Where have all the good smells gone?
WE didn’t seem to worry much about where we were at. We would get out of the car and know wherever we were in the Quad-Cities by the smell.
Now, in the sanitized air around us, most smells are gone.
During an idling moment, I sniffed with John Wetzel of Moline — who knows everything there is to know about the Quad-Cities — on the rarified smells that made our communities famous.
I remember when the only good smells in the Quad-Cities were National Licorice Factory in Moline; Twinkie Boulevard along River Drive in Davenport, where they made Wonder Bread; Jim’s Rib Haven in Rock Island; and the smell of burning leaves. Now, the essence of Jim’s is about the only good smell left … though leaves can be burned in a few scattered communities, raising regular howls of complaint.
John has long memories. “For some reason, I remember the smell of foundries,” he says. “The smell from Deere and Arsenal foundries were sharp, metallic.”
The smell of foundries hit your nostrils like a loud clang.
John takes a breath and remembers, too, when Rimco was in Rock Island. “All that lumber, and the sweet smell of sawdust was an essence all its own.”
We both shook our heads over the memorable smells of west Davenport.
West Davenport had a smell of whacko mixtures. On a hot summer night, when the humidity hung low and everyone sat on their front porches to cool off, someone would yell: “The dump’s burning.” We could instantly smell that it was.
The burning garbage stench drifted downwind, following the river, which wasn’t exactly perfume. The dump was everything west of the Centennial Bridge.
Its smell blended with the nearby “Hog Hotel,” a nickname for the five-story holding pens for pigs at Kohrs Packing Co., later to become Oscar Mayer. Blended with the hogs and the burning dump came the tang of cooking oats at Ralston Purina. The essence of Ralston was tolerable — rather like what greets you when you drive into Cedar Rapids — but when the three odors were joined, it was a mad mix.
We don’t have many smells left, good or bad.
John pipes up: “Oh, there’s one great smell left, popcorn at the ball park.”
I’ll add one more, the Stampe Lilac Garden, soon to bloom at Duck Creek Park in Davenport.
A sad blessing on a spring day
It was a warm afternoon, the promise of spring was assured. Marshall Reynolds, 82, of rural Alexis, Ill., told his wife, Harriett, “There’s a few good hours of daylight left.” So, with their granddaughter, Ellen, they headed for old Brownlee Cemetery, out in the country near Alexis. For more than 50 years, he had preserved the native prairie grass at this pioneer cemetery by burning off the old grass. That’s necessary for new growth to take place.
The burning was all but finished when Marshall slumped to the ground. He was dead, instantly, of a heart attack.
Family and friends say it was a blessing for an old retired farmer to pass away while working the land with family beside him on a warm spring day.
Add-cetera
LUCKY 8’s — Helen Norman of Morrison, Ill., will be 80 on the 8th day of the 8th month in ’08. “Turn the figures upside down and they read the same – 80, 8, 8, 08,” she says.
Bill Wundram can be contacted at (563) 383-2249 or bwundram@qctimes.com. Comment on this column at qctimes.com.