Not much going on this week.
Michigan lost a heartbreaker in OT, falling to defending champion Indiana 13-6. Fans are calling for offensive coordinator Jason Beck to be fired, though they’ve been calling for that for a couple of weeks now. Kyle Whittingham brought Beck with him from Utah, where he had the Utes scoring 41 points a game and averaging 270 rushing yards per game.
He hasn’t done that well at Michigan. The Wolverines are averaging 22 points and 147 yards per game.
So yeah, we’ve got problems. Should we be firing coaches just seven games into their first season? Probably not, but I understand the anger. Then again, but for Indiana scoring field goals off two Tommy Carr turnovers, Michigan would have won the game. Is that coaching or player execution? There’s only so much a coach can do there.
I don’t know.
I wasn’t expecting a championship season. It’s Whittingham’s first with the Wolverines, and I never got the impression Sherrone Moore did as much as he could have to prep the team. Whittingham truly is starting from square one, and I’m inclined to give him a huge benefit of the doubt. Benching Underwood for Carr the last two weeks was a good move on his part, I think. We’ll see how he and the team respond next week at Rutgers.
19th Century Wanderlust
When we lived in Ohio, my dad, on more than one occasion, accused me of having “New York by way of China Syndrome.” He meant I did things the hard way, like trying to get from southeast Ohio to New York by passing through China. Check a map if you don’t understand.
It may have been genetic, I’m coming to find.
My great-grandfather, J. C. Mueller, was one of eight children born to Johann Heinrich Mueller and Susanna Gertrude Wenzel. I knew three of his brothers also immigrated to the U. S.: Phillip Henry, Robert, and August. Robert got hired at a chemical company in St. Louis, but suffered from depression and other medical problems, and eventually died by suicide.
August and Phillip eventually went into the wine business, selling wine in Newark, New Jersey for several decades. But that seems to have been the second stage of Phillip’s life.
He immigrated to the U. S. in 1855 at the age of 15. I don’t see that anyone else from his family was on the ship with him. He settled in Manchester, New Hampshire “with relatives” and “worked in their stocking factory for a year.”
Interesting, that. J. C. also passed through Manchester, filing his Declaration of Intention there in 1869. I’d long been curious as to why he chose that city when he eventually was naturalized in New York City. The information about Phillip gives me a better indication. I still haven’t figured out who the family members were.
After Manchester, Phillip moved to Boston and became apprenticed to a fresco painter. That lasted until 1863, when his master died, and Phillip moved to New York to paint frescoes there.
That effort lasted for barely two years, as he “was seized with a desire to see the West. As far as St. Joseph, Missouri, he traveled by train.” What did he do at the eastern end of the Oregon Trail? He signed on with a wagon train, of course.
I don’t know how far that particular train traveled, but Phillip chose to become naturalized in the probate court at Virginia City, Madison County, Montana Territory, in February 1866.
From there, according to one obituary, “He spent 6 years wandering about – lumber camps, mining towns, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Sacramento. After a voyage from San Francisco to Panama and across the isthmus by train, he returned by steamer to New York in April 1871.”
How cool is that? Setting aside the 1,600-mile wagon-train journey, he traveled another 8,000 miles across multiple countries and the Atlantic Ocean at a time when travel safety wasn’t guaranteed.
I’m envious. I wish I’d been braver in my younger years when you could still hop on a freighter and skate the ocean. More than once I’ve thought I was born in the wrong generation.
I haven’t talked to my cousin to see if Phillip left any diaries or other records of his travels, but I bet they’d be fascinating.
How was your week?
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