WEDNESDAY, JUNE 8, 2022  –  7:15 a.m.

Grand Rapids is a great town to become educated (GVSU, Calvin, Aquinas Davenport and other colleges), and to have your children reared and educated. We have libraries, theatres, and certainly museums. Our City has prospered as a furniture palace, manufacturing mecca, and let’s not forget the “Bubble Boys” soap emporium that has forever darkened the hallowed halls of Ada. We have excellent medical facilities. Unfortunately, many of the early relics have been destroyed, taken down, or are overgrown. Solution: Let’s see Grand Rapids on a leisurely stroll where things used to be and where they are now. We have invited Caroline Cook, operator par excellence of her own walking tour, Grand Rapids Running Tours, to tell us about the City from your shoes and not your car or motorcycle.                                           

Invocator: Mr. Eric Nelson
Introducer: James Booth Burr, Jr., Esq

Tour Stories:

(1) A couple of tourists are taking a tour of Moscow. As they are walking, the husband feels a drop of water fall on his face. He turns to his wife and says “I think it’s raining.” “No, it is definitely snowing,” replies his wife. They started to argue, and the husband says “Let’s not bicker; let’s ask our tour guide, Rudolph, whether it is officially snowing or raining.” They walked up to their tour guide and ask, “Comrade Rudolph, would you kindly tell us if it is snowing or raining?” “It is raining, of course!” he replies. The husband turns to the wife and says “See? Rudolph the red knows rain, dear!”

(2) Before his inauguration, George W. Bush was invited to take a tour of the White House. After drinking several glasses of water, he asked President Clinton if he could use the bathroom in the Oval Office. He was astonished to see that the president had a solid gold urinal installed. That night, George W. told his wife, Laura, about the urinal. “Just think,” he said, “when I’m president, I’ll have my own personal gold urinal!” Laura had lunch with Hillary Clinton on her tour of the White House and told her how impressed George had been with his discovery of the president’s private bathroom and gold urinal. “Bill doesn’t have a gold urinal,” Hillary told Laura, “but that explains who peed in Bill’s saxophone.”