The Bohemian National

The Bohemian National Cemetery is a fine cemetery.  I haven't been out there for awhile, but it has a lot of fine statuary, and I don't know if it was a Czech thing or just what people did at the time, but many of the tombstones have little cameo-style photos of the deceased affixed.  Perhaps that was the style with the slow developing cameras of the day, but I prefer to think that it was the thought, when the photo was taken, that it would be on their tombstone, that accounts for the very serious expressions on their faces. One whole section is devoted to victims of the Eastland disaster, with whole families buried together all expiring on that same date.  In the center is the tomb of our great hero, Anton, "Pushcart," Cermak.  Right across from it is one for James Janovsky which was the name of my mother's father, though he is not interred there, so I don't know who is in that mausoleum.  This Christmas I will be getting one of those Ancestry kits and I'd like to find out more about that part of the family since right now I know nothing.

There is a story that it was founded when the regular Catholic cemetery refused to accept the body of a woman who committed suicide and the free thinkers buried her in the vacant land where the cemetery would later arise, and according to the laws of the time once a body was buried it couldn't be disturbed so it became the Bohemian National Cemetery.  This story is probably not true since I don't remember where I read it and I have not been able to find it anywhere else.  But I think it did arise from some disagreement between the religious and the free thinkers.  Free thinkers were a thing around the turn of the century (Willa Cather writes about them), not quite atheists, more like agnostics or people who don't partake in organized religion.  I think Bohemians became associated with them because of their religious dissensions.

Meis's last work was the IBM building, not  sure what it is called now.  This whole idea of naming rights is stupid.  A building should keep its original name, add that to my credo.  The Quaker Building is a couple blocks west on Dearborn.  It used to contain the world's largest box of Quaker Oats, which was not an actual box just a replica twenty or thirty feet high.  As a youthful Chicago booster I used to point it out with pride, but as I got older I began to realize, the world's largest box of Quaker Oats, big deal.

Armadillos were a big deal in Texas. People would point at a smear on the highway and say that was an armadillo but it looked like any other smear to me. I don't recall any mention of them in St Louis.  But here is a St Louis thing:  they call obstreperous hicks Hoosiers.  It has nothing to do with Indiana, just their name for that sort of people.  I expect the term was once in general use before it became confined to St Louis and that's how the citizens of Indiana got their nickname, as people often take their names from their distractors.  Though the land of Lincoln need not brag, it being called the Sucker State, but a little better than Missouri who some call the Puke State..