Busy day, for-pay work to be done. Good day to stay home anyway, since rain has been falling in thick waves. Snow expected on Monday, followed by a winter-like cold snap for a day or two. Bah.
On Friday, on a whim, I used an AI program to animate one of the Big Boy statues I saw last month. A modest ad for the museum.
I created a new You Tube channel for it, It’s AI, But It Ain’t Slop, which is a motto we can call rally around. I’m starting to suspect that much AI animation looks like it does not only because of the technology’s inherent limitations, but also because of unimaginative prompts. Just a hunch.
Anyway, in roughly 48 hours, the thing has gotten more than 1,000 views, along with three likes and a dislike, but no comments. That isn’t many views in the grand scheme of YouTube, and only about a quarter of that total watched all the way through, but I’m tickled all the same. My postings over the years have been desultory, and none has gotten more than a few dozen views, if that. Give the people what they want, I guess, such as talking Big Boys.
This clown in your nightmare. What did he look like again?
Right, Jack from Jack In the Box fame. Old Jack, that is, maybe from the early days of the fast-food chain in the ’50s and ’60s. Has that tired mid-century look because the mid-century was quite a while ago now. On the whole, even later versions of the clown has been retired.
I was fully awake when I encountered Jack, an artifact at Roadside America Museum, Hillsboro, Texas, a wall-to-wall gathering of American roadside advertising, or at least items that were pretty close to the roads – a sign or novelty item or product you might see at a gas station or a diner or a bar or a small grocery store or any such mid-century service business for a nation newly on the road, and with great gusto. Items large and small.
Located on a modest street of Hillsboro, a town between DFW and Waco. Jay and I arrived around mid-day on February 23.
Jack is around, but there are also Big Boys in quantity and variety. If I were that first one, I’d watch out for the criminal element from McDonaldland, standing right behind him trying not to look suspicious. Sure, he’s a burglar, but he might be a pickpocket or even a stickup man, too.
Betty Boop. From a slightly earlier time, but still pulling her weight as a carhop.
Mr. Peanut. Didn’t something happen to him? Died of a busted goober?
Esso. I’m barely old enough to remember the Exxon brand consolidation. (Mad magazine parodied that as “Nixxon: Still the Same Old Gas.”)
Who is this? Why does anthropomorphic hot dog man, though the liberal application of condiments, encourage larger creatures to take a bite out of his head, indeed consume him as completely as unfortunate extras in Jurassic Park movies?
Admittance to Roadside America – no relation to the web site and (former?) book series of that name that I know of – is by making a phone call outside its door. The proprietor, one Carroll Estes, comes to the door, invites you in, and shows you around the place, pointing out things and sometimes recalling the acquisition of this or that, or letting you know how rare or not certain items are. An affable old fellow, grizzled if ever anyone was, probably in his 70s. So the commercial memorabilia all around us was no memorabilia when he was a lad, but part of the lay of the land. I came along in time to see some of those ads or at least characters myself, though they were fading.
He said he was particularly fond of Grapette items. Once he pointed that out, I started seeing them everywhere.
Been a long time since I had a passing thought about Grapette soda. It was available in north Texas in the mid-60s, and I’m sure I had more than a few Grapette bottle caps, once upon a time. I don’t remember its sister sodas, Orangette and Lemonette. According to Wiki at least, Grapette still exists as a house brand in Walmart’s beverage stable, and is popular even yet in Latin America.
I don’t remember O-So Grape.
Originated in Chicago and, like so many, has been revived at premium prices, which seems to go against the spirit of soda water you bought for coins in your misspent youth, but never mind.
There was much more. Mr. Estis has a sizable classic car collection in another part of the building, a much larger structure that had some industrial use at one time. He showed us around. He’d restored many of them himself, but he said he doesn’t do that as much anymore. He had some great ones, too. Wish I’d taken notes. But I was in the moment.
Even in the moment, you don’t notice everything. Especially at a chock-a-block place like Roadside America, where curios compete for your attention like a gaggle of souvenir-wallas in Delhi. It wasn’t until I looked at this picture that I noticed Wile E. Coyote sitting at the diner booth.
Stands to reason that Wile E. would patronize the few diners on the desert roads he haunts. He never managed to make a decent meal of the Roadrunner.
Approach Huntsville, Texas, from the south on I-45, and you can’t miss Sam Houston. Big Sam.
The largest soap carving in the world until the city of Qufu (曲阜) in southwestern Shandong province put up one of Confucius that is 18.5 inches taller, from pedestal to top of the head.
That only goes to show that you don’t need AI to make stuff up. Sam Houston isn’t made of soap, naturally, but something a little more durable, concrete and steel, and towers 67 feet from the plinth — he must have a dandy view of the Interstate. It’s been up only since 1994, the work of Huntsville native David Adickes. As for Qufu, there are surely statues of Confucius there, but I don’t feel like looking them up.
Naturally I followed the signs to the statue’s parking lot, got out and looked around.
My priority afterward was lunch, and I happened on Mr. Hamburger there in the heart of Huntsville, a few miles from Big Sam.
Not in the original location that opened nearby in 1959, I later found out, but in a redeveloped gas station. The original mascot, looking a little tired after decades in the Texas weather, had been moved inside to greet customers as they go to the bathroom.
All that wouldn’t be noteworthy if the place hadn’t delivered the goods, but it did.
Thus fortified, I found my way to the Sam Houston Memorial Museum, which is on the campus of Sam Houston Institute of Technology.
Old joke: Sam Houston State University. Not a large museum, but a nice collection of artifacts.
None better than Santa Anna’s silver chamber pot, a spoil of war at San Jacinto that the Mexican government probably has never wanted back.
Besides the museum building, the grounds sport a small open-air museum. Including a log cabin (not Houston’s) from the Huntsville area, from around the time of the Republic.
A log cabin that was Houston’s. He used it for his law office.
The earlier of the two Houston homes in Huntsville.
The later of the two, Steamboat House. The nickname fits. Houston, relieved of the governorship due to his belief that Texas was making a mistake in leaving the Union, died there in ’63.
The grounds has a water feature. With water fowl and cypress knobs.
Elsewhere, some land fowl.
A touch of authenticity, since the Houstons must surely have had chickens around.
Never cared much for the term snowbird, with its connotations of getting up every morning to play golf during winter in some arid place, or spending the evenings with members of your cohort in some gated community, maybe drinking but definitely grousing about the state of the world. Still, considering that in the winter of 25/26, I’ve spent two out of the last three months – the hard winter months, up Illinois way – in warmer places, it would be churlish to cast shade on fellow old people who happen to enjoy golf or grousing.
On the other hand, I’m not about to claim snowbird as descriptive for myself. I just happen to be able to take long trips during the cold months (along with my laptop, for work). In December, Florida. In February, Texas.
Back on February 3, I got on a plane and flew to Austin. I flew home from Dallas on March 3. In between, I spent time – and Yuriko joined me for a while – traversing the state of Texas, going so far west at one point that we ended up in New Mexico. By traversing, I mean long drives, in a rental car part of the time, and in my brother Jay’s car as well, a blue Subaru known as the Blubaru.
I drove from Austin east to Houston, mostly on US 290; from Houston to Nacogdoches, mostly on US 59; then to Dallas on various state highways, such as Texas 21 and 19; and from Dallas to San Angelo to Marathon, Texas, on US 67 and on the grandly remote US 385, which will also take you to the desert reaches of the Big Bend.
From Marathon, Texas, across to Carlsbad, NM, our route took us along US 90, then Texas 56, then US 62/180. Later, US 62/180 took us from Carlsbad part way back to Dallas — to Sweetwater, Texas — but mostly we went on the faster but less interesting I-20. Dallas to San Antonio was partly I-35, but also US 281, which takes you around the perma-gridlock that is Austin.
Of all those, the road between Nacogdoches and San Augustine on a day trip, Texas 21 heading east, winding through greenish (for February) rolling hills, was a favorite.
The towns listed above were just the places I spent the night, alone or with Yuriko or with my brothers. In between were such places as Bastrop, these days a day-trip from Austin, with the requisite boutiques and restaurants; Huntsville, home of Sam Houston and memorials to the first president of Texas; San Augustine, rival with Nacogdoches in claiming to be the oldest town in Texas; Stephenville and Ballinger, geographically about as deep in the heart of Texas as you can be; the West Texas art town of Marfa and the way station of Van Horn; a string of oil patch towns such as Hobbs, NM, and Seminole, Lamesa, Snyder, and Sweetwater, back in Texas. Later, traversing north to south and back again, I stopped in Hillsboro and Belton, along the I-35 axis; and Lockhart, which has claimed for itself barbecue capital of the state.
Along the way, oddities were encountered. Otherwise, why drive on smaller roads?
Such as an ice cream shop in Waller, Texas.
Or a highly visible ad for Rockets RV Park in Gaines County, Texas, not far east of the border with New Mexico.
A former Texaco station on an obscure Texas highway (Farm-to-Market 1690).
Had various encounters with the historic El Camino Real, whose various tendrils crossed a large slice of the future state of Texas, once upon a time.
Yuriko and I visited Big Bend National Park, Guadalupe Mountains National Park and Carlsbad Caverns National Park. I saw the National Museum of Funeral History in the city of Houston and the museum devoted to Houston (the man) in Huntsville. Also, Roadside America in Hillsboro, an eccentric collection of American commercial art, complete with a personal tour by the proprietor, and the outdoor art at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, that is, brutalist concrete structures in the brutal desert environment. I became acquainted with the splendid Glenwood Cemetery in Houston and the smaller and more ragged, but no less interesting city cemeteries in Huntsville and Nacogdoches and Palestine. I stopped and looked at about a dozen county courthouses, of which Texas has many.
We ate a lot of meat along the way. As one does in Texas.
Also, Mexican food.
Eat like that and you’d better do some walking, and I did: various places in Austin and Houston and Dallas, in all three national parks, around downtowns and courthouse squares in a number of small towns, and a handful of local parks.
All that was good, but of course best of all, I had time to visit friends and relatives, of whom there are many in Texas: Tom and Nancy in Austin, Kirk and Lisa in Nacogdoches, another Tom and Steve and Ron and Greg and Judith in San Antonio, to list the friends; both brothers, two out of three nephews and their wives and all four of their children, to list relatives, along with the mother of one nephew’s wife (niece-in-law sounds peculiar, but that fits too). Also, I met for the first time two good friends of Tom’s in Austin, and one of Kirk and Lisa’s granddaughters.
I’d set out to do four long drives when I was 64, but this makes five. Guess I’m an overachiever about driving, anyway.
Time again to drag out that hoary old saying about children growing up fast, which is true only in the same sense that one’s entire life goes by fast, once you’ve reached the point of having lived most of it already.
Regardless, this week Ann turned 23, now a grown woman, fully employed, etc. That doesn’t mean you can’t have birthday cake, however.
Years ago, when we visited the Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota, I noted with satisfaction that Monty Python’s Spam Sketch was playing on demand in one of the exhibit rooms. I understand the museum has moved to a different location in Austin since then, but I hope they still play the sketch.
As far as I noticed, there was no clip of One, Two, Three playing at the World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta last month. The scene I’d pick is the back-and-forth about Soviet scientists’ efforts to replicate Coca-Cola without its famously secret formula: “Even the Albanians wouldn’t drink it.”
I’d have this clip playing, too.
Or even the jingle scene from The Coca-Cola Kid. Nice jingle.
The World of Coca-Cola shares a plaza with the Georgia Aquarium. Pemberton Plaza, named for the doctor who invented a particularly successful “brain tonic,” back in the days when enterprising doctors and druggists did that sort of thing. Interestingly, the museum doesn’t play up Lt. Col. John Pemberton’s military service for the CSA, or his morphine addiction, which drove him to experiment with a new wonder drug, cocaine, to kick his habit. That didn’t work out, but he did leave a lasting soft drink legacy.
As a museum, the place includes a number of interactive exhibits and activities, starting at the Coca-Cola Theater with a six-minute commercial. I mean, a short history of Coke. You can also see the vault where the secret formula supposedly resides —
— check out various smells associated with the cola-making process, “explore Coca-Cola’s iconic influence on art, music, fashion, sports, and entertainment,” and “engage with interactive displays and AI magic that bring Coca-Cola’s legacy to life in new, unforgettable ways,” the museum explains. You can even, if you register – maybe with some app? – stand in line to have your picture taken with a person in a polar bear suit.
“The Coca-Cola Polar Bear… became truly iconic in 1993 with the launch of the ‘Always Coca-Cola’ campaign. In the famous ‘Northern Lights’ commercial, created by Ken Stewart, animated bears gather to watch the aurora borealis while enjoying Coca-Cola — a scene that brought the Polar Bear to life and captured the hearts of viewers worldwide,” the museum notes.
Does it rise to the level of icon? Somehow the Coca-Cola Polar Bear had made only a faint impression on either of us, so we took a pass on it. Also, there was a line. And it cost extra? Always with the revenue streams. But I did enjoy the more standard sort of museum exhibits on offer at World of Coca-Cola.
A seasonal observation.
Artifacts from long ago.
Ads from long ago.
And from distant places.
I seem to remember a similar political cartoon of featuring the Earth being nursed back to health after the ravages of WWII, but I can’t quite place it.
There were video clips, including of course the “Hilltop” commercial. That, I remember. Many people old enough do too, which naturally gave the final moment of Mad Men its punch.
The museum also featured Coke product cans and bottles of various kinds (but not a collection of caps that I saw), many more than you see in everyday grocery stores. For instance, Sting and Bon Jovi had their own cans at one point, as part of a musician series.
Cans from around the world.
A very crowded room includes soda and water dispensers that allow visitors to sample Coca-Cola products from around the world. We went to town trying the various concoctions, as did a lot of people, and eventually I found my favorite: Bonbon Anglais, a wonderful fruit drink from Madagascar.
The web site Madagasikara tells us: La boisson gazeuse Bonbon Anglais est fabriquée à Madagascar, un pays reconnu pour ses produits naturels et son savoir-faire artisanal. I would expect no less.
The gift shop was crowded, too. I took pics but bought no Coke merch. (I might have bought a postcard, but found none.)
To my way of thinking, the Coca-Cola Co. should pay me – even a little – to advertise its products on my person. Also, while I’m on that particular hobby horse, the World of Coca-Cola shouldn’t charge admission, especially not as much as a standard museum.
I ran the numbers, and World of Coca-Cola admission costs more than twice as much as admission to the Taj Mahal. Sure, Georgia isn’t Uttar Pradesh, but it’s galling that you’re paying at all, just to be marketed to. Obviously Middle America disagrees with me – and Yuriko didn’t mind paying for both of us – so that idea will just have to be a quixotic hobby horse of mine.
Yesterday, behemoth retailer Amazon announced that its Amazon Fresh grocery stores are closing. All of them, about 70 locations, and closing soon, as in Sunday. I read about that this morning, and happened to mention the fact to Yuriko early this afternoon, so we decided to mosey over to the closest Amazon Fresh, about a 10-minute drive from our home here in the northwest suburbs.
We’d been there. In the store’s early days especially, a few years ago, weekly fliers came in the mail offering coupons that could, if used right, mean 40 percent or even 50 percent discounts. That was worth some visits. After a few months, however, the coupons got progressively more miserly or disappeared all together.
That was no surprise. The coupons’ main function was to get you in the door, and acquainted with the store, and ideally form a good opinion that inspires return visits. A good marketing plan, even if it relies on something as analog as paper coupons, and it might have worked but for one thing: there was very little distinctive, to an ordinary shopper, about Amazon Fresh.
The store promised to be something of a discounter, and sometimes it was. Until recently, for example, it sold sizable and reasonably good pizzas for $9 a pie or less than $2 a slice – entirely competitive. Other items were sometimes discounted as well, but in that the store was no different from any other store in the area.
Even that might not been a discouragement, if the store had competed on selection. By current standards, the NW suburban Amazon Fresh is mid-sized, so isn’t going to be able to offer everything under the sun. But even smaller stores can pull off a remarkable selection, if they try. Such as Trader Joe’s. Or even Aldi, whose more recent iterations are about the same size as the Amazon experiment in grocery stores.
But no. The Amazon Fresh selection is good enough, and certainly would be a boon in a food desert, or even at the edge of one. But the NW suburbs are the opposite of a food desert: we have hyperstores, warehouse stores, standard supermarkets of considerable size, discount grocers, and plenty of ethnic specialty grocery stores of varying sizes, all within a fairly reasonable driving radius. There are even dollar and convenience stores thrown into the mix, and every variety of take-out food that you can imagine. These parts are a highly competitive retail grocery and food & beverage environment, is what I’m saying.
And what did Amazon Fresh bring to the table in such an environment? A lot of meh.
Then there was this business of “Dash Cart.” Amazon Fresh made a big deal about how technically advanced the stores were, because you could “Skip the checkout line. Scan, bag and pay – right from your cart.” Well, OK. Some of the carts had consoles for self-scanning.
Did Amazon actually want its customers to adopt Dash Cart, or was it just showing off? I ask because any hint of any instruction about how to use the thing was lacking. Call it an engineers fallacy: this tech is so cutting-edge, so impressive, so neat that people will be eager to learn it. People will not. Maybe had there been an employee whose job it was to school us old timers, we might have been interested, but of course that costs money, and just wait until customers don’t even have to deal with checkout clerks, how much that will cut labor costs!
Besides, you still have to do the work the store should be doing – scanning your items – for free. That is the essential irritation of any self-scanning scheme. Turns out self-scanning isn’t going to completely replace clerks anyway, for various reasons, and I’m glad.
How could Dash Cart and its ilk actually work? One: activate the cart with a debit or credit card. No messing around with some app, no inputting some code that comes to your phone, or any of that nonsense. Two: the cart itself automatically scans items as you put them in, and shows in a highly visible way how much you’re paying, so that the price jibes with the price on the shelf. Three: That’s it, you leave. You are charged a total – again, a highly visible total – as you leave, just as you would be otherwise.
Is all that technically possible? How should I know, but I’m leaning toward yes. Or it could be.
Never mind all that, we figured the store might be knocking off 10 or 20 percent in the face of its demise. The first indication that we were wrong was the store parking lot, which was as crowded with cars as I’d ever seen it. The second clue was the lack of shopping carts outside — at all, including in corrals in the parking lot or next to the entrance. No shopping carts inside the door, either.
Hand baskets were available, and Yuriko started with that, her initial goal being vegetables. I waited inside the door (since it was about 15 F outside) and after a few minutes, got a cart that was being returned. While I was waiting, a store employee announced at the front of the store that checking out, even self-check, would involve and hour or hour-and-a-half wait. It was a thing that makes you go hmmmm.
Shopping cart delivered to Yuriko, I set out to investigate. The first thing I found out: the place was crowded. An entire large cross-section of the population of the nearby Chicago suburbs was loose in the store, younger and older, families with little kids, single shoppers, people whose ancestors (sometimes pretty recently) had come from Central Europe, East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Latin America and more. Put them all in the store and it was Supermarket Sweep time. I’ve never seen a grocery store so crowded or so many carts piled so high.
That resulted in some empty shelves, especially in the meat aisle and paper goods.
Sorry to say, the kitchen had already been closed permanently, its ovens cold and its workers presumably left to take their talents elsewhere, if possible. I’d wanted a slice of pizza at less than $2 just one more time, but no go.
But I’d misrepresent things if I left it at that. Many of the aisle and shelves still held the bounty of American agriculture and the never-ending efforts of food technologists.
What brought the crowd? Deep discounts, of course. It didn’t take long to work that out. Later I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and determined that nominal prices were back to late 1990s levels. Thirty years of inflation, slow and then fast, poof. That’ll pack ’em in. We joined the fun.
But the woman wasn’t kidding about the wait. The checkout line went back along the right-side aisle to the back of the store, turned a corner and went along the back aisle (dairy and such), and then turned a corner again at the left-side aisle, and ended about halfway back to the front of the store. Later, the line grew to go all the way around the store, back to the checkout area.
Before that happened, I got in line with the cart and Yuriko went out scouting for items, and later sometimes I did. This was a strategy employed by a number of couples in line. A view from the line:
I also went out to the car and re-arranged the items in the back, in anticipation of a large influx. Which happened, eventually, once we filled our cart – to the top – and got through checkout.
Checkout, which indeed had taken more than an hour to reach, was an anticlimax. It was just like any checkout, except more stuff than usual. Still, this is worth noting: We spent a shade over $250 on items that listed a few days ago for around $500. Definitely a deal, whatever you think of the behemoth retailer or its failed experiment in Amazon-branded supermarkets.
I have to admit it, we bought gas at Buc-ee’s more than once on our trip to Florida. Turns out that the chain’s gas prices are comparable with Costco. That is, 20 to 30 cents cheaper per gallon than most standard gas stations. Costco tends to be on main thoroughfares in densely populated places, which is sometimes convenient, sometimes not. Buc-ee’s is the flip of that, tending to be on major highways at some distance from densely populated places. Sometimes convenient, sometimes not.
We gassed up at the Smiths Grove, Kentucky Buc-ee’s just off I-65 on December 5, early in our trip. We had to make a decision on how to proceed from there. One choice: continue on I-65 to Nashville, take I-40 east from there roughly to Cookeville, Tennessee, and take smaller roads into Jackson County, to reach our friends’ home in the holler. Or: take smaller roads across southern Kentucky and into Tennessee, bypassing metro Nashville and going through towns and hamlets and farmland and woods we’d never seen before, ultimately connecting to the appropriate small roads in Jackson County. It isn’t too hard to guess what we did.
Kentucky 101
It so happened that exiting from Buc-ee’s in Smiths Grove takes you to Kentucky 101, a two-lane highway that can either take you back to I-65 or south through Warren and Allen counties. Coming from the crowds of Buc-ee’s, people and cars, the contrast of heading south on Kentucky 101 is clear.
As of now, at least, Bro. Tim Meador is the Allen County Jailer, so I assume he won the most recent election.
I know that’s a county job that probably involves a fair amount of paperwork. Still, I picture the Jailer as an official who, like in a movie, puts offenders in the jug himself, turning a skeleton key (one of a few jangling on a big ring) to lock the cell.
Scottsville, Kentucky
The main traffic hub of Scottsville (pop. 4,300), the seat of Allen County, is the junction of Kentucky 101 and 98, known as Main and Court streets locally. Instead of a county courthouse, the hub is in the form of a square with businesses around it and a lot of traffic passing through. More than I would have guessed.
It was lunchtime. I can report that Thai Orchid is as good as you might find in a larger town. In our time, Thai has pretty much joined the tapestry of American cuisine as thoroughly as Chinese or Mexican food did in previous generations.
The main public library is near the square, sporting a local Wall of Fame.
The names include Lattie Moore, who sang, “I’m Not Broke but I’m Badly Bent,” a song with pretty much the same theme as Al Dexter’s “Wine, Women and Song.”
I won’t look all the names up, but the Scottsville Wall of Fame also includes Johnny Green, pioneer aviator, who did the first commercial flights between Florida and Cuba, apparently.
Red Boiling Springs, Tennessee
We drove on Kentucky 98 east to the near-border town of Gamaliel, pop. 391, still on the Kentucky side of the line. A lesser-known Biblical name, but I also can’t help thinking of the G. in Warren G. Harding.
South from there, Kentucky 63 turns into Tennessee 56 after a few miles. There’s no sign marking the border, just one announcing the Tennessee highway number. Pretty casual for a line that might have been an international border, had the secessionists had their way (unless, of course, Kentucky left the old US).
Besides a cool name, Red Boiling Springs (pop. 1,205), Tennessee, has a history. As the name suggests, people took the waters there.
“As recently as 1920, Red Boiling Springs had about a dozen places in which visitors could stay,” The Tennessee Magazinereported a few years ago. “The largest was the Palace Hotel, which had 180 rooms. Over the next several generations, business declined… and… a 1969 flood destroyed large parts of the town. However, three of the Red Boiling Springs resort hotels are still open. They were in (nearly) continuous operation throughout the 20th century and still reflect more of the lifestyle of the late 19th century than they do the 21st.”
Make that two hotels. One of those mentioned in the article, the Donoho, burned down in November.
The gray, chilly day somehow fit the scene of a wrecked historic hotel.
Damned shame. I can’t leave it at that. Soon after passing through Red Boiling Springs, we arrived at our destination in eastern Middle Tennessee. The next day, we enjoyed a Tennessee hootenanny.
Our hosts, Dave and Margaret, on guitar and drums.
At least a foot of snow covers the ground outside, so it’s good to be inside. Winter has fully returned, but at least the early part, when the holidays are yet to come, and not the post-New Year grind of January or the interminable days of February, the alleged shortest month.
Thanksgiving was low key. I expect that’s actually true for most people, however many anecdotes there are about fractious Thanksgivings. Low key doesn’t get into sitcoms or in real or made-up tales on a Thanksgivingishell subreddit.
Back to posting after Christmas, maybe the first Sunday after. Got a lot to do before then.
One more note about Kansas City in September. Besides the World War I Museum and Memorial, there was one more place I wanted to be during my visit: Arthur Byrant’s, for the barbecue I remembered so fondly from the late 1990s. Good ‘cue has sustained AB long after the pitmaster of that name died in 1982.
I’d go again.
After I left KC, I headed not too far northeast to the Jesse James Birthplace Museum.
The birthplace museum, like the house, isn’t a large place, but it does convey some of the life and times of the famed outlaw, with some good artifacts and reading. Posters, too. I hadn’t realized that Jesse James was a character in the very last Three Stooges theatrical release, The Outlaws is Coming (1965), but there was the poster, along with ones advertising better-known biopics or Jesse James-adjacent movies. Somehow I missed that Stooges picture on TV as an impressionable kid, though I saw the likes of The Three Stooges Meet Hercules.
Jesse used to be buried at the homestead.
But at some point he was moved to Mount Olivet Cemetery in nearby Kearney, Missouri. Jesse receives rocks and flowers and coins from visitors 140+ years after his assassination by the Coward Robert Ford (“coward” capitalized, because the word is welded to his name in popular memory). As for Jesse, not a bad posthumous haul for a train robber.
Just as an example, do the Newton Boys get that kind of attention? No, they do not.
“The Newton boys were a criminal gang composed of brothers Willis, Joe, Jess and Wylie (Doc), who operated mostly in Texas during the 1920s,” says Texas State Historical Association. “Willis ‘Skinny’ Newton robbed over eighty banks and six trains from Texas to Canada with his brothers and other outlaws, including the single biggest train robbery in United States history. By the time they were captured, they may have stolen more money than all other outlaws at that time combined.”
I liked Mount Olivet. Got some stones of yore.
Aunt Duck had to have been a character.
Further east, along U.S. 36 in Hamilton, Missouri, is the two-roomed JC Penney Library and Museum. The town library is in one room, the museum in the other. Most of the Penney artifacts are under glass. A wax JC Penney stands in front of a portrait of the department store mogul.
In Laclede, Missouri, is the Gen. John J. Pershing Boyhood Home State Historic Site. A fine museum about the General of the Armies, including an exhibit on something unknown to me, the Twenty-Fifth Infantry Bicycle Corps — the Iron Riders. The Army tested long-distance bicycling in 1897 as a strategy for troop movement, with the corps riding from Missoula, Montana to St. Louis. Pershing wasn’t involved in that effort, but it did happen during his time in the military. Quite a story. Deserves to be better known.
One the last day of my driving, I didn’t want to stop for much, but I did spend a while in Nauvoo, Illinois.
There’s a LDS temple there now. It wasn’t the last time I came this way, in 1997. I couldn’t go in, of course. For that you’d have to join the club.
“Good morning,” Walter said in response to me, but in a hushed tone that somehow made his Austrian accent more distinct. “Do you want to see some bears?”
Yes. I followed him out to the large deck off the large common room of the Country Sunshine B&B. Outside we met with cool air, bright morning sun, and the strong smell of pine. The deck was a floor above the grassy ground, which sloped downward away from the bed and breakfast, shaded by a small copse of enormous pines.
We’d just spent the night at Country Sunshine B&B, the first of three for our visit to Durango, Colorado, a place I’d wanted to visit since the moment, years ago, when I heard Garrison Keillor describe the place in the engaging way that he had. I’d come out of our room – one of the three or four bedrooms off the common room – ahead of Yuriko, to examine the breakfast spread at the main table when Walter asked me about bears.
Under one of the tall pines, and among the many pine cones dotting the ground, was something dark and much larger: a bear.
“He isn’t the only one,” Walter said, pointed upward. Another sizable bear was perched part way up the largest pine. I didn’t say anything, or maybe I did. Something along the lines of, How about that. When I spend time on my deck, squirrels are about as large as the animals get, except occasional rabbits and raccoons.
“Look way up,” Walter said.
Two more bears – smaller bears, though I wouldn’t want to be face-to-face even with them – clung to the branches toward the top of the tree. They were hard to see, and my photos barely show them, but they were there, not moving a bit.
Soon Yuriko, and some other guests, had come to the deck to see the bears and take pictures. Every few minutes while we watched, the largest of the bears, the one on the ground, would start shimmying up the tree. The bear in the tree snarled at his approach, and, after pausing for a few moments, the first bear returned to the ground.
We were about 10 miles north of Durango, where the human settlement is fairly thin, and bears known to prowl the mountains on either side of the single road, US 550.
In the two decades of so that Walter and his wife Jodi have owned the B&B, he said bears had been sighted. Of course they had. Get careless with closing an outdoor garbage receptacle and bears will make an appearance in the neighborhood. During dry spells, they come for the creek waters near the property, and Walter pointed out that this summer had been fairly dry in the region.
But this was a first, Walter said: probably a male bear out to do harm to some cubs, a female bear standing in his way — a bear drama playing out in the tree near the B&B.
Late that afternoon, we returned to the B&B. Papa Bear, as everyone was calling him now, still lingered under the tree. Mama Bear still watched him from the lower branches, and the cubs still clung to the upper branches. Papa Bear had mostly quit trying to climb the tree, Walter said, but he was still waiting around.
The bears stayed in place through that evening, but when I went to the breakfast table the next morning to examine the bagels and spreads and fruit and hot drinks, the bears – I checked from the deck – they were not to be seen. After their one-day show (from a human point of view), they’d taken their drama somewhere else,
We spent that first day (September 16) wandering around town and nearby. In downtown Durango, small buildings that have endured for more than a century line Main Street.
Or not so small. Such as the magnificent Strater Hotel, built in 1887.
The sort of place where presidents stay, or used to. Did any? The hotel web site doesn’t say. I’d ask ChatGPT, but it would probably tell me that FDR stayed there during his Grand Western States Whistle Stop Tour in 1939, a wholly fictional event. Wiki says Gerald Ford stayed there. Louis L’Amour did too, and now has a room named after him.
A competitor. Named for this fellow, Union (brevet) brigadier general and railroad man, who co-founded the Denver and Rio Grande RR.
Downtown Durango is well supplied with retail.
Lunch options, besides burgers and empanadas or a liquid lunch, included the likes of the Diamond Belle Saloon, Seasons of Durango, Chimayo Stone Fired Kitchen, Steamworks Brewing Company, and Eolus Bar & Dining. All very nice, I’m sure, but we chanced on something more to our tastes at that moment: the Durango Diner. In business for 60 years.
Durango started not so much as a mining town, but a railroad node that served the mines further up the line. Silverton, for instance. One reason Durango is where it is: the Animas River. These days, the river is accessible to pedestrians in a number of places in town. One was near the Durango Library, also the location of a shady sculpture garden.
At this place, the tracks of the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge RR run along the river.
That was also true at the 29th Street Park, though the tracks were on the other side of the river.
