Does Spring still mean Great Junk for Kids?

Sunday's twin harbingers of Spring – the return of Daylight Savings Time and the expected snow melt –provoke a question from a childish mind of a Baby Boomer: do 21st century kids still have wonderful crap marketed to them when weather warms?

Kites!

Recent snows have seemed like Christmas in March, but surely there are merchants somewhere that have end-cap displays of kites ready to roll. Do kids still struggle with such magnificent airborne nonsense, tying tails out of rags. (Do parents still keep rags?)

What about yo-yos?

Besides 1960s elementary teachers rolling in TVs to watch space launches, there occasionally were grade school assemblies with experts from Duncan or some other yo-yo corporation demonstrating their talent.

Five-and-dime stores couldn't keep yo-yos stocked. (Are there still such yo-yo professionals? Where are they credentialed?)

Is it warm enough for squirt guns? Are cap pistols still popular in this post-Columbine, -Newtown era?

And jackknives. Not the Swiss Army type, but small- and medium-sized beauties with plastic sides molded to appear to be tree bark. Are they common or endangered in a zero-tolerance climate?

How about bubble bottles, or bicycle handlebar streamers?

Are wax lips made in the USA – and still chewable?

Speaking of chewable wax, what about those odd little paraffin snacks with super-sweet syrups squeezed into weird-shaped receptacles?

Where do we go? The nice Ben Franklin on Prospect Avenue in Peoria Heights closed and a web search turned up Ben Franklin stores in Moline, Quincy and Carthage.

Grrrr.

Oh, well: Don't feel old; feel young – Spring forward!

Frankly, The Origins of Saving Daylight Goes Way Back

In 1918, several months before the steamboat Columbia sank in the Illinois River, Daylight Saving Time was enacted in the U.S for the first time. Here is an excerpt from my book, “The Wreck of the Columbia: A Broken Boat, A Town’s Sorrow & the End of the Steamboat Era on the Illinois River,” Chapter 19 – DST.

It was late on March 31, 1918, a Saturday night soon to be a Sunday morning and the beginning of a new month, when Daylight Saving Time officially became a household phrase in America. It started with a crowd of gawkers lining the streets surrounding the Metropolitan Building in Manhattan. At exactly midnight, the crowd strained their necks and looked up at the huge lighted clocks, each 26 feet in diameter, one on each side of the building. A signal was given and the lights shut down—the largest four-dial clock tower in the world went dark.

A hush came over the crowd.

Time was literally at a standstill.

Then there was a cheer!

The crowd was festive despite the late hour and the start of Easter Sunday. A community chorus sang the “Star Spangled Banner,” and the New York Police band and Borough of Manhattan bands took turns playing “Over There.” The excited throng kept staring at the clock dials frozen in time. It just couldn’t be, they thought.

It was deep in the tower’s belly where all the work was taking place. Hired mechanics had made their way up to the tower’s inner workings and begun the arduous task of advancing the 13-foot hour hands manually. They had two hours to get the job done. Then promptly at 2 a.m., the lights flickered on again. Like magic, the clock tower was once again illuminated. Hundreds of late-night souls strained their necks again to see the clock dials’ hour hands in the glowing beams. The hands were pointing to the number … 3.

Three! It was 3 o’clock! For the first time in history, the nation had moved itself ahead one hour. The crowd shouted and cheered. Daylight Saving Time had officially begun.

“Blasé New Yorkers for whom New Year’s Eve celebrations have lost their thrill,” wrote a reporter for the New York Times, “rubbed their eyes and marveled at the novelty of an Easter Sunday of only twenty-three hours.”

The idea for daylight saving is most often attributed to Benjamin Franklin during his years as an American delegate in Paris in the late 1700s. Thanks to the oil lamp, Franklin would stay up late, usually playing chess, and sleep until noon the next day. One morning, quite early, he was awakened by a sudden noise. He threw open the tight window shutters and was even more startled by the amount of daylight coming into his room. “I looked at my watch,” Franklin later wrote in an article that appeared in the Journal De Paris on April 26, 1784, “which goes very well, and found that it was but six o’clock; and still thinking it something extraordinary that the sun should rise so early. I looked at the almanac, where I found it to be the hour given for his rising on the day.” Perhaps with a mix of astonishment and dry humor, Franklin wrote “that having repeated this observation the three following mornings, I found precisely the same result.”

Ever resourceful, Franklin had an intriguing thought. If he had slept six hours until noon through daylight and “lived” six hours the night before in candlelight, then wasn’t that just a waste of precious light and expense? “This event has given rise in my mind to several serious and important reflections,” he wrote. Franklin went to work figuring out the math. Assuming that 100,000 Parisians burned half a pound of candles per hour for an average of seven hours a day, and calculating the average time during summer months between dusk and the time Parisians went to bed, Franklin concluded that the amount saved, as he put it, would be an “immense sum.” Franklin proposed that all Parisians rise with him, when the sun rises, and to compel the naysayers, he proposed “a tax [be laid] per window, on every window that is provided with shutters to keep the light out.”

“Let guards posted after sunset to stop all the coaches that would pass the streets,” he bravely declared. “Let the church bells ring every time the sun rises. Let cannon(s) be fired in every street, to wake the sluggards effectually, and make them open their eyes to see their true interest.”

Franklin’s dry wit and humor notwithstanding, his scheme alarmed Parisians who weren’t ready for change. They thought Franklin’s idea was madness, and a surprising one at that, coming from an American intellectual and a figure that was so well-liked in France. After he left Paris, Franklin mulled over the idea and marveled at “inhabitants,” this time Londoners, who continued “to live much by candlelight and sleep by sunshine.” Franklin used the economy as an example, saying residents had little regard to the costs of candlewax and tallow. “For I love economy exceedingly,” he explained.

Eventually the idea of extending the day during the summer months was proposed. Instead of getting up by daylight, usually too early, then why not just move daylight later in the day and prolong the evening sun?

"Everyone appreciates the long, light evenings,” wrote William Willett, a London Builder who is credited with the idea of extending daylight. “Everyone laments their shortage as Autumn approaches; and everyone has given utterance to regret that the clear, bright light of an early morning during Spring and Summer months is so seldom seen or used."

Like Franklin, Willett was struck by the amount of people who kept their blinds shut in the morning hours even though the sun was fully out. If getting up too earlier was the crutch, thought Willett, then why not just stretch the light of the evening hours. European countries would adopt the idea first.

On April 1, Easter Sunday of 1918, Americans did as well.

Excerpt from The Wreck of the Columbia: A Broken Boat, a Town’s Sorrow & the End of the Steamboat Era on the Illinois River © 2012 by Ken Zurski. Used with permission from Amika Press.

"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" Our Favorite Fictional Presidents

We’ve kind of been in a presidential mood over here at The Peorian lately, primarily for two reasons. One was seeing Daniel Day Lewis take home the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of President Lincoln. The other was watching The Peorian editor, Paul Gordon, get into character for his performance as President Nixon in Corn Stock Theatre’s production of “Frost/Nixon”, something he took a little too seriously at times.*

And that got us thinking about our favorite presidents in film and TV. Not actors portraying REAL presidents (like Daniel and Paul), but fictional presidents. So we asked our murder of writers to tell us about their favorites for this week’s Our Favorite Things list: Our Favorite Fictional Presidents.

*He took the last cup of coffee claiming that the Constitutional principle of executive privilege extended to caffeinated beverages.

President Merkin Muffley
“Dr. Strangelove (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb)”
By Matt Richmond
When the world is on the brink of doomsday, the last thing you want to do is forget your manners. The fact that President Merkin Muffley – one of three characters played by Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove – keeps things courteous when a rogue U.S. air commander’s actions threaten to trigger an all-out nuclear war makes him the greatest fake president in fake U.S. history.

His phone conversation with the Soviet premier, Dmitri Kissov, is a highlight. (“Well it’s good that you’re fine and I’m fine. … I agree with you, it’s great to be fine.”) President Muffley also gets one of the quintessential lines in the movie, summing up the paradoxical thinking that defined Cold War policy of mutually assured destruction: “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the war room!”

The incredible improvised phone conversation between President Muffley and the Soviet premier:

No fighting in the war room!:

President Muffley discusses the Doomsday Machine with Dr. Strangelove. You might say he’s talking to himself:

President Thomas J. Whitmore
“Independence Day”
By Terry Towery
My favorite fictional president would have to be Bill Pullman’s President Thomas J. Whitmore in the 1996 sci-fi flick “Independence Day.” I don’t pick Whitmore because Pullman is a great actor (he’s not bad, just not great). No, I pick him for one simple reason: Pullman’s character delivers the greatest cheesy patriotic speech in movie history. I swear to God. The speech makes me laugh AND break out in goose bumps each time I hear it. And best of all, once “President Whitmore” finishes his totally awesome cheesy speech, he climbs into a fighter jet and heads out to blast a few space invaders. Seriously, could one ask for more in a president?

By Shaun Taylor
Bill Pullman looked like a president, had the name of a president and sounded like a president. He gave an awesome rallying cry/monologue to get a young, brash Will Smith and others to beat the hell out of a throng of invading aliens. He even dusted off his pilot's wings to fly one final combat mission against the angry extra-terrestrials. I remember walking out of the theater thinking, "Man, that guy that played the President in Independence Day should run for President when Bill Clinton’s done." The ignorance of fourteen year old I guess. But hey, Ronald Reagan did it! 

Here's the best version of the film version of the speech we could find:

Bill Pullman performs an alternate version of the speech:

Then there’s this guy doing the speech in NYC:

And finally some other guy performing it for an unsuspecting Florida crowd:

President James Marshall
“Air Force One”
By Tim Wyman
Knowing me means knowing that I'm a political junkie. While I've learned with age to keep most of my opinions to myself, I'll happily share who is my all-time favorite fictional president. There have been some good ones, but the best, in my humble opinion, was Harrison Ford in "Air Force One." The writing of his character and the story made him everything that we want in a politician. He was intelligent, self-assured, and did what was right even though it wasn't politically expedient. Then he kicked the ever-living-crap out of terrorists using brains, brawn and guts just to save his wife and daughter. And if that weren’t enough, he recaptured the plane and made a daring escape at the end. Talk about re-assuring your re-election! It was a great popcorn movie with a little bit of intelligence and a lot of action that put you on the edge of your seat more often than not. Plus really, he's Indiana Jones, right? How could he NOT be my favorite?

Getting all presidential in his speech:

Getting the terrorists off…his…plane:

President James Dale
“Mars Attacks!”
By Ken Zurski
I’m going with Jack Nicholson as President James Dale in Mars Attacks! not only because he died at the "hand" of an alien – literally. But also for this classic line: “I want the people to know that they still have 2 out of 3 branches of the government working for them, and that ain't bad.”

“Isn’t the universe big enough for the both of us?”

They come in peace:

President David Palmer
“24”
By Tim Cundiff
The story of Jack Bauer would not have been as much of a success if it weren’t for President Palmer. Bauer, played by Kiefer Sutherland, managed to save the U.S., the world, nay the universe from disaster after disaster. 24 had an intensity unlike any other program or movie. The pace, the plots, the stories were a recipe for success on this show. President Palmer ruled with confidence, trust and comfort for Americans during several tragic times in fictitious U.S. history. He was a solid character in an amazing show. Often associated with the booming voice from the Allstate Insurance commercials, the voice of reason and the voice of America was so perfectly cast as President. And I cannot forget to mention that Haysbert also played the role of Pedro Cerrano in the baseball classic Major League. A man of many talents, for 24 fans Haysbert wins the election for the greatest U.S. President. To conclude this piece, simply picture a black screen with digital clock numbers counting down…tick, tock, tick, tock.

A President Palmer tribute. Apparently, he had a bad day:

Did you know Hitler gave the order for President Palmer’s assassination?

The President
“Fail Safe”
By Kevin Kizer
I was contemplating two contenders of the comedic variety – Mel Brooks as President Skroob in “Spaceballs” and Terry Crews as President Dwayne Elizondo Camacho in “Idiocracy” – when I read young Matthew’s submission and selection of the serious-yet-apologetic President Muffley (“I am as sorry as you are, Dmitri. Don’t say that you’re more sorry than I am because I’m capable of being just as sorry as you are. So we’re both sorry.”).

This move by the Richmond boy drew me to another president in a movie that’s closely linked to “Dr. Strangelove” and was, in fact, sued before release by Kubrick for plagiarism. The movie is “Fail Safe” and it stars Henry Fonda as Mr. President. No time for first name/last name crap in this movie because American planes are on their way to deliver a nuclear attack and…well, it IS the exact storyline as “Dr. Strangelove” (incidentally, they were produced at the same time by Columbia Pictures – and the lawsuit was settled with the agreement that “Dr. Strangelove” would be released FIRST). The difference is that “Fail Safe” is an intense drama.

Directed by Sidney Lumet, Fonda plays a reasonable-yet-commanding President who has to make some very hard decisions – like bombing New York in self-retaliation for accidentally bombing Moscow. While the story is well-known now, at the time, it was a bombshell (pun very much intended) that left audiences stunned and terrified.

It includes an all-star cast of young talent – Larry Hagman as the President’s English-to-Russian translator, Walter Matthau in the dramatic equivalent of the Strangelove role (heartless nuclear expert minus the wheelchair and Nazi background…although there is another character in the movie on crutches) and Pillsbury Dough Boy-ish Dom DeLuise as a young sergeant.

Spoiler alert! This is the end of the movie so don’t watch unless you want to be spoiled. I say go for it:

A nice montage of key scenes:

Pere Marquette likely to open by end of June

Friday marks a milestone in the Hotel Pere Marquette/Marriott Courtyard project with the opening of the first structure of the multi-million dollar project.

It isn't the structure local officials originally hoped would be opened by the time March Madness 2013 hit downtown Peoria, but it still will be helpful to the thousands of fans needing a place to park when they attend the games at the Civic Center.

The new, 400-plus car parking deck at Monroe and Fulton streets that will serve both the Pere Marquette and Marriott Courtyard is set to open at 9 a.m. on Friday, said project developer Gary Matthews, president of EM Properties.

"It's ready to go," he said during a news conference Thursday amid the construction ongoing on the first floor of the Pere Marquette. It was hoped that nearly 100-year-old structure would be ready for March Madness and the fact it isn't will cost Matthews more than $100,000 in penalties, per his redevelopment agreement with the city.

But the good news announced on Thursday is that he can now say with certainty that the keys to the Pere Marquette will be handed over to the Marriott Corp. on June 1. Marriott will manage both the Pere Marquette and the Courtyard Hotel tower that will be built adjacent to the Pere Marquette after demolition of the buildings along Main Street between the Pere and Monroe street is completed this spring.

Laura Lojas, sent by Marriott from Dayton to Peoria to be general manager of the project, said the company's goal is to re-open the Pere Marquette by June 30, after staff is trained and the building is completely within Marriott specifications as to cleanliness and so forth. The number of staff that will be hired still is being decided, Lojas said, and she expects most will be local. That includes hotel managers; she introduced some who have been hired so far and they include Mike Mercer, a Peoria who will be food and beverage director.

Lojas, a graduate of the University of Illinois, said she is excited about the project and what it offers Peoria, which she said is "a marvelous city."

Peoria Mayor Jim Ardis said it was exciting to hear "an actual opening day" for the completely renovated Pere Marquette, which Matthews acquired last year to start the $93 million project off the ground. Renovation, however, has taken longer than expected for several reasons, with the age of the building the common denominator, Ardis said.

"Gary has been and remains very committed to the project and he is not going to let it open before it's completely ready. But there have been many challenges, which one might expect in a project this size and a building this old," he said.

However, there have been even more unexpected challenges, including the amount of asbestos that had to be abated when construction first began more than a year ago. Because of that, much of the work could not begin for weeks later than originally planned. Also, it was determined all plumbing and electrical operations had to be replaced for life safety reasons while still maintaining much of the historical value of the building that enabled the project to qualify for historical grants.

"When you are rehabilitating any old building, especially one downtown, there are always challenges to deal with," Matthews said. "But we are doing that and we're almost there."

Matthews said he expects the entire project, including installation of the $1 million, climate-controlled skywalk that will connect the two hotels to the Peoria Civic Center, will be finished by little more than a year from now. The hotels will be connected at Main Street with a common reception area and the skywalk will run through the alley between the structures and across Fulton Street to connect with the Civic Center near the entrance to the theater.

Being able to connect the hotels to the Civic Center was the chief catalyst of the project. After the Civic Center open a $35 million addition a few years ago it founded larger conventions still reluctant to commit to a second-tier city such as Peoria without a true convention hotel — one connected to the convention space at the Civic Center.

Already, officials have said, the project is garnering more convention business for a few years down the road.

CAPTIONS: (Photo by Paul Gordon) With construction still going on behind them, Peoria Mayor Jim Ardis, right, and Hotel Pere Marquette developer Gary Matthews share a laugh during a new conference Thursday at the hotel.

Laura Lojas was introduced Thursday as the new general manager of the Hotel Pere Marquette/Marriott Courtyard. She said Marriott Corp. wants to have the Pere Marquette reopened by June 30.