Did you set your clock this weekend?

I assume you remembered to change your clocks backward one hour over this weekend, if you live in a place where that is needed, such as here.

Neewollah Over For Another Year (Thank God)

Neewollah is over and done with for another year. It ended as usual in the early morning hours on Sunday with the folks from the Country Club costume party staggering home after an evening's festivities and the rest of town -- the less formal crowd -- going back to their homes after an evening at Austins on West Main Street following an evening (in either case) with much merriment and good times. Now I can let the cats go outside again ... although with the cold weather fast approaching they won't want to go out for very long at a time. Missy and Sassy are both here in my computer room now, getting cozy on their pillows.

A Chicago Neighborhood Slowly Disintegrates

An excerpt from a recent article in TELECOM Digest, October 29, afternoon edition:

Pat,
I recall you mentioning the Wabash office ("The Wabash Cannonball")being SxS at one time. Which part of the city did that serve, and doyou have any idea when it was replaced?
All info will be passed on to help reconcile old memories!
Thanks,
-Paul.

[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The 'Wabash CannonBall' a/k/a Wabash central office was one of the first, if not the first, central offices in Chicago, dating from the early 1900's; it served part of the downtown business district, which in those days (early 1900's, late1800's) was a wee bit south of the present 'downtown' area; 'downtown'tended to be more around Harrison/Van Buren Streets (east/west streets) and Wabash Avenue. Chicago, after the Great Fire, tended to build more to the north. The 'numbered' streets as a result are all southside, east/west streets. Northside streets going east/west are all 'named' rather than 'numbered'. Wabash was a panel office in the very old days; all I know for sure was that Wabash cut over in one large sweep from (mostly) panel with a bit of SxS tossed in to ESS in 1973 or 74. No wholesale SxS, nocrossbar, just straight to ESS. The Wabash central office is physically now (and as far back as I can remember) at 65 East CongressParkway (corner of Wabash Avenue and Congress).

On the far north side of the city, the EDGewater central office (so named because Lake Michigan at one point lapped at its doorstep until the lake was gradually filled in a little [at first with debris from the Great Fire, then later as city planners 'moved things around a little'] and the lake got shoved a few feet east on most of the northside). EDGewater CO consists of several exchanges; the ones I am familiar with are EDGewater (773-334), UPTown (773-878), LOngbeach-1(773-561), SUnnyside-4 (773-784), and maybe others. Although Edgewaterdates back almost to the earliest of times as well, and is in theUptown neighborhood, for whatever reason it mostly progressed over theyears from panel through step by step to crossbar, and when it was'cut' fairly early on (memory tells me it was 1976-77) one exchange there stood out like a sore thumb. City of Chicago was in the processof getting 911 service going everywhere in the city, except they raninto some hassles with LOngbeach-1. Everyone got 911 service exceptthe subscribers with Longbeach numbers (by then it was 312-561). Phonebook said '561 subscribers must continue to dial POlice-5-1313 andFIre-7-1313.' And that went on for a few months until telco was ableto successfully bring around Longbeach-1. And we were getting 'zero-plus' dialing about the same time; Longbeach was left out of that for a fewmonths also; _they_ had to dial '0' operator and ask for the longdistance numbers they wanted. Longbeach also had _no_ payhones in it;and the 9xxx series of numbers were given to 'regular subscribers'where normally numbers of that type (9xxx) _on other exchanges_ were often as not given over to payphones.

A bit of non-telecom history for a few minutes here; the Uptown neighborhood in Chicago _used to be_ -- like most of Chicago -- a very elegant, very rich white neighborhood. If you had an UPTown or EDGewater phone number, you lived somewhere between Ashland Avenue on the west, Lake Michigan on the east, Montrose Avenue on the south and FosterAvenue on the north. (I think those are still the boundaries). This is a neighborhood which, in the 1920-30's had the very elegant UptownTheatre (3000 plus seats) at Lawrence and Broadway, the RivieraTheatre a few doors south, the Aragon Ballroom, the Edgewater BeachHotel (_directly_ on the lakefront with its elegant mile-long boardwalk)Edgewater Hospital, Radio station WEBH (as in *E*dgewater *B*each *H*otel) and of course, Uptown Station, the very elegant train stop whichserved the Chicago, North Shore and Milwaukee Electric Railroad, oneof Samuel Insull's properties which was located at Wilson Street andBroadway, in the heart of beautiful Uptown, a shopping district only second in glamor to 63rd Street and Ashland in the Englewood area. Its all gone today. Between the first and second wars, a nice neighborhood for Jewish people; the Uptown neighborhood began going sour when the Jews moved out (going more north toward Evanston/Skokie) and poorer white people (known in street parlance as 'white trash' or 'hillbillies' [by and large people from Appalachia] moved in. The hillbillies stayed around through the1980's -- even a few still today -- but mostly they all ran off in dread and terror when the blacks started moving in around 1980 or so. Now today predominently black (although I remember the hillbilly population of Uptown quite well and in the early days of the hillbillypeople, also the gay population which lived there.) Uptown Station is still there, but mostly subdivided into small store fronts with one tiny entrance going direct to the train tracks where CTA has rechristened the whole thing 'Wilson Avenue CTA station', and since the CTA is a notorious slumlord -- they do _not_ maintain their property in any way, shape or form -- only when ordered to do so and fined bybuilding inspectors - the Uptown Station -- what remains of it as a train depot -- is a total dump, and very filthy. Uptown is now a 'dumping ground' by social service agencies looking to house hoardes of mentally ill people, ex-felons, drug addicts, etc. Quite a change from the Uptown I remember even in the 1960's. Most people do not even remember the North Shore Line nor Uptown Station. Very sad.

Weather Here in Independence

Here is the output from my weather station. During the first part of October, things were unseasonably warm, in my opinion, with temperatures in the nineties or lower hundreds, but then, following Wilma about the 20th or so of the month, things got more fall-like. You can see this forecast each day or whenever you wish at Indy Weather

Neewollah Week in Independence

Has Halloween become a more important holiday than it used to be? A very festive (for some people) holiday here in s.e. Kansas is Neewollah, which is Halloween spelled backward. It began in the 1920's as a way to keep children involved in safe and friendly activities instead of getting into mischief. In those days, it was a single day event on October 31, but in recent years it has evolved into a two week event, the final ten days of October, this year from October 19 through October 29. It has evolved into a combination Mardis Gras festival and OctoberFest for southeast Kansas. Far from being a way to keep children out of mischief, it has evolved into a way for guys to be rowdy, often times from too much drink. This Saturday night will be the big event of the season with a costume ball party at the Independence Country Club for the more formal among us; plenty of drinking and carousing for everyone else.

My cats always get very nervous and scared when Neewollah comes around each year. I very rarely let them go outside at all after dark, and certainly not during Neewollah.

Getting Started at Request of Some Readers

This is a new blog, started at the request of some readers of my other journal, TELECOM Digest. Watch for new entries here every day or three.

Some of the readers of the Digest want to hear non-telecom related stories from my days in Chicago. I'll see what I can do for them.