Author Archives: Denny

Book Review
Two More Old Highways Across America
Denny Gibson

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I had so much fun driving twice across the country for 20 in ’21 and the YT Too, that I did it again. This time, both coast-to-coast routes were from the era of named auto trails that preceded the U.S. Numbered Highway System. A drive on the National Old Trails Road was plotted years ago but never got scheduled. Only after I was given access to a guide for the Pikes Peak Ocean to Ocean Highway, an auto trail with similar endpoints, did I get serious about scheduling a trip on the NOTR that I matched with one on the PPOO. Driving both trails in one outing didn’t fit into my life in 2024, so they were split into two. Both trips and both routes do fit into this book, however, despite there being over 200 photos included. Apparently, that’s a personal record. In prepping to write this review, I reread my review for 20 in ’21 and the YT Too and saw it was bragging about “nearly 200” photos. “Over 200” is now the new high mark. This book doesn’t have more pages, though, so I have to resort to bragging about “nearly as many pages as 20 in ’21 and the YT Too”. 

I also bragged about the title of the Yellowstone Trail and US 20 book and bemoaned the fact that it wasn’t as clever as initially envisioned. Of course, clever sometimes also means cryptic, and that might have been the case here. Anyone who thought 20 in ’21 and the YT Too overly cryptic will be happy to see that the title of this book isn’t cryptic at all and not the least bit clever either. It really is about going across America on two old highways and, since I’ve done that before, it really is about two MORE old highways. It just occurred to me that some folks might be unhappy about having to guess which two, and I can understand that. But putting the wordy names of these two auto trails in the title would have made it entirely too long, and it’s too late to do anything about it now anyway. Sorry.

To be honest, though, even if the names National Old Trails Road and Pikes Peak Ocean to Ocean Highway were right there in the title, they would not be recognized by everyone. Out west, some would recognize the NOTR as something that turned into US 66. Back east, a similar number might recognize it and think it had become US 40. In the middle of the country, I suspect that just a few would even recognize the PPOO’s name. Of those who did, some might say it was replaced by US 36, while others would claim it became US 22. There is a little truth in each of these claims, but my point is that not all that many people know that the PPOO and NOTR were both once routes that connected the East Coast with the West. Their names in the title would not be any more enlightening to many than the words “Old Highways”.

There is a chapter on the history of each of the subject highways that might enlighten you a little, but the majority of this book just tells about me trying to follow the paths of the historic routes while gawking at scenery and points of interest and taking some pictures.

Two More Old Highways Across America, Denny Gibson, Trip Mouse Publishing, 2025, paperback, 9 x 6 inches, 185 pages, ISBN 979-8280457881.

Paperback and Kindle versions available through Amazon.

Reader reviews at Amazon and Goodreads are appreciated and helpful, and can be submitted regardless of where you purchased the book. All Trip Mouse books are described here with links to purchase signed copies.

Mystery & Benevolence On Display

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When the Mystery & Benevolence exhibition opened at the Taft Museum of Art in February, I tucked it away as something I would like to attend someday. But other things came along, and it eventually became untucked. A post on a blog I follow reminded me of it just in the nick of time. The exhibition closes today, May 11. I saw it on Wednesday.

The exhibition is subtitled “Masonic and Odd Fellows Folk Art”, and most of the items displayed are from either the Freemasons or the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, although there is a smattering of items from some lesser-known groups. The columns in the opening photo are from a Masonic temple and represent those at the entrance to Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem.  The letters ‘B’ and ‘J’ identify them as the pillars of Boaz and Jachin.

This is a traveling exhibition put together by New York’s American Folk Art Museum, but there are several local touches. One relates to this 1870 “Washington as a Freemason” poster printed by Cincinnati’s Strobridge Lithographing Company, as described by a “local story” placard.

Focusing on the “art” aspect of the exhibit, here are a couple of impressive marquetry works. The plaque contains numerous Masonic symbols, while Independent Order of Odd Fellows symbols fill the folding table. Additional IOOF items are displayed beyond the table.

The Odd Fellow’s “BURY THE DEAD” sign fits in with the “Benevolence” of the exhibit’s title. In the days before life insurance was common, help with burial expenses was a valued benefit of membership for many organizations. Goats appear in the rituals and symbols of several fraternal organizations. The rideable one pictured here belonged to the Modern Woodmen of America. Another item from something other than the Freemasons or Odd Fellows is this 1902 hooked rug. It is labeled as belonging to the Daughters of Pocahontas, although I believe it should be the Degree of Pocahontas, the Women’s Auxiliary of the Improved Order of Red Men.

I knew next to nothing about the internals of fraternal organizations when I entered the exhibition, and not much more when I exited. That’s not because the organizers didn’t try. It is because those internals are usually cryptic and often illogical, and I don’t believe either is by accident. My quite possibly incorrect understanding is that there are three degrees of “regular” Freemasons, but there are systems of degrees (called rites) that extend well beyond that. The Scottish Rite is one of the better-known of these, and the double-headed eagle is one of its better-known symbols. The “local story” displayed by the eagle is about Taft Museum of Art co-founder Charles Phelps Taft, who was a 33rd Degree Scottish Rite member.

The panel in the foreground contains International Order of Oddfellows symbols. The skeleton hanging on the wall is from the Knights Templar division of Freemasons. I was struck by the frequency with which skulls and skeletons show up here. There is a hint at an explanation in references to the Latin phrase “memento mori”. The English translation is “remember you will die”, and it is used as a reminder to do something good before you go. That’s pretty benevolent. The rest is still a mystery.

1950s Flashback

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The Cincinnati Museum Center has presented a 1940s Day or Weekend annually since 2011. I attended the third in 2013. Saturday was their first-ever 1950s Day. Asked on their Facebook page if this would also be an annual event, the museum said no. It is intended to be a one-time thing to mate up with the ongoing Julia Child and Barbie exhibits. “But,” they added, “it could come back!” I don’t really remember the 1940s, but I do remember the 1950s, and the rain on Saturday looked just like rain did when Ike was in the White House and Waite Hoyt was on the radio.

Individual information tables lined the rotunda. Pictured are King Records Legacy, Casablanca Vintage Clothing, and the American Sign Museum with a genuine 1950 NEON SIGN.

I stepped into the Newsreel Theater intending to watch a few minutes of the Moving Images presentation and ended up staying more than an hour watching clips of “Melody Showcase”, “Midwestern Hayride”, and commercials. I don’t remember “Melody Showcase”, but “Midwestern Hayride” was a staple at our house, and it’s even possible that I saw some of what I saw today when it was broadcast live.

1950s Day included quite a bit of live music. I caught the P&G Big Band, the Queen City Sisters, and Naomi Carman and the Bluecreek Boys. I do intend to check out the Barbie and Julia Child exhibits sometime, but the museum was far too crowded for that on Saturday. I’ll slip them in on a weekday when school’s in session and employed people are doing employee things.  

Living on the Air in Cincinnati

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I’m sure everybody is familiar with the joke about someone having “a face for radio.” It’s based on the idea that you do not have to look good to sound good. That’s an idea that often applies doubly to buildings. I’ve not been in a lot of radio stations, but I have been in enough to know that the people behind the microphones are frequently speaking in a dark cubicle far from prying and non-prying eyes, with little for their own eyes to take in as they work. That description has applied to Cincinnati’s WVXU and WGUC, but will no longer. Cincinnati Public Radio is letting the public see its new building this weekend. The bulk of personnel are already operating in the new space, and the plan is to switch broadcasting activity at noon on Tuesday.

I attended Saturday’s open house, which repeats today, April 27, 2025, from 1:00 to 5:00. Directions and other details are here. The cartoon in the opening photo stood not far from the entrance. The distance between speech balloons represents reporter Bill Rinehart’s signature pause when identifying debris on the roadway. I got my first view of the building from a drive by a few weeks ago, but this was my first up-close and stationary look.

And it was obviously my first look inside. That is the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra Woodwind Quintet on stage in an area dubbed The Gathering Space. There is also a Performance Studio. With spaces such as this, dare we hope that live music performances — possibly featuring local talent — might be in CPR’s future?

Pictures from the upper floor, including subjects from the preceding paragraph, show how open the building is.

The Instrument Petting Zoo, which seemed to be a big hit, was a new one on me. A more traditional petting zoo was also on the agenda, but the pettees had not yet arrived when I was there. After I walked to my car and worked my way back through the traffic to exit, I saw a Cincinnati Zoo van parked near the front door. I’m pretty sure that meant additional petting was happening or about to.

There are a number of smaller work areas, including some without windows. Most, if not all, of these are mixing and editing stations where a little isolation is a good thing.

As far as I know, the food trucks will not always be there, but they were certainly welcome on Saturday and will be there on Sunday if you want to grab a meal or some Graeter’s ice cream while checking out the building. The CSO quintet was piped outside to a nice park-like area, so I assume Sunday’s Gathering Space performances will be as well. That is where I listened while enjoying some black raspberry chocolate chip. The new place is finished, and the Welcome Weekend is half over. Cincinnati Public Radio is just about done packin’ and unpackin’.

ADDENDUM 29-Apr-2025: Although I was aware of the building’s forward-thinking mass timber construction and actually had it in mind as something to point out when I snapped the picture of the stairway, it completely got away from me during the writing phase. I was reminded of my glaring oversight as I listened to the official throwing of the switch at noon today. The core of this building is not steel or concrete. This is the first mass timber building in Cincinnati. Learn about mass timber here and watch a video about why Cincinnati Public Radio chose it here. 

Second Secular Season of Fish

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Yes, that image at right looks pretty much identical to the opening image in last year’s Lenten wrap-up post (A Secular Season of the Fish). In fact, this entire post looks about the same as that post, as well as every “season of fish” post I have ever done. It is simply a report on the seven fish fries I attended during the season. Six of them are new to me, and the seventh is a repeat I’ve had planned ever since I ate there last year.

The pictured map comes from the Cincinnati Fish Fry app, which I discovered and started using partway through the 2023 season. Anyone checking in at four or more fish fries through the app is entered into a prize drawing. I met the requirements in both years I have used it, but have won no prizes and expect the same this year. That’s not my goal in the least. I use the app to find fish fries, and it does a mighty fine job. I did not record the number of offerings in 2023, so cannot say whether this year’s drop from 87 to 73 is a trend or a blip. My guess is that, for commercial enterprises, it’s a trend. That is where most of the exits occurred. Participating commercial operations went from 16 to 4, while churches and others only dropped by one each, going to 53 and 16, respectively.

The first Friday of Lent coincided with the first day of Bockfest, and I had plans, weather permitting, to attend the Bockfest Parade at 6:00 PM. What could have been a scheduling dilemma was avoided by Pride of the Valley Masonic Lodge 95 and its 10 to 8 serving schedule. The pictured catfish meal, with coleslaw and a piece of cake hiding under the fries, was $12. Soda and water were $1. Some very good eating. And the weather did cooperate in allowing a dry parade. Check it out here.

I acquired the next week’s fish fix at Duwell VFW Post 7570 in Harrison, OH. The cod dinner was $15, and the iced tea was $2. Everything about the meal was good, but the standout to me was the inclusion of a human-sized portion of coleslaw. OK, maybe the amounts of both it and the same-sized mac & cheese were more than I needed, but it was a welcome change from restaurants that apparently think a little cup with a couple forkfuls of slaw is a serving.

I went outside the fish fry app for week three of Lent. I was in Darke County doing some chauffering for my stepmother, which allowed me to take in the fish fry in my old hometown. When I was five years old, we lived directly across the street from Ansonia American Legion Post 353, although the building has been replaced since then. $10 gets all the fish and fixings (there was applesauce, too) you can eat. Soda and bottled water was $1.

Week four saw me back within range of the app, though once again near its far western limits. Miller-Stockum American Legion Post 485, like the VFW of two weeks before, did not skimp on coleslaw.  This was the $12 cod dinner with a $1 bottle of water added.

I definitely got outside the lines on the fifth week of Lent. This is very much not a fundraiser for a non-profit. It won’t bother me at all if you count this as a complete fish fry miss. I was in Jasper, IN, and a search for fish fries revealed that one of the town’s most popular Lenten events was the Friday night seafood buffet at one of the town’s most popular restaurants. The restaurant, Schnitzelbank, was already on my radar, so it became my Friday fish find. It was a feast. At $28, it was decidedly outside the normal Lenten Friday budget, but that plate, which followed one from the well-stocked salad bar and preceded one with a couple pieces of fish and a dab of seafood alfredo, contains fried fish, baked fish, fried shrimp, steamed shrimp, new potatoes, scalloped potatoes, mushrooms, a mini crabcake, and a biscuit with apple butter. The Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier Dunkel was $5.50.

This was my second out-of-state fish Friday adventure for 2025. Florence, KY, Elks Lodge #314 is on the Dixie Highway, so I can claim a few historic auto trail miles this week. The tasty and filling cod dinner was $15, and the Yuengling was $3.25.

Here is the single repeat from last year. Gailey VFW Post 7340 is actually the only 2025 stop that was not entirely new to me. I was also here on Good Friday in 2024 when I ate beside a lady who had recently turned 100. The place was packed last year, but no more than half full this year. I was there very soon after it opened this time, so maybe it was my timing that made all the difference. Unfortunately, neither of the women I asked knew anything about the centenarian I had met, and one of them worked there as a bartender. The meal looked and cost the same — $12 — as last year. This Yuengling was only $2.

Cycle Thru and Collective Behavior at CAM

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I made it to “Cycle Thru! The Art of the Bike” within its first week. It opened at the Cincinnati Art Museum on Friday, April 4, and I attended on Thursday, April 10. It will be there for another eighteen weeks, through August 24. The exhibit includes photographs, paintings, and other pieces of art that feature bicycles, but while I enjoyed looking at those items, what I documented were the real things: Bicycles that might themselves be considered pieces of art.

The exhibit begins with an 1878 Ariel High Wheel. This style of bicycle originated in Britain and was commonly known as a penny-farthing because the pairing of the large and small wheels reminded people of the relative size of penny and farthing coins. On the left in that first picture is an Otto Dicycle, which women could ride without risking the embarrassment of exposing an ankle. In the foreground of the second photo is a cast iron and wood velocipede from 1865. I had seen the three-wheeled vehicle in the third picture in promotions for the exhibit but could not figure out what was going on until I read its description at the museum. That trailing wheel was supposed to make the ride smoother, but it’s not clear how well that worked. That rider comfort was definitely top of mind with this bike is reinforced by its “bespoke anatomical saddle“.

I thought one of the vehicles in the 1900s-1910s display might belong to Wile E. Coyote, but what looked like an Acme Rocket is one of two metal cans to hold air and keep the water bike afloat. The wall behind the very rare 1960 fiberglass Bowden Spacelander is filled with bicycles from the 1930s and 1940s. The 1965 Sears Spaceliner at upper left in the 1950s-1960s caught my attention because of its resemblance to my 1960 J. C. Higgins Flightliner. The Spaceliner was designed by Viktor Schreckengost and built by Murray, and I’m guessing that is also true of the Flightliner.

Of course, for anyone not having owned a Flightliner, the big attention grabber in that last group of bicycles is almost certainly the customized 1953 Schwinn DX Cruiser from Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. The saddle might not be bespoke, but everything else sure is.

The museum itself is, as always, free. “Cycle Thru!” is not. However, admission to the bicycle exhibit also includes another paid exhibit at the museum. Until May 4, that second exhibit is “Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior!“. After that, “Cycle Thru!” will be paired with “Farm to Table: Food and Identity in the Age of Impressionism“. I’m sure “Farm to Table” will be a very good show, but man, I sure liked the Sikander exhibition. The photo above is of the second edition of her sculpture “NOW”. The first edition is on permanent display outside the Appellate Courthouse in Manhattan

As the museum’s description of the exhibit states, Shahzia Sikander works “in a variety of mediums—painting, drawing, print, digital animation, mosaic, sculpture, and glass,” and I believe the exhibit contains examples of every one of them. The first item shown here, “Provenance the Invisible Hand“, combines silkscreening and hand painting. The second, “Arose“, is a glass mosaic. A detail from its center is here.

“Liquid Light II” is painted glass. “Promiscuous Intimacies” is a bronze sculpture. I made myself comfortable on a futon and watched the “Parallax” digital animation but somehow missed its description, so I am including a capture from a PDF of exhibit labels here.

I also missed any onsite description for “NOW”, so am including a capture of the PDF for that as well. It is here. As I did some fairly casual research on Sikander, I learned of an 18-foot statue named “Witness” that is similar to the 8-foot “NOW”. On July 8, 2024, while on display at the University of Houston, “Witness” was beheaded. Although an anti-abortion group had protested the statue’s presence in February, nothing is known that connects the group with the decapitation. Sikander explained her desire to not have the statue repaired with, “The damage reflects the hateful misogynistic act and it should not be forgotten.”

A Birthday in Hoosierland

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I set another personal age record yesterday. Even though the celebration was spread over three days and 300 miles, I am reporting it with a blog post rather than a multi-page trip journal for no particular reason although laziness could be a factor. The seeds were planted when I saw that Jason Wilber and Dave Jacques (John Prine’s long-time accompanists) had a concert planned in Chattanooga. I was interested, but before I could act on that, a date in Jasper, Indiana, was announced. When I realized that the Jasper concert was on my birthday and that a single front-row seat was available, I grabbed that seat and built the rest of the party around it.

Things got started on Thursday with breakfast at a favorite restaurant just inside the Indiana border. Folks at the State Line Restaurant make their own goetta (in and on the omelet) and strawberry jam (soon to be all over the toast), which makes it one of the best places ever to start a birthday party. The restaurant is not only on the state line; it is also on US-50, and that’s what I headed west on.

Although the trip was organized around a concert, this turned out to be the splurge of the outing. I visited the West Baden Springs Hotel with a group of friends back in 2007. At that time, it had only been open for a few months following a long closure and major restoration. I told myself I would stay there someday, and today, a little over seventeen years later, I did.

I stayed in this room and ate dinner at the hotel’s Ballard’s Restaurant, which uses a small section of the 200-foot diameter “Eighth Wonder of the World” dome as its dining area. The photos are from and of my table. That’s baked cavatappi on the plate and Trash Panda blonde ale in the glass.

Friday started with breakfast at Nila’s Place and ended with dinner at Schnitzelbank. When I began looking into Jasper eateries, Schnitzelbank consistently appeared as one of the best in town. I penciled it in as a likely spot for my birthday dinner. Then I went looking for a fish fry for the Friday night I would be in Jasper. It did not take long for me to discover that Schnitzelbank holds a very popular seafood buffet every Friday during Lent. So, a seafood buffet became my Friday fish fry, and I got rid of any problem I might have coordinating dinner at this very popular restaurant with the Saturday night concert. Here’s that buffet from one end to the other.

I definitely lucked out on my birthday breakfast spot. I’m pretty sure that everyone else at a rather busy Cranberries knew each other, and the waitress called me honey multiple times. I found a pretty good place for dinner, too. The fact that Pub ‘N’ Grub was about a block from the concert venue was a big plus. With the steady rain, I wished it were closer.

The Astra Theater is not exactly on the town square, but its entrance is accessed through an opening between two buildings at a corner of the square. It opened as a movie theater in 1936 and operated as a movie house until closing in 2002. After much refurbishing, it reopened in 2018 as a combination movie theater and performance venue.

That front-row seat was great for hearing and for seeing but not so great for photographing. Jason and Dave played a bunch of Prine songs and told a bunch of Prine stories. Sam Lewis and Andy West, both friends of John’s, joined them for a few songs and shared their own stories. This was a great kickoff to a tour they are doing, which will include a variety of guests at the different shows. Yeah, it’s a pretty good way to spend a birthday.

ADDENDUM 7-Apr-2025: Partially because they didn’t fit smoothly into the narrative and partly because I wanted to make sure the post was ready for Sunday morning, I omitted some of the things I did other than eating and sleeping. I doubt anyone is surprised that visiting breweries filled some of my idle time. I reached West Baden Springs way too early for check-in on Thursday, so I drove about fifteen miles south to check out Patoka Lake Brewing. On Friday, I tried out Saint Bebedict’s Brew Works in Ferdinand, and I also visited the Dubois County Museum in Jasper. I took no external pictures there and very few inside. A 1910 Sears Runsbout did catch my eye inside the large and impressive museum. Part of Saturday was filled with visits to the Santa Claus Brewing Company in Santa Claus and Yard Goat Artisan Ales in Huntingburg.

A Pair of Urani

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I have been to the original Uranus Fudge Factory in Missouri a few times since it opened in 2015. With the opening of the second Indiana “factory” outside of Richmond in December, there are now a total of three. The first Indiana “factory” opened three years ago in Anderson. I visited both of the Indiana stores on Friday, which I guess means I could do a “My Caboddle” post on them if I wanted.

The Missouri location is marked by an elaborate giant neon sign and a twenty-foot-tall Muffler Man style statue of Uranus Mayor — and owner — Louie Keen. Richmond has the huge block letter sign in the opening photo and a pair of not-so-tall Mayors. It also has a 110-foot cross. The cross was left by the previous owner, New Creations Chapel, much like someone might move and leave behind a couch that doesn’t fit in the U-Haul truck they rented.

Mayor Keen is not ten years old, but either has a really good memory or took really good notes on every potty joke that made him laugh at that age. The potties here, of course, have jokes. The establishment’s name lets you know what to expect, but there is a line that the signs, slogans on merchandise, and endless double entendres from employees do not cross. If you can laugh like a ten-year-old boy, you’ll be just fine.

There is, naturally, merchandise aplenty. Uranus, MO, sits beside Historic Route 66, and the inventory there reflects that. The Richmond store sits beside US 40 and could be considered to be on the National Road. Road fans should note, however, that it is not on the National Old Trails Road. It is on the stretch of National Road bypassed by the Dayton Cutoff, which the NOTR followed.

And yes, there is fudge; really good fudge in a bunch of different flavors. I left with a little Praline Pecan and a little Mint Chocolate. Uranus ice cream and sodas are also available, but I skipped both in Richmond. Gotta save something for the day’s other Uranus.

Fudge and ice cream might make you think of an amusement park, and Uranus has a bit of that, too. There is a shooting gallery in a back corner and a Vortex Tunnel near the exit. Without that handrail, there is no doubt that I would have been sprawled on the floor within just a couple of steps. Outside, the animatronic dinosaurs will be turned on “any day now” and will eventually guard a miniature golf course.

I then moved on to Anderson, IN. There is no statue of Mayor Keen here. I guess that could be him dressed as an astronaut, but I doubt it. The real Louis Keen is on the premises, however. The Anderson fudge factory opened on April 1, 2022, and is celebrating its third anniversary a tiny bit early with a party on Saturday featuring a fudge eating contest. One of the employees I spoke with indicated that Louis was next door, resting up for the big day.

Standing in front of the main building is something featured at all three locations: a fully functioning Zoltar. Here is the one at Richmond. The inside is packed with fudge and merchandise.

In Anderson, ice cream is served in a separate building. I got pistachio. The Anderson Putt Pirates Mini Golf, featuring the deep blue sea, is beyond the ice cream parlor. There are some dinosaurs and other figures here and there, but they are not animatronic, and they are not hanging out at the golf course.

I will close with this pictorial observation from the Richmond factory and my own observation about this post’s title. When I looked for the correct plural of Uranus, I was told that it was a proper noun and there was no need for a plural. Maybe so, but that was before Louie Keen got involved.

Cincy’s Fire Fighting Heritage

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I once ate dinner here. It was sometime in the 1980s. The company I worked for held a banquet for a sales conference here, and we were all allowed to tour the museum before the meal. I recall that I found the Cincinnati Fire Museum quite interesting at the time, but for some reason gave those memories the better part of four decades to fade. During Saturday’s visit, I did find a few pieces of equipment to be somewhat familiar, but I don’t really remember anything about the layout of the museum and have a hunch it has changed more than a little since I was here.

Steps — or for adventurous youngsters, a pole — lead to a lower level where the oldest items in the museum are on display. The city’s first fire engine has been lost to history, but its second survives. It is a pumper built by William C. Hunnerman of Boston in 1816. With a crew of twelve, it could throw water up to 133 feet. The massive drum was Cincinnati’s fire alarm from 1808 to 1824. After the city became too big for the drum to be heard by all, a bell took over, and the drum fell on hard times, which included a period of being used as an oat bin before someone recognized its importance and started to take better care of it. Bored-out logs like the one here were once common components in city water systems. When firemen reached the scene of a fire, they might drill a hole in the nearest pipe to access the water, then plug and mark it for possible reuse in the future. The name “fire plug” has outlived wooden pipes and hand drills by a bunch.

Before the middle of the nineteenth, things called fire engines were merely pumps that were usually mounted, almost always accompanied by some sort of tank, on wheels. Manpower pulled the engines to fires, and manpower operated the pump once they arrived. In 1853, Shawk and Latta, a Cincinnati company, developed the first practical steam pump for fighting fires. Cincinnati soon gained a reputation as a supplier of firefighting equipment. The horse-drawn fire engine (rear view here) was built in 1884 by the Ahrens (later Ahrens-Fox) Fire Engine Company, who had obtained the Latta patents in 1868.

At almost exactly the same time that steam power was dramatically changing firefighting equipment, an equally dramatic change was occurring with the firefighters. Boston began paying some of its firefighters in 1679. Cincinnati went further in 1853 and is considered to have established the nation’s first fully paid fire department. In 1873, Cincinnati firefighters were forbidden from holding other jobs, making them truly professional.

Closing things out is a pair of twentieth-century Ahrens-Fox fire engines. The chain-driven Model M-4 was delivered to Cincinnati’s Company 13 in 1918. The 1958 cab forward Model ECB is the last fire engine ever produced by Ahrens-Fox. It was retired in 1981.

Early TV Museum

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I have more than once seen the Early Television Museum mentioned in posts about under-the-radar museums in Ohio and told myself I should go there sometime. When that happened while early Cincinnati TV history was fresh in my mind from my recent visit to the Voice of America Museum, I decided now was the time. I went Saturday and was quite impressed.

The Kuba Komet in the opening photograph might be the newest item in the museum. I picked it not because of its age but because I thought it the most eye-catching thing there. It’s from England and was, in 1962, a complete entertainment system with a turntable and AM/SW radio concealed by panels. At 7 feet wide and 5 foot 7 inches tall, it was probably a bit intimidating.

I’m not sure what the oldest item is in the museum, but it must be something in the mechanical television gear from the 1920s and 1930s. There is a description of just how mechanical television works on the wall, but it did not help me much. To me, mechanical TV might be even more mysterious than electronic TV.

Apparently, the British were a step or two ahead of us during the earliest days of television. Most of the displayed items from the mechanical era are British. This is a British electronic television from 1938. It originally sold for about 135 pounds (approx. 11,612 pounds or 15,029 dollars today). The earliest picture tubes were often quite long and were mounted vertically to reduce their footprint. Mirrors allowed viewing while seated.

Television was introduced to Americans at the 1939 World’s Fair, and these two General Electric models were part of that introduction. Apparently, G.E. was making some picture tubes short enough to mount horizontally. Both models were priced somewhere around $600 ($13,626 today).

My earliest memory of television comes from 1950 when I was bribed with a Coke to sit quietly on top of the cooler while my Dad and a few other men watched the Saturday (I think) fights at the village’s only store on a screen about the size of one of the smaller ones in these pictures. Most items on display have a placard with considerable information about the item and most of those placards have a QR code that accesses even more information on the museum’s website. There is a tremendous amount of history on display here.