"Grand Trunk Hot Spot"

Here's an article from the December 1945 issue of Trains magazine about the Grand Trunk depot in Durand, Michigan. Nothing to do with Ainsworth, of course, but some interesting photos.

"Grand Trunk Hot Spot": Durand, MI 1945

It really makes me want to put on my good traveling suit, pack an overnight bag and walk over to the Ainsworth station to wait for the next eastbound passenger train.

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When I started this thing I thought that blogging was a good platform for this project. Not only would the immediate gratification of seeing my words on the internet keep me motivated to work, but the episodic nature of a blog perfectly reflected the fragmentary and disjointed way information about Ainsworth was coming into my hands. However, the information I've blogged remains pretty disorganized, and I have a naturally disorganized mind, so this is reinforcing my weakness. On the other hand, it's the best I've got. There is a (brief) history of Ainsworth from the beginning to the present day that could be written, and maybe the Hobart Historical Society would print it up just like the other helpful history booklets they've prepared — but I'm not the person to write it. I have to do episodes: I can't concentrate long enough on one impersonal topic, like the history of a town (as opposed to the history of a family, or one memorable event in a person's life), to bring together a coherent synopsis.

Now I'm finding that even researching one memorable event in a person's life, or at the end of it as in this murder case, takes so much time that it interferes with my blogging. If you blog, you're supposed to update frequently. But I'm spending so much time and energy comparing newspaper reports to reconcile their inconsistent statements, poring over old plat books to figure out where things happened, speculating over census reports to guess at a first name where only a surname was reported, that I just can't produce something on the side to put into the blog while I'm working on another story in the background.

All of this just to explain to you thousands of adoring Ainsworth fans out there why I'm not updating very often.

It's going to keep on that way, too, because I've got two more research-intensive stories I want to work on after the present one — I'd like to educate myself about the Indians who lived in this area, and then there seems to have been some big guy on the Chicago labor-union scene in the 1920s-30s, with a shady history and dubious friends, who bought a dairy farm out here in the mid-1930s, and I'd like to look into that whole thing.

So, in sum, sorry about the infrequent updates. Now back to work.