Robert Pence

... and the Chicago and State - Lake Theatres in the foreground.

Every house that I've lived in is still standing, clear back to the one my parents were building in 1939 when I was born, including the rental we lived in until they got their new house marginally habitable. The first winter, we lived in a basement covered over with the first floor and tarps and heated with a wood stove. Every school I ever attended, though, from kindergarten at Lincoln School in Decatur, Indiana, to the 1923 Bluffton High School building where I graduated in 1957, has been torn down. The 1955 auditorium/gym addition to the high school still stands and it used for worship services by a church and for community theatre productions. Every employer I ever worked for has been sold or closed or is near abandonment, except the last two, Lincoln Financial and IBM. Oh. And except for the US Air Force, which is now under the control of a mentally-impaired lunatic.

Golly Darn! Cleveland is just too festive for a fella' my age! :wink: Great pics; the Tremont event looks like lots of hometown fun. Some of those Breuer Tower concepts make me think Adobe should revoke some folks' Photoshop licenses. On the other hand, maybe they could incorporate the salvaged Hulett into a parking garage. Instead of ramps, they could use it to transfer cars between the street and various levels of the garage. Great space efficiency, unique attraction, historic preservation. :weird:

“If people want special amenities for bikes, they need to find a way to fund them,” says Craig Flynn, a Parkrose resident who ran for Metro Council in 2002 and speaks around town on transportation and density issues. “If bikes are getting more than their fair share, they need to find a way to fund it through their user fees. We need money for cars.” I don't object to the "user pays" concept. To achieve the quickest, largest impact, we should start with cars, because they incur the greatest overall costs. Equip cars with event recorders that keep track of gps info, speed, and engine sensor data (to monitor emissions). At annual registration renewal, recorder data can be used to compute the owner's share of public infrastructure costs, and the amount can be added to the registration fee. That's much more equitable than taxing people who don't own cars, in order to pay for amenities for car users.

That's splendid countryside, and you do an excellent job of capturing it with your camera.

Very nice. Looks like a perfect place to raise children; fortunately, I don't have any.

Beautiful shots!

I love county fairs! This year I've been mired down in so much stuff I haven't made it to any.

Tremendous variety of creative designs! Some are whimsical, and some are beautifully crafted. I never knew about the dome on the current courthouse tower. It looks a lot better with the dome in the old photo, not so incongruous.

I think the sunken garden at Lakeside Park dates from the early 1900s. My mom grew up near there in the 1920s (not on Forest Park Boulevard, but the working-class neighborhood to the west of there), and family photos from that era show the park well-established with mature trees by then. Time had taken its toll on the landscaping and the concrete work was eroded and deteriorated from years of freeze-thaw cycles, and about a year ago the garden underwent a half-million-dollar restoration. All the concrete structures were removed, including the fountains/pools, and recreated according to the original plans and designs. They did a first-class job. As you can seen from the photos, it's a popular place for weddings.

At last! I've been waiting eagerly to see these! Nice coverage. The historic home tour on Forest Park Boulevard that day was a great success; Jon said they ran out of printed tickets, and had to xerox more. It was a near-perfect day; the showers earlier made everything fresh and lush green, and the temperatures were mild. The area was looking its very best. I especially like this shot. It shows off the formal symmetry of the design:

Beautiful and fascinating photos. Your grandpa is a talented photographer.

Splendid view. I can't imagine what it would be like to live someplace like that. I think Seicer's photo of the Roebling Bridge works best with that streetlight out. Had it been working at full intensity, it would have created a foreground glare that would have washed out a lot of the detail.

Are Rich & ColDay giving you a gold watch in honor of your service?

Downtown Dayton's Gritty Edge - July 13, 2007 No comments, because I don't know anything about it. Just photos. Anybody who knows any background info is welcome to fill it in. Looks lovely on the outside, but it's a mostly-gutted shell with a huge round hole in the roof.

Fun times!

New Idea was a popular machinery line for a long time. They had a pretty full line, but the most popular items where I grew up were manure spreaders, hay mowers, and corn planters and pickers. The Amish have some New Idea corn pickers that they pull with horses. I don't know if they were factory built that way, or if they were modifications by a local mechanic; instead of being driven from a tractor's power take-off, they're powered from a large ground wheel, like a binder. They generally use eight-horse hitches to pull them, and they keep two teams in the field and trade off every half hour or so to let the horses rest. One large farmer near Harlan, Indiana, runs two pickers during fall harvest. That's 32 horses in the field, sixteen working and sixteen resting, and it keeps a bunch of boys busy watering them and looking after them.

Ironic, isn't it? Midwesterners with allergies used to move to Phoenix to escape the pollen and pollutants, and then their cars and their obsession with non-indigenous, water-hungry landscaping, combined with the geographic proneness for inversions, made the air quality worse than the places they left.

Wonderful views and a pretty good catch-up. It's good to see you've returned.

^Very good dating tips! Uh-huh. Reminds me of the time I met a rather drunk cute guy at a party. I found out later that night that he was married, but that wasn't the half of it. A couple of days later, he showed up on my doorstep, suitcase in hand, having left his wife and expecting to live happily ever after. :-o Cruel, self-centered heartbreaker I am. :x

Elegant! That's the nice thing about Midwestern cities & towns. Our sidewalks may be narrow, but they're never crowded! :wink:

Ewwww! :weird: :roll:

Of course we do. I'd venture that most of "us" can spot a drag queen quicker than most straight guys can. :roll: :-D Edit: I meant to say, "Of course we know what a girl is."

The 900-acre Carriage Hill Metropark, just north of I-70 on the east side of Ohio 201, is part of the Five Rivers Metropark System, and includes Carriage Hill Farm. The farm is a working farm set in the 1880s, staffed with historical interpreters in period costume and comprised of several buildings dating from the 1830s to the 1870s equipped with the materials and tools of farming of the period. It's on rolling, partly forested land. After a few hours walking around downtown on concrete, it was great to be away from the noise, walking in tall grass, feeling the breeze, and hearing birds. This house is a log cabin that was sided over in 1876. The wood shop is equipped with tools used to repair, restore and construct farm buildings. A shed on the end of the wood shop houses the Empire portable steam engine used to power the threshing machine. The blacksmith shop has all the tools needed to make hinges, latches, and parts/repairs for farm tools and implements. By far the biggest Catalpa tree I've ever seen! Summer kitchen and wash house. In summer, cooking was done in this open, screened building instead of in the house's kitchen. A cast-iron cookstove in an adjoining room took the place of the fireplace for cooking. Brick ovens were heated by building a wood fire inside. Wood was burned until the bricks got hot enough that the soot was burned off, and then the wood and ashes were raked out and the goods to be baked were put in. The things that took longest to bake, like bread, went in first, and things that baked quickly, like cookies, went in last. Each item was then taken out when it was done. It took practice to get it right. Hay mower Hay rake Water wagon to supply water to a steam engine. In a day's threshing, a steam engine can consume a thousand gallons of water or more, and it was often the job of some of the boys to take the wagon to a pond, creek or well and fill it with water, and then transfer the water to holding tanks on or near the steam engine. Percheron draft horses For some jobs, mules are better than horses

I'm grateful to Kunstler. He says it all, and much more eloquently than I could, saving me the time and trouble.