MORMON CHILDREN

Sorry that I was kind of grouchy yesterday. I employed my conflict resolution skills, and we worked things out amongst ourselves. Catherine realizes that it was a little unfair to expect Dan and me to write the whole storyline for the exhibit, so it's all good now. Today is a happy day because we had no class this morning, and Dr. Hardeman is out of town, so I'm FREEEEE! I slept in a little bit, and now I'm doing some laundry, homework, and cleaning--things I didn't have time to do this weekend. Alyson and I have to get the apartment cleaned up for the HA meeting tonight--it's our week to host it here. Maybe that means we can kick everybody out after one hour! :-) I should tell them that there is a 9:00 curfew at our building and all guests must leave at that time.

Last night I had a great time reading microfilm at the library. Reading newspapers on microfilm can be kind of addicting--because once you finish one day's paper, you have to move onto the next, and then the next, and then the next because you want to see if there's any good stuff in there. Last night I was reading the Charleston Daily News printed here in Charleston, Illinois. I was looking at the front page of the December 9, 1936 issue, hoping to find something about Tilford Dudley, but instead I saw a big headline that said: "NO WAR TOYS FOR MORMON CHILDREN." Random! I was quite surprised to see that on the front page of the newspaper in Charleston. The article was about how the Relief Society issued an official statement saying, "How inconsistent it is on the holiday honoring the birth of Christ to put into the hearts of children, by means of their toys, the very opposite of the message that heralded His birth, 'Peace on earth.'" The article went on to say, "The Mormon church organization asked America's Santa Claus today to exclude from his Christmas bundle all warlike toys." :-) Speaking of Mormons in the news, the other day Dr. Hardeman told me that even though he is a died in the wool Democrat, he doesn't think people are being fair to Mitt Romney. He said, "These people giving Mitt Romney a hard time about being a Mormon are about as un-Christian as they come! What is our country coming too?" Right on, Dr. H. I told him the joke that if we really wanted a Presidential candidate who fit all of the criteria for "first ever," we would elect Gladys Knight. She's a woman, she's African American, and she's a Mormon--all in one person! He said that if Gladys Knight were running for President he would switch parties.

Back to the microfilms. Just before I called it a night, I finally found something about T-Dud in the paper! It was soooooo funny. On Friday, February 18, 1938, the Charleston Daily News ran an article entitled: "Local Man Fined in St. Louis Court." The local man was none other than T-Dud himself! The article related that he was fined $30 by the police for "speeding 55 miles an hour and ignoring a stop sign." At this time Tilford was serving as the trial examiner for the National Labor Relations Board in DC, but he was in the area for the big court case against the Ford Motor Company's St. Louis operations. I guess that back in the 1930s, they were pretty serious about speeding violations--the article says, "He was arrested late at night, Feb. 5, by Motorcycle Officer Riley Evans, who reported Dudley drove north in Grand Boulevard between Park and Chouteau avenues, at 55 miles an hour and crossed Chouteau against a signal without stopping." Fortunately T-Dud was famous enough that he did not have to be present in court, and he had an attorney pay the $30 fine for him.

I read through a whole bunch of newspapers last night, but that's the only thing I found about T-Dud! You'd think that in Charleston, where he was from, that they would at least report his being nominated to FDR's administration or something like that. But I guess it's more interesting when someone gets arrested for speeding. Well, I'm off to do some homework.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

Hmmmm. I'm a little mad. Or maybe frustrated is a better word for it. The three-and-a-half hour meeting last night was in regards to the exhibit label outline that was due today in our Museum Exhibits class. It was a multi-part assignment, and since for all of our exhibit projects we are paired up in teams of two people, Catherine and Laurie--the exhibit curators--decided that they would have each of the partnerships work on one section of the assignment. Dan and I, the "Photography and Web Design Team" got assigned to write the storyline for the exhibit labels. This, first of all, is problematic in that we, being involved with the technical, not the conceptual stuff, have no idea what storyline the exhibit writer people want to use. So, they expect us to read their minds and come up with all of the information for the entire exhibit in one night (we had to complete our part of the assignment last Wednesday). Dan and I were totally confused about what they wanted us to do, so we did our darndest, but Catherine was quite upset that we ended up being "on a different page" than everybody else. Well, hello, we're not even going to be involved with writing the exhibit text, so why would we be on the same page as those who are--especially when no one even knows what the exhibit is going to focus on anyway!!!! So, at the meeting last night Catherine basically wanted to change everything Dan and I had done--which was fine with us, and it truly didn't have to take three hours to do. If Catherine knew exactly how she wanted the storyline to go anyway, how come she didn't just do it--since she seemed very irritated that she had to fix our work. Aly was hoping that Dan and I were okay after the meeting last night. Personally, I didn't care--I just wanted to get the dang assignment off of our backs. Aly said that the other day when the other groups were completing their parts of the assignment, Catherine instructed them to disregard the storyline that Dan and Tiffany had done because it was way off. These people are kind of making me mad! Sorry to complain--this is actually very therapeutic to be able to vent a little :-)

One more thing I need to vent about: in regards to ideas for the corridors exhibit (which will open in April), everybody is being totally impractical!! We spend hours throwing out ideas--99.9% of which could not possibly work. I'm all for being creative, but everybody needs to realize that we have very limited time and resources. But try telling them that, and they'll look at you like you don't have faith in their abilities. Sigh. Oh well, there is one bit of good news: we don't have our Research and Interpretation class tomorrow, so that's three more hours of time to work on other stuff! Hooray!!! Well, I'm off to Institute class, and then I think I'm going to go spend some time with Tilford Dudley on the microfilms at the library. I'll try not to be upset about everything. Oh, and one more reason why I'm a little grouchy is that my computer has a weird virus. I don't know how it got it, but it's really acting up. I had to spend a lot of time today, time which I didn't have, fixing it. I think it will be okay now though.

The Tilford Train

This morning when my alarm went off, waking me up from my little nap, I opened my eyes and realized that I felt like I got hit by a train--the Tilford Dudley train! I couldn't get out of bed to go to church. :-( I was completely exhausted, and another day was just barely beginning. I realized that this was not a good thing, so I started trying to plan how I could fit a nap in between church and the Dudley exhibit opening. According to my groggy mental calculations (while I was still half asleep) I would not have time for a nap--and I couldn't take one after the exhibit opening because we had another class meeting scheduled for this evening. Suddenly I realized that if I kept going at this pace I was going to have a relapse of my cold or get mono or something that could totally take me out for a while. So, I did the only thing I had energy to do and I turned off my alarm and went back to sleep. I slept until noon, but I woke up refreshed and feeling much better about everything. I think I just needed a morning off. I felt bad I missed church, but if my body were to shut down, I wouldn't be able to go anyway, and I'd rather not have my body shut down, so this was probably the best thing.

So, I got up, had breakfast, got dressed, and then it was off to the Dudley House. One of the people from church showed up at the Dudley House. Turns out he's one of the directors of the Coles County Historical Society! I told him sorry that I wasn't at church, and he said, "Oh, that's okay. Today the academic ox was in the mire!" There were a lot of people at the opening of the exhibit, and everyone seemed to love it. Angie and Sarah presented lectures about Tilford's childhood in Charleston, and everything went really well. Next week Laurie and Alisha will be talking about Charleston and the Dudley family during WWI, and then it will be two weeks from today, October 28, that Catherine and I will be presenting about Tilford's career as a lawyer and labor advocate. Everyone seemed very enthused about the exhibit and lecture series, so that was encouraging. A man named Harold Marker, one of Tilford's childhood friends even showed up today! He's super duper old, and Angie and Sarah said they were afraid they were going to lose him up on the front row a few times, but he perked up there towards the end and was telling all of these funny anecdotes about life in Charleston back in the day. You can check out the exhibit on our new web page I made! The direct link to the Dudley info. and pictures is: http://www.eiu.edu/~history/ha/2008ActivitiesDudley.htm.

After all of that was over, it wasn't too long before we had to have a class meeting to talk about one of our transportation exhibit assignments that is due tomorrow. It never ends! Catherine assured everybody that the meeting wouldn't go longer than two hours max. BUT, I'm sure you can guess what happened. It was a three-and-a-half hour meeting. It's sad when that seems like a "short" meeting--I was just glad that it didn't go for seven hours! Kristen said, "Maybe next time we should say that we're going to have a six hour meeting just so we can finish sooner than we plan for once." I immediately said, "NO!! We all know that if we planned for a six-hour meeting, it would turn into a ten hour meeting!" She concurred. I have decided that I really, really, really, really don't like school meetings. If someone is in charge and you have a purpose, that is one thing, but otherwise it's a total waste of time. And I hate wasting time--especially when I have other things to do. I get really antsy at these meetings, but everyone else seems to love them. Are all of my classmates crazy? I often wonder. The one bright spot at the end of the long meeting was that tomorrow we only have one class--no more Digital Applications for now! I miss the days when I had real weekends :-)

Dudley Eve

I'm burning the midnight oil again tonight! Once again, it says here on the website that it's Sunday morning, but to me it's still Saturday night--late Saturday night. I meant to go to bed earlier, but Dan, Aly, and I were watching "24" on DVD, and then I started working on stuff, and before I knew it, it was the middle of the night! I noticed in the picture at the left, which was taken today at the Dudley House after I had rolled out of bed, jumped in the shower, and gone over there, that I look a little tired. I think I'm developing dark circles under my eyes--a definite sign that I need more sleep. So I'm going to try really, really, really, really hard to do better at getting to bed. What was I doing at the Dudley House today, you may wonder. Well, today was Dudley Eve--the eve of the opening of the Dudley exhibit, and I took Aly over to the house this morning, planning to stay for maybe 30 minutes to help the exhibit team put up the exhibit panels. But, as always, 30 minutes turned into six hours. In this lovely picture, I am displaying a portion of the 15 foot roll of velcro we were using to stick the panels to the wooden display walls in the Dud House. We soon ran out of velcro, so Dr. Reid and I made a velcro run. She expressed to me that she was a little frustrated with the exhibit team because they were making everything a lot harder than it had to be. I told her that it's like that with everyone about everything--thus the seven-hour meeting a couple of weeks ago :-) We decided that everyone in the program is so totally focused and loves to work so much that people are making more work for themselves. It's like everyone thinks that you're supposed to be stressed out in grad. school, so they stress themselves out by making things more complicated than they need to be. Dr. Reid said that she never imagined in a billion years that the Dudley project would turn into such an ordeal. I think she felt a little better when I told her that it wasn't just this project--everything our class does turns into an ordeal :-) After the velcro run, while Dan, Aly, and Kristen stuck panels to the walls, Dr. Reid and I sifted through the pile of Dudley artifacts and papers that had been pulled out to be scanned for the project. I thought we had been upstairs for about an hour, but when we left it was 3:45 p.m.!

Thankfully Dad prepared me with a toolbox in my car before I left for school. It has come in handy many times, but today nearly every object in the toolbox was utilized. The first panic this morning was that they needed a screwdriver. I said, "Oh I have one in the back of my car." For some reason they were very surprised by this. I told them that I literally have everything back there that they could ever need (except for velcro)--including a week's supply of non-perishable food. They didn't believe me at first, but then they realized I was serious. Some of the foam core labels looked really bad, and they were wondering how to fix them. I whipped a file out of the toolbox and took care of filing off the rough label edges. Then they needed electrical tape to cover the lamp chords, and I had that too. :-)

There was one nearly catastrophic incident at the Dudley House today. Dr. Reid and I were upstairs with the artifacts, when Kristen came running up there holding an extension chord that was smoking. She said, "Dr. Reid! I think this chord almost caught on fire!" It smelled terrible. I guess that they plugged it into the wall, turned on the lights, and then, as the story goes, Kristen thought she heard something burning. Then they smelled something strange. Then they saw smoke coming from the wall. Luckily they pulled the chord before any flames erupted. That's all we would have needed--to burn down the Dudley House the day before the exhibit was to open!

I finally ate lunch at 4:30 this afternoon then Catherine and I worked on our Dudley presentation together. Needless to say, I'm a little tired of the Dudleys right now. Usually I'd be able to take a break from them on Sundays, but it will be another Dudley day tomorrow (today) because of the exhibit opening. Earlier this evening I was able to take a little break from everything, but I've been working on the HA website since then. Check out the new activities page: http://www.eiu.edu/~history/ha/2008%20Activities.htm. I still need to make some changes and add some things, but it's coming along. Well, I'm going to go take a little nap for a few hours before church starts :-)

Apples, Barns, Cemeteries, Dudleys . . .

It is 1:50 a.m.!! So, I guess it's really Saturday morning, but as far as I'm concerned it's still Friday night because I haven't gone to bed yet. So when I write about "today," I am referring to Friday. Why am I up at 1:50 a.m.? you may ask. Two words: Tilford Dudley. The big exhibit opening is this Sunday, and since the exhibit team (which will also include me) has to install the exhibit tomorrow, they wanted to get all of the panels assembled tonight. We started at 7:30 p.m. and left the room at 12:45 a.m. Dr. Reid came and stuck it out with us, and she brought pizza! That was super nice of her. There were several injuries sustained throughout the course of the evening. Aly burned her hand on the iron they were using to press the pictures down, and Dr. Reid got clobbered by a large box that she and I were carrying out to her car. One moment we were both holding it, and the next moment only I was holding it--and as her side of it went down, it sliced her across the cheek pretty good. I hope she'll be okay! We have literally shed blood, sweat, and tears over the Dudley exhibit!

But, to the fun part of the day. Today I went up to Monticello for the Piatt County Barn Tour--it was the perfect fall day! The sun was shining, the air was crisp, and I had a great time out driving through the corn fields. At one point I was driving along, and my car was making this weird noise. I thought maybe it was going to fall apart, but when I got out at the next stop, I realized that there was a corn stalk lodged up under the front bumper! Very fitting. I was relieved that my car wasn't really falling apart--it had just been dragging the corn stalk along the road. Up top you'll see some pictures from the day's activities: first you'll see me holding up the best cup of apple cider I've ever had. One of the historic barn owners had a produce stand set up for the barn tour tourists, and he had some fresh apple cider that was made of pure, fresh apple juice. It was divine! Next, you will see one of the historic barns. This barn is currently owned by the University of Illinois. Unlike the Arthur Cheese Festival back in September, which didn't really have any cheese, the Historic Barn Tour today did have plenty of cool barns. Next you'll see one of the old cemeteries from the tour route--along with the beautiful fall colors. Then, we get to my favorite stop of the day: Allerton Park. Allerton Park is owned by the University of Illinois, and it consists of a few hundred acres of formal gardens, statues, and a gigantic mansion. There was this guy by the name of Allerton who was a really wealthy Chicago businessman back in the 1930's, and he built the estate and had the gardens constructed. Before he died he donated it all to the U of I to be maintained for public use. It was soooooo pretty there! Last year the Illinois Tourism Bureau had a contest to determine the Seven Wonders of Illinois. I'm still bitter that Nauvoo wasn't chosen as the "Western Illinois Wonder!" And when I heard last year that Allerton Park, not Cozy Dog Drive In (where the corn dog was invented) had been chosen as the "Central Illinois Wonder," I was quite disappointed. I didn't think that Allerton Park sounded like a very cool place from its description, but I was indeed wrong--it's definitely "Seven Wonder" status. As you can see from the picture, the Allerton House is HUGE, and it has this pretty lake and all of these pretty trees. The picture of me with a strange, green creature is from one of the gardens surrounding the Allerton House. Mr. Allerton liked weird Oriental sculptures of strange animals, so they're all over the place. :-) I loved walking around through the gardens with all of the fall leaves around. The barn tour covered about 25 miles and consisted of 36 stops. I didn't stop at every place--that would have taken waaaay too long, but it was fun to see what I did. I'm glad I had a nice, fun, relaxing day to myself before having to come back to the stressful world of Tilford Dudley! Well, it's now 2:12 a.m., so I'd better be off to bed. I'm sure I'm going to dream about T-Dud tonight.