Jessica Cyders Archives

July 14, 2014

Then and Kind of Now Exhibit

I mentioned in a couple of posts that Curator Jessica of the Athens County Historical Society & Museum had put in some hurry-up requests for photos she could exhibit. I started bugging her for photos to prove that she had actually put together exhibits using the pictures.

Cyrus Moore III shot a panorama of the panoramas of Athens, Ohio, I took from the Radio and TV building last fall to go along with some cityscapes I had taken in 1969. I was pleased with the way they played off each other. If I remember correctly, the panoramas were about four feet wide and were made up of five or six frames stitched together with Photoshop doing all the heavy lifting. Something that used to take hours in the darkroom is done in about a minute in the computer.

Athens train station

Jessica and company did a nice job pulling together my photos of the Athens train station to go with a couple of older shots. I spent quite a few hours at that station going to and from Cape by rail and waiting for boxes from Railway Express. The building is still there and is in good condition.

Train station today

I wish more of the old train stations could have been maintained this well.

Court Street

Court Street is one of two main streets in uptown Athens. Jessica’s photos picked up some bad reflections from the plexiglass, but you can still get a sense that most of the buildings have stayed the same over the past 100+ years.

I posted the whole set of photos I sent her to consider if you’d like to see better examples of them.

That looks like the same spot

One of her interns said, “That looks like it was taken from the same spot,” referring to the photo at the bottom of Curator Jessica and Carol Towarnicky walking to lunch on a snowy day in October of last year. I didn’t take the top photo, but I bet the photographer was, like me, on that corner killing time waiting for the light to change.

A display with spirit

I mentioned the other day the hurry-up request for photos of the first beers being served at the student union back in 1969. She threw up this window display to help promote the Historic Tavern Tours the museum does as part of the 9th Annual Ohio Brew Week Festival.

You can see better examples of the photos here.

Passes the meter maid test

Jessica says she knows her displays works when the meter maid stops to check it out.

July 13, 2014

North Riverfront Park

Brother Mark and I rode our bikes from his house near the Botanical Gardens, past the Gateway Arch, and onto the St. Louis Riverfront Trail, over Chain of Rocks Bridge and into Illinois. You can read an account of our 2004 adventure on my bike blog.

Chain of Rocks Bridge

The blog has some neat photos and some interesting history of the Chain of Rocks Bridge, which used to be part of U.S. Route 66. The unusual bridge has a 22-degree bend in it to allow river traffic to have uninterrupted navigation of the river.

Quick tour for Curator Jessica

When I took Curator Jessica to the airport last November, we had some time to kill, so I took her to the North Riverfront Trail where we parked at the Union Electric Light and Power Company. Whenever I park at a trailhead, I scope out the lot for broken glass that indicates that cars have been broken into while their owners were away. Bad guys figure that you’re going to be gone for awhile.

The lot passed that sniff test, but I still felt uneasy for some reason. I’ve parked there before and ridden my bike in the area without my hackles going up, so I don’t know what I was picking up.

Floodwall Art Project

We passed the Floodwall Art Project, a seven-foot tall, 150-foot long tile mural designed by ceramic artist Catherine Magel and created with the assistance of at least 1,500 youth and adults from at least six St. Louis communities. The mural displays the history of the natural world beginning with microscopic life forms, moves into sea life, graduates to earth creatures, then ends with migrating birds.

Here’s where you can find out more about the Great Rivers Greenway. You can click on the photos to make them larger, too.

I felt uneasy

Curator Jessica was thoroughly enjoying herself, but my feeling of unease was growing. We were the only ones around, so there was no obvious reason why I was picking up bad vibes, but I suggested that we head back to the car.

This weird feature on a pedestrian overpass is unsettling, but I don’t think it was what was poking at my lizard brain.

I told Jessica that my misgivings were probably unfounded, but I had learned over the years to trust that instinct that something isn’t as it should be. She gave me her normal eye roll and “crazy guy” look, but didn’t object to moving on. I fully expected to see my car broken into when we got back to the parking lot, but everything was as we had left it.

I’ll have to see if I get the same feeling the next time I go there.

July 10, 2014

Beer Comes to Ohio University

Curator Jessica called to ask if she could use one of my photos to promote the Athens Country Historical Society & Museum’s Historic Tavern Tours this week. It’s all part of the 9th Annual Ohio Brew Week Festival, not that university students need any excuse to quaff beer. [Miz Jessica explained to me later I was wrong. Brew Week was cooked up to help the bars out during the slow summer season when the student population drops off.]

Kenny Kerr pours the beers

It was a chilly February day in 1969 when Kenny Kerr (the guy with the shiny hairdo) of Kerr Distrubuting poured the first beers to be served in Ohio University’s Ohio Room in Baker Center.

You had your choice of Stroh’s, Stroh’s or Stroh’s. And, it was low-test 3.2 beer. Low-point beer, as it is more accurately called, is a beer that contains 3.2% alcohol by weight.

Since it could be sold to 18-year-olds, it eliminated having to determine if a drinker was 18 or 21. I don’t think I ever saw anyone carded at the Ohio Room, probably because most college students were at least 18.

Theory about binge drinking

When I was in Athens over Halloween, I debated going uptown to shoot the costumed pub crawl festivities, but opted out because (a) it was cold, (b) parking was a problem and (c) one of the OU Post’s former editors from my era said, “I got tired of having my shoes puked on.”

He went on to explain that we lived in a different era: we didn’t have any money in 1969. Students would pool their cash with a few friends, head over to the Ohio Room for a couple of pitchers of 3.2 beer, do some socializing, then go home. Now it’s all about large quantities of booze, he said, and the streets are filled with inebriated students engaged in inappropriate behavior, some of which finds its way onto the Internet.

Pouring beer like water

Here’s a gallery of photos of the day when Stroh’s beer poured like water – and according to some purists – tasted about the same. Stroh’s, by the way, had an interesting history. It started as a regional beer, then ended up as the third largest brewer in the country. It even marketed a Stroh’s ice cream. A whole bunch of market changes caused problems for the company, though, and in 1999, after being in business for 149 years, it sold its labels to Pabst Brewing Company and Miller Brewing Company.

Click on any photo to make it larger, then use your arrow keys to move through the gallery.