I usually try rather hard to avoid chain restaurants but here’s one I went to less than a week after it opened. Not the chain — which opened in 2012 — but the latest link. Florida-based Ford’s Garage opened its first Ohio restaurant in the former LeBlond Machine Tool Company powerhouse in Norwood on Thursday, May 5. I stopped in the following Wednesday.
The first I became aware of the chain was when I read an announcement about this one being planned for Cincinnati. Of course, any restaurant featuring ‘burgers and beers has a good chance of catching my attention but it sounded like this place had a little more going for it. It is an official licensee of the Ford Motor Company which allows it to use the Ford name and logo and it uses Ford cars for decoration. It was obviously a place I was likely to visit eventually so I decided to do it sooner rather than later.
The 1917 powerhouse, which was most recently occupied by a Don Pablo’s, is accessorized to resemble an early service station. Gas pumps and a pair of Model A Fords stand near the entrance and there is a Model T and another Model A inside. The cars and the building are of similar vintage. A Library of Congress photo shows the building when it was younger.
The building’s high ceilings allow faux Fords to circulate around the restaurant on a simulated assembly line and a stationary Model A hangs over the bar. A penny-covered wall holds forty beer taps. As I was taking the picture of the taps, a restaurant employee told me there were 21,004 pennies on the wall. I have a suspicion he made that up on the spot but I’m not sure so I’m repeating it.
Of course, it takes more than decor to make a restaurant. There’s a lot more than hamburgers on the menu but that’s sort of their featured item so that’s what I ordered. This is the quite tasty Mushroom & (Tillamook) Swiss. A couple of other things in this picture deserve mention. One is the shop towel napkin inside the hose clamp. The second is the frost-covered surface beneath the West Sixth Porter. About eight years ago I saw a similar setup in a bar in Kingman, Arizona, and figured it would be in every watering hole in the country before I got home. But this is the only other one I’ve ever seen which is not much help at all to my reputation as a futurist.
Despite it being a chain with a plethora of gimmicks, I basically liked the place. The chain is fairly small with twenty stores in five states and the gimmicks are mostly harmless (the napkins) or cool (the cars). One gimmick, however, seemed a bit overly silly to me. I noticed the funnel behind the bar and had vague intentions of asking about it when I overheard one of the bartenders talking about it with a visiting friend. He flipped an unseen switch to open a valve in the transmission (He called it the crankcase.) that allowed some liquid to drop into the funnel and into a glass placed below it. He said it was for a drink called the “Oil Change” although I’ve found no such drink on the menu. As I said, it struck me as quite silly but who am I (a fan of Max & Erma’s double-breasted beer taps) to judge.
Missed it by that much. I had this really great idea for a book title, and even figured out the story that would fit it. I would drive one way across the country on the Yellowstone Trail and the other way on US 20. I would do this in the year 2020, and the resulting travelogue would be perfectly described by that catchy title: 20 in ’20 and the YT Too. But COVID-19 played havoc with 2020 travel plans and the wonderful title’s “best if used by” date came and went. I made the planned trip a year later and adjusted the title appropriately. It’s admittedly not quite the same but it’s not horrible. Is it? Well?
This post is a direct violation of one of the claims made on this blog’s “About” page. There the claim is made that “You will not be seeing a review of the latest novel…”. I suppose I could claim that, at the time of this review, The Lincoln Highway: A Novel is no longer the absolute latest novel, but the fact that it is a “#1 New York Times Best Seller” means it is precisely the sort of mainstream major publisher offering I had in mind when I made that claim. My primary defense is that I was tricked into reading it. Realizing that not everyone will see that as a legitimate justification, I will try to minimize the impact of the violation by not doing a very good job.
I got this book from Billy on May 7, 2015. I finished reading it on March 15, 2022. It is, as Billy himself admits and my elapsed reading time confirms, “a difficult read”. “Most people,” he says, “have understandably given up on it.” I was determined not to be like most people — no matter how long it took.
The book has been called a semi-autobiographical novel. According to Billy, it tells about his early life. “The best story I can tell in words is there if one really wants to know it”, he says. The writing style has been called stream of consciousness. In some manner, “stream of consciousness” and “semi-autobiographical” might also apply to the giant metal sculpture that is his life work. Its picture is on the book’s back cover. It is what initially made me and most others aware of Billy’s existence. When I first happened upon the sculpture in 2005, I thought its name, “Billy Tripp’s Mindfield”, might have been the title of a misplaced Beatles song, and learning that William Blevins Tripp is the artist’s real name has not entirely erased that image.
The first Easter post, in 
I’ve always wanted to have hair like Peter Frampton, and now I do. Many years ago, I told myself (and a few others) that when my hair loss reached a certain point, what remained would go too. Although I never really specified what that point was, I’m pretty sure I’ve gone beyond what I had in mind at the time. Once I acknowledged that, I had only to pick an occasion and have at it. Birthday #75 seems as appropriate an occasion as any.
Including this picture in this post also seemed appropriate. I’ve used it before — originally for 
