Princess For A Day

You would think that since I’m writing these posts, I would spare myself the embarrassment of relaying hokey events from my past. Well, you would be wrong. Out of respect for the historical record, I’m including everything, including the fact that I was the flower girl at Bradley’s 1966 Homecoming. You didn’t know Homecoming necessitated five-year-old flower girls? Well, read on.

The ceremony at which the Homecoming Queen was to be coronated was held in the Field House. This was such a big event that it required a rehearsal. At the rehearsal, the grownups explained to me that each member of the homecoming court would be announced and would step on the stage. My name would be announced last, and I would make my entrance carrying an armful of flowers. While we were being announced, the Bradley Brave would be doing a Native American dance on the stage in full war dress. (Very strange writing about those non-PC and in many ways offensive times in PC language). At the end of the dance, he would throw the headdress off his head.

At this, I would run to the young co-ed they pointed me to, hand her the flowers—thus designating her queen—pick up the headdress and run off the stage. I am aghast at the responsibility they gave a five-year-old. What if I handed the flowers to the wrong girl?
Anyway, we practiced this routine a couple of times. It seemed easy enough to me.

I got a special Indian princess/flower girl costume for the occasion, which was later recycled as a Halloween costume.


Above is a picture of my sister Theresa and I wearing part of the costume along with my brother Jim. I should add the disclaimer that my siblings did not give me permission to post any of the pictures I've used in this blog. They are helpless bystanders.

On the big night, my dad stayed by my side the whole time. When they announced my name, I didn’t want to go on the stage. I wasn’t really suffering stage fright. But the Bradley Brave was thumping around very energetically and I was afraid he would step on my bare feet. I need to remember this line of reasoning when I can’t understand why my four-year-old is refusing to do something.

My dad, whose priorities were always straight, did not insist I go on stage. He didn’t even act like my refusal was a big deal. After a few moments, I must have figured out my tootsies would not be pounced on, and I stepped up on the stage. The rest of the routine went swell. The right gal got the flowers, though I can't remember which one. My main motivation was to get my hands on that headdress. It was probably bigger than I was and with all the colorful feathers, it was beyond cool. Sadly, the Bradley Brave retrieved it almost immediately.

Thus began and ended my career as a homecoming court member.

How the Demise of a Neighborhood Sounds

PeoriaIllinoisian has a sad, beautiful short film portraying the houses and neighborhood of Maplewood in their final stages. The music makes it seem like a prayer.

Ghosts of Faculty Past on Maplewood

In 1964, when my family moved to 841 N. Maplewood, the John Shroyer family lived in what at this writing is the sole remaining house on the 800 block of Maplewood. Dr. Shroyer was Head of the Chemistry Department and Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The Shroyers lived in the house less than two years after we arrived. However, when my sister Theresa was born in the Spring of 1965, they gave my parents a silver spoon as a gift. The south wing of Bradley Hall is named the Shroyer Academic Hall.

My family and the Shroyer’s are just two examples of the Bradley employees who lived on Maplewood. A very partial list of the family names includes: Cummings, Deliniski, Hurd, Keating, Wessler, Dusenberry, Nothdurft, Novak, Smythe, Haverhals, Teeven, Richey, Jamieson.

One of the most colorful Bradley employees who lived on Maplewood had to be Pat Sier. She and her husband Don lived on the corner of Maplewood and Laura across from our house. Among other things, Pat worked as hair dresser, a veterinary tech and from 1976 to 1982 a security guard at Bradley. She was a short, short-haired, feisty woman who was the Gladys Kravitz of the neighborhood. One time, some soda bottles were stolen off a neighbor’s porch and thanks to Pat’s observant eye, the thief was apprehended.

When I was in high school, I used to baby sit Pat’s daughter Robin. A few years later when I was leaving my house for a potluck, the brownies I had on the front seat started to slide to the floor as I turned left from Laura onto Maplewood. Stupidly, I went to save the brownies and kept turning into a parked car on Maplewood. It was an old car made of heavy metal. Almost all of the damage was to my parents’ station wagon. I was very upset and not knowing whom the car belonged to, went up to the Sier’s door and knocked. I was crying when Pat answered. She was very comforting to me, telling me the other car was hardly damaged and the people wouldn’t care anyway.

After Pat’s stint at Bradley, she and her husband went on to own an auction company, a job perfectly suited to her energy level. Besides their daughter Robin, they also adopted a son, Justin. Pat died in 2001 at age 55 of a brain tumor.

She was the kind of person who made Maplewood such a fun place to live.

And Then There Was One

The house at 841 N. Maplewood, my childhood home and the focus of many of these posts, was knocked down yesterday. I was in St. Louis for much of the day with my husband and son, so I wasn’t around to see the big collapse. Yesterday was also my mother-in-law’s 93rd birthday, and we drove down Maplewood around 9:30 pm as we took her home from her birthday party. Ominously, all of the houses on the south end of the block were gone. We could see the silhouette of the Boesen’s brick house, one house from the corner. But then as we moved past it, the outlines of the rubble sitting on the lot of our house came into view.

John stopped the car and we all kind of looked at it. That mess had once been our home? It didn’t seem possible. I had been hoping that the house would somehow defy the laws of physics and refuse to destruct.

No one said anything except our son. He had been with me on many earlier drive bys and asked plaintively, “Why did they knock down mommy’s house?” I told him they were going to build a new building. It was kind of shocking to see the house gone, but my mother-in-law’s birthday put things in perspective. I had told myself that I didn’t want to see the demolition of the house anyway, but in truth, I probably would have watched if I’d been here to see it.

Of course, this morning I had to return to the scene of the crime and watch the mop up operations. When I arrived, the excavator was ripping into the tree on the corner of the lot that my dad and brother planted. I had written about the tree in a previous post with the hopes that it could be saved. Watching the excavator go to work emphasized how beyond quixotic this hope was. In about five minutes, the 30 foot tree was gone. Three swipes by the excavator amputated the branches and a couple more uprooted the trunk. Those excavators are scarily efficient machines. They are like steel, gas-powered dinosaurs. With its vicious-looking maw able to maul anything, the excavator is a most excellent destruction machine. They should make a movie about them along the lines of Killdozer.

After the tree was eliminated, the excavator turned its attention to the debris and began scooping it up and dumping it in the huge truck parked on the front yard. I kept searching for recognizable pieces from the house, but it all looked like a bunch of old wood and other junk. There really is something to that entropy stuff. I imagine by the end of today, the lot will be cleared.

That leaves just one house on the two blocks. You can see why that third little piggy was smart to construct a house of brick.

Below is the one house left on the two blocks of Maplewood.

Worth More Dead Than Alive To Some

In efforts to get a little exercise, my husband John and I visit Meinen Field a couple times a week, where we jog around the track for varying durations and intensities, depending on our energy levels.

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed a huge tree trunk lying on wood blocks at the south end of the track. My oxygen-deprived brain didn’t initially register that this was kind of odd. But as we continued our laps, a truly strange thought emerged from my synapses.

“I wonder if that’s the truck from the copper beech that Bradley cut down,” I remarked to John. He immediately embraced this idea. “I’ll bet it is.”

We continued to discuss the notion during our jog. It seemed a little preposterous. Why would Bradley, or somebody, lug this huge tree trunk to Meinen Field and put it up on blocks? It also seemed a little preposterous that we would just stumble upon it this way. It would be like me walking into a random Peoria house only to find the staircase from my old house at 841 N. Maplewood newly installed and leading to the second floor. And yet. . .

Well, I was able to verify that this is indeed the trunk from the copper beech that until a few weeks ago had been growing for more than 100 years on Glenwood Avenue between the now non-existent Sigma Chi house and the equally non-existent Alumni Center. The trunk is up on blocks to be dried out, and beyond that I don’t know what’s going to be done with it.

File it in the “It’s a small, strange world” category.

Still Standing

I really thought 841 N. Maplewood would be gone by now. Heck, I didn’t think it would even see the light of June. Having been stripped of its windows, shutters, and much of its siding, the grand, old homestead doesn’t look much like the picture above, but it’s still there.

The 900 block of Maplewood, however, is gone, a span of empty lots now. As of a couple days ago, eight houses, in varying stages of intactness, remain on the 800 block of Maplewood between Laura and Bradley Ave. Three houses on Bradley have recently been demolished with one more to go.

Williams Brothers, the construction company, has parked a couple of trailers on the 800 block and put up a chain link fence around a few of the newly created empty lots. 841 N. Maplewood, on the corner of Laura and Maplewood and 839 are outside the fence. Likewise there is a fence around part of the 900 block, where the parking deck will be constructed. If I read Bradley University’s plan correctly, the spot where our old house is will be part of a quad, so perhaps there’s not as much urgency to get the house down.

For whatever reason, it’s still standing. I think I feel one more flurry of posts before this blog and probably the remaining houses on Maplewood are finished.