After reading “Red brick
roads” (Jan. 19, 2017), a faithful reader who grew up in Tuscola – magical
name — recalled for me the almost melodic sounds made by car tires on the old brick
streets of that town, adding that the sounds should be recorded “for archives that store such things.”
Hear, hear. Alas, I’m not
sure that such archives exist, at least locally, as I lamented a while back in “Hearing
loss” (March 7, 2013), my plea for creation of a a museum of Springfield
sounds. I mentioned the whoosh of brick streets as one of the sounds that such
a museum ought to put in a glass case, as it were.
The origins of the name “Tuscola,” by the way,
are unknown, according to Edward Callery, author of Place Names in Illinois.
The town was founded by the Illinois Central Railroad, whose town-naming tended
toward the fanciful.
This article appears in Feb 2-8, 2017.
