Whilst driving around the state of Illinois, I visited Metropolis way down in the southern  most part of the state. I found a handful of Sears Homes, and I also found Superman.

I sent my brother an email and shared the photo I took of Superman (see below). My brother wrote back and said, “Smallville, Illinois? Ask to see Superman’s birth certificate. And while you’re there, ask about Obama’s too. More probable that we’ll see Superman’s first.”

Superman stands proud and tall in Metropolis

Recently, I traveled to southern Illinois to re-visit the site of the old Sears Mill.

In late 1911, Sears spent about $1 million to build a state-of-the-art mill just outside of Cairo, Illinois. The mill was actually located in a tiny burg called Urbandale. The Sears Mill was an impressive operation, covering 40 acres and employing about 80 full-time workers. About 20 acres were “under roof.” In other words, the site had 20 acres of buildings.

That’s a lot of buildings.

Each day, the railroad cars brought enormous quantities of yellow pine and cypress into the mill, right out of the virgin forests in Louisiana and Mississippi. Each day, those workers turned those logs into 10-12 kit homes. You read that right:  Hard-working men, using powerful saws and planers and other massive machines, carved those trees into kit homes. Kit homes with 30,000 pieces. That’s a lot of lumber.

In 2003, when doing research for my book, “The Houses That Sears Built,” I traveled to the site of the old mill. Not much to see there, but a couple little Sears Homes and a lot of woods and a couple bean fields.

Fast forward seven years to 2010.

Now I’m writing a new book about Sears Homes, and I decided it was time to dig a little deeper.

This time around, I contacted Richard Kearney, a local historian, long-time Cairo resident and all-around Smart Cookie and good man.

I asked him if he might have time to spend a day with me, helping me navigate the back roads of southern Illinois. To my delight, he readily agreed. Our day together could not have been any more delightful. With Richard’s fantastic knowledge of the area, I learned so much more about the old Sears Mill and its connection to local history.

One small example:  Soon after entering Urbandale, we turned onto “Sears Road” (the site of the old mill), and Richard spoke up and said, “You know, this used to be known as ‘Sears Roebuck Road.’”

I replied, “You’re kidding!”

He said, “It’s true. This road went all the way through, and when the Interstate came through, it cut the road right in half, creating two dead end streets on either side of I-57.”

This is the kind of quirky history that I just adore. I was enthralled.

“On the other side of the interstate,” Richard said, “you’ll find the other half of this road. It’s now called “Roebuck Road.”

Now I’ve been writing about Sears Homes for many years and I’ve been to Cairo many times and I’ve spent many hours learning more about Sears and Cairo and the mill, but I’d never heard any of this.

I asked Richard to show me where Roebuck Road was. He gladly obliged.

And there it was - Roebuck Road. And there was yet another bonus! Behind the Roebuck Road sign was a perfect little Sears house. It was a Sears Wexford.

A Sears House on Roebuck Road. Or maybe it’s a Roebuck house on Roebuck Road?

Either way, Garmin apparently never got the memo that Sears Roebuck Road had been sliced into two pieces.

Sears Road - in Urbandale

Note the little Sears Wexford in the background!

Someone needs to tell Garmin that Sears and Roebuck are now divorced - thanks to the Interstate!

Richard - thank you so much -  for sharing your knowledge and being such a good sport and giving up an entire day of your life to help me find my way around the southern-most tip of Illinois. You’re a real trooper and a treasure-trove of knowlege!

The first time I saw downtown Cairo, I stopped my car in the middle of the street and stared in disbelief. The entire business district, which comprised several blocks of brick streets in beautiful condition, was empty - deserted and devoid of all movement. Had it not been for a piece of trash blowing down the middle of the street, the scene could have been a still-frame.

The stillness, the quiet, the absence of any sign of life was fascinating, yet also left me wondering if the next sound I heard would be the theme from The Twilight Zone with a voice-over by Rod Serling.

Looking at the stunning late-1800s commercial architecture - most of which was in original condition and all of which had been abandoned - my intuitive sense told me that folks had left this place in a hurry. And as I began researching the area, I learned my hunch was on mark.

In the mid-1960s, racial unrest and riots were a sad part of the American landscape, but in Cairo, things went especially badly. African-Americans, weary of Jim Crow laws and disparate treatment, threatened to boycott businesses that employed only whites. White business owners responded by closing their stores. Large numbers of families - white and black - left the area and never returned. The population plummeted. Today, downtown Cairo is a ghost town - an incredible time capsule - frozen in the 1960s. The city that once boasted of 14,000 citizens now has about 3000 people living within its borders.

I’ve returned to Cairo several times since that first visit and each time, I make a point to drive through that incredible downtown area. I park my car and stare. I stare at the old buildings which are in fair to decent condition and still look much like they did when built 100+ years ago. I look at the store fronts whose doorways have not been darkened by a customer in many years. I study the two movie theatres that look much like they did when built in the 1920s and 30s. I take in the long view and look at the streetscapes, devoid of movement or activity.

Just behind those fantastic old commercial buildings lies a seawall and the Ohio River. I do believe that the city could build a fantastic tourism industry off this downtown area alone. I’ve never seen a sight like it.

Apparently, word is getting out, because on my last visit, I saw two tourists taking a plethora of photos of this eerie but fascinating downtown. However, if you decide to visit - come prepared. Cairo has no public bathrooms, no fast-food joints and no public water fountains. About 15 minutes away, just across the Ohio River, is Wickliffe, Kentucky - site of the nearest public restroom. The nearest Burger Doodle is 30 miles southwest in Cape Girardeau.

One thing Cairo does have is plenty of vacant lots, such as 1501 Commercial Avenue. This corner lot is a few blocks from the downtown area and according to the 1922 Sears Modern Homes catalog, it was the site of a beautiful “Elsmore” (Honor-Bilt home).  The testimonial on page 111 of the catalog reads, “Built by R. P. Fitzjearl, 1501 Commercial Avenue, Cairo, IL. He says, ‘Already-cut lumber saves one-third of time. Plans as simple as reading a book.’”

When I drive through Cairo, I look at all those empty lots and try not to think about how many Sears homes have been torn down in the intervening years. Several? Dozens? Or worse?

Thus far, I’ve identified about 30 Sears homes in Cairo. Many are in poor condition and a few more may be torn down before the city awakens to its architecture treasures. The addresses of these Sears homes are at the Cairo Public Library on Washington Street and make for a fun driving tour.

In May 1911, Sears opened up a mill in Cairo, Illinois. Cairo’s location at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers made it a natural for shipping and distribution. At the turn of the last century, Cairo (pronounced “Care-Roe”) could boast of having four major rail lines, enabling it to become a centralized shipping point for lumber harvested from the South and sent to the North.

The Sears Roebuck Mill, also known as the Illinois Lumber Company, got its start when Sears Roebuck paid $12,500 for a 40-acre tract in North Cairo. 

On May 21, 1911, The Chicago Tribune reported that Sears intended to build a $250,000 plant. A few weeks later, The Cairo Evening Citizen had doubled that figure and reported “Half a million to be cost of new Sears Roebuck Plant” (July 29, 1911).

In November 1911, Sears ran a two-page advertisement in American Carpenter and Builder Magazine headlined “Great News for Builders.” The advertisement (see below) said,

Shipments have begun from our second and newest great lumber plant in Illinois. We can deliver you bright, fresh, clean lumber at manufacturer’s prices almost as quickly as you can haul makeshift sizes and weatherworn stock from a high priced neighboring lumber yard. Our mill work is sheltered from rain, sun, soot and wind. Our new Illinois plant is located on two of the largest and fastest railroads in the North with direct connections to over 20 different railroads.  (Weatherworn stock was a reference to the fact that, unlike Sears, many mills did not keep their lumber under roof.)

In March 1912, F. E. Van Alstine, Superintendent of the Sears mill was quoted in The Cairo Evening Citizen as saying that Sears had chosen Cairo because of “their low freight rates, superior shipping facilities and other natural and commercial advantages, (which) made the city more desirable than St. Louis, East St. Louis, Paducah (Kentucky) or Memphis” (Tennessee).

But later that month, the rains came and the floodwaters rose, nearly destroying the brand new mill in Northern Cairo. On April 5^th, The Cairo Evening Citizen reported that the “main building of the new Sears Roebuck factory was hurled off its foundation and is leaning toward the east. Just what damage was done to these buildings could not be ascertained, as there was no way to reach them except by skiff.”

In mid-April, the paper said that all seven lumber sheds had been torn from their foundations and much of the lumber inside the sheds had simply floated away.

By August, The Cairo Evening Citizen happily reported that despite the hard times and high waters, Sears Roebuck had decided to remain in Cairo.  It also reported that about half the lumber sheds had been rebuilt and some of that floating lumber had been recovered. The same article reported that the folks at Sears corporate headquarters in Chicago were so pleased with Van Alstine’s post-flood restoration work that they presented him with a brand new automobile.

The mill produced everything for the Ready-Cut (precut) Sears homes except for millwork. The Sears mill located in Norwood, Ohio, supplied millwork; windows, doors and interior trim and moldings.

By the early 1930s, sales of Ready-Cut homes had plummeted and the mill began looking for other ways to generate income. They began building crating material for tractors and other large equipment, including Frigidaire refrigerators and appliances sold by Sears. In the late 30s, the mill produced prefabricated buildings for the camps which housed workers in the Civilian Conservation Corps. Wheeler relates that a typical CCC camp (which included several different buildings) required 400,000 feet of lumber and about 35 of these camps were milled and shipped by the Cairo plant.

In 1940, Sears closed the plant and sold it to the employees. Shortly after the employees purchased the plant, they obtained a contract to build massive crates for shipping B-17 and B-29 bombers overseas for the war effort.

After World War II ended, the former Sears Mill - now called Illinois Lumber Company - drafted and published their own book of house plans and tried to sell Ready-Cut homes again, but without success. The Cairo Evening Citizen relates that the plant was liquidated and closed in November 1955. The article adds this interesting aside:  “Like several other Cairo lumber industries, it slowly died because the wood articles it manufactured were supplanted by iron and steel.”

All that remains today at the site of the Cairo mill are two Sears kit homes - two Rodessas - which were built as part of an experiment in 1921, to prove the superiority of Ready-Cut homes over traditional  stick built homes.

When my husband read an early draft of my manuscript on internet dating, he suggested I make a change in the chapter I’d titled, “Rose’s Tidbits and Miscellany.”

“You’ve listed ‘persistence and perseverance’ as two important qualities for successful internet dating,” he said. “I’d put much more emphasis on that, because those are two of the most important qualities.”

He had a point. I’d talked to so many women who’d given up after a dozen dates, and had reconciled themselves to living alone for the rest of their lives. And I’d met also many women who’d found their one true love in less than a dozen dates.  But that wasn’t my experience. As the months rolled by and the dates kept coming (and going), I had only two choices: give up or push on. I decided to push on.

Perseverance is a common quality found amongst successful people. It was clear to me that perseverance had been the key to my success as both a freelance writer and self-published author. In 2002, I spent more than two years lobbying (perhaps even hounding) a woman at the Smithsonian to allow me to speak at that prestigious and well-known institution.

Eventually, she said yes and that event - that one-hour talk on Sears Homes - became one of the proudest moments of my career. For four years, I mounted a campaign to get the Wall Street Journal to write an article about my work and my book, The Houses That Sears Built. In Summer 2006, the Wall Street Journal called and asked for an interview. That article appeared on page one, above the fold! Reviewing my successes in those hard-to-succeed-in areas, I reasoned it’d be helpful in the dating world as well. And it was.

On October 29, 1941, Winston Churchill told a gathering of upper school students, “Never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.”

The great statesman’s words apply across the whole spectrum of human effort. If you give up too soon, you’ll be depriving not only yourself of much potential happiness, but some well-deserving and decent man, as well.

My 70th first date (now my husband) tells me that he’s glad I persisted and persevered. So am I.

Want to read more? Buy Rose’s book here.

A gorgeous 25-year-old woman named America Ferrera plays “Betty Suarez” on the popular ABC sitcom “Ugly Betty.”  The Hollywood-inflicted “uglying” of this Hispanic beauty is a paper-thin veneer, and really does little to hide Miss Ferrera’s natural good looks. It’s not hard to look beyond the extra-bushy eyebrows, gray-metal braces, uncoiffed hair and unattractive glass frames, and see that Ms. Ferrera is quite beautiful.

In addition to her lovely facial features, Ms. Ferrara has a well toned, shapely, feminine form. Slap on some braces and stir up the extra-bushy eyebrows and voila, you’ve got instant ugly? If that’s the case, there’s little hope for the rest of us.

If “Ugly Betty” is the measure of an ugly woman, we’re all in trouble deep. We “average women” are in trouble. Mainstream media is constantly force-feeding us the crazy notion that we have to be beautiful to be worthy, or even worse, to be loved.

In the powerful book, Flesh Wounds author Virginia L. Blum talks about an interview she had with a famous plastic surgeon. He told her,

The way you look has a lot to do with whether you’re going to attract somebody else. Let’s be pragmatic about the fact that if a woman cease to be attractive physically, it affects the physical, intimate relationship. I’ve seen women who have not had particularly good relationships or haven’t had a relationship with men for a long time and I make them look younger and prettier and they go on to get married and have wonderful, stable relationships. There’s absolutely no question that the face-lift helped them. We live in a real physical world (p. 127).

Ms. Blum responds to this with her own insights:

[The plastic surgeon] spoke with such authority. Yoked to his honesty is a kind of fiction about the transformative possibilities of plastic surgery. You can change her life. You can make her someone whom someone else would be willing to love. More to the point, if she isn’t succeeding on the dating/marriage market, it must be because she’s not attractive enough. That’s the most unsettling part of his account, isn’t it?

The self-evident undesirability of the woman who isn’t young and pretty. Young and pretty. You can’t have pretty without the young. As a feminist, I am indignant. Outraged (Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery, Virginia L. Blum, p. 127).

Like Ms. Blum, I also feel indignant and outraged. And Ugly Betty may be an award-winning sitcom, but the problem with it is, it perpetuates the tiresome message that’s been drilled into women’s heads for decades now. Ugly is a problem. Fix ugly with money. Spend money. Get pretty and then you’ll get love, because then you’ll be worthy of love.

In other words, money buys love.

In The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf writes that women’s magazines make their money by selling women on the idea that they’re suffering from a disease of “terminal ugliness,” and that this opens the to sell billions of dollars of “cures.”

And that seems to be the subtle message of Ugly Betty. We “less-than-beautiful” women need to spend a little more money on better glasses and better haircuts and invisible braces and electrolysis and then - only then - will the burdensome mantle of “ugly” be lifted off our shoulders and our true beauty will be revealed. And then, maybe then, we’ll find true love.

We just need to spend a little more money to be cured of that horrible disease of “terminal ugliness.”

I live for that happy day when I turn on the evening news and find that the male news anchors are young, svelte, well-coiffed and gorgeous, and the women news anchors are pudgy, untanned, hairless and unkempt. That’ll be my proof that the age of enlightenment has begun.

Yahoo news is reporting this morning that a man has been arrested for accosting his wife’s face with a cheeseburger. During a heated argument, the man lost his temper and began smearing a greasy cheeseburger over her face. Apparently, it erupted into a full-fledged food fight.

Read the short article here.

As a writer, I tend to pay way too much attention to non-verbal communication. And many sensitive souls - like me - are guilty of this, too. In fact, the experts say that 70% of all communication is non-verbal. I’ve noticed that when I see wedding videos and/or attend the weddings in person, that there are two kinds of men: The kinds of men who gently feed their wives their first bite of wedding cake, and the men who think that a woman’s wedding day is a swell time to act stupid and cram that cake into her face, embarrassing her, embarrassing himself, and proving to his friends and family that his new wife just married a real horse’s ass.

When did we lose our manners? When did we stop behaving well in public? And when did men get license to start treating their brand-new wives so unattractively at such an important moment?

I have observed that there’s an interesting semi-scientific insight that comes with the “feeding of the wedding cake.” Those men who do the cram often end up divorced. Those men who do the gentle feed, remain married.

Coincidence?

Nope.

Click here to learn more about Rose.

Part of the fun of traveling to 23 states and giving 200 talks on Sears Homes is seeing all kinds of wacky and wild stuff. One Sunday morning in 2003, as my host was driving me back to the airport (to return home to the Midwest), I saw this Sears Madelia (see second photo below). It was in Zanesville, OH (or a nearby town) and we were actually several blocks beyond this building when I told my host, “Please turn around. I think I saw something.”

He reminded me that we didn’t have much time and I told him I understood and this wouldn’t take but a second. And there - in all its painful glory - was this badly butchered Sears house. It’s actually a Sears Madelia and it was not that popular a model for Sears. (Sears sold 370 designs of kit homes from 1908 - 1940.)

The first picture (first image) is a happy, healthy Madelia in Wood River, Illinois on 9th Street. There are 24 Sears Homes in a row, a remnant from the days of Standard Oil’s purchase of $1 million worth of Sears Homes for their refinery workers. The second picture I’ve titled,

A Madelia trapped in a tavern’s body.

A happy little Sears Madelia in Wood River, IL

And here’s the Madelia trapped in a tavern’s body.

A Madelia trapped in a tavern's body

This next house is a Sears Crescent in Norfolk, Virginia. It’s a happy little Crescent with good self-esteem.

A happy Sears Crescent

And this next picture was taken by Rebecca Hunter, a kit-home expert in Elgin, Illinois.

An unhappy Sears Crescent in Illinois

Here's a Sears Westly, as it appeared in the 1919 Sears catalog

Unhappy Sears House in the Midwest. Too much plastic in one place.

I had not intended to bring a puppy home that day. My daughter Corey and I had gone out to Ahoskie, North Carolina  “just to look.” And then I saw her. She was far too cute to be real. I’m such a sap for puppies and this was one of the cutest living things I’d ever seen.

Theodora Duncan Doughnuts (”Teddy” for short) made the 90 minute trip back home with only three incidents of puppy puking. By then, I suspect she was done. I had never known that one little tiny puppy could hold so much kibble in her little tummy.

My daughter Corey went along for the ride and ended up being the one who held the puppy for the long journey home. That Christmas, Teddy was the happy recipient of about a dozen presents. And she chose to play with a cardboard tube instead. Just like a kid.

Teddy at Christmastime

Teddy and her new father

The Velveteen Rabbit is a children’s book that tells the story of a little plush toy that dreams about becoming “real.” The real hero of this story is the old Skin Horse, who’d lived in the nursery longer than any of the other animals. He was the resident old soul and he was wise and kind and knew much about life and love and truth. The Velveteen Rabbit longed to become real and it was the wizened old Skin Horse that had the answers.

The Skin Horse told Rabbit, “Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

Beauty - true beauty - is about being real. It’s about becoming the real person that our Creator intended us to be. It’s just as Margery Williams said in The Velveteen Rabbit. “Real isn’t how you are made,” the skin horse told the Velveteen Rabbit in this meaningful story. Rather, “it’s a thing that happens to you” (when you are loved).

Conversely physical beauty - that beauty which is skin-deep - is about conformity.

“Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder,” was a Twilight Zone episode that told the story of Janet Tyler, a grotesquely ugly woman. Checking into the hospital for her 11^th and final plastic surgery, she desperately hoped this surgery would be successful. All prior surgeries had failed and in this modernistic society, there was a mandate to conform. Ugliness (as defined by their government) was a failure to conform and a criminal offense.

Down the hallway from Janet’s room, we hear Dear Leader giving a speech about “glorious conformity,” broadcast into the hospital waiting rooms via a large television set. The Hitler-esque voice booms with ominous messages about the importance of conformity. Differences, he tells the masses, are dangerous and will weaken their culture. Conformity is essential to their very survival.

A few days after the woman’s surgery, the medical staff slowly removes the bandages and we see the young woman’s face for the first time. She is a real beauty, a blonde bombshell, perfect in every way.

The doctors and staff gasp in horror. The operation was a failure - again. The camera pulls back and we can now see their faces. They’re hideous-looking creatures, with swinish faces and long snouts, oversized mouths and deep creases. They are the beautiful people in this alternate reality.

Next, Janet is sent away to a special village, where people like her go to live out their lives. A handsome man escorts her out of the hospital with a promise that she’ll now know how it feels to belong, and to be loved. (Originally airing on November 11, 1962, this episode was very well written and absolutely haunting.)

The “glorious conformity” of skin-deep beauty is a moving target and its standards are forever changing, following the lead of the rich and famous, and their copious leisure time. In earlier times, the beautiful people were fair-skinned, un-tanned, pleasingly plump and soft. Most “working women” of that same period toiled in the fields for hours every day, developing muscle mass, dark tans and calloused hands. When women went to work in windowless cubicles, stuck behind a desk for eight hours each day, the beautiful people became the ones with deep tans, hard bodies and sleek figures. Beauty follows wealth and leisure.

True beauty - authenticity - is not about the world’s standards but about rediscovering that kingdom of heaven that is within you. It’s not a moving target, but a changeless standard with its roots in the divine.

The above is from Rose’s book, The Ugly Woman’s Guide to Internet Dating. To read the rest, click here:

When my 26-year-old daughter called to tell me that she’d made the decision to donate one of her kidneys to her best friend, Kaycee, I was not a happy woman. In fact, I was against it - wholeheartedly, or in this case,  whole-kidneyedly.

A few days later, I talked with her father and he made a valid point.

“Rose,” he told me, “the odds of those two girls being a match are one in a million. Don’t worry about this. Chances are good that once she’s tested, it’ll all end right there.”

Several weeks later, there was another phone call from Crystal.

“Mom, please understand,” she pleaded. “There’s a good chance Kaycee will die if she doesn’t get a kidney within the next year or two. She’s 24 years old and has already been on dialysis for 18 months. This is something I have to do. Tell me that you’ll support me in this.”

And then I sighed a motherly sigh and promised her that I’d try to grow into a supportive parent.

A few weeks passed when the next phone call came. “Mom, we’re a match. The doctors are stunned. They say that we’re as good a match as if we were siblings. I told Kaycee that there’s a reason that we always felt like sisters. I knew we’d be a perfect match. I just knew it.”

The surgery was scheduled for April 23, 2007. I told Crystal that I’d fly to Peoria, Illinois for the surgery. I was still not happy about this but I knew I had to do the right thing for my little girl.  My sweet little girl.

Less than five weeks earlier, I’d remarried and now I asked my new husband to fly with me. I couldn’t imagine doing this alone.

Continued at Kidney-shaped Hearts, Part II

Crystal (on the far left) with her sister Anna, Grandma Betty and cousin Laurel (1985)

continued from part I

My new husband and I arrived in Peoria the day before the surgery and spent some time with both girls. I needed to meet this Kaycee person. Despite my best “thy will be done” prayers, I still felt resentful toward Kaycee. I asked God again and again to open my heart and let Kaycee in..

Kaycee was a soft-spoken, sweet girl with freckles, fair skin and red hair. The moment I laid eyes on her, I felt an outpouring of maternal love that could only have its source in the divine. Crystal took me aside and said, “A few weeks ago, Kaycee told me she couldn’t go through with this. She said that it was better for her to pass on than to take a kidney from her best friend. I told her that I wanted to do this.”

Crystal also told me a little about Kaycee’s background. She received her first transplant when she was two years old. That kidney (from her mother), had lasted almost 20 years. Since then, she’d been on massive amounts of drugs and had already endured countless hospitalizations and surgeries. A few years earlier, Kaycee’s father, who’d been a touchstone throughout her difficult childhood, had died suddenly. And now Kaycee was in dialysis three times a week, three hours per treatment. It was after Crystal accompanied Kaycee to dialysis that she realized this was no way for a young woman to live. In additional to the physical and emotional strain, there was a financial strain, too. Twenty-four-year-old Kaycee was more than $100,000 in debt, due to the incredibly expensive dialysis treatment.

At one point during the five-hour surgery, Kaycee’s strong and stalwart mother stepped into a corner of the waiting room and sobbed uncontrollably. I felt a wave of compassion for this woman. How blessed I’d been to have had three healthy girls. How short-sighted and small-minded I’d been to rail against this procedure.

Continued at Kidney-shaped Hearts, Part III

Kasee (left) and Crystal (right)