Wisconsin Journal Number 29 9 June 1998 My parents came out for a 10-day visit towards the end of May. I'll write about what I did with them in this report---the next one will cover a trip Kaye and I took to Lake Superior while they were here (and could leave the kids with them). I hadn't seen the Hillside School and Studio at Taliesin, so we headed out to Spring Green on Saturday. We had just missed a tour, so we got tickets for later in the afternoon, and headed down to The House on the Rock. I wrote about THOTR in one of my early numbers, so I'll only talk about new things I noticed here. I was more attuned this time to not everything being what it seemed when it came to antiques. Real antiques, faithful reproductions, "liberal" reproductions and pure fantasies seem to be arbitrarily mixed together, though the rooms built earlier seem to have more authentic items. (I got a book about Alex Jordan and THOTR for my birthday, which was after this last visit. I've only skimmed it, but I noticed that there were once complaints about items labeled as authentic that weren't. The only change seems to have been to remove the labels.) In a case of firearms (which I think were real) I saw a flint-lock "6-shooter". It had six separate barrels, each with its own firing mechaninsm, that rotated into place. Another pistol had four groups of six barrels, so could apparently fire 24 shots without reloading. We happened to be at the right place at the right time to hear the Hupfeld Phonoliszt-Violina play, which they only run every hour and a half. The Phonoliszt is a combination player piano/player violin. The piano mechanism seemed standard; the violin mechaninsm was the unusual part. It had three violins, mounted with the fingerboards pointing down, strings facing outwards. A large rotating ring (maybe 20" in diameter) was driven from above. It had horsehair mounted on its interior circumference, which contacted a different string on each of the violins. (They were each tilted differently.) It seemed to me there should be a fourth violin, so all four strings could be played, but I didn't see one. When a note was to be played on a particular string, one mechanism would tilt that violin into contact with the ring, while a second would press down on the fingerboard in the place for that note. Volume was controlled by speeding up or slowing down the rotating ring. Sorry, no pizzicato. While the Phonoliszt was surely real, various other nickelodeons and automated instruments I wasn't so sure about. There are mechanically played versions of everything from harps to bassoons. Some look like they might once have worked, and still might be functioning to some degree, but almost all of the music machines are now supplemented with recorded music. There was an interesting music machine that wasn't working. It appeared to be one of the first jukeboxes. It didn't play 45s--it was earlier than that. It held about 20 Edison recording cylinders, on kind of a Ferris Wheel arrangement that could rotate any one of them into playing position. There were a few new things in the transportation hall, which is still under construction. There is a car covered in blue tile, and a newly constructed "Safarikar". The latter is a modified pickup with zebra-skin upholstery inside and out, and a red, heart-shaped bathtub in the bed. It tows a trailer holding a small pyramid decorated with 2500 model elephants, from a donated collection. Don't ask me why. My favorite part of the transportation room are the Burma Shave signs (HE LIT A MATCH/TO CHECK GAS TANK/THAT'S WHY/THEY CALL HIM/SKINLESS FRANK/BURMA SHAVE). I also noticed a hearse in a nearby room with a built-in organ that played a dirge, and then "When the Saints Go Marching In." Probably a chimera. In the room with the giant carrousel, my Mom noticed an interesting visual effect. If you climb up to a platform slightly above the carrousel, and stare at it so that it consumes most of your field of view, you eventually start to think that the carrousel is standing still, and you are moving in the opposite direction. An interesting physiological result is that once your "eyes" think the moving object is standing still, you can focus on it much more sharply. After our senses maxed out, we headed back to the more serene sights of Taliesin. On the way back, we nosed around some back roads looking for a view of the "Infinity Room" at THOTR, but it turns out the best view was from a wayside on the main road. We also found the Wyoming School, which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for the village of Wyoming late in his career. It's a small structure, with fairly simple construction, but the story goes that he accepted the commission because it would be the first public building of his in Wisconsin. Then we headed on to our tour of the Hillside Schol. FLW designed the first Hillside School for his aunts in 1887. None of his aunts married (there were 5, I recall) and they were all school teachers. Two of them founded the Hillside Home School as a coed boarding/day school using progressive ideas of education, such as "learning through doing." The school had significant enrollment, even in its first years, because of all the Lloyd nieces and nephews in the valley. The original building no longer exists, but the parts of the school that do exist date to 1902. Attendance eventually dwindled (partly because of approbation about FLW having left his wife and six children in Chicago and moving with his mistress to Spring Green). His aunts eventually closed the school, and sold it to FLW for $1, on the condition that it ultimately be used for educational purposes. Partly at the urging of his third wife, Olgivanna, he reopened it as an architecture school in 1932, forming the Taliesin Fellowship. The gymnasium was converted to a theatre and a kitchen was added. The apprentices added dormitory space, and build the drafting studio. In 1952, the old gym/theatre was badly damaged by fire (started from a pile of leaves FLW and some apprentices were burning), and a new theatre took its place. The orginal 1902 structure was square, supported by four large columns set in from the corners. The columns carried the load of the upper story and roof, so that the walls can contain lots of window space. The second story is a balcony to the first, and the opening is square, but set at 45 degrees from the walls. From the first floor there is an overlook into the dining area. The drafting studio is interesting for a couple of reasons. One is the floors, which are made from 2" plywood sawn into slices and laid on its side, to expose the laminations. The other is the triangular trussing arrangement that supports the roof and clerestory. The foundations of the building are just stone set into the ground, and the trusswork was made of green lumber. Knowing the foundation would settle, and the trusses would bend as they dried, FLW rested the corners of the trusses on steel pads on the foundation stones. The corners can be jacked up to accept shims to keep everything level, and, indeed, in some places you can see 4-5" of shimming keeping everything trim. The tour ended in an exhibit room of Wright's designs, both built and unbuilt, and then we dashed through a thunderstorm to the bus to take us back to the visitor center. The Friday after Kaye and I got back from up north (29 May) was Wisconsin's 150th anniversary of statehood. She, I and my folks headed downtown to see the sesquicentennial festivities. There was a lot of speechmaking on the capitol steps, which mentioned various Wisconsin contributions: unemployment insurance, malted milk, the Progessive Party, and so on. My Dad pointed out that nobody claimed credit for Joe McCarthy. There were a number of people wearing old-fashion costumes, and a few old vehicles parked around the square. At noon, everyone rang bells for a couple minutes as a National Guard flight flew overhead. We brought our own bell from home, and lots of little tin bells were passed out, but the loudest rings came from a carillon wagon that used to belong to Ringling Brothers Circus. After the speeches, there was a ceremonial birthday-cake cutting. The cake was about 12 feet across, in the shape of Wisconsin, showing the names of all the counties. (I read later in the paper that two of them were misspelled.) Since we were right by it, we decided to tour the capitol building. The rotunda area is sealed off, because of the resoration work going on with its paintings and mosaics. There are a couple places on higher floors where you can see in, and a closed-circuit television system actually lets you watch the restorers at work. We saw the Supreme Court chambers, and I poked my head inside of one of the legistlative chambers. We headed up to the observation deck, which rings the base of the external dome. Neither my Dad nor I are much for heights, and I only really wanted to look out when I was over one of the four wings. (The capitol is X-shaped.) Just below the observation deck, on the 6th floor, is a small museum about the capitol, where you can learn about the two previous structures as well as the current one. Part of the second (I think) structure collapsed during construction in 1883, and Frank Lloyd Wright was purported to have witnessed it. A few other tidbits I learned: -The statue on top of the dome, called "Wisconsin", wears a headress adorned with 2 cornucopias, 2 ears of corn, and a badger. The height of fashion, so to speak. -The legislature met in the first capitol before it was entirely completed, in 1845. The contractor was keeping his hogs in the basement, and there were gaps in the floorboards between the chambers and the basement. Ebenezer Child, representative from Green Bay, writes about stirring up the hogs with a long stick, and thereby drowning out a speaker he disagreed with (but not before the speaker got out an impressive stream of swearwords). -The current capitol was converted from DC to AC in 1962. Having sampled several of the local beers, we got lunch and then headed home. Later that night, after a dinner of grilled brats, Sarah, my folks and I headed over to Lake Mendota for the celebratory fireworks. I figured we would walk to avoid traffic, and Bascomb Hill is in a fairly close part of campus. I thought it would be a great place to watch because it looks out over the lake. There were lots of people there already, and the whole lake was dotted with the lights of boaters out to watch. The only problem is that the fireworks were being set off quite a ways off to our right, and were squarely obscured by university buildings in that direction. We headed towards the launching point, but never could find a clear view until we reached the path along the lakefront, and then could only see through gaps in the foliage. I ended up taking everyone on a hike that was quite a bit longer than I had anticipated. We probably would have been better off to drive over to the Memorial Union Terrace. The other anniversary event I saw a bit of was a Civil War encampment next to Camp Randall Stadium (named after Camp Randall, Wisconsin's main training camp in the Civil War, named in turn after an early governor). Lots of tents, muzzle-loading rifles and even a few cannon, with drums and fifes practicing for the parade on Saturday. I read in the paper later that they all ended up taking refuge in an athletic building that night when a thunderstorm with high winds blew through. (The storm caused a lot of damage in nearby areas. Twenty-five barns and fifteen silos blew down in Sauk county, and nearly every tree was knocked over at Mirror Lake State Park, near Baraboo.) The next day, my folks needed to get to Milwaukee to catch the train back to Portland. We went in early so we could spend some time at the Public Museum, which I had visited once before. The centerpiece of the exhibit on Wisconsin Indians is the "Powwow Circle," which depicts Indians parading and dancing at a modern-day powwow. I watched a brief video that showed how the figures in the circle had been contructed from body and face molds taken from real people. I also continue to pick up more bits and pieces of recent history (last couple centuries). For example, the Ojibwe were the only tribe that retained the right to hunt, fish and harvest on ceded lands in their treaties. They asserted this right by starting to spearfish on some of the lakes in Northern Wisconsin, which got sportfishermen worried about overfishing, but also provoked supporting demonstrations for treaty rights in Madison. It's also interesting to see that while tribes originally in Wisconsin were relocated further west, tribes from the eastern US relocated into Wisconsin. For example, a band of Oneidas came to Wisconsin in 1820, and are the only Indians here with an Iroquoian language. I spent quite a bit of time in another section, called Temples, Tells and Tombs, that talked about archaeology, mostly around the Mediterranian, with a lot about Egypt. There was a good exhibit there explaining the three scripts used to write the ancient Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs were used mainly for carved or painted inscriptions. It's a complicated script, with 700 symbols, which can stand for letters, syllables or whole words. It has no vowels, no punctuation (except for the cartouche) and some symbols have no sound value when spoken. Hiematic was a cursive form for hieroglyphs, used when writing on papyrus. Demotic came later, and used the Greek alphabet. Coptic was derived from it. Another exhibit described an interesting use of computers. One pharoah, Akhenaten, broke with religious tradition and mandated monotheism (to the sun god). He had all mention of other gods obliterated, which meant defacing the names of some of his predecessors who incorporated names of gods into their own names. After his demise, he was reviled, and all his monuments were torn down and used for fill in walls and columns. The scenes and writing that were on the walls of these monuments are being reconstructed by scanning in the decorated side of each piece of rubble, then having a computer try to solve the resulting jigsaw puzzle. Something that has only begun to dawn on me this year, through visits to this museum and the Field Museum, is that it wasn't just royalty who where mummified. Priests, members of the court, public officials were all buried this way. In the 19th and 20th century, hundreds of thousands of mummies were dug up. Initially the demand came from tourists wanting souvenirs, but many mummies befell even less dignified fates. They were shipped to the US to be used in making rag paper (yards of linens on each one). They were ground up to be used as medicine in Europe and even fertilizer in England. The Egyptian railroad used them to fuel trains. (That last use puzzled me, until I realized that the caskets were often carved from huge logs.) I took a quick spin through the European village again (where they have rooms and houses decorated in the style of different nationalities who settled in Milwaukee). Last time we were in, the rooms had Christmas decorations (where appropriate). This time, some had dyed and decorated eggs, from Easter. The last section I visited was about rainforests. The upper level features, logically, rainforest canopies. I was duly impressed to see a colleague from Evergreen, Nalini Nadkarni, as the subject of a video there. (Second time I've seen her in a museum this year!) She was rope-climbing a tree and harvesting a vegetation mat from a branch. The only bad part was that some short segment of the video at the beginning seemed to be skipped during play (which presumably explained why she climbs trees). I sent her a message that she should try to parlay her role as canopy poster child into some product endorsement deals, maybe for climbing equipment or pruning shears. >From there, with only a couple wrong turns, we found the Amtrak station and saw my parents off. Bye, Dave