Tag: Bakeries

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Road Trip, Part 4, Packing List, Smith Falls State Park to Houston, June 20-22, 2025.

Kolache

It’s a toss-up between a good kolache1 and a good donut, but I’d probably choose the kolache because they’re less common. Pretty good donuts can be found in lots of places, but the best kolache are found only on the edge of the interstate in small towns. In Texas they’re common enough, and in one of the best things you can say about anyplace kolache are common in Nebraska.

Kolache are Czech, re-homed by Czech immigrants to Texas and the Midwest, and are most often compared to Danish. It’s not an apt comparison. Danish probably originated in Austria, are often glazed, and like croissant are made with a laminated dough. Kolache should never be glazed,2 or laminated, and they feature a mildly sweet pillowy yeast dough.

Kolache are about the size of a biscuit. The center depression is filled with either a fruit preserve, sweetened cream cheese, or sweetened poppy seeds. A kolache without any filling would be a tiny bread loaf, not a kolache, and there’s no such thing as a sausage kolache. Except there are sausage kolache, but more on that later.

Many years ago I witnessed a panel discussion by a group of Tex-Czech bakers, who said that traditional kolache were filled with prune preserves, sweetened farm cheese, or poppy seeds. The panel members had all grown up on small Central Texas farms during the Depression, and explained that their mothers baked the big three because prunes were very cheap, everybody–meaning every Czech farm family–had a cow and made their own farm cheese, and that there were always poppies in the farmyard. I guess that in addition to farm cheese all those Czech farm wives made their own opium.

Kolache are filled with all kinds of fruit, not just prunes. I’d probably eat any kolache offered, but if they’re available I usually order one or more of the big three: a farm cheese, poppy seed, or a prune. At the kolache counter in Hruska’s in Ellinger–which sells my favorite kolache and where there’s always a line–the woman behind the counter once beamed when I ordered all three and said that those were the three kinds of kolache that her mother always made. That touch of tradition made both of us happy.

I don’t know the history of Kolache in Nebraska, or even how I knew that Nebraska, like Texas, loves kolache, but we had a campsite reserved for three nights at Smith Falls State Park near Valentine, Nebraska. Since by the first morning we had our Nebraska fish (or more precisely I had my fish and Kris had decided not to fish), the next morning we packed up our campsite a day early and took a 150 mile frolic out of our way to Verdigre, Nebraska, the self-proclaimed Kolach Capitol of the World.3

The dough in Verdigre Bakery’s kolache is a little different from Texas kolache. It’s less puffy, denser, more bite sized. . . Maybe the dough is a bit less sweet. After extensive sampling I couldn’t tell any difference between Texas and Nebraska fillings. The picture above is of poppy seed, so I guess opium is also a farmyard cash crop in Nebraska.

The lady in the Verdigre Bakery said that Texans sometimes stop by for kolache, but that we always asked for sausage kolaches. Kolache with sausage are not actually kolache, but klobasnek (or pigs in a blanket). Calling klobasnek “sausage kolaches” is common usage in Texas, and they’re made with the same dough as kolache. Still, even if it’s common usage, the misuse greatly annoys some Tex-Czechs.4 Kolache lovers from other states are just confused.

From Verdigre we drove another 180 miles out of the way to Omaha, because we had never been to Omaha, and somewhere during the drive to Verdigre we decided that this was our big chance. The College World Series was scheduled to start the next day, and Omaha’s streets were crowded with LSU purple and gold. I didn’t see any Coastal Carolina fans, which was the other team in the Series, and like their fans the Coastal Carolina team didn’t show up much for the World Series. We saw the stadium, and the lively district around the stadium, then drove on to Wichita, Kansas, where we spent the night. During that round-about meandering we crossed into Iowa, so I guess we actually drove through nine states, not just eight. The next day we drove 560 miles home from Wichita, a day earlier than we had planned.

Gear

In Wyoming they told us to bring six weight rods, which is a heavier rod than is normal for trout, but these were big fish in heavy current, so a six weight was a good idea. In South Dakota we used five-weights, which is the most common rod for trout. I tried a three weight spey rod to fish the Niobara River, but that didn’t go too well. I had Winston rods, Kris had a very old 1991 Orvis Rocky Mountain six weight, and she said it was so heavy she could barely lift it.5 I suspect she might have been exaggerating just a bit. She also had an Orvis Helios 3 five weight, and there were no complaints from her about the five weight.

We only used cold water floating lines. In Wyoming and South Dakota we mostly fished with underwater nymphs under indicators. In Nebraska I caught those extraordinary bass on black Pat’s rubber legs fished as streamers.

Our Car

This was a road trip, so a few things about our car.

Pre-trip my car had about 50,000 miles on it. The week before the trip we had scheduled maintenance done, and on the dealer’s recommendation had a brake job and I replaced the battery. I had the tires rotated at Discount Tire. I installed a Victory 4×4 rear window molle panel and upper shelf for storage in the cargo area, and re-mounted the fly rod vault on the roof rack. The upper shelf and the rod vault were useful, the rear window molle panel wasn’t but it looked manly. The fly rod vault holds four assembled fly rods, and rod vaults are apparently required by law in Colorado. They’re certainly common enough.

In addition to the rod vault I bought a Pelican gear box and mounting hardware from REI. I got the smallest box to minimize wind resistance, but it didn’t hold enough stuff. I should have bought the largest size.

In Wisconsin years before our muskie guide had demonstrated the cargo drawers in his truck, and since then I’ve wanted a set for our SUV cargo area. Plenty of companies sell cargo drawers for pickups and SUVs, but they’re expensive, and I thought that I could build my own. It took me about three weeks of intermittent labor, and the result includes the appropriate number of design flaws. I built two 35″ wide drawers from side to side, 30″ deep from front to back. The lower drawer is about 10″ deep and the top 6″.

I loved the top drawer. I could throw in my sunglasses and reels and rod tubes, my fly boxes and maps and camera, and all the other smallish stuff that would otherwise be rattling around loose in the back of my car, but the stuff I put in the bottom drawer would have done better in a duffel. Or a larger roof box.

What’s worse, the two stacked drawers ate up the back of the SUV, and the first time I went to the grocery after installation I realized that except for the back seat I no longer had anyplace to put groceries. When we stacked duffels on the drawers we couldn’t really use the rearview mirror. The drawers will get rebuilt as two shallower drawers, hopefully by our next road trip.

By the time I rebuild the drawers I figure it will have cost me as much as buying pre-made drawers in the first place.

Buc-ee’s

Buc-ee’s is a chain of travel centers, placed strategically along Texas interstates. The first Buc-ee’s was near Houston in Clute (home of The Great Texas Mosquito Festival). I have a love-hate relationship with Buc-ee’s. Once when I fished Matagorda Bay I parked my car for the day in an out-of-the-way corner of Buc-ee’s Wharton parking lot, and management tagged my car with a semi-permanent sticker that told me to never, ever leave my car in a Buc-ee’s lot again. It took an hour of scraping to get the sticker and the residual glue off my car window. It wasn’t very neighborly, and a polite note would have gotten the message across. I also don’t trust their brisket or kolache (though I do give them points for having brisket and kolache), and I hate crowds. Buc-ee’s interstate travel centers are huge and are always crowded, though there are so many urinals in the men’s room that there’s never a line.

On the plus side for Buc-ee’s, there are things you have to respect. There are all those urinals and the bathrooms are immaculate. The gas is cheap. You can buy many strange and amusing things in Buc-ee’s, from barbecue pits to onesies for the grandchild, they don’t allow 18-wheelers, and they’re spaced along the major routes out of Houston just where you need ’em. They pay their employees well above the minimum wage.

Buc-ee’s has now spread beyond Texas, to, among other places, Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Florida. On this trip we found one north of Denver. Someday Buc-ee’s will be everywhere, and beaver nuggets and mediocre kolache will be available to everyone.

I made my peace with Buc-ee’s on this trip. I forgave them that window sticker and I suffered the crowds. I bought their relatively cheap gas. I even bought some parched corn and a Rice Crispie treat. I did not buy my grandchild a onesie.

Where We Stayed, What We Ate

Out of our 12 nights, we spent only three in hotels. Two of the hotels were unremarkable, a Holiday Inn Express in Amarillo and a Holiday Inn in Wichita, Kansas. The most expensive hotel, The Rally Hotel in downtown Denver, was across the street from Coors Field where we stopped for baseball. Both the hotel and Coors Field were great, though the Rockies not so much. At check-in they gave us free beer, which was friendly even if it was a Coors. Staying next to the stadium was almost worth the cost, and almost worth the drive through downtown Denver at rush hour.

Because Roo the dog was with us, we felt more comfortable leaving her in an AirBnB than in a hotel on the days we spent fishing. We spent four nights in an AirBnB in Wyoming and three in South Dakota, and both were fine. The one in Wyoming had the better view.

We camped two nights in Nebraska, which meant that our car was packed with camping gear. We’ve owned our tent for most of our marriage, more than 40 years, and it has survived a lot of use. This trip though one of the poles broke. We cobbled together a repair, but I wouldn’t trust it in hard weather. The tent may have seen its last road trip.

Because we were camping and staying in AirBnBs, we cooked a lot. At home we almost always cook, and I’d say we’re adventurous, competent cooks, but on this trip there was no adventure. We ate beef for dinner and bacon for breakfast. We ate steaks. We ate burgers. We ate more steaks and then we ate more burgers. We ate eggs and bacon with toast for breakfast.

We spent a lot of time in grocery stores, which is actually a pretty good way to get to know a place. Mack’s Market in Thermopolis, Wyoming, not only sells groceries, but it has its own liquor store inside, and a gun shop. What more does one need?

I think I’ve covered most of the trip’s restaurant stops in the other road trip sections, except for the pizzas we had in Lander and Thermopolis in Wyoming. This really was a junk food extravaganza. We also had donuts in Amarillo, which would make a pretty good country song, and in Fort Collins, Colorado, which would also make a pretty good country song. The donuts were ok, but I wouldn’t have picked them over a good kolache.

Where We Didn’t Go

I would have liked to see more rivers in Wyoming, and in September we are going to fish for a day in Yellowstone at the end of our Montana trip, probably on the Firehole. 6 I’m already thinking about a trip next May through Wyoming and back to the Green River in Utah.

I’d like to explore more of the streams in the Black Hills, but probably never will.

We didn’t stop for an onion burger when we drove through Oklahoma. We didn’t see the giant ball of twine in Kansas. I guess I’ll be remembered as the guy who never saw the giant ball of twine.

Playlist

I made playlists for Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming, but I have to admit we mostly listened to books while we were driving. “Willow, Weep for Me,” by the Nebraska composer Ann Ronnell was on the Nebraska playlist. It has been recorded by everybody, and we had versions by, among others, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Julie London, Sarah Vaughan, Lew Rawls, Tony Bennett, Barbra Streisand, Chad & Jeremy, and Sam Cooke. Ronnell also wrote “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf.”

Disney pigs, likely from Nebraska.

The other well-known song on the Nebraska list was “Nebraska” by Bruce Springsteen, foreshadowing New Jersey, which will likely be our last state. Omaha and Lincoln seem to have pretty lively alternative music scenes. Mannheim Steamroller is from Nebraska. I’m not a fan of Mannheim Steamroller.

Danielle Ate the Sandwich, from Nebraska and Colorado, plays a ukulele and sings. She is wonderful, witty, and fun.

Ooh, I've got soul, I've got soul
But you'd never know, never know
If you were stuck across the table from me
The terrible dinner guest

The Terrible Dinner Guest, Danielle Ate the Sandwich
Danielle Ate the Sandwich.

There are about 100 songs named “Wyoming,” and all of them are pretty good, though the rap song “Wyoming” by Afroman doesn’t live up to his classic, “Idaho.” The country singer Chris Ledoux is the best known musician from Wyoming, and he’s big on melodramatic story-telling, which for me is not quite the thing unless it involves either Laredo, El Paso, or a girl named Rosalita (also foreshadowing New Jersey).

The best song ever written about Wyoming is “Git Along Little Doggies.” This is jumping ahead, but the best song ever written about Montana is “I Ride an Old Paint.”

I never got around to much of a South Dakota list. The only person on my South Dakota list is Shawn Colvin, though I probably should have included “Born to Be Wild” as a nod to Sturgis. I always enjoy Shawn Colvin, though, so I’m ok with sticking to Shawn Colvin.

Guitar

I played the guitar a lot on this trip, probably because we cooked in our adopted homes and there was more free time in the evenings. In Nebraska, at the state park, after the failed attempt at spey casting on the Niobara River, I sat at our campground and played for a couple of hours while Kris went to Valentine to shop for steaks, bacon, and burgers. A woman with a Denver guitar shop tee shirt came over to talk to me about guitars, and invited us to their campfire that evening. It was a nice gesture, but when I went to bed at nine-ish the campfire hadn’t kicked off. I’m sorry. They might have known someplace to fish.

  1. The Czech singular for kolache is properly kolach, and the plural is kolache. The Texas usage of kolache as the singular and kolaches as the plural is not correct, but it makes a lot of sense to English speakers, and probably Spanish speakers as well. At various times I use all of them. Sometimes I suspect I use all of them in the same sentence. I’m betting my usage would make a Czech baker’s head spin. ↩︎
  2. In Schuelenberg, between Houston and San Antonio, there’s an otherwise good bakery that glazes its kolache. It’s unnecessary frippery, and I’ve only stopped for their kolache once. ↩︎
  3. Verdigre is home of an annual Kolach Days Festival. Wikipedia reports that Kolache are also available in other Midwestern states, including Minnesota, South Dakota, and Prague, Oklahoma. Both West, Texas, and Caldwell, Texas, claim to be the Kolache capitol of Texas, and West does have very good kolache. I’ve never had kolache in Caldwell. ↩︎
  4. Sausage kolache are not even Czech, but a Texas variant. The greatest kolache variant of all is from a Cambodian-owned donut shop in St. Charles, Louisiana, where instead of sausage they stuff their koblasnek with rice boudin. Brilliant. There are now boudin kolache at most independent donut shops in Houston. ↩︎
  5. Graphite fly rods are impossibly light, a matter of a couple of pounds and some stray ounces. What’s more, the newer graphite materials in modern rods allow thinner tip ends than rods from 30 years ago, so that when you’re swinging a nine-foot lever a modern rod will feel lighter than a 30 year-old rod of similar weight. The 30-year old rod Kris was fishing was pretty light, but it likely felt heavier than what she was used to. ↩︎
  6. Most of Yellowstone is in Wyoming. This is one of those factoids that always seems unnatural, like Kansas City being in Missouri. ↩︎
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Michigan and Ohio Packing List

I’m lumping these two states together. It’s hard to do them together, but it’s even harder to do them apart, and they do sit next to each other. So they’re lumped.

Gear

Our guides in both states wanted us to use their rods, which helps them because they can come to the launch with the rods rigged. We didn’t take rods at all. Lance in Michigan fished with 4-weight Winston rods, which meant that I was fishing with slightly lighter versions of what I would have lugged to Michigan anyway. Katie in Ohio fished with 7-weight G Loomis NRX or Sage rods, so I was fishing with different brands of the 7-weight that I would have lugged to Ohio.

In Michigan we used floating lines, same for Ohio except for a wee bit of sinking line fishing. I can’t imagine that anybody actually likes to fish with sinking lines. To cast with floating lines you just have to pick the line up off the top of the water. Now mind, that’s no easy task, and a good line pick-up is the heart of the cast, well, that and about a half-dozen other things that are also the heart of the cast, but with sinking lines you have to get the line to the top of the water before you can even begin to pick it up, and sinking lines are not known for casting easily anyway. The whole process is fraught with peril for everyone standing near me.

We also fished out of boats in both states, so in addition to not packing rods and reels we didn’t pack waders or boots. No waders, no boots, no rods, no reels . . . I did take some flies, and used a couple, but the guides had those too. It was the easiest packing ever.

Detroit

Detroit was a joy. Parts of it are still beat up, but I’ve never been in a town where people were prouder of their city. The first night at dinner at Alpino we asked our waiter if there was something in particular we should see, and he wrote out a page-long list of places for us. He recommended places for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He listed don’t-miss destinations and neighborhoods just to drive through. It was good advice, too. We spent parts of three days in Detroit, and could easily have spent three more, and we didn’t deviate much from our waiter’s advice.

The one place recommended by everyone we asked was the Detroit Institute of Art. We spent three hours there before we left for Grayling, and could have spent another four. We barely got off the third floor, which is the smallest floor. As museums go, it’s about as good as anywhere, and should be on everyone’s list of American art museums. I even fished while I was there.

Greek fish dish, between 340 and 330 BCE; Roman fish mosaic, 4th century A.D.; Detroit Institute of Art.

Detroit has a large Middle Eastern population, with estimates of over 300,000 people. Apparently the growth was a combination of the growth of the auto industry and the decline of the Ottoman Empire, which is pretty serendipitous if you ponder it, and was then spurred by the lifting of restrictions on Arabic and Asian immigration by the Immigration and Nationalization Act of 1965. The signage in Dearborn, for instance, is doubled in Arabic. We went to Dearborn for afternoon baked stuff at Shatila Bakery. No donuts, but a good bakery anyway.

Our Alpino waiter had suggested lunch at the Yemen Cafe, which was a diner in a fairly beat-up neighborhood. The cafe was busy with African Americans from the neighborhood and Yemenis in fairly traditional dress, including one guy wearing a jambiya dagger, the dagger that Peter O’Toole wears in Laurence of Arabia. Open carry.

Our waiter brought us free glasses of Yemeni tea to try. We ordered slabs of hot Yemeni bread, chicken gallaba with hummus, and lamb fasah. We were taking the advice of our Alpino waiter and didn’t know exactly what we were ordering, but sometimes ignorance is bliss.

Detroit was at it’s peak of wealth and industrial might in the 1920s and 1930s, and the Art Deco buildings from its heyday are magnificent. Our Alpino waiter suggested the Guardian Building and the Fisher Building, both of which have been preserved in fine form. It’s kinda like visiting the Sistine Chapel. You don’t so much comprehend it as just stand around and gawk. There were great mosaics in the Fisher Building, though I saw no fish.

Guardian Building, 1929

Fisher Building, 1928

The first morning we were in Detroit I went for a run along the Detroit River, and when I tripped on the sidewalk and sprawled, customs officers offered me a bottle of water. The guy running in front of me came back to make sure I was ok. Detroiters are not only proud of their city, they’re friendly.

We took the Detroit Windsor Tunnel to Canada, and no matter what you may have heard I didn’t go there to buy Cuban cigars. Windsor looks like a good place to go if you’re in the market for cannabis, or a tattoo, or Cuban cigars. Cigars are heavily taxed and expensive in Canada, not that I would know.

We didn’t get to see the Tigers play because they were on the road, and I’m kinda glad. it gives me an excuse to revisit Detroit.

The first night we picked Alpino for dinner because it was the kind of Germanic high cuisine that we don’t really get in Houston. Alpino serves food from the Alps, which is German tinged with Swiss tinged with Italian, which makes for a nice combination. The food was good, our tour guide/waiter was great.

Our second night in Detroit we ate at Buddy’s Pizza, which first served Detroit-style pizza. Buddy’s was a Detroit bar, a former speakeasy, and it started serving pizza as a bar snack in the 40s. Square pizza is Sicilian, and the first pizzas were baked in liberated drip pans from the plants. I like to think of the pans as liberated anyway, though in truth they were apparently purchased from auto suppliers. Liberated drip pans just has a nice ring to it.

There are now multiple Buddy’s in the Detroit area, and I’m sure they’re all fine, but the original location reeks of authenticity. On the way in we asked an employee standing near the back door which pizza we should get. He told us his favorite was the Detroiter. Well of course it was.

He was a waiter but not our waiter, but before we left he went out of his way to visit our table and make sure we liked the pizza. Like I said, everyone was proud of their city, and who wouldn’t be? We really liked Detroit.

Cincinatti

After a day’s fishing in Ohio we spent two nights in Cincinatti. We went to a Reds game. We visited the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. I ate a hot dog with Skyline Chili and cheese, and we sat on a nice downtown square and listened to a lively band during Cincinnati’s Oktoberfest. We ate dinner at a completely forgettable restaurant, then we ate dinner the next night at another completely forgettable restaurant. We went to Graeter’s Ice Cream, and visited in line with two American Airlines flight attendants flying out of Dallas. It was nice enough, but it suffered in comparison to Detroit.

Skyline Chili, by the way, is actually a Greek ragu sauce usually served on spaghetti. It was dubbed as chili during the nationwide chili craze in the early part of the last century. It is not chili, and for Texans, calling it chili is heresy. It has cinnamon in it, and chocolate. I’ll just note that the Cincinnati Reds in recent years have consistently beaten my Astros, so eating Skyline Chili was debasement in hopes of appeasing the baseball gods. It’s no wonder that I didn’t enjoy Cincinnati as much as Detroit.

Of course Detroit then knocked my Astros out of the wild card round of the playoffs. Did I mention that I hate Detroit?

Hotels

In Detroit we stayed downtown in the Shinola Hotel. The room had lots of Shinola accessories, there was a Shinola watch store, and the downtown location made getting around Detroit easy. We walked to dinner at Alpino, and had the Tigers been in town we could have walked to the stadium.

In Cincinnati we stayed downtown at the 21C Museum Hotel, and were able to walk to the Reds game. There was plenty to do downtown, and we didn’t take the car out until we drove to the airport our last morning.

In Grayling we stayed at the Gates Au Sable Lodge, which sits on the bank of the Au Sable River, has a good fly shop and guide service, and has a good restaurant where we ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner for every meal. The Lodge has also collected all of the possible trout fishing bibelots produced in its 50-year history to adorn every available decorative niche, as if it had hired an interior decorator from the classified ads at the back of an old copy of Field and Stream. There were rod racks on the wall above the bed, and wader hangers by the door to each room. There were framed flies and fish prints and mounted fish, and Au Sable boat-shaped light fixtures. I was especially fond of our room’s trout fishing carpet.

Playlists

There are a lot of similarities between my Ohio and Michigan playlists. They seem balanced, as if the two states took turns producing songsters, and they share a kind of rock and roll grit that you just don’t always find in other states. In Ohio there are the Black Keys, in Michigan Jack White. In Ohio there is Josh Ritter, Marc Cohn, and The National, in Detroit there’s MC5 and Fountains of Wayne. Of course it’s hard to top Detroit’s Motown. With Motown you get Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, Aretha Franklin, the Spinners, the Temptations, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, the Four Tops, the Jackson 5 . . . Ohio does have the O’Jays, the Isley Brothers, and the Ohio Players, but Motown is Motown.

In Detroit there was Motown music playing everywhere. Well of course there was. It was like Hawaiian music in Hawaii. These people love their city.

The Supremes, The Ed Sullivan Show, CBS Television, 1966.

They really are good playlists, amazing playlists. Devo, Madonna, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, Rare Earth and Grand Funk Railroad. Roy Rogers, Dean Martin, and Nine Inch Nails. Tracy Chapman and Doris Day. The Foo Fighters. They are great lists full of great music, and I won’t report you if you skip Kid Rock or the Amboy Dukes. No one has to listen to Kid Rock or the Amboy Dukes when they can listen instead to Stevie Wonder. Or Roy Rogers.

I had vowed I’d hum Baby Love every day in Michigan, and I did.

Guitar

I took the Kohno. I worked on Bach.

The Tyler Davidson Fountain, Cincinnati.

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Illinois Playlist

What we took.

We packed to skip the baggage claim in Chicago. We flew in early on Saturday, and spent the rest of the day looking for things we’d never seen.

The only specialized fishing gear we took were polarized lenses. Our guides, Midwest Waters Anglers, provided all the gear, and it was great gear.

What I lost, Where we didn’t go.

I lost my beloved Bonefish & Tarpon Trust Yeti thermos. I really liked that Thermos.

I wish we’d had time to go to Springfield for the Abraham Lincoln Museum. We could have easily spent more time in Chicago.

What we ate.

By some measures Houston is now the most ethnically diverse city in the US, but that’s somewhat disingenuous. It treats all white people as a lump, which is like treating all Asians and Asian Americans as a lump, or treating all Africans and African Americans as a lump. Chicago’s story is in part a story of 19th and 20th century first-generation Irish, Polish, German, Italian, Welsh, and Jewish immigrants, white immigration that wasn’t from England via New England–the immigrants in The Jungle are Lithuanian. In 2019 the nativist impulse is aimed at immigrants from Mexico and Central America. In 1850 it was the anti-Catholic No-Nothings opposed to Irish and German Catholic immigration. Things never change.

Uncle Sam’s youngest son, Citizen Know Nothing, lithograph, 1854, Sarony & Co., lithographer, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. American political prints, 1766-1876. From Wikipedia. He looks a lot like Lord Byron.

As of 2010, Chicago is 31.7% non-Hispanic whites, 32.9% black or African American, 5.5% Asian, and 13.3% Hispanic, and 16.1% mixed or other, but there are lots of ethnic traditions not covered in those numbers. We wanted Chicago ethnic food, and got a list of restaurants from our friend Tom, who knows these things. He said that there were three great ethnic food cities in the US, New York, Chicago, and Houston, and that the hard part of the list for Chicago was coming up with stuff we didn’t have in Houston. It’s a great list, even if we only made it to three of the places. Some of Tom’s notes are included in quotes:

  • Min Hing Cuisine – “great dim sum for breakfast (6 kinds of shrimp dumplings is good enough for me).” We went there straight from the airport. Chinese are about 1.6% of Chicago’s population, and first got there before 1860 with the railroads. The population boomed in the 1950s and 60s.
  • Parachute – “fusion Korean American, in the best way.” This place has a Michelin star, and seems to be everyone’s favorite restaurant, Alinea be damned. Make reservations in advance. We didn’t make reservations, and getting in on a Saturday night without a reservation might be harder than catching steelhead. We didn’t catch any Illinois steelhead either.
  • Shokran – “Moroccan kebabs and salads, also tangines and couscous. Cash only. BYOB.”
  • Staropolska or Lutnia Polish – About 6.7% of Chicago is Polish, with Polish the third language, after English and Spanish. We ate at Staropolska, just around the corner from St. Hyacinth Basilica. The young blonde waitress with the Polish accent was proud that it was the oldest Polish restaurant in Chicago. It could use some freshening, but that might ruin the vibe, and the food was great and the service was great.
Staropolska, cabbage rolls and potato pancakes. That red sauce seemed to be heavily paprikad, and was outstanding.
  • Jibek Jolu – “dumplings and noodles . . . Uighur.”
  • Sayat-Nova – “Armenian. Typical middle eastern fare . . . ” It was also in the middle of the Miracle Mile, and we went on the Sunday night of a long weekend when there was still plenty of shopping to be done. After some terrified driving we found a parking garage ($26 for a bit more than an hour, and well worth it). Kris loved Sayat-Nova, and said I have to ask Tom for recommendations wherever we go. I wish Tom could have helped out in Pittsburg, New Hampshire.
Sayat-Nova. Lamb meatballs in yoghurt and mint sauce.
  • Little Bucharest Bistro – “quality Central European food, excellent service.” Romanian. We didn’t go, but the descriptions on the internet were great. It wasn’t far from Staropolska.
  • Birrieria Zaragoza – “fast casual Mexican all about goat.” The Mexican population is the fastest growing population in Chicago, so it made sense to include something, but it broke Tom’s rule, sort of. I don’t know of anyplace in Houston that specializes in goat.

The best thing about ethnic Chicago restaurants? Other than the food of course. I could wear my stylish fishing clothes, the ones designed by the fashion-forward stylists at Patagonia, to any of them, which I did.

If that wasn’t enough of a list, Tom provided a supplement: “Ghareeb Nawaz Indo-Pakistani. San Soo Gob San-Korean. Galit-Israeli-Middle Eastern. Kaboobi Persian Grill (North side – our favorite). Cabra Peruvian (Rooftop restaurant). If you have time for breakfast before you leave, make it to Dove’s Luncheonette….”.

Books, Movies, TV.

There are tons of movies from Chicago, and we watched The Blues Brothers, The Fugitive, and The Untouchables. Pretty good Chicago movies. We never watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I may be too old for it now.

Mostly I read about Lincoln. I wonder how he managed to govern so well without Tweets. This is a good time to ponder Lincoln, and there’s a ton of stuff out there. Sometimes we get better leaders than we deserve. Sometimes apparently we don’t.

I read Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Auggie March. I had tried to read Bellow before, but didn’t quite get it. This time was better. I tried to read The Jungle, but found it too painful. I listened to a lot of Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski novels, but never did figure out how to pronounce Warshawski’s name, which is a weak and obscure joke about the inevitable unlikable character trope in every novel. If they can’t pronounce her name, they’re almost certainly the villain. I listened to some Dresden File novels by Jim Butcher, but didn’t think they were nearly as amusing as when I’d listened to them years ago. Michael Harvey wrote some good Chicago mysteries, and I listened to those when I got tired of the others.

Donuts.

We picked up Polish pastries at Kurowski Sausage Shop, pretzel-like crescents lightly filled with an unidentifiable jam, but I was too intimidated to brave the meat case. On Sunday morning we made a quick drive to Oak Park for Donuts at Firecakes Donuts and a quick visit to the Frank Lloyd Wright studio. The donuts were just fine, and I wish we’d had time to look at the scattered Wright houses. Next time.

There are Dunkin’ Donuts everywhere in Chicago. Chicago should do better.

Playlist.

This was a long list, so it’ll be pretty general.

Chicago’s population is 32.9% non-Hispanic African or African American. The percentage of African American population in Houston, a Southern city with significant historic black communities, is only 22.9%. For the Houston metropolitan area, Houston plus the suburbs, the number drops slightly, to 21%, but for Chicago 32.9% plunges to 17% when you add in the suburbs.

The two cities are of roughly the same size, but their largest growth occurs about a century apart. The historic African American population in Houston has its origin in slavery, but much of the dispersion from the city into the suburbs occurred after the Civil Rights Movement, and Blacks apparently moved out to the suburbs in about the same numbers as they stayed in Houston. In Chicago, the boom in African American population occurred in the great migration, from 1910 to 1960, and plenty of movement to the suburbs occurred largely before the Civil Rights Movement. Blacks apparently stuck to (or were confined to) the City.

Why this is kicking off the music playlist may not be obvious, but there is a lot of great music out of Chicago’s African American community. There are three cities most responsible for the origination of jazz: New Orleans, Kansas City, and Chicago. The earliest migration of the Blues was from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago. This is Great Migration stuff, and stuff that shaped us profoundly.

Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five, 1925, Chicago

There’s another odd thing about Illinois music, there’s a surprising number of good folk/country/Americana musicians out of Illinois. Illinois is our second flattest state after Florida, tucked in as a drainage between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi. It hides all that flatness with a combination of skyscrapers and trees. Anyway, all that flatness makes for great farmland, and except for Chicago, this is Midwest farm country. It’s no surprise that farm country makes for country music and Republican voters.

Jazz

I probably should have done better, but Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong. Armstrong’s first recordings are from Chicago. The singers Dee Alexander and Johnny Hartman, and Herbie Hancock.

Blues

Of course the Blues Brothers was set in Chicago. Where else would it be? All of these musicians were from, cycled through, wrote about, or sang about Chicago: Robert Johnson, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Jimmy Rogers (no, not that Jimmie Rodgers), Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James, Little Walter, Luther Allison, Hound Dog Taylor, Jimmy Reed, Slim Harpo, Junior Wells, Buddy Guy, Son Seales, Otis Rush, Sonny Boy Williamson, James Cotton, Magic Sam, Lonnie Brooks, Earl Hooker, Freddie King . . . Is Bo Diddley the Blues? We talked about going to a blues bar on Saturday, but we’re old, things start late, and fishing starts early. Next time.

Dovydenas, Jonas,  Muddy Waters, Checkerboard Lounge, 423 E. 43rd St., Chicago; Chicago, Illinois, 1977, Library of Congress, Chicago Ethnic Arts Project Collection.

Folk/Country/Americana

John Prine, Allison Krauss, Shawn Colvin, Son Volt, Wilco, Steve Goodman.

Has there ever been a sadder song than Steve Goodman’s A Dying Fan’s Last Request? Not only was Goodman in fact dying, he was a Cub’s fan. There is nothing more pathetic than the Chicago Cubs, but it’s still one of the best baseball songs ever.

Scattered and Inconsisten Rock

In early adolescence, I thought Chicago was the greatest band ever. I liked the brass, I liked the politics, I liked the guitar. I hadn’t listened to them since. Color My World was probably the first song I learned to play on the guitar, though in my defense it was probably before it became the most important high school prom song ever written. I still think 25 or 6 to 4 was a pretty great song. Pretty good song. Ok, I still like it.

Reo Speedwagon, Cheap Trick, Smashing Pumpkins.

When Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville came out in the 90s it got great reviews and I bought a copy, probably without actually reading the reviews. We were on a family car trip and I started the CD in the car. Some song came on, Flower? Fuck and Run? Anyway, it was really not age appropriate, either for me or my children. This trip was probably the second time I’d listened to it. It’s pretty raw in a “I grew up in Chicago suburbs and graduated from Oberlin” sort of way. It may be age appropriate for my children now, but it’s still not age appropriate for me.

Liz Phair - Exile in Guyville.jpg

Random Stuff

  • Allister, Somewhere Down on Fullerton.
  • Mobstability, Crook County (Bond Crusher Mix).
  • Rhett Miller, The El.
  • The Lawrence Arms, A Guided Tour of Chicago.
  • Andrew Bird, Pulaski at Night. Good song.
  • Common, Chi-City.
  • Frank Sinatra, My Kind of Town.
  • Graham Nash, Chicago/We Can Change the World.
  • Sufjan Stevens, Illinois.
  • Dan Fogalberg, Illinois.
  • Ben Folds, Effington.
  • Twista, Crook County.
  • Kanye West, Homecoming
  • Aliotta Haynes Jeremiah, Lake Shore Drive
  • Jim Croce, Bad Bad Leroy Brown.
  • Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Mahler, Symphony #9 in D. The Chicago Symphony Center Orchestra Hall is magnificent.

Guitar.

Didn’t take one. A guy in the airport told me that he always checked his guitar, and convinced me that I could do the same with a good enough case. Kris thought that was a great idea. Stuffing a guitar in the overhead is a pain. I got back to Houston and ordered a new case.

Posted on

Alabama

For each destination state I’ve written at least one blog entry before the trip, but we went to Alabama on the spur of the moment so it didn’t get done. Usually they were evidence of my preconceived notions, and sometimes they were out-and-out wrong. For Alabama I started to skip it because it’s supposed to be a precursor not a post-cursor. I can’t quite bring myself to waste a perfectly good postcard though, so I’ll tell some stories from our trip.

Alabama doesn’t quite match Mississippi for music and literature. There is the one book, lots of people’s favorite book, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Fannie Flagg is enjoyable, but neither Ms. Flagg nor Harper Lee are Faulkner or Eudora Welty or Jermyn Ward. There’s some important blues like W.C. Handy and Ma Rainey, and there’s Hank Williams and Emmylou Harris, but it’s not the almost endless list of musicians from Mississippi. There’s Muscle Shoals though. That’s pretty good. And don’t tell Kris but I’ve had a crush on Emmylou Harris since I was 17.

Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Willie McCovey, and Satchel Paige were all from Alabama. Maybe they played on the same high school travel team.

And there’s “Sweet Home Alabama.” Ok, that’s harsh, Lynyrd Skynyrd wasn’t even an Alabama band, but the song is embraced by the state, there’s even a sweet home proclaiming sign when you cross the border from Louisiana, but the song’s resentment and outrage never seemed like quite the thing to me. It’s a catchy tune, but dang it’s pissy.

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It’s fitting that we did Alabama and Mississippi in the same year. Mississippi and most of Alabama were ceded to the United States by Spain in 1798. Mississippi was admitted as a state in 1817, and Alabama was admitted two years later in 1819. In the 1820 census, the Alabama population was 127,901. and some of my second and third great-grandparents lived in Alabama in the 1820s.

Alabama and Mississippi are a weird counterpoint to two other matching states, New Hampshire and Vermont, so going to the four in the same year has a weird resonance. The pairs of states are different, sure, but get rid of the state line and we could easily be back to 48 states without much change in the national character. They really are matched sets. There’s a lot more difference between, say Northern California and Southern California, or West Texas and East Texas, than between Alabama and Mississippi, or Vermont and New Hampshire.

Alabama has 4,887,871 residents, so it’s almost 2 million people larger than Mississippi. It’s also richer than Mississippi, but not by much. Mississippi now ranks ahead of West Virginia at 49th in median wealth per household, with $43,529, Alabama 45th, with $48,123. Alabama and Mississippi are also essentially white and black, with Alabama 68.5% white and 26.2% black, and Mississippi 63.5% white and 35.6% black.

Alabama Presidential Election Results 2016.svg
Alabama Presidential Election Results 2016, Wikipedia, US gov – derivative work: Ali Zifan.

In 2016, Alabama voted 62.08% for President Trump, and 34.36% for Hillary Clinton. Like most states, there is a rural/urban split, with Montgomery and Birmingham voting for Clinton, but like Mississippi there is a black majority in the rural historic cotton counties, the rich-soil agriculture region that belts the south-central counties of the state. In Mississippi it’s the Delta along the Mississippi River. In Alabama it’s the Black Belt. Where 150 years ago the majority of residents were slaves, 150 years later the majority of the residents are black.

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I have never been a particularly devout alumnus of the University of Texas. I don’t belong to Texas Exes or go to football games or answer the phone when the fundraising calls come in from Austin, but still, from time to time I check the football scores, and if I ever drive cross-country I’m going to stick the largest longhorn I can find on my rear window out of a strange mix of perversity and pride. Kris went to Rice, so her experience doesn’t really embrace the goofy. Hook ’em.

On the way out of town Sunday morning downtown Montgomery was deserted except for one family, African American, standing on a corner looking mildly lost Two were wearing burnt orange tee shirts and one of the tee shirts was clearly decorated with a white longhorn. I was overcome, rolled down the car window, flashed the hook ‘em horns hand sign and screamed hook ‘em! They were startled for a second, long enough for it to dawn on me just how stupid I was being, and how a black family in Alabama might not expect friendly gestures yelled from passing cars by white guys, but then all four of them flashed the hook ‘em horns sign and yelled hook ‘em! I was feeling pretty satisfied.

Except that Kris was beating on me, not just any mild sort of beating either. She was pounding on my shoulder just as hard as she could.

“Why did you yell fuck ‘em at those people!”

*

Earlier in May the Alabama legislature approved legislation that effectively banned abortion in the state. Alabama was followed by Missouri and Georgia. I think Louisisana’s legislation is on the governor’s desk.

I get it. Abortion is a difficult issue, and it should be. In Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court didn’t conclude that these questions are no-brainers, and that the litigants were wasting their time. I’ve been mulling the issues raised in my undergraduate Philosophy 101: Moral Philosophy: Abortion class for 40-odd years. It is an extraordinarily subtle and morally ambiguous question, which I admit I weigh out for the most part on the side of women’s rights, but there was a particularly gleeful screw-you totalitarian current to the Alabama vote that seemed to have more to do with political positioning than a thoughtful moral stance.

By happenstance after the trip a Republican congressman who I particularly like visited our office. He was not optimistic for his party for 2020, though he, a Republican in one of the most Democratic districts in the country, named a litany of party failures. He noted that 30% of the 2020 voters would be millennials, and that their first concern is climate change. Ok, climate change and college debt. He talked about the failure of both parties to adopt a sensible immigration policy, and how if legislation wasn’t adopted before the fall it wouldn’t get done because the parties needed it as an electioneering punching bag.

He said that in 2018 his party had lost 20% of its educated suburban women voters. He asked if we could think of what the party had done to recover that vote. “Georgia and Alabama,” I said. I forgot Missouri and Kentucky and Louisiana. It wasn’t only a mean-spirited choice by the states, it was a choice that given the 2018 election and what’s coming for the Republican Party in 2020 was incredibly naive.

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Notwithstanding what goes on in the capitol building, Montgomery is a pleasant place to visit. We did lots of stuff in our short stay: ate at a recommended restaurant, Central, saw part of a Montgomery Biscuits baseball game and even better went shopping in the Biscuits’ store, the Basket, and instead of donuts had excellent Sunday morning biscuits, the baked good not the ballplayers, at Cahawba. We also visited The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the national African-American lynching monument. It’s reminiscent of the Vietnam monument in Washington, and is incredibly effective.

It’s the African American lynching monument, but it’s probably worth noting that not all lynching victims were black. In the period from 1882 to 1968 there were more than 1200 white victims, and more than 3400 black. Most African American lynchings were in the South. There were 347 recorded lynchings in Alabama: 299 African American and 48 white victims. Mississippi lynched 589 African Americans. Texas lynched 352 African Americans (and 141 whites, though that number is likely to include Mexican Americans). The monument signage says that African American lynchings included levels of torture and brutality that were generally not part of white lynchings, though I suspect South Texas Mexican Americans might raise issue with that. Black lynchings in the South were in part, maybe in big part, to control political authority, and in part to enforce the codes of racial etiquette that were thought to be required for a moral society. Irony is so ironic.

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The University of Alabama is in Tuscaloosa, 80 miles north and east of Selma. We didn’t make it to Tuscaloosa, but we did drive from Montgomery to Selma on Sunday morning. Selma could be a graceful Southern town, with pretty churches and handsome early houses, but it’s not. Driving around it looks beat up and ragged, with a lot of public housing and a lot of boarded businesses.

When we got home I talked to a young friend, a graduate of the University of Alabama, who said Tuscaloosa would look just like Selma if it weren’t for the University and the Mercedes plant. Would you put your Mercedes plant in Selma? Sometimes it seems the sites of such extraordinary racial conflict never really recover, and whatever the notions are 50 years later the places are still battlegrounds. I felt sorry for Selma, black and white, but I wouldn’t put my Mercedes plant there.

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Floating the Tallapoosa on the long Memorial Day weekend there were other users, though it was never crowded. Where roads, not much more than tracks really, came down to the river through the hardwoods there were bank encampments of families and friends. They could be pretty elaborate, with multiple tents and pop-up shelters and dogs and children and pickups and boats and every kind of cooking gear imaginable, and, one suspects, plenty of beer. All of it seemed a bit slovenly, but a fun way to fill the weekend. Backwoods is a derogatory term for Alabama whites, like cracker in Florida and Georgia, or hillbilly in Arkansas, or redneck for anywhere in the South, and we were clearly in the backwoods. Our guide Craig made jokes but said they were his people, and I reckon they were some of my people too, though like I said none of my ancestors have lived in Alabama since before the War. Cousins.

There was an assortment of guys drinking beer and bait fishing where we took out of the river, a big guy came over to tell us all about himself. While Craig was loading the raft he talked, and he talked, and he talked. He told us about the tuna he caught while he was in the merchant marine, and his grandmother’s Irish potato salad, and where in those hills there was gold that could still be found. Craig thought he might have already drunk a bit of beer, but there was also a bit of the Boo Radley about him. Craig said that every time he came off the river there was always some weirdness. There was some weirdness, though the potato salad sounded pretty good. He ate it on Saltines, just like boudin.

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It had been way too long since my last Moon Pie, and in Alabama they were two for a dollar. You can get two Moon Pies and an R.C. Cola for two bucks. Inflation.