Paul Simons

Ann Shepard (Rueve)

My only experience with alcohol in high school was Orange Day. The only real vice that I had was sneaking a cigarette or two. 

Thought I’d share an article about the Union Terminal renovation. 

http://www.wvxu.org/post/behind-scenes-see-how-new-union-terminal-fountain-works

Stephen Collett

That is a great story, Richard, thank you. I am so glad you have checked in. I have felt a bit uncomfortable with the level of confession here, though I am glad we have started off at such a sober threshold. But it wasnt like that for me.

I also started with cigarettes early, say fourteen -first at an overnight party at Buchholtz`s, all of us going repeatedly out into the frosty yard to smoke cigarettes someone had. When the chance to drink came along I was all in. The opportunity came early and strong from the fraternity system. Again, I was one (I am grown up now) who was going to be trying alcohol. But as a freshman we were already courted and driven around and given drink, and that is what fraternity social life was about, largely. I regret now that I wasnt learning an instrument and playing in groups, for example. OK, we have a slew of good musicians from our lot, proff and good-time; that it was my own lack of gumption and perhaps musical talent. But the frat system had other social debilitators, that they were (so glad to hear this has changed) strictly racist /ethnic; that there were black, goyim and Jewish frats (and sors) with very little crossover, very limited official social interaction, more unofficial.

I think that students today are getting a lot more help with crossing group divisions and exploring creative potential. Can I start over?

Philip Spiess

So much to comment on here.  (Yeah, I know, you're probably saying, oh, god, here he goes again!)

First, I want to comment on the ubiquitous fraternity "punch," namely, a plastic garbage can filled with grain spirits and whatever juice and/or mixer may be at hand.  Although I have often heard of it -- certainly often in more recent times -- I have never actually witnessed it, thus revealing myself to be an elder both in custom and in age.  As a cultural historian who has spent the last five years or so of his retirement actively researching the history of cocktails and other drinks, and mixing and imbibing such, I can honestly say that the mind and spirit of a true toper recoil at the thought of said "punch," and that my tender aesthetic tendencies shudder at the prospect of such a drink, to say nothing of considering its vulgar presentation.  Persons, both male and female, who indulge in such pernicious potions and practices should be flogged in public -- because, obviously, they don't like to drink -- but they do like to get drunk.  (But I daresay they reap the rich rewarding and "heady" whirlwind of their behavior, each individually, on the morning after.)

Indeed, copious drinking, (and yes, I have done it in my time, and may still do it on occasion) is distinctly de trop:  even during Prohibition, the classic and iconic Martini glass was smaller than is often found now; the standard drink (per glass) of those times was -- and still should be, as a proper aperitif -- no more than 2 ounces total (regardless of what number of varied spirits you're mixing in your cocktail shaker) or 3 ounces at the most (how many times you fill your shaker and your glass is up to you).  The rise in the size of glasses (think of those balloon goblets that red wine was served in the 1970s and 1980s) began with the Tiki drinks craze in the late 1940s and 1950s, where the glasses had to accommodate, say, a slice each of orange, pineapple, lime, maybe banana, and perhaps a sprig of mint or Bouganvillea, etc.  Glass (and portion) size really took off when Vodka was introduced into the United States in a major way in the 1970s, and the merchants of vodka were seeking to foist off on the American public vodka-based sweet fruity drinks, including faux-Martinis mixed with fruit juices and given absurd Martini names.  The drinks got really big, and the drinkers got really drunk.  Connoisseurs of the present day, who have studied the matter as historic cocktail research and mixing has re-entered the scene at knowing bars in major cities (this includes new cocktails based on classic principles), agree that a drink does not have to be big -- or made of noxious ingredients -- to taste good and set you up for having a good time.  (Enough said.)

[A Note to Ann and Stephen on cigarettes:  At the back of the Walnut Hills library (under the dome), that is to say, the front of the building as it faces Victory Parkway, there is a small stairway-- obviously a fire escape from the library -- that comes out one floor below (on the main floor) near the school's front door (i.e., right next to what, in our day, was Mr. Brokamp's office).  Because this staircase passes a window (placed symmetrically on the facade), there is a significant, though hidden, enclosed space beneath the staircase, lit by said window.  You enter this space (if you so desire, as did Dale Gieringer and I in the year 1964, for reasons I won't mention here) by climbing between the stair-rail and the window and scooting down into the space.  I mention this here only because the floor of said space was littered with numerous cigarette butts, going back who-knows-how-many-years, possibly to my mother's time at good old WHHS, but offering distinct evidence of cigarette smoking going on in our day and others.]

Philip Spiess

Yes, I have more to say -- but on a different subject.  Ann, thank you for posting the article on Cincinnati Union Terminal; I hope others of you have read it, as did I.

Fitst, let me note (as a Cincinnati architectural historian) that I hope you all know that Cincinnati Union Terminal is not only one of the most important of Cincinnati's architectural landmarks, but that it is a national architectural landmark as well, namely of the Art Moderne era.  [N.B.:  The term Art Moderne refers to a style of architecture, as in Cincinnati Union Terminal;  the term Art Deco refers to a style of decoration, as is applied both to the inside and the outside of Cincinnati Union Terminal.]  It was the last of the great "union" terminals built in the United States (1929-1933) -- "union" because all of the seven railroads serving Cincinnati (the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad; the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad; the Pennsylvania Railroad; the Southern Railway; the Louisville & Nashville Railroad; the Norfolk & Western Railroad; and the "Big Four" Railroad), each of which had its own terminal in a different part of town, agreed to move their stations (terminals) to one great central location where all could be served (the idea was first proposed in 1905).  I won't go into more of this, except to say that the problem was that no space could be found downtown for such an enterprise; hence its site by the Mill Creek at the existing Lincoln Park, two miles northwest of downtown.  [Note:  Lincoln Park, if I can judge from old photographs, was nothing much; yes, it covered the area now covered by the Terminal's fountain and esplanade, and yes, it had a fountain in a central lake, representing a neriad or somesuch spouting a gyser of water -- it all looked pretty dusty, and I don't think it was missed.]

Cincinnati Union Terminal saw its grandest moments during World War II, when the vast movement of troops, supplies, and other passengers by rail warranted its scope and size (it was also significant that buses, streetcars, and automobiles each had their separate arrival and departure ramps, thus maintaining an easy flow of traffic, an idea picked up by Eero Saarinen when he designed Dulles International Airport outside of Washington, D. C.).  But after the war, passenger rail activity dropped significantly, and, by the late 1960s, Cincinnati Union Terminal had become nigh unto moribund.  In the late 1960s, the short-lived Cincinnati Science Museum moved into the Terminal's Rotunda and Concourse areas, but the building's distance from other centers of civic activity caused the museum to close about 1970.

Then disaster struck:  in 1972 Amtrak, the sole surviving passenger rail service to Cincinnati, moved its operation out of Cincinnati Union Terminal to a nondescript station under the 6th Street Viaduct, adjacent to some large trash heaps, which I described in a 1978 publication as being akin to "entering the city through its nether cheeks."  At the end of 1972, the Southern Railway System bought the Terminal's Concourse, the large back half from which passengers had departed or into which they had arrived, and announced that it planned to tear it down to make room for its "piggy-back" freight operation, which was too high to fit under the Concourse.  (Why the operation could not have been moved to the open tracks west of the Concourse, or why the tracks under the Concourse could not have been lowered the 12 inches necessary for clearance, has never been explained.)  In short, the Cincinnati City Council unconscionably withdrew landmark status from the Cincinnati Union Terminal, declaring it was not "historic," and the Concourse, its most usable space, was torn down; two years later the Southern Railway abandoned its "piggy-back" operation through Cincinnati, never having really carried it out, anyway.  (A last-minute effort, spearheaded by faculty and students from the University of Cincinnati's College of Design, Art and Architecture, managed to save the wonderful Art Deco murals of Cincinnati industries that decorated the Concourse; they were installed in Greater Cincinnati Airport in Kentucky, where they remain, though you can't always see them to good effect.)

The opening sentence in the article posted by Ann Shepard Rueve is a lie:  Union Terminal's fountain did not delight visitors since its inception in 1933; that fountain lay dormant, forsaken, filled with trash, and decaying for years before the present restoration rebuilt it (and I have the pictures to prove it!).  What delighted visitors to the Terminal over the years (aside from its decorations and the more recent museums) was the acoustical properties of the great arch of the dome:  I remember my grandfather taking me and my sister to the drinking fountain at the base of one side of the arch and saying, "Now stay here and listen!" -- and he then walked across the Rotunda to the drinking fountain at the base of the other end of the arch -- and he talked to us!  We could hear him perfectly, but we thought that his voice was coming out of the opening where you could get a paper cup to drink the water; we had no knowledge of acoustics in those days.  (You can get the same effect in the U. S. Capitol Building in the old House of Representatives, now "Statuary Hall," a fact which John Quincy Adams learned when he returned to the House after his Presidency -- and discovered that his desk was on the right spot to overhear the discussions of the opposition!)  

Paul Simons

Speaking of historical Cincinnati does anyone remember The Wheel and The Hub, downtown lunch establishments where what I can only call stout Cincinnati burghers could enjoy beer with lunch, which included free salad, all you wanted, pepper hash, really good? There was a sense of generosity, congeniality, conviviality that does still exist in some but not all places.

About booze - I have to remember it was a “thing” at parties, on weekends, also like smoking forbidden and thus more exciting, but everyone at that school was accomplished at something and booze was only a bit player in the whole movie in my opinion. Phil - I can't remember what fraternity or what college the plastic 55 gallons of alcohol and grapefruit juice drum was - Blomington Indiana? Columbus Ohio? I don't remember - but those things did exist.

Also I want to echo those who asked Rich Montague about the "white jeans incident". That brings up the whole jeans thing - it took a few years after high school for the culture to get it - to say wait a minute, all those cowboy heroes on theTV and movie screens are wearing jeans, blue jeans, holy crap, jeans are where it's at. Although some did have them ahead of the pack. In fact I had some kind of off-white ones that had some stretch, Levis, best I ever had, no longer available. Now a good pair of jeans that fit right cost a mint. I have heard it said that since early TV technology was incapable of producing the clean flat un-pixilated images we have now that we all learned to want clothes that resembled what we were seeing - that had a rough texture - jeans have that built in. And Levi jackets that were of course aided by movies like "Easy Rider".

Doug Gordon

(Rick, you were my hero back in those days for all the fun things you did that I didn't have the nerve for! )

From my own observations -- and especially observing the troubles that my son got into (!) -- it seems to be that the "illicit" things we used to do in high school have moved down to middle school; college hijinks are now standard in high school; and college is really out of control (yeah, we drank a LOT of beer in college, but now it's all hard liquor and worse). And I don't recall anyone getting into life-threatening situations due to alcohol consumption. Then again, I was in an engineering school and not Yale...

Philip Spiess

Paul:  The Wheel Cafe seemed to be one of the oldest eating establishments still left in downtown Cincinnati when we were youths (another was Grammer's German restaurant).  Though I never ate there, it was a long-time hangout of Republican-minded mayors and other politicians, who often did eat lunch there (and, I suspect distributed political largesse therefrom -- I think it was even owned by one of Cincinnati's mayors -- Walton Bachrach, I believe, and I think Carl Rich hung out there also -- in the 1960s).

I spent two years in graduate school at Indiana University (1970-1972) and, although I wasn't involved with my fraternity in those days, I don't recall any great tubs of "junk" drink being on campus (by the mid-1970s, apparently, weed and cocaine were popular in certain quarters) -- everybody (myself included) went for beer to a locally famous bar that annually won a national award for the "best college student tavern in the United States." Unfortunately, I can't remember its name (was it Kilroy's on Kirkwood?).  However, it was the place where, one night when I was suffering from a humongous cold, I told the waiter that I wanted "a hot lemonade laced with rum."  He said, "I'm sorry, sir; we don't serve that."  "The hell you don't!" I said; "I see people drinking hot tea over there with slices of lemon -- bring me a teapot of hot water, a plate of lemons, and a jigger of rum from the bar!"  He reluctantly did so, and I squeezed the lemons into the hot water, poured in the rum, added a dash or two of table sugar, and I was a happy camper.  It made me feel like a new man -- so I ordered another.  "Okay," said the waiter dubiously, "but this will be your last one, the bartender says."  "And why is that?" I said haughtily, with all the haught that a graduate student in his cups and carrying a walking stick can muster.  "Because," the waiter said, "other people are starting to order them!"  

Paul Simons

Phil your recollection just reminded me of a couple more of Cincinnati's stellar attractions. First the National Distillers plant along I-95 - I guess it was Hartwell, not quite out as far as Evendale -driving along you could smell that sweet sour mash they were using to make Old Grand Dad or Old Taylor or later Jim Beam . One of my college summer jobs was on the railroad that served that plant and I was in the warehouse, what I remember was a high ceiling and cases and cases of liquor from the ground up to it.

And then there's Mecklenburg's Beer Garden - if you like beer I guess this was the place to be. Also the finest liverwurst and onion on rye sandwich on earth, or anyway in Ohio. The place NOT to be for great beer anyway would have been the Varsity Mug Club where gallons and gallons of 3.2 beer flowed from taps into huge mugs into people and eventually via various processes back into the Ohio River.

ND also had the De Kuyper cordial brand - peach, peppermint, and other types of schnapps I guess - we had a great town. It isn't bad now with hickory barbeque smoke in the air from various purveyors.

Philip Spiess

Paul:  I well remember the National Distillers plant and the adjacent De Kuyper Cordials plant -- their odors, wafted on the spring air, were luscious.  (Probably what started me on my journey of investigating the history of drinking.)  I believe the Phillips Carey Manufacturing Company factory was just before you got to National Distillers, if you were heading north.

Mecklenburg's has a mixed history for me.  On my first day of Kindergarten at Clifton School (it being a half day), my mother took me and my then-best friend, Freddy Zacharias, and his mother, to lunch at Mecklenburg's Garden.  I had a simple (though ample) hamburger for lunch, and it was -- to my horror! -- heavily peppered (I did not like black pepper in those days, though that's certainly changed over many years of eating and cooking); I cried all the way home (I also got my thumb pinched in the folding front seat while getting into the car, which didn't help matters).  For some time after that, I loathed Mecklenburg's.  (I had a similar experience at an early age -- about six -- at what later turned out to be one of my favorite Cincinnati restaurants, the Central Oyster House on 5th Street, east of Fountain Square, of which I've spoken several times on this Forum; it was run by several generations of the Spicer family.  The first time I ate there, with my grandfather, I was served an oyster sandwich on rye bread, which I couldn't stand, either then or now, and I also got an oyster which was off-taste --"sour," as it were.  I went into a sulking fit -- a six-year-old version of "Get me out of here!"  I don't know when the change occurred, but oysters have been one of my very favorite foods for a very long time -- a tradition in our family since my childhood, which my wife and I still honor, is to have Scalloped Oysters on Christmas Eve.)  Needless to say, I went back to both Mecklenburg's and the Central Oyster House at some point early in my youth, and ended up at both many times, with a good time had by all.

However, over the years, Mecklenburg's has changed hands and cuisines about as often as the French have changed governments since the ancien regime held sway in Paris.  It had a bad fire somewhere in the early 1960s, and not long after that, the place was bought out by Hippies and turned into a sort of "Bean Sprouts-and-Me" establishment.  Those of us who reveled in good German (and Austrian) food immediately repaired to Lenhardt's on Macmillan Avenue near the university.  Eventually management changed again, and Mecklenburg's returned to a German cuisine, becoming a place where I could take visiting college friends in the summer for beer and Bratwurst under the grapevine arbors (the Cincinnati Zoo also served excellent Bratwurst, and we were known to inhabit the summer Bier-Garten atop the Wiedemann Brewery in Newport, Kentucky, as well, listening to the dulcet strains of the calliope concert from the Delta Queen across the river).  "Those were the days, my friend!"

Philip Spiess

Once more, friends, I feel I am speaking to myself -- and perhaps I am.  I have learned that some of you read these entries, but do not respond.  Have you no memories to share?  Have you no ideas to express?  Come on!  You're Walnut Hills students, with, I know, ideas of your own.  Why are we not hearing from you?  That, I believe, is the whole point of this ongoing Forum.  Are you too old, tired, and senile to rejoice in recollecting the days of our youth?  (Some of you, besides Larry Klein, Paul Simons, and me, must have eaten at Mecklenburg's Garden.)

But now (perhaps addressing myself in the mirror of remembrance), I'm going to write about the oncoming Hurricane Michael, or rather, its predecessors.  Have you ever asked yourselves why the U. S. Weather Bureau designates hurricanes (and no other storms) by human names (originally female names only)?  (And why, I'll ask you directly, have you been so incurious about life in these United States, that you have never asked yourselves that question?  I'll repeat:  you're Walnut Hills students; inquiring minds should want to know!)  Well, being, in my high school youth, a habitue of the Acres of Books used bookstore on Main Street in downtown Cincinnati, I discovered a book, Storm, by George R. Stewart (1941), that details, in novel form, the progress of a major storm across the Pacific Ocean and onto San Francisco and, as a serious snow storm, crosses California.  The book follows several major characters who have to interact with the storm as it progresses, one a young Weather Bureau scientist who tracks the storm's progress, and one a young lineman who has to deal with fallen wires in the sleet and snow.  As a youth, I found it gripping.  Why do I bring it up now?  Because the young Weather Bureau scientist who tracks the various storms forming over the Pacific, some of them major, some of them not, gives each of them female names, by which he can track them more easily.  This idea was immediately picked up for major storms (hurricanes, to be specific) by the U. S. Weather Bureau shortly after the book was published, and became established practice thereafter.  (The alternating use of masculine names with female names came into use, as you may surmise, when gender equality became a political/social issue.)  Stewart later published a similar book, Fire (1948), about Californians fighting forest fires in the West, but it doesn't maintain the glow that Storm does.

Paul Simons

I understand your frustration Phil and I can reply, not about the historical markers in hurricane study and naming, but about Bertrand Smith's 'Acres Of Books'. It was a perfect example of the late lamented stand-alone, non-chain bookstore, or so I thought until one minute ago. I had heard that Bertrand Smith was blind and Googled him and his store and found out there was a Bertrand Smith's Acres Of Books in Santa Monica, California. All these years I thought it was as Cincinnati as Oscar Robertson or a Skyline 4-way or a Frisch's Big Boy or Pete Rose and I was wrong. Oh well, we can all be wrong at times, even those who ascend to high office and still claim that burning one trillion tons of fossil fuels a year does not generate heat, leading to the type of hurricane Phil mentioned in his entry just prior to this one. We can all be wrong but we can also be careful from whom we buy used cars. This is non-partisan - it's actually self-criticism since I bought my my first car, a 1957 Plymouth, from a salesman named Sandy Leach who had a lot bearing his name in one of the tougher sections of Reading Road or Vine Street and I should have known better.

Jeff Daum

Phil, re your post #3685, I offer as means of an excuse for my lack of participation of late: being up to my neck in image editing from our month long trip to Africa (see my earlier post #3651).  I certainly appreciate your continued efforts on this forum and the font of information you share.

Philip Spiess

Jeff:  Keep posting those pictures!

Bruce Fette

Phil,

I am sure everyone enjoys your contributions to this forum, even though we are busy and less responsive. And of course we also think your contributions to the political dialog on the other email reflector are also extremely relevant. Keep up the great perspectives!  

Bruce

Dale Gieringer

    On the subject of restaurants of bygone days, does anyone remember Mills cafeteria? As I recall, it was in a building on 4th Street between Vine and Race, with a conspicuous neon sign in the shape of a Dutch windmill over the sidewalk outside.  I have fond boyhood memories of visiting there with my grandparents.     It was the first cafeteria I ever visited (not counting the lunch cafeteria at Westwood School, where I ate just two times and never returned after  being served an absolutely disgusting stuffed pork cutlet).  I loved sliding my tray on the rails past the trays of cottage cheese, roast beef, jello, mashed potatoes and macaroni.   What can I say?  I was easy to please at that age.  Above all, I loved Mills' blueberry pie.   Looking back on it, I don't think it was any better than the blueberry pie you can buy today at Krogers or Safeway, but blueberry pie was harder to come by in those days.

Philip Spiess

We ate at Mills' Cafeteria (one of the few cafeterias, I think, in downtown Cincinnati at that time) every once in awhile (south side of 4th Street).  I always admired the murals of Dutch scenes on the walls -- sea-scapes, if I recall.  Then suddenly Mills' was gone.  Imagine my surprise years later to discover that two of the Mills' murals had suddenly shown up on display in the "Cincinnati Arts" collections section of the Cincinnati Art Museum (maybe opened about twenty years ago now, but I, for one, am thrilled that someone on staff had the sense to recognize -- and present -- a local and important artistic heritage -- silver, ceramics, wood-carving, etc.!).  I don't know who painted the Mills' murals, but I suppose perhaps that it might have been a local artist, thus their emergence in that collection.

As an historian of Cincinnati since I was 16 (at least), I've tracked numerous historic artifacts that have suddenly reappeared in Cincinnati:  the columns from the U. S. Post Office and Customs House on 4th Street (a lovely Greek Revival Building) that was torn down (in, I think, the late 1880s or early 1890s), which suddenly reappeared in Carthage as the facade of the Longview State Hospital for the Insane -- but which have now disappeared again (when it was torn down); the impressive iron gates of Clifton's Balch mansion ("Dalvay"), which, when that site on Clifton Avenue at McAlpin became the new Clifton School, ended up in College Hill at the "Pizza King's" mansion, "Laurel Court," the former Archbishop's Palace of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati; the 10-foot in diameter (or more) round stained-glass windows from the old Victorian Cincinnati Public Library (of which I'll write another time), which was torn down in the mid-1950s when Carl Vitz, the director, built the then-modern (and still the) main Cincinnati Public Library at the head of Piatt and Garfield Parks (then next to the Gayety Burlesque Theater) -- which I discovered some thirty or more years later in the entrance to a popular pizza parlor which had just then opened on the Cincinnati waterfront near the West End Power Station!  I won't even mention the Rookwood Pottery tiles my father collected from Mount Adams when the Pottery closed in the early 1950s; suffice it to say that the largest one (6 feet by 6 feet, a perforated entrance hall screen, which stood in our garage in Clifton for years) is now in the collections of the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution.

Philip Spiess

Uh!  I hate to come in again, but I must respond to Paul Simons' comment on Bertrand Smith's "Acres of Books" on Main Street.  I knew the Bertrand Smith of Cincinnati's "Acres of Books"; I don't know that he was blind, but he did have poor eyesight.  More importantly, while he was not a hunchback, he was severely bent over when he walked, which is why he spent most of his time in his office on the mezzanine floor at the front of the first floor of "Acres of Books."  Whatever, he knew the book trade, and many of the more historic books in my library -- particularly my Cincinnati collection -- have, in the front, the imprint sticker of "Acres of Books."  When he died (don't know the year), I heard that he had given the store and its contents, in his will, to his assistant, a man whose name I never knew, but who I assume was the very slim and quiet gentleman who always actually waited on me, carefully wrapping my many book purchases of the day in plain brown wrapping paper, much as a Parisian fishmonger might wrap up the day's fish purchase to take home.

Paul:  I will check into that California "Acres of Books."  Did he have a son?  Did his assistant move westward?  I do not know; your news is news to me.  What I can verify is that, years before Amazon or Barnes & Noble, the Bert Smith's concern I knew was no chain store:  his establishment, as dusty as it was (and yes, on the top floor there were two things that excited my derision:  an ancient wooden bar, on the mirror of which was the slogan:  "No Irish Need Apply," and two shelves worth of books -- obviously never sold -- which were entitled "How to Be a Successful Writer"), was far more stimulating than the Ohio Book Store up the street or the "chi-chi" bookstore on Garfield Place, which hardly ever had any book I wanted to buy.

Paul Simons

You can just make out "LONG BEACH BLVD". Maybe he did have a son - there's a Wikipedia entry that I don't have time to read right now. I remember our Mr. Smith as well Phil - bent over, blind, on that upper floor of our Acres Of books, ripping up books that were being discarded. He had a particular way of ripping the pages from the binding. I don't know the ins and outs of this - it's hard to understand a lover of books being nearly blind and also ripping them up, but that's what I witnessed.

I have to weigh in - sadly weigh in at more than my high school weight - about Cincinnati cafeterias. Anyone remember one in the lower level of the Netherland Hotel downtown? The first place I ever had a veal cutlet with heavy yellow sauce on it, very good. But for decades since finding out how veal calves are treated I didn't touch the stuff. It's a staple at Italian restaurants and I did have a veal and peppers dinner about 15 years ago.Recently I tried a bite of it from a friend's dinner a few weeks ago and did't like it at all. That's my story, whether certain individuals believe it or not, and the FBI can confirm it if they want to.

Philip Spiess

Wa-a-l-l, I'm dumbfounded.  Paul, I looked up the article you mentioned on Wikipedia, and . . . I'm dumbfounded.  Turns out (if you read through several articles) that the real Bertrand Smith (1874-1965) "was an established Cincinnati bookseller" who "founded Acres of Books in Cincinnati in 1927.  He moved to Long Beach, California, in 1934 and opened his Acres of Books there."  Who knew?  So who was the old bent-over guy on the mezzanine in Cincinnati?

Paul Simons

Exactly Phil. Not only the Wikipedia entry - there are many references to the person and the store and they're all on Long Beach Blvd in California. I don't get it either. The only conclusion is that the great philosopher and mathematician Kanye Kardashian is correct in his assertion, made in the august chambers of another professor of astrophysics, economics, sorcery, witchcraft, and criminology, the name escapes me - of the existence of a multiverse which we unfortunately share with the two aforementioned learned gentlemen. Since that is the explanation they espouse it must be true. It must be said that the latter of the two esteemed natural aristocrats has made quite a specialty of the identification, hunting, and incarceration, or "locking up" of witches - a trade with a revered tradition in our great nation. It's about time someone revived the discipline, isn't it? Salem was a long time ago. What they were doing in Massachusetts was every bit as enlightened as what they were doing in Georgia, Alabama , and Virginia. Wonderful folks. About time someone is bringing that greatness back, as it was practiced in both the North and the South.

Philip Spiess

Any help I can give, Paul.  Fortunately, I have in my voluminous (no pun intended -- ha, right!) library a copy of the professional manual for witch hunters, Church Inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger's infamous Malleus Maleficarum [The Hammer of Witches], issued under a Bull from Pope Innocent VIII in 1484 to root out heresy and evildoing.  (Apparently it wasn't very successful:  we have much of both with us still.)  Naytheless, if you need me to shovel some advice your way from this handy volume (for example, when to use the trial by red-hot iron), just say the word!

Jeff Daum

OK Phil, I was going to post a couple of more images from our African Silverback Gorilla and Mountain Chimpanzee treks per your kind request, but for whatever reason the WHHS site will not allow me to post images either from my computer or from a URL at this time.  So, instead, here is a link to the Silverbacks https://www.daumphotography.com/Nature-Images/Gorillas/ and one to the Chimpanzees https://www.daumphotography.com/Nature-Images/Chimpanzees/ that hopefully will work.

It was truly facsinating to observe these Great Apes in situ.  Presuming the links work, you can simply view the thumbnail images, or click on any one, and it should go to a larger size.

Philip Spiess

Thanks, Jeff!

David Buchholz

I'll make this post strictly as I do almost all of my others, photographic, not political.  Jadyne and I just spent eight days in Islamic Morocco and found that our Moroccan hosts were kind, generous, hospitable, warm, friendly, knowledgeable about America and American politics, and last, bewildered by the anti-Islamic attitudes that come from a country wholly changed in so many ways from an America that they felt they knew.  So here are five images from our trip, and a link to the others at the end.

http://www.davidkbuchholz.com/new-gallery-46/