Tuesday night, we celebrated our anniversary at Cleary’s Pub in Chelsea, and Pat Cleary sat down with us for a while. He told us the recent remodeling that closed the restaurant for three days took place in the kitchen. He had the floor replaced. Also, “the line.” The line is where the staff work as they prepare food. That means that the whole kitchen operation was shut down. Yikes!
Pat said he approached the project with considerable concern, as Cleary’s is housed in an old building, and when you remodel an old building, you never know what surprises lie in store. Fortunately, he reports, all went smoothly.
The toughest part was removing the old line. “It probably weighed–” He paused to calculate. “A couple thousand pounds.” The company that sold him the new line took out the old one, and it was quite the undertaking.
“I had to pay them four hundred dollars,” he told us. “Best four hundred dollars I ever spent.” He says the cooks love all the upgrades. This sort of major maintenance is not an aspect of restaurateuring we’d ever considered. Thank goodness Pat did; dinner was terrific, as it always is.
We asked about plans for St. Patrick’s Day, Cleary’s being an Irish pub and all. Pat listed the menu offerings and festivities planned for the occasion. Then he sighed. “It’s a long day. I can hardly wait till it’s over.”
Motoring around town, this week, we passed a line of toddlers on their way somewhere. They were bundled up in colorful winter wear and bobbling along the sidewalk two by two. Our mom used to call tots this age jelly beans. The little guys we saw were as cute as candies, and filled with happy anticipation over whatever adventure lay ahead of them. They tossed their heads back and forth as marched along, the way toddlers do, as if trying to shake the pompoms on their hats.
They bore a certain resemblance to the crowd we saw at Willow Run on Wednesday night. Those were adults, streaming into the Michigan Flight Museum for one of the museum’s monthly presentations. The audience is mostly men and mostly older, although women come, too, and the occasional family. What most of the audience shares is a deep and abiding interest in the history of flight, and a fair knowledge of it. They had that same look of happy anticipation that the toddlers had, although they wore darker colors and lacked the pompoms on their hats.
Kirk Haas, a Wright scholar, spoke about the controversy between Orville and Wilbur Wright and the powers-that-were at the Smithsonian Institution over the museum’s long-time refusal to acknowledge the Wright brothers as first to fly. It seems the museum had granted fifty thousand dollars to a man named Samuel Langley to develop flight and wanted to credit him with being the first. Despite the fact that Langley’s plane didn’t fly. It crashed spectacularly both times it was tested, as chronicled by the press.
The man at the museum claimed that Langley’s plane “could have flown,” and overlooked the truth that it didn’t. It seems the man wanted to justify his largesse to Langley by rewriting history. This situation persisted for years. Orville Wright was so angry at having to defend his and his brother’s legacy that he shipped their pioneering airplane for display in Europe.
Eventually, with the death of the grantor and his protégé at the Smithsonian, our national museum corrected their exhibit on first flight. Orville still wouldn’t give them the plane. He demanded an apology. They apologized. He insisted on having it in writing. Only when the museum complied did they get the Wright Flyer, and it remains there on display in what is now the National Air and Space Museum. Who knew museum politics could be so fraught?
Winter’s still hanging on around here, although the temperature lately has trended upward. The goals have been taken off the hockey rinks at Thurston Pond again, and the ice is receding on some of the smaller ponds. This is happening notably on the Traver pond, which was again this winter the site of civil disobedience in the form of people going out on the ice in spite of the pond-side sign that forbids “recreational use.” Judging by looks, the scofflaws took particular delight in leaving footprints all over that pond. Scarcely any of it was unmarked.
It makes you wish you’d been there to see the folks making their approach to that little pond, intent on leaving their mark. No doubt there was happy anticipation and maybe even some pompom shaking.
7 March 2025