This'n'That; June fifteenth #1; Last Of The Pearls!

More Mid-west Pearls Of Wisdom-Again!

• I give you Chicago.  It is not London and Harvard.  It is not Paris and buttermilk.  It is American in every chitling and sparerib.  It is alive from snout to tail. -H.L. Mencken
• [Chicago] The hub of the continent.  -Federal Writers' Project, Illinois: A Descriptive & Historical Guide
• Iowa winters were very cold and I well remember seeing the coal oil frozen in the lamps in the morning. -Catherine Ann McLollum, The Crossroads of America
• The farms and small towns in the eastern half suggest the rich, more densely populated country of Iowa and Illinois.  The cities have much of the fast tempo and business-like ways that prevail in the larger cities of the Midwest.  But, in western Nebraska, fields give way to the great cattle ranches of the sandhill area, life is more leisurely, and manners area more relaxed.  Something of the Old West still survives. -Federal Writer's Project, Nebraska: A guide to the Cornhusker State.
• The people who know the place only by driving through it know the flatness.  They skim along a grade of least resistance.  The interstate defeats their best intentions.  I see them starting out, big-hearted and romantic, from the density and the variety of the East to see just how big this country is.  They are well read, and they have a vision as they come out of the green hills and the vista opens up, a true vision so vast that at night as they drive there are only the farmyard lights that demonstrate lane geometry by their rearranging patterns. -Michael Martone
• Old, genteel St. Louis--T.S. Eliot's city--thought of itself as a slice of cultivated Europe.  It seemed mysitified as to how it had landed here, stranded on the wrong side of the big American river. -Jonathan Raban
• This is a most peculiar state [Indiana].  It may not be so dynamic not yet so creative, sociologically, as it is fecund of things which relate to the spirit-or perhaps I had better say to poetry and the interpretive arts. -Theodore Dreiser
• I had visions of a dark and dusty night on the plains, and the faces of Nebraska families wandering by, with their rosy children looking at everything with awe. -Jack Kerouac
• Iowa is graced by absolutely marvelous people.  I know you hear that all the time, but it's true.  They are clean, brave, thrifty, reverent, loyal, honest and able to brush after every meal. -Donald Kaul
• Indianapolis.... where the practice of the arts was regarded as an evasion of real life by means of parlor tricks. Kurt Vonnegut
• Its women are lovely and stubborn, its men angary and ingenious.  Is there a land anywhere like southern Illinois? -Baker Brownell
• There's only one thing for Chicago to do, and that's to move to a better neighborhood. -Herman Fetzer
• I would never have been President if it had not been for my experiences in North Dakota. -Theodore Roosevelt
• Indianans have an ability to see sin at a distance but never at their very feet.  Indianapolis is shocked by vice in East Chicago; Bloomington is horrified by what goes on in Terre Haute or South Bend, and so on. -Roger Branigin
• New York is one of the capitals of the world and Los angeles is a constellation of plastic, San Francisco is a lady, Boston has become Urban Renewal, Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington wink like dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern megalopolis, and New Orleans is unremarkable past the French Quarter.  Detriot is a one-trade town, Pittsburgh has lost its golden triangle, St Louis has becom e the golden arch of the corporation, and nights in Kansas City close early.  The oil depletion allowance makes Houston and Dallas naught by checkerboards for this sort of game.  But Chicago is a geat American city.  Perhaps it is the last of the great American cities. -Norman Mailer
• That peppery, independent spirit, not entirely foreign to the onery mules who helped make Missouri famous, hs surfaced again and again in Missouri history, redent decades not excepted. -Neal R. Peirce
• Everybody in Des Moines is insured-against fire, flood, theft, hog cholera, death, crop failure, rickets.  Name it, and Des Moines has the insurance to cover it. -Philip Hamburger
• Here is the difference between Dante, Milton and me.  They wrote about hell and never saw the place.  I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years. -Carl Sandberg
• It is a remarkale thing to meet such an assemblage of educated, refined and wealthy persons as may be found there, living in small inconvenient houses on the edge of the wind and prairie. -Harriet Martineau
• Iowa is top-choice America,  America cut thick and prime. -Harvey Arden
• I adore Chicago.  It is the pulse of America. -Sarah Bernhardt
• We struck the home tril now, and in a few hours we're in that astonishing Chicago--a city where they are always rubbing the lamp and fetching up the genie and contriving and achieving new impossibilities.  It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago--she outfrows his prophecies faster than he can make them.  she is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time. -Mark Twain
• Iowa is more a demonstration farm than a place; more some cosmic public relations project to prove that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world. -Richard Rhodes
• Chicago's greatness, her unique qualities, her amazing rise and advance as a ciy cam from an unusual and balanced combination of the best bloood of New England and of the South. -Robert Shackleton
• When an Omaha man (or boy) speaks of a steak, one expects him to pull from his pocket a series of treasured snapshots of steaks. -Philip Hamburger
• Chicago is the ideal locaion for dancing on top of a volcano.  Eruptive and exciting, a city of superlatives.  It exaggerates all the splendor and squalor in America. -Anne O'Hare McCormick
• A Missourian gets used to Southerners thinking him a Yankee, a Northerner considering him a cracker, a Westerner sneering at his effete.  Easteners and the easterner taking him for a cowhand. -William Least
• I feel it is the Amerrican city, a blend of giant industrialism and the rest of America.  New York is a polygot and to me the connecting link to Europe, whereas I regard Chicago as the heart of America, urban, and that strange blend of Sandberg did such a great job of describing. -Ed Asner

    And so it ends!
Til Nex'Time....