Two Entertainers Who Died in Unfortunate Air Crashes

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I asked Ann about both Buddy Holly and Will Rogers not long ago. She was unfamiliar with them. That only goes to show a generational difference. As far as I’m concerned, both are visible threads in the American cultural fabric, people I always remember hearing about. But the tapestry is very large and changing, so every generation sees different threads.

While driving from Marathon, Texas, to Amarillo, I passed through Lubbock, a city I’d had scant experience with before. Maybe none, I’m not sure. So I took a short look around. If I’d had more time, I might have strolled around the campus of Texas Tech or visited the American Wind Power Museum or the Prairie Dog Town at Mackenzie Park.

But I only wanted to spend a few hours in town, so I made my way to the Buddy Holly Center.

The center, which is at 1801 Crickets Ave., and a block from Buddy Holly Ave., is a performing and visual arts venue that also includes a small museum dedicated to the rock ‘n’ roll pioneer from Lubbock whose surname was actually spelled Holley. The museum takes up two rooms. Really one and a half, since one room is more about other famous musicians and entertainers visiting the center, such as Sir Paul McCartney, who played a concert there in 2014 (and who, last I heard, owns the rights to Holly’s songs).

Still, I will say that the main exhibit room, which is guitar-shaped, was packed with items and full of things to read. Buddy Holly might have died at 22, and only worked for a few years as an up-and-coming professional musician, but he was busy. He wrote songs, made records, toured constantly, appeared a few times on TV, and somehow found time to get married. Clearly he’d found something he was good at — this new music genre — and went after it with great energy, creating a remarkable output in a short time.

On display are photographs, letters, post cards, tour itineraries, including one for the Winter Dance Party, recording equipment, a microphone, business cards, contracts, performing outfits, furniture, Buddy’s childhood record collection (all 45s), and his Fender Stratocaster, which is the last one he ever played. There’s a lengthy timeline posted on the wall detailing Holly’s life and career, and other one about the evolution of rock ‘n’ roll.

Also on display, oddly enough, are the horn-rimmed glasses he was wearing when he died. Apparently they were in an evidence locker in Cerro Gordo County, Iowa, until 1980. The 750-pound giant glasses outside the center were fashioned in 2002 by a local artist, Steve Teeters, who died a few years ago.

No photography allowed in the museum. The clerk who sold me my ticket, and signs in the display room, were clear on that point. Something about copyright. No doubt the RIAA would release flying monkeys to snatch the camera away from anyone foolish enough to take pictures, and bill him $10,000 per image besides.

You can, however, take all the exterior shots you want, including across the street at an eight-and-a-half foot bronze of Buddy and his Fender Stratocaster, created in 1980 by San Angelo-born sculptor Grant Speed, well before the Buddy Holly Center opened in 1999.  The statue was moved from elsewhere in Lubbock only a few years ago, and now fronts a wall with various plaques honoring 30 years of inductees on the West Texas Walk of Fame.

I recognized only a handful of names on the wall besides Holly, such as Waylon Jennings, Mac Davis, Tanya Tucker, Roy Orbison (who lived in Wink when he was young) and Dan Blocker, whose alma mater, Sul Ross State University, I drove by in Alpine.

The Buddy Holly Center is an adaptive reuse. Long ago, the building was a handsome depot for the Fort Worth and Denver South Plains Railway Co., dating from the 1920s.
En route from Amarillo to Lebanon, Missouri, I made a stopover in Claremont, Oklahoma, not far from Tulsa, to visit the Will Rogers Memorial Museum. Strictly speaking, I’d been there before sometime as a child. But I had no memory of it.

Will Rogers, on the other hand, I’ve always seem to have known about. That’s remarkable for an entertainer who wasn’t actually of my parents’ time — my mother wasn’t quite 10 when he died — but rather of my grandparents’ time. I knew enough about him to go see James Whitmore do his fine impression of Rogers live, including a rope trick or two, on one of the Vanderbilt stages in the summer of 1984 .

Here’s the view of the museum from the back. John Duncan Forsyth designed the original 15,000-square-foot limestone building, though there was an addition in the 1980s.

Will Rogers has a good many more exhibits than Buddy Holly, as you’d expect, considering that Rogers’ career in entertainment lasted quite a bit longer, beginning with wild west shows when that was still a thing, and moving on to all the media available in the first decades of the 20th century: vaudeville, movies, radio, and newspapers. No doubt if Rogers had lived on into the 1950s — he was only 55 when he died — we’d remember an early TV program called The Will Rogers Show.

Before I went to the museum, I had only the vaguest notion of Rogers’ early life in the Oklahoma Territory. I imagined that his origins were quite modest. Probably he was happy to have people think that, but in fact his father, Clem Rogers, was quite prosperous. The museum hints that Clem considered his son something of a ne’er-do-well, slumming as a cowboy and lassoist.

The last laugh was on Clem, who died before his son got into movies or on the radio. Ultimately, Will Rogers built himself a 31-room ranch house in California, which (per Wiki) “includes 11 baths and seven fireplaces, is surrounded by a stable, corrals, riding ring, roping arena, golf course, polo field — and riding and hiking trails that give visitors views of the ranch and the surrounding countryside — 186 acres.”

When the nation loves you, you can afford such digs. Here’s what President Roosevelt said over the radio in 1938 to dedicate the memorial in Claremore: “This afternoon we pay grateful homage to the memory of a man who helped the nation to smile. And after all, I doubt if there is among us a more useful citizen than the one who holds the secret of banishing gloom, of making tears give way to laughter, of supplanting desolation and despair with hope and courage. For hope and courage always go with a light heart.

“There was something infectious about his humor. His appeal went straight to the heart of the nation. Above all things, in a time grown too solemn and somber he brought his countrymen back to a sense of proportion.”

Rogers, his wife, three of his children and one of his grandchildren are interred on the grounds.

Naturally, there’s an equestrian statue of Rogers on the grounds.

It’s now near the tomb. To judge from the ca. 1970 picture I posted a few years ago, the statue has been moved from wherever it was then. The view from the back of the museum:

I didn’t take too many pictures inside the museum, but I make an image of a painting I liked.
It’s by an artist named John Hammer, who lives in Claremore. (More about him here.) I knew his style at once, since about a year ago I saw an edition of Travel Buddy — a coupon book you get at rest stops — that had a painting of his on the cover, a portrait of another Okie of renown, Woody Guthrie.

I picked it up because it was so different that anything you might see on a publication like that. I kept it because I really liked it.

One Cadillac Ranch & Two Stonehenges

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Driving out of Amarillo toward the west I got the impression that the city comes to an end at Soncy Road, a major north-south street. City to the east, open fields to the west. Looking at the city on Google maps, I see that impression isn’t absolutely accurate, but it’s pretty close.

I was going that way to see the Cadillac Ranch. Because that’s a thing you see while passing through Amarillo, like you might mosey over to the Eiffel Tower while visiting Paris for the first time. Google Maps simply calls it the Cadillac Ranch, as does my Michelin atlas. Curiously, my Rand McNally atlas calls it Stanley Marsh’s Cadillac Ranch.

The Cadillac Ranch isn’t far out of town, just south of one of the I-40 feeder roads, which is the former U.S. 66 at the point, so it counts as a Route 66 site for enthusiasts of that road. You can park off the feeder and see the installation from that vantage.

The Cadillac Ranch field is fenced with barbed wire, but not to worry. Visitors can go through a graffiti’d gate.

You walk right up to the 10 cars buried at an angle in the Panhandle soil and join everyone else looking at them or spray painting them.

Roadside America, the authority on attractions of this kind, says that “Cadillac Ranch was invented and built by a group of art-hippies imported from San Francisco. They called themselves The Ant Farm, and their silent partner was Amarillo billionaire Stanley Marsh 3. He wanted a piece of public art that would baffle the locals, and the hippies came up with a tribute to the evolution of the Cadillac tail fin.

“Ten Caddies were driven into one of Stanley Marsh 3’s fields, then half-buried, nose-down, in the dirt (supposedly at the same angle as the Great Pyramid of Giza). They faced west in a line, from the 1949 Club Sedan to the 1963 Sedan de Ville, their tail fins held high for all to see on the empty Texas panhandle. That was in 1974….”

Since then, the cars have been falling apart, but more importantly covered and re-covered ad infinitum with spray paint. The images I took on the afternoon of April 27, 2018 depict how it looked then — a look that I figure is almost as fleeting as cloud formations.

Note also that plenty of people don’t bother taking their spray cans with them when they leave.

The cars weren’t the only surface on which people paint.
Besides being a roadside oddity, I liked the Cadillac Ranch because there’s nothing else to go with it — no visitors center, no gift shop, no exposition signs, not even anything to tell you what the place is called or who created it.

My recent peregrinations also took me to two other places with upright objects installed in the ground, both Stonehenge replicas that I spent a few minutes looking at. One, completed in 2004, was at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin in Odessa.

Unlike the original, visitors are free to get as close as they like to the Permian Basin Stonehenge and even touch the stones. Spray painting would probably be discouraged as rank vandalism, however.

Roadside America again: “Made of limestone slabs up to 19 feet tall and 20 tons apiece, Permian Basin Stonehenge is slightly shorter than the original, but it’s exact in horizontal size and astronomically accurate. Although a plaque in front of the ‘henge claims that the replica is ‘as it appears today in England,’ that’s not exactly true.

“The slabs are blocky leftovers donated by a quarry, so they’re approximations, not duplicates; the Stonehenge stands in a circle of reddish Texas gravel, not the green Salisbury Plain; and the Heel Stone, which marks the summer solstice, had to be stuck in the ground across a street.”

On the last day of my trip, I stopped briefly in Rolla, Missouri, and got a breakfast sandwich at Hardee’s. Not far away was the Missouri University of Science and Technology’s Stonehenge replica. What better place to sit and eat your breakfast sandwich?

It’s a half-sized granite replica. Not a commanding presence, but worth a look. Once more to the Roadside America well, which says the replica was built in the 1980s to “showcase the stone carving capabilities of [the school’s] High Pressure Water Jet Lab.”

Palo Duro Canyon State Park

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Last Friday, I drove from Amarillo to Palo Duro Canyon State Park. It took only about 30 minutes: south on I-27 and then east on Texas 217, which ends when you get to the park entrance. Until very close to the entrance, it’s easy to look around and think, “Canyon? There’s a canyon around here? How is that possible?”

People — ignorant people, that is — are known to think “Texas is flat.” Some of it is, though, such as the Panhandle near Amarillo. A steppe’s a steppe. I’d read that Palo Duro was quite the canyon, but until I got there, it was a little hard to picture, driving down a mostly empty two-lane highway through terrain devoid of rises.

That’s just an example of my ignorance. If I’d done any kind of research beforehand, I would have found out that Palo Duro Canyon is enormous. Park literature calls the canyon the “second largest” in the United States, and a look at Google Maps, using the satellite image function, supports that idea, at least in terms of square miles of canyon floor.

The Grand Canyon is certainly deeper, and actually more grand — that’s in the name — but as the runner up among major U.S. canyons, Palo Duro is quite impressive. Here’s the kicker: the state park, even at 20,000 acres, is only a fraction of the entire canyon, which is about 120 miles long and averages six miles wide. The rest is private ranchland and maybe not much different than in previous centuries

You pay your entrance fee, a reasonable $5, and pretty soon you’re overlooking the sweep of the canyon, a long irregular groove carved in the flatness of the Texas Panhandle.

Made not by a mighty river like the Colorado, but one with a less formidable name, the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River. Unlike the bigger canyon in Arizona, visitors to Palo Duro SP have the option of driving to the canyon floor, 800 or so feet down. That’s because the CCC built a road into Palo Duro once upon a time, along with other structures.

So I drove in. I also got out and walked. Not on the longest of trails available, but a few miles on shorter ones.

I liked the Rojo Grande Trail. Rojo all right, in places. At least the kind of red you get in rocks.

Along with views of the canyon walls.

Plus plenty of semiarid-region flora and even a little fauna (a rabbit, in my case). Also, the occasional mark of man, besides the works of the CCC and the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department.

All along the park road, drivers are warned about flash flooding. There seemed little risk when I was there, but the potential is real.

Almost 40 years ago, heavy rains flooded the canyon, killing four people. According to the sign, water crested at 21 feet above the nearby low water crossing. Hard to imagine that much water gathering in a place that seems so dry, but nature’s capricious. Best to stay out of her way if possible.

Fort Davis National Historic Site

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The town of Fort Davis, which I later learned is unincorporated despite being the county seat of Jeff Davis County, Texas, has an example of an historic site worth seeing, though probably not worth going to see: Fort Davis National Historic Site. I was there a week ago, after visiting McDonald Observatory.

The place was a military post from 1854 to 1862 — Confederate the last of those years — and again from 1867 to 1891 as part of the string of forts in the region to protect emigrants, mail coaches, and freight wagons.

Fort Davis National Historic Site had about 60,900 visitors last year, putting it at 278th out of 377 Park Service units. About an hour wandering around the grounds was enough to see the standing buildings, ruins, a handful of exhibits, and the sizable parade ground.

Without this sign, there’s little to tell you that the old San Antonio-El Paso Road passed this way.
The odd thing to me is that when Fort Davis was re-established after the Civil War, the U.S. Army kept the name. Sure, Jefferson Davis had been Secretary of War in the 1850s. But from the point of view of the United States government, he had done some questionable things since then. Maybe it’s just an example of bureaucratic inertia.

The McDonald Observatory

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He died a good many years before I was born, and in fact I’d never heard of him until last week, but I have to like William Johnson McDonald of Paris, Texas. In life, he made a considerable fortune, but that’s not his distinction. Rather, in death McDonald left behind money enough to found the McDonald Observatory in far West Texas.

That’s a fine use for the fortune of a childless man. Maybe McDonald would look into the night sky there in Paris — and it was probably still pretty dark in that town in the early 20th century — and think that mankind needed to find out more. Build better telescopes, see further.

In full, the facility is the University of Texas at Austin McDonald Observatory, completed in 1939 and which now has telescopes on Mount Locke and Mount Fowlkes, near Fort Davis. Unlike Big Bend, I wanted to visit the observatory when I was young. That was the kind of youngster I was. In the spring of 1979, I think, a high school friend and I wanted to go, but found out there was a six-month waiting list. Or at least that’s what I seem to remember happened. We shelved the idea.

So for me it had to wait until the spring of 2018. The day after I visited Big Bend, I drove from Marathon to Fort Davis and then up the winding two-lane road into the mountains. Actually, pretty much every road in West Texas has two lanes, except I-10, but anyway I arrived at the observatory in time for the 11 a.m. tour, which is supposed to include a look at the two major telescopes and a look through one of the smaller scopes at the Sun.

Except that the Sun wasn’t to be seen. After clear skies and temps near 90 F. the day before, a front blew in overnight. When I went to bed that night, my room at the Marathon Motel & RV Park was about as dark and quiet as a place can be. Occasionally a train would roar by, which was pretty loud but not that often, and from time to time, dogs barked in the distance. That was it.

I woke at 4 or 5 a.m., while it was still very dark, to a constant whoosh of wind outside. Not the winds I’m used to at home, which can be loud and strong, but tend to subside for a few minutes at a time. This West Texas wind was constant. I fell asleep to it, and a few hours later, at dawn or so, it still was blowing with the same intense regularity. A little more sleep — that’s how I tend to sleep — and after that, the blow was still blowing the same.

With the wind came clouds, a little drizzle and much cooler temps. By the time I got to the observatory, I was in some clouds. So much fog that at first I could barely see the observatory buildings.

Instead of a look at the Sun, our guide showed us images of the Sun in the visitors center’s small auditorium, and talked about it and other stars. He was an informative young man, an astronomy enthusiast who happened to get a job in public affairs at McDonald. As usual with these things, I already knew a fair amount, but not everything.

I didn’t know, for instance, that UY Scuti is now the largest known star, at about 1,700 times larger than the Sun’s radius and 21 billion times the volume. Enough at least to engulf the the entirety of Jupiter’s orbit. Luckily, it’s at a safe distance of 9,500 light years or so. A near neighbor in galactic terms, but not really that near.

The tour first took us to the Harlen J. Smith Telescope, named after the observatory director who oversaw its construction. The scope is under the dome at some distance from the visitors center.

Under the dome, it’s a commanding presence.

The instrument was a creation of the space race. “McDonald Observatory’s new director, Harlan J. Smith… convinced NASA to build one of those new telescopes at McDonald,” the observatory web site says. “The telescope brought new life and prestige to the observatory, helped recruit top young faculty members, and established McDonald as key player in the exploration of the Solar System.

“Planning began in 1964, and construction was completed in 1968 on Mount Locke. Built by Westinghouse for about $5 million, the new telescope was then the third largest in the world. Weighing in at 160 tons, it had a fused silica mirror 107 inches (2.7 m) wide that gave it a light-gathering power one-quarter million times greater than the unaided eye. It began regular observations in 1969.”

The Harlen was also where a laser was first set up to bounce a beam off the reflector that Armstrong and Aldrin left on the Moon, measuring the distance between Earth and Moon down to some ridiculously small (in inches) margin of error. If that’s not a cool factoid, I don’t know what is.

The final stop was at the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, completed in 1997, which is under this dome.

“It was designed specifically for spectroscopy, the decoding of light from stars and galaxies to study their properties,” the observatory says. “This makes it ideal in searching for planets around other stars, studying distant galaxies, exploding stars, black holes and more.

“The telescope’s mirror looks like a honeycomb. It’s made up of 91 hexagonal mirrors. To make good observations, the 91 segments must be aligned exactly, to form a perfect reflecting surface. The mushroom-shaped tower to the side of the HET dome contains a laser-alignment system that works to keep the segments in proper alignment. The mirror segments form a reflecting surface that is 11 by 10 meters.

“However, the HET is known as a 9.2-meter telescope because that’s how much of the mirror is actually in use at any given time. This makes the HET, scientifically speaking, the third largest telescope in the world.”

As I was leaving, the Sun came out. The afternoon cleared up and the night was fairly clear back in Marathon. Hope the astronomers got to collect their data from the dark West Texas sky that night.

Big Bend National Park

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When I was young, I was a fan of the Texas highway maps produced by the Texas Highway Department (these days TexDOT), which were published annually and usually available at highway rest stops, though I think one year in the early ’70s I wrote to the department, and it mailed me one.

I admired those maps, unconsciously at that age, for good reasons. They were precise, easy to understand, useful and aesthetic, everything you need in a map. I found the color scheme for the cities and towns particularly fascinating. The largest cities were yellow. Mid-sized cities were green and large towns were brown. Or maybe those last two were the other way around; I don’t have an old map in front of me. To my thinking, that’s a brilliant way to depict population centers by relative size.

My 7th-grade Texas History teacher, the prickly Mrs. Carico, taught us map-reading skills one day using Texas highway maps. Imagine any teacher doing that now. I think I already knew most of what she said, though I did learn from her the difference between red mileage numbers (marked with red arrows) and black numbers that didn’t use arrows.

She didn’t care for the yellow-green-brown system, though I don’t remember why. Maybe because the national forests in East Texas and Big Bend National Park in West Texas were a slightly different shade of green. But I never found that confusing.

It’s probably from those maps that I got my first notion of Big Bend. There it was, hugging the Rio Grande, far from most everything else, thrusting into a remote part of Mexico, marked by the brown smears that denoted mountains on the map. A few roads went there. A few towns were nearby — but not that near. Somehow that place was a national park.

But I didn’t feel an aching need to go there. In 1972, when we took a family vacation to Carlsbad Cavern National Park, we could have just as easily have gone to Big Bend, but we didn’t, and the thought never occurred to me. In 1980, when I drove to El Paso from San Antonio, a little creativity on my could have resulted in a day in Big Bend, but it didn’t occur to me. In the 1990s, reports of his visits to the park by my brother Jay were interesting, but it seemed even further away than ever from my vantage in the Midwest.

Last year, I planned to go with Jay and Lilly, but circumstances prevented it. This year, I decided it was time, though by myself. So on April 24, 2018, in mid-morning, I found myself at the park entrance.

The road from the town of Marathon to the park entrance, U.S. 385, was a lonely one. I was almost by myself on the way down that morning. According to the National Park Service, Big Bend isn’t a top 10 national park by visitors. It isn’t even in the top 25.

In 2017, it was 41st out of 60 national parks, and 130th out of all of the 377 units of the NPS (Gates of the Arctic NP is last among national parks, unsurprisingly). A lot people probably have the same feeling about Big Bend that I had for many years: I’m sure it’s scenic, but it’s far away.

Glad I made the effort. It’s well worth the drive.

Those views were even before I got to the main places I visited in the park, such as the Chisos Mountains.

The Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive winds south to the Rio Grande, through the Chihuahuan Desert landscape.

Ross Maxwell was easily the most scenic drive I’ve taken since the Icefields Parkway in the Canadian Rockies. What is it about mountains, wet or dry?

Though it was very warm — upper 80s F., I’d say — I had a hat, sunscreen and water, so I took some walks. One was down into a shallow valley to the former Homer Wilson ranch, to see the abandoned buildings.

No one else was on the trail, going there or back. It was on this short hike that I appreciated the quiet of the park. In a city, or the suburbs, the din of traffic is always coming from all directions, strongly or faintly, except maybe right after a large snowstorm.

In the remote Chihuahua Desert, if you hear a car, it’s a single car, and it goes away. Mostly you hear the wind, birds, and your footsteps, until you stand still. Listening for traffic and not hearing it was as much a pleasure as drawing in air without any hint of pollution.

I also spent time on foot in the Chisos Basin, but the best walk by far was into Santa Elena Canyon on the Rio Grande. At that point, the limestone cliffs of the canyon are 1,500 feet high and as majestic as anything I’ve seen in nature. Photos do the massive shapes little justice, but I took some anyway.

The trail led a short way into the canyon, and up some hundreds of feet. I was exhausted by the time I got up into it, but the view of the Rio Grande from that vantage was some compensation. Sure, let’s build a wall here.

When I got back to the river, I took off my shoes and put my feet in. Cool but not cold, and it felt good.

The Trans-Pecos & Llano Estacado

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Back on April 14, I headed for Texas by car. I spent most of following two weeks in that state, arriving home today. Along the way, I drove 3,691 miles and change.

The main event was the wedding of my nephew Dees and his betrothed Eden on April 21 at Hummingbird House, a gorgeous outdoor wedding venue just south of Austin in the full flush of a Texas spring. An actual warm and green spring, unlike the cold and still brown spring I left in Illinois.

Rain had been predicted for the day, as it often is this time of the year, and there was an indoor pavilion just for that circumstance, but the Texas spring accommodated the bride and groom and wedding party and all the guests by not raining. If fact, the sun came out just before the ceremony, which was picturesque as could be.

I was remiss in taking pictures of Dees and Eden or anyone else, except for a few shots of my family.They’d flown to Austin the day before the wedding, in time for the rehearsal dinner, which was a pizza party in Dees and Eden’s back yard. The logistics of my family getting to Austin were a little involved, but everything worked out.

As for me, I’d spent most of the week before the wedding with my brother Jay in Dallas, arriving in Austin the Thursday before the wedding. The morning after the wedding, a week ago now, Yuriko, Lilly and Ann and I drove to San Antonio, where we all visited my mother and brother Jim. They flew back home that evening, leaving me to drive back to Illinois.

I wanted to return a different way than I’d came, especially since I had the week off from work (the week before the wedding was a work week). So I didn’t pick the most direct route home.

Namely, I drove west from San Antonio to Marathon, Texas, a town of a few hundred people in West Texas whose main distinction is its proximity to Big Bend National Park, which I visited last Tuesday. There are many impressive things to see there, but I was most astonished by the cliffs on the Rio Grande that form Santa Elena Canyon.

The next day I went to the Trans-Pecos towns of Alpine, Marfa and especially Fort Davis. Not far from Fort Davis is the McDonald Observatory, which I’ve had a mind to visit for years. It was cloudy and misty and a little cold when I got there, but that doesn’t matter when you’re looking at impressive telescopes. In Fort Davis itself, I visited the Fort Davis National Historic Site.

The next day, I drove north, through Midland-Odessa and Lubbock and finally to Amarillo, a shift in scenery from the desert of the Trans-Pecos to the high plains of the Llano Estacado. Along the way I made a few stops: the Presidential Archives and Leadership Library in Midland and the Buddy Holly Center in Lubbock.

While in Amarillo, a city I had not seen since a brief visit in 1979, I took the opportunity on Friday to see Palo Duro Canyon State Park, which is about 30 minutes outside of town. It’s a great unknown among natural areas in Texas and, for that matter, the United States.

I had enough time that day after visiting Palo Duro — the days are getting longer — to drop by and see the Cadillac Ranch, famed oddball tourist attraction, which is on the western outskirts of town.

This weekend was a long drive home: Amarillo to Lebanon, Missouri, on Saturday (I’d stopped in Lebanon the first day out, on the way to Dallas), and Lebanon to home in metro Chicago today. Tiring, but I did squeeze in two more sites. In Claremore, Okla., on Saturday, I saw the Will Rogers Museum. Not bad for an entertainer who’s been dead more than 80 years.

Today I stopped just outside St. Louis and took a walk around the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. Not bad for a culture that’s been gone for about 800 years.

One More Spring Break

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The Quasi-Spring Break I had in March lived up to its name, as winter-lite conditions persisted both in metro Chicago and greater New York. Essentially, wherever I was. Even through April until yesterday, we joined much of the nation in complaining about the cold (though I read that Phoenix had its first 100-degree F. day of the year not long ago).

So time again for another Spring Break. Maybe a warmer one. Back posting around April 29.

Till then, some entertaining music videos to watch. Such as the delightful animated video for Caro Emerald’s “That Man,” released in 2010. A fine homage to Saul Bass, and that mid-century style.

For something with a different vibe, “Ghost of Stephen Foster,” a song by the Squirrel Nut Zippers (2000), and another work of homage. This time to the cartoons of Fleischer Studios.

Finally, a charming video for Joni Mitchell’s cover of “Twisted,” which she released in 1974.

I’ve long enjoyed her version, and in fact it’s the first I heard. Listen for the Cheech and Chong vocal cameo.

These Vagabond Shoes Are Longing to Stray Right Through the Very Heart of It

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I try to take skyline pictures when I can, such as the modest skylines of Birmingham or Little Rock. I had the good luck of being near the highest point in Brooklyn when I was able to take a shot of Manhattan.

Actually, Brooklyn in the foreground, Manhattan in the background.

Topical humor, spotted on the subway.

A sign in Brooklyn offering a novel interpretation of “all day.”

I had an idea of taking pictures of construction sites in New York during this visit, as I managed to do in Denver last year. Pretty soon I got tired of it. The air was chilly, for one thing, but more importantly, construction sites seem to be everywhere. If nothing else, New York is a city always reinventing itself.

I took a few. Such as a high-rise underway at 161 Maiden Lane in Lower Manhattan.

It will be a residential tower. More deluxe apartments in the sky. Not all has gone smoothly.

I was also able to get a shot of the Ann St. sign, which I sent to Ann for her amusement.

As part of my walk in Lower Manhattan, I got a look at the South Street Seaport district, which I’d read about, probably even written about (it’s hard to keep track), but never seen.

From Wiki: “It features some of the oldest architecture in downtown Manhattan, and includes the largest concentration of restored early 19th-century commercial buildings in the city. This includes renovated original mercantile buildings, renovated sailing ships, the former Fulton Fish Market, and modern tourist malls featuring food, shopping, and nightlife.”

The drizzle made my walk-through a little less pleasant than it could have been, but I did enjoy seeing the restored buildings. I can imagine that on a pleasant summer weekend, the place is probably pretty busy.

At the edge of the district is South Street Seaport Museum, which I didn’t have time for. I did get a look at the nearby Titanic memorial, which is in the form of a lighthouse.

The plaque on the lighthouse says: “The lighthouse was originally erected by public subscription in 1913. It stood above the East River on the roof of the old Seamen’s Church Institute of New York and New Jersey at the corner of South Street and Coenties Slip. From 1913 to 1967 the time ball at the top of the lighthouse would drop down the pole to signal twelve noon to the ships in the harbor. This time ball mechanism was activated by a telegraphic signal, from the Naval Observatory in Washington D.C.

“In July 1968 the Seamen’s Church Institute moved to 15 State Street. That year, the Titanic Memorial Lighthouse was donated by the Kaiser-Nelson Steel & Salvage Corporation to the South Street Seaport Museum. It was erected at the entrance to the museum complex, on the corner of Fulton and Pearl streets, in May 1976, with funds provided by the Exxon Corporation.”

I got a look at, but did not board, the Wavertree, which is docked permanently at one of the piers, and which is part of the museum. It was built in 1885.

Wiki again: “The ship was launched in Southampton. It is 325 feet (99 m) long including spars and 263 feet (80 m) on deck. The ship is the largest remaining wrought iron vessel. Initially it was used for transporting jute from east India to Scotland, and then was involved in the tramp trade. In 1947 it was converted into a sand barge, and in 1968 it was acquired by the South Street Seaport Museum.”

One more image, also from Lower Manhattan, though at some distance from South Street Seaport. I just happened to walk by.

Engine 6 of the FDNY. The Tigers.

The New York State Museum says, showing a picture from before the tiger was added to the door: “On September 11, 2001, six firefighters from the FDNY Engine 6 Company were dispatched to the World Trade Center where they hooked the Engine 6 Pumper into a Trade Center standpipe on West Street. Four men from the Company — Lieutenant Thomas O’Hagan, Firefighter Paul Beyer, Firefighter William Johnson, and Firefighter Thomas Holohan — were killed in the tower’s collapse. Firefighters Billy Green and Jack Butler survived.”

The Mitzvah Tank

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Some New York subway platforms have electronic signs advising you how many minutes it will be until the next train. Sometimes I would notice x minutes to the next train, and then a few minutes later, it would still be x minutes. Gives new and opposite meaning to the term New York minute.

While wandering around Lower Manhattan during my recent visit, I had a New York experience — or at least one associated with the city. One of a small group of young Hasidim, who must have been no older than his late teens, approached me and asked if I were Jewish. I said I wasn’t, and on the group went.

They weren’t far from this RV.

It’s a Chabad Lubavitch “mitzvah tank.” Further investigation — the tank has its own web site — tells me that they first appeared in 1974.

“The Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, of righteous memory, had sent his tanks into the battle for the soul of the American Jew,” explains the web site.

“If a large part of American Jewry had ceased to come to shul each morning to don tefilIin and pray, the Rebbe was going to bring the tefillin to them. He was going to send one of his students to stop the American Jew on a city sidewalk. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ the lad would say. ‘Are you Jewish?’

“If the answer is affirmative, the young man would continue: ‘Would you like to put on tefillin today? It’s a mitzvah.’ The American Jew will be invited to step up onto the truck, roll up his left sleeve, bind the tefillin to his arm and head and recite a short prayer.

“If the American Jew is a she, she would be offered a free kit containing a small tin candlestick, a candle, and a brochure with all the information necessary to light Shabbat Candles that Friday evening — the proper time (18 minutes before sunset), the blessings in Hebrew and English, and a short message on the importance of ushering Shabbat into her home. He or she would also be offered literature on the Rebbe’s other ‘mitzvah campaigns’ or assistance in anything from having a mezuzah checked to finding Jewish school for their child.”

Apparently mitzvah tanks are on the move the eve of major Jewish holidays and Fridays before Shabbat. Passover was coming up when I saw the tank, actually a rental truck, so that fit. Also, though the trucks first rolled out in New York, they can be found anywhere Chabad is active.

I was asked the same question while wandering around Lower Manhattan during our short visit in 1995, though I didn’t see a truck at that time. Which reminds me of something else. Lower Manhattan seems to be a lot more busy these days on the weekend, especially with pedestrians. It has, in the 20-odd years since I spent much time there, become more of a residential neighborhood.