(Editor's note: In college, Doug Kamholz named his dog after Dag Hammarskjöld, the Swedish economist who served as secretary-general of the United Nations until he died in a plane crash. Doug's dog symbolized the hopes vested in the UN, which produced a lasting document about living free with dignity that celebrated its 75th anniversary this week.) by Doug Kamholz We planted people in the audience during our annual peace center celebrations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. On cue they popped up and spouted “Number 14! The right to asylum!” or maybe “Number 24! The right to rest!” The United Nations adopted this stunning set of 30 articles at its meeting at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, France, on December 10, 1948. The Universal Declaration stood as response to nightmarish barbarism during World War II. The authors’ goal was inclusive of all cultures, nations and regions, of all races, ethnicities, religions and genders, of all languages and opinions, of any class or status of birth. They proclaimed inalienable rights entitled to all human beings simply because they are human beings. As one would expect, there is lofty language such as “All human beings are born free” but there’s an equal amount plain-speaking. Take Article 24 from my opening paragraph: “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.” Guaranteed vay-kay, as the kids say. Today we live in a fatally fractious world (and country), a reason for pessimism. However, it was nations often at extreme odds that produced perhaps the finest compendium of human rights ever inscribed. To accomplish this, they worked through divisions to achieve union, a reason for optimism. Capitalism and socialism have been the two major currents of political philosophy for a century just as they were in 1948. It is fun (I can think of no better word) to read through 1,773 words of the Declaration of Human Rights and pick out which articles were drawn from capitalist-leaning societies and which were likely offered by the more socialist side of the world. Here are a couple examples of each: — Article 12. “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence . . .”  Capitalism has always championed individualism and personal privacy. — Article 17. “Everyone has the right to own property . . .”  Private property is the bulwark of capitalism. — Article 22.  “Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and . . . free development of his personality.” Socialism leans more to collective goodness and opportunity.   — Article 25. “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services . . .” This is the essence of socialist societal obligation and of socialism, itself. In 1945 President Harry S Truman appointed Eleanor Roosevelt to the U.S. delegation helping to form the United Nations. A year later Norwegian Trygve Lie, first U.N. secretary general, asked her to help form a formal human rights commission. She chaired the group drafting the Declaration along with representatives from France, Lebanon, China, Australia, Chile, Canada, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union.  “[W]e are all conscious of the great responsibility which rests upon us,” she said upon her appointment, “to help the United Nations achieve its primary objective of keeping the peace of the world by helping human beings live together happily and contentedly.This Declaration was Roosevelt’s focus for two years. The result remains an unmatched articulation of human aspiration on earth. One measure is that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the most translated text in the world. For Moxie readers in the U.S., there is a recent sad chapter. The president before Joe Biden pulled this nation out of the U.N. Human Rights Council in June of 2018. It happened the day after U.N. human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein denounced Donald Trump’s policy of separating children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley called the Council “a cesspool.” She resigned her ambassadorship at year’s end with some speculating she sought distance from Trump in order to mount a 2024 White House run against him. She’s currently second in polling to her ex-boss. Biden’s request to rejoin the Human Rights Council in his first year in office was granted by the U.N. General Assembly. The U.S. ambassador to the U.N. is now Linda Thomas-Greenfield. She is a career diplomat whose major work has focused on Sub-Saharan Africa as well as serving the State Department as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration.                                                                                                                 - 30 - Important note 1: Here (https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights)are all 30 Articles, all 1,773 words:

by Doug Kamholz The only generation we know intimately, viscerally, organically is our own. As a child of the ‘60s, I always have felt a little sorry for the offspring of any other time. That thought arises often. Today it conjures the power and sweep of anti-war marches in Washington, D.C. as well as that army of youth putting their feet in the street and their hands all over a changing America. I’ll quickly say some U.S. places and days have seen larger demonstrations than any against the war in Vietnam. Admirable marches in favor of this or against that have hit a million or more. Our largest, in 1969, saw half a million; five others in D.C. drew more. But there is a difference, a critical one. With few exceptions, hundreds of thousands of war protesters made their way to Washington’s wide streets each and every spring and each and every fall from 1965 until 1974, near the war’s end. We forged a powerful voice as well as a leading role in turning Americans against the conflict. [A rarely noted historical note: In 1945, U.S. Merchant Marine sailors were first to protest U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Four crews drew up a resolution condemning our government for employing their ships to transport European troops deployed to “subjugate the native population” of Vietnam. (Who knew?)] Back to the ‘60s. Just what colliding comets of the universe spirited tens and then hundreds of thousands of American youth to gather all those springs and all those autumns? Whatever mix of politics and culture made the moment we came to believe we must change our native land? Even more quizzical, how did we think we had the wherewithal to do so? What Really Happened to the Class of ’65 is a book by David Wallechinsky, son of author Irving Wallace, and Michael Medved, a conservative film critic. (I am of that class of ‘65 from Hononegah High in Rockton, Illinois.) The authors emphasize that parents of this graduating class had lived through the Great Depression and World War II, and that generation had suffered greatly so its offspring would not have to experience deprivation or global warfare. Influential Time magazine ran a cover article on the same class. It carried the subtitle: “on the fringe of a golden era.”  We were, in short, those very children of The Golden Age. Even the Cold War had gotten cooler. Our path was primrose. Our future was so bright we needed shades. Or was it? Just one month after graduation, Watts in L.A. went up in flames in what the book authors called “America’s first season of urban unrest,” proof some fringes were far from golden. President Lyndon Johnson began ratcheting up the war in Vietnam, doubling 1965’s draft to almost a quarter million and adding another 150,000 in ‘66. Not so golden, after all. There’s something happening here / But what it is ain’t exactly clear—Buffalo Springfield (a band named for a steamroller) sang in 1967. Indeed. Any assessment of my generation, what we dreamed or what we did, must start with simple demographics. Youth of the ‘60s were—and still are in some ways—the 900-pound gorilla (or guerrilla) in the census, only recently eclipsed by Millennials. That sheer size combined with parents who worked to free us from their own decades of hardship meant baby boomers basked in hopeful societal attention. Those numbers and that focus engendered a real sense of both identity and power. Not that we knew squat about what to do with it. Yet. In a 2021 New Yorker piece on the New Left, that youth-led search for a third way outside communism and capitalism, author Louis Menand chronicles its decade of vibrance starting in the early ‘60s. He writes about this modern awakening, this mobilizing of critical opinion on race, poverty, arms and war.  Menand speaks of the push to reject existing systems and begin anew. “If this was a fantasy,” he notes slyly, “then so was the Declaration of Independence.”  Understanding the anti-war movement requires revisiting this New Left awakening. As northern mostly white college students became aware of southern civil rights activism, they saw it included purposeful illegal activity well exemplified by Black college students refusing to leave a Woolworth’s lunch counter on February 1, 1960. From such actions they began to glimpse all-in investment, dedicating their own lives to altering life for everybody. So what were at first parochial protests on campuses about college rules soon blossomed into nationwide marches against the war and other issues. And then they came, spring after spring, fall after fall, living that all-in investment. In 2020, real passion brought millions out to stand with George Floyd or against gun violence in 2018, but these anti-war protesters are better understood in terms akin to religious devotion.  Like a daily rosary or five-times-a-day prayers or grace before meals, many youth of the ‘60s were that constantly immersed in their politics. A comparison with our Korean Conflict is useful. It’s a country in South Asia and had a civil war between north and south, just like Vietnam. Almost as many young men were drafted for Korea in 1950s as were inducted for Vietnam, and about 36,000 of them died there. But public protest was scarce even though the war was pretty unpopular.  What a difference a decade makes. One of our long-haired leaders, Abbie Hoffman, summed it all up thusly: “We were young, self-righteous, reckless, hypocritical, brave, silly, headstrong and scared half to death. And we were right.” Or as San Francisco’s Jefferson Airplane sang: “We are all outlaws in the eyes of America We are obscene, lawless, hideous, dangerous, dirty, violent and young Everything they say we are, we are And we are very Proud of ourselves” Today, at half a century’s remove and with climate change so prominent, we might ponder all that fossil fuel exhaust spewed from busses and cars crossing America carrying all those young feet itching to march through Washington year after year. Yes, quite the cloud. But there is this: eco-guilt is assuaged when we remember these were protests against Agent Orange and other defoliants that damaged 7.6 million acres of crops and other living things.  That’s equal to half the farmland in the state of Indiana. As for napalm, also no friend to nature, we dropped about 350 million tons on Vietnam, more than 20 times the amount dropped on Japan in World War II. To me the more intriguing seeming contradiction is how happy everybody looked much of the time while protesting horrors of war. Simply, we marched as a tribe; we inhaled both power and joy from our impressive numbers. This was youth culture in the flesh. These events shared some fun-loving spirit of communality easily seen at Woodstock. “Everybody get together,” sang The Youngbloods, “Try to love one another right now.” So, yes, fight against the war, but don’t forget to revel in a reworked trio from the Land of Oz:  lie-ins and tie-dyes and sex, oh my! This was, remember, the crowd that in 1967 sought to levitate the Pentagon, all 6.5 million square feet of it. About 40,000 hippies left that day’s march, crossed the Potomac and encircled the heart of U.S. military policy.  Hoffman, Alan Ginsburg and others met with a General Services Administrator seeking a permit to raise the building 300 feet in the air. They planned to chant Aramaic exorcism rites thereby cleansing the edifice and “the war would end forthwith.” Negotiations went well, but the permit granted only a ten-foot levitation limit. OK, the building stayed grounded, but on every other level – joy, laughter and publicity – it could hardly have gone better. The same can be said about another feature of this same October 21st protest march. Organizers arranged to have 200 pounds of flowers passed out so they could be stuck in the rifle barrels of the 503rd Military Police Battalion posted on duty at the march. (And a Pulitzer-nominated photo by newspaperman Bernie Boston made the moment famous.) Flower power indeed. Was there civil disobedience? Certainly there was and not always as comical as the above examples. But I think another comparison is in order here.  There are acts of folks refusing to obey a law for moral or philosophical reasons.  They happen at segregated lunch counters, at men-only country clubs, at military induction ceremonies. In sharpest contrast, I believe what we witnessed on January 6, 2021, was precisely the opposite. When the then-president ginned up his minions to take brickbats to our democracy, I can think of no better term for their rampage than UN-civil O-bedience. May every one of them, demagogue to desecrator, pay for their national disgrace. Back to the ‘60s. In Woodstock, the documentary of 1969’s seminal music festival in upstate New York, a young couple is asked why they have come, what they seek. They hem and haw and end up saying they are not sure. They manage to say they are just looking. Upon first viewing I was disappointed with their fumbling, wishing my generation had a more articulate response. But as years passed I grew respectful of that young couple admitting they were openly searching. We were all searching. That is how my generation lived and grew. We searched for how to end the Vietnam War and all military conflict. We searched for how to live in harmony with one another and with capital “N” Nature. May we never stop. In 1962’s Port Huron Statement, adopted at the first convention of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), main author Tom Hayden wrote: “If we appear to seek the unattainable, as it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable.” The late Todd Gitlin turned a keen critical eye on the ‘60s generation. I’ll let him have a final say: “ . . something else was stirring. In the spreading cross-hatch where the student movement and the counterculture intersected, a youth identity said, in effect: To be young and American is to have been betrayed; to be alive is to be enraged. [Demonstrations were] insurgent youth culture’s way of strutting its stuff . . , staking out room to breathe in an alien land. What resulted was an unavailable channel . .” So there you have it, Moxie readers, nostalgia for some of us and news to others. Our mothers and fathers imbued many of us with a guaranteed vision that our lives would be beautiful. And damned if we were going to stop marching until that was true.

Editor's Note: Explaining why his July 4 piece for us was late, Doug wrote: "Tornadoes and terrible winds screamed through central Illinois on June 29."  Normally, (eyebrows raised), we would say yea, sure and consider this to be a sentence written by someone too busy living life to write abou it. But we can tell you that Doug's choice of adjective and his verb usage were legit. We had visitors from Lincoln Land here on Chesapeake Bay fretting mightily as that storm savaged Abe Town, knocking out power for days and longer. We can report that Doug persevered through the fallen trees, torch lights and state capital mayhem, producing this two-part look-back to a time when an aspirant campaigned while detained. by Doug Kamholz  To celebrate Independence Day, I offer patriot and four-time presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs. In 1918 he spoke to an Ohio court after being found guilty of attempting to cause insubordination and refusal of military duty in World War I, thereby violating the Espionage Act of 1917.  He addressed the judge between pronouncement of the jury’s verdict and announcement of his ten-year prison sentence: “Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. "I listened to all that was said in this court in support and justification of this prosecution, but my mind remains unchanged. I look upon the Espionage Law as a despotic enactment in flagrant conflict with democratic principles and with the spirit of free institutions. . . “Your Honor, I have stated in this court that I am opposed to the social system in which we live; that I believe in a fundamental change—but if possible by peaceable and orderly means. . . “ Standing here this morning, I recall my boyhood. At fourteen I went to work in a railroad shop; at sixteen I was firing a freight engine on a railroad. I remember all the hardships and privations of that earlier day, and from that time until now my heart has been with the working class. I could have been in Congress long ago. I have preferred to go to prison. . . “I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills and the factories; of the men in the mines and on the railroads. I am thinking of the women who for a paltry wage are compelled to work out their barren lives; of the little children who in this system are robbed of their childhood and in their tender years are seized in the remorseless grasp of Mammon and forced into the industrial dungeons, there to feed the monster machines while they themselves are being starved and stunted, body and soul. I see them dwarfed and diseased and their little lives broken and blasted because in this high noon of Christian civilization money is still so much more important than the flesh and blood of childhood. In very truth gold is god today and rules with pitiless sway in the affairs of men. “In this country—the most favored beneath the bending skies—we have vast areas of the richest and most fertile soil, material resources in inexhaustible abundance, the most marvelous productive machinery on earth, and millions of eager workers ready to apply their labor to that machinery to produce in abundance for every man, woman, and child—and if there are still vast numbers of our people who are the victims of poverty and whose lives are an unceasing struggle all the way from youth to old age, until at last death comes to their rescue and lulls these hapless victims to dreamless sleep, it is not the fault of the Almighty: it cannot be charged to nature, but it is due entirely to the outgrown social system in which we live that ought to be abolished not only in the interest of the toiling masses but in the higher interest of all humanity. . .“I believe, Your Honor, in common with all Socialists, that this nation ought to own and control its own industries. I believe, as all Socialists do, that all things that are jointly needed and used ought to be jointly owned—that industry, the basis of our social life, instead of being the private property of a few and operated for their enrichment, ought to be the common property of all, democratically administered in the interest of all. . . ”     Deb’s speech went on to decry additional inequities of capitalism and to envision a day of bright justice for our nation and the world.  His last run for the White House was in 1920.  He campaigned from Atlanta Federal Penitentiary and garnered almost a million votes.  Next week’s biographical sketch of the man will include sources you can use to learn more.  Happy (Belated) Independence Day!                                                                                                            Part II Author's note: Moxie readers have learned here or elsewhere about events such as 1921’s Tulsa Race Massacre. As we study, we see more clearly chapters our teachers skipped in the American story. One of those is the proud history of socialism in the U.S. Below I reprise the last half of my storm-delayed Independence Day piece on Eugene V. Debs, a biographical sketch. One hundred years ago, a popular presidential campaign button read “For President – Convict No. 9653.” That was Eugene V. Debs in 1920. He got almost a million votes.     So who was this guy, this federal prisoner who was so beloved the warden in Atlanta took him home for Sunday dinner and whose words above are still taught as a paragon of English oration? Who was this guy whose percentage of 1920 votes was bigger than Ralph Nader’s in 2000? He was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1855. His parents ran a small grocery store. To help his family he quit school at 14 and got a job as a painter in local railroad yards. Thereafter he displayed a paint scraper to recall times he earned a living with his hands. He also read, including Percy Shelley, an English poet who supported the French Revolution, Debs’ family’s homeland. Shelley wrote: “Rise like lions after slumber / In unvanquishable number / Shake your chains to earth like dew / Which in sleep had fallen on you / Ye are many – they are few”.      By age 20 Debs was drawn to the deprivations of working people. A deep post-war depression had hit the U.S. Debs and many others lost their railroad jobs. Workers struck back by stopping trains and rioting. For a week in 1877 socialists actually took over the cities of St. Louis and East St. Louis. At the same time Debs is a rising star in labor organizing, starting with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen.     With little support from fellow labor progressives in Terre Haute, young Debs rented a hall for Susan B. Anthony to speak on women’s suffrage in 1879, forty years before females’ right to vote became the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That same year, 1879, Debs won election as City Clerk running as a Democrat.  He was re-elected in 1881. In 1884 he was voted to serve Terre Haute in Indiana’s state legislature. One year later Debs, then 30, married Katherine Metzel. Five years later, in 1890, they built their two-story home in Terre Haute. (In 1966 Debs’ home was named a National Historic Landmark. It is now maintained by the Eugene V. Debs Foundation and is open for tours.) Just a few years later the U.S. suffered another economic downturn. George Pullman, owner of the railcar company that bore his name, cut workers’ wages. Many lived in his South Chicago company town, also named Pullman, but their rents and company store prices did not drop with their wages. A strike grew among various railway workers. Once switchmen joined and refused to couple or uncouple Pullman cars, Midwest rail traffic jammed. Railroads hired scabs. Then more unions joined the strike until 125,000 had walked off their jobs. But when strikers derailed an engine pulling a U.S. mail train, the federal government felt a right to seek an injunction and jail strikers. So in late 1894, even after rising lawyer Clarence Darrow failed to win a reversal, Debs was sentenced to several months in jail in Woodstock in northern Illinois. (Yes, it’s that Woodstock where Bill Murray et al. filmed Groundhog Day and, yes, I confess to having a hamburger in Debs’ old cellblock in what is now Public House of Woodstock in McHenry County’s converted courthouse.)   It was there, during long days amidst cornfields and groundhogs and quiet that Debs read and thought and embraced socialism. Here is an excerpt from a 2019 New Yorker article. “For a long time, Debs disavowed socialism. He placed his faith in democracy, the franchise, and the two-party system.‘The conflict is not between capital and labor,’ he insisted. ‘It is between the man who holds the office and the man who holds the ballot.’ But in the eighteen-eighties, when railroad men struck time and time again, and as many as two thousand railroad men a year were killed on the job, while another twenty thousand were injured, Debs began to wonder whether the power of benevolence and fraternity was adequate protection from the avarice and ruthlessness of corporations backed up by armed men. ‘The strike is the weapon of the oppressed,’ Debs wrote in 1888.” Debs’ first run for the presidency was as a socialist in 1900. His second run in 1904 trumpeted demands starting with “The earth for all the people.” Four years later his campaign platform decried the shame of child labor and promoted this: “There is not a single right accorded man should not be accorded to woman.” Nominated again by the Socialist Party of America in 1912, his banner read: “WORKINGMEN VOTE YOUR TICKET:  UNITE AT THE BALLOT BOX.”  Debs ran once more, this time from his Atlanta prison cell in 1920.  Those early 1900s saw rising socialist power in the U.S., especially in places like St. Louis, Milwaukee and New York, cities with large German populations. In 1912 more than 75 mayors in 23 states held their elected offices under a socialist banner, and Debs won 6% of the presidential vote. A Slovenian woman and former hat makers’ union leader, interviewed in 1981, recalled with excitement, “Gene Debs held my baby!” Then came the rapid fall. Early there appeared and grew a non-socialist progressive party perhaps best known for its Wisconsin leader, Robert M. La Follette, often known as “Fightin’ Bob.” As World War I neared there were splits among European socialist immigrant communities. Later, when the Bolshevik (Russian) Revolution came in 1917, more socialists peeled off in favor of the Communist Party.  Meanwhile, Debs’ popularity had soared, and he was speaking out against the world war. But dissent drew suspicion in Washington. And that became the 1918 Sedition Amendment to the 1917 Espionage Act. Debs was arrested in Canton, Ohio, after a speech and charged with violating those acts by encouraging disloyalty to military service. It is after his conviction that he gives his most famous speech, including the words: “ . . while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” My last illustration of Eugene V. Debs’ human qualities is drawn from his years in federal prison in Atlanta, headquarters of his last campaign—from the jail house to the White House—in 1920. Not only did the warden invite him home for dinners, but also he allowed Debs to travel unescorted to Washington, DC, for an official meeting. When it was done Debs got back on the train to Atlanta. In December of 1921, President Warren G. Harding pardoned Debs, who was by then in failing health. All the prisoners were permitted to gather at the fence on Christmas morning to wave good-bye. Here is a description from a review of Ernest Freeberg’s Democracy’s Prisoner: “Some readers may be moved, as I was, by the photograph of a black-suited Debs standing on the road outside the penitentiary. With his back to the camera and black hat raised high in his right hand, Debs acknowledges the ovation of his fellow inmates.” A few years later, Eugene V. Debs died at age 70 while being cared for in Elmhurst, Illinois. But for many of us he is just like federally executed labor agitator Joe Hill in that line Joan Baez sang at Woodstock: “. . Alive as you and me.”                                                                                                                  -30- [Postscript 1 The late Solomon Burke left us a fine musical take on Deb’s famous words “. . while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” Hear it here in “None of Us Are Free” backed by the Blind Boys of Alabama:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Edaz7CUAZg8 ] [Postscript 2 I thank sources that helped with this piece: Bill Furry, executive director of the Illinois State Historical Society; Ernest Freeberg, History Department Head at the University of Tennessee; Jill Lepore, Harvard professor and regular contributor to The New Yorker; Encyclopaedia Britannica; and 2019’s Eugene V. Debs: A Graphic Biography with art by Noah Van Sciver and prose by Paul Buhle, et al.]

Editor's Note: Doug Kamholz reminds us of what happened 137 years ago this week, the Haymarket Affair, an explosive protest in Illinois that changed the course in the drive for workers' rights. by Doug Kamholz For May Day in the mid-‘50s, my mom affixed handles to pastel fluted cupcake wrappers filled with nuts and candies. I would then, tra-la, deliver them to friends. For years I thought that’s all May Day was. One spring in the mid-’80s, I was enjoying welcome shade of palm and mango trees in Matagalpa Nicaragua’s central park. I was in Central America for about six months, partly to learn what a victorious leftist revolution really looked like. A Sandinista soldier approached my bench. We chatted. Before long he proceeded to deliver a fine historical account of then-upcoming May 1, International Workers’ Day, a celebration sans nuts or candies. This memorial is mainly about that version. About 675 laborers died each week in work-related accidents in 1880s America. The U.S. is now down to about 100 a week with six times the workforce. (Sad to say, the workplace murder rate is quite likely higher these days.) Given those tens of thousands of annual deaths, it is ugly-easy to conjure all the injuries and other health damage suffered by 19th century workers. So much is due heroes and martyrs of America’s long struggle for labor rights. It was the very lack of these rights that abetted those workplace tragedies and left bosses with no liability, no consequences. At a time when 14-hour days were often the rule, fighting for the eight-hour day took center stage. The Chicago event that birthed Workers’ Day is called Haymarket, a name well known around the world (including Matagalpa’s park) though little-known here in Illinois or any of our other 49 states. The bones: On Tuesday evening, May 4, 1886, there was a labor protest rally at Haymarket Square in Chicago. Around 10 pm, police marched on the dispersing crowd of about 200. A bomb exploded in the air. Police started shooting. Seven police officers were killed and others injured. Eight labor leaders were charged with conspiracy to murder. Seven were sentenced to hang. Four did. To honor them and all Chicago workers, 1889’s International Socialist Conference in Paris named May Day a labor holiday now called International Workers’ Day. The sinew: Spring of 1886 in Chicago saw many strikes by about 50,000 workers. It was the eight-hour day movement. Workers walked out on some of America’s famous industries: Pullman, McCormick, Armour, Swift and more. On Monday, May 3, police came to quell strikers at McCormick Reaper Works. They shot and killed two. Local labor agitators were furious. One eyewitness was August Spies, editor of the socialist Arbeiter-Zeitung (Workers’ Newspaper). He rushed to his shop and produced a flier quickly carried to area saloons and working class halls. Printed in German and English, it read in part: “If you are men . . you will rise . . and destroy the hideous monster that seeks to destroy you. To arms, we call you, to arms!” A second circular, by a second radical, posed more specific plans in response to the dead at McCormick. It called a mass meeting for Tuesday at Haymarket Square and included a threat to storm police stations if officers moved on demonstrators. That Tuesday evening a couple thousand showed up at Haymarket, far fewer than the 25,000 that had come to other such rallies. In later court testimony a veteran Chicago Tribune reporter said it was “a peaceable and quiet meeting” with no violence promoted. Even Mayor Carter Harrison was there. He heard speeches by Spies and Albert Parsons, editor of the anarchist Alarm. He found the gathering calm enough to suggest to Police Inspector John Bonfield that a large contingent of police waiting in reserve be sent home. Bonfield balked and the order to stand down was not given, but the mayor went home unworried. Before ten o’clock the crowd had dwindled enough to move to an adjacent alley. They wheeled a wagon across one end as a speakers platform. By ten o’clock only about 200 remained. At ten o’clock a thunderstorm threatened and a strong cold wind swept the alley. The meeting was adjourned. It was then that Bonfield ordered 186 uniformed men stationed nearby to march military style into the departing crowd. His Captain William Ward shouted, “I command you, in the name of the people of the state of Illinois, to immediately and peaceably disperse!” The last speaker, Methodist pastor Samuel Fielden, was still standing on the wagon when the police phalanx came. He responded, “But we are peaceable.. .” Then a sputtering object appeared above the marching company. The bomb. The dynamite bomb. No one has ever identified the bomb-thrower. But in that moment the police felt attacked enough to begin shooting into the fleeing crowd. They kept shooting for ten minutes and fired 250 bullets, according to the next day’s Tribune. Many on both sides were wounded. Some officers were injured by the bomb. Bullets killed seven in their ranks, and forensic evidence indicates they likely died from friendly fire, those in the rear hitting those at the front. Three weeks later 31 anarchists and socialists were named in an indictment for what happened at Haymarket. Only eight of those were ever tried, and those eight happened to be the most effective labor leaders in Chicago’s eight-hour day movement. Only two of them were present at Haymarket on May 4. Three months later seven of the eight were sentenced to hang. One, Oscar Neebe, was given a 15-year prison term. A year later the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the verdicts and sentences. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal. On November 10, 1887, one day before the executions, Illinois Governor Richard Oglesby commuted two of seven slated for death, Michael Schwab and the Haymarket speaker Fielden. That same day a third, Louis Lingg, bit down on a percussion cap smuggled to him inside a cigar. Before he died, he wrote a farewell note in his own blood: “Long live anarchy!” The remaining four were led to a specially built platform inside Cook County jail and hanged until dead. They were George Engel, Adolph Fischer, Parsons and Spies. The last words from Spies were prophetic: “There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.” The Flesh: Around 1880, Chicago had the largest socialist presence ever seen in the U.S. As was true in other cities such as St. Louis and Milwaukee, leftist politics arrived with large numbers of German immigrants. They seldom were met kindly. Chicago’s Tribune defined a socialist as “a long-haired brawling idiot.” (And yes, I do take some personal offense.) Those same late 1800s saw a shocking series of police murders of strikers from Pennsylvania to Colorado and right down the road from this keyboard, in Virden, Illinois. The 1898 Virden Massacre saw seven striking miners killed by coal company gunmen. They lie today in the nation’s only union-created cemetery in nearby Mount Olive. It is where Haymarket witness and rabble-rouser Mary “Mother” Jones chose to be interred “with her boys,” as she put it. Across the nation, thugs were imported for owner security. Workers and bystanders were killed. State militia were called in on the side of the owners. Here in Illinois, militia men shot to death two (or three, depending on your source) striking stonecutters in Lemont (where limestone was quarried to rebuild Chicago after the 1871 fire). Sadly, we can use current news of school shootings to feel the frequency of these shootings of strikers. Back in 1886, the only person left who could save the condemned was Illinois Governor Oglesby. He had been close with Abraham Lincoln since 1840. He was an abolitionist. It is said he pondered that those who spoke out against slavery could have faced the same sentence as the Haymarket prisoners. One week before the scheduled hangings, Oglesby even wrote to a major Chicago bank president saying he would remove the death sentences and leave the men in prison if local business leaders consented. Captains of commerce gathered at a secret meeting. Some favored leniency but Marshall Field stood against it, and others would not go against the reigning merchant prince of the city. Petitions and letters flooded the governor’s office from around the country and the world. Some applauded the death sentences; some were appalled by them. Men and women of fame risked their high standing by opposing the ordered punishments. Across the Atlantic in London, playwright George Bernard Shaw walked the streets seeking petition signatures against the hangings. Spies was about to die but was also running with the tide. Those last words he uttered - “There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today” – began to come true in short order. The great Illinois social reformer Jane Addams, left, saw what she called “the startling reaction to Haymarket” as public opinion swayed toward sympathy. She called it a “profound influence upon the social outlook of thousands of people.” In 1893, Illinois welcomed a new governor named John Peter Altgeld. At great political risk, he shouldered the mantle of morality and on June 26 pardoned all three surviving Haymarket prisoners: Fielden, Neebe and Schwab. As reported by historian Dr. Robert D. Sampson, new journal editor for the Illinois State Historical Society, Altgeld spoke to senior men and women at the University of Illinois about a month before the pardons. “Let sunlight into dark places and the poisons collected there disappear,” he told them. “So with the dark places in the government and civil affairs that are now festering with wrong; let the sunlight of eternal truth and justice shine on them and they will disappear.” Altgeld served only one term, but he did much to advance progressive causes. There is a sad note in the title of his major biography, written by Harry Barnard and my source fo much of this piece. It is called Eagle Forgotten, the name given Altgeld by famed Springfield poet Vachel Lindsay. As for Haymarket, there is this from the late and revered Illinois labor historian William J. Adelman: “No single event has influenced the history of labor in Illinois, the United States, and even the world, more than the Chicago Haymarket Affair. It began with a rally on May 4, 1886, but the consequences are still being felt today.” Here are a couple reasons most of us know so little about something deemed so important in the daily lives of everyone who works. Five years after May Day was named a worldwide workers’ holiday in Paris in 1889, U.S. President Grover Cleveland, uneasy with the holiday’s socialist origin, signed a federal law establishing Labor Day in September. In 1958 President Dwight Eisenhower further de-emphasized May 1 as International Workers’ Day by declaring that date as our national Law Day. All that notwithstanding, the actual Haymarket site, west of Chicago’s Loop and just east of I-90, was dedicated a Chicago landmark in 1992. Five years later in Waldheim Cemetery, south of I-290 in Forest Park, the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument was designated a National Historic Landmark. It is where all five defendants who died in 1887 are buried. I have gone to Waldheim Cemetery for its annual Haymarket commemoration. Thinking about what labor struggles have won and with May 1 approaching, I will close by borrowing from Lincoln’s most famous address because these men, like those who died in Union blue, deserve our pause and respect: “[W]e here highly resolve these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom . .”

Illinois writer Doug Kamholz guided us and delighted us with his search for gems in the Midwest and as far away as the Great Southwest. For the conclusion of his series, Doug rhapsodizes on the essence of home, reminding us what home — and homelessness — means, especially at holiday time. by Douglas Kamholz There’s no place like it. It’s where the heart is. You may well hope to be there for the holidays. And it’s said to be the most lovely and beloved word in English. Home sounds enough like womb that it recalls our treasured first and subconsciously remembered abode. Home carries enough connotations to fill, well, a house. There is an Albanian proverb that says the sun at home warms better than the sun elsewhere. The late Maya Angelou reminds us, “The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” Seasonal favorite Charles Dickens advises, “Charity begins at home, and justice begins next door.” I sometimes wonder how my first out-of-womb home affects my life for good or ill. I lived in one place with the same two adults in a small town until college. So does that stability — and it was in all ways — leave me solidly grounded or life, or does it mean I can’t feel grounded with anything less than my original permanence? Growing up I knew all my friends’ immediate families, often extending to grandparents, aunts and uncles. I have at times wondered if that inhibits my getting truly close to those I encounter beyond those years. After all, I now have to take folks on their own, having never sampled their grammy’s holiday cookies. Before “Miles with Moxie” I penned a couple hundred political columns called “Wednesday Moorings with Moxie” during that calamitous span from November of 2016 to November of 2020. Home came up June of 2018 when the then-president’s border-crossing policy started separating families to dissuade Central Americans from coming to El Norte. I quoted young London poet Warsan Shire, Africa-born and deeply torn by the wrenching reasons anyone leaves home. Her poem is called “Home” and part of it says: no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark you only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well . . . you have to understand, that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land Benedict Cumberbatch, the popular actor, was playing Hamlet around 2015 when millions of Syrians felt forced to escape their homes. He read Shire’s “Home” to his theater audiences each night after his curtain call. The very term refugee carries the irony that refugees are those forced to forsake their refuge — home. A year ago there were 27 million refugees around the world. Seven million Ukrainians have added to that number this year. As a reporter I once stayed in a refugee camp. Near its western border, Honduras was begrudgingly offering refuge to neighboring Salvadorans displaced by civil war. Inside the guarded compound, warm greetings and offers of fresh eggs were obviously touching. One controversy in this camp was whether they should or should not build a church. They were, after all, deeply religious Roman Catholics accustomed to regular worship services. On the other side was the argument that building any such normal community structure meant admitting this was home, not just a stopping-over point. I don’t know the outcome of the argument, but it does slice deep into the flesh of homelessness. In the supposed settled world, places without widespread famine or war, virtually nowhere is without their homeless. They push their purloined shopping carts. They beg. They go to the library much more than I. This population is devoid of much, but we have landed on the term homeless which is perhaps, other than life itself, the most painful deprivation. In politically correct language, these people are deemed “unhoused” because almost everybody at least at some point had a home. “Unhoused” does sound easier to fix. After my first home lasted 18 years (with a few stints added later) I did not know if I would ever have another so long-lived. However, in just a few years I will double that 18-year stretch where I happily abide now. It’s a comfy two-story from 1905. Its builder and short-time owner, C. J. Carlson, was himself a carpenter; his 1908 funeral was held in his, and now our. living room. His legacy is his craft, smooth-sliding pocket doors and window frames finished down to the baseboards. It is, in short, my forever home. My wife Sheila is there. So are my books, telephone and keyboard. I very much hope your home holds you and yours just as well. For reasons to be made clear in the next paragraph, I will shoehorn Bob Dylan in here. (I have stepped inside his Minnesota boyhood home in Hibbing, but that’s not the point right now.) He sings of the preciousness of home in his excellent rendition of his own hero Woody Guthrie’s song, “Pretty Boy Floyd.” The lyrics tell of a man in Oklahoma, an outlaw to some and savior to others. One line reminds us that, “Some will rob you with a six-gun, And some with a fountain pen.” The song ends with Guthrie and Dylan telling us, And as through your life you travel, Yes, as through your life you roam, You won’t never see an outlaw Drive a family from their home. My attitude of self-disclosure (self-indulgence) in the preceding paragraphs is one signal of this as the final installment of “Miles with Moxie.” I thank each of you for traveling along in 2022 with special thanks to those who dropped me a note, those who passed these pieces on to others and certainly those who went to this or that destination described here. We’ve covered a good chunk of the Middlewest and even ventured from Arizona’s desert to Maine’s coast. My next stab at scrivening will have to percolate a while. I’ll let you know. In closing I will share an annual holiday tradition in our home. I recite to Sheila “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” by Dylan Thomas. This returns us to our theme and hands wordsmithing off to one of my many betters. In 1952 Thomas recorded his famous passages of poetic prose that hum with British working-class sights and sounds of the day as well as with the spirit of any young boy’s heart. Here are his last lines: Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang “Cherry Ripe,” and another uncle sang “Drake’s Drum.” It was very warm in the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a Bird’s Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the light in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept. DRAFTJS_BLOCK_KEY:bhm7aEditor's note: In 2022, Illinois writer Doug Kamholz guided us and delighted us with his search for gems in the Midwest and as far away as the Great Southwest. For the conclusion of his series, Doug rhapsodizes on the essence of home, reminding us what home — and homelessness — means, especially at holiday time.

Editor's Note: In Doug Kamholz's quest to sample American exotica, he's drawn to architecture of the appealing sort, old and new. In his latest travels, he follows celebrities from bygone eras to the Great Southwest, where he takes up temporary residence in visionary architect Mary Colter's La Posada. (He prefers Carole Lombard's room.) by Douglas Kamholz Who the hell would want to rent a room in some sprawling fake hacienda literally a stone’s throw from much-traveled train tracks? Clark Gable. Amelia Earhart. Albert Einstein. Diane Keaton and a couple U.S. presidents. That’s just a sampling. And me! The inn is called La Posada. It ranked among those romantic railroad hotels that lured travelers to beauty places of the Great Southwest. The Super Chief out of Chicago and other famous trains stopped in the front yard of La Posada. Passengers stepped down from their iron horses, passed through an iron gate, up the flagstone walk and right in the front door. The vision of an abandoned hacienda came from the fertile mind of master architect Mary Colter. She is perhaps most famous for Grand Canyon’s Bright Angel Lodge, one of her eight works still in use there, but she considered La Posada her ultimate opus. It opened in 1930 as one of Fred Harvey’s Harvey Houses, a chain of rail-line restaurants so renown we have Judy Garland starring in MGM’s The Harvey Girls in 1946. In creating La Posada, Colter had carte blanche to design every detail down to the dishes while the Harvey Company employed area Native Americans as artists and artisans for authentic decor. Its 70 rooms, three restaurants and graceful gathering spaces attracted a fine and famous clientele. Then that era ended. The Great Depression took its steam, and it went off the rails. Americans took to roads. The hotel closed in 1957. For most of the last half of the 20th century La Posada sank further into adobe dust, its glitz and glory sold off or junked. But its story (and stories) did not die. Along came a new vision and visionary. Allan Affeldt already had an activist history that included the first US-Soviet arena rock concert in Moscow back in 1987. In 1997 he and his wife, artist Tina Mion, bought the sagging hulk of a hotel from the Santa Fe Railroad and began to breathe beauty back into what is now rightly called a living museum. But for all its sumptuousness, it isn’t in some high-rent spot so room rates are quite people-scaled. The whereabouts of all this wonder will sound familiar to many readers. It stands on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, and it is such a fine sight to see. Yes, it is just down the street from that famous corner where songwriters Jackson Browne and Glen Frey exclaimed: It’s a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford Slowin’ down to take a look at me. There is now just the right truck and other details permanently installed in downtown Winslow. And the street that runs by both these destinations is none other than the Mother Road, Route 66. In recent decades Winslow suffered from another American transportation update: I-40 bypasses the town, taking traffic and commerce well away from the central city. Like many places it continues to look for ways, often artful ways, to regain vibrant community life. Winslow is still quite conveniently situated four hours west of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and just one hour east of extraordinarily hip Flagstaff, Arizona. I learned about La Posada by way of an enthused review from our friend Jeanne. I had reason to call her there back in the days when phones were not essentially a body part. When I asked the desk clerk to ring Jeanne’s room, he said, “Well, sir, there are no phones in our rooms.” They did offer to slip a note under her door. I was hooked. Each of three times I stayed there alone, I swore I wouldn’t go back without my beloved mate. Also each time I saw more rehabilitation and finery throughout the interior. On those solo trips I always took Carole Lombard’s old room in a second-floor corner. I would crank open the old casement window, sit on the wide sill, breathe desert air and listen to frequent clackety-clack on those tracks just over the low south wall. Recent years have seen more and more plantings restored around the main building. Coffee and tea in the sunken garden is a fine way to greet Winslow mornings. On one visit I was sitting at a spacious antique table writing a few dozen postcards when a man brought his daughter over to show her this pre-digital form of communication. We all were amused. In autumn of 2020, in that worst year of COVID, my wife Sheila and I decided we would risk one trip sleeping in just a couple places between home and Winslow where we booked a week at La Posada. (The inn was so cautious with room keys — actual keys these are — that you had to retrieve yours from a shallow bowl of disinfectant at check-in.) To do this trip right, I dropped Sheila in Albuquerque so she could ride Amtrak and arrive in style while I hightailed it by car with all our luggage and victuals. We rented what’s called the Manager’s Apartment (room 218); it’s where the owners lived during early years of renovation. It has a few extra mod cons but many original touches including French doors onto a wrought iron balcony facing south. La Posada offers guest earplugs for train noise but we were unbothered. Winslow long ago built car tunnels and overpasses so no whistle need blow in town. And the food. We dined only twice in the high-end Turquoise Room. It was all rich and succulent. This story is as much about my gregarious spouse as the restaurant, but at our parting meal the manager came over, took our bottle of wine away and replaced it with a better vintage still at the more modest price. Every time I have been in this luxurious setting I have ordered the most local thing on the menu: piki bread, a traditional Hopi wedding delicacy. It’s thinner than phyllo, nearly translucent, and made from ground blue corn, water and juniper ashes. For food away from the Turquoise Room, we had supplies from La Montanita Food Co-op back in Albuquerque plus take-out from town. Three different friends had sworn they ate at the best Mexican places in Winslow, but when we asked at La Posada, everybody pointed to the food concession at the local airport. This tiny airfield gets to call itself Lindbergh because the famous aviator designed it a hundred years ago using funds from Howard Hughes in a plan to win transcontinental airmail contracts. Of course those hotel workers were right, and we had a fine meal under a pergola on the inn grounds. Sheila, left, at Little Painted Desert county park, sampled each garden on the grounds, moving with the sun to new turf when she had read two more chapters of bestseller Lab Girl. She was preparing to lead a water quality workshop on the banks of Springfield’s Sangamon River for the NEA’s “Big Read” project in 2021. My reading mostly prepped me for the upcoming ‘20-’21 college basketball season. Of course there is art everywhere at La Posada, some traditional and some by the irreverent Mion. There is a large table with hundreds of wooden pieces where I played architect and built my own fake hacienda. There was live music nightly. Longtime resident guitarist Khent Anantakai one evening said we had been there so long they should name a room for us. La Posada has recently opened an official museum. It is just down a walkway in the old Santa Fe train depot. It displays hotel artifacts, art from area Navajos and Hopis plus traveling exhibits. We saw a wonderful display there on the surrounding land. It is called Homol’ovi, the Hopi word for “place of the little hills,” and there is nearby state park preserving pieces of a pre-conquest culture. Within an hour’s drive is Petrified Forest National Park which also includes publicly accessible parts of Arizona’s Painted Desert. Just north of Winslow is Little Painted Desert, a sadly maintained county park with jaw-dropping scenery. Flagstaff is also just an hour away, and my Brooklyn-born friend Harvey says Biff’s Bagels there are as good as any. A bit closer to Winslow is Meteor Crater Natural Landmark, a privately owned giant hole. The standing joke there is about how close the meteor landed to their visitors center. Leaving all this at week’s end was hard. Departure was softened by our first night back on the road. We stayed at the Blue Swallow Motel in Tucumcari, New Mexico, the same place we stayed the night before La Posada. It is as iconic as any relic of the glory days of Route 66. Our late artist friend Bob Waldmire drew images of it. (So has Bob Dylan.) The motel got permission from our local Waldmire family to replicate Bob’s likeness and works of his on walls of those (now hardly wide enough) private garages attached to some of their rooms. Moving northeast toward home and relying on an old Smithsonian magazine, we had our first look at that blanket of autumn copper-gold tallgrass prairie in the Flint Hills of central Kansas. Eight months later we were back for June’s annua “Symphony in the Flint Hills” where our joy and enchantment became themes of the first of these “Miles with Moxie” travelogues. - 30 - Postscript: To see my companion photo album of 18 shots featuring this month’s locations, those of you with access to Facebook can search for Douglas Kamholz, then click Photos (next to Posts, About and Friends) and click again for Albums and then one last click on the one entitled “Mary’s Masterpiece.”

Editor's note: Doug Kamholz abandons any pretense of objective journalism when writing about Wisconsin, a state with which he is smitten (and where he has kinfolk). His stated goal is zeroing in on Midwestern gems and promoting them to auslanders. After reading his latest post you may chart your own journey to an orchard, perhaps even one in the Badger State. by Douglas Kamholz The first fall I visited apple orchards above Gays Mills, Wisconsin, my dad was holding my hand. Queen Elizabeth II had just been crowned. This month, after scores of autumn returns, I’m fresh from another visit. Wisconsin’s southwest quarter along the Mississippi was hardly touched by those glaciers that made most of the Midwest a flat farming paradise. It’s all ice-cream-scoop hills and valleys called coulees (from French verb “to flow”) cut with the world’s largest concentrations of cold-water streams. It’s dubbed the Driftless Area or just the Driftless, and I love every square inch. At least one of those sparkly little waterways ranks in Wisconsin’s innovative Rustic Roads program, a statewide collection of far-flung and often unpaved stretches still unsullied by modernity. In the Rustic Roads guidebook, the description of one up in Pierce County (girlhood home of Laura Ingalls Wilder) says it “frequently crosses a trout stream." But more precise writing would correctly tell us the (thankfully shallow) stream crosses the road time and again. What a hoot! Every year our trip is to gather apples. This year my wife,Sheila and I bought home 23 half-pecks of 19 heirloom varieties. All these are grown for taste, not for skin color or shininess or lasting long in storage and on trucks. Back in 1905, farmers from around tiny Gays Mills won State Fair and national apple honors. Wisconsin State Horticultural Society urged commercial growing along a local high ridge. Now a thousand acres bloom white in May and hang heavy with fruit come fall. We give most of ours away accompanied by a short description of each variety and a one-pager on the real Johnny Appleseed, John Chapman. (I do put a pan on my head for folklore cred.) By now we have a route north from home that includes our favorite cheese shop, Baumgartner’s in Monroe, butcher shop and bakery, both in New Glarus, a shoe outlet in Black Earth, a Duluth Trading Company store (in Mount Horeb inside the former Mustard Museum!) and a U.S. 14 roadside vegetable stand complete with petting zoo. Oh, and hippies, lots of them. Artisans and back-to-the-landers from my generation plus new ones, too, are progressive forces in towns like Spring Green and Viroqua. Tiny La Farge, smack dab in the Driftless, is home to Organic Valley, a national brand and the country’s largest farmer-owned organic cooperative. Every other year includes the Reedsburg-based Wormfarm Institute’s absolutely stunning Farm/Art Dtour, a 50-mile figure-eight punctuated with very large artworks, rural wisdom and a fine sense of humor. (They even have a contest for five-line poetry posted on Burma Shave-style signs beside the byways.) Grants go to a handful of artists while community groups and farmers themselves add to the trove of roadside attractions. One dairy farmer mocked up a French bistro table in his cow pasture and put up a symbolic invitation that read: “Come have lunch with the ladies!” The Wormfarm folks put a real piano in an open field with an invitation to come make music. Our first eyeful this year was a 20-foot farmer marionette. Imagine driving a country road with a quarter mile of all yellow wash hung on a line followed by another quarter mile of all blue and then pink. Or imagine just 50 feet of farm-woman aprons pinned up next to a long list of uses, from carrying baby chicks to last-minute dusting to wiping a child’s tears. I have some more personal connections to the area. Several Kamholz dairy farms have been located near Monroe. The one remaining belongs to Chris and Amy Kamholz with their son CJ taking over more and more daily duties. They have a small herd of Ayrshire, a high butter-fat breed great for cheese. Chris’s dad was my late cousin David who, with his wife Vera, rode herd on seven kids and a bunch of Holsteins, those stereotypical black and white cows. Fifty years ago when I was living on my first commune, Laughing Acres, I went to buy a crate of layers from cousin David. He quietly took me aside to make sure I knew that brown hens did not necessarily lay brown eggs. My dad spent his last living day on that farm. One sunny September day in 1990 he closed up his home office (a remodeled chicken coop attached to a one-car garage) and drove up to Juda. He took a half-mile walk to see the new house David was building for his retirement, walked back, sat down, said he didn’t feel well and was off this mortal coil within an hour. Not a bad way to go. If there’s a through-line in the Driftless, that would be the Kickapoo River. It’s about as twisty a line as you can draw. (The name is from a still-existing tribe and means “those who walk the earth” or “he who moves here and there.”) The river snakes south 125 miles and is the longest tributary of the Wisconsin River, itself a tributary running west to the Mississippi. The Kickapoo gets credit for America’s first solar village or, more precisely, the nation’s first solar-heated central business district. Water takes an S-curve through Soldiers Grove, so it often floods in spring. After a bad one in ‘78, the village asked the federal government to convert flood control money to rebuilding out of the flood plain, essentially to move downtown up a hill. Then, quite radically, the town mandated owners to use solar technology to provide at least 50 percent of their heating. This was that old passive solar with water heated in black tubes on roofs but still it was this tiny town leading all of us into the future. One of our Driftless favorites is in that very same Soldiers Grove. A gussied-up Victorian, the Old Oak Inn is a six-room B&B with bathrooms down the hall and great food on real china. We have had a wedding and a ten- and a twenty-five-year anniversary weekend there, renting all the rooms and inviting friends. One year we all canoed a good stretch of the Kickapoo. “Do the ‘Poo” is a popular recreation refrain all along its course. This month at the inn we were entertained by a couple singer-songwriters and a five-piece ragtime band. Milwaukee Map Service made these great real-paper maps of southwest Wisconsin with every blacktop and gravel lane marked. We have worn out a few. By now I am probably an expert but without doubt a fan. If you’re looking for back roads or brick cheese or brilliant leaves, it is a wondrous place to be. On our last full day in the Driftless, we hit four orchards on the ridge above Gays Mills. Views from the high road keep catching those low valleys where autumn color is often the best. Six-foot, wine-red sumac borders groves of maple, birch, poplar and oak trees. Orchard sales rooms smell like apples well before you step inside. Parking lots are full of local and Iowa and flatlander (that’s us) license plates. Everybody’s plaid flannel looks warm. Noontime sun is making diamonds out of dewdrops. At the bar down the road in Rolling Ground, burgers and cheese curds wait. As my dad would say, it’s a peach of a day.

Editor's note: In his quest to present the hidden gems of his native Midwest, Illinois writer Doug Kamholz sticks close to home, which is fine with us because we, too, come from these fertile Illinois lands he writes about. Indeed, we visited them this month, and as we gazed out on sun-drenched corn from horizon to horizon, we recalled Carl Sandburg's words about Midwesterners blessed with vision from these wide-open prairies. by Doug Kamholz A longtime friend was kvetching about how dull it looked out all her windows in Tremont, Illinois. This Moxie means to spur you to vacation in central Illinois or, more likely, construct a “Put a Pin in It” where you live. Let’s say you are just south of Peoria and don’t want to travel more than two hours to anywhere. You might start by imagining this (or any) little village as the center of a clock. On Tremont’s clockface, somewhere between noon and one is LaSalle. You can have a mule-powered ride down and back up a section of the Illinois & Michigan Canal. You can board a 60-passenger packet boat while a trusty mule, probably not named Sal, trods a path beside the water pulling a line tied to the bow. The I&M has nothing to do with connecting Illinois and Michigan but rather links Lake Michigan to the Illinois River, and that connects the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River. The I&M’s 96 miles joined about 3,000 miles of waterways built during the early 1800s. By mid-century the iron horse had put Sal’s pals out to pasture. Moving a bit past one o’clock on the Tremont Timex is Starved Rock State Park which dates from 1911 and is the state’s second oldest. The name comes from a gruesome tale of inter-tribal warfare, not that anybody has found one shred or shard of evidence of starvation atop this 125-foot sandstone butte jutting out toward the Illinois River. However, there are many other parky treats: trails, waterfalls, dining and lodging. Plus there is another treasure right next door, one much less known and traveled. Matthiessen State Park was once a private preserve along the Vermilion River. It is now the scaled down Illinois version of Wisconsin Dells, though there are no amphibious ducks to ride nor any Tommy Bartlett Water Show antics. Rather a human-made waterfall creates an upper and lower dells (or dalles if you are French). There is a fun trail that steps rock to rock across the water, and a well-maintained paved walkway all around both the upper and lower dells. Up the road, come October, Utica holds its 52nd annual burgoo festival. Burgoo is sort of a Midwestern squirrel hunters’ stone soup and is loved by many, whatever is in that pot. Coming around to two is Dwight, now a burg of about 4,000. Full disclosure demands I confess this was my favorite town when I was a Chicago-to-Springfield docent for the National Park Service on Amtrak. Dwight’s fame is from the Keeley Institute, an early proponent of alcoholism as a curable disease. This legacy includes a mammoth pillared building downtown currently used as a developmental disability residence facility. But you can still enter the lobby and mezzanine where there are five exquisite stained glass windows, pictured above, meant to represent humans’ five senses destroyed by excessive drinking. On the same main street is a 1906 bank by Frank Lloyd Wright with a fireplace, not a vault, as its centerpiece. A couple blocks away is the historic Oughton farm whose owners were partners in the lucrative Keeley institute. A couple family members served in the Illinois General Assembly but it was a grandchild Diana who gained the most fame. She was a child of privilege. She went east to Bryn Mawr in the ‘60s but then moved to Ann Arbor to bolster anti-war Students for a Democratic Society. Her politics grew more militant; she joined the Weather Underground and died from an explosion in a clandestine New York City bomb factory. Also at two but closer to Tremont is Pontiac, home of perhaps the best of several Route 66 museums scattered from Chicago to LA’s Santa Monica pier along The Mother Road. (I may be biased as they have the most stuff from my late friend Bob Waldmire, pen-and-ink artist of the asphalt.) Pontiac boasts an old Chautauqua grounds with a swinging bridge. There is a car museum called Pontiac-Oakland, but Pontiacs came from a factory on Oakland Street in Pontiac, Michigan. Even closer to Tremont at about four o’clock is Bloomington-Normal, our state’s own Twin Cities. (As an Illinois kid I thought Minnesota had stolen the name from us.) The McLean County Museum, housed in an old and filigreed courthouse, is fine and farm-focused, just as it should be sitting near the most fecund earth on earth. Not far east of those Twin Cities, outside Le Roy (pronounced LEE-roy) is a wind farm that sits on what was the western shore of Lake Chicago, the older and larger precursor to Lake Michigan. At five on our clock is Atlanta. They have worked hard to make their little town inviting, serving up several murals by the world-famous Walldogs who have enlivened small-town buildings with about 800 artworks across the U.S. Atlanta is home of Dawes Elevator, at the top of this post, a finely restored example of what in our nation’s grain belt are called prairie skyscrapers. Also downtown is Atlanta’s unusual octagonal public library. One nearby storefront has been converted into a pinball arcade with machines from various decades offering the most fun you can have with a roll of quarters. Also at five but a bit farther toward the clock’s edge is Decatur, known for its frequent aroma of a thousand loaves of rising bread dough. It’s really corn and soybeans being processed. Having community-minded residents, including Warren Buffett’s son Howard, has helped create, among other improvements, an inviting string of attractions side-by-side: a children’s museum; a zoo; and a quite new sculpture park, all along the south shore of Lake Decatur. Downtown the Gin Mill’s silky lobster bisque is so popular they make it all year. A bit west of the city-center there is a well-known street, Millikin Place, with impressive architectural homes from end to end designed by Marion Mahony Griffin and Frank Lloyd Wright. Due south of Tremont, or six o’clock, is Springfield, where we locals say you can Link On Abe all over the place. Our treasures are pretty well known. A new one is The Route Museum, still in its infancy in finding ways to tell the story of African Americans along Route 66, which came right through town from its inception in 1926. Moving around to eight o’clock we have Jim Edgar Panther Creek Conservation Area. If you are seeking topography that seems states away from central Illinois without going to the north or south ends of our state, this will do the trick. Fifty years ago Commonwealth Edison bought out adjoining farms for a power-generating plant. Forty years ago they abandoned the whole idea, so Illinois ended up with 16,550 acres of undulating prairie and hill country, now a wilderness wonderland. Rare plants such as the small white lady’s-slipper orchid thrive here as do 87 species of breeding (not just stopping by) birds. Coming to nine o’clock on our Tremont Timex is Macomb with its Western Illinois Museum and downtown square that was the original model for what we now know as the game board for Monopoly. Macomb native Elizabeth “Lizzie” Magie invented The Landlord’s Game in 1903 and was paid $500 for what Parker Brothers has collected many millions even if they never passed GO. Civil rights hero C. T. Vivian grew up in Macomb where his family found less racism than in Missouri. Vivian, who died in 2020, was known as the field marshal for Martin Luther King, Jr. Western Illinois is often called Forgotonia for lack of state attention and funding. It has some up-and-down topography, and that made it ripe for engineer corps training in WWII. The U.S. Army quickly displaced enough farmers to make 18,000-acre Camp Ellis east of Macomb which also quickly became a POW camp that housed up to 5,000 German prisoners. And meandering through Forgotonia is the namesake of Edgar Lee Masters’ most famous literary work, Spoon River Anthology. An hour before high noon on our clock is Bishop Hill, once a breakaway Swedish religious commune and now a state historical site. Lutheran dissident Eric Jansson led 400 Pietists to the Illinois prairie in 1846. Four years later he was murdered and, as Kurt Vonnegut says, so it goes. Bishop Hill still stands as an alive place, vibrant — as these girls celebrating St. Lucia's Day attest — where goods and meals still lean Swedish. Each summer has its Chautauqua. A couple Augusts ago it was singer Jenny Lind, radical Joe Hill, poet Carl Sandburg and a few other famous Swedes come to celebrate the town’s 175th birthday. In December it’s Santa Lucia with dangerous young blondes wearing candles. (Well the blondes themselves may not be dangerous but their candle-lit headdresses are.) Finally due north of Tremont is Peoria, an old river town on the Illinois. Here are a couple lesser known features that definitely play in Peoria. Commonly called the Ag Lab, this fine Art Deco style edifice is where they figured out how to rapidly create millions of doses of penicillin for the Allied war effort in the 1940s. It is also where they store a little bit of everything from Ebola to LSD. Here is one last treasure: There are a few remnants of the work of an Italian stone cutter around town including the fancy work on the facade of the Grand Army of the Republic hall, what’s left of an old bridge and Joseph Petarde’s own unique home at 623 Fairholm in Averyville, where it is said his wife would only use the back door because of the stone nude carved on the front. So to borrow from and tweak Billy Joel . . . I’ve seen all the movie stars In their fancy cars and their limousines Been high in the Rockies under the evergreens But I know what I’m needing And I don’t want to waste more time I’m in a Prairie State of mind.

Editor's Note: No, that's Mick Jagger beneath the Gateway Arch, not Doug Kamholz. But like Mick, Doug has been hanging out in St. Louis. (Doug knows something about rock & roll, too). In his latest quest to present gems from Midwestern "flyover" lands to coastal snobs, Doug offers tips about history and happenings in the famous river city. by Doug Kamholz “Meet me in St. Louis, Louis, Meet me at the fair,” sang lilting Judy Garland in a 1944 movie. Here’s one attraction at that 1904 World’s Fair: A thousand Filipinos lived in a 47-acre preserve with one tribe, Igorots, scheduled to kill and eat a dog every day. So here we are, taking our turn about another major Midwestern city. St. Louis is most famous these days for a honkin’ big arch and a storied baseball team. Other wonders await us, some lesser-known ones, along with important chapters in the history book of actual American life. Let’s get the famous stuff out of the way. The immense croquet wicket on the Mississippi riverbank has come to symbolize St. Louis. Officially the Gateway Arch, it invites America to step onto Thomas Jefferson’s 1803 Louisiana Purchase and into The West. Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen designed it. Nobody died building it. At 630 feet, it’s the world’s tallest arch. It’s as wide as tall. Its two legs had to be within 1/64 inch when they met at the top. It opened in 1965. Forty blocks of St. Louis were destroyed for it. It’s very shiny. You can ride to the top observation deck where you get that sense of Jason Isbell’s lyric: From the sky we look so organized and brave. In 2009 the Mississippi Overlook Park opened right across the river from the arch. Its 40-foot high deck has spectacular views of the river and city, but many people are afraid to go to hardscrabble East St. Louis. Well, except maybe for the casino. Play ball! The St. Louis Cardinals are a National League baseball team and the most storied franchise in major league baseball outside of the New York Yankees. The Redbirds were the first club west of the Mississippi. Second only to those Big Apple Pinstripers, the Cardinals have won 11 World Series titles and 23 National League pennants. Let’s see. The first major-leaguer to play wearing eyeglasses was a Cardinal. That was George “Specs” Toporcer back in the 1920s. St. Louis had a second MLB team, the Browns, who lost the 1944 World Series to the Cardinals in what was called the “Streetcar Series.” How romantic. These days a cross-town championship would likely be dubbed the “Uber Series.” How different. Now moving on, first to City Museum. Oh, how plain. A city, with a museum. So what? Here’s what. It’s a 600,000 square-foot playground housed in an old shoe factory. Every inch and every adventure is a recycled and repurposed piece of St. Louis including two abandoned airplanes. On top of the tenth story is a Ferris wheel some traveling show left in a parking lot. You can spiral back down much of those ten stories on the slide I believe was used by workers to send boxes of finished shoes to shipping. I came home after my first visit to City Museum and looked for similar wonders elsewhere. But, alas, only in St. Louis. This steam-punk wonderland came from the late Bob Cassilly, a world-acclaimed sculptor. It opened in 1997 full of tunnels, mosaics, building pieces, colors, industrial parts, wavy lines, circus shows and a functioning old shoelace machine. It’s a hoot for all ages. Literally attached to City Museum via closed and cluttered above-ground walkways is the Last Hotel, the only hotel I know of that uses footwear humor in its name. A last is the wooden foot-shaped form around which leather is worked in shoe-making. (It apparently derives from the Old English “laest” or footprint.) A century ago City Museum was the International Shoe Company, then the world’s largest, turning out 50 million pairs a year. To oversee and showcase its wares, the company hired architect Theodore C. Link to design its ten-story headquarters. Boasting fine stonework, metalwork and terrazzo floors in Sullivanesque style with added Art Nouveau details, this masterwork opened in 1909. It has recently been reborn as the 142-room boutique Last Hotel. (Question for careful readers: When the shoe building went to new owners, how did Doug keep himself from saying it had been resold?) T. C. Link had local street cred because, in 1894, he designed the magnificent Union Station, soon to become one of the nation’s busiest terminals. Built in high-towered Romanesque Revival style, its vision is well displayed across a 20-foot span of stained-glass called the Allegorical Window. Three Greek goddess-type women appear. The hometown one in the center looks a bit smug while her sisters east and west look west and east toward Miss Mid-America. St. Louis train traffic grew into the 20th Century with the World’s Fair and then peaked in World War II when as many as a million men and women a week passed through the cavernous midway and out to the train shed where 32 tracks and platforms were walled with glass and ornamental wrought iron. Above was the Grand Hall waiting room with its 65-foot barrel-vaulted ceiling, its two-ton chandelier and that Allegorical Window. Times change. The chandelier and wrought iron were sacrificed to the war effort. Times changed again. Rail travel succumbed to road travel. On Halloween in 1978 the last passenger train labored out of this St. Louis crown. While Amtrak now operates a few blocks away, Union Station tries and tries again to get on track in the 21st Century. That Grand Hall is now the lobby of an upscale Hilton Curio Hotel, recently joined by a 120,000 square-foot aquarium. (All Aboard for Rails to Snails!) Right across Market Street from Union Station is a greensward. It marks the west end of an almost uninterrupted esplanade running 16 blocks and ending at that very shiny arch and that famous river. Splayed along two blocks of that stretch is about the most inventive, inclusive and delightful public project I have seen in a long while. Citygarden opened a dozen years ago as an urban oasis, half sculpture and half botanic park. Two dozen world-class sculptures punctuate the place, and you can get right up to them. Heck, there’s a sideways head you can walk into. There’s water, water everywhere, and while there are safety advisories, nobody was goofy enough to think you were going to keep kids out of any of it. The general design mimics Missouri geology. The north edge is elevated with limestone bluffs; you can observe from up there and dine. The art-strewn middle has pasture paths and a long pool, complete with waterfall. The south edge, along Market Street, is more the damp lowlands with a big splash pad and other wet fun. (Also, tucked away near that color-changing splash pad is a ground-level, metal marimba you can dance on like the keyboard Tom Hanks played in Big.) There are no gates at Citygarden, though it is officially closed from ten at night to six in the morning, so it is hard to say how many millions have wandered through. Speaking of millions, it took about thirty to put this place on the map, and that’s not counting some more millions for the 24 sculptures. But even at a much more modest scale and cost, other cities can look at Citygarden as land use that both excites and calms, where all are invited, many enlivened and some go home with wet socks. Now let’s go wet to dry, but only for a moment in history. One hundred and two years ago, the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution took effect: Prohibition. Still (well chosen word there, Doug) you could consume alcoholic beverages but none could be made, sold or transported. Certainly this had varying effects in various places. In St. Louis in 1920, 50,000 workers made beer in dozens of breweries. Most closed their doors within months. Those lost jobs along with more from bars and beer gardens cut deep in the city. There was also a nativist aspect to prohibition as it came after waves of German immigration, with St. Louis a major destination, and World War I “anti-Hun” sentiments. My final history chapter is likely unknown to almost all. (Please let me know if this is not news to you.) St. Louis is the only U.S. city ever taken over by Marxists! Lawyer and professor Mark Kruger dug into a passing reference to a worker takeover of the city and found a mother lode of Marx. His book is The St. Louis Commune of 1877: Communism in the Heartland. Kruger found those same waves of German immigrants and the fairly common Marx-inspired Workingmen’s Party groups some of them formed. While it was not those groups who mainly organized a raft of railroad worker strikes across the land in July of 1877, they were happy to lend hands and up the ante. In St. Louis they called for more strikes at more workplaces. The result was, according to Kruger, the first general strike in American history. The Workingmen’s Party seized the moment, set up headquarters, elected leaders, established security for property and made themselves more powerful than official officials. Kruger concludes: “And it made it the only city in American history to ever be ruled by communists.” A week later it was over. St. Louis and Missouri state forces quashed the commies and jailed their leaders. According to Kruger, those leftists weren’t looking for overthrow but rather for social reforms such as shorter workdays and an end to child labor. (Here’s a bump note for St. Louisphiles: The famed Veiled Prophet Ball and Parade, recently protested and now subdued, was born some months after that rebellion and celebrated its defeat. The first chosen Veiled Prophet was the police commissioner who help suppress the strike.) Oh, wait, let me throw in the St. Louis Zoo here at the end. It is big. It is famous. It is free. So now having mentioned the Arch and the Zoo, I have done St. Louis A to Z.

Editor's note: Illinois writer Doug Kamholz promised us travel gems, like this vessel from heaven at the Antique Boat Museum on the St. Lawrence at Clayton, NY. What we didn't expect was a primer on keeping your spouse happy on the highway while traversing swaths of America. by Doug Kamholz Of course you know the phrase “singing a different tune.” Well, that stuff’s about to get real. Fortunately you will not be subjected to my caterwauling; my lovely wife Sheila Walk cannot say the same. OK, let’s say your traveling companion is less than thrilled at a multi-day car trip. What to do? This was the riddle I had to solve. My first attempt was heading southwest from our Illinois home to Henderson, Nevada, just outside Las Vegas. (For some unfathomable reason we thought Fourth of July would be a dandy time to go to a desert). This trip would cross five state lines: Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and then the state of inescapable blistering heat. So with a couple days of sharp-eyed shopping, I assembled five appropriate gifts including an Eric Clapton CD (long before his COVID nuttiness) and a bubble gum baseball card featuring pitcher Bob Walk who may or may not be her relative. Each time we entered a new state Sheila got a gift. Sometimes it was only a couple hours until the next gifting; sometimes it was the next day. But it worked! A few years later we were heading to California (or for our purposes, eight states away). By this point in our marriage, Sheila had found the command “NO presents!” to issue previous to all my gallivanting. So I needed a new tact. When we crossed into Iowa she received the first of eight envelopes. Each one had a state’s name on the outside. Each one contained a piece of prose or a poem with our new state as a theme. Our last crossing, for example, brought forth a bit of history on the ill-fated 1846 Donner Party in part because it stepped off from Springfield, as had we. (Both wealthy Donner brothers, George and Jacob, farmed near here.) Going west worked well, too. I recommend this for traveling companions who are not the principle drivers and who tend to repetitions of “Are we there yet?” Last fall was going to be a challenge. The destination was Acadia National Park on the coast of Maine. Now we are up to nine state lines plus a bonus to be revealed later. What to do? What to do? Well, as you can deduce from the opening paragraph and my theme for this month’s Moxie, it was going to be a new song for every new state. Not just any song, but one that used the name of the state we were entering. I was off to the internet when Sheila was not around. Here goes. (With some exceptions, I felt obligated only to sing enough of these tunes to get to the name of the state. I do love her, after all. And the sooner that state name appeared, the better.) Cruising east out of Illinois into the Hoosier State, I had the quickest way to deliver my first mini-concert: “Gary, Indiana, Gary Indiana, Gary, Indiana,” I warbled in my best Professor Harold Hill Music Man/con man voice. Three Indianas in the first six words. Later in the day, Sheila heard, “Why, oh why, oh why oh / Why did I ever leave Ohio / Why did I wander / To find what lies yonder” though in fact we had just gotten there. It’s from a movie with Rosalind Russell and Edie Adams, but I remember it best sung by Doris Day, a Cincinnati native. The next day we cut to the northeast, hugging the Keystone State’s 40 miles of Lake Erie coastline. Crossing the border an hour or so out of Cleveland, Sheila heard, “Strike up the music the band has begun / The Pennsylvania Polka /Pick out your partner and join in the fun / The Pennsylvania Polka.” And I kept going long enough to include my favorite line: “Everybody has a mania / To do the polka from Pennsylvania.” After overnighting near Erie, PA, and venturing to beaches on the far reaches of Presque Isle in the Great Lake, we pushed on to my one and only deceit. All these songs of all the other states were about a whole one fiftieth of the country, for example Indiana or Ohio. Certainly The Empire State offers such tunes. Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind” comes to mind. But I cheated. This number’s New York really refers to our largest city. I cheated for a chance to sing the very first adult secular song I remember (and one appropriate from me to my audience of one): Around the world I’ve searched for you I’ve traveled on, when hope was gone, to keep a rendezvous I knew somewhere, sometime, somehow You’d look at me, and I would see the smile your smiling now It might have been in County Down, Or in New York, in Gay Paree, or even London Town No more will I go all around the world For I have found my world in you As you might imagine, this one went over rather well. And that’s a good thing as it had to last almost a week while we went gawking at wooden boats and architecture and suffrage history and a friend’s Cooperstown opera house, ending with good time with good friends who saw us off across Lake Champlain by ferry to the widest part of Vermont. My selection for our first New England state was a wellspring for this whole musical atlas thing,with “Yankee Lady” sounding in my ear. The late Jesse Winchester is one of my generation’s great songwriters. In this song he extols the state’s virtues: “I lived with the decent folks in the hills of old Vermont / Where what you do all day depends on what you want.” He nods to Vermont’s beauty as well as youth’s wanderlust: “An autumn walk on a country road / And a million flaming trees / I was feeling uneasy / Cause there was winter in the breeze.” In the end his Yankee Lady loses to his urge for going. It’s a story many of us can tell wistfully now that we’re wiser. Later that same day we traversed the skinniest part of New Hampshire. Here I utterly failed. You’d think somebody would have penned some lyrics saying “I am chilled and dew-damp, sir / Camped out here in New Hampshire" or perhaps "Wool abounds from new lambs' shear / on small farms of New Hampshire." But, no. So what Sheila got was only part, thank goodness, of the poem "New Hampshire" by Robert Frost which goes on for more than 3,000 words at the end of which the poet pointedly tells us, "At present I am living in Vermont." Crossing into our destination state I sang delightful strains of Roger Miller's "King of the Road." Miller describes his travel as "Third boxcar, midnight train / Destination Bangor, Maine" while we were on our way to a cottage a tad more commodious (and costly) than Miller's "eight by twelve four-bit room." A week later, after Sheila's cute little ears recovered, we headed west toward home with hardly any new states to celebrate in song. First was Massachusetts, which is the title of a Bee Gees song that pines "the lights all went down in Massachusetts," supposedly a heartfelt retort to all those going-off-to-California songs of the era. My rendition was so bad Sheila, a child of the '70s, could not recognize the number. Next we just clipped the northwest corner of West Virginia, a state I dearly love, to borrow Jimmie Rodgers' singing about Texas. I just couldn't leave its musical appearance to John Denver. He places the Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah River in West Virginia where they only barely are. And really, any valid song about the Mountain State has to have some pathos. I chose another late great from my generation and someone I got to know a little personally: U. Utah (Bruce) Phillips. He wrote "The Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia / Are the nearest place to heaven that I know" while recounting remorse that times are so hard he cannot stay, but rather must join that sad economic exodus: "I'll move away into some crowded city / In a northern factory town you'll find me there . For this troubled life is more than I could bear." On our last day on the road, the homestretch into Illinois, I serenaded Sheila with one final song, that aforementioned bonus, a traditional folk tune collected by poet Carl Sandburg in his wonderful 1927 anthology The American Songbag. It uses an old spelling and outlandishly promotes our Prairie State. The lyrics tell that Adam, upon seeing El-A-Noy, would surely think it was the garden he played in as a boy. Sheba, coming upon this land and feeling joy, would declare herself the queen of El-A-Noy. And so on. Here's the chorus: So move your fam'ly westward, Good health you will enjoy, And rise to wealth and honor in The state of El-A-Noy. That's one way to sojourn with a song in your heart. Travel well. Be well. Thanks for coming along.

(Editor's Note: Illinois writer Doug Kamholz refuses to abandon his quest for little-known travel gems, particularly of the archaeological variety, Now he's surveying outposts along America's longest river in a report that connects the dots between Malcolm and the Corps of Discovery. Note that William Clark, not Doug, was the poor speller). by Doug Kamholz. From Thomas Hart Benton’s shocks of corn to one Black Power shocker, the western edge of Iowa has those plus very weird dirt and a jaw-dropping Lewis and Clark story. With apologies to 1959 and the late Frankie Ford, Won’t You Let Me Take You on a “C” cruise? We start at the lower end in southwest Iowa, swoop down and left, just touching Omaha, then shoot up to Sioux City and finally make a last arc back east. Harlan is a small town with a couple stand-out features. My friend Ted envisions Harlan as rows of modest bungalows, each with a gigantic mailbox out front since it seems half our checks for magazine renewals get mailed there. More personally Harlan is home to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, designed by Proudfoot & Bird in 1900. Finely detailed and lovingly preserved, this intimate house of worship is the oldest structure deemed by Iowa architects as one of the 50 best - five per decade – from the 20th Century in the Hawkeye State. (It took a dozen years for me to see them all.) Sweeping an hour or so to the southwest, my wife Sheila and I were checking into an over-the-budget hotel in Omaha just across the Missouri River border into Nebraska a few years ago. At the desk she was perusing one of those cartoonish city maps drawn up for tourists. This one had a big empty swath, about in the middle of town, with one historical note: Birthplace of Malcolm X. Malcolm X!? In Omaha? Who knew? Malcolm Little (the slave surname he changed) was born almost a hundred years ago, on May 19, 1925. His whole neighborhood has long been demolished and left empty, but the Malcolm X Memorial Foundation has a place next to it. That address wasn’t on the cartoonish map so we just drove into the area and spied Aframerican Book Store, whose owner set up our visit. Here's a funny thing: To fund the Foundation, they sold about six vertical feet of soil to a local bank that needed fill, but, hey, it’s still the ground that was under Mr. X’s boyhood home. Back into Iowa and heading a hundred miles north, every inch under our feet is part of the world’s largest deposit of a fairly rare soil called loess (pronounced “Luss”). It is an aeolian (windborne) dust mixture of sand and silt with a bit of clay. All along Iowa’s side of the Missouri River, western desert earth blew in and piled up over tens of thousands of years. By now erosion has sculpted gentle 200-foot hills, some bordered by sets of wide terraces called cat steps. Tooling along the Loess Hills Scenic Byway makes a day of smiles. To see a lesser version of these deposits, you could go to China, where the color of loess gives the Yellow River its name. Just a few miles south of Sioux City is a double monument to Lewis and Clark's 1804-1806 Corps of Discovery Expedition. High on a river bluff stands a literal monument, a 100-foot sandstone obelisk, centerpiece of a 23-acre National Park Service site. It marks the final resting place of Corps member Sergeant Charles Floyd, Jr. He died on August 20, 1804. Leader William Clark wrote: “Serj. Floyd died with a great deal of composure. Before his death he said to me, ‘I am going away.’ This man at all times gave us proofs of his firmness and determined resolution to doe service to his countrey . . .“ The second monumental sense is this: Sgt. Floyd’s was the one death among about 40 Expedition members over 28 months and 8,000 miles to the Pacific and back. [A personal digression: Lewis and Clark’s travels are historic inspirations for going on the road. But for me it was my unmarried aunts. Dee Kamholz was my dad’s younger sister. Margaret Glave was the daughter of Fred, the widower my grandmother married years after my dad’s dad died. Margaret and Dee had jobs and vacationed together in the 1950s. When they got home they would haul their slide projector and screen around to relatives’ homes. They showed us Bryce Canyon or ocean shores or towering sequoias or somewhere far. I couldn’t wait to grow up and go.] Now it’s on into Sioux City for art plus two stunning architectural wonders of the Midwest. First let’s go play in the park. The Missouri River runs the south edge of Sioux City, Iowa, from west to east so one is generally headed uphill moving north through town. At the entrance to Grandview Park there is still a rise blocking any view of a deep amphitheater beyond. But as you top that rise, more and more arcs of a gleaming pure white rainbow appear. It is the Band Shell, a 6,000-seat Streamline Moderne beauty opened in 1935 with a stage big enough to showcase a hundred musicians. Downtown is Woodbury County Courthouse, often called the largest Prairie Style building in the world. There is not an inch of this 1918 masterpiece that is less than thrilling (and that includes a cramped walk through the former combined jail and morgue, spots probably not on the regular tour). In its stunning interior rotunda, four 50-foot murals by Illinois artist John Norton celebrate civic duty and life. Next your eyes move to gleaming white terracotta, exacting brickwork, a bright tile mosaic fountain backsplash and up to an artglass dome. It never stops and is one of the half-dozen most beautiful buildings I have ever seen. Another gem of the Midwest gets its own room over in the Sioux City Art Center. Iowan Grant Wood (1891-1942) is most famous for his 1930 American Gothic; it stars at the Art Institute of Chicago. But his championing Regionalism, the Midwest’s only major art movement, burst on the scene with Corn Room, a multi-canvas wide sweep across rich farm fields and now across three quiet, calming museum walls. (And for an echo of last month’s “Miles with Moxie,” Wood ran Iowa’s Federal Art Project for part of the 1930s.) On the last long curve it’s up and out of Sioux City heading over the top to the upper end of our “C.” What we once called folk art is now vernacular art, and enough vernacular art in one place is an art environment. Art environments are often a mix of obsession and inspiration. West Bend, Iowa, has a big one. The Shrine of the Grotto of Redemption covers city blocks. Father Paul Dobberstein began piling up rocks and gems and statuary in 1912. He didn’t stop for 42 years. Then he died. It took others another 50 years to finish the place. But there it is, always open, always free. To paraphrase Mr. Dylan, now everybody can get stoned. -30 - Postscript: To see a companion photo album of 12 shots featuring some of this month’s location, those of you with access to Facebook can search for Douglas Kamholz, then click Photos (next to Posts, About and Friends) and click again for Albums and then one last click on the one entitled MOXIE SKIRTS THE MISSOURI. Alternately, you can see a magazine-layout version on this piece accompanied by a few photos by going to newbaybooks.com and finding the Forum section. All my “Miles with Moxie” works are there.

(Editor's note. In his latest dispatch, peripatetic Illinois writer Doug Kamholz reveals hidden haunts in Ohio in his search for lesser-known Midwest gems. Who knew Ermal Fraze invented the pop-top? Or that cool cowboy Hopalong Cassidy was an Ohioan?) by Doug Kamholz I can try to remember, as an old song advises, when I was a young and callow fellow. On runs from college to my sweetheart’s, I sliced through Mid-Ohio with nary a sideways glance. Now comes great pleasure atoning for folly. There is a band of wonders across Ohio that goes from blueberry pancakes in an 1802 mill to Tom’s Ice Cream Bowl ,where they serve champagne sherbet. It’s 150 miles that go from Abe Lincoln to Louis Sullivan, from cowboy Hopalong Cassidy to astronaut John Glenn, from Orville and Wilbur to Frank Lloyd. Ohio’s state capital, Columbus, is about in the middle of all this. The capital’s Capitol — now gorgeously restored (see stained glass above) — happens to be the only place outside Springfield, Illinois, where Lincoln paused to publicly orate on his way to assume the presidency, and where a mere fifty months later his body lay in state on his way home to assume the tomb. (As residents of Springfield, Illinois, we are obligated to shoehorn Abe into pretty much everything.) The Buckeye State also is called “Mother of Presidents” as seven were born there, so Columbus is heavily coated in U.S. history. On the edge of town there’s a living history farm, and right downtown is a plant-based version of George Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of La Grande Jatte, featuring 54 life-sized topiaries. Our Mid-Ohio swath starts at Richmond, Indiana. For decades Richmond built most of America’s school buses, so just before hitting Ohio’s state line you saw a vast yellow sea of them from the eastbound lanes of Interstate 70. I had a friend, Neil, whose night job here in Springfield was cleaning school buses. We always called Richmond “Neil’s Nightmare.” Moving east, first is Dayton with its (locally-appropriate-adjective) top-flight art institute. As for those bachelor brothers Wright, we know too little about the only college-educated sibling in the family. Katharine got a degree from Ohio’s very progressive Oberlin College, ran the boys’ bicycle shop when they were off playing with airplanes and was their savvy media-handler when they got off the ground, so to speak. But the truly important Dayton inventor was, of course, Ermal Fraze. After getting caught short at a picnic without a church key, he went and created the pop-top. Thanks, Erm! Just 20 miles east is Antioch College, proudly clinging to its long leftist legacy. Coretta Scott is an alumna from 1951. Her husband, Martin Luther King, Jr., gave Antioch’s commencement address in 1965. The school has spurred a lively village called Yellow Springs, full of artisan shops and bookstores. (And yes, Dave Chappelle lives nearby so he hangs out in town.) Before departing, one might walk a while among 400-year-old trees in Yellow Springs’ thousand-acre Glen Helen Preserve and then make just a few more miles east to Clifton, home to the pancake haven that is Clifton Mills. The Little Miami River cascades into a narrow gorge in Clifton and hits perfect speed to power grinding wheels. Of five mills that stood along a single mile of riverbank, those for wood, wool and paper are gone. But one still grinds corn, wheat and rye. You can tour the lowest of the five-story structure to see its stone wheels and wooden chutes. But upstairs is where plate-sized flapjacks are served while laughing water dances over paddles of a tall decorative wheel just outside big windows. Almost every place I am writing about is within a few miles of I-70. Here’s a minor exception. My wife spotted tiny red letters on the Ohio map (Yes, an actual paper map) saying “Nat’l Afro-American Mus.” only ten minutes farther south from the pancakes. It turns out there are two Historically Black College and University sites, unusual for being in the north, at Wilberforce, Ohio. Central State’s campus houses the museum. It opened in 1988, long before the now-more-famous one appeared on D.C.’s National Mall. While there we saw an exhibit on Afrocentric comic books including a rare surviving copy of Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, a 16-page history of and guide for non-violent civil rights protest. In 1957, Fellowship of Reconciliation printed and shipped 250,000 copies to churches and other groups. The museum’s research found that distribution at least sometimes came with a warning to burn or destroy the comic after studying it, as possession might endanger the reader’s personal safety. Due north from Wilberforce and on the other side of I-70 is Springfield and a personal story. While touring the newly restored Frank Lloyd Wright house east of the city center (and Wright’s only Prairie Style home in Ohio) I learned that Burton J. Westcott, who hired Wright, also invented a car and put his name on it. I learned there was one right downtown in the county museum. So I went to see his 1920 cream and black Touring Car model. Heading for an exit I spied two elderly docents shuffling my way. Being too polite to outrun them, I let them catch up. They had one question: Have you been to the military exhibits? I was just on my way, I lied. Let us guide you, they offered. So off we went through narrow winding corridors filled with the most common relics of war from 1861 on. When we got to WWII, there was a case with a set of fatigues, metal ammo boxes and other paraphernalia. Across from that was a case devoted to WAC nurses featuring hospital whites and medical stuff. It was there they stopped and told me those were their own uniforms from when they met serving during “the big one” in our U.S. Army. I will never forget the pride and the love in their eyes. On our last run through Springfield, my wife Sheila (above) and I visited Hartman Rock Garden, what Roadside America calls “a happy architectural jumble of patriotism, education, history, religion, and popular culture.” Over the last decade of his life, H.G. “Ben” Hartman (1883-1944) turned his corner-lot yard into an art environment, a fantasy land built with several kajillion stones from a nearby creek. Among his many creations are Noah’s ark and Lincoln’s tomb. While we were there some decked out teenagers showed up for their prom pictures. Our other exception to the I-70 corridor is 40 miles north of Springfield in Sidney. Two of the last works by great Chicago architect Louis Sullivan were financial buildings in Ohio. They often are called jewel boxes because of their modest size and exquisite detail. Sullivan designed Sidney’s Peoples Federal in 1917. It remains an independent bank. It is sheathed in blue-green glass and tapestry brick detailed with marble and terra cotta. If that’s not enough, right across the street is The Spot, a classic diner heavy with red Naugahyde, neon, Formica, chrome, cool lettering and warm pie. We now head back to I-70 East for a 90-minute drive past Columbus to Newark and Ohio’s other jewel box. This 1915 bank, known as “The Old Home,” is nearing total restoration after decades when it was a meat shop, an ice cream parlor or just empty. Now it’s only months until every Sullivan mosaic and mural will greet visitors again. The Old Home is set to become the new home of a non-profit promoting Licking County. More generally, this town of 50,000 folks bubbles with community pride and products of that pride. From artful streetscapes to academic scholarships, Newark and Licking County are hard at and good at the work of improvement. (This year there’s a community survey asking simply what one thing do you think would improve life for others here.) Newark was also the home of Heisey Glass, well-known for treating employees well and making cute colored-glass animals plus much more. The owner’s grand home is now a museum to his craft. And just south of town is Dawes Arboretum, a 2,000-acre wonderland where I saw my first and only Silver Ghost Lacebark Pine. Wowser! Nearing the end of this Mid-Ohio jaunt is the town where Mr. and Mrs. Grey named their fourth child, a boy, Pearl. As he grew into an author of wild west adventures, he figured something a bit more manly might sell better. So he took his hometown’s name and became Zane Grey. However, Zanesville’s real fame is pottery. Revered twentieth -century brands such as Roseville and Weller were fired from southeast Ohio clay. The Zanesville Museum of Art displays the story of this one-time world center of clayware. Second-hand shops down on Main Street now can set vintage values on what were everyday-priced and all-American themed housewares. There is even Vasehenge, a circle of 18 six-foot flower pots. And Vasehenge stands at one of three ends of the town’s unusual Y Bridge across the Muskingum River. Just up from another Y Bridge arm is Tom’s Ice Cream Bowl. (It’s also four minutes off and back on I-70.) Tom’s came around in 1948 and still serves fine scoops including that aforementioned champagne sherbet. There is a drive-through but the window is still an actual window. Tom’s early-‘50s menu reads like they invented it all: “Use our Phone-In Window,” they excitedly advise. They promise that only ten minutes later you can arrive at their “Drive-In Window. Never Leave Your Car.” (I’m amazed there are no exclamation points!) After dessert, just a few miles farther east is Concord and astronaut John Glenn’s boyhood home, now a National Park Service site. I’ve never been, but I did hear a good story. One passenger on a bus tour was so tied to her conservative politics that she refused to step off and put her foot on Democratic ground. Our final stop is Cambridge, home to another hallmark of the last century, Cambridge Glass. Their pieces, opaque or translucent colors as well as crystal clear, seemed to occupy many family china hutches and Sunday dinner tables. Cambridge Glass has a museum where docents are eager to explain the subtle Scottie Dog ear-flap alteration from 1924 to 1925. On the way into town is (not a Y but) an S bridge, part of the National Road which started in Maryland in 1811 and went as far west as Illinois. When it got to a creek at an angle, for engineering reasons that are beyond me, it made sense to build a curve on both sides of the water; hence what is currently more than 200 years old still stands pretty sturdy though now only for pedestrians. For those of a certain ilk and age, perhaps the real star of Cambridge is William Lawrence Boyd, much better known as Hopalong Cassidy, a mid-century western hero who made 66 movies along with TV and radio shows. He called Cambridge his hometown. It may indicate the size of his surviving fan base that the only collection of “Hoppy” stuff (and there was a ton of it) was in the back of a junk store that burned down a few years ago, so that section has been x-ed out in the local Hopalong Cassidy Trail brochure. But for our purposes, let’s put Hoppy on his white horse Topper and let him ride on east, away from the setting sun all the way to the other end of Mid-Ohio at the bridge over the Ohio River and into Wheeling, West Virginia, where the Buckeye Hoppy says “So long, buckaroos!”

Editor's note: Folks are traveling again, and Illinois writer Doug Kamholz, in the latest installment of his Midwest quest "for hidden gems," as Bob Dylan would say, takes us to a place where masters of architecture performed dozens of tricks. (Photos by Don Nissen.) The best-kept secret in the Midwest is a small city an hour south of Indianapolis. It places sixth on an important list after Chicago, New York, Boston, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. That city is Columbus, Indiana, home to fewer than 50,000. That list is one ranking architectural significance across these United States. Of course if modern architecture isn’t your cup of tea, you won’t like these stories. (And let us hope that was the last of my architecture jokes.) Just how any modest burg could rate so high on any national list guarantees my interest unless it was a ranking of most polluted water or highest murder rate or, say, largest Beanie Baby collection. I also want to know how one distinction affects the rest of community life. We’ll get back to that. (ranking, not Beanie Babies) First Christian Church, designed in 1942 by Finnish-American Eliel Saarinen, started the architecture adventure in town. It is among the first religious buildings done in Modernist style, its buff brick and limestone resting under a 166-foot campanile or bell tower. Saarinen helped his son, Eero, on the St. Louis Arch in the 1960s. I. M. Pei, perhaps best known in the U.S. for Cleveland’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, designed the Columbus public library in 1969. This and First Christian alone would signify greatness. In Columbus they are two of 97 works by world-class architects. And these two are right across the street from each other with a 20-foot, sandcast bronze Henry Moore sculpture rising in a plaza between. (A comparable Moore bronze sold in 2016 for $33 million.) The biggest names have come to Columbus to make civic buildings, schools, churches, fire stations, plants, parking lots and a park. Everywhere, wood and stone and metal are crafted with such a human touch in such a human scale it’s easy to think it would bleed if you nicked it. Remember that scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy tornado-spins down from Kansas all sepia and then steps out her farmhouse door into that full-color Land of Oz garden? Well, crossing over Flatrock River on a beautiful steel-cable-strung bridge at the edge of central Columbus delivers that kind of drama. Your first mile or so after exiting I-64 is a chock-a-block gauntlet of chain-brand beige. Then riverside trees. Then the bridge. Then the Hoosier State’s own “Over the Rainbow.” It is visitors’ good fortune that seeing many of these jaw-drops is pretty easy. A step-up from just plain “Looky There!” is a $3 guide for walking and wandering around town. You could rent an audio device to enhance your “Looky There!” You could spring for a walking-tour guide who would say, “Looky Here!” What I keep going back for is the $25 bus tour from the well-run visitors center so I can get up close and inside stunner after stunner. For a break from buildings, go hang out in Mill Race Park along the Flatrock River on the west edge of downtown. It’s 85 acres of typical park stuff but with a twist; it’s all on a floodplain so almost nothing touches the ground. For example, water passes easily in the bathroom. Wait, that doesn’t sound right. What I mean is the walls stop a foot short of the concrete floor. On top bright red pipe frames the facility with an obvious “M” roof line on one side and an equally obvious “W” on the other. This is still the Midwest, so nothing around Columbus is all that hoity toity. There’s a grade school with long and bright-colored tunnel-connectors between its sections and levels. How could you not call it what students call it: the Hamster Cage? Eliel Saarinen gathered all of North Christian Church, picture left, under a shallow six-sided roof and a slender 192-foot spire. It’s locally known as the Oil Can as it surely resembles a spring bottom oiler, that common little household device that squirted oil when you pushed in its underside. (I remember my dad had one. When used, the spring bottom made a mellow plunk-plunk sound.) Prominent downtown is the four-story county jail’s large, white, wire-mesh recreation dome. Of course it’s called the birdcage. (Jail. Bird. Cage.) Chicago’s Harry Weese designed the bank beneath with crenelated towers on each corner. Evoking castle battlements, the tops of walls look like lower teeth with some missing and were likely meant to symbolize the bank’s security. But folks in Columbus thought the whole building looked like a dead horse, its four stiff legs pointing skyward. (That “dead horse” has recently been transformed into a coffee shop. And the horse, of course, has a drive-though.) Again recall that you don’t have to travel borough to borough in New York City or Nob Hill to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco to see these wonders. The whole city is less than half the size of Washington, D.C. Think of being in an excellent art museum with a Picasso in front of you and a Rubens, a Michelangelo and a couple Monets just down the hall. Returning to architect Weese, Washington’s underground D. C. Metro is perhaps his best known project, but his several buildings in Columbus put us on the tracks to where it all began. J. Irwin Miller (1909 – 2004) was well-born, well-learned and well-heeled. Through family ties he became head of Cummins Engine Company, world leader in diesel technology and located in Columbus since it began in 1919. As a parishioner in 1940, he helped convince the famed Eliel Saarinen to build a new First Christian Church sanctuary. Fifteen years later the young Cummins Foundation started offering to pay all architects’ fees for any public building in Bartholomew County. Weese and Miller went to Yale. Weese became the go-to guy for 16 projects in Columbus including Cummins factory buildings while the foundation’s work forged forward to employ most of the last century’s great architects; this philanthropy continues today. (Starchitect Frank Lloyd Wright is absent from Columbus as his personal morality was off-putting to the community.) Outside of business, Miller was the first layman elected president of the National Council of Churches and a major organizer of the 1963 March on Washington. He did say there was a selfish motive to hiring world-class designers beyond being a fan of Modern style; he said he hoped it would help attract the better and brighter to Columbus to make both Cummins and the town more successful places. The one-name film director Kogonada directed his feature film Columbus in 2017. It is a multi-award-winner in which the title city’s buildings are as much stars as are actors. South Korean Kogonada had once visited Columbus on a family trip and wanted to film there. His characters’ lives parallel what he said about the place in an interview: “For me, the town is a testament of this pursuit to find meaning inthe construction of space, in the relationship between absence and presence . . “ All this makes Columbus worth a visit. Here are a few details from my last time there. I always go for ice cream at Zaharakos — locals just call it the Greeks — on the main drag since 1900. You could think of it as an exquisite museum, with sprinkles! On that same street I bought a suit jacket at Dell Brothers, operating since 1916. A few days later my salesman, with the family name Dell, sent me a thank-you note in the mail. My wife and I have driven all over town, and that pride of place stretches block after block, neighborhood after neighborhood, wealthy to working-class. You can see answers to what creates life of community and quality of life. One last time, on the scale of un-discovery there may be no more shiny, multi-faceted nugget than Columbus, Indiana.

Editor's Note: This the first installment of an occasional series by Illinois writer Doug Kamholz in his "search for a gem," as Bob Dylan put it, in his travels. Easterners typically sniff at the offerings of Flyover, America — that vast swath of civilization that stretches between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. But Doug makes it his business to find marvelous places therein off the beaten track, but never "over-hyped, over-priced underwhelming big attractions." You will see that he has done so in a recent trip to the Flint Hills tall-grass prairie in Kansas, a state that that has as much to do with Western lore as the American West, as Doug tells us. Doug was born in the Midwest and says he's "happy to be living here at age 75." His work has included journalism, peace activism and university teaching. Do enjoy. Miles With Moxie: No. 1— The Flint Hills of Kansas Cattle herded down a hillside in the middle of Kansas seems hardly anybody’s idea of a vacation centerpiece. However, it was ours. And we were thrilled. And not alone. Cowgirls and cowboys crest a rise in the middle distance. In early evening light they drive hundreds of white-faced Herefords and red Angus across our view. That view is blocked a bit by three billowing sides of a days-old stage where the Kansas City Symphony has come to play for a few thousand of us spread out on a pasture slope in the middle of 10,000 square miles of tallgrass prairie. Music mixes with hoofbeats, and there are smiles all around. These are the Flint Hills. They make a hundred-mile-wide swath of eastern Kansas that stretches 250 miles from Manhattan south to the Oklahoma state line. Below that they are called the Osage Hills, headquarters to the tribe of the same name (and a destination for another day). Visitors are wise to start at the stunning new Flint Hills Discovery Center on the south edge of Manhattan where both the science and the seasons of Midwest prairie are well-displayed. Then it is to meander the hundred miles of scenic Highway 177 as it unfolds its curves and crests that put you smack dab in the middle of a landscape painting by Thomas Hart Benton. The draw to this almost treeless undulating land is in part its rarity. The Nature Conservancy, which operates an excellent Visitors Center (including American bison) on the scenic highway, counts less than four percent of the world’s tallgrass prairie still waves, and most of that is here in the Flint Hills. Another draw is an equation I apply to many places I travel. Divide how stunning the beauty or cultural significance of a place is by how well or little it is generally recognized by the traveling public. So a relatively un-famous wonderful spot scores big. And larger scores multiply how happy the locals are that you were smart and adventurous enough to choose to peruse their beloved piece of the world. Now here’s a sneak-peek into the future: Young prairie grass is tasty; you can make weapons out of flint; and nobody will ever put a plow into these hard-baked hills. But let’s back up many thousand years. [WARNING! The paragraph below contains hard sciences, specifically geology and botany.] During the Permian Period shallow seas covered Kansas. The aftermath of those eons is layers of limestone and shale full of prehistoric aquatic fossils close to the land’s surface. Thin topsoil over hard rock means trees can’t put down roots to anchor themselves. However, slender tallgrass roots called rhizomes can wriggle their way through porous stone. Reaching ten or twelve feet deep and branching sideways, they can and do nourish abundant tall prairie grasses — big bluestem, Indiangrass, little bluestem and switchgrass — which grow up to eight feet above ground. Also, as these layers of limestone erode, fragments of flint — a kind of dense quartz also called chert — accumulate. [Whew! OK, back to the soft sciences: history, culturalanthropology and then vacationology.] About 13,000 years ago several Mississippian tribes shared these bison-rich Flint Hills hunting grounds, though Kaw (or Kanza or Kansa) predominated. Arrowheads and spears made of flint can be chipped to sharp points, so we can safely assume folks were excited to find much of it among the hills’ rubble. (I would like to observe here that they were animated with the flintstones, but my editor wife will probably veto that line.) Each year Kaw burned thousands of acres of prairie. They had learned from lightning that fire induces new grass to grow, and then bison come for those young sweet shoots. Life went on like that for a good ten thousand years. These days there is an emerging, albeit belated recognition of the brutality visited on tribal people in the Plains after European invaders arrived. White people first showed up from Spain in the 1500s. Finding no gold, they went south to conquer Mexico. Of course more white people showed up as years passed. Part of what I want readers to know is that in the 1800s Kansas was what we call the Wild West, and that sense has never left. TV’s Matt Dillon was marshal of Dodge City, not somewhere in the far Southwest. The real Wyatt Earp, an Illinois boy, worked as a lawman in Dodge City and Wichita. Jesse James hold-ups? Billy the Kid’s famous jailbreak? The Marlboro man? Kansas, Kansas, Kansas. Same for cowboy boots and cowboy hats. And where did all those buffalo roam and deer and antelope play? Those are words from Dr. Brewster Higley (or Highley) out of Smith County, Kansas. Our last time in the Flint Hills celebrated the 200th birthday of the Santa Fe Trail. For most of my life, that historic path always had Rawhide trail boss Gil Favor (and a young Clint Eastwood) driving cattle north to market while meeting families — always boys with sticks and girls in gingham — moving west. All of that is almost all wrong, but the real Santa Fe Trail story is better than fiction. In short it was our young nation’s first overland international trade route. It was primarily a highway of commerce, and two-thirds of it — 750 miles — stretched diagonally across Kansas. Wheel ruts from wagons that trekked it still can be found, often preserved and protected. Starting in 1821, dry goods, household items, hardware, whiskey and a wide variety of manufactured wares went from Missouri to the adobe buildings that made up Santa Fe. Hides and mules — those famous Missouri mules — came the other way along with Mexican gold and silver coins. Revenue grew to almost half a million dollars in the 1840s. There could be a Santa Fe Trail only after Mexico revolted because Spain and frowned on trade with the U.S. The Flint Hills loom large in trail history. In Council Grove, one of two principal towns in the area, traders made pacts with Osage and Kaw for safe passage along the Santa Fe, and tribes were involved in buying and selling along the way. Many traders made multiple trips out and back; it was a two-month trip each way. My wife and I went to a lecture about women on the trail. Some found good reason to rejoice. “I breathe free without that oppression and uneasiness felt in the gossiping circles of a settled home,” Susan Shelby Magoffin wrote in her trail journal. “Oh, this is a life I would not exchange for a good deal!” These sojourns even had their own language. “Follow the tongue” meant pointing the lead wagon’s tongue at the North Star when halting for the night in open country so they would head in the right direction the next day. Heyday for the Santa Fe ended with our war with Mexico, disputed lands in our Civil War and most dramatically with the coming of the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad on February 11, 1859. Of course Council Grove and Cottonwood Falls celebrate their places in Flint Hills history. You still can eat at Hays House, opened in 1857 (though breakfast may be better down the street at Saddlerock Cafe). Or 25 miles down the scenic highway, you can have one of those touted Kansas steaks at Grand Central Hotel and Grill where, as the name implies, you can stay. Back up in Council Grove and right downtown is the Cottage House, dating from 1867. There are plenty of spots for lodging and camping in the area. Our nights were in an old converted barn called Tired of the City. The Cottonwood River ran right below our windows. The Flint Hills is home to many places that teem with the history and culture of various peoples who live and lived there. There are strolls around towns and hikes in the countryside. We drove off one June-green day deep into that countryside and found ourselves crossing onto open range. This is still grazing land. Plows can’t cut it. Cattle ranching is king, and to this day they burn more than two million acres in spring exactly as the Kaw taught them. We shared miles and miles of gravel roads with hundreds of herds of cattle as well as other wildlife. Every moment in these low, overlapping mounds is rich with a profound sense of place. Recently, right along the Neosho River in Council Grove, the community built an outdoor amphitheater (borrowing Greek earth-and-stone methods which seem to last a couple thousand years). Michael Martin Murphey, a big supporter of the Flint Hills, played its inaugural performance. (Most of us got back to our cars before a late-evening downpour!) “The Flint Hills don’t take your breath away; they give you a chance to catch it,” says Jim Hoy, a fourth-generation resident who teaches at nearby Emporia State University. The scene at the beginning of this writing is from an annual event called Symphony in the Flint Hills. Back in 2006 rancher Jane Koger wanted to celebrate her terrain so she hosted 3,000 guests at her place, and the summer concert has grown from there with a different ranch each summer and the Kansas City Symphony happy to hop into a caravan of white vans for their one-night offering of European and American music rooted, so to speak, in rural land. We heard “The Magnificent Seven,” the movie theme composed by Bernstein and Phillipe as well as “Divertimento in F Major” by Mozart, which he intended for outdoor festivals. Our 2021 crowd was COVID-reduced to 5,000, a couple thousand fewer than normal. The afternoon of the big day offers lectures and covered wagon rides and reasonably priced rental chairs for the hillside performance. And then the sun slants. And then the herd comes over the rise. And later, carefully timed with the setting of the sun, we stand and belt out all the verses to the Kansas state song, “Home on the Range.” With all that, who could possibly say a discouraging word? — 30 — Postscript 1: Of course these travel pieces could be dotted with links offering more wisdom than I can. But they won’t. I wish my writing to be for eyes, minds and hearts, not phones. There is an exception, though. Upon returning home, I sometimes recap adventures as Facebook photo albums (never with more than 21 images). If you have a FB page, you can access this one by searching for Douglas Kamholz, then Photos, then Albums and then click on the one entitled “VACATION, yes! But in KANSAS?” Postscript 2: Today’s mailing is a special case. Kansas songwriter Kelley Hunt has composed an homage to the very lands lauded in this month’s “Miles with Moxie.” Her song “Heartland” is used in the documentary film shown at the Flint Hills Discovery Center (which includes narration by Lyle Lovett, Michael Martin Murphey et al.), and you can hear it (with all its schmaltz) here:

Maybe after years in the newspaper biz I need titles and headlines to tell me what’s to come. So I was disappointed that in Amor Towles’ latest novel, The Lincoln Highway, the cross-continental road named for the 16th president from my home state was an afterthought. I had a bit of trouble with characters. An eight-year-old named Billy who provides the intellectual underpinning for the book? A fast-talking New York teen called Duchess who uses words like “deign” and “visage” but can’t read? And then there’s Towles’ punctuation: Instead of quotation marks, passages with utterances begin with M-dashes (—), an unending source of irritation. That said, I consider The Lincoln Highway — all 576 pages of it — worth reading. Especially if you have plenty of time. No, it’s not as good as Towles’ previous novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, the kind of book holds its place on the nightstand long after its finished. Lincoln was No. 4 this week on the New York Times (hardcover) bestseller list, which might or might not tell you something. (I give Towles credit for sending buyers on his website to Indie bookstores). A bit of what goes on: It’s 1954 and 18-year-old Emmett Watson heads home to Nebraska after being released from a work farm. His father has died and the family farm has been foreclosed, leaving Emmett and little brother Billy to fend for themselves. The plan is to head to California in Emmett’s Studebaker to find their mother, who disappeared eight year earlier. Things change when Duchess and Woolly, fellow teens from New York with heaps of issues, hijack the plot — and the Studebaker — sending the action eastward. And assortment characters — actors, prostitutes, an evil minister and a heroic Black fellow named Ulysses — take the stage. The book proceeds to a fairly dark ending in upstate New York. Along the way, the Studebaker changes color.

I'm also wondering what I will think when I've conquered 600 pages of Amor Towles' latest book, The Lincoln Highway, which starts out in Midwestern terrain I know better than Towles. Not long ago I read Towles' A Gentleman in Moscow, a novel that takes place in the early decades of the 20th century when Russia was ablaze with revolution. The suffering and upheaval of that era was barely an afterthought in the book, which takes places in a grand Moscow Hotel, the Metropol, where an aristocratic "former person" has been sentenced to house arrest. Count Alexander Rostov lives decades in this majestic edifice with its secret rooms and culinary delights, thoroughly adapting to his diminished circumstance by becoming head waiter in the hotel's elegant restaurant. Rostov is surrounded by friends, lovers and a talented daughter he never expected to have. He's a lover of literature and fine wines, a wise tactician who thoroughly outwits the revolutionists who think they've locked him up forever. In his experiences are lessons on making the most of what we have. I read A Gentleman in Moscow before I knew much about Towles. He was a Wall Street research analyst with a zillion-dollar firm who always wanted to be a writer after majoring in English at Yale. He has plenty of experience in opulent settings; A Gentleman in Moscow came into focus for him when he was on a business trip in a swanky Russian hotel. (Could he have been advising oligarchs?) Towles' life experience makes me wonder if he will pull off The Lincoln Highway, released in October. (I'm 100 pages in and not sold.) The book ostensibly is about a road with Lincoln's name (one of America's early transcontinental roads) and a 10-day journey by several fellows. (I prefer having women among a book's main characters.) Having grown up in Lincoln Land (Illinois) and lived a decade in Springfield — home to all things Abe, including his home and his tomb — I'm also a tad suspicious of slapping Lincoln's name on this book. In The Lincoln Highway, I'm still in Nebraska (the characters are soon to head East), and thus far Towles' depiction of farmers and rural life seems cliche'-ish. We'll see what a writer accustomed to wealth does with the character of a farm-raised young fellow ready to start his life after being released from a Kansas penal farm.

Editor's Note: M.L. Faunce is the author of My Date With an Oyster and Other Stories of a D.C. Girl Discovering Chesapeake Country. She is featured above, in pink, along with New Bay Books publisher Sandra Olivetti Martin, at a book release party in June, 2021, near M.L.'s home in Gulfport, Fla. Because of illness, she was unable to join in the ongoing Calvert Library workshops analyzing Ross Gay's "Book of Delights" — and getting our own delightful moments in print. I was honored to read aloud from an M.L. essay advising how people can open the door to regular writing. Uncle Willie's Oyster Roast by M.L. Faunce During the fall when I was young, my Uncle Willie would have oyster roasts on his and Aunt Mary’s farm in Indian Head, Maryland. Oysters were shoveled into a wood fire, then dumped on a long table just as they started to open. It was every person for themselves as my aunts/uncles/cousins scrambled for the hot oysters. Nothing thrills a kid more than a roaring fire under the stars—and then you get to indulge (tepidly first as a kid). Later, move over!

In Calvert Library-New Bay Books ongoing writing workshops, Dotty Holcomb Doherty's delight was experiencing sensory (and muscle) memory from auditory stimulus. Dotty is the author of New Bay Books-published Buoyant: What Held Us Up When Our Bodies Let Us Down — described by Tom Horton as “a quietly heroic tale of two women’s voyages through disease and dying, interwoven with voyages upon Chesapeake creeks.” Doherty, of Annapolis, is a former teacher and self-labeled "jock," in addition to being a “birder, wildlife photographer, writer, Quaker, poet, paddler, rower, gardener, knitter, Girl Scout leader and sunrise-watcher." Learn more at dottyholcombdoherty.com. Her Delight, titled "My Violin," describes a rekindled relationship between a human and a musical instrument. It’s been four decades, but I finally got my violin repaired. As I draw the rosined bow across the open strings to tune them, my ear remembers and can detect the variations in tone, my fingers recalling the delicacy needed in turning the pegs to make necessary adjustments. Flipping through old music, I search and find a piece easy enough to try. Ave Maria. My ear distinguishes out-of-tune from in-tune as I read the music and move my fingers up and down the strings, the bow pulling the music into the air. Vibrato. I remember! Scales. So familiar! I began playing in the third grade, and continued in orchestras and symphonies through high school, but in college, opted to concentrate on sports. Today, I feel I have opened a part of me that’s been closed. Laughing over my mistakes and lack of practice, I try and try again, playing stanzas until they feel natural and sound pure. The journey of memory and possibilities has begun.

(Editor's note: Calvert Library and New Bay Books are two workshops into our discussion of Ross Gay's bestseller "The Book of Delights" and chronicling our own delightful joys in everyday life. Join us in this forum now or register here for our third workshop, on Nov. 1, at the public library in Prince Frederick. *The Swing" This past weekend we drove to Charleston, South Carolina to help our daughter and her husband attend a wedding by being grandparents to our six-month-old Isla. We stayed in a lovely old house on Spring Street, turned Air BnB, with a wide side porch with a large swing tied to the high ceiling with ship’s rope. That quickly became Isla’s happy place, the only place where she would nap, draped across whoever had her at the time. I was the swing discoverer, having always been partial to them, and took her there the first afternoon. The weather was fine, the sun warm, the breeze just enough to whisper the leaves. I held this warm, compact bundle with the bright, bright blue eyes and sang every song I knew. Gradually, the eyes drooped closed, her body relaxed into mine, and she drifted away lulled by the swing. I drifted with her, reflecting that there was no place on earth I would rather be. That night when her parents came in, she awoke and cried loudly, inconsolably, unceasingly. In the wee hours, I went and got her to give her parents some rest. Isla was wide awake, as was I: a pair of night owls. We had the most delightful, non-verbal conversation in the dimness of the streetlights. She learned to high five and was so pleased with herself. I thought, how enchanting, and how delightful to have company in my insomnia.

With the Calvert County (MD) public library, New Bay Books publisher Sandra Olivetti Martin has been leading writing workshops focused on Ross Gay's "The Book of Delights," a bestseller. In October, two ZOOM workshops were held and a third Online & In-Person session is scheduled for Nov. 1. You can register here. The Book of Delights was selected by Maryland Humanities as the title for 2021, aimed at bringing together diverse readers statewide through the shared experience of the same book. The book features Gay's short essays, written most days in a year's time with the goal of finding delights in everyday existence. Writers in the Calvert library workshop are producing their own delights by practicing Gay's approach and discipline. Here are some we're proud of. We invite yours. Janice Lynch Schuster The sky is autumn pink But the trees are summer full I cannot catch the light With my camera To show you So let these few words remind you How we woke in cold October To the sky on fire with sun Norma Allen Lesser In the morning I move from the bedroom to the room with morning music and light. The tree outside the window is still bright green and protects me from the view outside. I remember when that tree was a mere skinny stick in the ground. After a few seasons there was young fragile baby green leaves, then strong bold teenaged leaves. Now I think my tree has stopped growing tall, the leaves are robust but in a few weeks they will turn yellow, then brown and be gone. In a few weeks, human time, in universe time merely a nano second. And through the thin brown branches, my view will return. Susan Nolan Not all princesses need rescuing. Holly had spent her formative years in a boarding school where she had gained few practical skills. I had grown up in a household where women cooked, cleaned and mostly, complained. Yet there we were: me with a screwdriver in hand and her reading aloud from the owner's manual of a 2010 Ford Escape. Within minutes, we had changed the light bulb and in doing so, fixed the blinker. We were free to make left turns safely. At night, we raised our Chardonnay-filled tumblers and congratulated each other for exceeding our girlhood expectations. Sally Schofield In Georgetown Hospital’s cold holding area, I was waiting to be called for my MRI test, when a kindly orderly came by and offered me a toasty, snuggable blanket, straight out of a warming cabinet. What a sensual delight! We got to talking and when I learned that he was from Liberia, I mentioned my trip to Africa. It opened up a door to an excellent conversation in which we shared our awe and excitement about the wonders of Egypt. Emmanual then started telling me about some of his adventures in the Middle East, when the radiologist showed up to escort me to the Imaging room. WelI, I was quite put-out at the interruption, sorry our chat had to end! What started out as a long, boring wait in a chilly, uncomfortable space, turned out to be a delight! Janice Lynch Schuster Early morning at the pool, swimming laps and kicking with the board, watching how others enter the water. I enter like a seal or a walrus, sliding down the edge of the wall feet first and completely, no dawdling for me lest the water be cold and take my breath away. Each swimmer has her own approach--some dip a toe in, then dive into the deep end. Those in the shallow water (like me) often swing their arms once or twice and jump. Others dip a toe, sense the cold, and wait a few moments, standing on the edge and surveying the twenty or so lanes of other swimmers, moving quietly along. Sooner or later, everyone must go all in. No one turns around once they have come this far.