Jeff Duntemann's ContraPositive Diary

While going over to get my shirts back from the cleaners last week, I noticed with delight that the Sugar Bowl has reopened under new ownership, having been closed since early 2007. The Sugar Bowl is a venerable restaurant in downtown Des Plaines, a little to the east of the even more venerable Des Plaines Theater, which has been a Bollywood cheaps house for about ten years now. My cousin Maggie McGuire worked at the Sugar Bowl for 17 years until a very peculiar incident forced it to close. It was sold and reopened for a few years in the early oughties, then closed again and sat empty for more than two years.

Carol and I walked over there this morning about 7:30 for breakfast, and I was most pleased. The Sugar Bowl was purchased by two Greeks, who rehabbed it down to the bones and made it sparkle. Around here, nobody does breakfast places like the Greeks, who also operate Kappy's in Niles about four blocks north of where Carol grew up (along with countless others). Their coffee is strong but not in the least bitter, and probably ideal for the breakfast-out crowd. I had two eggs scrambled with bacon, and Carol their cheese blintzes. The eggs were completely cooked (not always the case in restaurants, and important in this Era of Salmonella) and the bacon done to a perfect crisp. Carol would have liked her blintzes a little bit warmer. We think they're trying to make an impression by being fast, and they were, but you have to finish the job.

They're open every day from 6:00 AM until 3:00 PM. It's great to have a Greek-run breakfast and lunch place within a quick trot of our condo, and while it's not "fine dining," it's still dead-center in the grand Chicago tradition of locally owned one-off family restaurants. Highly recommended.

When I was a pre-teen, we used to get milk delivered to the house every few days. I don't recall fersure which dairy it was (Hawthorn Mellody Farms?) but the milk was in massive gallon returnable glass bottles with wire carry-handles, and a paper cap was machine-pressed over the lip to seal it. The caps themselves were circular sheets of blank white paper, but stapled to the center of each cap was a printed cardboard disk about an inch and a half in diameter, containing the name of the dairy. The cardboard disks are now collectibles, related in a vague way to the juice-bottle "pogs" that were stylish for half an hour or so in the mid-1990s.

Last week I got an email from someone asking if I knew anything about Dunteman's Dairy. I did (a little) and when I went looking around for more info I found an eBay auction for one of their milk cap disks. The disk arrived yesterday, and you see it above. As I've explained here a time or two, my great-grandfather Frank W. Duntemann was the only boy of five in his family to keep the second "n" at the end of his name. Most Duntemans that you see these days are related to me, and all the Duntemanns, what few remain.

Dunteman's Dairy was located at 420 E. Northwest Highway in Arlington Heights, Illinois. It was founded and run by Lenard Barney Dunteman (1906-1992) and his wife Grace Stippick Dunteman (1909-1978). As best I can tell, Lenard started the business in 1939, built a dairy plant from scratch, and ran it for almost twenty years. He bought raw milk from local dairy farmers (including some of his cousins) pasteurized and homogenized the milk, bottled it, and delivered it with his own trucks in Arlington Heights and adjacent Chicago suburbs. He was of my grandfather's generation. Technically, Lenard and I would be third cousins, twice removed. His father Albert Dunteman was my great-grandfather Frank Duntemann's younger brother, if that helps at all.

I don't know a lot more than that, nor how broad their product line was. I know that they made and sold chocolate milk, but whether they sold butter or cream, I'm still trying to find out. Lenard had a mild heart attack in late 1958, and panicked. Fearing early death, he sold the equipment to another local dairy (I don't know which one) to generate cash to support his wife, and retired. Ironically, Lenard lived to a genteel old age, but Grace died fourteen years before he did. The dairy building is still there and has been different things over the years. Parts of it have been razed, and what's left has been given a new facade and is now a Shell station.

One final note about paper milk caps. In the worst of a bad Chicago winter, a bottle of milk left on an exposed front porch (like ours was) would begin to freeze after an hour or two on a particularly raw morning. I still find it odd that the bottles didn't crack from the expanding milk, but something even odder did happen: A column of frozen milk would rise from the neck of the bottle, forcing the cap off. I remember seeing the cap a full two inches above the neck of the bottle on our porch once, circa 1959. This used to be a common sight (Stevan Dohanos did a Saturday Evening Post cover on it in 1944) but these days I doubt that more than a handful of my readers have ever had milk delivered to their homes. It's just not done much anymore.

As for why the bottles didn't crack, well, that still bothers me. I'm speculating that with whole milk, at least, the cream that collected at the top acted as a lubricant, allowing the ice to move freely upward, relieving pressure and keeping the bottle intact. If you've got a better theory, I'd love to hear it!

I have a lot of things on my mind (and plate) today, but I did want to pass along a pointer to a site that I received from Kevin Anetsberger: FuzzyMemories.TV, the Museum of Classic Chicago Television. What we have here is a large collection of short video clips from Chicago TV, the bulk of it from the 1977-1990 era. The clips are mostly short snippets of local TV shows, local TV station IDs and transitions, and especially commercials. I haven't had the time to go through much of it, but the Empire Carpet Man is in there, along with Boushelle Rugs ("Hudson 3-2700" sung in that boomy, basso profundo voice) and clumsy pitches for a lot of other local companies, including McDade (now long extinct), Zayre (ditto, though not exclusively of Chicago), Jewel, Venture (gone), Kiddieland (still there), Victory Auto Wreckers, and lots of TV ads for Chicago radio stations, like "FM 103 and a half." Plenty of kid stuff from Bozo, Ray Rayner, Garfield Goose, Svengoolie, Son of Svengoolie, and Gigglesnort Hotel. The clips that aren't commercials often include commercials, and the site provides abundant evidence that 70s hairdos and clothes really were as bad as we remember them, and not just in Chicago. (WFLD news anchor Kathy McFarland looks better than most, but oh, those guys on Fernwood 2 Night...)

Carol and I left Chicago when I got a transfer to Rochester, NY in early 1979, so nearly all of this stuff dates from after my era, but there are a handful of things from the early 70s, and some clips from an early educational cartoon called "The Funny Company" from 1962. Home videotaping first became a big thing in the late 70s, and that's probably why there isn't much there from the 60s, as much as I would have liked to see it.

Here's an interview with Rick Klein, FuzzyMemories.TV's creator. The site is on my short list of things to spend some time on when I have time to spend, but if you're in that space right now, go take a look.

Somewhere in Chicago (Pete Albrecht and I are still trying to figure out precisely where) there was once a very Gothic-looking building with a giant turtle on top of it. It was the Turtle Wax turtle, of course, and it existed when I was quite young. Any time we'd be in the car passing by it, my folks would very carefully point it out. That would have been 1958-1962 or so. Pete thinks the building is the Wendell Bank Building at the intersection of Madison, Ashland, and Ogden, and it certainly looks right, though Pete remembers the sign being somewhere on Cicero and not Ashland. I confess that I have no idea, but that intersection would have been on the way to visit my grandfather and Uncle Louie, so it's a plausble hypothesis.

The search for the abode of the Really Big Turtle did turn up an interesting little video on the main Turtle Wax history page about Ben Hirsch and the genesis of Turtle Wax. Hirsch invented Plastone Car Polish, which became Turtle Wax after Hirsch stopped by Turtle Creek near Beloit and had the brainstorm that his car polish created a "hard shell finish." Hirsch also invented the chocolate-covered banana on a stick and a few other things, though I suspect he made most of his money on Turtle Wax. The video shows some stills of the Big Turtle being erected and is worth a look, especially since it shows the monumental size of the statue. The video also includes an animated ad from the 1950s that's worth the cost of admission. The turtle sounds like Jimmy Durante.

I'm a little surprised that something that big and that iconically Chicago has been so little recorded online. It may be that it existed for only a few years, and it may have been moved to another location at some pont. We're looking for better information and I'll post any updates here as they happen.

• I lived in Scotts Valley, California for three years, and I never once heard of Axel Erlandson, an arborsculptor (that is, a person who coerces trees to grow in odd or artistic ways) who had a roadside attraction of sculpted trees in Scotts Valley from 1955 to about 1970. Not as weird as the Mystery Spot and clearly not weird enough for the Santa Cruz vicinity, the Tree Zoo was not a success, but some of those trees are mighty odd.
• There's a PDF document detailing name changes to Chicago streets here, and it explains who or what some of Chicago's streets were named after. The street where I grew up, Clarence Avenue, was named after a river in Australia. Kedvale, the street on which my grandparents lived, was an Anglicization of an Indian term for the print of a moccasin in damp ground. (Hence those shoes named "Keds.") Thanks to Pete Albrecht (another old Chicago boy) for the link.
• From the Some People Have All The Fun Dept.: Walter Jon Williams got himself and several other SF writers a tour of the NORAD facility inside Cheyenne Mountain, during this recent Worldcon. How they pulled it off isn't clear; I was told by people who have reason to know that they're just not doing tours anymore. (And sheesh, I only live about 3/4 of a mile from the Big Iron Door!) Thanks to Jim Strickland for letting me know.
• Bill Higgins sent a link to an interview with Wayne Green in ComputerWorld. Ol' Wayne is now 86 and still out there, supporting weird causes and making a ruckus--just not in the magazine business anymore. I'm fond of the guy because he bought my very first published article in the fall of 1974, and quite a few others in subsequent years. His legend counfounds historians; I've gotten many different opinions on just how much he had to do with Byte. I still have a very funny but weird little book called See Wayne Run by Gordon Williamson that suggests that he had little or nothing to do with Byte, but other people with reason to know claim otherwise. Here's some useful reminiscence/discussion; see especially the comment by Harry Helms W5HLH.

The weather today in Chicago promised to be as good as it gets this trip, so I decided to do a little exploring. I wanted to get some exercise and a little sun on my face, and run down to a neighborhood I hadn't set foot in for almost thirty years: Sauganash, an upscale part of the Northwest Side where my father's parents lived in the 1950s and 1960s. I went past the old house (at the corner of Kedvale and Glenlake), which had not changed at all, though the tree that my grandfather had planted in 1955 was now huge and breaking up the sidewalk. I had lunch at a hot dog place at Devon and Pulaski and parked the car on Pulaski near St. Odisho's Assyrian Catholic Church. I then did something interesting: I walked the old rail line that intersects Pulaski near Granville, southward as far as the Chicago River, roughly at Balmoral. The rails are still there, but by the depth of their rust I'd guess they hadn't seen wheels for a number of years. It was a little weird walking over Peterson on the rail bridge, but I wanted to see if there was any evidence of there having been a commuter rail platform at Peterson. I'm not sure why, but I always thought my grandfather boarded a train for downtown (he worked at First National Bank) on Peterson somewhere. This was clearly not the place. (Gretchen says he boarded at Edgebrook, and she's probably right.) Whatever that line was, it had clearly been freight-only.

Since I was on the right of way, I just kept going. The tracks continued, rusty and weed-choked, as far as I went. Just a block south of Bryn Mawr, a second line merged with it, and I found that the city was in the process of making a walking trail out of the old bed. So I cut north again on the walking trail, passing people and their dogs and a father flying a kite with his preschool son in a schoolyard. The trail is quite new, and in fact the walking bridge over Peterson was not complete yet and was fenced off. (The trail goes north as far as Devon.) So I skidded down the embankment and walked east back to Pulaski along Peterson to my car. It was a nice two-and-a-half mile stride, and when the sun was out it was quite warm.

That accomplished, I drove back west toward Des Plaines, and stopped in Park Ridge to do a little more walking. I wanted to visit Hill's Hobby Shop, and walked there only to find that they have moved to Buffalo Grove. I did, however, snap a shot or two of what is certainly the narrowest storefront in Park Ridge (and perhaps the whole Chicago metro area) at 147 1/2 Vine Avenue (60068) directly across the street from Park Ridge City Hall. I didn't have a tape measure in my pocket, but I'm guessing the whole thing was between four and five feet wide.

I'd seen it before, and remembered that it had been a knicknack shop a few years ago. Sure enough, googling the address showed it to have been (aptly) The Miniature Gallery, and there was a 2007 business registration sticker on the window. However, the counter and window displays had been ripped out, and it looks like it's being converted to something else, probably a hall to the rear. The art gallery in the rest of the building was also vacant, and the building as a whole was not in terrific shape.

No serious point to be made here, other than you miss some odd and occasionally wonderful things by driving everywhere. Spring's coming—so get out on shank's mare and see some of the weird stuff in your own neighborhood!

Calling all vampire lovers! (At least vampire writers, however you wish to take it.) There's a dazzling missed vampire opportunity that someone should sieze: Chicago's little-known but readily smelled Bubbly Creek. (1911 photo of the creek here.) I hadn't thought of it as a tourist destination, but Yahoo Travel has a review item for it. No jokes about it being the other Green River, please.

Although its name sounds bucolic, Bubbly Creek is more rightly considered anoxic, and it bubbles because, for over a hundred years, Chicago's meat packing industry dumped endless tons of animal fat, blood, and offal into the two swales feeding its southern end. The occasional fish spotted in its waters doesn't last long, and mostly what live there are bloodworms. The creek doesn't move; what water it has comes to it from the south branch of the Chicago River. And bubbles of hydrogen sulfide are still rising to the surface almost forty years after Union Stock Yards closed in 1971. I first read about Bubbly Creek in high school while forcing myself through Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. I thought he was making it up. He wasn't:

"Bubbly Creek" is an arm of the Chicago River, and forms the southern boundary of the Union Stock Yards; all the drainage of the square mile of packing-houses empties into it, so that it is really a great open sewer a hundred or two feet wide. One long arm of it is blind, and the filth stays there forever and a day. The grease and chemicals that are poured into it undergo all sorts of strange transformations, which are the cause of its name; it is constantly in motion, as if huge fish were feeding in it, or great leviathans disporting themselves in its depths. Bubbles of carbonic gas will rise to the surface and burst, and make rings two or three feet wide. Here and there the grease and filth have caked solid, and the creek looks like a bed of lava; chickens walk about on it, feeding, and many times an unwary stranger has started to stroll across, and vanished temporarily.

Let's just hope it was "temporarily."

Apart from The Jungle, I know of no novel that deals with Bubbly Creek. Even Andrew Greeley, for all his South Side sympathies, has never treated it. (I can see it now: The Bishop and the Bloodworms.)

Nonetheless, Bubbly Creek is a golden, unexploited vampire opportunity, for this reason: Under a thin layer of recent silt on its bottom lies a substratum of clotted blood six feet thick. Who knows what bacteria and associated phages are furiously evolving down there? What sort of siren call does that much densely packed blood put out onto the Astral Plane? Does that unwary stranger vanish only temporarily because when he comes up, he's already dead but still ambulatory? Is this why Chicago's ward heelers (remember, Bridgeport is less than a mile east) were called "bloodsuckers" in certain households? (Like mine, back when Bubbly Creek was still first-run.)

C'mon. Tell me you couldn't have some great greasy fun with that!

I went shopping for a few groceries yesterday afternoon, and scored something I hadn't seen in a great many years: Green River soda. (Diet Green River, at that!) Green River was a commonplace when I was young, and after leaving Chicago in 1979 and realizing that Green River was a local brand, I more or less assumed I wouldn't be having it anymore. But hey and begorrah, there it was on the shelf at Shop and Save in downtown Des Plaines, right next to Dog-n-Suds Root Beer. (I bought a diet jug of that too, in a glass bottle!) I was Skyping with Pete Albrecht last night while slugging entirely too much of it, and reflecting on how, well, green it was. Pete then told me he couldn't stand it anymore and had to run out and get some, which he did. In Costa Mesa, California.

Who makes the soda now was a tough question to answer. Web research turned up a peculiar lawsuit, which implies that the Green River trademark was licensed in 1985 by Sethness-Greenleaf, a Chicago area manufacturer of food industry flavorings, to a couple of entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurs eventually defaulted on their payments, and (since they did not have the "secret formula") created their own clone of the syrup. The judge in the case gave the rights back to the Sethness-Greenleaf. Somewhere along the way, Clover Club Bottling Company bought the rights, and now produces the soda. They also produce Dog-n-Suds Root Beer.

While mulling Green River, Pete and I managed to recall the name of Lasser's Beverage Company, a small bottler once located near De Paul University on the north side of Chicago. They made their own syrup, in some truly peculiar flavors like Maple Syrup and Pink Champagne, and could be found in smaller grocery stores like Certified until at least 1979, when we moved to Rochester, NY. Schweppes eventually bought them. Their bottles and caps are now collectibles, and can be seen at times on eBay.

Although I didn't mention it in yesterday's entry, Carol and I passed the Weather Bell downtown at Monroe and Clark on Friday. It's a sign that has outlasted its owner by at least fifteen years. Bell Federal Savings erected the sign in the early 1960s, and promoted the location as "the Weather Bell Corner." My aunt and godmother Kathleen Duntemann worked there for many years, and Carol worked there the summer after she graduated high school. ABN AMRO ate Bell Federal back in the 1990s, and a Walgreen's now occupies the ground floor space. But the Weather Bell is still there, with the Bell Federal name at the top blocked out, telling us the time and (via color codes) how bad the weather is: Green = Ok; yellow = lousy; red = Hey man, this is Chicago! Whaddaya expect!

Speaking of Chicago's ghost signs, there's a nice page from WTTW on ghost signs, which there means old painted advertisements on brick walls. There is no mention of the Turtle Wax Turtle, a turtle statue that sat high atop a building somewhere in Chicago. We used to see it while driving down to the south side to see my Aunt Anna and her family near 31st and Morgan, but I have no clear recall of where it was. (I even had a blurry photo of it once, but it's turned up missing.)

Pete gets Maurice Lenell Christmas Cookie Assortments at CVS Pharmacy in Costa Mesa. Bay's English Muffins, once a Chicago specialty, have gone national, and can be had even in Colorado Springs. I guess the world gets flatter all the time!