Author Archives: Denny

My Wheels — Chapter 40
1997 Schwinn

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Since this vehicle is still a part of my fleet, I’m claiming that it’s OK to cover it now although it should have appeared in My Wheels Chapter 33. It arrived as a birthday gift about a year ahead of the 1998 Corvette that actually was the subject of Chapter 33. In conjunction with the Forester and Miata, it provides me a full range of passenger capacities: 4, 2, or 1. The photo at right was taken when the start of my first documented road trip, in the aforementioned Corvette, was delayed, and I pedaled to the nearest watering hole to pass some time.

The bike was quite a surprise. My girlfriend and best buddy combined forces to select and purchase it. My girlfriend knew me and my buddy knew bicycles and the gift was exactly what I would have bought on my own had I been more familiar with the modern bicycle world. I had no desire to go racing or take long-distance slogs up the sides of mountains so the twenty-speed skinny-tired models I’d been seeing did not appeal to me. More importantly, the skinny seats that always seemed to sit too high above those skinny tires appealed to me even less.

The gift bike had none of that. It had fat tires and a fat seat on a frame that would have fit right in during the 1950s of my youth. Chrome fenders and white sidewall tires were perfect mates for the black and brown frame with the brown bearing a sort of faux wood grain pattern. As cool as all that sounds, there’s more. There is real magic in that bike. It’s in the rear axle. It’s a Shimano Nexus 7 Speed Hub with the workings all internal and controlled by a small handlebar-mounted shifter. The biggest magic of all, however, is the genuine pedal-backward-to-stop coaster brake. It wasn’t exactly a Pee Wee Herman bike, but it was closer than most. When I rode my new bike past a nearby playground, a young boy shouted out, “Nice bike, mister.” Nothing could be finer.

I moved into my current home when the bike was just a couple of months old. The pictured Fridays was more or less across the street, and there was a Kroger grocery not far beyond. There was a Walmart at one end of the street, and a convenience store and some restaurants at the other. Behind the Kroger was Kings Auto Mall, which was basically a 3/4 mile loop lined with about a dozen auto dealers. In the other direction, my office was less than a mile away. I frequently used the bike to reach the restaurants and occasionally did some shopping on it with the aid of a small backpack. I rode it to work several times but not as much as I should have. Days that were warm enough to allow riding the bike were usually warm enough to work up a sweat, which didn’t seem like a good way to start a day at the office. My favorite place to ride was the auto mall. Traffic was fairly light, and I could easily pedal through the lots to look over cars and window stickers. Conversations with salesmen happened now and then, but they were never quite sure whether or not I was actually a potential customer.

The picture at left shows the Schwinn in roughly the same spot as in the opening photo. The Fridays was demolished and replaced by a LongHorn Steakhouse. The Walmart turned into a JCPenney, and the convenience store has been replaced by a fast-food restaurant. The auto mall is doing well as evidenced by a Toyota dealer having taken over the Kroger store. Actually, the whole neighborhood is basically doing well. Naturally, some businesses have closed over the years, but they’ve been quickly replaced. There is overall growth in both the commercial and residential aspects of the community. And in the traffic.

I ride the Schwinn very little these days. There are many reasons but traffic is one of the biggest. The Fields Ertle exit of I-71, where I live, is often cited as one of the most congested spots in the Cincinnati area, and much of that congestion has developed during my time here. On top of the gradual increase from the population and business growth, there was a major step input from a new Procter & Gamble complex about two miles north of me. Major highway improvements have helped the flow of trucks and autos but not bicycles. Even the once rather quiet auto mall loop now has significant traffic and is no longer very relaxing. Getting there isn’t relaxing at all.

So I usually pump up the tires in the spring, as I did this week, and cruise through a few parking lots before returning the bike to its spot in the garage and letting the tires again go flat. There is a bike trail not far away, and it’s certainly fair to ask why I don’t use it more often. The truth is, the only reason I have is laziness. It is often overcrowded on weekends but not so much during the week. I have a cheap rack that takes some effort to mount on the car and more effort to get the bike secured on it. Maybe if I had a better rack that was easier to use, I’d hit the trail more often, but I’m too cheap to buy one. So maybe I have two reasons for avoiding the bike trail: I’m cheap and I’m lazy. But I’m honest.

My Previous Wheels: Chapter 39 — 2018 Subaru Forester
My Next Wheels: Chapter 42 — 2025 Forester  

Movie Review
King Kong
Radio Pictures

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No, I’m not really going to review an eighty-seven-year-old movie that just about everybody has seen multiple times. But I am going to review the experience of seeing it on the big screen for the first time ever. The original King Kong was released on April 7, 1933, so it’s not quite eighty-seven years old but it’s mighty close. My first glimpse — and it wasn’t a whole lot more than that — was sometime in the mid-1950s.

It was on TV, of course, on what was decidedly NOT a big screen. It was probably in 1957 when the movie made its national television debut. The timing likely wasn’t considered “late-night” then and certainly wouldn’t be now, but it was late enough that I had to beg for an exemption to my normal bedtime. Although I was successful, I did not get the exemption’s full benefit. I fell asleep before the movie started, woke up to watch a few scenes through bleary eyes, then dozed off again before the big ending. Today I can’t even remember what portions of the movie I saw. I remember that I saw all of the giant gorilla, not just his face or hand, and I remember it was dark. Seeing Kong in his entirety narrows it down some. The fact that it was dark does not. The entire film was darkened to obscure, reportedly, some of the bloodier scenes and some details of Fay Wray’s femininity. Fay Wray had lots of femininity.

Since then, there have been several viewings that I did manage to stay awake for. Although the screens were considerably larger and clearer than the one parked in our living room sixty-some years ago, all were on a TV. I think the movie became a favorite the instant I actually saw it all. The story was fairly creative but not particularly complex, and the acting was only a few steps removed from the silent film era. Neither was what attracted me to the film. I appreciated its craftsmanship and the window on history it provided. Stop-action animation and rear projection on matte paintings were not invented for King Kong but they had never been used anywhere near to this extent.

The window on history I mentioned exists largely because the movie was made as a window on, if not the future, the leading edge of the present. The film’s exciting finish features the Empire State Building which had just been completed in 1931. It was then the world’s tallest and would hold that title for almost forty years. The armed airplanes that attack the doomed giant were seen as “the most modern of weapons”. Some were models built for the film but some scenes show actual state-of-the-art military planes from a nearby U.S. Naval airfield. From two decades into the twenty-first century, those bi-planes look pretty primitive. Realizing that they represented the most advanced technology of the day definitely helps generate a real appreciation for the film’s special effects created with contemporary tools.

On Sunday, I finally got to see the big guy on the big screen. Fathom Events put together a one day showing at Regal Cinema. Something I’d recently learned was that King Kong was the first movie with a thematic score. This means it was written to coordinate with and enhance on-screen actions rather than just provide some background music. Sunday’s showing included the opening and closing overture which had naturally been cut from every time-constrained TV version I’d ever seen.

The experience was nearly everything I’d hoped it would be. The wall-filling Kong was more frightening than any smaller version I’d seen, and Wray was every bit as alluring as I remembered, and her screams, with an assist from the theater’s sound system, were even louder. That thematic score, which I paid a little more attention to than usual, benefited from the sound system, too. If I ignored the fact that I was sitting in a wide well-padded recliner with NBA sized legroom, I could almost imagine I was watching like it was 1933.

The experience was only “nearly everything I’d hoped” for one reason. In the lead up to Sunday, I’d read a review of the movie which was really a preview of a 2011 screening. It’s here. My anticipation grew when it talked of “seeing it in a packed theater on a big screen with an audience”. I got the big screen but I did not get the packed theater. There were less than twenty people at the 1:00 show. I know that old B&W movies just generally do not draw big crowds but there was more going on here. COVID19, the disease caused by a Coronavirus, was growing. Large gatherings had been banned and the NBA, NCAA, MLB, and other groups had canceled events. In Ohio, schools had already been closed by the governor and within a couple of hours of me leaving the theater, he would close all bars and restaurants. Many museums and other institutions have closed on their own.

That’s why Sunday’s experience was about as far from a packed theater as is possible. Yesterday (Tuesday) the theater itself was closed and so was the Empire State Building observation deck. I’ve only been to the top of the Empire State Building once. It was in the early ’70s when King Kong was no more than forty years old. In a narrow space on an inside wall. there was a heart with the words “King Kong loves Fay Wray”. I’d like to think it’s still there but probably not. 

Trip Peek #92
Trip #144
SCA Conference 2017

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This picture is from my 2017 “trip” to the SCA Conference. I put trip in quotation marks since the conference was in Cincinnati and I spent every night at home in my own bed. The retired Holiday Inn sign is in front of the American Sign Museum where we had dinner after the first full day of the conference. That day was spent on a bus tour around the Cincinnati area, the next was filled with presentations, and the third with a bus tour north along the Dixie Highway.

Trip Peeks are short articles published when my world is too busy or too boring for a current events piece to be completed in time for the Sunday posting. In addition to a photo thumbnail from a completed road trip, each Peek includes a brief description of that photo plus links to the full-sized photo and the associated trip journal.

Burr on Tap

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For 2020, the Cincinnati Museum Center is holding a series of after-hour events under the heading Museum on Tap. The first, “Space Gallery Pub Crawl”, was in January and associated with the Apollo 11 exhibit then in place. The second, “Aaron Burr: American Bastard”, happened on Thursday, and I was there.

The “on tap” in the series’ name comes from the fact that adult beverages are available. While there are no actual taps dispensing draft beer, there is beer in cans and bottles along with wine and spirits. These beverages were offered at four different locations including two in the Public Landing area. One reason the cobblestone street was fairly empty when I arrived was that many attendees were standing in lines at the other two service locations I’d passed on the way. Event literature admits that the Public Landing of the 1850s is somewhat more modern than the Cincinnati Mr. Burr would have seen but it’s a better fit than, say, the Hall of Dinosaurs.

The museum’s gathering was set in 1807 and, while Burr was not present himself, several of his friends, acquaintances, and accomplices were. Pictured, from left to right, are boat builder Leonard Armstrong, Senator John Smith, Charlotte Chambers Ludlow (widow of Cincinnati founder Israel Ludlow), and Mayor James Findlay. Smith aided Burr in his schemes, Findlay hindered him, and Armstrong and Ludlow were attentive observers.

This being my first Museum on Tap experience, I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect. I thought there might be some sort of presentation but that wasn’t the case this time. I can’t say whether or not that’s true of other events in the series. A handout supplied some background on Burr’s trial for treason and his relation with Cincinnatian John Smith. This was augmented by several posters that might have appeared on the streets of Cincinnati. Chatting with the folks in period dress added details. In conversation, Senator Smith put a modern twist on things by referring to reports of his wrongdoing as “fake news”. When I asked for a solo photo, there was no question of where he wanted to pose. He smugly stepped over to the poster with his name and the words “NOT GUILTY” while ignoring the question mark and the smaller print as only a practiced politician can.

I also spoke with Mayor Findlay, who was among those calling for Senator Smith to resign, and Mrs. Ludlow, who had met Burr only once and was clearly not impressed. Onboard the Queen of the West, Leonard Armstrong happily shared his knowledge of the flatboats he built for businessmen like Smith. From the forward deck, I could see the street becoming more crowded.

One thing happening on the street was artists from Music Resource Center performing original material. I briefly mentally questioned the presence of hip hop music in 1807 but quickly realized that the hip hop musical Hamilton is responsible for much of the current awareness of Alexander Hamilton and the man who shot him, Aaron Burr. In fact, singing karaoke versions of Hamilton tunes was one of the activities supported by the Music Resource Center but the signup sheet was still empty when I left. An area a little bit away from the landing was designated as dueling grounds and Nerf pistols were provided for anyone wanting to recreate the Hamilton-Burr encounter. Apparently, some did, as I found the pistols in various locations when I peeked in but I never caught an actual duel in progress.

Attendees could also increase their knowledge with trivia flip cards or a scavenger hunt-style bingo game and I saw quite a few people doing both. Questions on the flip cards were not Burr-specific but were generally focused on the early 1800s. Bingo game questions referred to various displays throughout the public landing area. I flipped a few cards but left the bingo competition to others. That’s why I still don’t know how much Hattie Calhoun paid to update her dress. 

Festless in Cincinnati

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In last week’s post, I told of becoming a big fan and semi-regular attendee of the annual Bockfest parade. At the time, I had every intention of attending this year’s event but it didn’t work out that way. Despite predicted near-freezing temperatures, those intentions survived until the afternoon of the parade but no further. Predictions of partly cloudy and low chance of precipitation became completely cloud covered with light snow. Recalling my 2013 “I’m too old for this” decision, I gave the parade a miss.

I had, of course, planned on the parade being the subject of this week’s post. Fortunately, there had been an event earlier in the week which makes a very suitable substitute. Narrow Path Brewing, in nearby Loveland, held their own mini-Bockfest on Tuesday. There was no parade but there were genuine goats, imposing monks who may or may not have been genuine, and a genuine ceremonial tapping of a keg of bock beer.

I didn’t make it to Bock Hall or the adjacent tent of many breweries in Cincinnati, but I did get to sample three of the area’s bock offerings. The first was the Sonder Brewing‘s William Goat featured in last week’s post, and the second was Narrow Path Brewing’s Pathinator that I enjoyed on Tuesday. The third was Common Denominator at  The Common Beer Company on Saturday. I met fellow road and beer enthuiast Perry Huntoon there, and his son snapped our picture when there was still a little Common Denominator left in my glass.

Scenes from when I actually made it to the big downtown bash can be found here: 2010, 2011, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019.

Royal Competition

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I attended my first Bockfest Parade in 2010 and immediately regretted missing the preceding seventeen. My attendance hasn’t been perfect since then but it’s on the plus side: 6 of 10. My attendance at other Bockfest events has been perfect. I haven’t attended a single one and that includes the multiple Sausage Queen competitions that take place each year. One reason was the expectation of crowded spaces which I don’t enjoy nearly as much as I once did but location has also been a factor. To be honest, location could be problematic for a couple of reasons. One, of course, was distance. Most events happen downtown which means a bit of a drive plus dealing with parking. Secondly, many were in places I was unfamiliar with. I presumed that most of the attendees were folks who frequented the various places and the fact that I did not sort of added to the “crowded spaces” aspect. But this year the last of seven qualifying events took place just up the road in a place I’m fairly familiar with.

Sonder Brewing is the brewery closest to my home. It’s less than two crow-miles from my door and about two and a half if I stick to the roads. I arrived more than an hour ahead of the scheduled start of competition and the place was packed. I got a beer and hovered near the bar until a seat miraculously opened. My first beer was a porter. The second was the more appropriate William Goat bock pictured above. I can’t say whether or not the flouting of the “‑ator” bock naming convention was intentional but I can say it was quite good. I happily sipped my brew to the sounds of 99 Luftballon and Beer Barrel Polka — both in German. Then it was La Bamba and Livin’ On A Prayer in Spanish and English respectively.

The competition took place in the far corner. The acoustics were horrible so I had almost no idea of what was going on and the lighting and distance helped me make photos that matched the acoustics. I got no pictures of one of the three entrants and didn’t even learn her name. I was rooting for Ashli, who was assisted by an energetic dance team, only because I’d met her and some of her team before things got rolling. Rhonda also had a little help and both had sizable cheering sections.

Rhonda was the ultimate winner although I don’t know why or how. She will represent Sonder Brewing in the final competition for the 2020 Sausage Queen at Bockfest Hall next Saturday.

 

Trip Peek #91
Trip #87
Route 66 Festival 2010

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This picture is from my 2010 trip to the Route 66 Festival. It was promoted as a Joplin, Missouri, event since that was the nearest city but the main organizers lived in Kansas and most activities took place at the Downstream Casino in Oklahoma. It’s quite fitting that the featured photo is of the point where all three states meet. The first day of the festival was the sixth day of the trip. On the way there I visited Saint Louis, Missouri, and a few towns in Kansas and Oklahoma. The homeward portion of the trip is documented in a separate journal since I headed directly to my first ever Lincoln Highway conference after the three day Route 66 festival.

Trip Peeks are short articles published when my world is too busy or too boring for a current events piece to be completed in time for the Sunday posting. In addition to a photo thumbnail from a completed road trip, each Peek includes a brief description of that photo plus links to the full-sized photo and the associated trip journal.

Free? Advertising on the Dixie

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Seeing things like signs, banners, and menus for local businesses bearing the logo of some large corporation is quite common. Details vary but the basic model is that the big corporation shoulders some or all of the cost and the small business gets some advertising for little or nothing. The idea is hardly new and the concept has never been restricted to purely commercial enterprises. During the last half of the 1920s, a pairing of this sort existed between a major highway and an American hereditary association. The major highway was, of course, the Dixie Highway. The hereditary association was the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC).

The UDC was the “advertiser” in this instance. Between 1926 and 1935 the organization was responsible for at least ten plaques being erected beside the highway. It’s unclear whether or not the Dixie Highway Association was an active participant in this arrangement. Because the 1926 creation of the United States Numbered Highway System brought an end to all of the named auto trails, the DHA was not very active at this point.

Combined, the previous picture and the one at right show the ten plaques in north to south sequence. The northernmost marker is in Ohio, the southernmost is in Florida, the one preceding it is in South Carolina, and the others are in North Carolina. Except for the date erected, eight of the plaques are identical. The one in Florida contains the same text as those eight but has a different image of Lee. The one in South Carolina contains different text but has the same image as the bulk of the plaques.

The South Carolina plaque is the bigger oddity. All the others were erected in 1926, ’27, or ’28. It was erected in 1935. One of the differences in its text is its specific identification of the Greenville and Fort Sumter Chapters of the UDC as being responsible for erecting the marker. All others simply identify the overall UDC. The Florida marker was erected in 1927 ahead of at least three others. None of the other nine markers uses this image of General Lee.

Eight of the plaques essentially look just like this one which happens to be in Ohio. All plaques follow this general format even when some details vary. Approximately the top one-third is occupied by an image of General Lee on horseback. His name appears below the image in large letters. A bit farther down is the name of the auto trail. The letters in DIXIE HIGHWAY are larger than the general text but smaller than the letters in Lee’s name.

Maybe what I’ve written so far will help explain how I’m currently thinking about these markers. My first contact with the markers was in 2008 when I stumbled upon the one in Marshall, NC. After I learned there were others, I made a point of visiting them all and accomplished that in early 2015. At the time I thought of them as something similar to the Madonna of the Trail markers on the National Old Trails Road. That’s pretty much how I saw them until the summer of 2017.

Streets, parks, and statues honoring military and civilian leaders of the Confederate States of America had been drawing more and more attention. In August of 2017, the death of a counterprotester at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA, cranked that attention up several notches. There was now enough attention for some of it to fall on one of those UDC plaques less than twenty miles from my home. Within days of the events in Charlottesville, a group in Dayton, OH, announced plans for a protest at the plaque near Franklin, OH. Plans to protest the protesters formed almost as quickly. City officials made a preemptive strike by removing and hiding the marker in the middle of the night. It didn’t make anybody happy but it didn’t make anybody dead, either.

Some news crews and some of those not happy people made it to the site on the morning following the removal. I made it, too, in the role of curious bystander. I chatted casually with a couple of the reporters and tried to defend the Dixie Highway a bit. I’d been calling the plaques and their mountings Dixie-Lee markers. Everyone else was calling the Franklin marker a Robert E. Lee monument and occasionally mentioning that it was on the Dixie Highway. It slowly sunk in that, for the reasons above, they were right. The monuments were not primarily concerned with marking a road like the Madonnas of the Trail or the concrete posts along the Lincoln Highway. I found myself explaining that the Dixie Highway was not associated with the Confederacy and asking that they not tie it too closely to Lee. For the first time, I compared the markers to a big branded beer sign with “Bob’s Bar” at its bottom. Learning that the brand on the sign was run by crooks, doesn’t automatically mean that Bob is a crook.

The plaque has been pried from the stone at the NC-SC border. It is lost or possibly destroyed. The marker in downtown Asheville has been attacked and damaged twice. The Franklin, OH, marker is back at roadside but is now on private property. That’s it in the picture at left. It’s even been buffed up and polished a bit. I want all the markers to stay. I deplore the vandalism that has occurred in the Carolinas but I don’t consider it an attack on the Dixie Highway. I now see that those markers really are what others have called them, Robert E. Lee monuments that happen to be on the Dixie Highway.

This topic came to me as I was writing last week’s post about the name of the Dixie Highway. I initially thought of it as a paragraph or two tacked onto that post. The length of the Dixie name post left no room to tack on anything and it is now quite obvious that a paragraph or two wouldn’t have been nearly enough. But it’s also pretty obvious that the two belong together. Again, I want all the markers to stay. But I don’t want them to stay at the expense of the Dixie Highway. Controversy will continue to swirl around statues, flags, and other items legitimately tied to the Confederacy. The Dixie Highway should not be part of that. Saying, as I have, that neither the word Dixie nor the Dixie Highway is inherently racist loses some sincerity if defending the road includes defending these markers.

A Dixie by Any Other Name

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If something called a dixie existed, I have little doubt that we could refer to it differently without changing its aroma, but the word “dixie” doesn’t really identify anything. It is not, in other words, a common noun. As a proper noun — with a capital ‘D’ — it is used as both a surname and a given name and to identify a wide variety of things including a region of our country. People with a first, last, or nickname of Dixie surely outnumber things bearing the name but there are certainly plenty of those. It has been used to identify buildings, songs, currency, music groups, towns, counties, movies, beer, boats, ships, taverns, race tracks, waterways, restaurants, mountain ranges, athletic conferences, grocery stores, airports, schools, universities, and much more. With an ‘X’ made of a stylized flower, Dixie is a registered trademark of Georgia-Pacific for a brand of paper products.

In the 1960s, an all-girl singing group borrowed the name — without the flowery ‘X’ — of those familiar disposable cups and topped the charts with hits like “Chapel of Love” and “Iko Iko”. Near the end of the twentieth century, another all-girl group hit the charts with a name containing the word “dixie”. That group, the Dixie Chicks, generated some controversy, but it came from political statements and not from their name. I’m not aware of any controversy at all associated with the Dixie Cups, and I’m guessing that they didn’t consider the word “dixie” to be racist.

But recently the word has been associated with racism by some. The Dixie Highway has been included in some of these claims which naturally caused me to take notice. It is an outgrowth of the rise of controversy and confrontation over Confederate monuments and streets named after Confederate generals. If the move to change a roughly six-mile-long street from Hood to Hope was complicated, renaming a piece of the nearly 6,000-mile-long Dixie Highway must be at least three orders of magnitude more so.

The aforementioned Hood Street was in Hollywood, FL, where three streets (Hood, Lee, and Forest) were renamed (Hope, Liberty, and Freedom) in November 2017. In Riviera Beach, FL, a couple of miles of Old Dixie Highway were renamed President Barack Obama Highway in 2015. The picture at left was taken between the two, near Boyton Beach. Of course, the word “dixie” had nothing to do with the renamings in Hollywood. The generals after which the streets were named had clearly been chosen because of their roles in the Confederacy. The word didn’t have much to do with the name change in Riviera Beach, either. Residents cited the role of the street as a dividing line between black and white and the site of KKK cross burnings.

Although I’d have preferred it hadn’t happened, I have no serious objection to the Riviera Beach action. It was based on specific and painful memories. That doesn’t always appear to be the case when replacing the Dixie Highway name is proposed. Published reports of these proposals have occasionally prompted me to send emails to people connected with them. It is not done to protest but to inform. We road fans often comment — and sometimes laugh or cry — about people being completely oblivious to a major historic highway running right by their door. Knowing how common that is with “celebrities” like the Lincoln Highway and Route 66, we shouldn’t be surprised that it is even more often the case with the lesser known and more complex Dixie Highway. Not knowing just how important or far-reaching all the roads in your neighborhood once were is a pretty natural situation.

It seems that even we fans don’t always consider that “far-reaching” bit. It’s OK to be saddened by a name change, but there is no reason to verbally abuse, as I’ve seen too many times, those backing a change. Removing the name Dixie Highway from a few miles of Florida — or other — roadway is not going to affect all those other miles any more than Cheyenne, WY, (The first town to do so.) changing its Main Street to Lincoln Way impacted the rest of the continent crossing highway. The Dixie Highway, as well as every other named auto trail, was never labeled with its name in every jurisdiction it passed through. Numbered US and state highways utilize streets and roads with all sorts of names. Not one inch of US-66 officially exists at present yet people follow it every day. The Adairsville, GA, pavement in the picture at left is officially named and signed Main Street but that doesn’t change its past as a part of the Dixie Highway or prevent it being unofficially marked as such.

Most of the talk about renaming sections of the Dixie Highway has originated in Florida. In some sense, that’s ironic since the Dixie Highway was a major factor in the development of the state. On the other hand, development is rarely 100% beneficial to all and I’ve no doubt that many were negatively impacted by the development and the road that helped it along. Plus, as those Riviera Beach memories show, experiences generate stronger feelings than a name or a physical path ever could. About two weeks ago, the New York Times published an article based on discussions in Florida’s Miami-Dade County. Its audience was almost certainly wider than that of similar articles publishes by Florida based news organizations. One indication of that was a small but obvious two-day blip in visits to an eight-year-old Dixie Highway related post on this blog. Maybe that’s somehow fitting since I’ve often quoted the Times when trying to convey that the Dixie Highway is not inherently evil. In 1915, the paper referred to the route as “The Dixie Peaceway” when it reported the formation of the Dixie Highway Association. It described the road as “a monument to celebrate the half-century of peace within the Union”. Maybe that was hyperbole or maybe it really reflected the feelings of the time. If so, it seems extra sad that so many see it as something entirely different today.

Those people who found this site after reading the New York Times article didn’t learn a whole lot during their visit but they were obviously curious. They were brought by search engines which may have also taken them to other sites where they learned much more. Whether curiosity was their only reason for visiting or they were decision-makers gathering background, I’ll never know. Regardless, I suspect we will see a few more miles of Dixie Highway get renamed before it’s all over. That’s unfortunate but hardly a disaster. No matter the name, it will still smell like a rose — or maybe an orange blossom — with strong undertones of asphalt and Model T brake bands.

ADDENDUM 9-Feb-2020: Some thoughts on the markers placed along the Dixie Highway by the United Daughters of the Confederacy were considered for this post but have been given their own post instead. Free? Advertising on the Dixie

So It’s a Little Fishy

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It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Groundhog Day. I don’t mean the movie, although I like that well enough. No, I mean Groundhog Day the day. I’ve seen Punxsutawney Phil, Buckeye Chuck, and Rosie the Groundhog perform predictions regarding the nearness of spring. I once had plans to observe Woodstock Willy at work but those got knocked off by a blizzard. I have eaten some sort of pork sausage on the second day of February for several decades. I’m quite taken with the holiday and may get out to see one of the furry forecasters next week, but yesterday I checked in with a popular predictor of a very different sort.

Several years ago, some folks in Buckeye Lake, Ohio, hatched a plan to give their community a little mid-winter boost. Winterfest involves many of the town’s eating and drinking establishments. Special food and drink offers combine with assorted entertainment to make it a fun day and fuel sales. A blatantly groundhog day like event anchors and opens the festival.

By 6:00 AM, a crowd had begun to gather in the park near the lake. Around 6:30 Benny the Bass arrived in his hundred-gallon aquarium. Music, dancing, and some lighthearted speeches helped build the excitement until 7:00 when a bucket of minnows was emptied into the tank. According to the six-year-old legend, if Benny downs a minnow in a minute or less, an early spring is on the way. If not, winter will drag on for another six weeks. I’d read that the official chant was “Take the bait. Spring can’t wait”, but chants of “Eat it Benny” were all I heard today as time ticked away. The thirty-second warning was reached then a countdown of the final seconds and a loud moan of disappointment from the crowd. I wonder if the old “Take the bait” chant would have made a difference. 

It was a short moan that got quickly covered by the boom of fireworks and a blast of Springsteen. “Glory Days”, rockets’ red and white glare, “Born in the USA”, and for many, it was time to go get a beer.

The crowd thinned quickly so I was able to see the whole tank for the first time. I walked around it to photograph the bad news that someone had written on the glass on the opposite side, but before long, the same sad prediction was written on the other side as well.

The opening photo was taken yesterday when I first came into town and stopped by the Buckeye Lake Brewery. That’s where Benny will be displayed for the rest of the weekend. The bartender had suggested parking near the brewery and walking to the park. That’s what I did which gave me an opportunity to stop by Our Lakeside Diner for breakfast on the way back. A Groundhog Day breakfast always includes pork sausage. Today was a lot like Groundhog Day but sausage didn’t seem all that appropriate for the occasion. My problem was solved when I saw perch & eggs on the menu. Walleye was also offered but perch seemed just right.

By the time I finished breakfast and walked on to the brewery, Benny had been moved to an adjacent spot. The finned boat and wood-grained wagon make for a really classy ensemble. I don’t think there was an official minnow count so it’s unknown if any are missing but Benny and most — if not all — of the minnows seem to be getting along reasonably well.

Unlike many of the festival attendees, I wasn’t quite ready for a beer. I paused briefly at the brewery then moved on for a walkabout that let me peek at some of the other businesses in town. I eventually settled down in the tent in front of the brewery to listen to Paper Street Music Company while enjoying one of those multipurpose beers that fans had promoted at Benny’s side. Not every business in town was open but those that were seemed pretty busy. Apparently that wintertime boost Winterfest was created for is a reality and bennyfishal to all participants.