CAT Tracks for April 20, 2012
NEW IN CAIRO

From the April 19th edition of The Cairo Citizen...

CAT Tracks Editor's Note:

Good news about the new fire truck...

...with our history of fires, we can always use one of them!


As for the "Fort Defiance Transportation and Civil War of the Western Theater Museums"...

...may it become a tourist magnet!

Hope all y'all pay it a visit.


As a former history teacher, I suppose I should be excited...should have attended the Grand Opening. Maybe if I were still teaching, I could summon up excitement and passion...attempt to lead my students by personal example.

Sadly, it is not to be.

Don't get me wrong, I do sincerely hope for success. And...I am heartened. Fort Defiance has been cleaned up this year. Along with the mowing of various city properties and the promise of further demolition of decaying buildings, Cairo is looking better.

But...


Three things influence my personal "half-empty" feelings about the new museum:

  • I gotta be me! Whether by nature or nurturing, I fall into the "glass-half-empty" segment of society.

  • Secondly, I'm a math person by nature...not history. I got into "history" when I went to college. To keep up in math, you must attend class and do your homework regularly. To keep up in history, you can skip class and read the material the night before the test. The latter won out. So, my lack of interest in the Toll House museum is not due to any shortcoming on its part. Hey...when my wife and I went to Hawaii, we went to the Arizona Memorial (the U.S. battleship that was sunk during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.) Julie was excited, going from display to display reading about the historic event. Me? I would alternate between keeping her company (but not reading) and wandering over to the nearest window to look at the scenery.

  • Finally, it is the Toll House. To paraphrase former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's famous line during World War II and the Battle of Britain (Hey, I do know history, I just don't like it!):

      Never...has so much been paid by so many to so few.

    The article above reports that the Toll House museums were financed by a $600,000 grant from the Illinois Department of Transportation.

    Before that grant, there was the grant to finance the (also mentioned in the article) restaurant...that appeared briefly.

    Talk about unforgetable...

    The opening of a new school year coincided with the opening of the new restaurant. A group of us teachers decided to use the rare hour-long lunch period to test it out. Well, that hour was spent waiting on our food order to arrive...COLD. We spent that hour down in the sunken restaurant area glancing up at the windows high above. Trust me, this was off-putting to a group that teaches in a windowless building. The "balcony" out back facing the river...exposed to the sun, open to mosquitoes! That's certainly designed to attract tourists! (Yes, dripping sarcasm.)

    I don't think any of our group ever went back to the Toll House Restaurant, although I'm not sure that was due to the bad, cold food or whether it was because the restaurant closed before we could try, try again.


    And then there was the fiasco with "the missing key" to the Toll House during the previous city administration...when the folks who provided the funding were locked out of viewing what their money hath wrought, relegated to peering through the windows and holding a press conference on the parking lot (while "the missing key" was reportedly cruising the Caribbean.)


    That's the "history" that gets in the way of me venturing forth to visit the Toll House museums.

    Oh, well...

    ...my loss!


    Anyway...

    ...according to the article, the new Cairo museum is open daily from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

    PS: If you are interested in things historical, I'd visit sooner rather than later.