Times sure change.

The last-known photo of the 1976 University of Mishipeshu Men's Varsity sculling squad, on the Vistula River in Krakow, Poland, August 1976. Thanks to that Marisha for getting it out of my storage bureau and up on here.

I have to say, times sure have changed since my last tenure as 3rd Ward councilman in the late-1970s. Back in those days, there was such a municipal budget crunch that the city council had actually rented out the Fletcher O. Casady Council Chamber to a group called the Armitage People's Temple, what we had thought was a community fraternal organization (it was, in fact, a sort of death cult that had close ties to the Mushkobewun Park Massacre). The council itself met in an unheated mooring room in the old Zeppelinarium here in the 3rd Ward through 1979. What time to be alive in Armitage Heights that was. Times change!

It's real nice to be working on people's good 2008 problems this time out. I mean, the community is in sort of rough times right now, I understand - the subprime crisis has hit south Hanley and Kendall Park particularly hard, and there's bad unemployment numbers all over. But gee, I don't know if this stuff stacks up against the problems we had in the neighborhood in the mid- to late-'70s. I mean, just a quick list and you can remember what it was like here at that time: besides the Mushkobewun Park Massacre, we also had Mayor Freese's doomed 1976 third party presidential run and subsequent kidnapping and brainwashing, Kimball F. Burin's knife-fight with Representative Thurston, the municipal water burglary of 1975, the Kendall Park Stranglers (Sr. and Jr.), nineteen separate gas crises, the heating fuel crisis, the motor oil crisis, the cooking offal crisis, the mobilization of the National Guard when 2nd Ward Councilwoman and Maoist Bethany Adler-Monacelli was elected City Council Treasurer, the general horticulture strike (right), the Esperanto Uprisings, the Hanley Fires of '74, '75 and '78, the shuttering of the Cassock District, that Bachman-Turner Overdrive concert at the old Armitage Palladium that no one showed up to, the various fires, arsons, explosions and implosions that claimed, among others, the Fitzhugh Building, Fitzhugh Hall, the Dubow Towers, the Bulgarian-American Friendship Palace, the Levinson Brothers Candleworks, the Cashmere Registry, Aldolf's Omaha East and the Tribune-Herald Telefax Archives, the disappearances of Baby Andrea, Baby Colleen and the Fitzhugh Twins, the Citizens Band Wars, the Mushkobewun Park Massacre reprise, the Kendall Park Zoo public auction, the bankruptcies of 1976-77 and super-bankruptcy of '78, the junk bond parade of 1979, the Fifth of July, Sixth of November and Maundy Thursday Disasters, the abduction of the 1976 University of Mishipeshu Men's Varsity sculling squad in Krakow, the marijuana-fueled motorbike death of Councilman Spence Whitmarsh and freezing of funding for his beloved hippie sculpture gardens, the unintentional- but- still- internationally- calamitous destruction of the Soviet Peace Plaza in 1975, the freeze-drying of Senator Franzen, the Black Panther Olympics (left), the Tarbaby Debates, the rise and fall of Allen Jeffreys and the Mellowhearts, the city council's Valium Act of 1977, the publication of Kimball F. Burin's Moloch of Stanton Ave., the 1976 land-yacht debacle that led to half the City Council's resignation, Mayor Freese's conversion to Zen Buddhism and subsequent repudiation of his official duties, the Voyageurs losing the NBA title to a pretty weak L.A. Lakers two years in a row, the still-unsolved disappearance of Stedman Plaza, the rise of the English Equal Progress Party and its disastrous merger with the Esperanto Rights Party, and of course the sexual healers scandal of '73. Those are just the few that occur to me off the top of my head. That Marisha hardly knows any of them, but let me tell you, it was a challenge to try to run the 3rd Ward at that time. Let me tell you.

I barely recognize the new City Hall, actually. It was built downtown in 1983 on the site of the old Telefax Archives.

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Stedman Plaza in 1919. Where was it misplaced in 1974-75?