Dubuquers: In Loyalty, Steadfast

A recent email from Joe Schallan, a Dubuquer living in Phoenix, on Dubuque and the Cubs:

Dubuque, Iowa, has been a hotbed of Cubs fanaticism for a very long time. I know my mom went from Dubuque to Wrigley Field in 1938 to see a game. Does the fascination with the Chicago Cubs go back even further? I suspect so, though the Dubuquers who would know have probably passed on to the Great Ballpark Above.

There is a certain social convention associated with the Cubs: In the summer, when you arrive at a relative’s house, the Cubs game will be on WGN, even if no one is currently in the living room actually watching it. (But someone may be *listening* from the kitchen.)

In any case, you knock and go in by the kitchen door (never the front), step in, and before you say anything else, ask “How are the Cubs doin’?”

To inquire after anyone’s health or how the kids are doing before asking about the Cubs would be a breach of Dubuque social etiquette.

When I go back there in the summer or fall (usually once every year), I see homes with flagpoles flying Cubs banners. In the summer of 2005 I saw a home on a hillside where the owner had taken the slope in front of his house and made a flowerbed in the form of the Cubs logo, with geraniums for the red and some other flower for the blue.

I was there in October 2003 about a week after the Steve Bartman fiasco, and the place was in mourning. The rural districts surrounding Dubuque in Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin are Cubs hotbeds, too, and on that trip I saw the following in Lancaster, Wisc., just north of Dubuque:

http://members.cox.net/jbsphx/cubshope.html

But I grew up a Dodgers fan. Why?

My cousin Harold Stecklein, whose Conoco station at 32nd and Central some oldtimers may remember, acquired a taste for the Brooklyn Dodgers while he was in the service in WWII, and stayed true to the Blue even after he came home to Dubuque. When I was seven I thought it was so cool that Harold went against the prevailing grain that I, too, adopted the Dodgers. Harold and I were probably the only Dodgers fans in northeast Iowa.

My family moved out to Arizona and the Dodgers left Ebbets Field for sun-splashed Los Angeles, but I kept up my emotional attachment to the Dodgers, with the glorious Koufax years coinciding with my teenage years in Phoenix.

Meanwhile, in Dubuque, the faithful stayed with their Cubs through miserable season after miserable season, seasons made crueler by the events of 1969, 1984, and 2003.

There is an ancient German motto — In Treue Fest — which in fact was used in coats-of-arms and official seals by various German states. In the First World War, Bavarian soldiers of the German Army marched off to the trenches with it emblazoned on their belt buckles. It means “In loyalty, steadfast” and is quite close in spirit to the U.S. Marine motto, “Semper Fidelis” — “always faithful.”

“In Treue Fest” is what being a Dubuquer is all about — steadfast in loyalty, be it to the Cubs, the family, or the Church. In a culture in which everything that seems to be solid melts into thin air (to paraphrase Karl Marx, who was at least astute on this point), many in Dubuque, even in this late age, remain steadfast in loyalty. It is a defining characteristic.

Cheers,

Joe S.

Not Made in Dubuque

A not so funny conversation with Hormel Customer Service:

HORMEL:
Hormel Customer Service.

ME:
Hi. Could you tell me where DUBUQUE® Plumpers are produced?

HORMEL:
Do you mean where you can buy them?

ME:
No, I mean where they are made.

HORMEL:
. . . . They’re made in . . . Dubuque.

ME:
. . . . In Dubuque?

HORMEL:
Yes . . . .

ME:
Uh . . . at which plant?

HORMEL:
. . . . I’m sorry, I’m not allowed to divulge that information.

ME:
Oh . . . I live in Dubuque, and I don’t think DUBUQUE® Plumpers are made here.

HORMEL:
. . . .

ME:
I think Hormel acquired the DUBUQUE® Plumper brand several years ago when the Dubuque packing plant closed.

HORMEL:
. . . . Could you hold for a moment?

ME:
Yes.

HORMEL:
. . . .

ME:
. . . .

HORMEL:
Sir, could you hold on for another moment?

ME:
OK.

HORMEL:
. . . .

ME:
. . . .

HORMEL:
Sir?

ME:
Yes?

HORMEL:
DUBUQUE® Plumpers are made in Fremont, Nebraska.

ME:
Fremont, Nebraska?

HORMEL:
Yes.

ME:
Oh, OK. I didn’t think they were made in Dubuque. The packing plant has been closed for a while.

HORMEL:
. . . .

ME:
OK . . . thanks.

Trade a Husband in Dubuque

I recently read Rachel Crothers‘ 1931 play As Husbands Go, a whimsical, romantic comedy set “in the country 10 miles from Dubuque.” The play was “given great reception on Broadway” in the early 1930s, and was made into a movie in 1934 by Fox Film Corporation.

Unluckily, the movie, which was “mostly filmed on location in Iowa,” does not appear to be available on VHS or DVD. I had to borrow the script from University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City via interlibrary loan.

As Husbands Go is about “a lady who wants to trade a husband in Dubuque for a poet in Paris.” Burns Mantle, special New York correspondent to the Chicago Daily Tribune, described Crothers’ play as “a nice little study of a middle aged wife who finds romance again in Paris and tries to bring it home with her to Dubuque, Ia., and the thoroughly sweet, safe, and loyal small town banker husband who gets in her way” (March 15, 1931, p. G1).

The photo at the upper left is of Gloria Holden, the “calm, poetic beauty” who played the wife in the stage version of As Husbands Go (Chicago Daily Tribune, January 31, 1932, p. E9).

Although As Husbands Go contains no direct physical description of Dubuque, real or imagined, the play relies heavily on the myth or mystique of Dubuque as being simple, comfortable, and humdrum (yet simultaneously self conscious, strained, and raw), especially in comparison to the sophistication of Paris and New York.

One character, an English poet visiting Dubuque, makes the following observation: “Everything seems a little more real — more honest — over here. Less glamour. Things seem to me somehow to be just exactly as they are, if you know what I mean” (p. 125).

Of course, nothing is as it seems in As Husbands Go. By the end of the play, even Dubuque assumes an air of sophistication, in its own peculiar way.

1976 Dubuque Mother

Photo: 1976 Dubuque Mother. Todd Ehlers on Flickr.

I tried to use this photo of Todd Ehlers’ mom as the header image for the Dubuquer blog, but the original is just too wonderful to crop. I think I’m in love!

Have You No Morels, Man?

On Sunday afternoon I went morel hunting at Bellevue State Park, about 25 miles south of Dubuque.

Although I failed to spot the elusive fungi, I did find a large turkey feather to give to my four-year-old daughter Rebecca.

Thankfully, I did not unearth any human skulls, nor was I shot by turkey hunters.

Dubuque’s Fictional Demise

An excerpt from Erik Hogstrom’s front page newspaper article “Note to self: It’s only a movie, British film chronicles comet’s direct hit on Dubuque,” Telegraph Herald (Dubuque), Tuesday, April 3, 2007:

Duck! Or move. Or remind yourself it’s only a film.

A British made-for-TV movie features a nightmarish scenario: A comet packing the equivalent destructive energy of 6 million Hiroshima bombs plunges into a small city in North America called … Dubuque!

Hogstrom reports that the movie Futureshock: Comet Impact is currently being produced for the Discovery Channel.

Unfortunately, a production assistant interviewed for the article did not know why the movie’s British screenwriter Edward Canfor-Dumas chose Dubuque as the comet’s impact site, nor if there are any plans to film on location in Dubuque.

Maybe the Iowa Film Office could help Dubuque Mayor Roy Buol convince the producers of Futureshock: Comet Impact to shoot pre-impact scenes in town?

When not reporting for the TH, Erik Hogstrom is the author of Dubuque’s most eclectic blog, route 1.

Boy with Drum and Dog, Dubuque circa 1867

Photo: View of a boy with a drum and a dog, Dubuque, Iowa, circa 1867. From Stereoscopic views of Dubuque, Iowa by Samuel Root, in the Robert N. Dennis collection of stereoscopic views, NYPL Digital Gallery.

To help visualize Civil War era Dubuque as described in Russell Johnson’s Warriors into Workers, visit Stereoscopic views of Dubuque, Iowa online at the New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery.

Stereoscopic views, also called stereographs, are pairs of nearly identical images that appear to be three-dimensional or 3D when viewed through a stereoscope. Stereoscopic views were popular during the 19th century.

The views of Dubuque were taken by photographer Samuel Root around 1867. Root, who had a studio in Dubuque from 1857 to 1882, supposedly included his spotted dog in many of his local stereographs.

Dubuque Warriors into Workers

I’m currently reading Russell L. Johnson’s Warriors into Workers: The Civil War and the Formation of Urban-Industrial Society in a Northern City, Fordham University Press, 2003. The northern city in this scholarly book is Dubuque, Iowa.

Warriors into Workers examines the impact of the Civil War on the “Key City.” Russell Johnson argues that the war helped transform Dubuque from a frontier community of miners, artisans, and merchants to an urban industrial and manufacturing center. From Johnson’s introduction:

Military service in the Civil War, I argue, made a significant contribution to the creation of American industrial society, a contribution that has been heretofore unappreciated. Soldiers from Dubuque entered the Union army from a midsize, nonindustrialized city, were immersed for up to three years–sometimes more–in an intense urban-industrial experience, and then returned to a city increasingly penetrated by industrial capitalism.

Johnson’s in-depth academic analysis, for example of property data from census records of business class (low and high nonmanual), working class (artisan and unskilled), and other classes of independent soldiers and soldier-sons is, well . . . laborious. Johnson’s analysis, however, is balanced by fascinating firsthand accounts and descriptions of daily life in Dubuque and the Union Army before, during, and after the Civil War.

I’d love to read many of the sources cited by Johnson, for example Josiah Conzett’s Recollections of People and Events, Dubuque, Iowa 1846-1890, Franc B. Wilkie’s The Iowa First: Letters from the War and Pen and Powder, and Joseph B. Dorr’s Diary of Prison Life. I’d also like to learn more about Florence Healey, the controversial young woman who replaced a male clerk in John Bell’s dry goods store during the Civil War.

I’m very interested in Dennis A. Mahony’s The Prisoner of State, 1863. Dennis Mahony, a Dubuque newspaper editor and leader of the large local Irish community, was arrested at his home in Dubuque by a U.S. Marshal and jailed in Washington, D.C. for several months in 1862. Mahony, a Democrat, was an outspoken critic of the Lincoln administration and the war. While never formally charged with a crime or tried in court, Mahony was supposedly imprisoned by authority of the War Department for “discouraging enlistments” and for disloyalty to the government.

I wonder to what extent if any Dubuque’s early Copperhead or anti-war reputation fed into the later perception of Dubuque as a provincial backwater.

Origins of “Double Dubuque” Part Two

In my previous post, I said newspaper columnist Matt Weinstock supposedly wrote a book entitled Double Dubuque, Fables and Foibles of Los Angeles. Weinstock’s Double Dubuque book was mentioned in Fred Beck’s “Farmers’ Market” column in the L.A. Times on July 17, 1945.

Oddly, I could not locate a copy of Weinstock’s Double Dubuque, nor could I confirm that such a book was ever published. Weinstock did publish a book in 1947 called My L.A., so in hopes of discovering the elusive origins of the epithet “Double Dubuque,” I borrowed Weinstock’s My L.A. through interlibrary loan.

My L.A. is a compilation of descriptions and anecdotes of 1930s Los Angeles taken from Weinstock’s then popular Daily News column. Disappointingly, My L.A. contains no references to “Double Dubuque.” The only mention of Iowa, in fact, appears on pages 105-106 where Weinstock jokes about the varying estimates of attendance of the annual Iowa Picnic.

So what happened to Matt Weintsock’s supposed book Double Dubuque? In the introduction to My L.A., written by none other than Fred Beck of the L.A. Times “Farmers’ Market” column, Beck makes the following confession:

At this point, I want to tell you a little secret. Forgive me if I appear to smirk, faintly, but once a long time ago I printed a false statement in a sort of a column that I write and which appears in the West’s most polite daily. I stated that Matt Weinstock was writing a book about Los Angeles. Two things happened. First a lot of people wrote for a copy of the book. Second, a lot of publishers swooped down on Matt. He hadn’t started the book, but these events caused him to do so, which is what I had hoped to see happen.

So Fred Beck’s 1945 hoax fooled me! There never was a book entitled Double Dubuque, and the origins of this phrase remain a mystery.

An unrelated postscript:

In 1934, Frank Merriam defeated novelist Upton Sinclair for the governorship of California. Merriam was born in Hopkinton, Iowa, less than 50 miles southwest of Dubuque. While there appears to be no direct connection between the rise of Governor Merriam and the origins of phrase “Double Dubuque,” the coincidence is notable.

Origins of Nickname “Double Dubuque” for L.A.

The following dialogue between Fred MacMurray (NEFF) and Barbara Stanwyck (PHYLLIS) caught my attention while recently watching the 1944 film noir classic Double Indemnity:

NEFF
Where did you pick up this tea drinking? You’re not English, are you?

PHYLLIS
No. Californian. Born right here in Los Angeles.

NEFF (smirking)
They say native Californians all come from Iowa.

Dubuquers should easily recognize the humor and irony in this allusion to their home state. During the mid-to-late 1940s, Rufus Blair, a publicist for Paramount Pictures, the same studio that produced Double Indemnity, popularized the phrase “Double Dubuque” to describe Hollywood.

In the 40s, Blair’s dispatches containing the latest Hollywood gossip and rumors appeared in newspapers across the U.S., including the Chicago Daily Tribune and Washington Post. Blair wryly listed “Double Dubuque” as the dateline for each of his reports.

On June 9, 1949, the Chicago Daily Tribune explained that Blair was “a former Chicagoan” whose “Double Dubuque” characterization of Hollywood was used in “an admixture of awe, derision, and nostalgia.”

More about Rufus Blair appeared in the Los Angeles Times on March 10, 1987:

Jack Hirshberg, an old-time Hollywood press agent, writes that Blair was also one of that glib breed — a San Francisco newspaperman who was lured south in the 1930s to do national publicity for Paramount.

“Rufus was never taken in by Hollywood,” Hirshberg says. “His irreverence for the sham he, himself, helped create in order to build audiences for the studio’s films and stars was one of his many endearing points.

“Rufus was first of all a newspaperman. . . . His wit was sharp, his typewriter articulate. Rufus was a lovely man. He died two or three years ago in San Francisco.”

Well, at least he got out of Double Dubuque.

Although Rufus Blair popularized “Double Dubuque” as a nickname for Hollywood, he probably was not the first to use it. Newspaper columnist Matt Weinstock reportedly wrote a book in 1945 entitled Double Dubuque, Fables and Foibles of Los Angeles. I cannot verify that such a book exists, but I have requested a copy of Weinstock’s 1947 book My L.A. via interlibrary loan.

Unverified claims that comedian W.C. Fields coined the phrase “Double Dubuque” have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, for example in the column “The TV Scene” by Cecil Smith on January 16, 1964, and in “Putting Down Town” by Ray Hebert, December 14, 1981. W.C. Fields starred in several movies produced by Paramount.

Baltimore journalist H.L. Mencken is frequently cited as inventor of the phrase “Double Dubuque” as an epithet for Los Angeles. Mencken savaged L.A. in his writings, describing it as “nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis” and “the capital of American idiots,” and by claiming that “there were more morons collected in Los Angeles than in any other place on Earth.” But if H.L. Mencken ever called L.A. “Double Dubuque,” I have not been able to find the original source or quotation.

Some scholars assert that Los Angeles was called “Double Dubuque” as early as 1900. For example, see Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions by Edward W. Soja (2000) page 123, or Michael Engh, S.J. in Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s edited by Tom Sitton and William Deverell (2001) page 202.

These scholars say Los Angeles was dubbed “Double Dubuque” and “Iowa by the Sea” because of the large numbers of “middlebrow” and “homogeneous” Iowans who settled there around 1900. But again, they do not provide original sources or citations.