Sunday, October 25, 2009

Atchison, Kansas

Well, I need to catch up with this blog! A variety of things have been going on.
First, my good friend and fellow grandmother, Susanne, was here last week with her 3 little doggies. This first picture is Taffy, the oldest, and the second picture is John, playing with the other two, Tulip and Tiki. Taffy was a little too mature for roughhousing with him, but the other two loved it.

Then later in the week John took me on an outing for my birthday. We drove down to Atchison, KS, where we enjoyed looking at the beautiful mansions, like this one, and the gorgeous fall colors. In its hey-day, Atchison had the largest per-capita number of millionaires in the country. That was in the famous days of the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe railroads. At one time up to 85 passenger trains per day stopped at the Atchison depot. I can hardly imagine that!
This picture was taken along the bluff-lined Missouri river.
We had our first stay at a Bed and Breakfast. The house was built in 1948 as an example of Italianate architecture (if I remember correctly), by Mr. Fred Stein, who invented the first radio which ran on electricity from the wall rather than from the cumbersome battery cells used previously. Go to the following to learn more about a fascinating man http://www.steinlite.com/history.html.

This is a picture of The Professor's Room, our bedroom. Yes, there was a bed and a bath as well!
Part of the reason for going to Atchison was to visit the Amelia Earhart home and museum and see the new movie Amelia. She was born in Atchison and lived with her grandparents for most of her early years. This is a portrait of her in the upstairs of the house.

John and I were the first "official" guests to a special exhibit of some of her own clothes and other items, as well as some from the movie. I don't remember seeing this outfit in the movie, so not sure where it came from.

For the movie, we went downtown to the only theater in Atchison. It was so old I wondered if Amelia had gone to movies there, but never heard anything about that. When you walk into the theater, you're standing under the screen and facing the audience. Although every seat was full for the movie, I wanted you to see how tiny it is. There were only 3 seats on one side of the aisle and 6 seats on the other, for a total of 116. (If you do the math, you'll see that doesn't come out right. Our row had only 2 seats because of a curved jut in the wall.)But, I think they had divided their old theater into two theaters, so the original would have been double this. We were glad we arrived more than a half hour early so we could sit together. Late arrivals weren't as fortunate!

At any rate, we enjoyed all the sights of the small town. I would recommend it as a short jaunt of a trip. And, for those "in the know," we did go to Nell's Hills. If you're not "in the know," as I wasn't, you'll have to figure that out on your own!
Have a great day!

2 comments:

Michelle Traudt said...

Great pictures, those dogs are so cute! It sounds like you enjoyed your birthday activities.

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