Chicago Weblog

No Spring (yet) this year. Last week’s photo showed CVH in her parka on Michigan Avenue, and today it was 28°C (82°F) in Chicago. They don’t turn on our air conditioning for another week, so the cat is hot:

On the morning of 3 March 1934, infamous bank robber John Dillinger escaped from the jail in Crown Point, Indiana. Supposedly he used a wooden gun that he had carved there to fool the guards.

Earlier, upon arriving in Crown Point, John had some rather casual pictures taken with the Sheriff and Prosecutor. His escape and these photos ended their political careers.

After leaving the jail, Dillinger went to the garage next to the courthouse, stole the Sheriff’s Ford V8, and took it to Chicago, abandoning it a block from where we now live.

These days, it’s a lot harder to find a parking spot in our neighborhood. The hundred-year-old L tracks in the background are being rebuilt this year.

A Dillinger buff eventually tracked the car down, restored it, and even took it back to Crown Point to show it off.

There are hundreds of laundromats (“washaterias” CVH calls them) in Chicago. I can see where it is difficult for laundromat owners to come up with a distinctive name for their business. Some don’t try very hard at all, like “Coin Laundry”.

Some try a little harder, but “Spin Cycle” isn’t exactly original or poetic, either.

I take my items that don’t go in the coin machine to a neighborhood cleaners, Smile Cleaners. It’s a nice, positive name.

Fun Wash, is positive too, but might be pushing it a bit far. Ditto for Wash & Relax.

The one that never fails to tickle me is Fluffy Laundry. I just love that name.

My second place goes to Happy Bubble.

There’s a LaundryLand in our neighborhood. Not the most imaginative name, but they have a really great sign.

Even though we don’t drive, we went to the Chicago Auto Show, billed as the largest in the nation.

There were a lot of very shiny vehicles there.

I was hoping to see real-life examples of electric car technology, but Toyota seemed to be the only company giving any significant attention to electric cars. The overwhelming emphasis at the show was on gasoline powered trucks. Of course, American manufacturers don’t make regular cars anymore, having ceded that market to overseas. But even Nissan was focussed on their trucks, and didn’t have an single Altima or Maxima there.

On the other hand, if you wanted to drive a truck over a crazy steep hill, this was the place to be.

This was very popular. Perhaps because there are no hills in Chicago.

There were a number of sports cars that you could sit in, but of course you could not turn on the engine. I sat in a Dodge Hellcat.

It’s not that impressive as a parked car. I looked in the car’s performance statistics using the dashboard computer and saw that it had never gone faster than ninety miles an hour. What a waste.

The ads said that there would be classic cars from local car clubs on display, but alas, there were no club booths. Ford did bring an electrified F-100, which I thought was cool.

The most spectacular display, though, was not an automobile at all, but Subaru’s National Park display. Beautiful aerial images of western parks (Denali, Arches, Yosemite) displayed on a wraparound screen and an imaging floor. It even snowed on you! (Not exactly enchanting for Chicagoans.)

The nicest car to sit in was this Lincoln.

I’m not kidding. You could sit in this vehicle for a week. It made everything else at the show feel like a city bus.

If you knew me in college, when I lived in the land of ice and snow, you would have heard me complain about the weather. And how I was cold all the time.

And you would have heard me say (many, many times) that, when I graduated, I was going to move to a place where it didn’t snow and I would never, ever, ever come back north.

And I did so, living in Houston for many years, and enjoying Houston weather.

Yet here I am, living more or less happily in Chicago. How could this be? There are some reasons.

• The northern winters are not as bad here as they used to be. Taken together, the string of winters ’77, ’78, and ’79 were the coldest and snowiest string this part of the country had seen in decades. Thanks to global warming, that record will likely stand for the next two or three hundred thousand years.
• Winter wear is now available in tall sizes. When I was in college, this was not so. One certainly could not get boots in size 15; they just weren’t made. I trudged through the snow in Converse All-Stars: canvas basketball shoes with a thin rubber sole.
• I don’t wear glasses outside anymore. So they aren’t fogged up all the time.
• For now at least, it’s perfectly all right to wear a mask. A mask on your face can make it feel ten to fifteen degrees warmer. Of course, that doesn’t work if you wear glasses.
• I’m retired. If it’s too damn cold or snowy, I just don’t go out.
• My wife didn’t like hot weather anymore and wanted to move north.

However, I am still cold all the time.

I frequently ride the Chicago Transit Authority bus. The most common bus in our part of town is the sixty-foot 4000 series New Flyer. It bends in the middle.

I’ve always been impressed at how the drivers maneuver these big critters through traffic and around corners.

Recently, drivers were practicing parallel parking these buses on our street. I was very impressed.