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CAT Tracks for August 31, 2016
DOWN ON MAIN STREET |
UPDATE: Okay, I changed my original title "A GHOST STORY" (that I was never fond of) to reflect the main reaction from a loyal reader of CAT Tracks:
From Antique Archaeology.com
CAIRO, ILLINOIS: AMERICA’S FORGOTTEN CITY
CAT Tracks Editor's Note:
Okay, Mike, if you are going to do a post in June of 2016 about the "ghost town" of Cairo, Illinois...
...couldn't you have whipped out your cell phone and snapped some current pictures of the downtown area instead of searching the Internet archives?
I mean...
...the pictured buildings are long gone.
And "sinkholes"? On Main Street?? Not for quite some time, Mike!
As for the snarky "Cairo, (pronounced by locals as “we don’t care-o”)"...
...well, maybe you should read the rest of your article:
Maybe you could have addressed the proper pronunciation issue by using something like:
"If you really care about Cairo, you'll pronounce it Care-o."
The mixed messages of this article would seem to indicate that Mike "phoned it in", (maybe) passed through Cairo (or stopped at a bar in a nearby town, listened to local gossip about Cairo's past, fearing for his safety and fueled by spirits of his choice, dashed off the opening paragraphs of his "ghost story", leaving it to someone else to do the grunt work. (Hmmm...maybe that's why Mike didn't take any current pictures of Cairo, he never made it that far!)
Fortunately, the "ghost writer" of Mike's story didn't have his negative bias and gave Cairo a positive treatment.
POSTSCRIPT:
Maybe the bar where Mike drank in his legends and lore of Cairo was on "Main Street". There certainly are a lot of those in Southern Illinois...
...just not in Cairo!
Hey, Mike...
...did you happen to see Bob Seger while you were here? There???
"There isn’t even a street named Main in Cairo is there? If he had said 'the main street' it would have been different. This was bizarre indeed."
The original post follows...
"The 2,800 residents that remain are all those who stayed after the summer flood of 2011. Can you imagine the sort of passion those citizens have for their town that they’d rather stay than to leave? It’s like they see the diamond underneath as they clean up their city..."
