Last week I visited Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, to give two talks—one on my fly work (now winding down) and the other on evolution, creationism, and religion. My host was the genial Morris Levy who, with his wife Maria, did a lot to make my visit comfortable and pleasant. On the last day, before I took the bus back to Chicago (there’s no airport in Lafayette), they took me on a sightseeing tour of campus. Here are a few holidays snaps from that tour.
The first stop was the football stadium. Purdue’s athletic teams have the unusual name of “The Boilermakers”, which, according to Wikipedia, stems from the school’s reputation (still high) for engineering:
The nickname ‘Boilermakers’ goes back to 1891 when the Purdue football team defeated nearby rival Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana 44–0. An account of the game in the Crawfordsville Daily Argus News of October 26, 1891 was headlined, “Slaughter of Innocents: Wabash Snowed Completely Under by the Burly Boiler Makers from Purdue.” Engineering education in the 1890s at Purdue meant hands-on work in the forge room, where students heated and molded metal, just like the “blacksmiths” and “boilermakers” the football team was called after defeating opponents. The local Purdue press picked up on the name, with a notice in the November 1, 1891 Lafayette Sunday Times, “As everyone knows, Purdue went down to Wabash last Saturday and defeated their eleven. The Crawfordsville papers have not yet gotten over it. The only recourse they have is to claim that we beat their ‘scientific’ men by brute force. Our players are characterized as ‘coal heavers,’ ‘boiler makers’ and ‘stevedores.'”
Outside the stadium is, in fact, a large statue of a boilermaker:
Purdue is a wealthy university, and is big on statues, so one can find some awesome sculptures. One of the engineering buildings is named after Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the Moon and an alumnus of Purdue. (He and one other astronaut, whose name I can’t recall, got their start as majors in aeronautical engineering at the school.) Although Armstrong died last year, he attended the dedication of this building and the unveiling of his statue, which shows him sitting in an informal pose:
My favorite statue of all, though, was this one in front of the veterinary school. It shows a bunch of domesticated animals and two vets taking care of them. The skeletons of a few animals are also shown on their outsides, a macabre touch that I could have done without. But really, this is a cool group of sculptures that evinces a certain sense of humor.
Note the cat to the right of the horse’s foreleg.
Of course I had to be photographed petting the kitty (note the innards; what is that thing?):
The new president of Purdue is the former governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels. He lives in a large and spiffy house on the edge of campus, and we drove onto the spacious grounds so I could take a picture. I was told that although this is the official President’s House, he doesn’t live there most of the time:
I had requested to eat at West Lafayette’s most famous restaurant, the Triple XXX Family Restaurant (a name not only reundant, but contradictory!). It’s very old, and is in fact the remnants of the first drive-in restaurant in Indiana, opened in 1929 (for you non-Americans, that’s a restaurant where one can drive up to a microphone, order food, and have it delivered to your car, where you eat it while schmoozing with your date and fellow students). The drive-in part is now defunct, but you can see the car bays below.
The XXX is famous for two things: the Duane Purvis burger, a hamburger with cheese that is underlain by a thick coat of creamy peanut butter, and its root beer, brewed especially for the restaurant by a firm in Chicago. Although the burger sounds dire, it’s actually quite good: the peanut butter nicely complements the meat and cheese. And the root beer, not too sweet or carbonated and loaded with root-y flavors, is a good complement.
Here’s the menu—MEATY! I, of course, had the Duane Purvis and a root beer.
Purvis (1913-1989) was a famous halfback and fullback on the Purdue football team, selected as an All-American player in 1933 and 1934. He was also a superb javelin thrower: his record at that sport wasn’t broken until 1982. Here’s his picture, overlooking the many XXX customers who nom his eponymous burger:
How the burger came to be named after Purvis is not quite clear; the owner told me that Purvis’s son, who still lives near Purdue, related how his dad would put peanut butter on everything, and asked the XXX to prepare him a burger smeared with the substance.
At any rate, the burger lives on in in infamy. Here’s mine, with a root beer.
It was good! This close-up shot shows the melting peanut butter oozing out from under the meat patty:
Here are Maria, Morry, and I, about to tuck into our burgers:
Finally, a group of college girls came in to eat, and I couldn’t help thinking that their poses would make a nice “decisive moment” photo in the Cartier-Bresson-ian sense. I surreptitiously snapped them when they unwittingly fell into a sort of pattern.
Next week: Appalachian State University, with an awesome schedule of nomes and sightseeing. Besides my talk (there will be a secret word to get a cat drawn in your copy of WEIT), I’ll be talking to the atheist and secular student group, as well as a class in religious studies.
