arch’s garage was charging $10 event parking. I eschewed that option and we parked down on the levee for only $4. The levee is paved with cobblestones. Anne recounted a story of an office Christmas party, years ago, that was held on one of the riverboats. She recounted her difficulty in trying to navigate these stones, while wearing heels and in the dark. The river was surprisingly high on Sunday, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. We walked up the front steps from the river to the Arch.
I guess that this was the first time that I have actually gone inside the Arch since 9/11. This time they had X-ray scanners and a metal detecting booth just like at the airport. Saturday was the forty-fourth anniversary of the Arch, but on Sunday things were pretty quiet. We got our tickets and were immediately assigned a tram car for our ride to the top of the Arch.
The tram cars are little egg shaped capsules that seat five. This one-part elevator and one-part amusement park ride alleviates the need to climb the 630’ via the 1,000 plus stairs that now serve solely as an emergency exit. There was another couple in our car as we rode up to the top. I think that the guy was feeling a little claustrophobic. I know Rey was feeling cramped. As you near your destination, where the Arch curves the most, the tram cars rotate increasingly more frequently to keep its occupants sitting level. If you are already nervous, it is an unnerving event.
The top of the Arch is a single room that can’t help but convey the inverted triangular shape of the exterior. Each side of the room is lined with small rectangular windows. On the west side lays Saint Louis. On the east side is the Mississippi and then Illinois. I’ve been up in the Arch when there was a stiff wind and you could feel the Arch swaying. Sunday though was not such a day. Eventually, we saw enough and took all the pictures we wanted to and rode down the other leg of the Arch. In this tram ride we had the car all to ourselves. Rey got to stretch out.
We killed the time in between the tram ride and the movie with a tour through the museum that lies underground beneath the Arch. The Arch is a national monument. It is officially known as the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. It commemorates the westward expansion of our country that occurred throughout the ninetieth century. It was situated in Saint Louis because of Saint Louis’ pivotal role as the Gateway to the West. Rey (naturally) found a new exhibit that describes Saint Louis’ contribution to the westward expansion of baseball.
The movie that we watched was, A Monument to a Dream. It is a short twenty-minute documentary film about the making of the Arch. In 1967 it was nominated for an Academy Award. Anne and I have seen it many times and we still love it.
We next adjourned from the Arch to neighboring Laclede’s landing for lunch. Once a warehouse district, it is now populated with restaurants and bars. We were seated and had placed our order before the waves of football fans began to arrive. Walking back to the car along the levee, we noticed that the water had risen further. So it was with some relief that we found the car still high and dry. All that was left was for us to slog home through football traffic.