Odd Bits
From Portable Pianos to Portable Organs
Earlier this week My Own True Love and I were at an event at an aviation history museum in Poplar Grove, Illinois.* In the course of chatting with the executive director, the GI Steinway (aka the Victory Vertical) came up. The director mentioned that another museum in the community had a portable organ made for…
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Late to the Party: Independent Bookstore Day
In the United States, the last Saturday of April is Independent Bookstore Day—a nationwide party for book lovers. (Here in Chicago, the independent bookstores host a bookstore crawl, which is far more dangerous than a pub crawl as far as I’m concerned.) For the past few years, I’ve run a blog post the day the…
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Pianos for Victory
This story has been brought to my attention twice in the last 48 hours from two different sources.* Sometimes the universe says “You need to write a blog post about this!” in a very clear voice. When the United States entered World War II in 1941, raw materials of all sorts were diverted to the…
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