Operation Mop-Up, Part II

Oh, hello there! And how are you this fine summer afternoon?

Your timing is excellent - I'm just taking a break from stuffing all of my possessions into boxes (truck-loading commences tomorrow), so I've got a little time to tell you about the rest of my adventures around the Valley over the past week or so. You'll recall that I've been trying to get in a little more sightseeing before I point the wagons southward. Well, I'm happy to say that I've crossed most of the important things off the list, although a few items - the Hadley Farm Museum, the Amherst Historical Society - will have to wait until another day. I'll discuss the recent adventures in ascending order of humorousness.

Historic Northampton
I have walked, biked, or driven by this place about two hundred thousand times, but I never got around to visiting it until last week. No, that's not quite true. Back in early June, Kate, Meagan, and I tried to pop by after breakfast one morning, but they were opening late that day and we didn't manage to fit it into our schedule. And then a few weeks ago Kate and I tried again, but it was closed, for reasons that were - and remain - mysterious.

So I was quite excited when we finally caught the place during opening hours this past week. Something this hard to get into must be spectacular, I thought, like a really exclusive nightclub or a Mormon temple. I'm sorry to report, however, that my excitement was somewhat premature. It was a perfectly nice little museum - a room showing artifacts from Northampton's history, arranged chronologically and in narrative form, with lots and lots of text glued to the cases and walls, plus a small gift shop - but it was distinctly lacking in the interactive bells and whistles I've come to expect from modern museums. C'mon, Historic Northampton! Step into the twenty-first century! Give me an animatronic. pulpit-pounding, firebreathing Jonathan Edwards that I can scare the kids with. Give me a "What Would Sylvester Graham Do?" interactive computer game featuring a series of moral dilemmas and engaging (if slightly lewd) sound effects. Give me a life-size Snuffaluffagus that I can climb on - who cares if Snuffaluffagus wasn't from Northampton? But don't expect me to read. Sheesh. History can be so boring.

The Student Prince
I don't often make it down to Springfield, even though it boasts both the Basketball Hall of Fame and a Dr. Seuss sculpture garden. When I do find myself in this, the regional metropolis, it doesn't take me long to remember why I rarely go there - if you're ever feeling like there just aren't enough scary drug dealers in your life, spend half an hour in the Springfield bus station and tell me if that doesn't solve the problem. A once prosperous city that fell on hard times quite a while ago, Springfield has made some efforts at urban renewal - it's certainly a much more appealing place to spend an afternoon than nearby Holyoke (the birthplace, incidentally, of Volleyball) - but it's clearly got a long way to go before it becomes the next Pittsburgh or Providence.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I wandered into the Student Prince, an old fashioned German restaurant founded in 1935 that I learned about while reading Brock Clarke's An Arsonist's Guide to Writers Homes in New England. Just down the street from the prison-like train station, around the corner from the Payday Cash Advance shops, the pawn shops, and the nail salons, the Student Prince can be found serving pot roast, bratwurst, and sauerkraut to the largest crowd of well-dressed old white people you've ever seen. By old, I don't mean spry-retiree, denture-cream-commercial old. I mean nursing-home old, one-foot-in-the-grave old, really-too-old-to-be-eating-bratwurst old. Really, really old. And when I say well-dressed, I mean suits and ties. On a Tuesday. At lunchtime. It was like stepping back in time, to a time when everybody was really old and white and knew everybody who walked through the door, a time when well-dressed old men with mustaches and slick black hair walked from table to table shaking hands with other patrons and asking after their grandkids, a time when everything was decorated in what can only be described as High German Hunting Lodge Kitsch (lamps made of antlers, one of the largest stein collections in the USA, etc.). Outside, it was all dusty urban despair; inside, it was a Bavarian spa town circa 1937.





The food, I must say, was excellent. I had homemade sausages with apple sauce, sauerkraut, and German potato salad. I am a sucker for hearty German fare, after all, to say nothing of hearty German kitsch. So it's probably a good thing that I only discovered how incredibly wonderful the Student Prince is at this late date - otherwise I'd probably have spent much more of my valuable time there, dining on sausage and cabbage at least often enough to get the old folks to start greeting me by name.

The Calvin Coolidge Presidential Library and Museum
Now I really have no excuse for not having visited this one earlier, since it's literally right next door to my house. The Forbes Library began collecting Calvin Coolidge's papers in 1920, around the time he was making a name for himself in Massachusetts politics after serving as mayor of Northampton, where he was also a successful lawyer, from 1909-11. The museum isn't open as often as the rest of the library, but it's open often enough - I live right next door - that I really should have peeked in before now. As it happens, I almost missed it entirely. As with Historic Northampton, I had two recent false starts, finding the doors locked during times I expected them to be open, but I did finally manage to visit yesterday afternoon.

And what I learned was nothing short of astonishing. What I learned was this: Calvin Coolidge was the most boring man in American history. Yes, you read that right - not the most boring president, but the most boring man. Think of the dullest person you know. Form a good mental image: what they sound like, what they smell like, what they look like. Got it? Okay, Calvin Coolidge was three times more boring than that person.

It must be a very difficult thing to build a Presidential Library and Museum for the most boring person in American history, and I feel awfully sympathetic for the poor curators and librarians who have the task of looking after this man's legacy. Clearly, they know what they're up against. Here's what it says in one of the early display cases:



How's that for hedging your bets?

Calvin Coolidge was president from 1923 to 1929, taking over after Warren G. Harding's mysterious death in office and proceeding to do absolutely nothing at all while America enjoyed one of the most debauched periods of its history. Here's what I learned about Calvin Coolidge's time in office: he was the first president whose inaugural address was broadcast by radio (big whoop: anybody inaugurated in 1923 would have enjoyed the same honor - it wasn't him, it was the technology); he signed a few treaties, none of them of any lasting importance; his wife wore lots of dresses at White House events; his son John died after getting blood poisoning from an injury sustained on the White House tennis courts; he installed the first White House Christmas tree (yawn); he was, for reasons that are never explained, named chief of the Sioux (the photo below shows how Coolidge could make even an exciting event like this look utterly and completely boring - the Indian behind him to the left is saying, "Oh, god, when will this be over?"); and he presided at the opening of Mt Rushmore. This latter must have been especially humiliating, insofar as the looming faces of those far more important presidents inevitably brought his own boringness into even sharper relief.





Interspersed amongst the images of Coolidge and his wife not doing anything are some excerpts from his autobiography, boringly titled The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge. Here's a representative quote:

When we first went to Washington Mrs. Coolidge and I quite enjoyed the social dinners. As we were always the ranking guests we had the privilege of arriving last and leaving first, so that we were usually home by ten o'clock. It will be seen that this was far from burdensome. We found it a most enjoyable opportunity for getting acquainted and could scarcely comprehend how anyone who had the privilege of sitting at a table surrounded by representatives of the Cabinet, the Congress, the Diplomatic Corps, and the Army and Navy would not find it interesting.

Wow, I almost fell asleep just typing that. And this was the stuff the curators thought was good enough to extract! One can only imagine what the rest of the Autobiography is like.

Despite all this, there is one thing about Coolidge that almost redeems him in my eyes, and that proves nobody can be 100% boring all the time. Sitting under a pair of elephant tusks given to Coolidge by Theodore Roosevelt (a president who lived at the opposite end of the boring meter from Coolidge) there sits a large, black electric horse that Coolidge kept in his White House dressing room. I have no idea why he had it or what he did with it, but I like to imagine him coming home after a long day of ribbon-cuttings before crowds of listless onlookers, kicking off his sensible loafers, donning his ceremonial Sioux headdress, and riding that electric horse with all his might, one hand waving free, whooping silently.



And now I'm going back to pack some more. When next we meet, I'll be in Nashville.