Photo exhibit includes Route 66 images January 23, 2009
Posted by Ron Warnick in Art, Events, Photographs, Signs.add a comment
Artist Laura Smetak will host an exhibit of her recent photography, including old signs on Route 66, at the McKinney Performing Arts Center in McKinney, Texas, on Jan. 31, reports Pegasus News.
The show, titled “At Work and On The Road, A Collection of Photos Taken on America’s Backroads and in McKinney’s Backyard,” presents a vivid collection of photos taken by the McKinney artist during recent cross-country motorcycle trips through Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, New Mexico, Arkansas, Yellowstone National Park, Oklahoma and the Texas Hill Country – as well as in McKinney.
Her collection includes a series of colorful vintage signs taken along Historic Route 66 and elsewhere, as well as evocative travel and nature/landscape shots from her travels.
“The majority of the signs, with exception of two local ones, were taken this summer on a 10-day, 3,600-mile trip through six states to Yellowstone,” she said. “I didn’t really plan to take the photos, just started taking random pictures of signs on that trip and really liked the images and their nostalgic appeal.”
You can see a few photos on the arts center’s Web site, including the Blue Swallow Motel in Tucumcari, N.M. Other photos are posted on Smetak’s blog here.
A big hole in the ground January 23, 2009
Posted by Ron Warnick in Attractions, History.add a comment
The International Herald Tribune has an excellent article about meteor impact sites and other natural holes around Arizona, including the big Meteor Crater off Route 66 east of Flagstaff.
Some interesting facts about Meteor Crater:
- If a football game were played at the bottom, the crater’s walls would hold 2 million spectators.
- The 4,100-foot-wide crater was created by a meteor only 150 feet wide.
- Scenes from the 1984 movie “Starman,” starring Karen Allen and Jeff Bridges, were filmed there.
- The crater once was mistakenly thought to be a dormant volcano.
Another stimulus proposal January 23, 2009
Posted by Ron Warnick in Attractions, bicycling.add a comment
Another community has latched on to trying to get money from President Obama’s upcoming stimulus package. This time, according to WEEK-TV, the Route 66 town of Chenoa, Ill., is making a pitch:
And community leaders in Chenoa say they also are requesting more than $300,000 in federal stimulus funds in order to build a bike trial on Old Route 66.
“We’d like to get that finished off to provide a mechanism for people to walk on to ride bicycles in Chenoa and you know it’s going to bring some jobs to the community also if we get the construction started”, said Chenoa Mayor Walter Hetman.
Book review: “The Leisure Seeker” January 22, 2009
Posted by Ron Warnick in Books, Movies, Road trips.2 comments
He has Alzheimer’s disease. She has a serious case of cancer and has stopped taking the treatments. He’s driving the family’s late-1970s RV. She’s riding shotgun and popping pain pills. He’s subject to outbursts of anger and confusion. She’s cynical and wistful. The elderly couple is going down Route 66 for a final vacation together.
This may sound like a road trip from hell. But Michael Zadoorian’s new novel, “The Leisure Seeker” ($24.95, HarperCollins, 288 pages, in stores Tuesday), turns out to be a brisk, entertaining read with an abundance of humor and poignant moments. “The Leisure Seeker” also has been optioned by Sharp Independent films.
The story starts with John and Ella Robina already on the road, departing their native Detroit. Against their adult children’s protests, they point their Leisure Seeker RV toward Chicago and take the Mother Road to Disneyland. Ella, who’s calling the shots, knows that she and John don’t have much time left, and wants to take a vacation together.
It’s quite an adventure. They get held up by robbers at the Texas-New Mexico ghost town of Glenrio, suffer a harrowing fall in New Mexico, eat pie at the Midpoint Cafe in Adrian, Texas, buy grapes from one of the roadside stands in Missouri, tour Meramec Caverns … between the misadventures, they do many of the things that tourists do — if time and health allow.
At their stops for the night, the couple watches slides from previous long-ago vacations. During a slide show at the Lincoln Motel in Chandler, Okla., John and Ella have a pleasant encounter with fellow Route 66 tourists. Those slides allow the couple to reminisce — if John has the capacity to do so.
Zadoorian’s portrayal of John and his creeping dementia comes across as heartbreakingly accurate. Occasionally, John wakes in the morning and is remarkably lucid for a few minutes, “as if his mind has forgotten to be forgetful.” Then he returns to his mental fog. Most of the time, he doesn’t cause problems. But he periodically goes into a rage amid his confusion, including one ugly incident with a prank-pulling clerk at the Snow Cap Drive-In in Seligman, Ariz. Ella has to keep an eye on John, making sure he doesn’t wander off without her. More concerning, Ella thinks that John is entertaining thoughts of suicide.
Zadoorian’s wisest decision with “The Leisure Seeker” was to tell the story entirely from Ella’s point of view. She comes across as curmudgeonly but lovable — typical for a woman who’s lived long and no longer cares much about decorum. Here’s an excerpt of Ella’s thoughts, when the couple is driving past the Gemini Giant in Wilmington, Ill., and she’s fiddling with her wig:
As we pass the Launching Pad Drive-In, again I want to crank down the window all the way. Then I realized that if I want to feel the wind and sun on my face, there is no reason why I can’t. I rip off my Babushka, then unclasp my helmet of synthetic lifelike fiber (the Eva Gabor Milady II Evening Shade — 75% white/25% black) at the back where it is tentatively tethered to my last remaining hair of any thickness. I reach underneath, then pull back and up to unsheath my head.
I roll down the window and throw that goddamned thing out where it tumbles and flops along the side of the road like a just-hit animal. Such blessed relief. I can’t remember the last time my scalp saw direct sunlight. What little hair I have on top is thin and delicate like the first frail wisp of an infant. In the delicious wind, the long strands twist and dance around my scalp, a sad swirled turban, but I don’t care today. It had bothered me so much when my hair thinned out after menopause. I was ashamed like I had done something wrong, afraid of what everybody would say. You spend you life so worried about what others think, when in reality, people mostly don’t think. On the few occasions when they do, it is often something bad, but one had to at least admire the fact that they’re thinking at all.
I look back at my Styrofoam wig stand. The head is still taped to the counter, no longer my companion, but now staring at me, judging, wondering “What the hell did you just do?” I don’t look at myself in the mirror. I know I look like death warmed over. It doesn’t matter. I feel lighter already.
The novel’s conclusion won’t be a surprise to many, although it may happen in a way you won’t expect (Zadoorian inserts a few MacGuffins to keep readers guessing). The ending may prove troubling to some readers and will inspire a lot of discussion. But Ella’s final words on the page will haunt long after you close the book.
Highly recommended.
Pedal to the metal January 22, 2009
Posted by Ron Warnick in Music.add a comment
This version of “Route 66,” starring pedal steel guitarist Herby Wallace, will probably please some Western swing or country fans out there. Scat singing is Ben Brogdon.
Hometown of Castle Car Wash eyed for preservation January 21, 2009
Posted by Ron Warnick in Highways, Preservation, Towns.add a comment
The unique Castle Car Wash building on Ogden Avenue, aka Route 66, in the Chicago suburb of North Lawndale has recently become the target of preservationists.
Now, according to the Chicago Tribune, other parts of Lawndale are being considered as important historic sites, and the car-wash building is now considered a catalyst in the effort:
Amid the century-old greystones and scores of Jewish synagogue buildings still standing, a young Benny Goodman launched his career with rooftop garden gigs at the Jewish People’s Institute, now the Lawndale Community Academy on Douglas Boulevard.
Later, Golda Meir lived in the neighborhood, attending Zionist meetings that led to her role as prime minister of Israel.
And (Martin Luther) King lived on Hamlin Avenue in the mid-1960s, overseeing a new urban civil rights movement in Chicago. Near where his run-down apartment once stood, clubs wailed with a tinny new “West Side sound” of blues generated by the likes of Howlin’ Wolf and Buddy Guy. [...]
For instance, a few Ogden Avenue clinics pay homage to Belle Whaley, known as “the first lady of Lawndale” for the decades she spent feeding the neighborhood’s poor and elderly before she died in 1990.
Dawkins lives a few blocks away. He’s happy to share stories about such characters as Big Bill Hill or Left-Hand Frank who helped make Lawndale a blues mecca.
“That’s all gone now,” he said recently, staring out a McDonald’s window at subsidized apartments that stand where a 12th Street blues hall once packed in large crowds.
By the way, Chicago roadie David Clark is quoted in the article.
The Castle Car Wash building is representative of an earlier, happier era in the town. I’m just glad that the movement to buy the deteriorating building and convert it into a tourism center seems to be gaining momentum.
More about North Lawndale can be read here.
(Photo courtesy of David G. Clark.)
The mother of sucker traps, Part 2 January 21, 2009
Posted by Ron Warnick in Businesses, Vehicles.add a comment
Here’s the second part of Car and Driver magazine columnist Patrick Bedard’s interview with a longtime gas station owner on Route 66 in Williams, Ariz., and the car-repair scams that his employees foisted on the public for decades.
An excerpt:
My mind leaps to the possibilities. (“Sir, your radiator is leaking real bad!”) It would be so easy for a getter willing to go too far to poke a screwdriver through the fins as he leaned in to pull the dipstick.
“Oh, yes, it happened,” Killinsworth agrees. “I wouldn’t let my boys carry a sticker in their pocket, a sharpened screwdriver. Poke a tire,” he says, “then it would bubble.”
This was back before Goodyear and Firestone had tire stores everywhere, not to mention Walmart, Kmart, and Big O. “We stocked all the good movers, bought up to 500 at a time on 30-60-90, pay a third every 30 days. I could space ’em out so they didn’t all come at once. You can’t sell from an empty shelf,” he says.
“But my boys never used tools,” he says. “You don’t want to poke a tire, then have the guy not buy one; the tire goes flat, and he starts rolling that thing up in the rocks. I wouldn’t want that on my conscience. So we never did that. To my knowledge.”
The whole thing is worth reading. It’s a good thing for Bedard’s source that there’s a statute of limitations.
Part 1 of Bedard’s column is here.