I bet you always wondered where Ronald Reagan went to college, didn’t you? I’d driven by a million times but I finally detoured and photographed the leafy campus of Eureka College in Central Illinois. Unlike many other small colleges around the country, it is holding on and continuing to enroll students. Like any Midwestern university,…
Tag: Americana
The Day The Music Died
The plane carrying Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens didn’t make it very far, and it crashed in a field several miles north of Clear Lake. The local news has a good summary of the cause of the crash, so I won’t rehash it here. Unlike the freezing cold, snowy winter night of…
Surf Ballroom, Clear Lake, Iowa
Buddy Holly played the Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis on April 15, 1958. Less than a year later, he, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens would be crisscrossing the Upper Midwest in the dead of winter, hitting small ballrooms such as the Surf Ballroom in the small town of Clear Lake on the shore of…
Tina and Ike Turner Haunts
I recently read Tina Turner’s autobiography, and I thought it would be interesting to see if any of the places in the book were still standing. To put it bluntly, most of the famous clubs where rock n’ roll began (yes, it began here in St. Louis, but our leaders are so bad at their…
Metropolis, Illinois
It dawned on me when we visited Metropolis, Illinois, which in no way has any connection to the Superman comics other than its name, that if you have innovative business leaders, you can create a tourist economy anywhere. There are at least a half dozen shops selling memorabilia and other knickknacks up the street from…
The Pony Express and Patee House, St. Joseph
Moving up into the hills of St. Joseph, we encounter the Patee House Hotel (pronounced “Pay-tea,” no accent on the first e), which played a critical role as the offices for the Pony Express and is now an eclectic and fun museum. Heavily influenced by an early Italianate style, the most stylish hotel in St….
Joseph Robidoux IV and Jesse James, St. Joseph
It was a little later, in 1843, that St. Joseph was incorporated as a city, laid on the groundwork of a French American Joseph Robidoux IV. His mark on the city is still present to this day in the east-west streets coming out of downtown, which are named after his children. Robidoux was active in…
Dad’s Cookies
314 Day is tomorrow and I wanted to bring you a great story the day before about a St. Louis Institution. Everyone knows about Dad’s Cookies in Dutchtown, but did you know that it was originally part of a chain out of Los Angeles? They are the last store to survive after every other one…
Wally’s, Fenton
Coming back from a wonderful lecture on the history of the John Busch Brewery at the Washington Historical Society, I thought it would be fun to stop at Wally’s Great American Roadtrip in Fenton off Interstate 44. It is huge! Just look at all of those gas pumps! I assume this is Wally? Your kids…
Auburn Avenue, Mount Auburn, Cincinnati
Mount Auburn? That sounds interesting, I thought to myself, and then discovered that there was a historic site related to future president William Howard Taft. After taking a terrible photo of his boyhood home, I photographed many of the houses along Auburn Avenue, which follows the crest of the hill. The siting of Mount Auburn…