Last Days of the Spring Term

Indigo Bunting

On May 1, Bill Snyder, Bill Newman, Paul Hinrichs and I enjoyed a glass of wine at Whiskey Run in Brownville--and on a very pleasant evening.

Newman and I drove to Rock Port in Missouri to check out the wind farm there. As this link indicates, Rock Port, Missouri, plans to become the first completely wind-powered town in the country.

Impressive to see and to hear the thirty or so towers with the rotating blades, especially after watching for over a year the towers loaded on trucks and wondering where they all ended up.

After a union meeting in Lincoln (State College Education Association) the following day, 2 May, I rushed back to Peru to gather notes and thoughts.

The union business certainly set the stage for the evening, for I traveled south to Falls City, to the beautiful library there to talk about John Ford, John Steinbeck, and The Grapes of Wrath.



Around fifty folks--I forgot to take a picture of the people who came for the discussion and the film--attended the event; I controlled myself and stopped The Grapes of Wrath only a few times to share information and an interesting anecdote now and again

I stand here with Merle Stalder, who graciously donated the Thomas Hart Benton lithographs that Twentieth-Century Fox commissioned for the film.

If you get a chance stop by the Falls City Library and Arts Center and view the lithographs and other featured items in the Stadler Gallery.

My presentation was part of the Kansas-Nebraska Chautauqua program: Bright Dreams, Hard Times: America in the Thirties.

Commencement went very well the next day. And after turning in grades and taking care of some end-of-the-term matters, I joined my colleague Dan Holtz and headed to a pond at which we like to fish.

Although the water remains cool and the fish sluggish, we managed to pull in a few Large-mouthed Bass and a couple Bluegill, an enjoyable way to conclude a very busy term.


And for the past week in particular, I have taken quite a few pictures of the birds in my back yard.; this past week, many Rose-breasted Grosbeak, Indigo Bunting, and Baltimore Orioles visited my feeders.

I take off in the morning, Wednesday, for Ripon, Wisconsin, my home away from Peru--hard to believe that I have made this commute for fifteen years. I look forward to adding some material and to continuing the blog next fall.

Kissing Northern Cardinals

Baltimore Oriole