Nightmarish human faces weren’t invented by demented AI, but have long been with us. Case in point.
There’s Harry Truman in there somewhere. This particular wax dummy watches patrons in the small gift shop at the Harry S. Truman Little White House, which we toured on our second day in Key West.
The property belongs to the state of Florida these days, but of course was once a federal facility. Specifically, used by the Navy as officers’ quarters for the base at Key West. Truman took a cotton to the island early in his presidency, and visited often, and this is where the Navy put him up. He came to relax and play cards and fish and drink, naturally, but also to be president somewhere besides Washington in winter, since by the 1940s communication tech could facilitate such a thing.
The museum has been restored to its appearance in the late 1940s, and damned if it isn’t like walking into my grandparents’ time, entering an ordinary sort of American house of the period. The president might have stayed there, but Harry and Bess weren’t the sorts who went in for the latest expensive styles, but rather the sort of things available at a department store or via mail order: couches with some color but not too much, wooden coffee and end tables, mid-century lamps, etc.
Except, that is, for the handsome custom-make card table. That wasn’t available from Montgomery Ward.
“The poker table was a gift to Truman in 1949 by three civilian contractors working in the U.S. Naval Station cabinet shop,” says Wood Shop News. “The table is a marvel of craftsmanship and one of the most popular pieces at the Key West facility. Measuring 58” in diameter and 28” high, according to Little White House executive director Bob Wolz, it is based on a poker table that was used on the U.S.S. Williamsburg presidential yacht. The piece is made of mahogany with built-in chip holders and ashtrays crafted from recycled brass shell casings. A solid tabletop can be used to cover the poker table to turn into a dining space.”
The limo parked on the grounds of the Little White House wasn’t standard mid-America either.
A nearby sign says that it is a 1950 Lincoln Cosmopolitan Presidential Limousine. One of nine that the Truman administration used, since in those days presidential vehicles weren’t transported by air, as they are now, so the government had them stationed in various parts of the country, ready to use.
The car is a museum piece, but no mere museum piece, since I understand that the current owner, the Key West Harry S. Truman Foundation, rents it under specific conditions. Namely, you pay some large fee, and are driven around Key West for a while. I learned this when we saw an elderly couple get in the back seat, followed by a uniformed driver, and off they went.
One more thing about the Little White House: the grounds are a small arboretum.
Flora includes well-known varieties, such as avocado, coconut, date palm, mahogany and mango, plus less-than-household names, such as Fiji fan palm, soapberry tree, and my own favorite name, gumbo limbo, whose “wood, though soft, was used in the past to carve carousel horses,” the museum tells us.
“How many of you came because you’ve read some of his books?” our guide at the Earnest Hemingway House in Key West asked our small group. We’d paid our entrance fee, waited outside the house for a few minutes, then started on the tour. I was in that group. Most of his books, in my case.
“OK, some of you. How about because someone else dragged you here?”
A few more hands went up. I don’t think he was taking a survey, exactly, just kicking off the tour in an interesting way.
“What about to see the cats?” Hands went up. Some laughter.
Yuriko came for the cats, mostly, though she told me Hemingway is a writer than isn’t hard to read in the original English. We’d come to Hemingway House after our Duval Street stroll. It was about as pleasant a day as possible for such a walk. Everything is a short distance in Key West, so we arrived after a short walk.
The house is a block off Duval, on as high a spot as Key West provides, and in the shadow of a lighthouse about a block away. The grounds are lush, the house itself a handsome two-story legacy of one of the 19th-century Key West booms. One Asa Tift, a Key West wrecker, completed the house in 1851.
Tift was one of the more successful wreckers, looks like: a man who led small boats out from Key West to the nearby hazardous reefs when ships foundered there. Wreckers were eager for valuable salvage from these vessels, and if the Hemingway House is any indication, the rough-and-tumble of salvage — and you know the process was dangerous, full of natural hazards, but especially other violence-prone wreckers out for the same prize — nevertheless produced at least few men of means in isolated, pestilential Key West.
Emphasis on pestilential. Just ask Asa Tift, whose sizable family, for whom the house was built, were carried away in that all too common 19th-century way, by communicable disease.
The Hemingways showed up some decades after old man Tift died, acquiring and renovating the property using her family’s money. They did what they did, and these days the house is a museum to their presence.
No one lives there anymore. No hefty, dark-mustachioed man staggers home from Sloppy Joe’s bar good and drunk and flops to bed there, or goes to the upstairs office-studio and bangs out famed literature during sober periods, or argues with his wealthy wife under the sub-tropical shade trees – quarrels whose root seemed to be Hemingway’s roving eye, with a dash of alcoholic irresponsibility added to the mix.
The pool was an addition by his wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, which caused consternation for Earnest. Something about taking the place of his informal boxing ring on the same site, done while the author was out gallivanting somewhere. Terrific writer he might have been, and I certainly admire his talent for gallivanting, but he also seems to have been a touchy bastard.
Tourists and staff come and go, but in our time, only cats live at 1301 Whitehead St., a property enclosed by sturdy brick walls. Said the be the descendants of Hemingway’s son’s six-toe cat, the herd is large. Our guide told us how many, though I can’t remember the exact number now. In the range of dozens, beyond the dreams of even the most thoroughgoing cat ladies.
They are everywhere.
I mean everywhere, except maybe the pool.
My favorite story about the house doesn’t involve cats. The guide didn’t tell it this time, but I heard it before. By the mid-1930s, Hemingway was already a Famous Author, and without even telling him, the local chamber-of-commerce or the like put the house on a pamphlet given to tourists, as one of the local sights. Inevitably, people started showing up at odd and inconvenient hours, or entered expecting a tour. The brick wall all the way around the house is a legacy of that situation.
Note that “Southernmost Point of the Continental USA” is marked “temporarily closed.” That wasn’t going to deter me from a look if possible, so we headed down Whitehead St. from the Hemingway House. About a block from the site – a painted concrete buoy-shaped structure; I’d seen pictures – the area was closed and torn up for construction, and sure enough, the Southernmost Point was inaccessible.
A little construction wasn’t going to prevent Key West from allowing the Southernmost Point to serve its only purpose, however. That is, attract tourists. So with a little lateral thinking, and in this case literally so, the city installed a duplicate buoy a block away on the coast, at the Gulf of Mexico end of Duval.
It draws a crowd.
Give the people what they want: an inaccurate but fun geographical marker. In fact, there was a line to take one’s picture with the buoy, as the many visitors to Key West have been doing since 1983.
This iteration of the buoy finds itself in a high-toned neighborhood.
I understand that a later paint job added “90 miles to Cuba” on the buoy. As the crow flies or the Mariel boatlift lifts. A nod to the island with long-standing ties to Key West, especially in the days of Cuban cigars, cigar factories in the town, and Cuban organizations, such as San Carlos, which happens to stand even now on Duval, a few blocks — short island blocks — from the Southernmost Point.
Former school for the Cuban population, along with a stint as a Cuban consulate, and longstanding meeting place for those keen on kicking Spain out of Cuba during the heady 1890s. These days, the island-handsome building is a museum, free to wander around, with (in our case) a spontaneous five-minute introduction on the spot by the volunteer, a woman roughly my vintage, who sat behind a temporary table near the entrance.
Jose Marti is remembered in various spots in the museum.
As well he should be. He spent some time in Key West, gave speeches, and brought the cigar workers around to the cause. San Carlos was the place to do so in town, which happened to be a hotbed of anti-Spanish feeling – San Carlos and the town itself. Nice museum, but almost no one from busy Duval was there. Maybe the nonprofit that owns the building can set up a bar and serve overpriced Cuba libres to cruise ship visitors.
If you asked me, and no one has or will, Key West is missing something in having plain manhole and utility covers (though this isn’t bad).
I suspect custom covers cost more, and money is money, but distinctive places should have distinctive manhole covers. Aren’t details important in fostering – or in this case enhancing – a sense of place?
On the other hand, Key West has a sense of place without too many equals. That’s as good a reason as any to stroll down Duval Street, tourist hub of Key West, and take it all in. Or as much as you can. On a mild mid-December day, that wasn’t hard.
As a tourist street, a lot of retail detail.
Buildings that have somehow survived these last 100 years or so, despite the ocean’s habit of kicking up a hurricane-force fuss now and then.
St. Paul’s Episcopal, 401 Duval.
In 2014, I ducked away from crowded Duval into the church, which seemed to be open because the organist was practicing. I sat, impressed by his vigorous noodling, and by the fact that no one else was in the church.
This time, closed.
Looks like a movie theater. It was. Now a Walgreen’s.
More detail.
“Duval Street, the undisputed ‘Main Street’ of Key West, is the only place in the U.S. where one street allows you to walk from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico,” says the American Planning Association, in picking Duval Street a Great Place in America.
“ A citywide commitment to preserving the National Register of Historic Places single-largest collection of wooden structures has allowed Duval Street and the rest of Key West to transition from an economy based on maritime industries and Cuban travel during its earlier years to one now supported by entertainment, art, and tourism.”
Island-vibe Santa Claus can be found in Key West in mid-December. In fact, I was expecting more such Santas. Even he needs to vacation, preferably somewhere warm (see #13).
We spent two days walking around Old Town in Key West, which is time enough to cover a fair amount of ground, considering the small size of the place. More conventional St. Nicks were also to be seen, some of them finding their place in a place of business.
Not sure if pink counts as conventional Santa Claus. Usually he’s red, of course, a depiction of jolly old elf owes to Coca-Cola, but pink is pretty close. Anyway, pink Santa had a few fans.
A message for Santa, going for ha ha ha, rather than ho ho ho.
This retailer gets right to the point.
Maybe not the full Griswold, but decked out in quantity.
Trees: evergreen simulations, which seem a little out of place. But why not?
A pair of pink aluminum trees.
We need a revival of the aluminum tree. Not everywhere during the season, but up a notch in the Xmas décor world. Unless that’s already happened. It might have and I wouldn’t have noticed.
Tree in the abstract. Fronting a banyan. That, I think, counts as Key West local.
So does this.
Near dusk the first day was a good time to see lights.
Not Christmas lights, but colorful all the same, and available to take home. We didn’t.
Not specifically Christmas either, but also colorful.
Countering the spirit of Florida cannabis law, if not the letter? Not sure. This truck wasn’t the only one we saw. Didn’t patronize them either. Ho ho ho.
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.
Decorating for Christmas this year meant a rapid set-up. We spent a fair number of hours on the 23rd making the living room ready for a tree – moving clutter, mostly. On Christmas Eve, I brought the tree in from the garage, and Ann mostly decorated it. Finishing touches, by me, were in progress even on the morning of Christmas Day, but since that moment in the life of our family doesn’t involve an early-morning rush downstairs by children anticipating Santa’s bounty any more, that was doable.
Ann did a fine job of decorating, in the style of our family: fill up the tree with a wide variety of glowing and glinting objects accumulated across the decades.
We got a late start on decorating for Christmas, though when I think about, decorating after the Solstice discourages the sort of front-loading of Christmas that a lot of people complain about, but which they do anyway.
We had a good reason for the late start: a drive to Florida and back, beginning on December 4 and ending on the 22nd. Not just to Florida, but as far as you can go in that state, at least by car, namely to Key West and back. Early to mid-December seemed like a good time to do such a thing, after any traveling people do for Thanksgiving but before the worst of the Christmas-New Year’s rush. A short shoulder season in other words, but a good one, with room rates not quite subject to surge pricing, and crowds thick in some high-volume tourist destinations, but not impossible.
Also, Florida has few mosquitoes this time of year. Not no mosquitoes, as we found out one day in the southern reaches of the peninsula, just a “bearable” number.
Sometime earlier this year, I got the idea that I wanted to take four long drives after turning 64. Four for 64, you could say. Doing so by the end of 2025 wasn’t part of the idea, but that’s how things worked out. The drive to Florida and back, by way of such places as Indianapolis, Louisville, Chattanooga and Atlanta, totaled 3,682 miles. For all four trips since June, the total is about 14,300 miles.
That could be made to sound impressive, but in fact American men my age average more than that every year, about 15,000 miles, at least according to this source, which cites US DOT data. Younger men drive even more annually. Most of that is commuting, however. My commuting mileage by car has been exactly zero this year, and while I drive locally to stores and such, it couldn’t be more than a few thousand miles. So it seems clear that, as an American man, it was my duty to get out and drive.
When we headed south in early December, snow covered the ground all the way past Indianapolis, where we stopped for a few hours at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which is part of a larger campus called Newfields – and better examined in summer, I think. But the museum is a good one, with a solid collection, especially 19th-century American and European works. Such as “Justitia,” a Morris & Co. work from the 1890s.
After overnighting south of Louisville, we diverted from I-65 and took smaller roads through southern Kentucky and into Tennessee to a holler in Jackson County, where we were the guests of dear friends. Tennessee musicians from those parts — some professional, others skilled amateurs — gathered on the the evening of Saturday the 6th, for one of the periodic jams in our friends’ barn, which houses no animals these days, but a small stage and some sound equipment and a fair number of folding chairs. A joyful jam it was. Food was potluck. I like to think we went to a hootenanny.
The road through the holler. By this point, no snow. We were trading cold for warmth. That was one of the goals of the trip. Maybe the main one.
From there it was mostly a straight shot down through Georgia on I-75 to Florida, and eventually US 27 to Orlando by way of non-coastal Florida places like Gainesville, Ocala and Lady Lake, a string of settlement less agricultural and less pastoral now than ever, more like an endless outer suburb. Heavy traffic is an invasive species in this part of Florida, surely as pythons are in damper parts of the state. Not just masses of cars and trucks, either, but also golf carts. We passed close enough to The Villages to see billboards advertising legal representation in the event of golf cart accidents. Carts, I’ve heard, provide transport in great numbers in that sprawl of a settlement.
The drive to and in Florida involved the usual North American mix of large and small roads, smooth and ragged, grid-like and irregular, though Florida cities tended toward the irregular (except for Key West), and as crowded as can be and as empty as can be. Snow lined the way up north, thinning out the further south we went, giving way to brown landscapes and bare trees. Then we came into greenery – evergreens and palms and even deciduous species turning color. We crossed mighty bridges over mighty rivers, small culverts over alligator haunts, and the string of bridges that make up the civil engineering marvel known as the Overseas Highway (US 1). We crossed barely acknowledged borders and signs at the Florida visitor center on I-75 proclaiming The Free State of Florida.
Florida Man was out and about, weaving in and out of high-speed traffic, pushing 100 and pretty sure that physics doesn’t apply to him, though I have to admit that Florida isn’t different from any other state in that way. Traffic stopped cold more than once: for a banged up, upside-down SUV; for a raging RV fire, attended by a half-dozen firemen; for a serious two- or maybe three-car wreck on the other side of a divided highway; for construction, usually without any workers in sight; and once for no reason that we could tell at all.
In Orlando, we spent all December 9 at Universal Epic Universe, a theme park that only opened in May. Ann flew in the day before we went to the park and flew home the day afterward, taking advantage of the low prices that discount airlines offer to high-volume places in a shoulder season, if you take no bags and buy nothing to eat or drink at sky-high prices, literally and figuratively. A small bag of hers had been stowed in our car for the visit.
A theme park is one thing, but I wanted a look at Orlando, at least a sliver of it, the next day. Ann’s flight was fairly late that day, so we were able to spend part of it in posh Winter Park, including a tour boat ride through the town’s small lakes, lush with greenery and expensive houses on their banks, and connected by canals.
A drive that included the stretch of US 41 that passes through the Everglades took us to Homestead, Florida, and the mid-century charms of The Floridian motel. A day in Everglades NP followed, including an airboat tour and a drive to the coast at Florida Bay. The next day, before leaving Homestead for a drive in the rain across the Overseas Highway to Key West and while the sun still shined, we toured the Coral Castle, a one-man construction project using 1,000 tons of oolite to make walls, carvings, stone furniture, and a castle tower.
Key West was a two-day, three-night mid-December ramble on the busy and less busy streets of Old Town, including humans but also chickens, taking in the likes of the Hemingway House, the Little White House, Mallory Square, the San Carlos Institute, the Key West Aquarium, and the Key West Cemetery. Also, tourist shops, boutiques and the building where Pan-Am was founded. We ate and drank, though as our wont, nothing alcoholic. Key West was decked out for the holidays but not over the top. We walked and walked some more. It felt like a couple of pleasant summer days.
From my 2014 visit, I knew that on the back streets near the little-visited cemetery, parking was possible on an otherwise cramped island. So it was. On Margaret Street, within sight of the cemetery.
The return drive took us up the eastern coast of Florida, but avoiding the worst traffic in Miami-Dade by taking Florida’s Turnpike. By December 17, we’d arrived in Orange Park, a large suburb of Jacksonville, for a stay with two other dear friends, former Austinites now in northern Florida. Part of the next day was in and near downtown Jacksonville, one of the larger U.S. cities I’d never visited before (I believe San Jose is now the largest on that list). During our downtown stroll, we encountered the coolest building in Jacksonville and certainly one of the coolest in Florida.
We quit Florida on the 19th, but weren’t quite done with the trip. Yuriko had never been to Atlanta and wanted to go. Though I’d been however many times since 1982, I was happy to oblige, so we spent two nights and a day there, using the day to see the astonishing Georgia Aquarium and the impressive but somewhat overpriced World of Coca-Cola.
The last legs of the trip were long drives: Atlanta to Elizabethtown, Kentucky; and from there to home the next day. I wasn’t about to let them be completely dull drives, so we stopped on the second-to-last day in Chattanooga, to see the conveniently located, blocks-from-the-highway Chattanooga Choo-Choo redevelopment. On the last day of the trip, we stopped in Jeffersonville, Indiana, and walked across the Big Four Bridge, a former RR bridge across the wide Ohio, now serving pedestrians and bicyclists.
Home and then — Christmas, when things slow down for a week or so. Good timing.
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.
In Abilene, Kansas, not long ago, I found myself wondering, whatever happened to Manus Hand? That’s because I stood at that moment near the graves of President and Mrs. Eisenhower, Ike and Mamie.
The 34th President of the United States and the First Lady repose in a chapel-like structure on the grounds of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum and Boyhood Home in Abilene, pop. 6,400 or so, the town where the president came of age.
I’ve been told I visited before, with my family during a trip to Kansas when I was a wee lad, but I don’t remember that at all. So I count this as a new visit to a presidential sight, including a grave site, which makes 21 presidential graves all together. But for the federal shutdown in October, there would be four more at least: Adams père et fils, FDR and TR.
I thought of Manus Hand because, back in the Neolithic age of the Internet, he had a web site featuring photos of him at presidential grave sites. In my own dead presidents days, I found Hand’s site at some point. He had visited almost all of them by then, 36 by his count. His site is still in existence, without much change, except an update to note that George H.W. Bush had died (2018), but not Jimmy Carter.
The Eisenhower Boyhood Home, moved to the site. No tours available when I came by.
The Eisenhower Museum.
Midcentury, and what could be more fitting for Eisenhower? It’s chronologically organized: early Ike in Abilene; his Army career before WWII, including his cross-country epic; during that war and right after the war; his presidency and post-presidency, and a gallery about Mamie. Well organized, interesting artifacts, but (for me) none more interesting than a titanium sphere.
The sphere is a replica of the pennant sphere that traveled to the Moon in 1959 aboard the Soviet spacecraft Luna 2, which was the first manmade object to reach the lunar surface, or any celestial body. The sphere was a detail that I remembered from long-ago reading about space exploration. I didn’t realize one existed any more, even in replica form. Khrushchev presented it to Eisenhower during his famed visit to the U.S. that year (Khrushchev’s due at Idlewild!).
Luna 2 carried two spheres filled with liquid and an explosive charge, designed to burst apart on impact and scatter pentagonal pennants, the Moon Registry says. The pennants were imprinted with: 1) Sentiabr 1959 (September 1959); CCCP… ; and the state seal of the USSR, a wreath of grain around the hammer and sickle. It is theorized that the medallions vaporized on impact.
Russia is still shooting Luna missions to the Moon. The most recent, Luna 25, crashed near the lunar south pole in 2023 but, unlike Luna 2, not on purpose. Oops. More about the many pennants the Soviets sent into space is here. On display next to the sphere is a lunar rock, which must have been a posthumous gift, since Ike didn’t live quite long enough to benefit from astronauts rock-gathering on the surface, though he was still alive during Apollo 7, 8 and 9.
A close second excellent artifact was a dagger Marshal Zhukov presented to General Eisenhower on the occasion of the defeat of Germany, a good-looking blade with an ivory hilt and gold decorations. I picture an exuberant Zhukov, as in The Death of Stalin, handing the knife to Ike and saying something earthy. Apparently the two, Ike and Zuke, got along well in the early months of the joint occupation of Germany. Differences aside, they had job experience in common. I don’t remember seeing anything about that in the museum, but there was a lot of material, so that could have been easily missed. That and any reference to Kay Summersby.
It was hot that day, September 24, but after visiting the museum, I took a look around Abilene anyway. The town hasn’t forgotten its most famous native son. Also, Donut Palace was closed.
A lot of the detail would be different, but I’ll bet Ike would still feel at home with the scale of Abilene. Small town, small buildings, but some solid touches.
Including at least one building Ike would have known.
Chicago had cows, Abilene has cowboy boots.
The Hotel Sunflower. Former hotel, that is, now apartments.
The Sunflower State. The flower looks a little ominous, peering down at the settlers.
Structures that aren’t grand, but stately even so. Petite stately, you might call them.
Out near the highway: truth in naming. But note also, the bowling alley is closed. I could go either way on the reopening of an alley in that location, but I really want the sign to stay.
One more thing Abilene is known for, at least since 2022.
The World’s Largest Belt Buckle. Says so right there on it. How large would that belt have to be?
“Designed by local artist Jason Lahr, Fluter’s Creek Metal Works, the buckle features Dwight D. Eisenhower, Wild Bill Hickok, Abilene & Smoky Valley Railroad, Historic Seelye Mansion, C.W. Parker carousel horse, C.L. Brown telephone, a racing Greyhound and Chisholm Trail longhorn inlaid with blue quartz,” says the city of Abilene, Kansas.
“The buckle is a project of the Abilene Convention and Visitors Bureau which hopes the new roadside attraction will entice travelers to stop and visit the Best Historic Small Town.”
Cold winds rolled through northern Illinois today. Seven inches of snow are forecast for Saturday. What? Right, it’s winter. The winter solstice is just the shortest day of the year.
Back to posting on Sunday. Regards for Thanksgiving.
Something to upset PETA sympathizers.
Stroll down Greene St. in the mountain town of Silverton, Colorado, at least in mid-September this year, and you’d have had the opportunity to buy a hide for $300. We did, but declined. Still, it wasn’t just a Colorado detail, but a Western one. The West, where men are men and cow hides hang in the sun. As far as I could tell, you couldn’t buy a hide with Bitcoin, but I suppose you’d have to ask the seller to be sure.
Not five minutes after we’d parked off the main thoroughfare of Greene Street in Silverton, on a large side street, a steam locomotive hauling a valuable cargo — tourists — pulled into town, a block from where we parked. The Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge RR train from Durango had arrived. Instantly the streets around the train were thick with those same tourists who had paid roughly $100 a head for the scenic ride, though I suppose many, the majority maybe, had gotten a slight discount as seniors.
I assume the economy of 21st-century Silverton depends pretty heavily on these arrivals, at least in the warm months, as day after day the line disgorges its many passengers for their layover. No doubt the likes of High Noon Hamburgers or the Shady Lady or a lot of the other businesses in town wouldn’t be viable otherwise.
Blair St., paralleling Greene St. a block away. No need for pavement.
Greene St.
Lots to see on Greene.
Including the fine Colorado flag, flying at Railroad Art by Scotty, a seriously cool gallery.
“Railroad Art by Scotty presents the custom matted and framed collector Railroad Art Prints by renowned railroad artist H.L. Scott, III,” its web site says. “These are not photographs and they are not created on the computer. These are pen & ink drawings created by Scott using the technique known as STIPPELING or pointillism.”
One of the few buildings I’ve seen that clearly states its elevation.
The Grand Imperial Hotel. A lofty name to live up to, but probably posh enough to do so.
Restored to its 1880s appearance in the 2010s, no doubt at considerable expense.
As it looked in 1940, a photo from the Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Photograph Collection.
More Greene St.
Greene is short, because Silverton isn’t very large, and so the street, now a road, soon heads for the hills.
The Hillside Cemetery of Silverton.
An apt name.
With a good view of the town.
Some sizable memorials.
More modest ones.
Echoes of lost men from another time. Beyond the outstanding beauty of a hillside cemetery in the flush of autumn, reason enough to visit the cemetery.
