Month: August 2018

We expected to be in Chicago weekend-before-last, but things changed when Abby and I attended Tim Turner’s memorial service in California.

Thanks to our skillful trip-planning, we arrived in Chicago just in time to drive the rig through Friday-afternoon rush-hour traffic.We then enjoyed a happy evening at Clark’s and Abby’s new condo in Evanston (Clark is doing a post-doc in neuroscience at Northwestern).  Ginny then stayed in nearby Skokie (site of the only hotel we could find near Evanston that was both dog-friendly and had a big enough parking lot for us to park The Big T) over the weekend while Abby and I went to Santa Cruz for Tim’s service.
After a nostalgic, family-centric (past and present) trip to California, we flew back to Chicago Monday. 

Ginny and Clack got to spend a nice afternoon at a beach on Lake Michigan in Evanston while Abby and I were gone, but they missed seeing Magical Mia, who was in California with Pete and Angela instead of in Chicago attending a reunion of Angela’s family, as had been planned.

Tuesday, Abby, Clark, Ginny and I went to Chicago, where we cruised the Chicago River for a tour of the architectural marvels of the Chicago skyline.  And there are plenty of marvels…

plus one recent stain on the landscape.

We then traveled from one great Midwestern city to another – to Cleveland, to visit the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame. Cleveland takes credit for being the birthplace of Rock n Roll, mainly because a local DJ, Alan Freed, coined the name and hosted the first rock concert, the Moondog Coronation Ball, in 1952.  When the idea for the Hall was concocted in the early 80’s, the presumptive location was New York, home of much of the recording industry.   But Cleveland mounted a compelling campaign, one element of which was that it would be a featured, even singular, tourist attraction in Cleveland, compared to NYC, where it would have been a drop in a big bucket.

The Hall of Fame is impressive – a distinctive building suggestive of the pyramid on the cover of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album, located on the revitalized shores of Lake Erie.  

The museum artifacts include wreckage of the Otis Redding plane crash,

a Tom Petty concert jacket,

the settlement agreement dissolving The Beatles, 

a Jerry Garcia guitar

and an exhibit highlighting the latest Hall of Fame induction class (including Dire Straits and the Moody Blues – it’s about time!!!).

There’s even a drawing of an Oregon football player by “James” Hendrix when he was in grade school in Seattle.

Luckily, we visited while there was a special exhibit on the San Francisco rock scene of the 60’s…the music I grew up with!

Friday, we headed to Williamsport, PA.  For anyone who ever played Little League baseball or is the parent of someone who did, Williamsport was the seemingly unattainable destination – the site of the annual Little League World Series.

A city now of about 110,000 people in north central Pennsylvania, Williamsport is the birthplace of Little League Baseball and still is the beating heart of the sport.  

The Little League World Series is sports in its purest form in 21st century America.  Little League International is a self-effacing organization (which I got to know while negotiating ESPN’s media rights agreement in 2007) that administers thousands of local youth baseball leagues, culminating in an annual championship tournament of 16 teams (eight U.S., eight international).  The organization’s  priorities are sportsmanship, safety and fair play.  Because this is the 21st century, it’s an enterprise that is awash in television-related money.  ESPN televises the entire two-week tournament, plus the regional finals leading up to it.

The main ballpark in the complex, Howard Lamade Stadium, is one of the greatest settings for a baseball game  (or any sporting event) anywhere. 

Thanks to an old Bristol pal, I was able to get great seats for both days we were there.  The U.S. and International championship games (South Korea 2, Japan 1; Honolulu 3, Peachtree City, Georgia 0) were on Saturday and the final-final game between Hawaii and South Korea was Sunday afternoon.

We quickly became fans of the Hawaii team.  Their fans were great (featuring their cool “Hon-O-Lu-Lu” chant), plus they carried a morale-boosting burden for the entire state, which was hit by a major hurricane during the tournament.  The team also co-won the award for best sportsmanship among all the teams in the tournament.

While Little League is still predominantly about pitching, we marveled at the caliber of play in the field.  The final play of the International championship game was the South Korea pitcher catching a line drive against his stomach and throwing to first base to double off the potential tying run.  Georgia’s centerfielder made a diving, backhand catch to keep the U.S. championship game close, which rivaled any Web Gem on SportsCenter.  And all four teams’ shortstops repeatedly made eye-popping plays.  The whole thing was a joy to watch and when Hawaii won the title Sunday afternoon (3-0), Williamsport rocked!

We left Pennsylvania Monday to spend the next three-plus weeks in upstate New York.  Our next report will include pictures of Niagara Falls!

Your faithful correspondent apologizes for the recent lack of productivity.

My laptop got hacked – beware of a link purporting to be an Adobe Flash update.  After resetting lots of passwords and getting a replacement credit card, all seems well again.

So the next order of business is to go back to a leg of our trip in Michigan week-before-last (time flies!), after we crossed the Mighty Mac Bridge onto the Lower Peninsula (which I learned is a legit name and not just a Yooper zinger at the bigger-city folks down south).

After a couple of restful days near Traverse City, Ginny and I teed it up Wednesday-before-last for the first time in waaaay too long. In doing so, we proved the value of quality over quantity. Arcadia Bluffs is one of the best, most scenic and most enjoyable courses we’ve ever played. It’s links golf overlooking Lake Michigan (which was hazy in this pic, due to smoke from the forest fires as far away as Yellowstone/Glacier).

We then drove some seriously back roads from Arcadia to Fremont, MI (home of Gerber baby foods!) to visit Ginny’s Aunt Maggie and her husband Harry.  Maggie is Ginny’s mom’s youngest sister, and it’s easy to see the genes for both beauty and magnetism in the McAndrews bloodline!

Maggie and Harry live on Peck Lake, where we had a nice booze cruise.

The treat of the evening was listening to Maggie’s stories about her big sister…and watching Ginny’s smile at all the memories of her mom.  The only disappointment of the visit was that we didn’t have more time to spend together.

It was one of the most heart-warming evenings of our trip.

Our relaxing stay near Traverse City, Michigan was interrupted by sad news.  Tim Turner, Maggie’s brother (which makes him my ex-brother-in-law, a weird term if there ever was one) passed away last weekend.  I’m flying to California Saturday for the celebration of his life.

Tim was an overgrown kid who, happily for everyone who knew him, never grew up.  He was large in size and even larger in his kindness, humor and mischievousness.

There was no way not to like Tim.  He always had a twinkle in his eye.  His irreverence was contagious.  But the younger you were, the more you liked him.   He was the all-time best uncle – Pete, Abby and JJ loved him dearly, for good reason.

Tim regularly attended Burning Man, the annual celebration of utopian fantasmagoria.  But he also was a brilliant mathematician and a gifted computer programmer, and he could intelligently converse about an amazing array of topics, always with a unique and thought-provoking perspective.

Here’s a classic Tim story.  At about the time Gerald Ford became President, he (Tim) had a part-time gig tutoring math students at UC Berkeley.  He got so many phone calls from his students, he gave himself a semi-unlisted phone number.  Semi, in that he was still in the Pacific Bell Telephone Book (remember phone books?), but he listed his name backwards – Tim Turner became Mit Renrut.

I met Tim in the 1970’s, which put a poignant edge on my trip this week to the Gerald Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Gerald Ford was a man of solid accomplishments and no flamboyance.  Due to his stiff speaking style, he was perceived as not very bright.  In fact, he spent much of his life exceeding peoples’ expectations.  He only got to go to the University of Michigan because his high school principal saw his potential and convinced people in Ford’s native Grand Rapids to establish a scholarship for him.  He then starred for the Wolverine football team and even had NFL offers.  But he wanted to be a lawyer.  He got a job as an assistant coach for the Yale junior varsity football team.  While there, he sought admission to the Yale Law School.  When he was initially denied, he took classes on his own time to prove he could handle the academic rigors.  He then was admitted, and went on to graduate in the top 25% of his class.  First elected to Congress in 1948, he was shrewd enough to get appointed to the House Appropriations Committee, because he knew that those who controlled the pursestrings controlled power.

Lyndon Johnson once derided Ford’s intelligence by saying he had played football without a helmet (maybe because Ford committed occasional oratorical gaffes, such as when he said on the floor of Congress, “If Abraham Lincoln were alive, he’d be rolling in his grave”), but President Johnson appointed him to the Warren Commission in 1963 that investigated the assassination of President Kennedy.

The Watergate scandal started in 1972 (coincidentally, the year I met Tim Turner) with the break-in and wire-tapping of the Democratic Party’s national headquarters by burglars hired by the Republican Party.   The scandal steadily escalated, due to historical investigative reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post and a Congressional investigation into the whole mess.

In 1973, as Watergate grew into the dominant topic in American politics, Ford was a 12-term Congressman from Michigan and House Minority Leader.  He aspired not to be President but to be Speaker of the House.  Then, in the midst of Watergate, Vice President Spiro Agnew suddenly resigned in disgrace due to proof that he regularly accepted bribes while Governor of Maryland.  Nixon became the first President to invoke the 25th Amendment of the Constitution by appointing Ford as Agnew’s successor in late 1973 and his appointment was enthusiastically ratified by Congress.

The following year, Ford became President when Nixon resigned amid conclusive proof that he had lied about his role in the Watergate affair.  Yes, a President once resigned because he got caught lying.

“Our long national nightmare is over,” said Gerald Ford upon taking the oath of office as the 38th President.  While that was the punchiest line of his speech, Ford then went on to say something else that is vitally important 44 years later – “Our Constitution works.  Our great republic is a government of laws and not of men.”

President Ford set an example of common decency that contrasted refreshingly with the deviousness, combativeness and paranoia of his predecessor, Nixon.  “There are times when we don’t need greatness in our Presidents,” CBS News once said.  “As Ford showed in the wake of Watergate, there are times when goodness will do.”

Ford was President for only two-and-a-half years, but they were momentous years.  The Vietnam War ended in defeat for the U.S. and its South Vietnamese ally (after which Ford not only authorized the immigration of Vietnamese refugees into the U.S., he personally welcomed many of them to the country), the nation endured a serious energy shortage, inflation rattled the U.S. economy, the Helsinki Accords were ratified (mandating economic, scientific and economic cooperation among nations and embracing human rights, which were credited with hastening the demise of the Soviet Union) and the U.S. celebrated the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence.  During his 1976 bid for election to a full term, Ford’s platform included national catastrophic health insurance, “so people don’t have to go broke to get well.”

With President Ford, America also had a rock-star First Lady.  Betty Ford was more than just charming – she was an out-front proponent of the Equal Rights Amendment, which ultimately failed to become a part of the Constitution because enough Republican-controlled state legislatures rejected the notion that the Constitution should state unequivocally that women are entitled to equal rights under law.  Betty also matter-of-factly acknowledged the reality of things that made conservatives gasp in horror in the 70’s (not the 60’s, the 70’s), such as premarital sex and marijuana usage.

When President Ford left office, he and Betty were the first First Couple to sign a joint book deal, so that each of them wrote their memoirs.  That Christmas, one of Betty’s gifts to Jerry was a t-shirt saying, “I’ll Bet My Book Out-Sells Yours!”  It did.  By a lot.

However, Betty’s most significant contribution to American society came when she admitted to alcohol and prescription-drug dependency.  She not only candidly acknowledged her problem, she did something about it…The Betty Ford Center now is a worldwide leader in innovative and effective treatment of substance-abuse problems.

Gerald and Betty Ford each were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  President Ford also was bestowed with the Kennedy Profiles In Courage Award for pardoning Nixon and sparing the nation the prolonged agony of prosecuting the disgraced ex-President.

I’ve never voted for a Republican for President, but if I had to pick one to have voted for, it would be Gerald Ford.  It’s a wonderful irony, which is hard to imagine in the ugly times in which we now live, that Ford became good friends in his later life with the man who defeated him in 1976, Jimmy Carter…himself one of the most decent men ever to sit in the Oval Office (as confirmed as recently as this week – https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2018/08/17/feature/the-un-celebrity-president-jimmy-carter-shuns-riches-lives-modestly-in-his-georgia-hometown/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.b66eadd99ac8).

After my trip to California, we will enjoy a couple of days in Chicago/Evanston with Abby and Clark, then we head east again for a brief visit to the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame In Cleveland and then a weekend of baseball at the Little League World Series in Williamsport, PA.

Sault Ste. Marie (pronounced Soo Saint Marie), Michigan is at the opposite end of Lake Superior from Duluth.  It’s located on the far northeastern corner of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.  Its twin city, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, is located directly across the St. Marys River.

We arrived Thursday afternoon after driving from Marquette, Michigan.  En route, we drove through Christmas, MI, but there wasn’t much reason to slow down.

Also during the trip, we toured a remarkable little place called Owsald’s Bear Ranch, in the town of Newberry, MI.

Oswald’s currently has 40 bears that have been rescued from various life-threatening situations.  They are provided with various habitats, which are as big as a half-mile in perimeter.  Reportedly, PETA is not impressed and gives the place a hard time.  It’s hard to imagine the logic of this, but PETA is an organization that, when given the choice of stridency and common sense, seems to always choose stridency.

We saw newly-rescued cubs…

young bears and big-boy (and -girl) bears who, despite their habitats, know when to hang near the crowds and get apples…

and more than one big guy who just decided to climb a tree.

They are beautiful creatures.  

We got double-lucky in Sault Ste. Marie.  The weather was Duluth-like – sunny and warm.  Plus, our RV park was smack-dab on the St. Marys River, with a view of Canada…

and some biiiig ships.

“Sault” is French for shallow rapids.  The Saint Marys River links Lake Superior to Lake Huron. Unfortunately, there’s a difference of 20 feet between  the lakes, which produces rapids on the Saint Marys between the lakes.  Freighters do bad things in rapids, so to facilitate commercial traffic, locks were constructed, first by Canada (1894) and then by America (1896).  They’re now part of the 2,300 mile-long St. Lawrence Seaway between Lake Superior and the Atlantic Ocean.

On Friday, we toured the Soo Locks.  Our tour boat entered the Canadian lock along with a spiffy motorboat…

the gates closed…then it took 10 minutes to fill the lock with 1.5 million gallons of water to raise us 21 feet (the lighter color on the top of the sidewall at the left of the pic is the water-line to which we were raised), after which we could go to Lake Superior.  We then went past a steel mill, reportedly one of the ground zero points for the President of the United Base’s steel tariffs against Canada.  

We returned via the bigger American locks, which include one that’s six-fold longer than the Canadian lock we used and requires 22 million gallons of water to either fill or be dispersed.  As big as it is, some of the freighters are so big that they have only two-and-a-half feet of leeway on either side of the lock when they’re in it.  However, Congress cannot find the money to fund a new super-lock big enough to accommodate the latest and largest tankers (enjoy your tax cut, everybody).
Our boat started at ground level with a park on the American side…

and with a pressbox-like tourist viewing area…

but 10 minutes later, we had dropped those 21 feet, which changed our perspective on everything (that strip of darkness in the pic below is the top of that same viewing area shown in the previous pic…

before we headed back out onto the Saint Marys and to our Sault Ste. Marie dock.

Saturday morning, we headed south.  Fun fact – we left Sault Ste. Marie via the northern terminus of Interstate 75.  Last Monday, we left Duluth via the northern terminus of I-35.  During our trip so far, we’ve also driven on the western terminus of I-90 (Seattle), the western terminus of I-80 (Oakland), the western terminus of I-10 (Santa Monica), the southern terminus of I-5 (San Diego) and the western terminus of I-8 (San Diego).  This is turning into a thing for us.  Our itinerary also includes the eastern termini of I-90 (Boston), I-80 (New York), I-26 (Charleston) and I-10 (Jacksonville), the southern terminus of I-95 (Miami) and maybe the eastern terminus of I-40 (Wilmington, NC) and the southern termini of I-65 (Mobile) and I-59 (New Orleans).  This probably isn’t as interesting to most people as it is to me.

Our plan was to drive down I-75 Saturday and cross the five-mile-long Mackinac Bridge.  It straddles the strait between Lake Huron and Lake Michigan and links the Upper Peninsula to the rest of Michigan (although there’s a sneaky-snarky sign near the bridge, presumably put up by a Youpper, directing southbound traffic to the “Lower Peninsula”).

Thanks to a last-minute tip from Lisa Foster, however, we called an audible and stopped at the town just before the bridge, St. Ignace, MI, where we caught a ferry to Mackinac Island.

Mackinac Island is a cross among Martha’s Vineyard, Block Island (which is slightly less than half the size of Mackinac), Victoria, BC, Cape May and the Boardwalk at Epcot.

It’s full of charm, history and fudge.

The French stole the island from what I guess we should call the Indians or Natives (can’t call them Native Americans because this was during the 1670s).  The British took control of the entire Straits of Mackinac area after the French and Indian War ended 1763.  The U.S. got the place as part of the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War, then hung on to it by the Treaty of Ghent that ended the War of 1812, even though we lost two battles to the British when trying to recapture the island after the Brits seized it during that war.

Mackinac Island was a center of the fur trade and commercial fishing in the mid-1800s, but since then the place has mostly been about tourism.  Based on the size of the many spectacular old houses on the island, it’s also been a long-time place for the beautiful people to build, spend and play.  

Our ferry first drove us out to the Mackinac Bridge.

Our tour guide offered no explanation – presumably because there isn’t one, geologically – for why Lake Huron and Lake Michigan have the characteristics of one body of water, but are considered to be separate.  Both of the lakes and the Straits of Mackinac between them (where the bridge is built) have the same elevation and freely exchange water.  If they were considered one lake, they/it would comprise the biggest fresh-water lake in the world, instead of Lake Superior.

Pulling into the harbor at Mackinac Island, we knew immediately we were in for something special.  The Grand Hotel is true to its name (it even charges you $10 to walk on the sidewalk outside the place).

There is also small-town charm.

But around every quiet corner, there were bunches of tourists.

There are no motor vehicles on the entire island.  As a result, there are more bicycles than at a Sierra Club convention plus an endless stream of horse-drawn carriages used both for both tourism and business.

So instead of traffic cops, Mackinac has clean-up crews.

The main export of the island now appears to be fudge.  I counted 10 fudge stores in a two-block area.  The aroma of baked sugar permeates the main part of town.  And it’s really good fudge, by the way.

And if all this wasn’t enough to make for a great day, Roxy loved her first boat ride.  Sting mostly basked.

We then drove uneventfully across the “Mighty Mac”  bridge…
to a little town outside of Traverse City, MI, where we’ll spend the next few days, catching up on a couple of activities we’ve gotten out of the habit of doing – golf and hiking!

Sometimes, sarcasm comes true.

In 1871, when Duluth, Minnesota was a settlement of barely 3,000 people and Congress was considering enacting a land grant to the area, a Kentucky Congressman named J. Proctor Knott took to the floor of the House of Representatives and gave a speech, interrupted 62 times by laughter, about what he termed “the untold delights of Duluth.”  Dripping with more sarcasm than a piece of pie a la mode (invented in Duluth) on an August afternoon, Knott suggested that Duluth was the nascent center of the universe, in part because its weather was “cold enough for at least nine months in the year to freeze the smoke-stack off a locomotive.”

Despite the satire (and the defeat by Congress of the land grant), Duluth grew to over 100,000 people by the 1920s.  During the first decade of the 20th century, it was the busiest port in the United States, even surpassing New York City.  Located on the western edge of Lake Superior (the largest freshwater lake in the world, holding more water than the four other Great Lakes combined, plus three extra Lake Eries), it can access the Atlantic Ocean via the St. Lawrence Seaway.  Its primary cargo was iron ore mined in Minnesota, for shipment via the Great Lakes to mills in Illinois and Ohio.  Duluth was such a boom town for a while that U.S. Steel built a plant there which, in turn, spawned other manufacturing and trade.

Duluth even had a National Football League franchise in the 1920s, the Duluth Eskimos.

Speaking of Eskimos, there’s that weather.  Duluth averages over 100 days a year when the high temperature is below freezing and 40 days a year when the low is below zero.  According to at least one government study, Duluth is the fifth-coldest city in the U.S.  Lake Superior is so big, it can even generate its own Nor’easters – here’s a wave hitting a 130-foot cliff a few miles up the coast from town.

However, in early August, Duluth is fantastic.  Ginny and I arrived on an 80-degree afternoon with the sun glinting off Lake Superior.

The steel mill is long gone, the Minnesota iron ore lode played out decades ago and the population has dwindled to about 85,000.  Now Duluth’s biggest industry is tourism.  We were lucky enough to book an RV park on the waterfront, which is accessible by crossing the Duluth Aerial Bridge, built in 1905 and one of the few vertical-lift bridges still operating.  

The bridge is on the National Register of Historic Places, but it still works.  It was in its up position when we arrived (causing the first traffic jam we’ve been in in months).

The bridge is the gateway from the industrial waterfront onto Lake Superior.  It also abuts a pedestrian walkway along the water called Canal Park, an old warehouse district that’s now full of restaurants, craft shops and a park. At the turn of the 20th century, there were more millionaires per capita in Duluth than anywhere else in the country.  Apparently, they all build really cool houses because the city abounds with great architecture.

Monday, we drove the North Shore Scenic Byway from Duluth.  The roadway hugs the shore of Lake Superior all the way to the Canadian border about 150 miles due north.  We only went one-third of that way, going as far as the Split Rock Lighthouse, constructed after there were 29 shipwrecks on Lake Superior in 1905.  The lighthouse is only 54 feet tall, but it’s built on the edge of a 133-foot cliff (the one in that Nor’easter picture above).  In their heyday (which ended in 1969) the lighthouse and foghorn could be seen and heard over 20 miles away.

On the drive to Split Rock, we also visited the little town of Two Harbors, where natural beauty and industrial brawn coexist,

and Gooseberry State Park, which has waterfalls…

and panoramic views of Lake Superior and its coastline.

Duluth has been the most pleasant surprise of our trip so far.  Part of it was lucky weather timing (by Tuesday morning, it had turned foggy and chilly) but it’s also simply another example of how many hidden gems there are in our country!  Nevertheless, we’ll leave it to others to explore Duluth during winter, although we disagree with the extent of the weather-related comments of the infamously sarcastic Congressman Knott, who was willing to “let the freezing cyclones of the black Northwest bury (Duluth) forever!”

 

Dogs and baseball cheered us up after our visit to the Hoover Library.

Roxy, our toddler Field Spaniel, was born in Iowa City, near where we stayed this week.  We’re still in touch with her breeder, so we arranged for a reunion after our trip to the Hoover Museum.

When we knocked on the door of the house of the breeder, a delightful woman named Kay, we thought we were in a new movie, 101 Field Spaniels.  Turns out Kay still has four of Roxy’s littermates, Roxy’s mom, two dogs on loan from Roxy’s father and a couple of other Fieldies.   Kay reunited with Roxy…

Roxy reunited with her mom, Bluebelle…and hilarious chaos reigned.

Friday morning, we headed north towards Minnesota, with a stop en route in Dyersville, Iowa at the Field of Dreams baseball field.  We didn’t hear any ethereal voices or see any movie (or baseball) stars, but the place brought back great memories of the movie!

They built it, we came (and I shoulda worn my Red Sox shirt).

We crossed into Minnesota Friday afternoon…
and we’re happily encamped on the banks of the Mississippi River in Winona…en route to Duluth, then across the Upper Peninsula of Michigan next week.

“Upon his individual head was wreaked the spirit of resentment and of vengeance for events which neither he nor any other man in public office could control…There is a tragic element in this closing of a political career.”

So wrote the New York Times of Herbert Hoover on November 9, 1932, the day after Hoover suffered the worst loss in American history by a President running for reelection.

Only 12 years earlier, a NYT poll ranked Hoover among the 10 greatest living Americans.  After making a fortune as a mining engineer, he became a world famous humanitarian.  As “The Great Engineer”, he was responsible for feeding millions of starving refugees in Europe during and after World War I and he administered the conservation of America’s food supply during that war.

“He is certainly a wonder, and I wish we could make him President of the United States.  There couldn’t be a better one.”  So said none other than Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1920.

Hoover served in the Cabinet of Presidents Harding and Coolidge in the 1920’s as Secretary of Commerce.  He had such a reputation as a progressive and activist that he was also referred to as “the Under Secretary of everything else.”  Known as Cautious Cal, President Coolidge’s standard response to Hoover’s stream of ideas in Cabinet meetings was, “Waaall, that might be a good thing; might not.  We’ll see about that lateh.”

Hoover was easily elected President in 1928.  That was at the apex of the Roaring Twenties.  Hoover had warned Coolidge earlier in the decade that the prosperity of the times was built on risky investment policies, but he was ignored.  Only eight months after Hoover’s inauguration, the stock market crashed.  For the rest of his term as President, the nation sank into the Great Depression.

“Democracy is a harsh employer,” admitted Hoover after FDR defeated him in 1932.

Hoover’s reputation was somewhat rehabilitated in his later life.  President Truman brought him back into public life in 1946 by asking him to lead another humanitarian effort to feed post-World War II Europe. Nevertheless, Hoover’s life after his Presidency was mostly forlorn, and his Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa (his birthplace) has the same air about it.

The building and grounds are tasteful.  However, there were almost no visitors while we were there (the nearby town of West Branch was nearly deserted, too).  The biographical film on Hoover playing in the Museum theater hasn’t been updated since 1992.  The gift shop is almost bereft of Hoover-specific merchandise (it’s mostly generic Presidential items).

Museum displays include poignant video testimonials by survivors of war-torn Europe whose lives were saved by Hoover’s administrative genius.  There are some fascinating artifacts, including the equipment used in the first public demonstration of television technology, which featured a speech by then-Secretary of Commerce Hoover. 

The exhibits don’t run away from the economic calamity that scarred Hoover’s Presidency.

But while acknowledging Hoover’s shortcomings as a communicator – “I would that I had the words to say what is in my heart,” Hoover was quoted as saying as he witnessed the suffering of millions during the Depression – the Museum avoids the reality that his cold persona amounted to a fundamental leadership flaw, making him utterly unable to inspire and reassure the American public as the economy melted down (the national unemployment rate hit 25% by 1932).  By comparison, FDR had the innate ability to communicate with average Americans in their time of need, which made him beloved.

All Presidential Museums engage in spin, but this one ignores serious policy errors made by Hoover as the Depression deepened.  He signed federal legislation imposing tariffs on foreign goods, triggering a trade war with Europe that artificially inflated the costs of goods at the time consumers could least afford to buy them (ahem).  He increased taxes and insisted on balanced budgets, instead of using deficit-spending for stimulus.  He largely resisted federal-level recovery programs (with a few notable exceptions such as the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which provided government-secured commercial loans), leaving most relief efforts to the already-financially-strapped states.

The Museum also paints a rosy picture of Hoover’s retirement…when in fact Hoover was something of a recluse workaholic after his wife, Lou, died in 1944.  He was a relentless critic of FDR’s domestic and foreign policies (“I outlived the bastards,” he said with some grim satisfaction, referring to the creators of the New Deal).  On the other hand, he was the first ex-President to write a best-selling book about another President – The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson.  He also was a generous fundraiser and supporter of the Boys Clubs of America and other charitable causes.

He also may have been the last man in America to fish while wearing a tie.

“He was an enigma,” concluded Gene Smith, author of the aptly-named Hoover biography, The Shattered Dream.

Fun fact – from 1933, when he left office, until the end of Harry Truman’s second term in 1953, Hoover was America’s only living ex-President.  By comparison, we now have five (Carter, Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43 and Obama).

Our visit to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield, IL on Monday was a surprising disappointment.

The first exhibit we went to, “Ghosts of The Library”, features Disneyesque special-effects and is sponsored by AT&T.  Other branded pablum followed, although the family portrait was unsponsored.

Maybe it’s because Lincoln is so famous, but we saw nothing that was new or particularly thought-provoking.

The house wasn’t much better.  Everything in it was identified as a reproduction.  The setting itself is a block-long Sturbridge Village-like recreation.  

But our last stop of the day was powerful.  Lincoln’s tomb is majestic, somber and dignified.  

There are other Lincoln-related sights in downtown Springfield, including a statue with an inspirational message:

After Springfield, it was on to Iowa, through more and more cornfields, to the Herbert Hoover Library.