Scenic Rural Indiana

August 2, 2013
Day 6
We enjoy a big (free) Amish breakfast at the Inn--love their hearty home baked raisin bread.  Then we visit the Menno-Hof Visitors’ Center for a multimedia presentation/museum experience that fills our heads with information about the history of the Anabaptist faiths and about the Mennonites and Amish folk that live around here.

We learn a lot (like even though people don’t often convert to the faith, the Amish population is growing, because birth control is prohibited and three fourths of children who grow up in the faith remain in the faith). 

 

But, our favorite part of the day is time spent just driving around the countryside admiring the farms and the beautiful horses grazing in the fields near every Amish home, seeing families in their buggies going about their errands.  Amish laundry drying on the clothesline has a simple beauty.  As do neatly planted fields, and men tending them with horse drawn machinery.

 

Here are a few of our favorite sights from Shipshewana and beyond.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meyer and Meijer in Grand Rapids

August 1, 2013
Day 5
Our hearty tasty big breakfast at our B&B, Peaches, begins with a crunchy lace tuile, molded into a cup shape and filled with fresh peaches.  Amazingly enough, the rest of the meal lives up to this flamboyant signature dish beginning.    

The Innkeeper, Jane, pops out to chat when she isn’t busy cooking for us (the only guests), and we reshape our tentative plans for the day after she suggests that we might want to visit a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright just a couple blocks away.  

But before we go to that house, a few words about the Peaches B&B house, which is architecturally notable in its own right. 

 

It was built in 1916 in an unusual style that Jane says is Georgian Manor style.   The entry door is unassumingly tucked around the side of the house, with a porch heavily curtained by wisteria, and fragrant with the aroma of lavender growing in the garden nearby.  The house is 8,000 square feet, including a lower level which originally served as a ball room, and now is a game room.  The first owner lived here for 62 years, and he had a couple of live in maids, a cook, a gardener, and some other help, which probably accounts for how much of the home’s original design elements remain intact, including all the pristinely white tile, the big slippery tub, and the quaint plumbing fixtures in our bathroom.  Jane has been living here and running her B&B for twenty years now, and her tender loving care shows. 

The Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house was built in 1910 for Meyer May, a Grand Rapids clothing store owner.  It stands in stark contrast to the other homes in the neighborhood--where the favorite styles seem to be variations of Victorian/Queen Anne and Neoclassical.

 

Meyer May was short in stature, and Wright designed the house to fit him, so the ceilings seem even lower than his normal Prairie style (on the front porch, one of the men in our tour who is six feet five inches tall has just one inch between the top of his head and the ceiling).   Like other Wright houses we have toured, the entry door is tucked away, the entry area is dark and cramped, and there is a dramatic opening and brightening of the space when you emerge into the main living area.  No hall closet--the coats of guests were collected by the maid and piled on the “wrap table” in the hall.

 

There are 117 leaded glass art windows in this house!  Frank Lloyd Wright designed or commissioned all the furniture, light fixtures, and rugs!  He didn’t choose the artwork, but put pegs on the ceiling molding where he would allow paintings to be hung.

The closets were designed with pull-out racks that held clothing on hangers, an unusual system for the time.  Meyer May was the first retailer in this country to display his merchandise on hangers in 1906, and he extended this practice into his home.

But, truly the most amazing thing about this house is the story of its rescue and renovation.  Unlike our B&B, this house had a troubled life.  Meyer Mayer lost his wife shortly after the house was built, and a few years later he married a woman with two children.  He had two, she had two, and the house, big as it was, only had two bedrooms for children.  So they built an addition to the house--one that was in keeping with the house’s style, but was not Wright designed or approved.  Then, the inevitable problem of Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie style homes started eating away at the house--there were leaks in the flat roof areas, and the wide, cantilevered eave overhangs began to droop. May died in 1936, and the house remained vacant and neglected for six years before it sold. Later owners compromised its architectural integrity by adding carports and additional entrances when part of it was subdivided to become student rental housing.  The students didn’t treat the place with kid gloves either.  

Enter the hero of the story--Steelcase--at that time a privately held company headquartered in Grand Rapids.  The owner of the company decided to rescue the house, and he spared no expense.  A fascinating film at the Visitor Center (the house next door, purchased for just that purpose) explained the painstaking process of bringing the May house back from a wreck to a museum-quality renovation/recreation of the home as it looked in the year 1911.  The process involved pulling off the sagging roof and totally restructuring it using a steel frame to provide support (so that it looked the same, but was far superior structurally than Wright’s version--which technically makes it inauthentic, but their goal was reproducing the look, and the end justified the means). 

 

Museum experts carefully stripped five coats of paint in the front hall to reveal a mural of hollyhocks painted by someone famous.  They had fabric woven to match a sample swatch located in Frank Lloyd Wright archives to ensure the authenticity of the dining room chairs. They hired the company that originally made the area rugs throughout the house to do them again, using the diagrams and fiber samples the rug company still had in their files.  Furniture that was commissioned but missing from the house was constructed using the original plans. They ripped down the addition and saved the bricks, which skilled masons used to rebuild parts of the original structure, using an unusual mortar technique involving different colors of mortar used in the vertical and the horizontal joints. The ornamental copper fittings outside were redone.  Basically, the whole place was taken apart and put back together again to look brand new.

 

As you can tell, we are enthralled with this home (although it would be hell to live here--Dick can’t help but notice that there is lots of standing water visible on the roofs--leakage just waiting to happen, the bathrooms all need major updating, and the lack of closets would drive us bonkers). 

We can’t decide which we enjoyed more--our morning at the Meyer May house or our afternoon wandering around the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park.  The gardens are mostly settings for the sculptures, which are spectacular.  And a lot of the gardens are wildflowers and meadows. 

The first sculpture we see is in the garden café, where a massive Chihuly rendition of  hundreds of glass flowers meanders over the ceiling.

 

Outside, here are some of our favorites:

 

 This is a mammoth statue envisioned and drawn by Leonardo da Vinci, but never executed during his lifetime.  A generous donor arranged for a renowned equestrienne and sculptor to execute the design--twice.  He donated one to this sculpture garden and one to an appreciative Leonardo site in Italy.

(I have the attributions for these sculptures in my notes somewhere, but am too tired to look them up right now.)

 

 

 

After a good long walk through the gardens, we are ready for another drive.  We need to start heading south toward Indiana, where we are looking forward to a visit with family in a couple days, and Dick gets a great idea for an interesting destination along the way.  We drive to Shipshewana, a town in the heart of Amish and Mennonite country, just over the border in Indiana. 

We arrive at the Blue Gate Garden Inn to find the last few rows of the parking lot are roped off for some very unusual cars--a week-long rendezvous of Kaiser and Fraser car owners is in process.  The cars were made 1945-55.  I hadn’t ever heard of them, and don’t recall seeing one before.  Dick thinks they are ugly, I think they are so odd that they are cute.

Of course we have to do the tourist thing and eat an Amish dinner.  Stuffed, I recall too late that you shouldn’t eat like the Amish if you don’t work like the Amish.

Having a Grand Time in Grand Rapids

July 31, 2013

Day 4

We wake to a morning that is overcast and chilly (at least for us), with alternating misty and wind-blown rain.  It is a perfect day for a visit to the Gerald Ford Presidential Museum--which is, in fact, the reason for our pilgrimage from Savannah all the way to Michigan.  

But first, we must do a little further exploration of a few places that caught our eye last night on Eighth Street in Holland, when we were too intent on finding a dining destination to stop and shop. 

We pop in Moynihan’s Art Gallery and Gifts, where we buy a fluffy ottoman covered in hundreds of colorful shredded fabric strips from India.  We saw it in the store window last night and knew it was destined to live with us.  We come for the ottoman and stay for quite a while admiring the artwork, a huge dimensional wall hanging ingeniously constructed of lots of tubes made from old neckties, and lots of unique internationally sourced home goods.

We grab big lattes to take the chill off the day at JT’s Coffee, where they have a side room with a huge Barrista School counter.  A video playing where we are waiting for our lattes shows how we could learn to make fancy designs in the foam of our espresso drinks if we attended Barrista School.  (However, we know that our $29 Mr. Coffee Espresso machine is incapable of producing foam of the correct consistency to make these designs, so we don’t eat our hearts out that we are missing out on this educational experience.) 

Our final stop is Reader’s World, a very laid back independent book store, with a great selection of beach reads and more heady stuff.  With a quick restock of our reading material, we are on our way to Grand Rapids, just twenty miles away (no backroads today). 

The Vice Presidential Museum provided a bit of an introduction to Gerald Ford yesterday, so we know that he was the only President who had not been elected to either the Presidency or the Vice Presidency.  But, at his Presidential Museum, we are surprised to find that Ford chose to remind us that he was not elected two times before we even get to the ticket counter--once through words engraved on the base of a bronze statue of him in the plaza out front of the museum, and again slightly paraphrased and engraved in stone in the foyer.  

 

These words from his swearing in address appear on the base of the statue:  

“I am acutely aware that you have not elected me as your President by your ballots, and so I ask you to confirm me as your President with your prayers. 

I have not campaigned either for the Presidency or the Vice Presidency.  I am indebted to no man, and to only one woman--my dear wife--as I begin this very difficult job.”  

In case anyone missed these words as they approached the museum, they would surely see them as they left--this quote is also engraved on an obelisk at the entry to President Ford’s burial site on the grounds of the museum. 

Like all the Presidential Museums we have visited, this one is packed with information that leads us to admire and appreciate Gerald Ford more than we did before we stepped through the doors.  As a museum curation panel says, “It was a unique moment in American history--the inauguration of the country’s first unelected President, in an atmosphere combining elements of personal tragedy, public scandal and popular uncertainty.” 

 

 

His overarching accomplishment was being a decent and honest enough person to restore the American people’s trust and faith in the office after both his predecessor Vice President and President had acted unethically and dishonestly enough to be forced out of office.  He only had thirty months in office, after all.  It is amazing that he could get much of anything done, but as his congressional colleagues said, “he’s a workhorse, not a show horse.” 

Gerald Ford's Oval Office replication

But, beyond the politics, here are a few things from his life before the Presidency that were interesting to us: 

He was born Leslie Lynch King Jr., named after his mother’s abusive first husband, whom she divorced six months after his birth.  She remarried a man named Gerald Ford three years later and renamed her son to be his step-father’s Junior. 

He joined the Boy Scouts at age 12 and attained the rank of Eagle Scout in two years.  He claimed that the virtues and principles he learned in scouting were an inspiration to him for the rest of his life.

His Yale Law School classmates included Superior Court Justices Potter Stewart and Byron White, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Sargent Shriver, Pennsylvania Governors Raymond Shafer and William Scranton, and US Senator Peter Dominick. Wow. 

We had forgotten about the two attempts on his life in September 1975--Charles Manson follower Squeaky Fromme shot at him in Sacramento September 4 and Sara Jane Moore tried to shoot him in San Francisco September 22. 

We could go on and on, but suffice it to say this was a man with a strong moral compass at a time when our nation sorely needed someone to chart a path.   

The usual First Lady vignette--fashion and table setting--is also here

And, of all the presidential museums we have visited, it gives the most attention to, and respect for, the influence and impact of the First Lady.  It credits Betty Ford with being an outspoken advocate of women’s rights and a tireless campaigner for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. She was an advocate for early breast cancer detection after her breast cancer diagnosis and surgery, leading countless other women to get checked--including the Vice President’s wife Happy Rockefeller, who was diagnosed and treated less than a month after Betty Ford’s diagnosis. 

 Her openness about her chemical dependency problems was lightly touched upon, as well, but that was pretty much after the Fords left the White House, and this Presidential Museum does not cover those years, even though Gerald Ford was our longest lived president to date, and served longer as a former President than any other President besides Hoover. 

I love this quote from Betty concerning her strategy for influencing her husband’s views on issues she cared about, women’s causes in particular: “I used everything, including pillow talk at the end of the day, when I figured he was most tired and vulnerable.”  

Speaking of being tired . . .

We are at Peaches, a Bed and Breakfast Inn located in the historic Heritage Hill neighborhood of Grand Rapids, and it is time for the bedtime part of Bed and Breakfast.

Why We Love Two Lane Highways

July 30, 2013
Day 3
We spend just about the whole day meandering from Richmond, Indiana to Holland, Michigan.   On expressways, we probably could have covered the distance in four hours or so, but look what we would have missed:

The road is lined with family farms.  Prideful barns, and barns that have been left to crumple.

 

 There are magic miles when the road becomes a path through green stalks of corn that tower above us on both sides.  Front yard tables hold summer squash, zucchini, and tomatoes for sale; a sign invites us up the driveway for brown eggs.  There are lots of farm implements, shiny and rusty--useful to the farmers and artful to us.

Our route is punctuated by small towns that proudly trace their heritage back to pioneers in the 1800s.  This is the Swiss clock tower in a lovely park in the center of Berne, Indiana.  The park commemorates the town’s founding by Swiss Mennonites in 1852.  

 

And the Mennonite heritage of the town lives on.

 

The crown jewel of the day is our chance discovery of the United States Vice Presidential Museum at the Dan Quale Center in Dan Quale’s hometown of Huntington, Indiana (population 17,400).

 

The Vice Presidential Museum--motto “Second to One”--traces the history of the Vice Presidency from John Adams through Joe Biden, with brief summaries of each Vice President’s individual contributions to the office or his special political circumstances.  A variety of historical artifacts document each Vice President’s accomplishments (or lack therof).

 

Since Dan Quale donated eight tons of records and artifacts, and no one else was so generous in endowing the place with stuff, he does get a bit more attention (and space) than the others.  And, he is accorded more respect here than he was by the press during his Vice Presidency. (Remember the extensive coverage of his misspelling of the word “potato” at a primary school spelling bee, and the derision spewed upon him for upholding traditional family values?) 

Forget about it.  He’s a hometown hero, and rightly so.  And, hey, Indiana is proud to boast of four other Vice Presidents, too--Colfax (with Grant 1869-73), Hendricks (with Cleveland 1885, he died eight months into his term), Fairbanks (with Teddy Roosevelt), and Marshall (with Wilson).   

Here are a few other things we learn that lead us to conclude that the Vice President was not really considered to be very important at all until pretty recently:  

There wasn’t a Vice Presidential residence in Washington until 1974, when the 33 room mansion on the US Naval Observatory Grounds was finally procured and adapted for that purpose.  One of the adaptations was the installation of bullet-proof glass in all the windows--a quality which we learn the Quale kids appreciated because they were able to play ball inside the house without fear of breaking a window.  

The first Vice President to actually have an office in the White House was Walter Mondale--who expanded the role of the Vice President considerably while serving with Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s.   

The 25^th Amendment of the Constitution provided a means for filling a Vice Presidential vacancy--the President appoints a replacement, who must be approved by a majority of both houses of Congress.  When this amendment was ratified in 1967, the office of the Vice President had been vacant for a cumulative period of 38 years.  Gerald Ford was the first Vice President sworn in under the terms of the 25^th Amendment, and he has the dubious distinction of being the only holder of the Presidency not elected to either it or the Vice Presidency (recall he was appointed by Nixon when Agnew resigned amid scandal).

John Garner, Vice President to Franklin Roosevelt, described the Vice Presidential office as “Not worth a bucket of warm s*it.”  (Not willing to be Roosevelt’s Vice President for a third term, Garner tried to run against him in 1940 and we know how well that turned out.)

Enough already.

 

Time for lunch.  And where better to go than Nick’s Kitchen, the Huntington Restaurant where Dan Quale began all his campaigns.  The Vice Presidential Museum even has a chair from Nick’s that Dan stood atop to announce his (alas?) unsuccessful bid to return to his office of Vice President for a second term.  

Nick’s Kitchen is famous in its own right, a Huntington institution for over 100 years, and the proud originator of the pork tenderloin sandwich, invented here in 1908.  Of course we have to sample the signature dish, which turns out to be way too big to fit in a bun (and to provide way more than one person’s appropriate calorie intake for an entire day). 

In the afternoon, we drive around the charming lakeside art colony of Saugatuck, which we last visited aboard Starsong.  This ferry has been crossing the Kalamazoo River there since 1838.  The ferry pilot propels it by turning a crank which pulls the ferry along an underwater chain.  It is a lovely five minute ride, as we recall.

Our final destination is Holland, Michigan, where we climb Mount Pisgah, a 157 foot sand dune that towers over Lake Macatawa to the east and Lake Michigan to the west.  To preserve the sensitive dune ecology, the climb route is a series of switchback stairways--239 steps in total.   We are rewarded with panoramic views at the top.

Back in downtown Holland, we notice a crowd gathering around an outdoor performance pavilion in the park.  A band concert is about to begin, but we are hungry and too tired to add yet another activity to this very long but lovely day.

Large to Small, God’s In Them All

July 29, 2013
Day 2
The Vagabond Glovers hit the road for a day of utility driving yesterday, and clicked back into true road trip mode today as we approached Cincinnati, our old homeland.
 

Just over the river in Northern Kentucky lie two Catholic churches that are scant miles apart geographically, but unfathomably distant from each other in every other way.  And, until today, we had not visited either one, although we passed within less than a mile of each one hundreds of times over the twenty some years we called Cincinnati home.

 

Our first stop is the tiny Monte Casino Chapel, built by Benedictine monks in 1878.  Measuring a mere six by nine feet, it was declared the world’s smallest church by Ripley’s back in 1922.  Sadly, the monks abandoned the monastery after Prohibition’s passage in 1920 eliminated their livelihood of maintaining vineyards and making wine here.  The chapel fell into disrepair, and thieves and vandals took their toll. 

 

 

Nearby Thomas More College (which was established by Benedictine sisters in 1921) moved the petite chapel to the College campus in 1965, where it was restored and rededicated in 1971.  Now the cycle continues, and it is falling back into ruin again.  Saplings have taken root in the roof.  The front door and stained glass windows are long gone--a padlocked gate in the doorframe prohibits entry, but allows a view of the sad state of this little chapel that no longer welcomes the faithful. Inside two grey plastic trash cans sit amidst plaster that has fallen from the cracked and moldy walls.  A hammer lies on the altar.  Yet, somehow, despite its decay, the chapel retains an aura of grace and beauty--at least when viewed from afar.

We resume our notable religious architecture pilgrimage, and within five minutes are standing awestruck within St. Mary’s Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption, dwarfed by its 81 foot high arched ceiling, transfixed by the glowing stained glass windows which comprise over 80 percent of the side and front walls of the sanctuary. 
 

The cornerstone was laid in 1895, and the church as we see it today was completed in 1915.  Its blown stained glass windows are intricate and exquisite.  The north transept window remains today the world’s largest blown stained glass window--67 feet by 24 feet. 

 

 

The rose windows are immense jewels, 26 feet in diameter.  The stations of the cross are highly detailed Venetian mosaic masterpieces of ceramic and mother of pearl tile.  Outside, the façade is a replica of the façade of Notre Dame Cathedral (albeit in about one third scale, and without the bell towers and all the carved detail--numerous portals and niches “await the creative genius of the next generation,” in the words of the Cathedral’s walking tour).

 

In other words, they ran out of money before it was finished.  A deacon volunteering at the church while we were there told me that someone donated enough money to carve one more saint into the façade, but he is sure it will not happen in his lifetime, due to the complicated church politics of deciding which saint would be carved and which niche filled.
 

How little blue collar Covington managed to become the home of this extraordinary religious treasure remains a mystery beyond our comprehension--like so much related to religion.