Welcome to Forgotonia

The following was originally aired as a commentary on local NPR-member station WIUM/WIUW Tri States Public Radio.

Children in the region will be out and about knocking on doors this week. Commentator Alison McGaughey says that’s exactly what gives her fright.

Tomorrow night, I will be participating in trick-or-treat—my first time as an adult.

Not as a parent taking kids from door-to-door, but as a citizen, opening my door to the treat-seekers.

I should be excited, but I’m nervous.

I’m not afraid of the ‘trick’ part. It’ll be the children of friends and co-workers who’ll be stopping by. And I’m going to be generous. I’ve got full packs of bubble gum to give out, which isn’t too shabby, I don’t think. So I’m not worried about anyone throwing eggs.

I’m nervous because this is a big step for me. This is my first time participating in Halloween as a city dweller. (Well, “city” in terms of being aMacomb resident who lives within city limits.)

You see, I grew up on farm a few miles outside town, which you could only reach by driving down a bumpy gravel road. In my entire youth, we had exactly one visit from kids seeking candy. For people who live out in the country, Halloween is a silent night.

We only lived a few miles outside town. Even if any of my friends had thought to come all the way out to our house for a fun-sized Snickers, their parents would have discouraged it. “My dad says it’s too hard on the tires.” Or, “My mom wants to know if your mom will bring you into town instead, because she just washed the car.”

At least this meant Halloween got to be all about me. My parents drove me in to town and I got to hit up everyone we knew. I never had to sacrifice a single second of loot-gathering time by staying home to return the favor.

And really, we weren’t all that cracked up on people popping in, anyway.

When you live in the country, a knock at the door is something to fear. If it’s not the Culligan man or the meter reader, chances are it’s some drunk dude who staggered for miles to the first light source he saw after he slamming his car into a ditch five miles away. (We never were quite the same after that one.)

The one Halloween that some kids did come to our door, I was long past the age of being a trick-or-treater myself. It was my senior year of high school, and I was doing homework at the kitchen table when my parents suddenly appeared in the adjacent dining room, peeking out through the blinds and looking concerned. “What’s going on?” I said.

“Someone’s coming down the road, and they’re slowing down,” Mom said. “They’re stopping. I think we’ve got trick-or-treaters!”

Sure enough, the car stopped, and a little witch and a fairy princess stepped out, followed by their mother. Family friends of ours. Mom darted to the kitchen. “What am I going to give them?”

“I don’t know,” I said, jumping up and searching through my bookbag for stray pieces of gum. But all I found were cough drops. “Don’t we have any…chocolate chips or anything?”

But we were out of time.

“Trick-or-treat!”

I went to the door. “Um, just a sec,” I said. I tried to think of something to stall them, as I heard cabinet doors banging behind me.

Then Mom was behind me. I was just about to say, “Sorry, kids,” but I watched in horror as she dropped packages of instant oatmeal into their plastic jack-o-lantern buckets. When they looked up at her with somewhat bewildered thank-yous, this was her reply:

“Hey, at least it’s brown sugar!”

The Good Hope United Methodist Church will hold its annual Cookie/Candy Walk and Chicken & Biscuit Luncheon this Saturday, November 3rd at the church. Homemade goodies sold by the pound will be available from 9am – 1:30pm. Chicken & Biscuit luncheon will be from 11am – 1:30pm.

Directions: Take Route 67 to Good Hope. At the stop light in town, turn west onto Main Street and go 4 blocks. Church is on the right hand side of the road (300 W. Main Street).

I mean, like I said, not that I’ve ever been there or anything, (especially not, like, days before this , but…)

Police arrest trespassers at rumored ‘haunted’ site

(from the Peoria Journal-Star)
Tuesday, October 30, 2007

MACOMB – Seventeen people were charged last weekend with misdemeanor trespassing at Vishnu Springs, where many similar incidents have been reported in recent months.

McDonough County Sheriff Rick VanBrooker said that at 3:35 p.m. Saturday, two cars were found parked outside the gate and blocking the entrance and the road that leads to the former hotel and springs.

Police ticketed seven people ranging in age from 18 to 22.

At 10:12 p.m. Sunday, police again found two vehicles parked at the entrance. This time they ticketed 10 people ranging from 18 to 22.

All 17 were issued notices to appear in court.

The former resort area in the northwest part of the county dates to the late 1800s. Its history includes rumors the former hotel is haunted.

The spring water on the property was rumored to have healing and medicinal properties.

Vandals often pry off the boards covering the hotel windows and doors to get inside, and the walls inside are spray-painted with graffiti.

The property was donated to the Western Illinois University Foundation in 2002. WIU officials have said they hope to redevelop the property one day.

This headline appeared in the Western Courier today:

AGS eats testes

“The Alpha Gamma Sigma fraternity orchestrated its first “AGS for Bags Support for Gilda’s Club” fundraiser in support of testicular cancer research Saturday morning at the AGS house. After a bags contest, the event wrapped up with a turkey testicle eating competition.”

Freshman law enforcement and justice administration major TJ Nieukirk, a member of Sigma Chi, was quoted as saying,

“At first I was a little nervous about the whole thing, but I was starving, so that helped me shove as many balls in my mouth as possible.”

You can get all the, um, hairy details here.

You know you’re getting old when…you’ve traded in live rock shows for writers’ speaking engagements.

But that’s the way I roll these days, yo.

Sarah Vowell (who, if you’re not already a fan
of her essays on “This American Life,”
appearances on Letterman and Conan, or quirky books like “Assassination Vacation,” you may know from her work as the voice of Violet from “The Incredibles,”) gave a reading last Thurs. (10.25) at the Englert Theatre in downtown Iowa City.

My friend and I who both adore Mizz Vowell made the trek and got our books signed afterwards, (although that’s always kind of a weird thing, like, “Hi! I’m a fan! Can you write your name on a piece of paper

She was, of course, smart, funny, quirky, and cranky.
(It was painfully hilarious to hear her handle the inane “if-you-were-a-tree, what-kind-of-tree-would-you-be”
questions during the Q&A session.)

A student reporter from the Daily Iowan
did a nice little write-up and interview with her,
“Life in the term-paper lane,” here.

Ok, so this event took place quite far away from actual Forgotonia, but, since it wasn’t in Chicago proper (and therefore part of “downstate Illinois”), I consider it to be worthy.

A friend of mine who works in radio broadcasting sent me this link to prove that yes, it really did happen— that at the conference he went to over the past weekend, the keynote speech was actually an impromptu riff session (of the verbal kind, rather than the musical) by Rick Neilsen of Cheap Trick.

According to my friend, a former congressman from Rockford was supposed to give the keynote speech but wasn’t able to make it. So Rockford native Rick Nielson filled in for him. “He didn’t really give a speech – he just took questions,” my friend said. “Some of his responses were pretty funny.”

(I haven’t had a chance yet to talk with him and get further details, but here’s what my own question would’ve been: “Did you or did you not, sir, once play at my uncle’s prom [as my Freeport-bred mother has always claimed]?”)

When I clicked on the link for more details, I couldn’t help but crack up at this:

The INBA Fall Convention in Rockford featured two legends: one rock and one radio. Rockford native Rick Nielsen filled in as the Saturday night speaker, entertaining reporters’ questions about being the lead guitarist of the band Cheap Trick for more than 30 years. Then, former WBYS radio owner Charlie Wright of Canton spoke and accepted the INBA’s “Illinoisan of the Year” award.
Poor Charlie Wright! His thunder = officially stolen.

Actual “Letter to the Editor” in My Hometown Paper:

Three years ago I bought a house in Elvaston. It looked to me like it would be a nice, clean place to live. But I didn’t know we would have to wear our boots when we go to the post office after a rain….It looks like the state could spare a load of gravel and fill them up.

Alva Woodworth
Elvaston

Ever since I was a teenager, I have been obsessed with the legend of Vishnu Springs—the site of a once-popular resort that’s now a ghost town, hidden deep in a ravine in McDonough County.

Despite having grown up just a few minutes down the road from the place, I’d never heard of it until my late teens, when my aunt and uncle—who had gone to nearby Western Illinois University at the height of the hippie era—were reminiscing about how they’d hung out at a commune in the woods, a building that had been the Vishnu Springs hotel, when they were students.

The site, they told me, was completely hidden from the road, and it wasn’t really near anything, but was a few miles north of the village of Tennessee, Ill.—just down the road from my hometown of Carthage, and only a few miles west of Macomb and WIU.

You go out in the country, they said, you get to this certain spot, and then you have to crawl back through the brush, walk a long way through the trees and down into a deep ravine.

And then, after you’d hiked back quite a ways, there stood the old hotel— a place where legendary Chicago mobsters may or may not have stayed.

Vishnu had been a resort in the early 1900’s, a place where rich folk came to bathe in the natural spring because they believed it held magical powers.

It was once so popular that the railroad even built a line directly between Vishnu and Chicago, they said. And now there was nothing left but the old hotel buried deep in the woods.

I sat spellbound as they described the place to me. It was like finding out the Titanic itself had been lying at the bottom of our farm pond all these years and no one had ever thought to mention it.

I thought about Tennessee—which I knew to be nothing more than a spot in the road on the way over to Macomb, a smattering of crumbling houses and trailers with seemingly permanent yard sale set-ups in the front yard—and the whole thing sounded as magical as if my home stomping grounds had once been connected to Oz.

Over the years I’ve hoped for the chance to see the place, but the property was privately owned. I knew the general location but wasn’t sure exactly how to find it.

And, if I were not afraid of getting in trouble, I would admit here that finally, a few weeks ago, I got a chance to see it. Please, don’t prosecute me. I mean, like they say, forgive us uur trespasses, right? But if, hypothetically, I HAD been there, these were the pictures I would’ve taken:

(more below, after the photos)

I’ll just say that if you ever did happen to get to see it, you’d find the spot to be not much to look at itself.

I mean, it’s really just a dilapidated, unremarkable building.

It’s only if you’d try to imagine the life that had once come through the place that you feel like you’d seen something special.

Then, you’d be angry at the idiots who have felt the need to leave their mark there. Because, unfortunately, as the hotel has sat idle, it’s been a graffiti magnet.

If I had been there, I would tell you that I couldn’t understood how a place of such historical significance could be left in such disrepair—why no one has ever undertaken the project of at the very least getting a historical marker made.

But this week there’s a bit of news in the local media about Vishnu Springs.

Last weekend, the local historical society took a trek to Vishnu, bringing some local news reporters along, and one local paper mentions the possibility that the place could, eventually, come back to life some day.

According to the Macomb Eagle, “…WIU received the 220 acres as a gift from the granddaughter of the early 20th century owner, Ira Post. Brush has been cleared, the hotel has been inspected, trails have been made and plans are being forged to restore the ghost town into a site of natural and archaeological studies.”

While so far the plans to do something with the grounds sound rather nebulous, it’s good to know there are at least people thinking about what can and should be done.

I just hope that while the plans are taking shape, the hotel and grounds can be protected from further damage.

It’s not much to see, but it’s something worth saving.

Because, if I had been there, I would say I could almost hear the train whistle as I walked around the grounds. The bustle of women in big hats and dresses. The bubbling spring. The breath of life once breathed in this rural, remote Forgotonia.

True Story from the Register-Mail:

“Library Hosts Adult Book Club”

(hee hee.)

(The porn selection for this month is “To Kill a Mockingbird.”)

I learned recently (from my 85-year-old grandpa) that my paternal great-great- grandparents (Mattie A. and William C. Icenogle) are buried just down the street from where I live.

While I was out walking on Saturday I thought I’d snap a picture of their grave. I have no idea what that marker on the left stands for. I’ll have to do a little research.*

Also, the spelling of Icenoggle here has an extra “G.”

(Who knew?)

Apparently that letter got lost somewhere along the way.

(Wonder if there used to be even more vowels and /or consonants in “McGaughey” ?!?)