Ike's Place

Just before he became supreme commander of the whole wide world (well NATO anyway), Dwight D. Eisenhower purchased a 189-acre parcel of land on the Gettysburg battlefield. He and Mamie got the land, the old farmhouse, 600 chickens and 25 cows for only $40,000. He gave Mamie carte blanche to spruce the place up, and she went to town. Six years and $250,000 later, the place was done and Dwight invited the entire White House Staff to help warm his house. The Eisenhowers spent 365 days of his two terms at the Gettysburg house, and entertained the likes of Nikita Krushchev, Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan on its grounds. We didn't take the time to go up close to the house, but here's a picture that we snapped from the top of the tower out on the battle field. I guess if anybody deserves a giant house on a haunted battlefield, it's Eisenhower.

Monument to the 20th Maine

Being the progeny of generations of westerners, Sara and I can't trace our family tree to any rustic Civil War fighting types...at least not at the moment. Due to this, we weren't able to get our pictures next to the monument hailing the names of our family's fallen heroes. Instead we posed in front of the monument to the 20th Maine since we'd read so much about them. We were also fortunate enough to have asked a crazy lady from Maine to snap the picture for us. Not only did we get this well taken snap shot, but we were also the recipients of many stories about her own family's fighting among the 20th Maine, as well as her many reenactments thereof. I think it's kinda cool that this monument stands among the very rocks that were the cover for the members of the 20th Maine as they defended Little Round Top from the Alabamans, eventually ran out of ammo, and charged down the hill brandishing their bayonets. Thanks to The Killer Angels, this has gotta be one of the most photographed non-statue monuments in the battlefield.

A Little Time at Little Round Top

Here's Zoe and I on Little Round Top. Several Union brigades defended this hill on the second day of fighting, and one can read story after story about the heroic things that were done by the Union soldiers to defend their position. We spent a couple hours walking around on the hill, not because it was so large that such a huge amount of time was required to take it all in, rather, because there was so much to see and contemplate up there.
Can you imagine the courage it would take to be part of the Alabama or Texas brigades that were ordered to run up this hill while being shot at from above? Or to be one of the soldiers from the 20th Maine that ran out of ammunition after the first 2 assaults from below, and drew their bayonetts as they ran down the hill to encounter the oncoming Confederate soldiers? Or to be an artillery guy trying to lug your cannon up the hill, all the while being shot at by snipers, only to discover at the top of the hill that you couldn't lower the cannon's turret far enough to effectively fire at the oncoming enemy?

The view from the top of Little Round Top is the same view of the battlefield that was seen by hundreds of soldiers. Even after seeing the movies, reading the books and visiting the memorials, I can't picture what actually happened on and around this hill. I'm not sure whether to call these grounds sacred or not...people died for my freedom, and I know that this fact adds a few tallies under the "sacred" column, but I can't get over the fact that no matter how ticked off people can get, there's not really a reason to get the guns out. Yet still, on the other hand, everyone that has visited this site can feel the reverence of the locale, thus rendering the area one of holiness, says I.

The Ex-Gettysburg National Tower

I'm not sure if many other people out there in the world get as interested in stuff like this as I do, but I just found out that there used to be a great big tower on the battle ground that got knocked over in the year 2000. Some guy owned a bit of land adjacent to the National Military Park and thought it would be a great idea to build a 393 foot tower in 1974 and charge people to take a look around. Check out how terrible that thing looks! Its just hideous. As you might imagine, there was a load of controversy about the tower for years until the government finally paid the owner 3 million dollars and took ownership. During the anniversary of the battle in 2000 a guy dressed up like a Union soldier, and another guy dressed up like a Confederate soldier fired cannons at the tower (ceremoniously) and ten pounds of explosives brought the tower down. You can see footage of the demolition on Youtube and its pretty cool. That tower was gigantic, I mean the Church Office Building is only 20 feet taller. It might have been neat to have such a great view of the area, but I'm a much bigger fan of the "originality" that exists in the area now that the tower has come down. I could watch that destruction video over and over again...and I did.

I don't think it was built as a replacement to the 393-foot eyesore, but there is another tower that sits out in the battlefield now. After some time I was able to convince Sara to go with me to the top of the new tower to take a look around. It was pretty cool to be able to see Little Round Top, Big Round Top, Cemetery Ridge, and all the other sites from above. Mostly though, I just wanted to climb up the cool stairs and see how easy they were to fall off of. Check out this picture of Sara with Little and Big Round Top in the back ground. Holy Cow, I have so many good pictures from Gettysburg, I haven't even started talking about Little Round Top or the Gettysburg address. I'm still so amazed that we were fully entertained for a full day in the park, I hope that the pictures and the explanations thereof are interesting enough to keep you reading for a full five minutes.

The Death of a Rock Genius

Les Paul died today at the age of 94. I feel so strangely when my rock'n'roll heroes pass away. Should I be ashamed to say that I felt a deep personal loss after I heard of his passing? The same thing happened when I found out that George Harrison had died. I was in line at the buffet at Juan Dolio beach resort in the Dominican Republic. Since I was a missionary at the time, I had spent several months in a bubble, not knowing a thing about what was going on out in the world, especially the world of pop culture. When a sweet little old lady from England that I was chatting with broke the news to me that George had passed away a few weeks prior, I actually lost my appetite and went into a weird mental zone, as though he were a close personal friend of mine. The feeling only lasted like ten minutes, and I immediately resumed eating the American food I had been craving for the past several months, but I'm still surprised it affected me so deeply. It's a good thing I wasn't around on December 8th, 1980.
This has been a month full of the strangest coincidences, and Les Paul's death was no exception. Les Paul was born in Waukesha, Wisconsin, a city also famous for being the birthplace of my daughter, Zoe. It was in Waukesha that he invented the solid-bodied electric guitar, and learned the electrical engineering required to later invent multi-track recording. On top of becoming known as the Wizard from Waukesha due to his inventions, you should see him playing that guitar! Check out his jams on YouTube and you'll see what I mean. As I'm sure to explain in some upcoming blog, it was just yesterday that Sara and I hopped into our car to leave Wisconsin forever. How strange it is that Les Paul died as we left Wisconsin, it's history, and it's culture behind us. It sounds ridiculous, but its almost as though his death has helped me to officially close the Wisconsin chapter of my life and move onto the next one, and it happened to be as we were leaving the state that he passed away. Every Thursday night Les Paul played his guitar at a Jazz club in New York City, and I always wanted to go see the show. I'm now kicking myself that I didn't ever get there...but it's too late now. Perhaps this is why I go into my ten minutes of mourning after my rock'n'roll heroes die. I'll never be able to see George Harrison, Michael Jackson and Les Paul in concert, and when they died they took their genius with them, never to be shared again. So long Les Paul, you'll be missed by this former Wisconsinite. I'm totally getting "Chasing Sound" from the library and watching it again once this long road trip is over.

Cannonized

These are pictures of some of the hundreds of cannons that were lying around out there on the Gettysburg battlefield. You couldn't swing a dead cat out there without hitting one of these cannons, and it sorta makes me sad because cannons are pretty nasty chunks of metal. I did some looking around on the internet to find out how cannons work and when they were first made, and I found out that human beings are really cruel and terrible creatures. But I personally don't know anyone that invented cannons, so I guess I haven't a reason to get all up in arms about it (pun intended). War, (huh!) what is it good for? Absolutely nothin'!We thought it was really cool that the year the cannon's turret was made is etched into the front. I couldn't tell you how often we heard tourists ask the tour guide people if the paint on the cannons is original. Yeah, the cannons miraculously didn't get a single scratch on them as they got hefted over hill and dale and had massive rocks fired out of them. This is a rare picture of Zoe actually looking at the camera instead of being completely focused on her cannon stick stacking. She's not a huge fan of national historic sites, but she very much likes not being in her car seat. Have you ever seen that episode of The Andy Griffith Show where Andy and Barney are trying to find a place to put the old Civil War cannon that was donated to the city of Mayberry? It's pretty funny.

James Longstreet and His Beard

Hiding out in the trees as we drove between the stops outlined on the map was a statue of a guy with a great big beard riding on his horse. We recognized the beard immediately as the one sported by our favorite confederate general, James Longstreet. The battle at Gettysburg didn't end up going so well for the Confederates, and they decided to use General Jim here as the official stool pigeon. How I see it is that Robert E. Lee told him to do a bunch of crazy stuff that Longstreet knew would lead to the needless deaths of loads of rebels, so he tried to postpone the attacks and convince Lee to not go through with them. Since everyone south of the Mason Dixon line all but worship Robert E. Lee, they had to blame someone for his errors, and Longstreet was their guy. Due to the controversy surrounding his reputation, it wasn't until 1998 that a monument was finally erected in his honor at Gettysburg, and it was placed back in the trees so it's not easily seen. The statue is of James Longstreet on his horse, Hero, and it is much smaller than any of the other monuments to Gettysburg Generals. Sara and I, on the other hand consider this our favorite statue on the grounds, mostly because its the only one that's not up high on some gaudy pedestal. Standing next to the statue it feels almost as though we were actually witnessing him trotting by on the way to lead the rebels to their unnecessary deaths. As soon as we stopped to take pictures, Zoe got to work stacking as many sticks as possible on Hero's hoof.

If I weren't such a wuss I'd grow me a tight-lookin' Civil War beard. Unlike the soldiers of the 1860's I get all whiny when I haven't shaved for a few days and my chinny chin chin gets all itchy. Can you imagine having a great big Merlin beard and wearing those long jackets in the July weather as you ran around getting shot at? Yipes. The internet says that they kept their beards long due to the war-time razor shortage, but I think it was because their wives weren't around to nag the beards off of them. I wonder if there will ever be a time when it will once again become legit to wear a bushy beard, or at least some of those cool Martin Van Buren sideburns. Here in Milwaukee there are a lot of Harley guys that wear big long beards, and it makes me really jealous. Whenever I see these guys I really want to stare at them and fully contemplate their whiskered glory, but I know I should just look away because I don't want them to kill me.

Monuments at Gettysburg

The battle at Gettysburg was really nasty and full of all sorts of gunshot wounds, dead people and really nasty food, so I don't think I'll go into great detail of who shot who and where and why. Like so many other sites of national history, there's a special feel in the 6,000 acre battlefield, and you can tell by how reverent people are, and how serene the area is, that something remarkable happened there. Another great indication of the impact this site has had on our current state of freedom is the overwhelming prices stuck onto the gazillions of books and memorabilia for sale in the gift shop.

Since there is so much land to cover, and over 1,400 monuments have been built to commemorate the battle, we found it impossible to even try and read all the plaques. We followed the marked trail through the park, stopping at the 20 or so sites listed on the map, and read about what happened there. Along the way we looked at the monuments that had neat statues, or lots of sticks that Zoe could dig in the dirt with. Since the place is so gigantic you have to follow the trail by car, which required a lot of getting Zoe in and out, which required a lot of leaning over on my part, and a lot of screaming on Zoe's part as she did not want to leave all her newly acquired Civil War sticks behind at each of the stops. I began to call this Zoe's own personal rebel yell, but stopped when I realized that was probably sacreligious.

I've thrown a picture of each of our favorite monuments in this posting, or at least the three pictures that came out well. The first was taken looking over the battlefield from the top of Little Round Top. Sara loved it up there and we spent quite a while walking from one side of the hill to the other looking across the field. This is another one of those Sara pictures that could probably be a post card. I'm not really sure who the statue is a likeness of, but I know that if you get up on the rock that the statue is standing on, the park people get pretty angry. The next picture down is of Zoe's favorite monument, Virginia's state monument. She liked it so much because there were like twenty cannons surrounding it, all of which she decorated with sticks. We're thinking about getting a Civil War cannon and a bunch of sticks to take to church with us since they kept her quiet for over an hour. She also enjoyed running up to the base of the monument while people were trying to take pictures of it, pointing at the statue of Robert E. Lee and shouting "Horsey". The monument at the bottom is my favorite, it was put there by the state of Pennsylvania in memorial of it's fallen sons. This is the largest of the monuments in the park, and visitors can climb up to the top of it and look around. We didn't go up there because this was towards the end of the trail and honestly, as you begin hour number six of looking at these things, you kinda just want to go get something to eat.

America's Best Battle Site

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania is another one of the places that Sara and I have always wanted to visit since we moved to the Midwest. I'd never actually been to a battle site before...we were seriously considering going up to Normandy while we were in France, but we had très peu euros out there and decided that a better use of our funds was to lick the ramekins of a few more orders of crème brûlée. After reading Band of Brothers, I've decided we made a horrible choice. We didn't really know how much time we wanted to spend looking around at Gettysburg, so we decided just to plan a whole day and if it ended up being a bust we'd kick it back in the hotel for the rest of the evening. There was so much to do there that we rushed through the area all day and still hadn't seen everything by dusk. Of course we had to go back to the hotel after dark since that place is definitely haunted to the gills.

Sara and I are pretty nerdy and decided that if we were gonna spend an entire day in such a historical place we best know our way around. On the suggestion of our good friend Donny, we read the book The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara. My my my was that a great read. I would reccomend it to anyone interested in knowing about the Civil War's bloodiest battle. Of course, if you're not the type that enjoys reading, you can rent the movie Gettysburg, which is a word-per-word recreation of the book. You probably ought to have some Pepsi Max on hand as the movie is four hours long and features many bearded men. I'm glad I read the book instead of just watching the movie since a huge portion of the plot is lost during the first hour as viewers are trying to decide if that super hairy Union guy truly is Harry from Dumb and Dumber (he is).