Front yard, originally uploaded by Hawk3ye.

Thanks to Mr. Brown Thumb for prodding me to make a front garden update! Although now that I have run outside with my camera, edited and uploaded my photos, answered a few emails, and generally goofed around, it is almost time to pick up the Little Guy from daycare. So I will be brief:

First of all, I am very thankful for the grass that was planted on the corner. It looks different in any season, and always a spot of light in the garden! I’m not really sure of the variety.

My least favorite feature – the yews that flank the steps.  I’m fairly sure that I want to keep them to have some evergreens through the winter, but the shaping is not going so well.  I have been looking at some online photos and blogs trying to get ideas for how to tackle them.

The spiraea looked really cute in June, but now are looking quite wild and wooly again. The front burning bush is lovely and graceful, and the favorite napping place of Orange Cat (our neighbors’). The back burning bush has suffered a little in the heat, and you can see some leaves near the bottom have turned red. I wonder if I should take off all the small, bare lower spindles or leave them?

You can’t see it right now, but I have planted a lilac just over the fence. I hope that it will grow up to that horizontal dining room window and add yet another level to the landscape.

Finally, there’s our yellow maple tree in the backyard, down the brick path. I really don’t know what kind it is, but the color is always unusual in any season.

Today is my first day of full-time telecommuting. I don’t have the extra 40 minutes in the car each day listening to Kurt Vonnegut stories on audiobook, but I do potentially have a more interesting lunch environment than the suburban office park (although, minus the goose poop, that can be quite pretty).

Today I spent my 30-minute lunch cutting down last year’s decorative grasses from the front yard. Lo and behold, there were daffodils and Siberian squill and possibly tulips underneath!

I can’t wait to see what the blooms look like.

Seka Meets Lynch, originally uploaded by leznek.

I just spent a little time looking at my husband Jim’s photos on flickr. He tends to be selective about what he posts, including choice shots from his digital collection and others that were scans of school days, but every one seems to encapsulate a wonderful facet of his personality. They just hang together well as a collection. So just in case you haven’t before, click on “leznek” and browse around.

Cermak Plaza, originally uploaded by Hawk3ye.

I updated the tags on my Chicago set on flickr, and added a new photo of the cool Cermak Plaza sign from this weekend. I’ll have to try to get a better one of that sometime.

I really enjoy photographing these signs and buildings and will continue to expand this collection over the years. I think I have a lot more old photos in my files that should be in this set, including some black and white film photos that have not yet been scanned.

There are a ton of wonderful blogs about Chicago architecture and signage out there. To name a few that I read:

Uknavages at Wellpinit, 1955, originally uploaded by Hawk3ye.

I am just crazy for babies lately, and can’t stop cuddling my little baby Simon each night when I pick him up from daycare. I am really enjoying this photo of my mom & family. She was born in January 1955 in Tuscola, IL, but the family traveled to the Pacific Northwest that year to find mining work. They moved back to Illinois by the end of the year.

Here’s info from Aunt Pam:

Yes, that’s snow back there. We only lived in Wellpinit about five or six months, from about June of 1955 until November – moved out before the worst of winter hit. As I recall we are all dressed up in this photo because we were headed out on one of our rare excursions. This might have been the time we went to Seattle. I can’t remember. Mike remembers the chronology better than I do. This must have been an early snow that fell. Thanks for the compliment on the hair. I’m sure Mom did her best to make up presentable and not like a bunch of wild indians on the reservation At least your mom seems to be wearing a sweater.

More of Aunt Pam’s photo scans from Wellpinit: flickr.com/rdpamrussell

James William “Will” Webster Smith, aka “Smokey Bill,” was born Sept 10, 1890 in Providence, Webster county, Kentucky. He married Verla Leona Doss and had 9 children, 7 of whom lived to adulthood, including my grandmother, Mary Mildred Smith. His youngest daughter Barbara is the only one living currently. The family lived in Harco and several other coal towns in Saline county Illinois and Clay county Kentucky. Smokey Bill died in Harrisburg, Illinois in June 1970.

Below is a picture of great-Grandpa Smith (right) and a man identified on the back as Clarence Johnson. The photo postcard was probably taken between 1910 and 1920.

I always thought that, while handsome, Smokey Bill looked like a troublemaker or black sheep of some type in this photo — but I imagined it to be the slightly more glamorous life of a Shawneetown gangster, ladies man, gambler, or since he was born in the hills of Kentucky, maybe a moonshiner. But apparently his was the ignominious career of Chicken Thief. Below is some more detail from my aunt about her grandfather:

“[Cousin] Johnny confirmed that Grandpa Smith was an accomplished chicken thief. In fact, she said that Grandpa and a sister of Grandma’s (don’t know which one – must have occurred in Kentucky where the sisters lived) could go into a chicken house and steal chickens without any of them making a peep. I asked Bob about this and he told me there is a real knack to stealthily grabbing a chicken and putting it down into a bag without making it or the others erupt in loud clucks and squawks.

“By the way, in November of 1934 Grandpa was 44 – old enough to know better. But the thirties were tough times. Aunt Barbara was only two years old, Betty, five, Mildred, seven, Todge, nine, Toots, fourteen, Lou, seventeen, and J. G, twenty-one. I’ll bet J.G. was away in the Army. I have a feeling there are a lot of things about Smokey Bill we’ll never know. Cool things, like this .”

I absolutely love my family!

I really SHOULDN'T find this so funny... but it's over, so I can laugh.

Rufus Reuben Tucker, originally uploaded by Hawk3ye.

One night enjoying some brandy and babbling with my friends Tom & Kathy a long-forgotten family story popped into my head. Although it had always been there and to my mind was just as well-worn as most of my tales, apparently it was new to Tom & Kathy, and when I repeated it later, to Jim as well. So sit right back and you’ll hear the tale:

Rufus Reuben Tucker was one of those “no-good” relations that family has little nice to say about later (many apologies to cousins Judy & Bill Tucker & families). He was married to my grandpa’s much-loved sister Petrona, who died too young of breast cancer in the late sixties or early seventies. [Update Per AP: She had breast cancer at one time, but died of heart disease in 1975.] They had a bitter divorce and she destroyed most photos of him, so the one shown here is a rare specimen from the family archives.

The story I remember has to do with the famous 1938 radio broadcast of “The War of the Worlds.” You may have heard that the broadcast was mistaken for breaking news by American listeners and created a panic, although Wikipedia says this is largely a myth:

The War of the Worlds was an episode of the American radio drama anthology series Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was performed as a Halloween episode of the series on October 30, 1938 and aired over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network. Directed and narrated by Orson Welles, the episode was an adaptation of H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds.

The first two thirds of the 60-minute broadcast was presented as a series of simulated news bulletins, which suggested to many listeners that an actual Martian invasion was in progress. Compounding the issue was the fact that the Mercury Theatre on the Air was a ’sustaining show’ (i.e., it ran without commercial breaks), thus adding to the dramatic effect. Although there were sensationalist accounts in the press about a supposed panic, careful research has shown that while thousands were frightened, there is no evidence that people fled their homes or otherwise took action.[citation needed] The news-bulletin format was decried as cruelly deceptive by some newspapers and public figures, leading to an outcry against the perpetrators of the broadcast, but the episode launched Orson Welles to fame.

According to family lore, Rufus Reuben Tucker, then employed as much of my mom’s family was in the coal mines of Southern Illinois, was caught up in the (perhaps mythical) wave of panic. He grabbed up a coffee can containing his all of his young family’s savings, left wife and children behind, and hid down in the mine to escape the Martians.

The practicality of this move aside (do extra-terrestrials accept US currency?), you can imagine that forever after Reuben would have been known as 1) an ass, 2) a fool who believed the “War of the Worlds” broadcast was real, 3) a coward who immediately abandoned his wife & kids in the face of alien invasion, without seeing one flying saucer or little green man.

Flush with recent praise for this gem of a tale, I asked my Uknavage family if they remembered any more details. And none of them knew what I was talking about! What? Did I make it up? Did I overhear it sometime at a family gathering when neither of my aunts, my uncle, or my sister were present? It seems unlikely but possible.

We do have some video archives from the late 1980s of my grandpa & his aunt Susie — a couple of hours of old family stories in fact. So I have some research to do to find the source of this story, where Reuben & Petrona lived in 1938, what mine that might have been, how widespread the radio broadcast was in Southern Illinois, etc. Another fun mystery to be solved.

1890 Chicago Blue Book, originally uploaded by Hawk3ye.

I just read an amazing blog post by John Tolva about tracing his ancestors arrival in Chicago from Italy.

The blog reminded me that I had found an address for Jim’s ancestors at 259 Hermitage Avenue in Chicago, an address that no longer exists. Suddenly I have the resources to find out if that address might have been renumbered or to view what the map of that neighborhood looked like in 1890.

As for my own Chicago ancestors… When I chose to move to Chicago 12 years ago it was because I had grown to love the place during many weekend train trips throughout high school and college. My family, however, all lived in Kankakee & Iroquois counties in Illinois, with other relatives spread across Colorado & points west. As I’ve lived here though I have found that I do have roots in Chicago: My great-great-grandparents, Nikolaus Posing and Mary Virginia Bensler, left Luxembourg as young people on the same ship in 1882, and after a few years on the east coast, were reunited up in Chicago. They were married in Rogers Park (or “South Evanston” as it reads on the certificate) on September 19, 1887, and still lived there in 1890. By 1900 they had relocated to Kankakee County.

I think it’s about time to track down those Bruckers and Posings in Chicago history and stand for a time where they did.

Cats in Oma’s window, originally uploaded by Hawk3ye.

I lost two kitties this month. I miss Snatch and Tomas.