The county historical society has an annual chili feed. I don't remember actually dining at it before--I have a vague memory, or was it imagined? of having pie with the children and Nancy and her children at one.
The society uses the meeting room of the museum, which was a large classroom back in the day, and the black boards are still on the wall. Banquet tables, chairs, and other diners filled the room. The chili was quite good, mild, and I learned from a waitress that "Millie's Chili" had been served for thirty years, using the family's grass-fed beef, and now being made by the second generation of the family, which donates it for the feast. I sat across from a couple who were 20 years older than me. He was from Ohio, and she was from Queens, New York, and her grandfather had been a tug-boat captain. He told me of his history, but I don't remember it.
Afterwards, I went down to the Drake Park Neighborhood Historical District and walked for about 40 minutes. The leaves were still thick and dry on the ground, and pumpkins were still in the doorways of the houses, the temperatures have been cool, as so they looked for the most part as if they'd been carved only a day earlier. I saw the house that Greg Putnam, Amelia Earhart's husband lived in when he was still married to his first wife, and the company house that served room and board for middle management and the comptroller of the logging company, and learned that the camp towns were served with a motion picture theater and a forty piece brass band to keep up the morale. (I knew from other sources that the camp towns were moved around the forest by rails, and were where loggers and their families lived, Les Schwab having spent his boyhood in one.) I saw a couple getting what looked like engagement photos in front of a while painted wooden arch that decorated one house's front walk. The houses varied from a three-story mansion to a small brick four-unit apartment row. One house I remember driving by, back when we were looking for a house to buy, when the girls were little--it was only seven hundred square feet.
street sign from https://www.oldbend.org/drake-park-neighborhood-historic-district/
The society uses the meeting room of the museum, which was a large classroom back in the day, and the black boards are still on the wall. Banquet tables, chairs, and other diners filled the room. The chili was quite good, mild, and I learned from a waitress that "Millie's Chili" had been served for thirty years, using the family's grass-fed beef, and now being made by the second generation of the family, which donates it for the feast. I sat across from a couple who were 20 years older than me. He was from Ohio, and she was from Queens, New York, and her grandfather had been a tug-boat captain. He told me of his history, but I don't remember it.
Afterwards, I went down to the Drake Park Neighborhood Historical District and walked for about 40 minutes. The leaves were still thick and dry on the ground, and pumpkins were still in the doorways of the houses, the temperatures have been cool, as so they looked for the most part as if they'd been carved only a day earlier. I saw the house that Greg Putnam, Amelia Earhart's husband lived in when he was still married to his first wife, and the company house that served room and board for middle management and the comptroller of the logging company, and learned that the camp towns were served with a motion picture theater and a forty piece brass band to keep up the morale. (I knew from other sources that the camp towns were moved around the forest by rails, and were where loggers and their families lived, Les Schwab having spent his boyhood in one.) I saw a couple getting what looked like engagement photos in front of a while painted wooden arch that decorated one house's front walk. The houses varied from a three-story mansion to a small brick four-unit apartment row. One house I remember driving by, back when we were looking for a house to buy, when the girls were little--it was only seven hundred square feet.
street sign from https://www.oldbend.org/drake-park-neighborhood-historic-district/
No comments:
Post a Comment