Memory Lame in Missouri

Before, when a long trip abroad has been imminent, I have taken whirlwind tours of the Midwest to say good bye. (See, e.g., here) Now I'm doing it again, this time with a family.
Friday, April 28, 2017, we packed up the pick-up one more time and unceremoniously drove away from Chicago on the Stevenson Expressway, bound for a tour of central Missouri. Christine had never visited the town where I spent four rambunctious years "studying" in central Missouri. We also managed to fit in visits with some disgruntled Army veterans, living happily with their four kids just on the outskirts of Fort Leonard Wood, and another disgruntled veteran of St. Charles County.

One last breakfast at 3rd Coast before saying good bye to North Dearborn Parkway.

The drive to central Missouri was challenging. Maybe you noticed, but after the Midwest's warm winter, it has been a rainy spring. Maybe you also have noticed that Midwestern weather usually flows from west to east. We had the luck of travelling southwest, deeper and deeper into a storm travelling along a front stretching from the southwest to the northeast. As we drove southeast, the storm just stayed on top of us. I have never driven in such an intense storm for such a long period; usually these intense storms just pass quickly right over you, but not when you continuously drive along the front. The back of the pickup truck was full of our luggage, but as long as great enough speed is maintained, precipitation is blown away from the bed; miraculously everything remained mostly dry. We drove in the storm for several hours.

We were travelling on I-55 with the arrow.

We arrived to the outskirts of Waynesville, Missouri, the nearest town to Fort Leonard Wood, safe and sound, and began partying, family style, with Josh and his wife Abi (veterans of the overseas war on terror) and their four kids. After several drinks late at night, Josh threw some trash in the yard. Why does a man throw trash into his own yard? I don't know. In the morning, his daughter Jade, who apparently dreams of being a hall monitor, put him in jail "for trashing the yard." Below presents a good representation of how Josh felt in the morning upon his release from jail.

Smile for the camera, kids.

Bobby playing with his new friends.

Jade, the proud narc, is on the right.

After 24 hours of fun, we needed to leave before we wore out our welcome and trashed the yard again. We caught up with Matt B, the St. Charles party veteran, and his daughter Astrid for some Mexican food in Warrenton and then headed to Columbia, Missouri.

At the Mexican restaurant in Warrenton, Bob decided to eat the menu instead of his refried beans. I changed his diaper twice on the floor of the bathroom: #dadlife.

Columbia has changed. Columbia is a fast growing city, and there is presently a lot of residential property investment in the downtown. From the few Mizzou grads who have trickled up to work at my firm in Chicago, I've heard rumored that downtown is nowadays the hot place to live. It must be hot -- what with all of these new apartment buildings built and being built.

I always thought it so silly that college kids wanted to live in suburban apartment buildings and commute to campus. Even when I went to Mizzou, downtown was full of restaurants, bars, coffee shops, independent cinema (lucky folks who have a cinema like this in their backyard), music theaters, street festivals, gourmet groceries, and the other trappings of modern American urban living. To be near to downtown and campus, which abuts the downtown, I lived in the student ghetto of East Campus, full of beautiful old homes and old homes run into the dirt by reckless, liberated college students.

For the present trip, Christine and I stayed at the Tiger Hotel in downtown Columbia. Everyone in Columbia knows the Tiger Hotel because it is one of the tallest buildings in the city, and on its top it wears a sign that says "Tiger." The Tiger Hotel started life in 1920 as one of those grand old school hotels, this one designed to be Columbia's best. Over the years it saw a number of changes, some more well-thought than others. By the time I was "studying" in Columbia, the Tiger Hotel had been converted to a retirement home. In 2011 it was converted back into a hotel, this time a modern hotel with nods to its historic past.

On the ground floor is Glenn's Cafe with its famous sign. The sign has traveled around to a number of restaurants in Columbia since its genesis in the 1930s. I even worked for the former owner one summer as a bus boy at a successor restaurant to Glenn's (he was a grade-A prick, never saying a word to me while in his employ; however, the southern-style food was delicious, and I enjoyed my employee meals; I also enjoyed drinking beer at Glenn's Cafe when I was underage). Now Glenn's Cafe has been reincarnated as the restaurant on the ground floor of the Tiger Hotel serving some variant of New Orleans cuisine.

The Tiger Hotel. You can see the "T" of the Tiger sign at the top, and at the bottom you can see the Glenn's Cafe sign. When I was a student at Mizzou, Glenn's Cafe was a few blocks from here.

What happens when a baby has a credit card? Bobby bought breakfast at Glenn's Cafe. I had shrimp and grits. What is the singular for grits? Is it a grit? (asked Vinny in My Cousin Vinny) Southern food isn't quite as common in Chicago and Cedar Rapids as in Columbia.

Now Columbia isn't exactly in "the south," but I understand that during the Civil War, central Missouri tended to favor the Confederates because of its rural demographics and industry (i.e., slaves working in agriculture ). In fact, the name of the sports teams, the Tigers, is named after a pro-Union militia that defended Columbia during the Civil War. Way to get on the right side of history, Mizzou; the intransigency increases the further south you go (hello, New Orleans).

View of the Mizzou campus and some new downtown residential buildings from the window of our Tiger Hotel room.

The campus of University of Missouri impressed Christine (but perhaps Bobby less so; he mostly slept during the tour). I have been to a number of Midwestern colleges, and, in my opinion, Mizzou is the most handsome. I imagine opinions are strong about this topic, so I withdraw before starting an argument. Mizzou is handsome because of its consistent architectural styles throughout whereas many schools made poor decisions during the years where "urban renewal" was popular. You should see (or maybe you don't want to) the building where I went to law school at University of Pittsburgh; it was built in the brutalist style -- sounds handsome, right? -- constructed of course in the 1970s. The oldest part of Mizzou is built around the Francis Quadrangle with sober, red brick schoolhouse style buildings. To the east, buildings are built in a neo-gothic style with white limestone, intended, I guess, to mimic east coast schools and Oxford.

The core of the campus looks mostly the same as it did in my school days with its stately old buildings, but in addition to the new apartment buildings, other changes are afoot downtown. When I went to school there were no Starbucks yet in Columbia; luckily some independent coffee shops remain. I learned to drink coffee by the liter while in Columbia. The Music Cafe, where I drank my first craft beer, Boulevard, as an underage party animal, is no longer with us. It's funny: we didn't seek out Boulevard or craft beer; my friends played in a band there, and Boulevard is what they served. On this trip we paid tribute to the campus Domino's where you could order a $4.99 pizza that would be delivered in 20 minutes and the restaurant, Chipotle, that confused us with its funny name back before it was an international phenomenon. We also took a picture of the newspaper where I worked, ignominiously and briefly, having never been published on the front page.

Many, many more dedicated journalists than me worked at this newspaper, but I did grace its newsroom for a few years.

Jesse Hall on the Francis Quadrangle.

At the Tiger Hotel I talked to a valet who was holding our bags. He said his parents remember the days before there were so many apartment buildings downtown. I was thinking, "Well, I guess this is what happens when you get old: college kids start treating you like a member of their parents' generation." It's funny, though, because my time at Mizzou doesn't feel that long ago, and I don't feel much different now than I did back then -- mentally, at least... I am much less physically fit now... So I guess I just proved the kid's point... Damn it.