A Darke Drive

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A sixteen-mile long driving tour some fifty miles from home is what passes for a road trip when cabin fever and a coronavirus collide. Several years ago, the Arcanum Wayne Trail Historical Society folks put together a self-guided driving tour of the nearby area. That area is the southern part of the county where I was raised so the tour naturally interested me. As I recall, when the tour was first announced, there was some sort of museum event associated with the launch. I couldn’t make it but copied the tour description to my phone and plotted the route on my GPS. My intent was to combine driving the tour with a visit to the museum, but it never became a high priority and, with the museum open just one day a month, it never happened. The COVID-19 pandemic has eliminated even that single day of museum operation while elevating my need for some sort of outing. Road trips planned for April, May, and June have evaporated, those envisioned for July are all but gone, and August doesn’t look any better.

The tour passes one street south of the museum but I stopped by for a picture. The other pictured building is just up the block and some may remember it from this 2017 post. Sadly, the restaurant that was housed in the building and which triggered the post has closed. I’ve since seen a couple more Battle Ax Plus signs, but this was the first.

Arcanum’s Main Street runs north and south. I’m guessing that George Street, where the museum sits, was the original main east-west street since the first street north of it and the first street south of it are called, respectively, North Street and South Street. The tour begins at the intersection of Main and South and heads west, toward the water tower, on South Street. Arcanum isn’t a large town (population 2129 in 2010) so it doesn’t take long to reach open countryside.

South Street quickly becomes Arcanum-Hollansburg Road and intersects State Route 503 in just a few miles. At the corner, a church that was once part of a settlement named Beech Grove has been converted to a home. The tour turns south here, but I headed a short distance north to pause at the cemetery. Someone keeps the cemetery mowed but there is little evidence of any other sort of maintenance. A neighbor’s tractor display helps make the stop worthwhile.

I returned to the tour route and followed it to another cemetery. This is Ithaca Cemetery just north of the town by that name. Going backwards in time, we have veterans of the Civil War, Mexican War, and War od 1812. There are quite a few Civil War veterans buried here including one with a modern military plaque. That sort of plaque is common but I don’t recall ever seeing one for a Civil War vet. Sure is easier to read than weathered stone.

The tour description identifies four burials of significance here but I only managed to locate two. The first is Arcanum’s founder, William Gunder, who is buried next to his wife Nancy. The other is Revolutionary War veteran William Ashley although calling it a burial isn’t really accurate. Ashley was buried on a family farm nearby and when a new owner refused public access to the site, the marker was relocated here. Presumedly, Ashley himself was not moved. The other markers in the picture are for Revolutionary War veterans Ezekiel Farmer and William Walker. These are fairly recent additions and are not mentioned in the tour description. My guess is that these are also markers only.

The tour makes two passes through Ithaca. The directions discuss the impressive three-story I.O.O.F. building on the second pass but I paused for this photo when I entered from the north. The two passes actually overlap only at this intersection. This small crop of Corvairs, which look overly ripe and may have missed their harvest date, is at Ithaca’s western edge.

This is Darke-Preble County Line Road and, since I’m on the south side driving east, I may actually be in Preble County taking these pictures. The trees and bridge mark Miller’s Fork which is, according to the tour directions, “the speculated location of the first settlement of white people in southern Darke County.” The second picture is of the intersection with OH-503 which once contained a toll house, a one-room school, and the aforementioned Ashley farm. The tour directions do not indicate where the farm was in relation to the intersection so the location of William Ashley’s remains may or may not be in the picture.

The tour heads north on OH-503 but turns off of it on the second pass through Ithaca. It then returns to its starting point on Arcanum-Ithaca Road which becomes Main Street at the city limits. It was great to get out and drive some back roads even if it was for less than two hours including graveyard loitering. It helped with road trip withdrawal for the very short term, but overall it may have aggravated it by reminding me of what I’m missing. 

Book Review
Secret Route 66
Jim Ross & Shellee Graham

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At first glance, this probably looks like a perfect fit for my bookshelf. Like many of the other books there, its subject is a historic highway and its authors are people I know. In this case, the highway is Route 66 and the people are the husband-and-wife team of Jim Ross and Shellee Graham. Both are accomplished historians, photographers, and writers with Jim probably having a bit of an edge in the history department, Shellee having an equally small lead on the photography side, and their writing skills being too close to call. A second glance, however, just might turn up something about this book that is different from most of the others with which it now shares shelf space. It is the word “secret”.

I am not a fan of books with words like “haunted”, “mysterious”, “unsolved”, or “bloody” in their titles. I don’t know whether or not that puts me in a minority of road fans, but apparently it does in the larger world of readers in general. A writer friend’s publisher has pushed for a “haunted” book saying they are four times as popular as the other kind. To me, those words smack of exploitation. They seem to scream out the intent of emphasizing some sort of supernatural or scandalous connection for a topic that must be otherwise boring. I acknowledge that “secret” doesn’t sound quite as exploitative as “haunted” and that even “haunted” and the other words I’ve mentioned can be used as honest labels, but I still find them offputting.

Anyone who read my blog entry about visiting the recently reopened American Sign Museum will know when I bought this book and may even have some idea why. The ASM, like practically every other museum in the country, was hit hard by a COVID-19 related closing. As a member, I’d paid nothing for my visit, and wanted to show a little support with a purchase.

So how is this book I didn’t exactly want? Surprisingly good. I’m not really all that surprised, of course. To my relief, the idea of revealing secrets doesn’t get much further than the title. I doubted that a pair of respected authorities would suddenly become conspiratorial sounding characters sharing dark secrets from the shadows but it was good to have that verified. To some extent, the subtitle also does that. Weird, wonderful, and obscure accurately describe the book’s contents.

Almost everything in Secret Route 66: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure is something that, while not actually a secret, is not likely to be found in mainstream guides. Even when the subject is something commonly known, Ross and Graham provide some detail or backstory not commonly known at all. Sometimes the subject isn’t a place or a thing but simply that uncommon detail or story.  Among the things that struck me as weird is the true tale of a proposal to use atomic bombs for roadway excavation. Everyone has their own definition of wonderful but my definition is matched by the story of the Motel St. Louis sign that wandered off to help people find another motel (Finn’s in St. James) and then a church (New Hope) before being rescued and returned home. I thought learning about the annual reunion for the ghost town of Alanreed was kind of wonderful, too. Topping my personal list of obscure things is the chapter on several abandoned bridge abutments on the original route through Santa Fe.

A pair of facing pages make up each of the ninety chapters so that everything about an item can be studied without flipping back and forth. A sidebar contains appropriate information, such as location. These pages are printed in black and white, but they are augmented by sixteen pages of color photographs (plus 2 b&w to make the positioning work) in the middle of the book. Some page flipping here is appropriate but the subject and associated page number are shown for each photo to make it easy. Images in the book are a mixture of historic and modern. Most of the modern photos are the work of the authors but not all. Other researchers and photographers are always credited with images provided.

I ended up liking this book that I didn’t exactly want. That really was to be expected with the Ross and Graham names on the cover. It’s a good reference to add to a Route 66 library although not to start one. Seeing obscure things is good. Seeing only obscure things not so much. You don’t want to come home from your first Route 66 trip and have to say “no” to every “Did you see?” your neighbors and relatives ask. You want to respond with, “Yes, and did you see the [put your favorite Route 66 ‘secret’ here]?” 

Secret Route 66: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure, Jim Ross and Shellee Graham, Reedy Press, LLC,  October 15, 2017, 6 x 9 inches, 208 pages, ISBN 978-1681061078
Available through Amazon.

Maya at the Cincinnati Museum Center

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March 14 was to be opening day for a huge exhibit of Maya artifacts at the Cincinnati Museum Center. March 9 was the day a state of emergency triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic was declared in Ohio. The opening did not happen. On Friday, nearly four months later than planned, I was among the first group of visitors to step into the exhibit. We all wore face masks and all staff members wore face masks in addition to clear plastic shields. We were all museum members as only members are allowed in for the first week. Our entry time was preselected which is pretty normal with major exhibits at the museum but the number allowed for each interval was considerably less than what it would have been in March. There were floor markings to encourage six feet of separation and a few interactive “experiences” were removed to eliminate contact. Touching the artifacts would be forbidden in any case and I don’t believe any were removed. All 300+ seemed to be right where they had been waiting for four months.

The Children’s Museum and the cave portion of the Natural History Museum are closed but most of the center is open. Entry, however, is now time-based and I had reserved a slot for checking other things out after the Maya exhibit. That was not to be as I immediately headed home. Missing an appointment with an AC service guy in July is not wise.

That scheduled service call did not actually make me rush through the exhibit but it did cause some shortcuts. As I entered, I learned that an audio tour was available through my phone, but in the probably mistaken belief that it might slow me down, I ignored it. No doubt that’s one reason I have so little information to share on specific items. I read every description but took no notes, not even with my camera, and my memory did not retain details very long.

I did not photograph many of the numerous small pieces in the exhibit and didn’t even do a particularly good job with the larger ones. The three items displayed here against the lighted and decorated pyramids can reasonably be called mid-sized. The picture at the beginning of this article is of the one at the front right of the wider view.

This stela is one of the largest items in the exhibit. It can be seen beyond the pyramids in the previous pictures. Created in 800 CE near the peak of Maya civilization, it documents some of the accomplishments of a Maya king. That’s something I happen to know because of some only slightly blurry photo notes.

Only four Maya codices, all written after the civilization’s peak, are known to exist. The Cincinnati exhibit includes this partial reproduction. It and the two stone carvings are among the items I wish I’d picked up more details on, and it’s likely they will become justifications for a return.

I have no details to share about the stone mask but I do have this for the jaguar man. The exhibit was originally scheduled to close on September 7 but the delayed opening has moved that to January 3, 2021. I hope to return and be better prepared with more time when I do.

As for the rest of the museum, I will definitely be returning, possibly as soon as this coming week, to see that. I sort of want to see what changes COVID-19 has triggered and I most definitely want to check out a special exhibit on women and the vote that is open through September 27. As everyone should know, this is the centennial of the first national election in which women were permitted to vote. 

Book Review
The Tinker of Tinkertown
Carla Ward

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I guess my purchase of this book fits the technical description of an impulse buy, but I sure don’t think of it that way. Yes, I bought it without a hint of hesitation the instant I learned of its existence and there was certainly a lot more emotion than logic involved in the decision. But I sincerely believe that the logical part of my brain had long ago decided that acquiring this book was something I needed to do as soon as it existed. If it ever did.

It was the last day of June 2011, almost exactly nine years before I heard of this book, that I first heard of Tinkertown. As I sat in an Albuquerque hotel room working on the day’s journal, a friend sent a message saying, “Don’t forget to checkout Tinkertown”. In the morning, I did just that and was immediately blown away. Ross Ward, the tinker — and creator — of Tinkertown had already been gone for many years but I got to see many of his artworks, meet Carla, his widow, and tour the museum that the two of them had built in Sandia Park. It was a place that simultaneously reminded me of some of the many one-man folk-art installations I’d seen while being completely unlike any of them.

As I’m sure is the case with many visitors, it was the mechanized carvings that made the biggest impression on me. It’s the sort of blending of engineering and artistic creativity that tugs at both the analytical and the aesthetically driven parts of my brain. There was ample evidence of Ward’s other talents in some flat paintings, the bottle filled walls, and the sometimes whimsical but always artful signs appearing throughout the museum and grounds. There were enough hints of Ward’s life outside of Tinkertown to seriously arouse interest. That interest really can’t be satisfied with a single book, but this one does a remarkable job of trying.

Sometime between the book being ordered and its arrival, I revisited its description and noticed its length of thirty-six pages. I wasn’t worried but I did wonder how Carla could tell Ross’ story in just three dozen pages. The answer, as I think I already knew, is “Just fine.” She tells it with pictures and just enough well-chosen words to properly place those pictures in Ross Ward’s life and to tell some details of that life that the pictures do not.

There are several delightful photos of Ward, but the bulk are of his art and the bulk of those are in a section of “2D Work”. It’s a section I found quite interesting as most of its contents are things not displayed at Tinkertown. Items range from posters to etchings to fine art paintings representing nearly every period in Ward’s life. A personal favorite is a circus parade that he drew on thirty feet of adding machine paper at the age of eight.

A “Tinkertown” section follows. The pictures in it are of things I’ve seen but that doesn’t make me enjoy it any less. The well-done photos provide an excellent look at the exhibits that got me interested in Ross Ward to begin with. A timeline of Ross Ward’s life appears on the final page. 

There might be just thirty-six pages in The Tinker of Tinkertown, but they are really great pages. I’ve learned that images of the flat artwork came from high-resolution scans and that Carla (with an iPhone 11) is responsible for most of the modern photos including those shots of sideshow attractions and trapeze artists in Tinkertown. The images are well served by the fairly heavy semi-gloss paper they are printed on. That paper, by the way, is Forest Stewardship Council certified which speaks not only to the quality of this book but to the quality of the people at Tinkertown.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused Tinkertown to miss its traditional April 1 opening this year but the museum and staff are ready for the reopening when it is permitted. The book, of course, will be available there when that reopening occurs, but until then an online purchase is the only option available. Order your copy here.

The Tinker of Tinkertown: The Life and Art of Ross Ward, Carla Ward, Tinkertown Press, June, 2020, 11 x 8.5 inches, 36 pages, ISBN 978-0-9793124-8-9

Return of the Signs

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Concerts, museums, festivals, and parades have all made frequent appearances in this blog but not lately. They have all been impacted by the COVID-19 shutdown. I”ve tried to keep my concert cravings in check by watching online live streams and even did a post about it back in the early days of the quasi-quarantine. The closest a museum has come to being the subject of a post in the last several months is when I covered the new stairs at the closed Cincinnati Art Museum. Until today.

The Cincinnati Art Museum opened to members on June 18th and to the public two days later. Parts of the Cincinnati Museum Center will be open to members on July 10 and to the public on the 17th. The American Sign Museum allowed members in on July 1 and will open to the public on Wednesday, July 8. Preceding a general opening with a members-only “soft opening” isn’t the only thing these three have in common. All will operate at reduced capacity enforced by advance reservations. Employees and visitors will be screened for high temperatures. All employees will wear masks and masks will be required for all visitors to the Sign Museum. The other two stress the wisdom of wearing masks and ask that visitors comply but apparently won’t actually require it. Hopefully, anyone not wearing a mask will be glared at intensely until they at least start smoldering.

Almost as soon as I heard of the Sign Museum’s opening, I went online to make my reservation. I had expected to be asked to pick a day and time but was simply assigned the first slot on the first day. That was just fine with me but I’m guessing a phone call is required if a specific time and date is needed. Before entering, I stepped out front to get a look at the recently added Burma-Shave style signs. Here is the font-appropriate finale. The big letters atop the building were rescued from Cincinnati Gardens just ahead of its 2018 demolition. The ‘S’ was moved and three lower case letters added to make the perfect sign museum topper.

Once inside, it was scan, scan, scan. My temperature was checked with a forehead scan, my ticket was scanned on my phone, and I scanned a QR code for the self-guided tour. The free live tours have been temporarily halted to help maintain social distancing. I’d never tried the audio tour and figured I should since the live tour I always recommend won’t be available for a while. The audio tour is accessed through a smartphone by scanning the QR code or entering the URL. It then plays through the phone (earphones recommended) and is controlled (start, stop, etc.) through it. I was quite impressed and will have no qualms about recommending it in lieu of a live expert. With or without a guide, I almost always find something new when I visit although sometimes it’s something that’s been there since day one and I’d just not noticed. These signs on the floor were definitely new. They are placed throughout the museum as reminders about social distancing and to provide visual hints as to just how far six feet is.

Of course, all the old favorites are still there. The audio tour talks about the history of signs just like a live guide would and describes many of the more interesting signs on display. It doesn’t cover every detail of every sign and that’s just like a live guide, too. Exploring and reading on your own is part of the fun. The audio tour does come up short when it comes to answering questions but the folks at the front desk and roaming staff members are happy to do that.

A favorite spot of mine is this workshop area which is usually open with contents constantly changing. Some signs leave here to return to their proper homes in the wild while others are on their way to be displayed in the museum. The big camera, a highlight of my day, is one of the latter. A lot of space remains unfilled in the building housing the museum and a major expansion is in the works. As told here, the neon trimmed Pentax, complete with working flash, will be part of that expansion.

As I mentioned, I sometimes think something is new when it isn’t but I’m pretty confident that both of these items are recent additions. The “color chart” was once used by Cincinnati’s Holthaus-Lackner Signs who donated it. I’m absolutely certain that the neon sculpture is new because I watched the comment card being taped to the window as I approached. For any who miss the Dan Aykroyd connection, there’s this. The Neonworks sign shop can be glimpsed in the background of both of these photos. Guided weekday tours usually included a visit inside the shop. Those visits are on hold along with the tours but you can still watch through the windows.

Before leaving, I made a pass through the gift shop where I spotted this book by a couple of friends in Oklahoma. I then posted a picture similar to this one to a Route 66 Facebook group. It has received about fifty reactions (including from one of the authors) but no comments. I really expected someone to jump all over the Kentucky tagged items on the left and those on the right tagged Ohio. Route 66 ran through eight states that are listed on an out of frame sign, and neither Kentucky nor Ohio is among them. Those two states do, however, supply the majority of museum visitors and gift shop customers. There is a Stanley Marsh 3 (the Cadillac Ranch guy) sign on the cover of the book that reads “ART IS WHAT YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH”. Clearly, those candles are art.

Blocked

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Back in December, I was unfriended on Facebook for what I believe to be the first time. I can now add being blocked to my list of Facebook experiences. On the occasion of the unfriending, I noted it in a Facebook post, and my first thought was to do the same for the blocking, but I decided to do a blog post instead. For one thing, I did not have a post planned for this week, and for another, I thought something longer than what comfortably fits in a Facebook post was appropriate. It also lets me include a few more details about both the December unfriending that surprised me and the recent blocking that didn’t.

As I said in that December post, I am conflict-averse. I don’t go out of my way to stir up trouble or to seek it out. Very few (possibly none) of my own posts are overtly political and I don’t even respond to all that many which are. I do occasionally hit the “Like” button on posts I agree with and find especially clever or insightful. I think I may have tapped “Angry” on a post or two I didn’t agree with, and I know I’ve punched in “Haha” on some posts linked to satire that I’m pretty sure the poster did not recognize as such. Those are enough, I would guess, that, even though I haven’t shouted out my political position, anyone who cared and was paying attention could make a tolerably good guess.

I almost never get any more aggressive than providing links to items debunking claims I know to be false. This is what got me unfriended and blocked. The fellow who unfriended me is someone I’ve met in real life and with whom I share some interests. Our politics probably don’t align perfectly, but they lean in the same direction. The end of our cyber-friendship began when he posted a meme comprised of a picture of Donald Trump with a quote that started with, “If I were to run, I’d run as a Republican. They’re the dumbest group of voters in the country.” It was something I’d seen before and which I knew was a fabrication. I commented with a link (possibly this one) providing some evidence of that. In very short order, the comment was deleted, and I was unfriended within the next few hours.

I was very surprised and thrashed around for a while looking for other explanations but eventually decided that I had actually been cut loose because of that comment. Part of my surprise was due to the meme being one I’d probably welcome if it were true. But misinformation doesn’t become truth by being palatable.

This was hardly the only time I’ve posted corrections to items I might have wished were true, though I’ll admit to there being even more times I’ve offered corrections to posts I was very happy weren’t true. A common response is simply silence, but reactions range from thanking me and deleting the post to disparaging my sources and attempting to justify the post. If I respond at all to people denigrating fact-checking sites such as Snopes or Politifact, it is to encourage them to be as selective in the sources they do believe as in the sources they won’t believe. I accept that some fact-checking sites can be perceived as having a bias, but it makes no sense to me to automatically dismiss a statement that offers some supporting evidence in favor of a meme that offers none. At the extreme, and I’ve only seen this a couple of times, people have claimed that something must be true purely because a disliked fact-checking site says it is false.

Rarely does the defense of a post I’ve responded to involve evidence. It’s almost always along the lines of “Well, it could be true.” or “But, that’s what they want to do.” I really find that disheartening as it’s saying that it doesn’t matter if something is true or not, as long as it’s for “my side”. In my mind, defending your position with falsehoods does more harm than good. Those attempted defenses aren’t quite as disheartening as being unfriended or blocked, though. Taking those steps seems to be saying that, not only don’t I care about this particular bit of truth but I don’t want to hear about any others, either.

This week’s blocking wasn’t much of a surprise at all. The blocker regularly posts multiple pro-Trump memes and comments, brimming with misspellings, and errors in grammar and punctuation, every day. The majority are simply rah rah opinions, but once in a great while, he posts something that makes a claim of fact. Once in a greater while, I’ll offer a correction.

Once was in May of last year when he posted a somewhat popular meme about the repeal of a 1952 law that prevented Muslims from holding political office. It is debunked here, which I linked to in a comment. At that time, I didn’t even know that anyone other than the originator and Mark Z could delete a comment so, when it disappeared, I assumed I hadn’t posted it properly and tried again. It disappeared again. That day I learned that the owner of a post can delete comments, then grinned, and moved on.

On Tuesday, I happened to catch a post of his with a quite old meme claiming that ABC had banned the wearing of US flag pins. I recognized it instantly and spent a few seconds to pass along this link that debunks it. It wasn’t long until both my comment and the post disappeared, and I eventually figured out I’d been blocked. On Wednesday I learned that blocking is kind of like unfriending-plus, then grinned and moved on.

I’ll admit that the guy was kind of fun to watch and in some odd way, I might even miss his strings of commas and other “creative” bits of punctuation now and then. But in my heart, I know this breakup was for the best. I’ve never unfriended or blocked anyone, but during the leadup to the 2016 election, I did temporarily stop following some people. I suspect I’ll have to do that again in the next few months. Unless, of course, some more trash takes itself out.

Book Review
Roadside Pics and Picks
Tim O’brien

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The subject of my most recent book review was also a photobook and it also included things at roadside, but the similarity doesn’t go much further. That other book (A Matter of Time) dealt with a specific highway. This one features stuff beside a bunch of different highways and exactly which highway is hardly ever important. Maybe that hints at the basic difference between the two books. (And before I write it out loud let me say I’m a big fan of both approaches.) One book is serious; The other is fun.

To continue my comparison of the two books just one gratuitous step further, one identifies with fine art and proceeds to deliver. The other book also mentions fine art but it’s really just in passing. Here’s what O’Brien says:

I am not a studio photographer. I am not a fine arts photographer. I am here to document something.

There aren’t all that many more words in O’Brien’s book. There’s a foreword from RoadsideAmerica.com’s Doug Kirby and an introduction of sorts, titled “Prelude to an Exhibition”, from O’Brien. I lifted the quote from there. The rest is almost all images. Collections of similar items and sites with multiple photos get a few descriptive paragraphs. Individual photos are captioned with their location only. There is no narrator.

I’ve probably milked all I can from the coincidental reviewing of two photobooks in a row so let’s take a serious look at this fun book. It is softcovered. All images are printed in full color which allows them to “document something” quite well. It is divided into sections for the three categories promised by the subtitle plus a bonus fourth.

The bonus section comes first. “Roadside Art Parks” documents seven of the more famous examples of the genre with quite a few pictures of each. I got an exaggerated opinion of my own worldliness when I counted two of the first three as ones I’d visited. I was put back in my proper place when I ended the section with a score of 3 out of 7.

The “high” of the subtitle appears next in “Things-On-A-Pole”. I’d quickly learned my lesson and made no attempt to count and compare what I’d seen. In addition to tires, there are pictures of elevated fish, airplanes, cars, trucks, boats, etc. Et cetera includes a category labeled “Stuff”.

In addition to famous installations such as Cadillac Ranch, Carhenge, and the sadly vanished Airstream Ranch, “Half-Buried” includes quite a few of the not so well known examples of things poking out of the ground. The pages pictured at left show a personal favorite. When I visited Combine City in 2007, there were ten retired machines planted in the Texas field. There are fourteen in O’Brien’s description so it apparently kept growing for at least a while. On the other hand, the dedicated website that existed in 2007 has gone missing.

Section four, “Roadside Giants” fulfills the promise of the subtitle’s “huge”. There are subcategories like animals, donuts, people, and the ever-popular stuff. The donuts category offers a find-the-bagel challenge you can play at home.

I met Tim O’Brien at the 2019 Society for Commercial Archeology conference where I learned just enough about his career as a photojournalist to become jealous. He spent years in public relations for Ripley’s Believe it or Not!, more years editing Amusement Business magazine, and even more years free-lancing and authoring his own books. Those years were often overlapping. Maybe some of the photos in Roadside Pics & Picks are outtakes from past projects. Maybe some are from side trips slipped into totally unrelated assignments. In fact, both situations seem rather likely. Something that seems absolutely certain, regardless of how he came to photograph each of these huge, high, and half-buried pieces of roadside art, is that he was having fun doing it. Also certain is the fact that I had fun looking at the pictures regardless of whether they brought back memories, triggered an addition to my To-Do list, or made me mourn something that’s gone. And it made me jealous again.

Tim O’Brien’s Roadside Pics & Picks: The Huge, the High, the Half-Buried, Tim Obrien, Casa Flamingo Literary Arts, April 24, 2020, 11 x 8.5 inches, 174 pages, ISBN 978-0996750455
Available through Amazon.

My Caboodles — Chapter 2
Madonnas of the Trail

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The Madonna of the Trail statues were one of the first things that entered my mind when I initially started thinking of sets of things I had seen all of. When the era of named auto trails came to an end, a couple of the major auto trails undertook projects aimed at keeping their names alive for posterity. The Lincoln Highway was marked by nearly 2,500 concrete posts that literally guided travelers along the entire route. The National Old Trails Road Association’s project was, in some sense, less ambitious in that only twelve markers were placed; One in each state the highway passed through. The markers themselves were much larger and more intricate than direction markers and all twelve still exist at or near their original locations which makes seeing the whole caboodle possible. Photos of the statues follow in the sequence in which I first saw them with the exception of the photo at right. That’s a 2018 photo of the Madonna in Richmond, Indiana. Comments accompanying the pictures include the date of dedication, its position in the sequence of dedications, and the coordinates of its location.

1. The first Madonna of the Trail monument I ever saw was, unsurprisingly, the one in my home state of Ohio. It originally stood about three miles west of downtown Springfield but was moved a little closer to town in 1956 or ’57. The first picture was taken in 2004 at the second location. I never saw her at her original location. The second picture shows her at her current home in downtown Springfield where she moved in 2011. Dedicated 1st, July 4, 1928. N39° 55.496′ W83° 48.677′

2. Of course, there’s also no surprise in the fact that my second Madonna was the one in Richmond, Indiana. Not only are these two Madonnas the closest to me, I believe they are closer to each other than any other pair. The first picture was taken in 2004 on the same day as a preceding picture of the Ohio Madonna. The second picture, with a clearer and brighter Madonna and a new walkway, was taken just two years later. Dedicated 9th, October 28, 1928. N39° 49.835′ W84° 52.334′

3. In 2005, I ventured one state beyond Indiana to visit my third Madonna of the Trail monument in Vandalia, Illinois. A festival that I never did identify, was in progress in the former state capital when we arrived. As part of the festival, raffle tickets were being sold at the base of the monument which sits on the grounds of the old capitol building. Dedicated 7th, October 26, 1928. N38° 57.649′ W89° 05.671′

4. A month later, I added two Madonnas in the states just east of Ohio. The sightings occurred on the way home from a business trip to central Pennsylvania so that state’s Madonna, at Beallsville, was encountered first. Dedicated 10th, December 8, 1928. N40° 03.630′ W80° 00.776′

5. West Virginia’s Madonna of the Trail came next. It is positioned a little east of Wheeling. At this point, 80% of the Madonna monuments I had seen were situated on or very near golf courses and I began to think there might be some sort of symbiotic relationship between the two. Dedicated 2nd, July 7, 1928. N40° 03.362′ W80° 40.157′

6. In September 2005, I bagged my fourth Madonna of the year and sixth overall. The California monument is not near a golf course or any other open space. It is in the city of Upland in the median of a busy street near an intersection with an even busier street. I would, in fact, never find another Madonna and golf course pairing. Dedicated 11th, February 1, 1929. N34° 06.434′ W117° 39.073′

7. In 2006, I drove the full length of the National Road in celebration of the 200th anniversary of the legislation that first authorized it. That took me past all of the Madonnas east of the Mississippi but only one of those was new to me. It was also missing. A sinkhole had endangered the Bethesda, Maryland, monument prior to my visit and it was stored a few miles away awaiting site repairs. That turned into an opportunity for my absolute favorite Madonna of the Trail photo ever. I was able to get a shot of the lady in her rightful place in 2011. Dedicated 12th, April 19, 1929. N38° 59.046′ W77° 05.655′

8. On the west edge of Lexington, Missouri’s Madonna of the Trail became my eighth in May 2007. Getting to two-thirds of the caboodle took just four years but it would be another four years before I would even get started on the last third. Dedicated 4th, September 17, 1928. N39° 11.197′ W93° 53.177′

9. A two Madonna day started in 2011 with the monument in Springerville, Arizona. Here the idea of Madonna of the Trail monuments being given scenic pastoral settings really took a beating. This lady occupies a small plot adjacent to a MacDonald’s. The marker behind her identifies this as a stop on a historic driving tour. Dedicated 7th, September 29, 1928. N34° 07.993′ W109° 17.108′

10. The second Madonna of the day was in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I’d been in Albuquerque before but had missed the monument. I had previously driven through the city on Historic US 66 which was the National Old Trails Road successor in these parts but I had not driven the original pre-1937 alignment which had followed the NOTR and on which the statue had been placed. Another complication was that the monument had been moved to the north corner of the area it was in which put it nearly a block away from even the old Sixty-Six alignment. To make up for missing it on earlier visits, I’ve included a picture of Madonna with a friend. Dedicated 6th, September 27, 1928. N35° 05.572′ W106° 38.991′

11. The count stayed at ten for another five years. I reached the final pair on consecutive days in 2016. The Madonna of the Trail monument in Lamar, Colorado, is next to an old train station now serving as a visitor center. Dedicated 5th, September 24, 1928. N38° 05.360′ W102° 37.147′

12. In Council Grove, Kansas, the setting for the Madonna of the Trail monument is pretty open. It’s a bit reminiscent of the park-like settings of my early Madonna visits even though there isn’t a golf course in sight. Dedicated 3rd, September 7, 1928. N38° 39.724′ W96° 29.212′

ADDENDUM 14-Jan-2024: After gathering the coordinates of all the Madonnas for another project, I decided to add them here.

Music Review
Blues With Friends
Dion

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I started off my recent review of Willie Nile’s latest album by talking about my initial experience with it and I’m going to do the same thing here. I ordered both CDs ahead of their release dates but my experiences with them do not have much in common beyond that. I kind of keep up with Willie and placed my order while the music was being recorded. I ordered Dion’s CD in response to an ad on Facebook. I honestly believe it’s the first thing I’ve actually bought through a Facebook ad despite the platform’s tendency to flood my feed with eerily well-targeted items. There was nothing even slightly mysterious about why this album appeared. Just look at its list of guests. Predicting that I might be interested really could have been a no-brainer.

The only thing even remotely eerie occurred on the day it arrived. June 5 was the official release date. On the morning of June 1, I got a message saying my order was out for delivery. Preordering can have its advantages. In the afternoon, I took a look at Facebook and saw that a friend had shared a link to a video that had been posted a couple of days earlier. The video was of Dion singing one of the songs on the album and as I watched it the mail truck pulled up to deliver my copy.

I don’t doubt that current events had something to do with the posting of that particular song. By current events, I mean the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and protests over racial inequality and police brutality. The protests were triggered by the death of a black man at the hands of police although racial inequality was already a major topic of discussion because of the uneven impact of the pandemic on people of color. The black man was George Floyd. He died on May 25. The video was posted on May 29. The song is about Dion’s friendship with Sam Cooke, a black man who died in 1964. The video is extended a bit with some comments from Dion. I suggest watching it regardless of what you think about Dion, the blues, or any of the friends he recorded this set with. It’s here: Song for Sam Cooke (Here In America)

So what about the CD? I once reviewed a CD with a single word and I’m tempted to do the same thing here — with the same word. That CD was Love for Levon which was recorded live at a 2012 benefit concert following the death of Levon Helm. I justified not giving it a real review by telling myself that it was a big enough deal that my tiny voice would be totally drowned out by real reviewers, but the real reason was that there were so many wonderful performances by so many excellent artists that it would be nearly impossible to do justice to them all. Both arguments definitely apply to Blues with Friends. The word was “Wow!”

But it’s obviously too late to do a one-word review and there are some significant differences. The biggest is that, while Blues with Friends features an astounding roster of musicians, every song was written and sung by one man.

Dion DiMucci is eighty years old. His career is sixty-three. That’s a lot of time to pick up talented friends and Dion seems to have done better than most and he’s done it all along the way. Some of the friends contributing to this album, such as Joe Lewis Walker and Jeff Beck, have been performing since the 1960s. Samantha Fish began recording in 2009. None of them had to be begged and Joe Bonamassa didn’t even have to be asked. Joe wanted to play on “Blues Comin’ On” from the minute he heard it demoed. Dion credits Joe and his enthusiasm as being the catalyst for the album. As Dion tells it, “So I sent out invitations to my friends — and would you look at the names of who said yes!”

I have a feeling that all that talent could make some pretty crappy material sound good but what it does here is make good material sound even better. Saying that every song was written and sung by one man wasn’t entirely honest. Dion actually had a co-writer on each of them. It was Buddy Lucas on “Kickin’ Child”, Bill Touhy on “Hymn to Him”, and Mike Aquilina on everything else. Dion is the lead singer on every track although he does get help on a few. Of course, when that happens it’s people like Van Morrison, Paul Simon, and Patti Scialfa doing the helping.

I’m going to stop it with the details since I know that my tiny voice will be totally drowned out by real reviewers and there were so many wonderful performances by so many excellent artists that it would be nearly impossible to do justice to them all. Wow!

Coincidence at Play (Again)

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This post originally appeared on April 3, 2016. A few weeks ago I predicted that I would be recycling more blog posts as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic restricted real-world interaction, but I didn’t think that would be the case this week. I had a pre-canned series post selected when coincidence struck. I was trying to figure out when I had visited a particular museum and resorted to searching this website for some record. The museum is one with many Civil War artifacts so I used those words in the search and this post appeared in the results. I had all but forgotten it but a reread made me think that a repost might be appropriate. As I wrote four years ago, “there’s still plenty of crap going on.” I did, incidentally, read “To Kill a Mocking Bird” within a couple of weeks of seeing the play.

tcamb1I’ve yet to read To Kill a Mockingbird. I have seen the 1962 movie multiple times and now I’ve seen the play. I had hoped to read the book between learning that the play would be performed this season at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park and actually seeing it but that didn’t work out.

The Friday night performance would be the biggest event of my week but I didn’t expect it to lead to a blog post. I anticipated that a canned Trip Peek would be published this morning. A Friday morning email got me to thinking differently.

The email was the April E-News from the Smithsonian. One of the topics was “The Scottsboro Boys” with this two sentence tease: “The case of the Scottsboro Boys, which lasted more than 80 years, helped to spur the civil rights movement. To Kill a Mockingbird, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee, is also loosely based on this case.”

I read the article referenced in the email and could easily see similarities between the 1931 real world incident and the fictional one Harper Lee set just a few years later. Both involved black men accused of imaginary crimes against white women and both occurred in a world where color mattered a whole lot more than truth. Later I read that in 2005 Harper Lee said this was not the incident she had in mind when writing To Kill a Mockingbird but that it served “the same purpose”. Despite there not being an official connection between the Scottsboro Boys and To Kill a Mockingbird, reading about the incident and its repercussions served a purpose for me, too. It provided an unpleasant picture of this country near the midpoint between the Civil War and today. The accuracy of that picture is reinforced by a contemporary pamphlet, They Shall Not Die!, referenced in the Smithsonian article.

tcamb2I took my seat on Friday with the Scottsboro story fresh in my mind. The stage was bare except for a single light bulb which would actually be removed at the play’s start although it would return later. The stage consists of a large circular center and a surrounding ring both of which rotate. Sometimes they rotate in opposite directions which can seem to expand the distance between actors or the distance they travel. Set Designer Laura Jellinek states that “our main goal was to eliminate any artifice between the audience and the story” and this set certainly accomplishes that. As one audience member observed during the discussion that followed the play, she briefly looked around for the jury during the courtroom scene before realizing that “we were the jury”. At its most crowded, the stage holds nine chairs for the key figures in that courtroom scene.

The discussion I mentioned happens after every performance. Anyone interested moves close to the stage to listen or participate. There were naturally questions about this specific production but there were also questions about the story. There is a sign in the lobby that I now wish I’d taken a picture of. “Don’t read books that think for you. Read books that make you think.” might not be 100% accurate but it’s close. Friday night’s discussion was evidence that this play is prompting some thinking and I’ve no reason to think that discussions following other performances are any different.

tcamb3There is also a set of blackboards in the lobby. As I assume is true at every performance, the blackboards started out empty except for a question at the top of each. By the time people started heading home, the boards were full. It’s pretty clear that some thinking is going on here, too.

It was the coincidence of the Smithsonian email showing up on the day I was set to see the play that nudged me towards making it a blog entry. There is another coincidence of sorts that I find interesting.  Each week, the blog This Cruel War publishes an article on lynchings. The article is published on Wednesdays but, since I subscribe via RSS and I seem to always be behind in my RSS reading, it is often a day or more after publication before I read a specific article. I read this week’s post the morning after my Playhouse visit. In it, the source of the series’ title, “This Disgraceful Evil”, is given. It comes from a 1918 Woodrow Wilson speech in which he calls upon America “…to make an end of this disgraceful evil.”

We don’t have to deal with actual lynchings now as much as in 1918 but there’s still plenty of crap going on. “It cannot live”, Wilson continues, “where the community does not countenance it.”

Originally scheduled to end today, April 3, To Kill a Mockingbird‘s run a Playhouse in the Park has been extended through April 9.