American Road magazine Winter 2019 by American Road, LLC

d Painted Places d Shrine of the Pines d Watts Towers AMERICAN ROAD

VOLUME XVII NUMBER 4

WINTER

US $4.95 CAN $4.95

2019 Display in Travel Through March 2020

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AMERICAN ROAD

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Features

Departments

30 Painted Places

58 US 10: Driving the Dime

A LOOK AT TEN MASTERPIECES AND THE LOCATIONS THAT INSPIRED THEM

Christina’s World. American Gothic. Stockbridge Main Street at Christmas…. You’ve seen the paintings, and you know the artists who painted them. We go into the galleries to review masterworks by Andrew Wyeth, Grant Wood, Norman Rockwell, and others—and then head out on the highway to revisit the actual locations portrayed on each canvas. • ENSEMBLE

64 Art Cars A WEIRD AND WONDERFUL WORLD ON WHEELS

Is a car just something that gets you from point A to point B? Or can it be considered a mobile art exhibit on four wheels? We look for an answer in the wonderfully weird and wacky world of art cars, where people carpet vans with cameras, cover trucks with cork, and paint convertibles in homage to the late Timothy Leary. • ENSEMBLE

98 American Road’s “Art and Soul” Photography Contest MAKING A MASTERPIECE WITH A CAMERA

For our magazine’s eighth annual photography contest, we invited our readers to look at the country’s highways and byways as if they were regarding a masterpiece on canvas. We asked them to send us the pictures they’ve taken that they consider high art, and they showed us just how elevated their eyes can be. • CONTEST WINNERS

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“Shrine of the Pines”

Decades ago, Michigan’s pine forests were decimated by logging crews. Enter Raymond “Bud” Overholzer, a wilderness tour guide who looked at the stumps the lumberjacks had left behind and began whittling from them the Baldwin Shrine of the Pines. • THOMAS ARTHUR REPP

88 US 50: Drive Me Lonely

“Seat of Eternity”

Expecting the Rapture? The biblical End of the World? Washington, D.C., janitor James Hampton was. And so he fashioned a front-row seat for God and his celestial crew—a little apocalyptic something he called the Throne of the Third Heaven…. • MARK VERNARELLI

92 Landmark Status

“Watts Happening”

Watts Towers has survived everything from the 1966 Watts riots to the 1994 Northridge earthquake and a 1974 effort by Fred Sanford to supercede them with his own artistic sculptures. What gives these enduring landmarks their staying power? • JESS WINFIELD

104 The Extra Mile

“Flying Circus”

Welded from pieces of farm machinery, shaped like Ferris wheels and airplanes and featuring sheet-metal men and animals, some of the contraptions at Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park stand fifty feet high and weigh ten tons. That’s a lot of whimsy to go round. • TONY CRAIG

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VOLUME XVII • NUMBER 4 • WINTER 2019

AMERICAN ROAD MAGAZINE • PO Box 46519 • Mt. Clemens, Michigan 48046 • Phone (877) 285-5434 • Fax (877) 285-5434 • americanroadmagazine.com

Stop-Overs

Roadside

14 Memory Motel

5 Editor’s Rambler

They say a man’s home is his castle. But in Ona, Florida, one man’s castle can be yours for a night—if you check into the Blue Moon Room at Solomon’s Castle, a quirky landmark-cum-art-museum that lets guests sleep medieval in the Sunshine State. • KARRAS STRASBURG

“You Gotta Have (More) Art”

10 Write-of-Way

Letters from Our Readers

11 Who’s Driving? Contest

54 Think Big!

Batter up! In 1977, Michael Carmichael of Alexandria, Indiana, applied a coat of paint to an old baseball he’d stuck on a stick. Today, said baseball has been painted more than 26,000 times—a fourteen-foot, 2.5-ton globe that scores heavily in the record books. • ERIKA NELSON

86 Diner Days

To Martin Sanchez, owner of Tio’s Tacos in Riverside, California, art is largely any discarded object: “The soda cans, the beer bottles, the oyster shells and beef bones,” he says—all that comes through his kitchen may find its way into the sculptures he creates outside. • JESS WINFIELD

12 Friends in the Fast Lane: Road Event Retrospect

Archeology’s Wacky Wisconsin Conference • Flying High: Craig’s Bird Painting Takes Top Honor • The Teenage Gas Baron of Miami, Oklahoma

18 Tunnel Vision: News Around the Road

Boulder and Bolder Moves • Blessed Are the Innkeepers • That Turtle Needs Your Bra • New Spark in Flint, Michigan • Smoky Valley Scenic Byway • Black Hawk Patched Up • Slumberland Goes Dunkin’ • Avocados Close I-10 • Invasion of the Big Heads • And the Museum Goes to… • The 2.12-Carat Arkansas Trip • Cops Help Cats • Route 66 Loves Miner Frecs

24 American Road Sweepstakes

96 Another Roadside Attraction

If a stitch in time saves nine, what can be saved by 504 quilt squares attached to the broad side of a barn? Feed and grain store owner Elsie Bennett of Mount Ulla, North Carolina, decided to find out—with a little help from a number of sew-and-sews. • TONY CRAIG

90 Inspection Station

On-the-Go Pain Relief Balm • Don’t Make Me Pull Over: An Informal History of the Family Road Trip • Mixcder HD901 Headphones

108 Advertiser Index 88

109 Park Place

Your Curbside Calendar

110 John Claar’s Hitching Post Road Gifts & Souvenirs

112 American Crossroad Puzzle “’Art and Soul”

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EDITOR’S RAMBLER “You Gotta Have (More) Art”

ere’s a smart riddle for the surrealists in our audience: Why did the giraffe cross the road? Answer: Because his freaking spots were on fire. The silliness of that non sequitur has appealed to me since I was aged nine, when my parents took me on my inaugural trip to the Art Institute of Chicago. There, hanging on a wall in Gallery 396, I beheld Inventions of the Monsters (1937), an apocalyptic masterpiece brought into being by the giddy, garish brush of Spanish Dadaist-turned-world-confounder Salvador Dalí. The painting was stomachchurning—a vision Saint John the Divine might have writ into his Book of Revelation had he swallowed a box of rotten communion wafers. Dalí populated his oily canvas with creatures too freakish to forget: a horsewoman with a head of disheveled hay; a cat angel with cornflower wings, and, in the background, all patches and smoke plumes, a burning giraffe—a flambé on stilts—that seared itself into my eyeballs. “That’s cool,” I said. As I grew up, the sight of that combusting camel leopard stayed with me. I returned to Dalí’s opus on many occasions—on school field trips and on college dates, when I endeavored to impress more than one beloved coed with my knowledge of its bitter shadows. Eventually, I found myself visiting that painting on my honeymoon, standing in its fever with my newlywed wife on a young February morning. “I like the giraffe,” I ventured. “It’s hot,” she said. “Yeah, it’s cool,” I agreed. “Why is it on fire?” “It’s hot,” I said. “Oh, that’s cool,” she said. “Wait a minute…. Are those boobs or butts clumped up in the corner?” That’s a line of inquiry, I can attest, that easily leads to an afternoon spent rolling around an apartment in a rapturous puddle of body paints. Hot, indeed. Art stays with us. It informs our opinions. It colors our views—even as it reveals that we all read the landscape a little differently. And therein lies the hue of this issue of American Road, which looks at the national palette through the eyes of our artists. “Painted Places,” our lead feature, revisits scenes that inspired the masters to canvas—from the all-American roadway Norman Rockwell portrayed in Stockbridge Main Street at Christmas (1930) to the salty seaside beacon Edward Hopper preserved in A Lighthouse at Two Lights (1929). Have you ever wished to perceive the country’s soul? Dig the rural lines of Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930) or the power that makes Frederic Edwin Church’s Niagara (1857) the best depiction of the Honeymoon Capital of the World—with or without body paints. Some classic car enthusiasts insist there’s nothing more beautiful than a well-tricked-out ride, but the artists we showcase in “Art Cars” find their engines in extremes. They cover trucks with cork, carpet vans with cameras, or bury their sedans under every manner of toothbrush and denture. Surreal enough? If not, follow us to Watts Towers in Los Angeles; Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park in Wilson, North Carolina; or Shrine of the Pines in Baldwin, Michigan, to see the way time and place can be twisted with a tree root. Salvador Dalí, of course, gained fame for his paintings of melting timepieces—although I suspect his inspiration for those dripping clocks drew more from nature than his conceit might admit. Plenty of times, during blistering summer outings in the Mojave Desert or its like, I’ve expected my own wristwatch to ooze off my arm. Why, I recall a day in Death Valley when I was baked to near delirium at Badwater Basin: The sun scorched the salt flats to 128 degrees, and I swear I saw my Timex bubbling to a boil. Admittedly, it wasn’t long afterward when I beheld a giraffe galumphing across the road, back ablaze, a flambé on stilts—and an indeterminate interval following when I awoke with a washcloth wetting my forehead—a restorative applied by a cat angel with cornflower wings. “It’s hot,” she said. “I was chasing the flaming giraffe,” I said. “That’s cool,” she said. Editorial Director d ON OUR WINDSHIELD: Rex Rosenberg’s art car BugWing blends a pared-down 1965 Volkswagen Beetle with

a 1981 Honda Gold Wing motorcycle. Photo by Rex Rosenberg. [Opposite] Salvador Dalí’s surreal masterpiece Inventions of the Monsters (1937) can be viewed inside the Art Institute of Chicago. Institute photo by EQRoy. Inventions of the Monsters appears courtesy Peter Barritt/Alamy.

THOMAS ARTHUR REPP Editorial Director REBECCA REPP General Manager JILLIAN GURNEY ROBERT KLARA JESS WINFIELD Editors MELISSA BRANDZEL Copy Editor GARY MANTZ Radio Show and Podcast Host SUE HRONIK Communications Director STACY SMITH BOSCO WALTER FENWICK MORRIS J. LILLIAN EDWARD McCLELLAND Roadside Contributors POP AMHEARST ERIKA NELSON KARRAS STRASBURG MARK A. VERNARELLI Department Editors SONNET TAMSIN AVALON SAWYER THOMAS ’ALDEN Creative Interns TONY CRAIG Staff Photographer ED WEXLER Caricature Artist LINDSAY PULLIN Circulation LYNN MILLER Calendar ROBERT C. CLAAR Roadside Consultant LYNETTE NIELSEN Hitching Post Sales RICHARD ETCHELLS Online Index JENNIFER & PAT BREMER Online Forum Moderators Advertising Representatives

Phone (877) 285-5434 for the representative in your region

REBECCA REPP becky@americanroadmagazine.com (206) 369-5782 RICK GOWER rgower@americanroadmagazine.com (877) 285-5434 / Ext. 3 JOHN VITOLO jvitolo@americanroadmagazine.com (877) 285-5434 / Ext. 5 SHEILA MARTIN smartin@americanroadmagazine.com Administrative Assistant

AMERICAN ROAD (ISSN 1542-4316) is published quarterly by Mock Turtle Press, LLC. Included in EBSCO Publishing’s products. Copyright © 2019 by Mock Turtle Press. All rights reserved. Printed in the USA. Printed on recycled paper.

MAIN OFFICE PO Box 46519, Mt. Clemens, MI 48046 (877) 285-5434 americanroad@americanroadmagazine.com CIRCULATION PO Box 90998, Long Beach, CA 90809 (877) 285-5434 circulation@americanroadmagazine.com HITCHING POST ORDERS PO Box 90998, Long Beach, CA 90809 (877) 285-5434 circulation@americanroadmagazine.com

AMERICAN ROAD app available through iTunes. Subscriptions: $16.95 per year, US; $29.95, Canada; $42.95, foreign. AMERICAN ROAD does not accept unsolicited materials. Writers query editor@americanroadmagazine.com. We are not responsible for materials lost or damaged in transit. Opinions of articles appearing in AMERICAN ROAD do not necessarily reflect those of AMERICAN ROAD editors or staff.

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AMERICAN ROAD

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WRITE-OF-WAY

Letters from Our Readers

Post correspondence to AMERICAN ROAD • PO Box 46519 • Mt. Clemens, Michigan 48046 • letters@americanroadmagazine.com • Letters may be edited for clarity and space. Not all letters are published.

DRIVE-IN DELIGHT wesome article on drive-ins in the Summer 2019 magazine! I was specifically interested because I (Detroit Diecast) manufacture drive-in speakers. This past spring, our Detroit Diecast Eprad drive-in speakers were used as awards for the annual EarthxFilm Festival 2019 event. The drive-in speaker trophies were given out for the best Creative Storytelling awards. Our speakers looked awesome displayed on the acrylic stands! Thanks again for showcasing these existing drive-ins located across the country. The story has inspired us to check out some of the featured theatres. In fact, we are heading to the Cherry Bowl Drive-In on US Highway 31 in Honor, Michigan, first!

Rich Bzovi Detroit, Michigan Hi Rich. We are thrilled that you found “A Night at the Drive-In 3…32 Classic Picture Parks Across North America” inspirational! We like the idea of turning drive-in speakers into trophies, and we hope you will keep us posted on your quest to visit Michigan’s outdoor screens. Our Executive Editor can often be found frequenting the Ford Drive-In Theatre of Dearborn. He’s partial to the Ford because it regularly screens the classic Filmack intermission trailer.

enjoyed the article about our drive-in [Winner Drive-In] in the Summer 2019 issue. My mom showed me her copy. Thank you! My mom, Betty Fast, still runs the drive-in at age 87. Currently she does all of the mowing on the grounds, sells the advertising, orders and stocks supplies, and is in the concession stand every night it is open. Mom usually mans the popcorn machine. People enjoy coming and visiting with Mom before the movies. She has enjoyed several generations of families over the years. My folks always tried to keep the business as family-oriented as possible, and believes you should treat others the way you want to be treated. Is there any way we can get a copy of this article? Thanks! Have a beautiful day! Kim Nordsiden Winner, South Dakota Hello Kim! Thank you—we’re so happy you enjoyed the piece about the Winner DriveIn. We will be happy to send you a copy of the magazine. Your family story about the drive-in is wonderful. Readers will recall that your childhood house adjoined the drive-in, and your father rigged up a speaker so you could watch the film from your window. Now, that’s what we call a good parent!

MOVIE AWARD: Detroit Diecast drive-in speakers were turned into trophies at the EarthxFilm Festival of 2019.

hat a pleasure reading your Summer 2019 piece on existing drive-ins. It made me reminisce about experiencing them as a child, as a teenager, and later with my children. Those drive-ins were on North Adams in Massachusetts on Route 8; on Route 35 in Hazlet, New Jersey; and another on the Sunrise Highway in Long Island, New York. Sadly, they are gone and now exist as commercial retail space. But one you missed that is still going strong is the Eden Drive-In theatre in Eden, North Carolina, just north of Greensboro in Rockingham County. I can still happily enjoy that experience as a retiree! Douglas Sanecki Greensboro, North Carolina Hello Douglas! We are very glad to hear you enjoyed the Summer issue and our feature “A Night at the Drive-In 3.” Thank you for letting us know. Don’t be dismayed—we did run an article about the Eden Drive-In Theatre in our Summer 2011 issue in the “A Night at the Drive-In” feature. To date, we’ve actually done three installments of “A Night at the DriveIn”—and covered the story and history behind some one hundred of the classic outdoor screens. It’s great to know the Eden Drive-In is still a thriving showplace and you are an avid supporter in carrying on the tradition. May you enjoy many more nights at the Eden. Those are the stories our readers love to hear.

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WHO’S DRIVING? THE STATE OF RIDGE ROUTE s of August 2019 the concrete on the Ridge Route is at or over its onehundred-year anniversary. For its age and all it has gone through, it’s still in pretty good shape in many places [it’s currently closed]. On Monday, June 10, representatives from the Ridge Route Preservation Organization (myself; Harrison Scott, past president; Dave Omieczynski; and Richard Valot) had a meeting with representatives from the Angeles National Forest (including Jerry Perez, Forest Supervisor; Justin Seastrand, Environmental Coordinator; Ricardo Lopez, Road Engineer; and Jamahl Butler, District Ranger). Our meeting, which was held on the Ridge Route near the southern end, was to discuss a range of topics regarding the road. We initially met at the Ridge Route and Templin Highway, where we made introductions and briefly went over the meeting details. From there, I led the group with my sport bike up the road to the southern gate. At that point, we discussed the land ownership problems and the 2010 paving, which we believe will help us with our goal of getting the road reopened. After our discussion, they opened the gate and I led the group on a tour of the Ridge Route from the southern gate to Reservoir Summit. The initial plan, however, was to only go about four miles north to see the recently reconstructed section of road. At each stop, the US Forest Service (USFS) people decided to go a bit further. We didn’t mind this at all! Along the way, we made stops at some of the sections of the roadway that had been repaired as well as some of the historic sites along the road, such as the National Forest Inn site. At each major stop, Scotty brought out his books and showed photos of the sites. Once we reached Reservoir Summit, we had another discussion regarding the state of the roadway. Overall, it was in very good shape with only a few areas needing more immediate attention. Many sections had been resurfaced and we did make it clear that we didn’t want to see a wholesale repaving of the roadway for the sake of preservation. They seemed to understand this. After our discussion and hike to the reservoir, we all headed back to the southern gate to finalize our meeting.

The meeting was productive and positive. There is still a lot of work to be done, but they were willing to help and to work with us [to reopen the road]. It seems to be coming down to a funding and land ownership issue right now, both of which we foresee getting resolved at some point in the not-too-distant future. They stated they would do additional research regarding the land ownership issue at the southern end of the roadway. Another concern is roadway maintenance, which we may be able to help defray with volunteer effort. Instead of a Memorandum of Understanding, we may be entering into a Volunteer Agreement regarding cleaning drains and such along the roadway. With regard to opening the roadway, there is still no estimate on when it will reopen. There are still additional issues that need to be addressed, but we at least have a better understanding of what the USFS sees as the problems. One of them, overall condition of the roadway and ability for vehicles to travel safely, I tried to prove by using my sport bike. If I can go on the roadway using that vehicle, most everyone should be able to pass over it safely as well. Only time will tell if this meeting was truly successful, but I believe it was. I will give updates when we hear back from the USFS in the near future. When we start to plan work parties on the road, we will need volunteer help and support. People interested in following our progress and in volunteering to help in our efforts can read more at ridgeroute.org or email us at admin@ridgeroute.org.

HINT: “You know his Mum. A postage stamp painting: Old Grey and Black.” 1) IDENTIFY the NOTABLE AMERICAN who appears above in the car. 2) SEND your ANSWER to: driving@americanroadmagazine.com or AMERICAN ROAD, PO Box 46519 Mt. Clemens, MI 48046 The names of all individuals providing correct answers will be entered in a drawing for the prize(s) shown below. One winner will be selected immediately before our next issue goes to press. No purchase necessary. Estimated odds of winning are 1/10,000.

Michael Ballard President Ridge Route Preservation Organization San Diego, California Michael, thank you for the update on California’s historic Ridge Route—the first paved highway linking the Los Angeles Basin and the San Joaquin Valley over the Tejon Pass in the Sierra Pelona mountain ridge. We applaud your dedicated effort in preserving this historic roadway—initially paved between 1917 and 1921. We know our readers will appreciate the information and the opportunity to volunteer. Please keep up the great work! 

ROUTE 66 CLASSIC BOOK PACKAGE! Package Retail Value: $122.80! Get your kicks with this Route 66 collection of books: Route 66: The Empires of Amusement; Route 66: Romance of the West; Strange Route 66: Myth, Mystery, Mayhem, and Other Weirdness on Route 66; and 66 on 66: A Photographer’s Journey.

Born Lázló, actor Peter Lorre gained fame playing a serial killer in Fritz Lang’s M. In his later years, he starred in Roger Corman’s “Poe Cycle” of films. CONGRATULATIONS TO MICHAEL EVANS OF IXONIA, WISCONSIN!

AMERICAN ROAD

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FRIENDS IN THE FAST LANE

Road Event Retrospect ARCHEOLOGY’S WACKY WISCONSIN CONFERENCE

1 (1) IT’S SHOWTIME! Members of the Society for Commercial Archeology pose at the SC Johnson Golden Rondelle Theater in Racine, Wisconsin. Built as the Johnson Pavilion for the 1964 World’s Fair, the historic building continues to function as a performance space.

ISCONSIN DELLS, Wis.—“Wacky” and “archeology” in one breath? Yup. In June 2019, sixty-nine roadside enthusiasts, preservation advocates, and neon sign nuts gathered at Chula Vista Resort in Wisconsin Dells for the 42nd Society for Commercial Archeology conference. Paper sessions were complemented by tours exploring the unique built environment of Wisconsin Dells, its initial inspiration in the natural Upper Dells formations, and the area’s transformation from mid-century tourist destination into the “Waterpark Capital of the World.” A final day tour visited surrounding iconic sites: the Al Ringling Theatre in Baraboo, House on the Rock in Spring Green, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s spectacular SC Johnson administration and research campus in Racine. Wacky!

FLYING HIGH: CRAIG’S BIRD PAINTING TAKES TOP HONOR

2 (2) BIRD’S-EYE VIEW Artist, animator, and American Road Staff Photographer Tony Craig painted Interlude, a work that depicts a barn swallow resting on a boat tie. The painting was accepted for the 2019 Birds in Art show at the Woodson Museum in Wisconsin.

ARKERS ISLAND, N.C.—A little birdie told us about a big honor: Tony Craig, Staff Photographer for American Road, was pleasantly surprised when his painting of a barn swallow taking a rest on a boat’s tie line was accepted for the 2019 Birds in Art national show at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin. Interlude, the title of Tony’s work, will join other paintings of avians in the Birds in Art tour that will travel from Texas to New York to Maine in 2020. Tony himself finds birds an appropriate subject for many an artistic medium: He also confesses to a passion for duck decoy carving.

THE TEENAGE GAS BARON OF MIAMI, OKLAHOMA

3 (3) SUPER SERVICE: A modern Horatio Alger has bought a 1920s-era service station along Route 66 in Miami, Oklahoma. Nineteen-year-old Eli Chenoweth hopes to relocate the building and restore it to its operational glory on the Mother Road.

IAMI, Okla.—Okay, Boomer. When you were a teen maybe you worked at a vintage Route 66 service station. Generation Z buys ’em. In pairs. Eli Chenoweth, a 19-year-old entrepreneur who opened The Frozen Elephant shaved-ice shop at age 16, has purchased the oldest service station in Miami, Oklahoma, dating from 1921. He hopes to move it to adjoin his previous purchase, the Miami Marathon Oil Service Station, a Route 66 National Historical Landmark since 1995. “I love Miami,” Chenoweth told KSNFTV in a recent interview. “I want to motivate the young people.” This represents an evolution of his own business motives from 2016, when he told the Miami News-Record, “I like to have all the money.”  Photo 1 by Kevin Patrick. Photo 2 by Tony Craig. Photo 3 by Eli Chenoweth.

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MEMORY MOTEL Solomon’s Castle Ona, Florida

hey say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. They also say that a man’s home is his castle. But only in Ona, Florida, do they say that one man’s trash is another man’s castle—and a treasure of a home, to boot. That’s the story behind Solomon’s Castle, a quirky landmark-cum-art-museum-andB&B that stretches above the surrounding orange trees like some shiny, medieval mirage. At first glance, its mere presence suggests that Sir Galahad may have visited the Sunshine State: This fortress looks like something plucked from the pages of Le Morte d’Arthur or Idylls of the King. But closer examination reveals it to be more Monty Python than Malory: Two knights in armor flank the castle’s drawbridge—a white knight called “Day” and a black knight called “Night.” An awning hanging over a tower window is monogrammed with a large “S” as if it were a large bath towel. And are those really aluminum plates from a printing press tiling the castle’s walls? Indeed, they are: cast-off printing plates from the local Wauchula newspaper, The Herald-Advocate. They give the fortress its Excalibur-like sheen, and they serve, collectively, to turn the castle into a time capsule: As has been noted, the hidden sides of those plates are covered with yesterday’s headlines. You could peel them off and read old news. The old printing plates were affixed here— like everything else on this plot of land—by a sculptor who truly believed in repurposing. His name was Howard Solomon. He was a native

BY KARRAS STRASBURG

New Yorker who moved to Florida in 1955 and worked as a cabinetmaker, shipwright, and interior designer before purchasing ninety acres of swampland southwest of Ona in 1970 and beginning to build. “Dad has been called the Rembrandt of Reclamation, the da Vinci of Debris, and the Wizard of Odds and Ends,” says Solomon’s daughter, Alane. “When he first came here, he realized that he didn’t have a lot of room for building out, so he started building up. He’d add a tower here and a turret there, and before you knew it, he had a castle.” Solomon began sharing his quirky Camelot with the public at the behest of the local Kiwanis Club. Back in the day, he gave a lecture about art there, and members showed up at his home the following Sunday afternoon to see what he’d been talking about. For the next twelve years, Solomon gave free tours of the premises, even as the castle and its attractions grew. At one point, he decided to build a replica of a sixteenth-century Portuguese galleon sixty-five feet long—an endeavor that became the restaurant known today as The-Boat-inthe-Moat. He later admitted, “At the time, I didn’t know if it was going to be a gift shop or a restaurant. It didn’t matter to me. [I] just wanted to build a boat in a moat.” Visitors today find Solomon’s Castle filled with everything but the Holy Grail. Solomon was a prolific artist, and he outfitted his palace with all manner of sculptures, typically wrought from cast-off materials. There’s a menagerie assembled from coat hangers (complete with a unicorn); an alligator made from an oil drum (“His name is Samsonite because

Solomon’s Castle • 4533 Solomon Road • Ona, Florida 33865 • (863) 494-6077 • solomonscastle.com

his mother was luggage”); a lion shaped from welding rod; and an elephant with its tusks fashioned of manatee ribs and toenails of clamshells. There are “Piston People”—humanoids crafted of old car pistons—a motorcycle christened “Evil Kornevil” concocted from an old corn picker, and “Dr. Kevorkian’s Dueling Set”—a framed pair of pistols with barrels pointing back at the shooters. Guests who’d like to stay overnight in the surreal realm are welcome to book the Blue Moon Room—a handcrafted efficiency apartment nestled into the East Wing of the second floor of the tower. A vaulted ceiling and elegant stained glass windows contribute a touch of medieval charm to this hideaway equipped to sleep two. Breakfast is served in the morning. Of course, visitors who want to forgo the snooze can just grab a bite at the aforementioned Boat-in-the-Moat. In fact, lunch is the perfect time to view Solomon’s last handmade sculpture, modeled just before his demise at age 81 in 2016. It’s a ten-foot replica of a turnof-the-century locomotive, as delightfully incongruous with its Arthurian surroundings as nearly everything else inside the castle. But just when it begins to bring to mind the anachronisms of Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, guests may notice that it’s ever stranger than it first appears. “Yes,” Alane says. “It’s built of cream of chicken soup cans from the kitchen.”  KARRAS STRASBURG is a Department Editor for AMERICAN ROAD. Large castle photo © Ilene MacDonald. Additional photos courtesy Solomon’s Castle and Alane Solomon.

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Contributors: Melissa Brandzel, Robert Klara, Gary Mantz, Edward McClelland, Thomas Arthur Repp, Mark A. Vernarelli, and Jess Winfield

Bolder and Boulder Moves

ENVER—A surprise rockslide of epic proportions has created a new geological point of interest in the Southwest. On May 24, two giant boulders rolled off a cliff and onto a mountain highway between Cortez and Telluride in southwestern Colorado, giving the state a new burden to shoulder overnight. Luckily no one was hurt in the incident. The smaller of the two boulders, a 2.3-million-pounder, was demolished with dynamite and removed from the road. But the larger boulder—a whopper of a rock weighing more than eight million pounds— completely destroyed a section of the highway, causing a road closure, stopping traffic, and derailing some Memorial Day weekend plans. The Colorado Department of Transportation suddenly found itself between a rock and a hard place: explode the boulder

and rebuild the broken highway, or build a new road around the boulder? Facing a cost of $200,000 for the demolition, the DOT went with option #2. Colorado State Highway 145 would be rebuilt around the boulder—a wider road, with more shoulder—and a guardrail would be constructed near the rock. Emergency funding from the Federal Highway Administration would cover much of the $1.3 million tab to repair the two-lane highway. The giant rock has become Colorado’s newest natural landmark. Governor Jared Polis spread the word via a Twitter post: “Everybody meet Memorial Rock. We will not be destroying this 8.5-million-pound boulder—which is the size of a house. Instead, we’re going to make a new state landmark and save taxpayers money,” he wrote. Not everyone was pleased with the name. Many took to the Internet themselves to make their viewpoints known. “Memorial Rock— could they have tried less?” one unimpressed citizen complained. “Unless there is someone underneath it they should perhaps come up with something more fitting.”

ROCK ON! Workmen widened Colorado State Highway 145 around the newly dropped Memorial Rock.

Some suggested that the government could best benefit by selling naming rights of the rock to the highest corporate bidder. (“Coors Rock!… Toyota Rock!…”) But our favorite response took a more practical approach to the big stone’s christening. “Given the day it fell,” that poster asked, “shouldn’t it be called ‘The Friday Before Memorial Day Rock?’”

Blessed Are the Innkeepers

ULSA, Okla.—Minister Sharyn Cosby’s church tries to breathe new life into troubled souls. Now, if her flock has its way, an old Route 66 hotel will be born again, too. The derelict Brookshire Motel, currently on Preservation Oklahoma’s Most Endangered Places list, has long been an official city nuisance. Abandoned since the early 1990s and condemned in 2016, the white-and-blue motor court with a cottage-style front office has not seen guests in years. When a fire ripped through the place in February, demolition was all but certain. That’s when Pastor Cosby decided to step in. A church has little need for a motor inn, of course, but the Tulsa church envisions something different for the space: a community meal center, classrooms, a farmers’ market and—of course—a gift shop. (This is Route 66, after all.) “It gives us the perfect opportunity,” Cosby told Tulsa’s TV 6 news, “a perfect space, that we can [use to] continue to reach out to people and effect change in the community.” With its huge neon sign rising from a box hedge, the Brookshire flourished in 66’s heyday, but could not survive the road’s decommissioning or the coming of discount lodging chains. Though the official transfer of the deed has not been finalized, the church’s goals are ambitious. These include building a coffee shop in the rooms behind the cottage, which itself will house the new gift shop. And while the renovation plan is necessarily utilitarian (ministers-in-training will find rooms here), Cosby has—to the relief of Route 66 fans— earmarked funds to restore the neon out front.

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New Spark in Flint, Michigan

That Turtle Needs Your Bra

NDIAN TRAIL, N.C.—Ladies, before you throw that worn-out brassiere in the trash, consider the good that old undergarment may yet do. Like what? you ask? Well, how about saving a turtle’s life? The enterprising people at Carolina Waterfowl Rescue have determined that the little clasps that fasten a bra together also work surprisingly well when it comes to rejoining the pieces of a turtle’s broken shell. This isn’t just a bit of trivia, either: The group really would like to have your old bras. There is, sadly, a great need for them. Rescue groups report seeing as many as forty turtles with broken shells brought in every week, their injuries most often caused by motorists having run them over. Why such high numbers? Turtles instinctively return to waterways to lay eggs, which invariably involves crossing roads. For a turtle, a split shell isn’t necessarily a fatal injury, but spontaneous healing can take months or even years. An Iowa rescue group pioneered the use of bra clasps threaded with zip ties to keep the broken pieces fastened tight, and the method worked so well that other groups adopted the technique. Once the shell heals, rescuers unglue the clasps and return the turtle to the wild. Seeing as humans so often caused the injuries to start with, there’s a measure of cosmic justice in people correcting the situation. We hope you’ve never run over a turtle, but we also hope you’ll send your unwanted brassieres to Carolina Waterfowl Rescue at P.O. Box 1484, Indian Trail, NC 28079. Jennifer Gordon, Executive Director of the rescue, asks bra donors to include a small monetary donation, too. “We are paying staff overtime to process the bras,” she says.

LINT, Mich.—On the brick wall of a building in Flint, Michigan, New Orleans street artist Courtney Buckley (who goes by the handle “Ceaux”) was spraypainting the finishing sheen on a mural. The painting depicted a pair of second-line marchers in a Mardi Gras parade, but Ceaux had included a local touch: The woman held a fan that read “Flint,” with a green map of Michigan beneath. “The fan traditionally has the name of your krewe,” Ceaux explained to a Michigander. “It’s just a way to combine representing our culture and Flint’s culture.” Flint, the Vehicle City, was once known for Buicks and Chevys. Since GM tore down most of its factories—and half the population moved away—Flint has become a gallery of empty spaces, an urban canvas on which artists can create a new vision of what the city represents. Ceaux’s artwork is part of the Flint Public Art Project, which is bringing in artists from all over the world with aims to brighten up some one hundred urban walls. From Manchester, England, came the duo Nomad Clan, who painted a match setting fire to the word “Entropy” behind the altar of an abandoned church. From Houston, Emily Ding arrived to design a mural featuring multicolored birds flying past the face of a pensive girl. Flintstone Charles Boike hiked his way here from nearby Fenton, Michigan, and contributed a mural portrait of Mexican surrealist painter Frida Kahlo. “It’s an open gallery,” says director Joseph Schipani, who organized the project with $90,000 in public and private funding, and hosts artists at his house. “There are no

barriers for anybody to look at the artwork.” In recent years, Flint has been known for a water crisis that tainted the city’s drinking supply with lead. After that, Schipani said, “I think people were ready to see something beautiful going on in the community. The city is going to become successful by trying new things and having that creative freedom go on here.”

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Smoky Valley Scenic Byway

OPEKA, Kans.—Say “Kansas” and three things probably pop to mind: the eponymous 1980s rock band; that extensive drive through the High Plains to and from Denver; and, of course, that one movie that Kansans really hate us making a joke about every single time they say they’re from Kansas (but are too nice to say so). Kansas aims to change that narrowness of knowledge about the Jayhawk State. In 2010, a $220,000 grant from the Federal Highway Administration funded the installation of interpretive panels and kiosks along scenic byways at thirty-nine tourist attractions statewide. Eight years later, the signs have popped up along the U-shaped, sixty-milelong Smoky Valley Scenic Byway off of I-70, and the route is ready to be rolled. An ancient Indian path through this river valley was stampeded by European boots when gold was discovered at Pike’s Peak in 1858. Dubbed the Smoky Hill Trail, it was the fastest route west from Fort Leavenworth to Denver. In 1865, to protect colonial travelers from the indigenous Comanche, Kiowa, Sioux, and Arapaho who took exception, the Butterfield Overland Despatch stagecoach line was established and protected by a string of US Army forts — only to be made obsolete five years later by the Kansas Pacific Railroad. Traveling east to west, pioneers on the newly

reappointed trail can exit in Ogallah and head south across the valley through classic Kansan wheat grass and wildflowers. The geography changes dramatically at Cedar Bluff State Park, where redwood-topped cliffs rise over a reservoir popular for hunting, fishing, and waterskiing. After a jog west on US 40, you’ll head back north on US 283, and take in the Wilcox School, a restored, one-room prairie schoolhouse built in 1886. Roadside markers note locations where the loop crosses the old stagecoach line. The byway rejoins I-70 in WaKeeney (no typo), the “Christmas City of the High Plains,” renowned not only for its holiday festivities, but also for its courthouse’s appearance in Peter Bogdanovich’s 1974 film Paper Moon, starring Tatum O’Neal. Yes, it turns out there’s more to Kansas than just that one film about a young girl’s misadventures. There are two!

Black Hawk Patched Up

REGON, Ill.—The Eternal Indian. That was the name sculptor Lorado Taft gave his forty-eight-foot, 270-ton statue of the Sauk chieftain Black Hawk, which rises above the Rock River in Oregon, Illinois. The statue, though, has proven to be anything but eternal. Taft, an early twentieth-century artist, built it out of concrete because he couldn’t afford bronze. The sculptor had seen a fiftyfoot concrete chimney at the Art Institute of Chicago, and thought that material would make an acceptable substitute.

GRASSY PASS: The Smoky Valley Scenic Byway displays wildflowers and grasses through the seasons.

The Eternal Indian, in Lowden State Park, was dedicated in 1911. It is a treasured Illinois landmark, but one hundred midwestern winters have been rough on Taft’s concrete giant. The celebrated statue needs work every decade or so to repair the ravages of age and weather. It was patched up in the 1980s and 1990s, but for most of the past four years, it has been wrapped in plastic sheeting to cover up cracks opened by water dripping off the Indian’s folded arms. This year, though, the Eternal Indian is finally getting another renovation, paid for by $350,000 from the state, and nearly as much from private donors. The Chicago Blackhawks hockey team, which indirectly took its name from the statue’s subject, donated a jersey for a silent auction—their contribution to this grand artistic effort. At the time of this writing, the restoration is nearly complete. Once the work is finished, the Eternal Indian can resume his stony vigil over the Rock River—if not for eternity, then at least for another ten years or so. “We’ll take it one decade at a time,” says Jan Stilson of Black Hawk Restoration Art and Development, which raised money for the project. “Concrete is unpredictable with freeze and thaw….” And, of course, nothing lasts forever.

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Slumberland Goes Dunkin’

Invasion of the Big Heads

AVALE, Md.—Even if you never spent a night at the Slumberland Motel, you probably stayed somewhere like it. It was one of those vintage park-at-your-door establishments that was cheap but rich with charm—an overnight oasis constructed wayback-when on a classic, two-lane highway. The Slumberland was the last surviving mom-and-pop motel in the area owned and operated by an actual mom and pop: Tony and Edith Mutchler. They were the kind of people who would let sportsmen store freshly caught fish in their freezer. And they saved special rooms for couples who wanted to revisit where they’d conceived their first child. (Apparently Room 49 had some fertility juju.) Located in LaVale, Maryland, on old US Highway 40 just west of Cumberland, the Slumberland was the first respite on the iconic National Road. But since 2016, the no vacancy sign has been perpetually dark. The twenty-five rooms stood like a ghost town waiting for weary travelers that never came. There are still many places to stay in LaVale, with at least five chain hotels within a mile of the closed Slumberland. But none that seem like they could’ve been the setting of a Johnny Cash song. Last July, the donut franchise Dunkin’ confirmed that they’d purchased the Slumberland property, and will be open for business by early 2020. Dunkin’ may fare better, but it’s unlikely there’ll be any more stories about fishermen using the fridge or babies being conceived in what used to be Room 49.

Avocados Close I-10

EGUIN, Texas—A funny thing happened on the way to the Mexican restaurant: Near midnight on October 29, a box trailer filled with some twenty tons of avocados overturned on Interstate 10 west of Seguin, Texas, spilling thousands of the green tropical fruits onto the pavement and closing the roadway for hours. By nine the next morning, the Texas Department of Transportation had dispatched cleanup crews to wrangle with the mellow green mash. No one brought tortilla chips to shovel up the sauce, but during the cleanup, Cibolo police did joke that they wished the spill had involved donuts instead of avocados.

HITING, Ind.—“Let’s face it, sports mascots are ridiculous, right?” says Orestes Hernandez, formerly an executive with the Florida Marlins. “No, I mean, they’re ridiculous!” he insists. While we may also find them to be variously entertaining, annoying, or, for those among us prone to masklophobia (the fear of people in masks and costumes), nightmare-inducing, it’s hard to argue with Hernandez—especially as he is now the Executive Director of the Mascot Hall of Fame in Whiting, Indiana, which opened in 2018 and held its inaugural induction ceremony this past June. The idea for an edifice honoring the colorfully costumed, big-headed, grinning #1 fans of the home team came from one of their own. David Raymond was, for seventeen years, the man inside the Phillie Phanatic, a giant green flightless bird with a beak like a tardigrade. (For the Phillies’ PR purposes, Raymond was officially just the Phanatic’s “best friend.” Ridiculous? Or creepy?) Raymond created the Hall of Fame as an online venture in 2006, and was surprised when the city of Whiting approached him to transform it into an $18-million facility. Opened in 2018, the brick-and-mortar hall features a fifty-seat theatre, a timeline of the evolution of mascots from medieval court jesters, and interactive play areas for kids. To the sixteen inductees carried over from the hall’s online era, the June induction ceremony added four more: Tommy Hawk (Chicago Blackhawks), Sluggerrr (Kansas City Royals), Benny the Bull (Chicago Bulls), and the hall’s new elder statesman, Penn State’s Nittany Lion, who made his first appearance in 1904.

The induction ceremony was a weekendlong event. “It included a cocktail reception for all the inductees where they got to come as human beings—which is rare for them!” Hernandez points out. The next day, museum members attended a breakfast where mascots acted as servers. And on Sunday, “close to a thousand” turned out for the induction festivities, which featured a parade, food vendors, face painters, and a giant inflatable hockey rink. Museum founder Raymond sees it growing even larger. The mascots themselves were speechless at the induction ceremony (which, the newspapers pointed out, was proper), but Hernandez had plenty to say. “It was ridiculous fun!” Hernandez notes. Ridiculous? Or terrifying? Sorry—maybe it’s just us.

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And the Museum Goes to….

The campus will be home to cuttingedge project spaces, an alfresco piazza, and an active education studio. Fine dining and casual eateries, a bustling shop, and an openair terrace will add to the visitor experience, capped off with unparalleled views of the Hollywood Hills. So are you ready for your close-up? Visit academymuseum.org for more information, and pass us the envelope, please….

OS ANGELES—And…the Oscar goes to...the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures for Best Venue Celebrating All Things Movies! From special exhibitions to dramatic rotating galleries, this emerging museum is a blockbuster production touting “something for everyone.” The cinematic showplace, slated to open in early 2020 on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, will boast a three-thousand-squarefoot campus and six stories of dynamic exhibits and features. Extensively restored from a historic 1939 department store, architect Renzo Piano promises the finished project will be a museum like no other. The big-picture vision is to create a global film hub to draw visitors from around the world to experience an intimate, behind-thescenes look at the art and science of movies past, present, and future. Planned amenities include two state-of-the-art theatres, artifact collections, and long-term exhibits on all aspects of moviemaking. Special themed installations will inspire, educate, and entertain film buffs on the inner workings, history, and joy of motion pictures. “The Where Dreams Are Made: A Journey Inside the Movies” exhibit will be every cinephile’s fantasy, showcasing evocative settings and rare objects from the academy’s collection of photographs, film/video assets,

The 2.12-Carat Arkansas Trip

screenplays, and posters. Costume elements such as the headpiece of the title creature from the movie Alien (1979) and Shirley Temple’s tap shoes from The Little Colonel (1935) are highlights of the collection. So are less lauded pieces of Hollywood lore, including the Olympia typewriter Joseph Stefano used to write the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and a study for a matte painting of Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu mansion in Citizen Kane (1941). A museum app will allow fans to delve into the backstories behind their favorite films and learn more about Tinseltown lore.

LIGHTS! CAMERA! ACTION! The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures is slated for a 2020 opening.

URFREESBORO, Ark.—On a hot summer day last July, Josh Lanik was hunting for gems with his family at Crater of Diamonds State Park in Murfreesboro, Arkansas, a 37.5-acre plowed field that’s attracted rockhounds for over a century, when he spotted a brandy-colored rock about the size of a jelly bean. “It was blatantly obvious there was something different about it,” says Lanik, 36, a schoolteacher from Hebron, Nebraska. He soon learned it was a 2.12-carat diamond, the largest found in the park this year. (And a grand total of 296 have been reported so far.) And because of the park’s “finders keepers” policy, it was his for the taking. After the story made headlines, several of Lanik’s former students texted him, asking if he’d be retiring from teaching. But Lanik had the gem appraised and claims it’s “not worth near as much as you’d think.” He plans to have the diamond put into a ring for his wife.

Cops Help Cats

UNCIE, Ind.—When police in Muncie, Indiana, visited the Muncie Animal Care and Services Shelter, they discovered it was short on supplies to take care of the hundreds of cats there in need. Hoping to help, the officers came up with an innovative solution. For a limited time, Muncie residents who had received parking tickets would be allowed to pay off those tickets by donating the corresponding value of cat food or litter to the animal shelter. The promotion was successful: Not only did the shelter receive plenty of donations from parking-ticket holders, but other members of the community dropped off supplies as well. All agreed it was a purr-fect resolution.

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Route 66 Loves Miner Frecs

ALENA, Kans.—The town of Galena, Kansas—a former mining community with a current population of approximately 3,200—has a new resident. Oddly enough, this new fellow hasn’t said a word—yet everyone seems to be digging him. His name is Frecs, and he’s designed to serve as a modern-day Muffler Man statue—one of those tall, eye-catching fiberglass sculptures used as advertising or roadside attractions that rose to popularity in 1960s America. Standing on old Route 66 on East Front Street near Galena’s historic viaduct, the nineteen-foottall gentleman is dressed like a miner—clad in overalls and wearing a helmet that features a working headlamp. He’s decked out with accessories: a pickax, a bucket, and a rope— well prepared to chip his way into history and modern memory. The idea for the big statue’s creation originated with Kansas Historic Route 66 Association president Renee Charles. She wanted to build something to pay tribute to her grandfather, local miner Milbern John Busick, an army veteran who also completed jobs for the Works Progress Administration. Frecs actually bears a playful resemblance to Busick himself, who was nicknamed “Frecs” by his fellow zinc miners for his friendly freckled face. Charles enlisted Galena welder John Simon to create the framework for the sculpture, which was afterward wrapped with chicken wire. Frecs is made of “poor man’s fiberglass,” Charles says, which she describes as a mixture of cloth, canvas, glue, and paint. The artwork, which Charles is hoping will help revitalize that area of Galena, has been more than a year and a half in the making. As of press time, Frecs is still receiving some touchups and final additions. No doubt he’s on the road to becoming Galena’s most popular photo stop—an attraction that will point the way with his pickax toward more to come.  Colorado State Highway 145 photo courtesy Lisa Schwantes, Colorado Department of Transportation. Turtle courtesy Carolina Waterfowl Rescue. Flint mural photographs by Edward McClelland. Smoky Valley Scenic Byway photo by Doug Stremel, courtesy Kansas Tourism. Black Hawk statue by Carrie O’Neil. Mascot Hall of Fame exterior courtesy Mascot Hall of Fame; interiors by Charlie Simokaitis Photography. Academy Museum of Motion Pictures concept drawing, Alien head, and Psycho typewriter courtesy Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Frecs courtesy Renee Charles, Kansas Historic Route 66 Association.

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A LOOK AT TEN MASTERPIECES AND THE LOCATIONS THAT INSPIRED THEM

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CHRISTINA’S WORLD 1948, Egg tempera on gessoed panel, 32.25" × 47.745" Museum of Modern Art • 11 West 53rd Street • New York, New York 10019 • (888) 999-8861 • moma.org

n 1991, John Sculley—the marketing guru that Steve Jobs had hired to run Apple Computer—gifted an isolated farmhouse and two acres of land in South Cushing, Maine, to the Farnsworth Art Museum. Wealthy businessmen giving generously to nonprofit arts organizations is nothing new, of course, but this bequest was different. The house, built by a sea captain in the late 1700s, had been the longtime home of the Olson family, close friends of the painter Andrew Wyeth. And the grassy slope below its weathered gray shingles had been the setting for one of the most famous American paintings of the twentieth century, Christina’s World. Sculley’s gift not only meant that the Farnsworth could preserve an important piece of vernacular New England architecture, but also allow visitors the chance to stand on the very spot Wyeth did before creating a work that has deeply moved millions of viewers.

Christina’s World portrays Christina Olson, a woman Wyeth met in 1939 after being introduced by their neighbor Betsy James, who would become Wyeth’s wife. The Pennsylvaniaborn painter, aged 22 but already exhibiting his work professionally, was summering in Maine, where he found himself captivated by the landscape and, soon, by Christina Olson, then living in the old gray house she had inherited. Aged 55, Olson suffered from a degenerative nerve condition commonly mistaken for polio but now identified as Charcot-MarieTooth disease. It had robbed her of the use of her legs. Refusing the perceived indignity of a wheelchair, Olson crawled instead, dragging her body around “like a crab on a New England shore,” Wyeth once said. It was Olson’s stubborn resilience, her quiet dignity, that Wyeth had sought to capture. Olson, he later reflected, “was limited physically but by no means spiritually. The challenge to me was to do justice to her

extraordinary conquest of life which most people would consider hopeless.” Wyeth succeeded in doing justice to that conquest. But in the process, he also paid homage to the melancholy and haunting landscape of coastal Maine—indeed, down to individual blades of grass and expanse of overcast sky. Visitors to the property today are bound to find it more verdant than the scene rendered by Wyeth’s brush: Pines have

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ANDREW WYETH Olson House (late 1700s) 384 Hathorne Point Road • Cushing, Maine 04563 • (207) 354-0102 • farnsworthmuseum.org grown up along the ridgeline and the hues of grasses and the house itself are far richer than one sees on Wyeth’s 1948 canvas. Wyeth had always filtered his realism through a magical lens. But the recent death of his father had also suffused Wyeth’s mood with no small amount of pensive gloom. Those not given to ruminating over a patch of grass might prefer a visit to the Olson house itself, which has been maintained in

the weathered, even decrepit, state in which Wyeth would have known it. His friendship with Christina Olson was close enough that she’d given him an upstairs room to use as a studio. Furnished with a handful of Shaker chairs, its faded paint crackled and clinging to the walls, the house conjures the same chilly solitude that the painting does. As for the painting itself, the Museum of Modern Art quickly purchased it from New York’s Macbeth Gallery for the thenprincely sum of $1,800. And though Wyeth’s work would eventually make him wealthy, Christina Olson refused the painter’s offer to share the proceeds. Olson is known to have liked Christina’s World a great deal, reportedly saying in her later years that “Andy put me where he knew I wanted to be. Now that I can’t be there anymore, all I do is think of that picture and I’m there.” —ROBERT KLARA

STRUGGLING MUSE: Andrew Wyeth (1917– 2009) was so taken with Christina Olson that he painted her into his works each summer for twenty years. He claimed she possessed a “powerful face with a great deal of fortitude. The Quality of a Medici head,” and expressed a wish to be buried beside her when he died.

PHOTO CREDITS: Large photo © Cheryl Fleishman. Wyeth portrait © Bruce Weber. Interior © Randy Duchaine; small exterior courtesy Marc Girard.

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NIAGARA 1857, Oil on canvas, 40" × 90.5" National Gallery of Art • Constitution Avenue NW • Washington, D.C. 20565 • (202) 737-4215 • nga.gov

here was a time when Niagara Falls was the uncontested Honeymoon Capital of the World. From the mid-1800s through the early1900s, newlywed couples from America’s great industrialized cities could hardly consider themselves hitched unless they jogged from the altar to the nearest ferry or train, purchased a pair of steamy tickets, and embarked upon a hot-and-heavy trip north to consummate their union within earshot of the cataract’s titillating tide. Times have changed. These days, young lovebirds dashing from the chapel might just as likely pop off at a Motel 6. But those honeymooners with a taste for tradition, an appreciation for history, and an eye that can still prize the sublime continue to find their way to Niagara Falls. And that’s why Frederic Edwin Church’s famous painting Niagara still hints at the power it held in 1857—even if its rumble seems a little bit further away. Church himself was a romantic. He was the son of a well-to-do Connecticut family who early in life exhibited a unique artistic genius. In 1844, at age 18, Church traveled to the Catskill Mountains, where he became the lone pupil of Hudson River School master Thomas Cole. The latter was so impressed with the young man’s talent that he told his

fellow painters Church possessed “the finest eye for drawing in the world.” The student, for his part, adopted a style of painting in harmony with his teacher’s—rendering the Catskills and Berkshires in dramatic light— before moving away from Cole’s allegorical style to more fully embrace a passionate realism. Church set up a studio in New York—he tutored his own pupils—and then he turned his attentions toward painting the locus of all things artistic in America in that era—the flowing majesty of Niagara Falls. “Church’s enthusiasm for Niagara Falls… united him in interest with the countless artists who had depicted the scene so often that it was the most popular, the most often treated, and the tritest single item of subject matter to appear in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury European and American landscape painting,” author John K. Howat noted in his 2005 monograph, Frederic Church. “The great falls…were held in awe for their sublime and eternal expression of God’s presence in nature.” Tourists, however, were quick to spy more than the Almighty in the omnipotent cascade: Expansion-minded Americans saw in the falls a symbol of national push, movement, and power. And the honeymooners sweating on its shores surely likened its force to that of their own indomitable drives.

In March of 1856, Church made his first of five visits to the falls—and quickly developed a fever for them. By midsummer, he was rooming at Niagara with the family of wealthy New York merchant and railroad man Jonathan Sturges, but the record shows he was too smitten with the scene to socialize. “[Church] is intoxicated with Niagara,” Sturges’ daughter confirmed in a letter to her mother. “He rises at sunrise, and we only see him at meal times. He is so restless away from the falls that he cannot keep still…. Often in the evening…he will get up and say, ‘Well, good night, I am going down to see the effect of moonlight and shadow.’” The product of this immersion—this “marination in the mists,” as one historian has termed it—was a turbulent masterpiece remarkable for its heart-stopping verisimilitude.

Niagara appears courtesy the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

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FREDERIC EDWIN CHURCH Niagara Falls Table Rock Welcome Centre • 6650 Niagara Parkway • Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada • (800) 563-2557 • niagarafallstourism.com

Church’s Niagara measured seven feet in length, a massive painting that swamped the senses of those who came to see it exhibited alone in a Manhattan gallery. Patrons paid twenty-five cents for admission to the show, then lingered for hours to study the artwork, peering at it through opera glasses and binoculars and poring over its every detail.

And there was a lot to pore over: Church’s composition placed viewers on the brink of Horseshoe Falls—the largest of Niagara’s three cataracts—then effectively pulled them into its raging magnificence. Church accomplished this feat by omitting any land mass in the foreground, shrinking all signs of civilization, and pushing the plane of the falls nearest the eye downward to reveal more of the current’s dramatic rush. Indeed, to many who beheld them, the green, roiling waters in the painting actually appeared to move. “Church created…real water” wrote author Pierre Berton in his 1992 record Niagara: A History of the Falls, “boiling, coursing, sparkling, churning, skipping in runnels over the ragged ledges…bubbling in eddies at the viewer’s feet, foaming in one triumphant splurge over the stark lip of the Escarpment.… That, after all, was Frederic Church’s genius.” So colossal an achievement was Niagara that Church was hard-pressed to equal it. He succeeded only once, with The Heart of the Andes (1859)—an effort that served up Ecuador’s Mount Chimborazo on a ten-foot canvas—but he never again captured America’s soul as purely as he had with Niagara. In 1867, Church returned to the falls to paint another panorama only to discover the fame of his first masterpiece had far outpaced his own:

AQUA MAN: Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900) found his greatest success as an artist in the waters of Niagara. He painted the falls no fewer than three times—forever pursuing a new view. In 1867, art critic Henry Tuckerman described Church sketching Niagara from a treetop.

Working on the shore, he was approached by a stranger—likely a chafing newlywed—who took one look at the artist’s latest endeavor and verbally belittled it. “Hmph!” the gentleman jeered. “You ought to see Church’s Niagara.” —THOMAS ARTHUR REPP

PHOTO CREDITS: Large photo by By Mats Bergstrom. Church portrait, public domain. Honeymooners courtesy Niagara Falls Tourism. Table Rock marker by By twilllll. Welcome Center by Kit Leong.

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AMERICAN GOTHIC 1930, Oil on beaverboard, 30.75" × 25.75" Art Institute of Chicago • 111 South Michigan Avenue • Chicago, Illinois 60603 • (312) 443-3600 • artic.edu

he list of iconic pairs of Americans who have been depicted in this place is seemingly endless, and still growing: JFK and Jackie; Michele and Barack; Mickey and Minnie; Lady Liberty and Uncle Sam; Scully and Mulder; Peggy and Hank Hill, with Hank wielding a spatula; Marge and Homer—with Homer skewering a donut. Of course, you know we’re talking about what is arguably the most famous, and certainly the most parodied, of all American paintings: Grant Wood’s 1930 double portrait American Gothic. Less well known is the fact that you, intrepid sojourner, can join the pitchfork-andspectacles club by visiting Dibble House, the

tiny cottage in tiny Eldon, Iowa, that is the painting’s backdrop. It would be difficult to find a spot in the forty-eight states more literally “in the middle of nowhere” than Eldon. On a map, find the triangle formed by Des Moines, Kansas City, and Peoria, put your finger in the center of it, and there it is, just a skosh to the north but still well over an hour south of I-80, the nearest interstate. Yet so iconic is American Gothic that this one-restaurant, no-stoplight town attracts more than fifteen thousand visitors a year. The most significant of those visitors was, of course, Grant Wood himself. Wood was an Iowa native, born in 1891 in Anamosa, a few hundred cornfields north of Eldon. After his

father’s death when Wood was ten, he lived in Cedar Rapids, with his sister Nan and his church-organist mother, in a cramped studio above a hearse garage. Wood spent much of his twenties in Paris, dabbling in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism and came back a changed artist, one who wanted to capture the rural and small-town Iowa he knew. “I had to go to France to appreciate Iowa,” he said. In 1929, a fellow artist, John Small, drove Wood around Eldon looking for subjects. Wood was struck by the “Carpenter Gothic”style house that Charles Dibble had built in 1882, and particularly the amusingly literal, Sears-catalogue Gothic window adorning its second floor. Wood sketched the house on the back of an envelope, then, back in his Cedar Rapids studio, rendered it in oil on beaverboard. He enlisted his sister, Nan, and his dentist, Byron McKeeby, as models for the portrait subjects, and the rest is art history. The painting, now considered a prime example of American Regionalism, is the subject of reams of interpretation. Is the couple and their humble home a nativist paean to an idealized rural America? Or is it, as many midwesterners took it, a metropolitan elitist’s satire of pinched farmland fundamentalism? Is it a simple mourning painting, in which the daughter shows concern for the emotional state of her newly widowed, emotionally inaccessible father? Or is it an elaborate mythological allegory in which the globe on the cropped weathervane at the painting’s top is the then-recently discovered planet Pluto, thus suggesting the true identity of the tridentwielding male figure, while the woman’s brooch pegs her as Proserpina, the goddess of the harvest, her stray lock of hair suggesting her recent ravishment?

American Gothic appears courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago.

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GRANT WOOD Dibble House (1881–1882) 300 American Gothic Street • Eldon, Iowa 52554 • (641) 652-3352 • americangothichouse.org Such is the enigmatic nature of art that all these things may be true or not. But the house itself is an un-enigmatically real midwestern home. In fact, it was leased as a private residence until 2014, most recently to Malibu native Beth Howard, who wanted “to live…my fantasy,” as she told the New York Times. Today, the cramped, fragile, 750-squarefoot structure is no longer occupied; it is open to visitors only one day a month. Instead,

the adjoining American Gothic House and Center, opened in 2007, emphasizes educational history and family-friendly outdoor activities. The center, which offers free admission, features a gallery with exhibits on the history of the painting, the artist, and the house. A media room screens a thirty-minute documentary as well as a seventeen-minute cartoon for kids. Events include regular concerts on the house’s front porch and lawn, art contests, even bullfrog races. But most importantly, knowing its main draw, the center maintains a costume rack of aprons, jackets, and overalls, allowing visitors to dress up for their own appearance in the most recognizable of all American paintings— placing you right up there with the iconic likes of Ken and Barbie, Bill and Hillary, and Beavis and Butthead. And unlike all those others, no Photoshop is required. —JESS WINFIELD

MAN OF THE LAND: Although American Gothic brought Grant Wood (1891–1942) international fame, he still strove to present himself as a simple Iowa farmer. He sported bib overalls in nearly every photo taken of him, and he once admitted, ”All the really good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.”

PHOTO CREDITS: Large photo © kdotaylor. Wood portrait, public domain. Exterior window © Joe Taylor Cinema. Interior window courtesy Ottumwa Courier.

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A LIGHTHOUSE AT TWO LIGHTS 1929, Oil on canvas, 29.5" × 43.25" Museum of Modern Art • 11 West 53rd Street • New York, New York 10019 • (888) 999-8861 • moma.org

n 1927, Edward Hopper had one of the best days of his life as a hitherto struggling artist. His painting Two on the Aisle sold for $1,500 (nearly $22,000 in today’s dollars). And with that money in hand, Hopper purchased his first car. It was a 1925 Dodge—used—but it was enough to get him and his wife, Jo, out of New York’s summer heat and up to the breezy seclusion of Cape Elizabeth, Maine. Among the subjects Hopper painted that summer was the local landmark Two Lights— as the name suggests, a pair of lighthouses that stood 895 feet apart atop the shoreline near Dyer Cove. In fact, over the next two summers, he would create three oils and multiple watercolors of Two Lights. (Dating to the 1870s, the lighthouses allowed mariners to take dual bearings in order to fix their position on the way into Portland Harbor and steer clear of the rocks.) Of the multiple works, the best known

is an oil titled A Lighthouse at Two Lights, which Hopper painted in 1929. The picture portrays the eastern light of the pair, the one closer to the ocean and boasting two keeper’s cottages at the base of the cast-iron tower. Like so many Hopper paintings, this one feels instantly familiar—perhaps because Hopper’s canvases have been so endlessly reproduced for calendars and dorm-room posters. But for those who seek a deeper communion with Hopper’s moody realism, the good news is not just that this painting is up on the walls of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, but the lighthouse can still be seen, too. Well, mostly. The landscape around this scene has, in the ninety years since Hopper set up his easel, inexorably yielded to progress. Housing developments have claimed the surrounding farmland. The assistant lightkeeper’s house in the painting is no more. Most dismaying for area residents, however, was the dramatic expansion of the main lightkeeper’s house

carried out in 1999 by Wall Street tycoon William J. Kourakas, which, lamented the preservation group Lighthouse Friends, rendered it “markedly different from the dwelling immortalized in Hopper’s paintings.” Nevertheless, the light—an active navigation aid—is still there, and the scene remains easy to recognize. Not that reaching it is so easy. The rural and secluded coastal towns of 1920s Maine have become the rich

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EDWARD HOPPER Cape Elizabeth, East Tower Light (1828) Viewable from the beach at the eastern terminus of Two Lights Road • Cape Elizabeth, Maine 04107 retreats of today, and Cape Elizabeth is among the richest. The eastern light is not open to the public, and the lightkeeper’s house remains in private hands. But nearby Two Lights State Park, a pristine perch filled with picnic tables and shoreline trails, affords a beautiful view of the light. The slightly more adventurous can motor to the far end of Two Lights Road, where a dirt parking road leads to the rocky shoreline and an even closer view.

Like most of Hopper’s work, A Lighthouse at Two Lights breathes with plainspoken beauty and aching loneliness. As the curator Barbara Haskell once observed, Hopper struggled with “isolation in the industrial world.” And no doubt, the fact that people continue to experience that struggle explains the enduring popularity of Hopper’s scenes of empty theatres, desolate street corners, and windswept shores with lighthouses. In a technical sense, Hopper was drawn to the play of light across the geometric surfaces of these structures. But on an emotional level, lighthouses embodied solitude like little else. And Hopper rendered them better than anyone. As the artist’s friend Charles Burchfield once said, Hopper “put the stamp of ownership” on what he painted, rendering “lighthouse towers almost as though he had invented them instead of merely being their recorder.” —ROBERT KLARA

SOLITARY MAN: Edward Hopper (1882–1967) was an American Realist who once opined that the power of his paintings was a reflection of his own loneliness. Astute viewers of A Lighthouse at Two Lights will note that the isolated beacon is cut off from the thing it serves: The sea is not shown; there is no water in view.

PHOTO CREDITS: Large photo and tower detail courtesy Paul VanDerWerf. Hopper portrait courtesy National Portrait Gallery. Aerial courtesy Visions Of America, LLC.

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LOOKING DOWN YOSEMITE VALLEY 1865, Oil on canvas, 64.5" × 96.5" Birmingham Museum of Art • 2000 Rev. Abraham Woods Jr. Boulevard • Birmingham, Alabama 10019 • (205) 254-2565 • artsbma.org

osemite Valley is one of those places on earth so breathtakingly beautiful that it’s practically a piece of art in its own right, rendered by the mighty hands of nature. It would take some chutzpah to exaggerate the grandeur of Yosemite Valley in order to make a buck, right? Meet Albert Bierstadt and his 1865 painting Looking Down Yosemite Valley. The first of his large-scale paintings of the natural masterpiece in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, Bierstadt’s huge work bathed the valley in a romantic, sunset-haloed, highly unlikely golden glow and exaggerated the already monumental proportions of its rock formations to sell the Civil War-weary public a beatific vision of the American West. That’s how the artist rolled. Born in Germany, Bierstadt moved to America with his family before his second birthday, but went back to Germany as a young

man to study in Dusseldorf. Upon his return to America, he first made his name with a sixby-ten-foot depiction of the Alps in 1858’s Lake Lucerne, but quickly became famous as the greatest painter of the landscapes of the westward expansion. Having already visited and painted the Rockies, Bierstadt sketched Yosemite in 1863 and returned to New York to paint it in his studio. In addition to the painting’s remarkable size and scale, it’s also notable for its unusual prospect. Most Yosemite landscapes are painted facing east, up the Merced River. As the title suggests, Looking Down Yosemite Valley gazes due west, downriver, with the granite mass of El Capitan on the right, Sentinel Rock on the left, and Middle Cathedral Rock in the gauzy distance. Bierstadt subjected the release of his grand work to the grandiose PR treatment for which he became famous. “A Bierstadt canvas,” the Smithsonian notes, “was elaborately

framed, installed in a darkened room, and hidden behind luxurious drapes. At the appointed time, the work was revealed to thunderous applause.” Following its New York unveiling—which was delayed two weeks due to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln—the painting went on a tour of the eastern states. The campaign created both enormous public curiosity about Yosemite and a seller’s market for further Bierstadt paintings of Yosemite.

Looking Down Yosemite Valley appears courtesy the Birmingham Museum of Art.

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ALBERT BIERSTADT Yosemite Valley View of the Merced River, Sentinel Rock, and El Capitan • Yosemite National Park, California • (209) 372-0200 • nps.gov/yose Ironically, it was thanks partly to Bierstadt’s work that the remote Yosemite Valley became practically overrun with tourists. With the end of the Civil War and the completion of the transcontinental railroad, by the time Bierstadt returned there in 1872, according to the NEH’s Picturing America project, “Bierstadt lamented the loss of the unspoiled wilderness he had portrayed only a few years earlier.”

Yosemite hasn’t gotten any less popular since. Made a state park by decree of Abraham Lincoln in 1864 (during the time Bierstadt was working on the painting) and a national park in 1872, Yosemite now sees an average of more than four million visitors a year. The ongoing difficulties of coping with such traffic—not to mention climate change and its accompanying wildfires and deforestation—are the subject of another story. But if you’ve never made the trip, don’t let all that deter you. The splendors of El Capitan, Half Dome, Bridalveil Falls, and all the rest have somehow survived both Bierstadt’s hyperbolic marketing campaign and the resultant crowds, and that great advocate for the West, Horace Greeley, wasn’t exaggerating when he proclaimed, “I know no single wonder of nature on earth which can claim superiority over the Yosemite.” —JESS WINFIELD

MOUNTAIN MAN: Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902) left his mark on the land he painted: In 1914, the Colorado Board on Geographic Names and the US Board on Geographic Names designated a Front Range peak of the Rocky Mountains “Mount Bierstadt” in his honor. The artist had made the first recorded summit of the 14,065-foot peak in 1863.

PHOTO CREDITS: Large photo © rmbarricarte. Bierstadt portrait, public domain. Small valley photo © Bill Birtwhisle. El Capitan courtesy National Park Service.

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A HOME ON THE MISSISSIPPI 1871, Chromolithograph, 8.5“ × 13.5“ Library of Congress • 101 Independence Avenue • Washington, D.C. 20540 • (202) 707-5000 • loc.gov

ack in the 1800s, there were few ways to get the news about what was happening across America. Without Internet, television, or radio—long before “Google” became a verb—people relied heavily on newspapers and magazines for information. Photography was relatively new at the time, so the print media often turned to artists for paintings or quick, detailed sketches to accompany magazine or newspaper articles. And that is how talented British illustrator and painter Alfred Rudolph Waud built a successful career in America’s Deep South. Waud was born in London in 1828 and studied at the Government School of Design and the Royal Academy of Arts. He immigrated to the United States in 1850, working as an illustrator for a humor magazine and a travel guidebook before joining the staff of New York Illustrated News in 1860. When the Civil War began in 1861, Waud was sent to cover the Army of the Potomac, the primary

Union military contingent. As a special artist for the paper, he served as a kind of on-thebattlefield press correspondent, sketching what he witnessed with drama and intensity. Later, Waud joined the staff of Harper’s Weekly magazine, but continued his work with the army. His artwork included scenes from the First Battle of Bull Run, Battle of Gettysburg, and other important military actions. Waud played an instrumental role as a chronicler of the Civil War: His detailed battlefield scenes were sometimes the only glimpses that Americans had of what the war actually looked like. This earned him notoriety as one of the leading artistjournalists of his time. After the war, he continued working as a freelance illustrator. In 1871, the US government commissioned Waud to paint Woodland Plantation, an antebellum mansion located in West Pointe à la Hache, Louisiana. The artwork would be included in a documentary about the Mississippi River.

Woodland Plantation, built in 1834 by magnate William Johnson as an 11,000-acre working sugar cane plantation, was spared the damage of the Civil War. Waud traveled to the site, about forty minutes south of New Orleans in the region known as the Deep Mississippi Delta, and went about sketching the red-tile-roofed mansion, the horse-drawn carriages, the trees. His creation, A Home on the Mississippi, has stood the test of time. If the image looks somewhat familiar, it’s for good reason:

A Home on the Mississippi appears courtesy Library of Congress.

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ALFRED WAUD Woodland Plantation (1834) 21997 LA-23 • Port Sulphur, Louisiana 70083 • (504) 656-9990 • woodlandplantation.com In 1871, printmaking company Currier & Ives published a chromolithograph of the piece in its popular Homes Across the Country series, adding touches of its own to Waud’s work. At the end of Prohibition, Currier & Ives licensed the image to the makers of Southern Comfort bourbon, and for seventyfive years, Waud’s art graced the label of the Southern Comfort bottle. Woodland Plantation underwent renovations beginning in 1997 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in

1998; the following year, it opened as a country inn. Today’s fifty-acre property, comprised of five buildings, is a bed-and-breakfast and a restaurant, Spirits Hall, that serves up Louisiana oysters and traditional Cajun and Creole dishes. The beautiful natural setting on the Mississippi River offers a peaceful spot to soak up some of the history and culture of the South. Stroll the property to see wildlife and flora, including a wide variety of birds and Louisiana Purchase Cypress Legacy #4, one of the oldest cypress trees in Louisiana. On summer afternoons, Buddy, the resident alligator, might make an appearance. Devoted anglers will be pleased to know that the Deep Delta is one of the top fisheries in North America. Take a 45-minute boat tour or just relax on the porch with a glass of Southern Comfort, natch. The place still has the kind of slow-down-and-take-it-easy vibe that Waud captured nearly 150 years ago. —MELISSA BRANDZEL

UNCIVIL SERVANT: Alfred Waud (1828–1891) dodged snipers’ bullets during his days as a field artist accompanying the Army of the Potomac. Although he sketched other subjects after the war’s end, he continually returned to the scenes of devastation. Waud was stricken by a heart attack while sketching battlefields in Georgia at age 62.

PHOTO CREDITS: Large photo © Tosh Brown. Waud portrait, public domain. Aerial courtesy Woodland Plantation.

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LAKE McARTHUR, YOHO PARK 1924, Oil on cardboard, 8.5" × 10.5" National Gallery of Canada • 380 Sussex Drive • Ottawa, Ontario K1N 9N4 • (613) 990-1985 • gallery.ca

n 1906, the Canadian Pacific Railway published a guidebook titled Resorts in the Canadian Rockies. Among the amenities offered at the Banff Springs Hotel was an excursion to Lake McArthur—“a sapphire gem, located above the tree line, and with a huge glacier, fed on the precipitous heights of Mount Biddle, terminating in the water, where it breaks into huge icebergs.” Guidebooks can sometimes lay it on a bit thick, but this one was telling it straight. Even among Canadian Rockies lakes, McArthur is a stunning sight. Its sapphire blue comes from its depth—279 feet, the equivalent of a twenty-sixstory building. It’s fitting that this lake wound

up in a Canadian Pacific guide, since it takes its name from James Joseph McArthur, who surveyed the land for the railroad in 1887. But the lake might be little known now were it not for a visitor who arrived in the summer of 1924. He was James Edward Hervey MacDonald. Today, the Canadian government’s parks site still lists detailed directions to this spot. The McArthur Pass and Lake McArthur trail is a five-mile circuit that leads along a rocky ledge and into an open meadow on the north shore. While it’s rare enough to be able to visit the setting of any famous painting and find it largely unchanged, the terrain that MacDonald rendered is nearly exactly the same now as it was ninety-five years ago.

Born in England in 1873, J. E. H. MacDonald was in his teens when his family immigrated to Canada, where he enrolled in Ontario’s Hamilton Art School. In 1911, after years of working in commercial art in Toronto,

Lake McArthur, Yoho Park appears courtesy the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

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J. E. H. MacDONALD Lake McArthur, Yoho National Park View from Lake McArthur’s northwest shore • Yoho National Park • Field, British Columbia V0A 1G0 • (250) 343-6783 • pc.gc.ca MacDonald staked his future on landscape painting. His distinctive style helped establish an entire Canadian art movement championed by like-minded landscape painters who became known as the Group of Seven. MacDonald believed that to properly paint the land, the artist had to immerse himself in it. He did this first in the wilderness of Ontario before entering his “mountain phase” and heading west to British Columbia. In 1924 he painted what many consider his finest work, Yoho Park’s Lake McArthur,

an alpine aerie cupped into the valley below Park Mountain and Mount Schaffer. Already a proud nationalist, MacDonald was profoundly moved by the experience of painting in the bracing air a thousand feet above sea level. “I have memories of the clearest crystal mountain days imaginable,” he later reflected, “when we fortunates in the heights seemed to be sky people living in light alone.” MacDonald died in 1931, and Lake McArthur, Yoho Park eventually found its way into the National Gallery of Canada. Looking at the painting now, one is struck by how deftly MacDonald transmuted the complex topography of the Rockies into frosty slabs of color. His emotional connection to the site still radiates from this small canvas. As Canadian art historian Tom Thomson has observed, while all members of the Group of Seven painted in the Rockies, “it remains very much MacDonald’s special place.” —ROBERT KLARA

WALDEN POND? J. E. H. MacDonald (1873–1932) responded to Canada’s landscape with a sensitivity honed by his interest in the American writers Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. ”One felt that the mountains are not completed. The builders are still at work…often from the chasms one hears the thundering as the gods…change their minds.” MacDonald named his son Thoreau.

PHOTO CREDITS: Large photo © Marko Stavric. J. E. H. MacDonald portrait courtesy Archives of Ontario. Winter scene Zeljkokcanmore. Summer scene © attilio pregnolato.

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BROOKLYN BRIDGE 1919–1920, Oil on canvas, 84.75" × 76.625" Yale University Art Gallery • 1111 Chapel Street • New Haven, Connecticut 06510 • (203) 432-0600 • artgallery.yale.edu

et us say that you finally got your time machine working and were able to travel back to the New York City of 1917—to lower Manhattan, we’ll further suppose, where you could take an easy walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. It is late at night and, as you pass beneath one of the two great granite-block towers, you notice a thickset, middle-aged man, looking around and not so much impressed by the sights as bewitched by them. A jumper, perhaps? No, but a man shaken nevertheless. Indeed, he would later write: “Many nights I stood on the bridge—and in the middle alone—lost—a defenseless prey to the surrounding swarming darkness—crushed by the mountainous black impenetrability of the skyscrapers.” Time-machine etiquette dictates that you

don’t disturb the people you encounter in the past and, in this case, that is a good thing. For the portly man on the bridge is Joseph Stella, and the ruminations holding him in thrall will result in a series of some of the most beautiful and evocative paintings ever made of this bridge. And this bridge, dear visitor, has been painted an awful lot. Born in Muro Lucano in southern Italy, Stella moved to New York in 1896 but abandoned his studies of medicine in order to pursue art. Initially an academic realist, Stella, after a brief stint living in Paris, returned to New York in 1917 as a committed futurist. He arrived just in time to witness the dawn of the Machine Age. Stimulated and provoked by the tensions of modern urban life, Stella worked out his complex emotional response through his paintings—most notably of the

Brooklyn Bridge; he lived nearby, having found an apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Brooklyn has changed since then, but its namesake bridge has not. Today, using the approaches at either anchorage, it’s easy (and free) to take the same walk over the span that Stella did, via the wide, wood-plank pathway that runs along the bridge’s spine. Though the bridge is hardly a contemporary structure, it has always possessed an uncanny ability to harmonize with the modern city that grew up around it. The web of suspension cables girding the walkway imposes an alluring grid on the vertical lines of lower Manhattan’s skyscrapers, while the portals of the bridge’s stone towers act as a Gothic picture frame for the sky and the varicolored lights of the cityscape beyond. Today, you will see locals and tourists alike stopped in their tracks to contemplate the views from the bridge. Though there are further and higher vantage points of the city, none is more thought-provoking. It’s not a stretch, then, to feel some semblance of the sensory overload that compelled Stella to paint the bridge he called a “shrine containing all the efforts of the new civilization of America.” Stella’s Brooklyn Bridge of 1919–1920 does not portray the view from the bridge so much as the dizzying experience of standing on it. The cables thrust themselves toward the viewer, trapping him, as the towers stack themselves in the center of the canvas in a vertiginous repetition. But the most affecting element is light—headlights and traffic lights, the glow of distant buildings, and the dark blue reflections off the river far beneath. Every visitor who walks the bridge will take away his or her own impressions, of course,

Brooklyn Bridge appears courtesy the Yale University Art Gallery.

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JOSEPH STELLA Brooklyn Bridge (1883) Above the East River between Brooklyn and Manhattan • New York, New York 10038 • (718) 222-9939 • brooklynbridgepark.org but for Stella the experience seems to have been an intoxicating blend of excitement and confusion, as though the ever-accelerating pace of modern city life was always just a step ahead of what was manageable. “Here and there,” Stella related, he saw “lights resembling suspended falls of astral bodies or fantastic splendors of remote rites—shaken by the underground tumult of the trains in perpetual motion, like blood in

the arteries—at times, ringing as alarm in a tempest, the shrill sulfurous voice of the trolley wires—now and then strange moanings of appeal from tugboats, guessed more than seen, through the infernal recesses below—I felt deeply moved, as if on the threshold of a new religion or in the presence of a new divinity.” In the June 1920 issue of the journal Current Opinion, one commentator praised Stella’s figurative and symbolic view of the bridge for being “more real, more true than a literal transcription of the bridge could be… The whole picture is throbbing, pulsating, trembling with the constant passing of the throng of cars”—so much so, he added, that a less attentive viewer “might not even recognize it as the Brooklyn Bridge.” Fortunately, we can, and the spectacle that held Stella in thrall a century ago is one that repeats itself, every night, to this day. —ROBERT KLARA

BRIDGE BEYOND: Smitten with the city and inspired by Italian Futurists, Joseph Stella (1877– 1946) saw in urban landscapes a spirituality previously reserved for nature. Of his nights on the Brooklyn Bridge, he said, ”I felt deeply moved, as if on the threshold of a new religion, or in the presence of a new divinity.”

PHOTO CREDITS: Large photo by TTstudio. Stella portrait and smaller day photo, public domain. Night photo © Prochasson Frederic.

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WATERFALL—NO. III—‘IAO VALLEY 1939, Oil on canvas, 24.25" × 20" Honolulu Museum of Art • 900 South Beretania Street • Honolulu, Hawaii 96814 • (808) 532-8700 • honolulumuseum.org

t’s hard to think of Hawai‘i without thinking of pineapples. But for American painter Georgia O’Keeffe, the fruit Hawai‘ians call hala kahiki seemed to be the last thing on her mind when she visited the islands and discovered the wonders of their stunning natural beauty. In 1938, New York City advertising agency N. W. Ayer—working on behalf of one of their clients, the Hawaiian Pineapple Company—capitalized on the trend of hiring fine artists to make ad campaigns look classier. They commissioned O’Keeffe, once dubbed by Time magazine as the “least commercial artist in the U.S.,” to go to the Territory of Hawai‘i and paint two canvases of pineapples

to be used for a promotional campaign. The Wisconsin-born O’Keeffe—an American modernist known for her vibrant paintings of flowers, New York skyscrapers, and bones with a backdrop of desert sky—was already an acclaimed artist. She was inspired by nature and frequently used it as her subject matter. As a young artist, she eschewed strict realist tradition and found her own style. The O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe notes that she developed her craft into “a refined and dramatic brush technique of laying down colors that meet at a hard edge, creating spectacular color shifts along a precise line.” In January 1939, O’Keeffe took a voyage to Hawai‘i on the SS Lurline ocean liner.

For almost three months she explored the Hawai‘ian islands, visiting Oahu, Kaua‘i, Maui, and the Big Island, painting twenty canvases in all during and after her trip. On Maui, known as the Valley Isle, she traveled along the coast and into the mountains. In the western part of the island, she was drawn to the ‘Iao Valley, a verdant mountain landscape dotted with streams—an area so beautiful that she made the journey up the winding road several times to visit it. These trips inspired a few canvases, including Waterfall—No. III, which was painted near the mouth of the valley. Though the waterfalls in the valley aren’t permanent fixtures—they appear from time to time during the year, after a heavy rainfall—O’Keeffe happened to luck out with the timing of her visit. But pineapples were clearly not on her agenda; instead, she created a variety of landscapes. To satisfy the ad agency—or perhaps to annoy them—she sent them paintings of a heliconia plant, a pink banana, and a papaya tree. But the Ayer agency needed their pineapple. To nudge O’Keeffe, they eventually shipped a pineapple plant to her penthouse in Manhattan. She finally delivered two canvases several months later, only one of which actually portrayed the prickly fruit. The ‘Iao Valley, though devoid of pineapples, is full of scenic vistas and tropical flora. In 1972, it was designated as a World Heritage site and a National Natural Landmark; as the location where Kamehameha I defeated the Maui army in the 1790 Battle of Kepaniwai, it’s also a historical site. The valley was once kapu (sacred or forbidden) to anyone except Hawai‘ian royalty, and for centuries the ‘Iao cliffs were a burial site for the ali‘i (members of a Hawai‘ian noble family).

Waterfall—No. III appears courtesy the Honolulu Museum of Art.

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GEORGIA O’KEEFFE ‘Iao Valley ‘Iao Valley State Park • 54 High Street • Wailuku, Hawaii 96793 • dlnr.hawaii.gov/dsp/parks/maui Today, this ten-mile-long, four-thousandacre valley is a popular paradise containing ‘Iao Valley State Park. It’s very accessible by car, and easy to navigate once you’re there,

with hiking trails, a ridgetop lookout point, and signage with historical information. Walk the ‘Iao Needle Lookout Trail and Ethnobotanical Loop, a paved 0.6-mile trail offering a view of the soaring, twelvehundred-foot Kuka‘emoku (‘Iao Needle), a mountain peak created by the erosion of the rock around it. On ‘Iao Valley Road, just before ‘Iao Valley State Park, the Kepaniwai Park Heritage Gardens is a showcase of the multicultural history of the island. The park’s gardens and buildings reflect a wide variety of cultures, including Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and Portuguese. For travelers who want to stay in the area, the nearby town of Wailuku, once home to New England missionaries and a thriving sugar company, has a handful of lodging options. Rain is frequent; the valley summit is one of the wettest places in Hawaii, averaging out to an inch of rainfall per day, much of which drains into the ‘Iao stream. Those who are looking for O’Keeffe’s Waterfall—No. III will find it as part of the collection at the Honolulu Museum of Art. When you’re in O‘ahu, give it a look-see, then head to Maui to check out the ‘Iao Valley.

THE PINEAPPLE EXPRESS: Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) never said much about the paintings she produced from her time in Hawaii, although she did say a lot about art. She once told an interviewer that her ultimate wish lay in “Filling a space in a beautiful way. That is what art means to me.”

If you’re lucky, you might spot a waterfall. Either way, you won’t be thinking of pineapples. —MELISSA BRANDZEL

PHOTO CREDITS: Large photo by Spotmatik Ltd. O’Keeffe portrait in public domain. Aerial by Joe West. Needle by the World Traveler. Stream by Shane Myers Photography.

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STOCKBRIDGE MAIN STREET AT CHRISTMAS 1967, Oil and acrylic on board, 26.25" × 95.25" Norman Rockwell Museum • 9 Glendale Road / Route 183 • Stockbridge, Massachusetts 01262 • (413) 298-4100 • nrm.org

or the past thirty years, on a designated weekend in early December, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, transports itself back to the mid-twentieth century. The town restricts traffic from Main Street, while local officials and shopkeepers take pains to arrange the storefronts just so: a lighted tree in front of City Hall, a wreath on the bank door, a red 1957 Ford coasting past the Red Lion Inn. Of course, many small towns in America break out the garland at holiday time, but Stockbridge (pop. 1,947) has a template that no other town has. It’s called Home for Christmas (Stockbridge Main Street at Christmas), completed in 1967 by the dean of American illustrators, Norman Rockwell. While Stockbridge Main Street at Christmas is a mammoth painting (nearly eight feet long), it is not as famous as canvases such as Rosie the Riveter (1943), Freedom from Want (1943) [the Thanksgiving-table one], and Saying Grace (1951). But the Stockbridge oil affords art fans the rare opportunity not just to visit the site of the well-known painting, but also be part of its tableau. “The image and character of Stockbridge has changed little over the years,” reads the Stockbridge Chamber of Commerce guide to the event, “thanks to the great care and affection of its residents, and it is that special ambiance which draws so many.” Fair enough. But there are other reasons why the main commercial thoroughfare of Stockbridge remains as pristine as it is. One of them is that the street was designated as a

National Historic Site in 2002, which had the practical effect of freezing the district in time and assuring that none of the Georgian and Federal buildings would be razed to make way for McDonald’s. The other is the reverence that the Berkshires have for Norman Rockwell, who didn’t just paint Stockbridge but also lived there from 1953 until his death in 1978. When he first moved to town, the 59-yearold Rockwell found a space right over the butcher shop and, after installing a $5,000 picture window for natural light, converted it into his studio. Though Rockwell was already famous and well off, thanks to the hundreds of covers the Saturday Evening Post had commissioned from him, he was also mired in a troubled marriage and suffering from depression. Yet Stockbridge offered solace to the graying painter. His psychoanalyst’s office was right across the street, and the pageant of stores, homes, and people became a rich fodder for his work. In fact, small towns and human tableaux

we so engaging to Rockwell that he didn’t feel like painting much else. Prior to moving to Stockbridge, the artist had owned a farmhouse in Arlington, Vermont. And though the Green Mountain State’s covered bridges, red barns, and autumn foliage beckoned to his brush, Rockwell ignored the landscape entirely. An oft-told story goes that a fishing buddy of Rockwell’s once called the painter’s attention to the picturesque setting they were in. “Yes, isn’t it beautiful?” Rockwell responded. “Thank heavens I don’t have to paint it.” Rockwell preferred buildings—but only as settings for the kind of ordinary human customs, dramas, and rites of passage that many critics dismissed as cliché, but that the public adored. In the middle years of the twentieth century, Americans saw themselves in Rockwell’s paintings—or at least the selves they wished they were or thought they should be. And though the scale and removed perspective of the Stockbridge painting doesn’t allow it to be as intimate

Stockbridge Main Street at Christmas appears courtesy the Norman Rockwell Museum Collection, © Norman Rockwell Family Agency.

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NORMAN ROCKWELL Stockbridge Main Street Historic District Main Street between Elm Street and US 7 • Stockbridge, Massachusetts 01262 • (413) 298-5200 • stockbridgechamber.org

and relatable as, say, Breaking Home Ties (1954)—which portrays a father sending his son off to college—or The Runaway (1958)—a depiction of a fugitive boy seated at a diner counter next to a cop—it evokes the usual Rockwellesque warm fuzzies because it conjures the idyllic small-town Christmas better than any other contemporary American painting. Indeed, much of the allure of Stockbridge Main Street at Christmas is that the viewer can feel like a part of the rituals of the main-street holiday season even though the street pictured is far away. Though Rockwell’s painting appears to be a

freeze frame of town life, it was in truth more of a slide show flickering in his mind. Rockwell began to paint Stockbridge in 1956, but then walked away from it. By the time he decided to complete the work in 1967, eleven years had elapsed. During that time, the types of automobiles that plied Main Street changed considerably, as did other details. Rockwell smoothed over the discrepancies and made it work. He also added mountains in the background—ones that had never existed. But sprucing up reality was a Rockwell specialty, and not just in this painting. Explaining his inclination toward the idyllic, Rockwell once said: “Maybe as I grew up and found the world wasn’t the perfect place I had thought it to be, I unconsciously decided that if it wasn’t an ideal world, it should be, and so painted only the ideal aspects of it.” Though businesses have come and gone in the half century since Rockwell completed his canvas, visitors today can still stop into the Williams and Son Country Store and dine at the Red Lion Inn, which started as a stagecoach stop in 1773. (In the painting, the inn’s windows are dark because the Red Lion was a summer-only operation in Rockwell’s day. Today, it’s open year-round. It also has a lobby cat whose name happens to be Norman.) Just west of town, the Norman Rockwell Museum houses 998 original paintings, including Stockbridge Main Street at Christmas, which hangs behind velvet ropes and continues to cast its nostalgic spell over visitors. It’s common to hear that Rockwell’s

HOME TEAM: Norman Rockwell (1894–1978) found ideal subjects for painting in everyday venues. “Commonplaces never become tiresome,” he said. “It is we who become tired when we cease to be curious and appreciative. We find that it is not a new scene that is needed, but a new viewpoint.”

work—and this painting in particular— evoked “a simpler time” in America. But with the dawn of atomic weaponry, hysteria over communism, polio, and systematized subjugation of minority groups, the 1950s were hardly a simpler time. They did, however, predate the shopping mall and the big-box store. Though nobody knew it at the time, it was the final act for the American main street. Fortunately, a real one and a famous painting of it are still around. —ROBERT KLARA 

PHOTO CREDITS: Main Street photos courtesy Stockbridge Chamber of Commerce. Rockwell portrait courtesy Library of Congress.

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THINK BIG! World’s Largest Ball of Paint Alexandria, Indiana

ucked among a series of winding, narrow asphalt roads, housed in the shed just across the lawn from their home, Michael and Glenda Carmichael of Alexandria, Indiana, have a pet project—a project that occupies every scrap of their free time. While other Boomer couples tinker with muscle cars from their youth, or perhaps allow that small horticultural endeavor to take over their garden and life, the Carmichaels feed, grow, and lovingly care for the World’s Largest Ball of Paint. That’s right—a giant orb, larger than two people can hug, suspended from the ceiling of the modest shed and composed of layers and layers and layers of paint (more than 26,000 of them at last count). It started small enough: At the globe’s core resides a baseball. In 1977, Michael Carmichael created the curiosity’s kernel by running a three-eighths-inch rod through a baseball and handing the resulting ball-on-a-stick to his three-year-old son to apply the first coat of paint. That initial blue layer was swiftly covered with another layer in another color, and from there the spheroid grew. And grew. And grew. Fortunately, Michael knew he’d need to engineer some way of accommodating its expansion. You see, this wasn’t Michael’s first ball o’ paint rodeo. The first came quite by accident during his time as a varsity high school baseball player. While working at a local paint store, he and a friend were playing an unauthorized game of catch in the shop when the inevitable happened—a throwing error. The ball

BY ERIKA NELSON

knocked over a gallon of paint, getting coated in the process. Michael put it aside, and then proceeded to dip the ball in color after color, recording the ball’s growth. After one thousand coats, he donated it to his shop teacher, who passed it along to the Alumni Museum at the Knightstown Children’s Home in Knightstown, Indiana. Thanks to that experience, the current paint ball hangs from an I-beam by a chain hoist, with a clever support rod that can expand as the ball grows. Expansion may be under control, but any spherical endeavor has other, unique difficulties to be overcome. The World’s Largest Ball of Video Tape, for example, tends to unwind, while the World’s Largest Balls of Twine (yes, there is more than one, but that’s another story) can lose their roundness once they become too cumbersome to turn. The Ball of Paint is suspended, eliminating the need for turning— but the nature of paint is to drip. Those drips accumulate and compound as the layers are applied, leading to a bumpy bottom, while seemingly small imperfections on the main body of the ball amplify into pubescent-like protuberances. Michael will occasionally trim off these unsightly blemishes to restore and smooth the surface, saving the shavings for a unique souvenir. The drip chips reveal the paint layers in a gem-like natural pattern, much like Fordite (aka Detroit Agate) or a carefully cut and polished composite stone. Shortly after starting the second ball, Michael and Glenda realized they enjoyed showing off their private obsession, and recast it as a public work of art. Guests are invited to not just admire the mass, but also become a part of the endeavor by painting their own layer. Fivegallon buckets line the room with a rainbow of options. The layer number is painted on the ball first (a must for the perfect Big Ball selfie) and recorded for posterity, then guests dip a small roller into a bucket and, with the aid of a paint-spattered mirror on the floor, cover the orbicular object with their color of choice. Once the ball is completely covered, each painter receives an official certificate, signed by Michael Carmichael himself, listing the coat number, color, and painting date. If a certificate isn’t enough, guest artists may re-

ceive a very special memento to remember the event by: their very own piece of the ball from Michael’s collection of chips and shavings. Glenda and Michael prefer that you make an appointment to help become a part of history, and are genuinely sweet, compassionate hosts. They know that no Mount Everest is climbed alone, and they’re the Tenzing Norgays of Indiana, assisting all of us in achieving, even if only until the next guest adds a layer, a new World Record. The World’s Largest Ball of Paint is a genuine celebration of the transformation of the everyday into the extraordinary. There is no charge for your experience, but donations are accepted.  ERIKA NELSON is a Department Editor for AMERICAN ROAD and the innovative artist and educator behind worldslargestthings.com. Michael Carmichael photo courtesy Glenda Carmichael. Additional photos by the author.

World’s Largest Ball of Paint • 10696 North 200 West • Alexandria, Indiana 46001 • (765) 724-4088 • ballofpaint.freehosting.net

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GEARING UP THROUGH THE GREAT LAKES AND THE GREAT PLAINS

“Shrine of the Pines”

n 1913, poet Joyce Kilmer proclaimed to the world his love of things leafy. I think that I shall never see/A poem lovely as a tree, he wrote in his arboreous ode. Yet not until 1941—when the logcabin-cum-rooty-museum called Shrine of the Pines opened to the public near US 10 south of Baldwin, Michigan—did woodworker Raymond “Bud” Overholzer show the world why and how a man could grow enamored with a simple forest stump. Overholzer was born in Paulding County, Ohio, in 1890. He moved to Baldwin with his wife and mother during the 1920s to pursue a career as a wilderness tour guide. For nine months of each year, he led trout anglers and deer hunters along the banks of the Pere Marquette River and into areas of forest heavily scarred by logging saws. The trees had been harvested to rebuild Chicago following the Great Fire of 1871—a worthy cause, but one that left the land looking empty and forlorn. The grand eastern white pine (Pinus strobus)—a giant the Iroquois revered as “The Tree of Peace”—had been all but cut clean of the landscape, decimated by the unrelenting

lumber barons. The loss weighed heavily upon Overholzer’s mind, and the more he studied the pines’ hacked, hulking stumps, the more he saw waste wanting use. His imagination whittled away at the idea, and in good time, so did his hands. “Mr. Overholzer began to make things out of these forgotten stumps,” says Bonnie Simpson, a seasonal caretaker at Overholzer’s old Michigan home. “At first, he began taking bits and pieces of wood home and carving small things—a vase, for instance—but as his skills and confidence grew, he started to shape elaborate pieces of furniture from larger and larger white pine roots and other remnants. Everybody in town heard about these incredible pieces he was making. People would go out to his house, and he would give them little tours to show them the work that he had done.” Eventually, Overholzer’s collection outgrew his humble residence, so he purchased twenty-eight acres of land on the Pere Marquette with designs to construct a new kind of home-turned-showplace. “He and three friends came out and built this door,” Simpson says, pointing to the great portal that today

• BY THOMAS ARTHUR REPP

US HIGHWAY 10 travels from Bay City, Michigan, to Fargo, North Dakota, via Lake Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Historically, the route began in Detroit, went directly to Midland, and extended from Fargo to Seattle.

seals Shrine of the Pines. “It’s made of eighteen pine logs. It weighs about three hundred pounds, and it’s constructed with no nails, no screws, and no hinges. It’s held together with wooden joiner pegs. On the top, they embedded a piece of oak—a pin about the size of a kitchen rolling pin—and on the bottom, they installed one about the size of a softball to act as a pivot, and the door turns on those. They used oak for those parts because oak is a hard wood and lasts a long time, but that’s the only oak you’ll see at Shrine of the Pines.” In building his new woodsy gallery, Overholzer sought to capture the flavor of a hunting lodge. He constructed its ceiling and floor of red pine, its walls, of white, and worked to instill its interior with sportsman’s spirit. Years earlier, Overholzer had become a skilled taxidermist. Now he proudly displayed his animal mounts inside his new shrine. Most of the trophies were locally won: toothy muskellunge, snapping turtles, noble deer. But among the stuffed menagerie, eagle eyes will spy an odd southwestern roadrunner. “I’ve no idea where that bird came from,” Simpson says.

ROOTS OF THE MATTER: [Left] Shrine of the Pines builder Raymond “Bud” Overholzer obtained much of the cast-off wood he used to build his fanciful furniture from root fences— stumps left by loggers that local farmers had set up to mark the boundaries of their lands.

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House of Wood When Shrine of the Pines opened to the public in early 1941, press reporters were fast to praise it. One of the first articles written about the new tourist attraction was printed in the Escanaba Daily Press Press, the Herald-Press of St. Joseph, and additional Michigan newspapers in mid-May of that year, under the headline unique furniture found in michigan. “A few miles south of [Baldwin]…is one of the strangest displays of furniture to be found anyplace in the world,” that article explained. “A trail through the woods is marked with a sign ‘Shrine of the Pines,’ and as you wind down toward a bend in the river you are suddenly confronted with a quaint, comfortable looking log house. Inside is the labor of almost a quarter of a century…chairs, tables, beds, window frames, candelabra [made] from nothing but pine stumps…rubbed by hand to a high polish in natural color.” Within a few years, Shrine of the Pines was regularly entertaining groups of school children on field trips, and the crowds have never stopped coming. Overholzer conducted tours annually from May 1 to November, and the season remains the same today. Tours take some thirty minutes to complete—with time at the end reserved for the taking of questions.

Yet the presentations themselves have grown so polished over the last seventy-eight years that questions are often answered before they can be asked. “When Mr. Overholzer made his furniture, he followed three rules,” Simpson says. “First, the wood had to be Michigan pine. Second, the finished product had to be useful. And, lastly, the piece couldn’t cost him a penny.” Overholzer’s frugalness has become the stuff of legend. Sandpaper cost money, so he made a habit of visiting local lumber mills and obtaining their discarded sanding belts. “He’d grind his own glass, glue it to the paper, and use that to sand each piece of furniture he made,” Simpson says. After a day toiling with such abrasive stuff, Overholzer’s fingers would be raw and bloody, so his wife, Hortense, would lovingly wrap them with poultices of deer tallow. “Hortense was twenty-four years his senior,” Simpson says. “She had actually been his grade-school teacher, and when he grew up, he married her. Talk about a schoolboy crush!” Overholzer worked on his projects tirelessly throughout each winter, and the results are one of a kind: The centerpiece of Shrine of the Pines is a massive dining room table shaped from a seven-hundred-pound stump that stood seven feet in height. For three and a half days, Overholzer sliced that trunk down to size with a crosscut saw. Then he carved and inlaid sixty pieces of wood to fill out its face.

FIELD TRIP: [Above and below] Located near US 10 south of Baldwin, Michigan, the sylvan Shrine of the Pines is a tribute to Pinus strobus—the eastern white pine—that had been decimated by loggers’ saws. Naturalist Henry David Thoreau once said of the species, “There is no finer tree.”

He let tree roots serve as table legs—and legs on the twelve matching chairs. The making of the entire set took eight years. Its finished magnificence attracted envious eyes. “Around about 1950, Henry Ford came through, took a tour, and offered him $50,000 for the dining set,” Simpson says. “But Mr. Overholzer turned him down. He said he’d rather have his table where everyone could see it, not just an elite few.”

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HEARTH AND HOME: [Above] An eerie chandelier fashioned from a single taproot adds light to the shrine with its antique glass globe. [Right] Hortense Overholzer’s rocking chair and ottoman were the only pieces of furniture used with any regularity. Yet everything inside the Shrine of the Pines, including the his-and-her thrones that front the great rocky fireplace [below], are infinitely usable.

BED AND BOARD GAME: [Left] The pair of daybeds on display at Shrine of the Pines invite quirky dreams. Overholzer himself called the twisted root at the foot of the bed pictured here his “Guiding Hand.” [Above] The squares on Overholzer’s checkerboard were burned into the wood with a hot iron. Checkers for the set were boiled in blackberry juice to stain them with color.

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Lodge-Podge In all, some two hundred items crafted from timber castoffs are displayed inside the Shrine of the Pines—everything from a pipe tobacco humidor shaped from a hollowed-out burl to candelabras wrought from artfully twisted roots. There is a poker table inlaid with 120 pieces of wood—some of those pieces no larger than a dime—and a checkerboard with burnt squares and handmade checkers colored with boiled blackberry juice. There are daybeds sporting deerskin pillows and mattresses, and heavy his-and-her chairs that stand near the fireplace, looking like fairytale thrones. One particular feature that finds favor with guests is the chandelier that hangs over the scene, a glass globe entwined in a jungle of roots that recalls something Bilbo Baggins might have used to light up his nights in the Shire. For all of the imagination on exhibit—and all of the utility in the forms—only two pieces of the shrine’s furniture were ever used with regularity: a rocking chair and a matching ottoman. “Mr. Overholzer made them for his wife,” Simpson says. “It took him several years, off and on, to find the right piece of wood that wouldn’t lean too far back or forward to make the rocker. When he finally got it balanced perfectly, you could push it once, and it would rock back and forth exactly fifty-five times. “Hortense used the rocker for twenty-five years. She’d sit by this window and look out at the river. He made the window frame from one single root system—and the glass was repurposed from an old grocery store window in town. He scraped the painted words off of it, but if you look at it just right, you can still see the shadow of a stencil that used to say we deliver.” Other words can be read on premises. Overholzer spelled out shrine of the pines in large letters, using nothing but naturally shaped tree roots, and attached the name to an overhead rafter. “The r took him three years to find,” Simpson says. “The s took him seven years to find.” Every tour inevitably wraps at the shrine’s great rocky fireplace, where Overholzer’s favorite piece, a curious root system that clings to the chimney like a stubborn vine, is displayed. “He claimed you could see all twenty-six characters of the alphabet in it,” Simpson says. “And you can—a to z.” Overholzer was 62 years of age when he died in 1952. At his request, his body was cremated, and his ashes sprinkled over the Pere Marquette. After his death, Hortense

Shrine of the Pines • 8962 M-37 • Baldwin, Michigan 49304 • (231) 745-7892 • theshrineofthepines.com

LOG JAMB: [Above] The three-hundred-pound pine-log door that serves Shrine of the Pines turns quietly on an oak pin and pivot. Tradition says that the majestic portal and its frame were the first parts of the Shrine of the Pines finished.

continued to lead tours through Shrine of the Pines. She passed away at age 92 in 1956. Today, the property is maintained by the Society for the Preservation of the Shrine of the Pines, a nonprofit organization that engages volunteers as enamored with Raymond Overholzer’s work as the rest of us.

“We have a ninety-nine-year lease with an option for ninety-nine more,” Simpson says, assuring guests exiting through the famous log door that the shrine is here to stay. Outside, the wilds that Overholzer loved are waiting to welcome free spirits. Cars wheel away past the trees, heading north or east on US 10, carrying awestruck passengers overwhelmed by the wonder taking root. d THOMAS ARTHUR REPP is the Editorial Director of AMERICAN ROAD. Photos by the author.

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ART CARS A WEIRD AND WONDERFUL WORLD ON WHEELS

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Is a car just something that gets you from point A to point B? Or can it be something more—a creative expression of your personality or a mobile art exhibit on four wheels? Across the United States, a growing number of car owners aren’t content with drab, cookie-cutter vehicles, and they’re not afraid of subverting the factory finish. So these amateur artists—call them “cartists”—glue gewgaws to the fenders, torch intricate designs into the hoods, and paint their car exteriors with an array of colors more typically found on a canvas than an automobile. These one-of-a-kind autos, called “art cars,” aren’t just a feast for the eyes. They’re also street-worthy and legal. They may turn heads out on the road, but they’re not getting any tickets for operating an unsafe vehicle. If anything, cops might pull them over just to get a better look. Art cars aren’t exactly a new phenomenon. Early motor vehicles doubled as mobile billboards for politicians, traveling salesmen, and sometimes even products. Remember the Wienermobile? The hot-dog-shaped car has been traveling the country since 1936, originally with a very, very tiny driver. (Only a three-foot, six-inch man, dubbed “the World’s Smallest Chef,” could fit in the driver’s seat.) But the early 1960s brought a wave of auto personalization. From coast to coast, people were transforming their cars into bold statements of their individuality. In other words, they were letting their freak flags fly. From pop icons like Andy Warhol to rock stars like Janis Joplin to social critics like Ken Kesey, cars were becoming as unique and eccentric as the people who drove them. Today, you won’t find art cars in just one part of the country. They’re up north and down south, in cold climates and warm, blue states and red, ocean-adjacent cities and landlocked towns. They converge at art car parades in Houston, Texas—the oldest and longest parade, which launched in 1988— to Minnesota, which hosts “Art Cars on Ice,” a cavalcade of decorated cars that drive through fishing shanty communities. From Baltimore to Seattle, and from Trinidad, Colorado, to Columbus, Ohio, cartists of all walks of life bring their motorized art to the people, brightening the parking lots, highways, byways, and public spaces of our diverse nation.

ART SCHOOL: Creating an art car can be an educational experience. [Above] The art car Sheik Your Groove Thing was completed by Rebecca Bass and the students of Bellaire High School southwest of Houston back in 1999.

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CORK TRUCK Artist: Jan Elftmann Base Vehicle: 1987 Mazda B2200

ittle did Jan Elftmann realize when she began collecting corks that it would change her life. She would become known for corks, make friends all over the US, and even— because of her corks—travel across the sea on one corker of a quest. Her journey started with a whimsical idea when she was a student at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She thought she might be able to make art out of the corks pulled from wine bottles at the Italian restaurant where she was working as a waitress. Fellow servers and customers helped her stockpile the corks, chucking them into buckets she put out for her collection. The collection grew and grew, until she had enough for every lake in Minnesota. That is to say, she had ten thousand corks. Elftmann attempted to make sculpture out of the corks, but that didn’t work. She tried making a cork self-portrait. That idea didn’t float, either. Eventually the corks wound up stored in the attic of the house she shares with her musician-ad-man husband, Dave Lewis. She focused on her drawing and other activities. Then one day, some twelve years after she began collecting those corks, she attended

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the Houston Art Car Parade, and had an epiphany: “Watching all those art cars roll by, I thought, ‘I can’t believe I didn’t think of the car as a canvas!’” She glued the corks all over her small pickup truck. Some, she formed into shapes, like the hearts on the doors. She spelled the words “Cork Truck” backwards above the truck’s front bumper, so as to be read in rearview mirrors. She knew her Cork Truck was a hit when a woman in a crosswalk stopped to hug the hood, calling out “I love this!” Elftmann and her Cork Truck became a permanent part of the Minnesota art-car scene. “We get together a lot,” she says of herself and the state’s other cartists. “We have our own parade in July.” She went on trips with other cartists, as many as ten strong crossing the country. She drove the Cork Truck to California, Missouri, and Texas. In Houston, in a moment worthy of a hearty toast, the Cork Truck visited John Milkovisch’s landmark Beer Can House. She was featured in the New York Times with the Cork Truck, gussied up in a marvelous corkladen ball gown of her own design. In Louisiana, she and Dave drove out to an off-the-beaten-path, turn-left-at-the-bigtree-style eatery for shrimp po’ boys. The proprietor asked, “Did you drink all that wine?” She handed him one of the art-car postcards she carries with her. They include information about the car and answers to the top three most-asked questions: It doesn’t float; she did not drink all that wine; 10,000. His answer to her answers was free food. It’s just one example of the way cork buoyed Elftmann’s social life. After some fourteen years of daily driving, the Cork Truck puttered out. As months passed, she found that she missed the very special vehicle.

You know, cork only grows in Portugal and Spain, and a little bit in Morocco. They can’t get it to grow the same way anywhere else in the world. It’s unique. The trees live to be two to three hundred years old.”

A 2017 journey abroad confirmed, “I was still into corks.” In Portugal, she saw cork oaks growing, learned about the harvesting of cork bark, and visited a cork museum and a factory where they made champagne corks. “I learned so much going over there. You know, cork only grows in Portugal and Spain, and a little bit in Morocco. They can’t get it to grow the same way anywhere else in the world. It’s unique. The trees live to be two to three hundred years old. “It’s interesting to get involved in an art material that teaches you something,” she observes. “Cork doesn’t absorb moisture, it doesn’t decompose, it doesn’t burn.” Who would want to leave something so magical behind? With ten bins of corks in her studio—a new collection, thanks to people who gifted her bags of corks through the years—Elftmann knew what to do when she came into possession of a 1999 Saab wagon. She covered it with corks, and now tools around in Cork Car 2. She has much to feel buoyant about, including the next big trip she and Dave have planned. They’re going to Ireland, to—you guessed it—County Cork. Even though they know it doesn’t have anything to do with the material, it’s bound to be great for some stories. —STACY SMITH-BOSCO

Cork Truck photos by Harrod Blank.

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CAMERA VAN Artist: Harrod Blank Base Vehicle: 1972 Dodge Tradesman

hey say a picture is worth a thousand words. And that’s particularly true where Camera Van is concerned. The bulky vehicle rolls onto the scene, covered top to taillight with cameras, and onlookers don’t know what to say. Fortunately, artist Harrod Blank is in the driver’s seat, and he’s a friendly and forthright fellow. Asked to explain the origins of Camera Van, he reveals that its concept can be traced to a memory etched in emulsion. “I guess it was my dad who provided the ultimate inspiration,” he says. “He was a moviemaker, a documentarian. I would carry his tripod when I was a kid.” One night, Blank says, he dreamed he was driving a car covered in cameras, taking snapshots of surprised faces as he raced through the streets, and celebrating the spontaneity he captured. In the morning, when he awoke, he decided to build the vehicle he’d motored through Slumberland. “Camera Van was my dreamturned-reality,” he says. Blank goes on to detail the pains he took to transform a 1972 Dodge-made van into a one-ton, rolling photographic studio. “So much reinforcement was needed,” he says of his eye-popping opus. “I had to plan for what

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would become a ten-thousand-pound rolling art form but, hey, I’m no car guy! It took two years designing and building it. I eventually realized that its old six-cylinder engine would never be powerful enough to haul so much camera gear.” He and a New Mexico mechanic installed a V8. What makes the Camera Van so heavy? The answer can be summed up with one number: 2,750. That’s the number of cameras that carpet the hulking old Tradesmanmodel Dodge. Many of the cameras are Instamatics—those cheaply made point-and-shoot cameras manufactured by the Eastman Kodak Company from 1963 through 1988. Blank covered the van’s exterior with them and other comparable cheapies such as Continental Insta-Loads and Minolta Autopaks. He assembled a front grille that displays every model of Polaroid camera ever made—from the Land Camera 1000 OneStep to the Model 20 Swinger. On the driver’s side door, he designed a star with burned-out GE MagiCubes; on the passenger side, he fashioned a large eye from colored photo filters and mirrored glass. And he spelled out the word smile on the van’s roof— a message for low-flying planes and onlookers standing on overpasses—again employing a stock of discarded Kodak Instamatics. But Camera Van is more than just a photogenic museum: It actually takes pictures of the people it passes on the street. Among its 2,750 cameras are six functional Canons that shoot print film and two operational video cameras that capture live images. Inside, amid a dashboard that is wall-towall silicon and selenium light meters, are monitors and controls that allow Blank to see what those artificial eyes see. At will, he can transmit to four TV monitors on the passenger side of the vehicle. Depress-

ing the appropriate remote shutter button captures the images. It all works something like Allen Funt’s long-running Candid Camera (1948–1992) television series— on wheels and with new technical twists. Camera Van is well traveled. The eye-popping vehicle has been shipped to the United

I guess it was my dad who provided the ultimate inspiration. He was a moviemaker, a documentarian. I would carry his tripod when I was a kid…. Camera Van was my dream-turned-reality.”

Camera Van photos by Harrod Blank.

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Kingdom and Europe for country tours, one of which involved an unwitting invitation to the Queen of England’s garden party at Buckingham Palace. That adventure culminated in what could have devolved into an international incident, as it is not “the done thing” to encourage guests to pose for cameras in such a hallowed environment. Fortunately, Blank evaded incarceration in the Tower of London. Although the van is stored regularly at Art Car World Museum in downtown Douglas, Arizona, it remains an active and interactive showpiece of performance art. And Blank

delights in every appearance. During his artistic turns with the Camera Van, he often wears a custom-made “flash suit”—a costume comprised of some two-thousand antique flashbulbs. The costume weighs sixty-eight pounds—it’s powered by a pair of six-volt batteries, which ensure that its flashbulbs keep flashing—and it even has a top hat and shoes to match. It is an ultimate display of art for art’s sake. All of it dazzles the mind. Smile, please! —POP AMHEARST

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HOMAGE TO TIMOTHY LEARY Artist: Jeff Lockheed Base Vehicle: 1949 Crosley Hotshot

n his quietly confident tones, Jeff Lockheed sweeps aside his Scottish Methodist roots, not so much in denial but to show irrelevance to the bohemian mosaic that constitutes his life and style. Yet, what a style. For the past three decades, his former St. Louis home at 1903 Pestalozzi Street has been serving as the most vibrant watering hole in the city: the Venice Café, home to the weird, wonderful, and wacky. Automobiles are a central feature at Venice Café. From the earliest days, when Lockheed partnered with Paul Cuba, an artist friend, and decided to open a coffeehouse-cum-art-bar, an appreciation for funky wheels was already part of the poetry. They painted the floorboards of their new hot spot Cadillac Pink because… well, just because it seemed appropriate. Lockheed’s fascination with art cars dates from the time he decorated his father’s 1969 Ford pickup truck—festooning it with dolls and mannequins, and painting it in a lively outré style. Subsequent access to the Lemp Warehouse, former home to the Falstaff Brewery, allowed Lockheed and his cadre of artistic friends to paint and decorate a series of vehicles as the muse took them; always with purpose, always with expressionism in mind. Their drive originated from the 1950s

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“muscle car” scene, interlaced with SoCal surf and hippie culture. It was a heady, invigorating blend that eventually led Lockheed to seize upon one cultural icon as his ultimate inspiration: the flower-powered, pill-popping, philosopher-turned-mind-expanding messiah, Dr. Timothy Leary. Born in 1920 in Springfield, Massachusetts, Timothy Leary was a noted professor of psychology at Harvard and a researcher prior to becoming an advocate of psychedelic drugs during the 1960s. He was imprisoned on marijuana charges, then escaped but was recaptured in a series of adventures that often saw him flitting from one bizarre court case to another. Outspoken and experimental, he worked subsequently in cybernetics and the entertainment industry, where he mixed with many counter-cultural and artistically inclined figures. He published several books of his experiences and converted to Hinduism in later life. He died of prostate cancer on May 31, 1996, filming his death at his Beverly Hills home for posterity. Shortly before he died, he reportedly woke from a deep sleep and rhetorically asked, “Why not?” over and again. Leary loved the ambiance at Venice Café and famously visited the artistic mecca (“stoned as he could be,” one onlooker noted). In 1985, Lockheed decided to design an art car in tribute to the good doctor. He’d call it Homage to Timothy Leary and commit himself to producing a true head-turner—a vehicle that would draw together the machinery of a subversive period of 1940s automobilia with the colorful pop art of the hippie era and the soporific influence of psilocybin… Leary’s drug of choice. Lockheed began with a 1949 Crosley, which was America’s first-ever compact car. He painted it in bright primary colors. Picasso-like blue nude was painted on

Every time you get the car out…it’s a parade. People follow it and want to talk with you. That’s its beauty. You come out of the drugstore and have to answer twenty questions. I love it.”

the driver’s side of the chassis augmented by ducks and bulb horns. The hood bears a bleary face that could be likened to something that Norwegian printmaker Edvard Munch might have painted if he’d ever dabbled in magic mushrooms. The car features a luggage-carrying, bamboo canopy, the four corners of which have the inevitable mannequins’ hands attached to them, like a Cajun voodoo lean-to, without the sinister overtones. The brightly painted hands recall the Dreadful Flying Glove from the Beatles’ 1968 animated feature film Yellow Submarine. “Every time you get the car out, with you in it, it’s a parade. People follow it and want to talk with you. That’s its beauty. You come out of the drugstore and have to answer twenty questions. I love it!” Lockheed says. He never stops tinkering, adding another trinket to the endless mosaic of the café’s garden or the interior walls of the property. Even the lightweight Crosley has been known to receive additional pointillistic artistry, as Lockheed continues his crusade on an unfinished, if slightly skew-whiff, St. Louis mobile portrait. Artists seek escapes, just as visitors to Venice Café will find their escapes among the jumbled “literati” and frequent glitterati keen to experience a trip into American lore. —IAIN ROBERTSON

Homage to Timothy Leary photos by Harrod Blank.

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ATOMIC DOG Artist: Rebecca Bass Base Vehicle: 1993 Volvo Wagon

n an east Houston neighborhood, a group of middle schoolers, led by their teacher, are out walking street to street, scrounging through piles of junk that people have left out on the curb. They find old sofa cushions, shoes, a beaten-up end table, scraps of discarded metal. They place items into the trunk of the teacher’s car. This is a way of shopping for art supplies when you have no money. The teacher is Rebecca Bass and the kids are the first group of her students to build an art car. Prior to this moment, Bass has made an impassioned case before the sympathetic principal at the inner city school where she teaches, Edison Middle School. This art-car project idea isn’t about churning out artists or art-car builders, she says. It’s about building character. It’s about guiding kids through the experience of creating something as a team. It’s about showing them a world they’ve never seen, Houston’s vibrant art world, and lifting their sights from the disadvantaged area around them. Plus, there’s the big parade in which they will participate, and a party at the end, the Art Car Ball, and she can get tickets. “Okay, Bass,” he answers. “You can do this.” He gives her a budget of $300. She finds an

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old VW bug for $100. She lures students into joining the art car project by buying food for them to chow down while they bedazzle the Volks. She endures their discontent over having to work on the art car after school, on weekends—and even during spring vacation. But as the car takes shape, the kids enjoy themselves more and more. They have a blast when they take their creation out for a test run. People wave and laugh and clap their hands. And then, when the day of the Houston Art Car Parade arrives—and the world becomes a rolling spectacle of creativity, a crazy holiday filled with painted monsters on wheels—the Mayor’s Trophy is awarded to… Rebecca Bass and the kids from Edison Middle School! That scenario played out in 1990. It’s called a turning point in the Houston Art Car Parade’s history—not only because Bass and her art-car classes became an institution within the parade, but also because she inspired other educators to think of art-car projects as potential learning tools. Bass has since led middle and high school students through the art-car building process thirty-one times, at a dozen different schools. They’ve earned awards year after year after year. They’ve been featured on TV and in print. And somewhere along the line, they cobbled together one of the most remarkable art cars ever created. That occurred in 2006, when Bass’ students transformed a 1993 Volvo Wagon into the amazing Atomic Dog. The funky petrol-fed pup was a fourteen-foot-tall phantasmagorical tribute to singer-songwriter George Clinton, his Parliament-Funkadelic music collective, and their 1982 R&B doggie-styled hit of the same name—a bluesy barker with the woofing refrain Bow-wow-wow-yippie-yo-yippie-yay.

Featuring figures of band members including Clinton, who was riding a giant mirror-mosaic-covered dog with a big blue nose, it was made of synthetic stucco topped with silicon and broken pieces of mirrors, copper, and Mardi Gras beads—crates of Mardi Gras beads, fashioned into swirls and

This art-car project idea isn’t about churning out artists…. It’s about building character. It’s about guiding kids through the experience of creating something as a team. It’s about showing them a world they’ve never seen.”

Atomic Dog large photo by Ina Fassbender. Details courtesy Harrod Blank and Rebecca Bass.

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waves over cymbals and drums. There were mirror-covered guitars in front, and chrome pipes that came courtesy of Harley-Davidson. The students, from S. P. Waltrip High, spent four intense months working on the car. At the Houston Art Car Parade, the class won the Mayor’s Cup Grand Trophy and $1,500. And the New York Times called Atomic Dog a “celestial battleship.” Not only that, but one morning at the very end of the school year, the school secretary came running down the hall crying out, “Miss Bass! Miss Bass! George Clinton’s on the

phone!” He’d seen the New York Times story about the car and wanted to come see it. So the funk master himself flew into Houston, met the class—and signed his autograph on their art car. Yippie-yo-yippie-yay! Atomic Dog would go on to be exhibited overseas—blaring Clinton’s famous song the entire way—before settling permanently into Houston’s Orange Show Center for Visionary Art. It’s there today on display— still the funkiest Fido that’s ever met wheels. —STACY SMITH-BOSCO

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CHEWBARU Artist: Rex Rosenberg Base Vehicle: 1995 Subaru Legacy GT Sedan

any great art cars boast a bit of bite in their designs. But ChewBaru has enough teeth to eat a small army. Just check out its chompers: Its hood is plastered with dentures glued in place with something stronger than Poligrip. Its grill is lined with exhausted tubes of Aim, Colgate, and Crest, shining like a mouthful of polished pearly whites. We once opined that ChewBaru looks like a chariot ridden out of Dante’s Third Circle— the sphere of the gluttonous—needing only a potbellied Cerberus to complete its grotesque picture. And we stand by our assessment: Once you see ChewBaru, you’ll likely brush your teeth before you go to bed. Photographer Rex Rosenberg created this prosthodontic monster on wheels. He was a newcomer to the art-car scene when he acquired a hail-damaged Subaru Legacy in 2004. Although he had previously created a cut-and-shut, single-seat VW Beetle he called BugWing (a sleek ride inspired by three-wheeled cars such as Morgan and Messerschmitt), he had no idea what to do with his new chewed-up clunker. Then, as Rosenberg recounts, he began thinking about teeth….

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“It was just as I was falling asleep in a motel, somewhere in western Nebraska,” Rosenberg remembers, “when the idea for ChewBaru filled my thoughts. I’d seen a car at the Houston Art Car Parade called Handy, which was covered in mannequins’ and dolls’ hands. After I saw that, all I could think about was ‘Which body parts could I use?’” Rosenberg decided that teeth were a fine focus and decided to use dentures to make a mastication-mobile. Almost immediately, he realized he was onto something subversive— something that elicited responses of “Sick!” or “Gross!” or “Grim!” His great eBay search for dentures commenced, and his gummy collection grew. Slowly but surely, the 1995 Subaru was subsumed by teeth of all sorts, as well as upper and lower dental impressions, dental instruments, articulators, and pages from dental-college manuals of various vintages. Expended toothpaste tubes gave depth to the bumpers and a wireless, infrared, nightvision camera recorded the reactions of fascinated bystanders. Rosenberg integrated a set of oversized molars into his design—the type used to teach orthodontics. He saved the freakiest feature for the vehicle’s roof: the headless torso of a mannequin that, for some reason, uses a toothbrush to scrub its own severed head. ChewBaru often hits the highway to attend shows all over the US. Rosenberg says he is fascinated that many other countries would not allow an art car on their roads, which further consolidates ChewBaru’s unique North American stature. “Oh, I get hauled up regularly by the cops,” he says, “but they are mainly just curious, and it is fun watching their reactions to ChewBaru.” Like so many other art-car creators, Rosenberg finds he never finishes tinkering with his automotive masterpiece. “I do not

I’d seen a car at the Houston Art Car Parade called Handy, which was covered in mannequins’ and dolls’ hands. After I saw that, all I could think about was ‘Which body parts could I use?’”

think I’ll ever finish adding to and titivating ChewBaru,” he chuckles. Dentures are produced from lightweight acrylics, so the alloy bridges and dental instruments have only added around three hundred pounds to the Legacy’s weight. “Its ‘boxer’ engine is stock and still runs sweetly enough, despite the mileage covered,” Rosenberg says. “My only real issue has been keeping those teeth clean!” The bulk of ChewBaru was completed some five years after Rosenberg obtained the original car in 2004. Since then, he’s been asked many times how he keeps the dentures in place. Surely, those false teeth are secured to the steel with something stronger than Poligrip? “GOOP Marine glue,” Rosenberg reveals. Now, there’s something you don’t want to put in your mouth. When he first came up with the ChewBaru concept, he asked his dentist cousin for help in finding discarded dentures. “The look on his face was priceless,” he remembers. “However, he thought that the idea was way too weird and refused point-blank to help.” Did his cousin’s renouncement do lasting damage to the familial relationship? “We are speaking,” Rosenberg jokes. “But only through gritted teeth.” —IAIN ROBERTSON

ChewBaru photos by Rex Rosenberg.

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YODA HEAD Artist: Kimi Bainter Base Vehicle: 2012 Nissan Versa

he order drew some curiosity at the wig store that day: cases and cases of hair. Synthetic hair. A thousand dollars’ worth of loose synthetic hair. Why would anyone need that much fake hair? Certainly, it would have drawn curiosity had the staff known it was for…a car. For Kimi Bainter, who placed that order, drawing curious and disbelieving looks has been a way of life for decades. From the time she was a child in tiny Forney, Texas, Kimberly Bainter showed the gift of an unusual imagination. When she was in fourth grade, she had to wear an eye patch, so she drew a normal human eye on the patch. It looked so realistic it proved to Bainter that 1) she could draw and 2) her drawing could earn her a lot of attention. She loved monster movies, science fiction, fantasy, and horror. She studied different schools of art, becoming self-taught to keep pace with the demands of her creative thinking. Her attraction to mayhem and the macabre took her to rare places. While others might hear the words “dead head” and think of a Grateful Dead music fan, for example, Bainter took them in the literal sense, and was inspired to create artwork depicting a person

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with a dead head. With that kind of thinking, it was only a matter of time before she would turn her talents to special effects. It all started the fateful day in 2012 when she and her husband and their four children drove from their family home in Willis, north of Houston, to their first Art Car Parade. Viewing the rolling artworks, “I thought, ‘Well, hell! I can do this to my bike.’ “I never sculpted in my life before,” she adds. “I didn’t know I could sculpt until I tried it.” By the time she was done, the bike featured a gang of twenty to thirty human faces, each of which looked scared, all over it. “All of the eyes flashed. It had eyeball lights,” she says. “The Soul Keeper,” as she named her rolling creation, won second place in the Cycle division of the parade in 2013. She wore angel wings and a pink boa that day. “It was a wonderful time.” The next year, she returned with Eyegore, her husband’s Nissan Versa dolled up with a giant eye on its hood, scary blinking eyes, different types of fake skin—“human skin, vampire skin, werewolf-type skin and lizard skin”—that appeared stitched together, and hair in the back. Eyegore won first prize! Clearly, Bainter found her niche. Inspiration struck again in 2016 when she looked hard at her Versa and saw a familiar friend from a galaxy far, far away: the face of Jedi Master Yoda. “Well, hell! Yoda’s face fit the car! I saw I could make it,” remembers Bainter. And so she began work on the art car she’d call Yoda Head. First, she sculpted her Yoda vision in clay. From that sculpture, she was able to make a massive mold. She filled the mold with latex, then foam. When the material was ready,

she attached it to the Versa. She then added about seven more layers of latex, inserted Yoda’s distinctive sparse hairs—some 607 of them—and painted him a nice, alien green. “My husband saw a way to attach the ears over the mirrors,” she notes. When completed, those ears majestically soared to

Well, hell! Yoda’s face fit the car!… My husband saw a way to attach the ears over the mirrors. Of course, those ears had to be detached any time the car was driven across town.”

Yoda Head large photo by Paul McRae. Car details courtesy CW39. Parade © Morris Malakoff.

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nearly six feet tall, rising above the car itself, and adding a good four feet on each side for an art-car width approaching fourteen feet. (“Of course, those ears had to be detached any time the car was driven across town,” Bainter adds.) The Yoda Head’s giant green and yellow eyes lit up. Crowds loved him. To hear the cheers, an onlooker might have thought all of Alderaan was cheering for him. He went on to win the Houston Art Car Parade Grand Trophy in the Best Daily Drive division. Perhaps the Force whispered in her ear, “Chewy.” Because the following year, Bainter

was out buying gasp-inducing amounts of fake hair in order to transform her car into everyone’s favorite Wookie, Chewbacca. “I thought it would be easy, but it was not,” says Bainter. There was an awful lot of fur cutting to do. As for what’s ahead, Bainter proclaims, “I’m either going to be doing a werewolf or a zombie.” There’s a wig store in Houston that just might be pulling for the werewolf. —STACY BOSCO-SMITH

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EXCESSORIES ODD-YSSEY Artist: Kelly Lyles Base Vehicle: 1996 Honda Odyssey

n the annals of automotive disgrace, the 1971–1980 Ford Pinto is hard to beat. The car, with its tendency to burst into flames if the gas tank was ruptured in a collision, made Time magazine’s Worst Cars of All Time list and Popular Mechanics’ list of Top Automotive Engineering Failures, and even found its way into the American Museum of Tort Law. But Kelly Lyles’ Ford Pinto story is a happy one. It began three decades ago, when the Seattle artist found herself in need of wheels and strapped for cash, and a used car dealer showed her a Pinto with a mere 15,000 miles on it that she could actually afford. Sweet deal though she may have made, Lyles felt mortified to be seen in the Pinto. Then she had a brainstorm: What if she got the car painted like a horse? Fate intervened when she was in a non-combustive fender bender—and since the other driver was at fault, she got $600 for repairs. “I went in [to a paint shop] with all my drawings of cowboys and horses, and said, ‘This is what I want.’ They laughed at me and said, ‘You’re kidding, aren’t you?’ I said, ‘Would I really be here if I wasn’t serious?’ I was dressed in a little cowgirl outfit and probably sounded like a moron,” she admits today.

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Whether it was the drawings, the outfit, or Lyles’ infectious humor and joie de vivre, eventually the shop spray-painted Pinto spots on the car for half price. Not only that, but when she went to retrieve her car, the team had written “Whoa” on the brake and “Giddyup” on the gas pedal. The gearshift was labeled in masking tape: “Stable” for park, “Trot” for first gear, and “Gallop” for second. Lyles added horse hood ornaments and a cowboy diorama in the back dash. And for a special extra touch, the turn indicator was wired to play “Love Me Tender.” Le Pinteau, as Lyles’ car came to be known, was meant to be seen and enjoyed by an appreciative public. Lyles went to her first art-car event in the late 1980s, and took to the art-car culture like she was made for it. After reading art-car king Harrod Blank’s Wild Wheels book (a spin-off of the similarly titled documentary seen on PBS in 1993), she wrote Blank a fan letter—and they became friends. Oh, the places she would go. There were artcar caravans and art-car exhibitions. Art cars became a part of the annual summer solsticetimed Fremont Fair (famous for its naked cyclists). There were trips out of state; Lyles recalls traveling from the Pacific Northwest to the Lone Star State in a caravan of art cars. “We always travel in packs!” she says. Le Pinteau was retired after ten years, and then Lyles created Leopard Bernstein—a feline homage to musical theatre composer Leonard Bernstein—complete with ears, a tail, and some seven hundred jungle cat representations. That 1989 Subaru DL wagon moved to Blank’s Art Car World museum in Arizona upon decommissioning. Meow! Eventually, Lyles’ talent for dressing up automobiles led her to create her crowning achievement, which figuratively can be considered a sort of flamboyant tiara: It’s her cur-

I went in with all my drawings of cowboys and horses, and said, ‘This is what I want.’ They laughed at me and said, ‘You’re kidding….’ I was dressed in a little cowgirl outfit and probably sounded like a moron.”

rent ride—a Honda van—and she has made it into a rolling paean to the trappings of women’s wear. She calls it Excessories Odd-yssey. Atop the roof of the van are fringed white boots, sandals garnished with daisies, lavender cat’s-eye sunglasses, pumps in black and brown and turquoise and red, galoshes with green and yellow stripes, belts and gloves, beads and handbags—a pile of accessories that could have come straight from the closet floor of a very messy fashionista. The sides of the vehicle are festooned with costume jewelry along with some flip-flops and purses. How do they stay on? Lyles uses a type of glue “called Flexible Feel, which I’ve heard is used for airline windows, but I’ve heard that about other things, too,” she says. “Most people use silicone, but to me, silicone is too easy to pull off. You know, children pull on things sometimes. The Flexible Feel is far stronger.” She calls it “the most ‘me’” of all her cars. And no wonder. On the hood of the vehicle is a handpainted, supersized magnetic facsimile of a 1950s paper doll that looks like Lyles, complete with interchangeable outfits and the title “Beauty on a Budget.” —STACY SMITH-BOSCO

Kelly Lyles portrait by James Cheng. Additional photos courtesy Kelly Lyles.

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OWL CAR Artist: Kate Pearson Base Vehicle: 2008 Chrysler PT Cruiser

hen does a common refrigerator magnet become a milestone marker of achievement? The answer can be found amid the lively swirl of artist Kate Pearson’s work. Hers is a world in which a harmonious blend can be produced from such disparate pieces as Pennsylvania Dutch rosemaling, Hawaiian hula kitsch, Floridian flamingos, Mexican Madonnas, Disney princesses, giant plastic ice cream cones, and uplifting sentiments about having faith in oneself. Such is the stuff art-car dreams are glued on for Pearson. She has created thirteen of the rolling creative wonders over nearly three decades, becoming a local celeb in the old copper mining town of Bisbee, Arizona, where she is based, in the process. Her latest is a 2008 orange PT Cruiser that is truly a hoot. It’s the Owl Car, festooned with a flock of the feathered fellows standing straight up on top, with distinctive owl images on the front, sides, and back. Pearson says she went for the theme simply because “I enjoy owls.” She used a PT Cruiser as her base car because the compact Chrysler, with its design reminiscent of a 1930s gang-

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ster getaway car, resembles a nocturnal bird of prey in its own way. “I found a lot of vintage owls from the 1960s on eBay, which I purchased for the theme,” adds Pearson, who hand-painted her finds. “The owls perched atop the Cruiser are the kind you buy to scare away birds from gardens,” according to her. Because of the car’s rounded roof, “I had to figure out a way to keep them on top with braces and brackets and screws so they wouldn’t fly off.” Even at that, she found the hardest part of the process “painting the sides of the car, lying on the ground on cardboard to do it.” Also, speaking of making art cars in general, Pearson admits there is “lots of tedium, but I am used to that, having made so many.” In fact, she has found at times a certain meditative calm about the intricate work of gluing on hundreds of bottle caps, glass beads, and plastic miniature pieces of fruit. Pearson, who hails from Hellertown, Pennsylvania, found her way into the art-car world after honing her skills in other media. She recalls, “I started making art cars for a three-woman art show I was part of. I handstenciled a car and mounted giant cow horns on the front and then parked it in front of the art opening, in 1990.” Among her other works is her Love 23 art car. It’s a 1983 Ford LTD station wagon covered with toys inside and out—four thousand on the outside, eight hundred inside. She chronicled her travels with the popular art car by painting scenes: at the Burning Man festival, at the Continental Divide, at David Letterman’s show in New York City. Another favorite is her Hula Girl art car, with three lovely hula dancing maidens painted on the hood and another on top. The latter is a veritable Hawaiian Shiva goddess with multiple arms offering pineapples,

a starfish, flowers. A bewitching mermaid is painted across the trunk. Pineapples adorn the hubcaps and line the hood, and a beach scene of multihued scalloped blue waves and coconut palms flows around the sides. When not making art cars, she has other artistic creations occupying her time.

The owls perched atop the Cruiser are the kind you buy to scare away birds from gardens. I had to figure out a way to keep them on top with braces and brackets and screws so they wouldn’t fly off.”

Owl Car photos by Harrod Blank.

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She paints, designs fabric and clothing, writes poetry and loves to collect postcards and buttons. Her art cars have taken her across the country more than a dozen times. Her motor artworks have been featured in magazines in Asia and Europe, and have found their way onto TV and film, notably an HBO documentary and Harrod Blank’s Automorphosis. And then there is the fact that, yes, she and Love 23 inspired a refrigerator magnet. The day that magnet was made, as she told author Laurie E. Dickson for her book

Artists’ Interiors: Creative Spaces, Inspired Living, “I felt I had made it, that I had reached my goal as a successful pop icon artist.” Even with all the journeys and acclaim in her rearview mirror, some aspects of Pearson’s car art are just as much fun as when she began, such as raptor-ous responses she gets when swooping into new places in her Owl cruiser, “running into people that have never seen an art car, or people that just love owls.” You might call it a beak experience. —STACY BOSCO SMITH

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CARTHEDRAL Artist: Rebecca Caldwell Base Vehicle: 1971 Cadillac Hearse

he thought seems quaint today, but there was a time when the then-looming turn of the millennium struck fear in the hearts of the populace. Y2K led to overtime for many a computer programmer, while others were inspired by singer-songwriter Prince to party like it was 1999. For Northern California-based artist Rebecca Caldwell, the coming of the year 2000 led to the welding of a Volkswagen Super Beetle onto the top of a 1971 Cadillac Hearse. This was the beginning of one of the most startling and dark art cars ever. Brace yourself for Carthedral. Caldwell was in her twenties, and recalls feeling “a sense of wonder and dread” as the millennium approached. There were “fears that computers would fail and apocalyptic consequences were rumored. Carthedral was a monument to that sense of imminent death and destruction. It was simultaneously a labor of love for art and hate for the automobile and our worship of war and death machines.” She imagined a Gothic cathedral on wheels, complete with flying buttresses, gargoyles, and stained glass windows.

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Caldwell had taught herself how to weld and how to work with fiberglass, skills that would be put to the test in abundance as she worked to make her nightmarish vision a reality. The most difficult task, she discovered, involved taking a cutting torch to the ceiling of the hearse after adding the Volkswagen Super Beetle to the roof. “But it had to be done in order for it to transform,” she says. When the dark vehicle was completed, it looked like something that had rolled off the last hunchbacked pages of a Victor Hugo novel—and then stopped by the Munsters’ family mansion for a tune-up. Carthedral stood nearly twelve feet tall and measured some twenty-four feet in length—a huge, hulking machine that seemed like a stranger to daylight. The peculiar spectacle of sepulchral surrealism was decorated with skeletal figures that appeared to be agents of scrawny pain and a likeness of Shiva, the Hindu god of the creation, upkeep, and destruction of the world. Weird, long bulb horns graced the sides of the hearse and a screaming metal face served as an unsettling hood ornament, open mouth eating the wind. Save for drops of red here and there serving as taillights and plastic-glass accents— and a chunk or two of surviving chrome— Carthedral was rendered entirely in black. It looked like death on wheels. Nevertheless, the creepy vehicle was street-worthy, and it took Caldwell to points as far as Seattle and Houston, to art-car parades, and down to the Nevada desert for a half dozen Burning Man festivals, where one stunned admirer hailed it as “Mad Max on steroids.” Amazingly, she was pulled over by police only a couple of times. But then, as she pointed out, Carthedral was not the vehicle anyone would use to try to get away with

Carthedral was a monument to that sense of imminent death and destruction. It was simultaneously a labor of love for art and hate for the automobile and our worship of war and death machines.”

any sort of illegal shenanigans. Most of the time, police she encountered simply wanted to look, take pictures, or ask questions, like everyone else. Parking was a bigger problem. The artist, who credits the support and encouragement of friends and family for her ability to “manifest my crazy dreams, as absurd as they were,” went on to create a more modest art car she dubbed The Witchmobile. It was a 1962 Dodge Lancer emblazoned with a Ouija board on its back, a top hatwearing raven on its front—“nevermore!”— and a comfy cushioned wingback chair for its driver’s seat. These days, she pursues her art in other ways. She says she has not driven an art car in years. In fact, “currently I live a very quiet, introverted, and private life. However, my compulsion to create, decorate, and express myself is still strong, but is now focused on transforming my home into an artful sanctuary for my family of Chihuahuas. I spend my time painting.” Carthedral has been parked for more than twelve years at Harrod’s Art Car World in Arizona. Caldwell hopes “it serves as a distraction from our everyday horrors.” Amen. —STACY SMITH-BOSCO 

Carthedral photos by Harrod Blanks.

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DINER DAYS Tio’s Tacos Riverside, California

ou’ve heard the stories: There’s an island of plastic and trash the size of Texas floating around the Pacific Ocean; ninety percent of recent samples of precipitation high in the Rockies contained microplastics— remnants of our synthetic clothing, packaging, and containers. Yes, it’s literally raining plastic. That rubbed Martin Sanchez—the owner and operator of Tio’s Tacos, a Mexican seafood eatery a stone’s throw from the historic Mission Inn in downtown Riverside, California—the wrong way. “Here in the US, everything is disposable, and it saddens me,” he told the Sacramento Bee in 2015. Sanchez decided to make a statement—a monumental, ever-growing statement—about our disposable culture. Sanchez was one of ten children born in poverty in Sahuayo, Michoacán, Mexico, known as “the Athens of Michoacán” because of its flourishing arts scene. He began a workaholic existence at age 4—cleaning shoes, running groceries, washing cars—but it was never enough. “We lacked everything,” he told local news outlet KCET. “Clothes, toys, even food.” So in 1984, at age 16, he came to the US and began a new life in Riverside. First he sold fruit under freeway overpasses. Then, with his wife, Concepción, he launched a hot dog cart, with little success. “Hispanics, they want tacos, tacos, tacos,” he says. So he converted the wiener cart to a rolling taqueria, and by 1990 he was renting his current brickand-mortar space. In 1995, he bought it. In 2000, he bought adjoining land, expanding the property to a half acre. He was a successful entrepreneur, and thanks to the 1987 amnesty program, a legal one at that.

BY JESS WINFIELD

Tio’s serves a fast-casual menu of what their website calls “authentic traditional recipes from Sahuayo, Michoacán.” In addition to carne asada burritos and tacos al pastor, there’s an array of dishes common to many mariscos (seafood) outlets in SoCal: various chilled cocteles (seafood cocktails) in large glass goblets, whole fried tilapia, siete mares (“seven seas”) soup, raw oysters, and shrimp prepared half a dozen different ways. The counter, where customers order and pick up a number to await their food in a double-barreled dining room, features an array of a dozen fresh jugos (juices), from tamarindo to watermelon to strawberry horchata. Several can be ordered in the form of a surprisingly potent margarita (made with tequila rather than wine or soju, a rarity for fast-casual Mexican joints). And Martin Sanchez’s food is just fine. But it’s dwarfed by the genius and sheer scale of his art. Wander outside Tio’s, and you’ll find not just the standard patio dining area of rickety chairs and potted plants, but also an entire half-acre topography of Sanchez’s artistic mind’s eye: Aztec-inspired figures, three stories tall, with live palm tree crowns for hair; an entire small-town street, an homage to his hometown, complete with a small chapel built to honor Concepción’s request for sacred space in which to pray. And it’s all fabricated from recycled materials, mostly the vast pile of detritus that comes out the back door of a Mexican kitchen and usually goes straight into a dumpster. “The soda bottles and cans, the beer bottles, the oyster shells and beef bones,” he says, “everything that comes in a bottle or a sack is always recycled, never discarded.” The results include a towering pyramid of green beer bottles; an undersea-scape mural framed in oyster shells; and huge, surrealistically misshapen human forms whose “flesh” is made of aluminum cans. Sanchez’s own used clothes and his three daughters’ toys get into the act as well. In lifesize side-by-side sculptures of a couple, Barbie dolls form the private parts of the woman; her male counterpart pees a stream of water from an old bathroom sink fixture where faucet handles suggest testicles. The vibe is part Gaudí,

part Watts Towers, but Sanchez’ sensibility brings a wickedly earthy, subversive sense of humor. A life-size sculpture of Popeye guards the entrance to the sacred chapel. The female figure with the Barbie-doll hoo-hoo has “lactating” breasts. It’s all stunning and overwhelming and, thanks to the constant supply of new materials, constantly growing. As one happy diner and art aficionado, Lisa Hopkins, told the Sacramento Bee: “You gotta come on the weekends (on the back patio) and watch him work on new stuff.” And maybe have another beer—Sanchez has plans for the bottle.  JESS WINFIELD is a Los Angeles-based screenwriter and novelist and an Editor for AMERICAN ROAD. Bottle cap mosaic by Paul Quesnell. Hand sculptures by Kevin Dooley. Additional photos by the author.

Tio’s Tacos • 3948 Mission Inn Avenue • Riverside, California 92501 • (951) 788-0230 • tiostacos1.com

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• BY MARK VERNARELLI

RIDING AMERICA’S LONELIEST ROAD

“Seat of Eternity”

ashington, D.C., was a city abuzz on January 20, 1949. Eager to witness the inauguration of Harry Truman, well over a million people surged into the capital city, where they lined the avenues to watch the marching bands, the cadets, the Air Force planes, and, riding in a Lincoln Cosmopolitan, the thirtythird president. But up in the ramshackle blocks of the city’s northwestern precincts, James Hampton was not paying much attention to President Truman. He had better things to do. Indeed, on that very day, Hampton had entertained a visitor named Adam.… Adam. As in the Adam, from the Book of Genesis. As in bad apple, sneaky snake, and all. Indeed, such visitors were not new to the reclusive and mystical Hampton, a janitor who had few friends and lived alone in a boarding house. Hampton had, by his own account, already been visited by personages no less than Moses, the Virgin Mary, and even God himself. And it was these visitations that would soon lead Hampton to leave his room and rent an empty garage nearby. Hampton was convinced he had to get ready—ready for the

return of Christ. And what better way to prepare than to build a throne and an altar? And so, in 1950, he got busy. Today, the result of Hampton’s tinkering occupies the first floor of the Smithsonian Institution’s Renwick Gallery. Nobody is wholly certain of the purpose of Hampton’s creation—an assemblage of altars, tables, chairs, and other ecclesiastical accessories, all fashioned from everyday objects such as light bulbs, desk blotters, and jelly jars, then sheathed with yard upon yard of silver and gold foil. It’s so breathtaking and bizarre, perplexing and profound, it is hard to know what to call it, though Hampton dubbed it the Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly. That’s a name that needs some explaining. But first, Hampton could use a bit of explaining, too. The Celestial Custodian Hampton was the son of an itinerant preacher. He worked as a short-order cook before serving in the Pacific during World War II. After his discharge from the US Army Air Forces, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he found work at the General Services Administration as a janitor. It was a job he’d keep for the rest of his life. A private man given to mystical beliefs and entranced by the numerous

US HIGHWAY 50 travels from Ocean City, Maryland, to West Sacramento, California, via Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada. It once extended to San Francisco.

religious visions he had, Hampton focused much of his attention on the Book of Revelation, which holds that Christ will return to judge the nations. His Throne, crowned with the injunction fear not, appears to have been his way of preparing for the end times. After renting the aforementioned garage in 1950, Hampton spent time toiling in its bays at midnight, after the end of his night shift. Scholars have speculated that he took full advantage of his position as a janitor to rescue all manner of discarded furniture and office supplies: glue, tape, insulating board, and desk blotters. He was also spotted around the neighborhood, pulling a child’s wagon loaded with additional refuse—everything from cigarette boxes to wine bottles. Like a bird building a nest, Hampton found a place to use everything.

Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum • 1661 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest • Washington, D.C. 20006 • (202) 633-7970 • americanart.si.edu/visit/renwick

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Hampton’s creation features multitiered formations in symmetrical, parallel rows, with displays on one side of the great throne devoted to Jesus and the other reserved for Old Testament figures such as Moses. Scholars surmise that the “third heaven” in the Throne’s name refers to scriptures that define God’s domain as the “heaven of heavens.” The work’s beauty derives from its scale and complexity, but its genius is found in its inventive use of ordinary objects—some incorporated so seamlessly into the design that the viewer must look closely to recognize them. Most affecting are the light bulbs that, it is believed, Hampton selected to symbolize Christ as the light of the world. All are covered in metallic foils that evoke celestial majesty. And whether one is religious or not, it’s easy to see how the artist was guided by some inner vision, ineffable but precise, and known only to him. As the Smithsonian has observed, the work “embodies a complex fusion of Christianity and African-American spiritual practices overlaying themes of deliverance and freedom; it is both astonishingly splendid and profoundly humble.” Hampton once told a visitor that the Throne “is my life,” and also that “I’ll finish before I die.” But he didn’t. His plans to use his creation as the centerpiece of a storefront church never came to fruition. And since unincorporated materials were found in the garage, curators believe that the Throne was destined to be even bigger than it is. The Great Beyond Following Hampton’s death from stomach cancer in 1964, his landlord went searching for back rent. He entered the garage and beheld a spectacle that was the folk-art equivalent of King Tut’s tomb. Summoned to settle the estate, Hampton’s sister lacked the means to care for the Throne of the Third Heaven, but a newspaper advertisement eventually drew the attention of the art community and, with it, interest from the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum, which took possession in 1970 and put it on display. Reposing in its own corner of the galleries, the Throne has amazed and perplexed spectators ever since. “I’m just not sure what to think,” said Oklahoman visitor Vera Marnolde, squinting at a typewritten tag affixed

THE END IS NEAR: [Above] Janitor by day, creator of ornate religious sculptures by night, artist James Hampton spent fourteen years building his Throne of the Third Heaven in a rented garage. [Right] Hampton employed brilliant metallic foils to evoke spiritual awe and splendor in preparation for Judgment Day.

to one of the altar-like pieces devoted to the Virgin Mary. “The little tags saying the Virgin Mary appeared over Washington on such and such a date,” Marnolde began, before pausing in exasperation. “Were these the artist’s visions? Does he say God revealed them to him? Where does it come from? In any case, the man must have been truly a man of faith, and he clearly wanted to make a piece of art fit for Jesus.” The Smithsonian has identified at least 180 objects that were used to build the artwork, which was the first and only creation James Hampton ever made. Indeed, Hampton has come to epitomize the “outsider artist,” an individual driven to create art despite having had no formal training in how to do it. Still, one doubts that artistic training could have made this bewitching piece better or more alluring. And even though the Throne, parts of which are now nearly seventy years old, is faded and unfinished, it retains its power to stun, especially from a distance, shimmering like some sort of seat that actually has descended from the empyrean.  MARK VERNARELLI is an Emmy Award-winning author and a Department Editor for AMERICAN ROAD. James Hampton portrait courtesy the National Park Service. Photos of the Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly courtesy the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

HOLY WRIT: [Above, center] Hampton left behind texts written in an arcane script that he may have understood as the word of God as received by him. [Above] A crown of Hampton’s making bears the inscription Revelation 7, Verse 3—a Bible verse that deals with the “sealing” of “the foreheads of the servants of God” at the end of the world. AMERICAN ROAD

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ing anything.” Intentionally or not, the author has hit on his own book’s biggest flaw: Confined with his family to the hermetic cabins of a string of Lincolns, Oldsmobiles, and Ford Town-and-Countrys, Ratay presents a social perspective that is as blindingly white as Dad’s requisite sidewall tires. —JESS WINFIELD

Contributors: Gary Mantz, Lynn Miller, and Jess Winfield

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oad trips provide a vacation from the daily grind. Unfortunately, they don’t provide relief from aches and ills. What can be done to make travel—and life—less agonizing for people suffering from painful joint conditions? As someone who lives with back pain, it seemed to me, not much. Then I discovered On-the-Go Pain Relief Balm by Vital Body Therapeutics. The solid roll-on balm combines 200 mg of CBD with healing herbs. The formulation includes Arnica—with anti-inflammatory properties to heighten relief. Shea butter and beeswax lock the balm in place. The roll-on is compact and easy to pack. Does it work? It was put to the test on a trip when back pain kept me awake. Ibuprofen and hot pads hadn’t helped. I gave in. I applied the balm to the area of discomfort and crawled back to bed hoping for a miracle. The next morning I realized that I actually had drifted off to sleep. That was a miracle enough for me. Vital Body Therapeutics prices the product reasonably—minimizing pain on the pocketbook, too.

or coastal elites who wonder which version of America the red-hatted among us would like to see again, Richard Ratay’s Don’t Make Me Pull Over! provides one likely answer. Ratay evokes a gauzy America of the 1970s by recalling road trips with his impressively nuclear family. We follow elementary-school-age Ratay as he bounces, seat-beltless, about the back of a succession of “gas guzzlers” from the family’s “upper-middle-class” home in suburban Milwaukee to various golf-friendly southern climes. Between tales of Mom’s saint-like patience in the face of Dad’s “making time!” trip-management style and his older brothers’ farts, Ratay careens through brief histories of the Interstate Highway System, the station wagon, drive-through restaurants, the development and fortunes of the Howard Johnson’s and Holiday Inn chains, and more—with a similar lack of restraint. The book is as breezy as one would expect from the pen of a journalist-turned-ad copywriter, and if you’re looking for nostalgia, this is your book. But, as Ratay notes regarding the interstates’ limitations, “In a very real sense, travelers were able to cross vast swaths of America without ever seeing or experienc-

wo years ago, quality wireless headphones cost upwards of $50 and were considered a good investment. Today the Mixcder HD901 is available for roughly half of that price, which tells you how competitive this niche in the electronics marketplace has become. This model is satisfyingly functional and pleasingly balanced, delivering music or spoken-word audio with a healthy bias for bass but without sacrificing the mid-range: If you like a deeper music signature in your ears, you have found yourself a comfy overear bargain. A micro USB charging cable and 3.5mm audio cable (included) pair the set with wireless devices. Reports of reliable Bluetooth connectivity win praise from heavy home users and travelers alike, especially with the HD901’s sixteen-hour rechargeable battery life. The headset folds, making packing a cinch. Go ahead and test the limits of volume and endurance for yourself. You know you want to. Just remember that the ears you save with those tiny volume controls are your own.

—LYNN MILLER

—GARY MANTZ 

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THE INDELIBLE AND INDISPENSABLE ICONS OF THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE

“Watts Happening”

hink of the instantly recognizable, monumental structures that act as easy markers to indicate the setting in a film or television show. Why put up a chyron that says “New York City” when you can use an establishing shot of the Chrysler Building? Or “St. Louis” when you can catch light gleaming off of the Gateway Arch? Or “Seattle” when there’s the Space Needle at hand? But neighborhoods are a different story. The Chrysler Building doesn’t make us think of the politically heavy Turtle Bay; the Gateway Arch doesn’t suggest St. Louis’ now largely demolished Riverfront; and the futuristic 1962 Space Needle surely doesn’t evoke its positively preindustrial-sounding neighborhood of Lower Queen Anne. Show us a shot of Watts Towers, on the other hand, and we know we’re not just in a neighborhood, but in “The Hood”—home of the fictional (and funny) Sanford and Son (1972–1977), the fictional (and much less funny) Menace II Society (1993)—and the very real, oft-filmed, monumental work of

art effected by an Italian immigrant construction worker named Sabato Rodia. Born in 1879 in Ribottoli, a small village in southern Italy, Rodia, known as “Sam” or “Simon” in the US, arrived in New York as an undocumented immigrant at age 15. After bouncing around the country doing odd construction jobs, he moved to Southern California and landed a job at the famous Malibu Potteries ceramics factory. Divorced twice and estranged from his three children due to his alcoholism (“I was drunk all the time, always drinking,” he admitted), he sobered up, bought a small triangular lot in Watts, and, in 1921, began work on “something big”—a monumental artistic endeavor that became Watts Towers. Some say Rodia undertook his project to distract himself from the siren song of the bottle, but whatever the reason, he spent the next three decades working on what he called Nuestro Pueblo, a complex of seventeen structures built to various heights, including three main towers. The tallest of those towers tops out at ninety-nine-anda-half feet—purposely six inches shy of one hundred so as not to require the securement

• BY JESS WINFIELD

WATTS TOWERS ARTS CENTER is located at 1727 East 107th Street, Los Angeles, California 90002. Phone (213) 847-4646 or visit wattstowers.org for more information.

of assorted permits. Rodia designed and constructed the intertwined sculptures— considered masterpieces of outsider art in the Italian-American naïve style—on the fly, working without blueprints or schematics. Initially, Rodia dug and poured a shallow two-and-a-half-foot cement foundation and topped it with piles of broken cement to act as footings. Atop this hard bed, he erected slender steel columns. He mounted narrowing, concentric circles to these columns, creating avant-garde towers, and connected the towers to each other with whimsical loops, graceful arcs, and flying buttresses.

WATTS UP? [Left and above] Watts Towers has been called “a fairyland in an otherwise gritty neighborhood,” and the sculpture has become a symbol of resiliency to urban Los Angeles. In 1965, when riots rocked the surrounding area, the whimsical spires emerged unscathed.

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The steel and wire surfaces were then swathed in Rodia’s secret mortar mix and, while still wet, encrusted with all manner of salvage and bric-a-brac—scavenged broken tile, pieces of seashells, and shards of green glass culled from discarded bottles of Canada Dry Ginger Ale, Squirt, Bubble Up, and 7-Up bottles. The result is remarkable enough. But what makes Rodia’s achievement truly extraordinary is that he accomplished it all, alone, using the most basic equipment and employing neither welding gear nor power tools. The diminutive artist (he stood merely four feet, eleven inches in his stockings) scaled the vertigo-inducing edifices without scaffolding, carrying a bucket dangling from one elbow. Rodia worked on the towers for thirtythree years, until, at age 75—and after suffering a short fall from a tower in the summer of 1954—he decided to hang up his bucket and walk away. In 1956, he deeded the property to a friend and retired to Martinez, California, to be with his sister, and never returned to Watts. He died in July 1965, less than a month before the race riots that would gain unwanted international notoriety for his old neighborhood. Watts Playing? In the years following the riots, the newly infamous Watts and its cinematically picturesque towers became a go-to location for tales of urban Black America. Blaxploitation film directors loved the weird artworks. In Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde (1976), a physicianturned-Frankenstein-like monster (Bernie Casey) carries a limp female hostage to the towers before he’s surrounded by police. A black cop, gun drawn, says to his white partner, “We can’t fire on these towers, Harry. It’d be like firing on the Lincoln Monument.” Minutes later, at Harry’s command, they do just that, raining a hail of bullets on the monster who now rages, Kong-like, atop the eerie spires. In Frank Packard’s Abar, the First Black Superman (1977), Rodia’s masterpiece likewise gets riddled with LAPD ordnance when it provides shelter for a black motorcycle gang and their leader, the film’s eponymous, medically enhanced symbol of black rage and wreaker of vengeance.

WATTS MY LINE? [Above and right] Artist Sabato “Sam” Rodia employed all manner of bric-a-brac in creating his towers, including Canada Dry bottles and fragments of mosaic tile. And then, he signed his work [below], etching his initials into cement and pressing his tools into the area around those initials to create a unique signature.

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WATTS ON SCREEN? Watts Towers has served as a location for Hollywood filmmakers for fifty years. In 1979, its image even appeared on the promotional poster for Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde [left], a blaxploitation movie about a medical doctor who develops a serum that turns people into savage monsters. Actor Bernie Casey [left, second from top] played the titular healer-turnedhell-fiend. [Left, third from top and descending] Other turns Watts Towers has taken on screens large and small include those showcased in Ricochet (1991), which sees villain John Lithgow impaled on a spire, and La La Land (2016), which uses Rodia’s sculptures as a backdrop to a musical romance. The funniest moments inspired by Watts Towers are surely those in the “Tower Power” episode of Sanford and Son, in which junk dealer Fred Sanford (Redd Foxx) set out to build his own version. [Right] In 2017, all tours of Watts Towers were suspended as a three-year restoration project commenced. At the time of this writing, that project is wrapping up: The towers are scheduled to reopen in the spring of 2020.

During the 1980s and 1990s, white filmmakers used bigger budgets to inflict larger indignities upon Rodia’s life’s work. In Dennis Hopper’s Colors (1988), a tale about Crips/ Bloods gang wars as seen through the eyes of (naturally) two white cops (Sean Penn, Robert Duvall), the climactic car chase sends a black sedan soaring sideways into a tower before exploding. A white man finally gets his in Russell Mulcahy’s Ricochet (1991), when Ice-T electrifies the hell out of the towers, helping Denzel Washington send hitman John Lithgow to one of the more memorable fall-and-impale deaths in film history, right up there with Christopher Lee’s turn as Saruman in Peter Jackson’s extended edition of The Return of the King (2003). Watts Towers has provided inspiration for small-screen productions, too. In “Nobody Sleeps” (2003), a Season 3 episode of Alan Ball’s HBO undertaker drama series Six Feet Under (2001–2005), aspiring artist Claire Fisher (Lauren Ambrose) visits the towers and opines that their creator’s name has probably been lost to history. (“This is a…masterpiece,” she proclaims to her boyfriend, “and maybe the guy who made it just thought he was shit and now no one even knows his name.” “Simon Rodia,” he answers without missing a beat.) In “Tower Power,” a Season 4 episode of the aforementioned Sanford and Son, junk dealer and Watts resident Fred Sanford (Redd Foxx) decides to build a tower of his own, utilizing pieces of scrap in his backyard. He gives his icon a fancy name (“The Fred G. Sanford Memorial Tower and Private Park and Historic Landmark and Forest”) and takes on airs as a serious artist.

When his son, Lamont (Demond Wilson), derides his creation (“This is an ugly mess that you made here, man”), Fred fires back, “You don’t know nothin’ about judgin’ art. You the only one in kindergarten that flunked Clay.” Watts New? In 2016, Watts Towers was featured in the Hollywood musical La La Land. Within the plot of that award-winning picture, it provided a dreamy backdrop for a romantic date between aspiring actress Mia Dolan (Emma Stone) and struggling jazz pianist Sebastian Wilder (Ryan Gosling). In real life, however, the towers have suffered at the hands of that greatest player: time. In 2017, they were closed to public access for a three-year restoration project that is only now nearing completion. When the project commenced, the towers had a reputation for toughness: In 1957, the City of Los Angeles tried and failed to move them with a construction crane, and the rumblings of the 7.1 Northridge earthquake of 1994 rolled off them like water from a funky duck’s back. Restoration workers were surprised, therefore, when they rolled up their sleeves and discovered how delicate pieces of the spires could be. “It’s like remodeling a house,” says Mark Gilberg, project manager of the restoration team from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “You pull out a wall to fix one thing, and you find five other things that need attention.”

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Gilberg clambers up the ribs of the scafolding without fear (he apparently holds no memory of that image of John Lithgow impaled on one of the spires) and points to a languishing section of the second-tallest tower. Up close, that detail—and sheer quantity of the objects embedded in the aging mortar—is formidable. But many items are missing and have left nothing more than ghostly impressions in the cement. The cracks in the surface are too numerous to tally. Even as gaps are patched and pieces mended, fans of Watts Towers remain deeply devoted to what remains. The story of Bruno Pernet illustrates the unusual ways they can appeal to people. Pernet is a marine biologist at California State University, Long Beach. About a decade ago, he became fascinated with the 7,700 shells Rodia had entombed in the mortar of Watts Tower—shells of black abalone, Venus clams, and their kin. Pernet began cataloguing those shells, foot by foot, in an undertaking he joyfully called the Watts Tower Bivalve Inventory Project. “If this were a museum collection, all the shells would have labels,” Pernet told the Los Angeles Times in 2019. “Here, the labels were missing.” In the end, he identified the shells of thirty-four species—ten snails and twenty-four bivalves—that Rodia used to adorn his masterpiece. To his surprise, these included Washington butter clams, west Atlantic clams, and other armored sea creatures not indigenous to the local waters. Somehow, they too had found their way to Watts Towers. Rodia himself presciently predicted that “everyone” would come to see his impressive monuments. Yet he never did fully explain why he built his towers. Moved by one mood or another, he’d often meet inquiries with questions of his own. “Why a man make the pants?” he’d asked. “Why a man make the shoes? I build the tower people like....” And that has certainly proved true. d

JESS WINFIELD is a Los Angeles-based screenwriter and novelist and an Editor for AMERICAN ROAD. Watts Towers ribbing © Joseph Sohm; aerial courtesy Stefan Simon, Director of Global Cultural Heritage Initiatives at Yale’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage. Green bottles by Jess Winfield. Ceramic faces mosaic courtesy Library of Congress; green ceramic leaf mosaic © VinceZen. Rodia portrait courtesy Los Angeles Public Library. Rodia signature and single tower © Francis L. Fruit. Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde (1979) poster and screen capture; additional screen captures from Ricochet (1991), La La Land (2016), and the “Tower Power” (1974) episode of Sanford and Son. Restoration workers courtesy Mark Gilberg. Closing photo © mccown.

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ANOTHER ROADSIDE ATTRACTION West Rowan Farm, Home, and Garden Mount Ulla, North Carolina BY TONY CRAIG

n a barn adjacent to a small feed and grain store, the type of business that used to be ubiquitous in rural America, something very big was happening. It was a hot June morning in the North Carolina town of Bear Poplar. The barn doors were open to let a breeze through, and a crowd gathered to watch the final stages of something remarkable. You might guess that a foaling is underway, or perhaps a horticulture contest for the local 4-H. But it is nothing of the sort. Atop the folding tables, a colorful terrain of plywood squares, each painted with a decorative geometric pattern, fills the space below the rafters. This is what’s known as a barn quilt, and the woman casting an appraising eye over the kaleidoscope of color has good reason to do so: Soon, these panels will be lifted up and attached to the side of her business. Her name is Elsie Bennett. She and her husband, Brian, own the feed store, which does business as West Rowan Farm, Home, and Garden. And though Bennett is excited that this piece is the largest community quilt in the state of North Carolina—and possibly the country—her enthusiasm is tempered by more strategic thinking. Once it’s up, the barn quilt will draw visitors—and the Bennetts could use every one of them. “Unfortunately, agriculture has changed drastically, and the feed business has gone to the wayside for us,” she explains. “So I just prayed and tried to think outside the box, trying to think of a way to keep this place going.” The Bennetts have already found a few ways to increase traffic. As the name suggests, West Rowan Farm, Home and Garden sells everything the home gardener might want. But there’s also an ice cream parlor inside, plus a schedule of barn dances and even art classes. The quilt project began when Bennett held a class in which students designed and painted their own two-footby-two-foot plywood square—and three hundred people signed up. Then she got to thinking that so many panels would make a very big barn quilt indeed.

Barn quilts have become a phenomenon in America. About twenty years ago, an Ohio woman named Donna Sue Groves created a barn quilt—the idea was to display her mother’s quilt patterns to inspire succeeding generations—and the idea began to spread. In Kansas, there’s a barn quilt that measures 484 square feet. But Bennett figured she could beat that. After all, there’s 487 square feet of available space on the side of her store. What’s more, enough local farmers in and around Rowan had started hanging up their own patterns that Rowan County already had a quilt trail. Certainly, then, the community interest was there. Bennett began her project in February 2019, inviting volunteers to paint after contributing a small materials fee. An added incentive was the chance to write a personal story on the back of each panel. Bennett has squares dedicated to the memory of parents and grandparents, and ones featuring designs taken from century-old family heirloom quilts. There are squares painted in honor of pets, for breast-cancer awareness, and in support of local businesses. One square features Nicaragua’s national flower (the Sacuanjoche) and North Carolina’s state bird (the cardinal) to celebrate the marriage of a Nicaraguan woman to a North Carolina lad. And though she had her hands full organizing everything, Bennett found time to design several squares herself. “I want to keep the squares true to quilts,” she said. “They have to have the geometric lines, contain some area of white, and resemble something that could be sewn to be considered a barn quilt.”

Children and people with special needs painted the largest center square of the mural. “We had handicapped children who could barely hold a brush and their parents helped them,” Bennett continued. “We’ve had older dementia patients who were high functioning to also paint on it.” The installation began on the morning of July 8 before an assembled crowd. Once all the squares were up, Bennett could see that she actually had room for a few more. After some quick work with her paint and brushes, she was able to bring the panel count up to 504. And in fact, she hasn’t stopped making squares. Her own building’s flank might now be covered but, she points out, there are barns around with plenty of space.  TONY CRAIG is a North Carolina-based animator and film producer and a Staff Photographer for AMERICAN ROAD. All photos by the author.

West Rowan Farm, Home, and Garden • 11575 North Carolina Highway 801 • Mount Ulla, North Carolina 28125 • (704) 278-2800 • facebook.com/westrowanfarm

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AMERICAN ROAD’s

“’ART AND SOUL” PHOTOGRAPHY CONTEST WINNER!

RUNNER-UP!

WINNER BIRD ON A WIRE by Kevin Klitzke of Cottage Grove, Minnesota, is defined by a sharpness in its image and its thematic elements: Note how the wings of the kingbird are mirrored in miniature by the barbs on the barbed wire fence—and again in the stark angles of the bare branches. “I go on an annual spring road trip to explore the Great Plains,” Klitzke says about the creation of this striking image. “I found this spot a mile south of Kiowa, Kansas, on the Kansas-Oklahoma border that had some scissor-tailed flycatchers in the area. Patience pays off. I waited more than two hours to get this shot, but it was well worth the wait!” We think so, too, and award it our top honor. Congratulations, Kevin! You win the $500 Grand Prize!

RUNNER-UP JUST DANDY! by Fred Zimny of Lake Placid, New York, looks at a new day through the end of the life of a dandelion. It captures the rising sun through the mature seedhead of a flowering weed in a composition that sets everything alight in the fiery orange of the morn.

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AMERICAN ROAD Asked Readers to Send Us Images They Considered High Art

—and They Showed Us Just How Elevated Their Eyes Can Be….

As Zimny explains, the photograph’s geographic point of origin is also important to its terminal feel. “I shot it at Montauk, Long Island, New York,” he says. “Montauk is ‘The End’—the last town on Long Island before one gets to England. Sun, sand, and open beaches—it doesn’t get any better.”

HONORABLE MENTIONS [1] OH, CANADA! by Maurice Vieren of Wesseling, Germany, draws its exhilaration from a natural high in the Great White North. “Some little birds followed us on our way up to the top of Mount Benson on Vancouver Island, Canada,” Vieren says of his breathtaking climb into the sky. “ When we arrived at the top of the mountain, I captured my ‘Picture Perfect.’ My camera (a Sony Alpha a6400) was set on self-timer and shot the picture in the exact same moment when I climbed on the flagpole and one of the birds landed on my hand. Just awesome!” [2] MANHATTAN PERSPECTIVE #2 by John Holt from West Midlands, United Kingdom, takes a bird’s-eye view of the Big Apple. “The picture was taken early in September 2018 on a visit to New York City,” Holt recounts. “It was taken from my bedroom window looking directly down on to West 43rd Street in Manhattan. I thought this typified the canyon-like blocks of apartments that dominate this part of New York not a quarter of a mile from Times Square. Also the predominance of the yellow taxicabs, which are such an integral part of the bustling New York scene. I feel that the image is a form of street art taken from an unusual angle.”

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HONORABLE MENTIONS [3] OLD CABIN FEVER by Cotton Ketchie from Mooresville, North Carolina, pays tribute to time with its autumnal tones, lazy sways, and achingly beautiful aging focal point: “The Blue Ridge Parkway is my favorite road in the entire United States,” Ketchie reports. “This photo of Brinegar’s Cabin depicts life on the frontier of the Blue Ridge Mountains on North Carolina in the 1800s. The cabin is the only structure on the entire Blue Ridge Parkway that has never been moved. It still waits out its remaining years on the same foundation on which it was built in 1885.”

[6] SLEEPING BEAR EQUILIBRIUM by Megan D’Arcy of San Francisco finds its footing at the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in Glen Arbor, Michigan. “I’m balancing on a giant tree limb with the gorgeous Lake Michigan in the background,” D’Arcy enthuses. “Northern Michigan is where I go to unplug and re-energize from the buzz of San Francisco. As they say, it’s ‘Pure Michigan.’” And this photo is pure harmony: Note the diagonal counterbalance provided by the sand and leaves.

[7] COLORADO ON ICE by James Wadford of Gilberts, Illinois, gives new meaning to the phrase “purple mountain majesty.” Wadford snapped his striking photo during a motor trip around the Centennial State. “While driving through the White River National Forest in Colorado, I pulled off the road to photograph some fall colors and captured the cool temperatures and the haze over the mountains,” he says. The round crimson treetops provided the perfect foreground for the sharp chilly peaks.

[4] ON THE RODEO ROAD by Jerry Chinn of Prescott, Arizona, saddles up for the eye with grit and contrasting colors. The portrait, which captures the image of a bronc rider limbering up as he prepares for his eight seconds in the spotlight, was taken behind the chutes of the 2019 Frontier Days Rodeo in Prescott, and says much about American determination with its intent of the wrangler underscored by the strong steel lines of the pens. [5] FOOTLOOSE by Teresa Hull of Mundelein, Illinois, sweeps a light moment off its feet. “This photo was taken at a state park in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula where my family stopped on a road trip,” Hull explains. “We decided to take a quick swim before continuing to our destination. I took this snap of a footprint on the rocks by the river as a way to capture the fun moment. While not intended to be art, the image was meaningful, and I saw it as a kind of art. “

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HONORABLE MENTIONS [8] ROUTE 66 KICKS! by Deborah Ritch from Tonawanda, New York, revisits one of our favorite routes—and one of our favorite locations. “Nothing says ‘road trip’ more than a drive along Route 66,” Ritch says. “The ‘Mother Road’ from Chicago to Santa Monica…takes you back to the ‘good ole days.’ Roadside attractions abound. This vintage Standard Oil gas station in Odell, Illinois, was one of the first sites we came across on our trip. Built in 1932, it was restored in 1999.”

[11] SEA OF GREEN by Jacquelyn Danbury of Bordentown, New Jersey, takes a dip in Garden State waters during the off-season—when hues of the Atlantic drastically change. ”My favorite travel destination is the New Jersey Shore, and I especially love visiting in the winter,” Danbury reveals. “The traffic is better, and the beaches are empty—a beautiful blank canvas! The way the moss forms, the shells collect, and the sand molds—all untouched by humans—creates a masterpiece of nature.”

[12] BAMBOO BLONDE by Bobbie Dougherty of Mays Landing, New Jersey, leaves us wondering who the beautiful model holding the sun might be. Dougherty insists the image celebrates the “freedom to be alone with nature at a remote island.” Lucky fellow.  AMERICAN ROAD thanks all of our entrants and

congratulates our winner, runner-up, and twelve honorable mentions. Watch AMERICAN ROAD for the announcement of our next photo contest!

[9] AMERICAN PIE was taken by Roy Karna of Victoria, Australia, with a Fuji X-T2 while he was on holiday in New York City. “The iconic Brooklyn Bridge reminds me of the halcyon days of large American cars of the 1950s and 1960s,” Karna writes. “It’s as American as driving ‘a Chevy…to the levee….’” Here at American Road, we’re Don McLean fans, too, so we can appreciate Karna’s prescription for riding in a classic: “Play Buddy Holly on the radio, and lose yourself in the memories of a time when road travel was king.“ [10] WHERE’S NEMO? by DeAnn Kirgan of Rugby, Tennessee, celebrates an architectural gem too often overlooked. ”Historic Nemo Bridge is fourteen minutes from Wartburg, Tennessee,” Kirgan reveals. “And the bridge’s bronzy rustiness wears the fall nicely. It is a treasure tucked away in the Obed Wild & Scenic River Dark Sky Park. Years ago, the community pulled together the funds to save and restore this road less traveled. Thank goodness. It is a beautiful site.”

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GOING THE DISTANCE TO VISIT DESTINATIONS OFF THE BEATEN PATH

“Flying Circus”

“E

verybody made fun of me—they laughed at me,” Vollis Simpson said in an interview shortly before his death. “I didn’t pay them no damn mind.” Indeed, he did not. Simpson, a retired welder and machinist, stuck instead to the workbench at his farm in Lucama, North Carolina, and kept making his whirligigs. He’d mount them high on poles where they could catch the wind and do what Simpson designed them to do: spin, and spin gloriously, the road reflectors that he attached to repurposed fan blades and bicycle wheels throwing the sunlight around. That was 2010. Simpson died three years later, at age 94. Under other circumstances, that would have been the end of it. After all, the creations of most backyard tinkerers are destined for little better than the junkyard. But Simpson was no ordinary tinkerer. And thanks to some forward-thinking civic minds in the nearby city of Wilson, plus some funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, Simpson’s whirligigs got a second lease on life. Today, some thirty

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of them are the centerpiece of the swirling folk art environment that is known as Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park. Descendants of the weather vane, whirligigs can take many forms: pinwheels, toy helicopter blades on sticks, lawn ornaments such as ducks with spinning wings, windmills, farmers working pumps…basically anything that turns or spins in the wind. But the reason that Simpson’s whirligigs got their own park—two acres right in downtown Wilson—is because their creator elevated his craft to the sublime. Some of the thirty whirligigs here stand fifty feet high and weigh in at ten tons. That’s a lot of whirl to go round. Welded together from pieces of old farm machinery, shaped like Ferris wheels and airplanes and often featuring charming sheetmetal men and animals, the contraptions tower over nearby buildings and buzz with an audible hum as onlookers shade their eyes and squint upward with mouths agape at the endless oscillations. Born into a farming family in Lucama, North Carolina, in 1919, Vollis Simpson served in the Army Air Corps during World War II. When he left the service in 1948, Simpson discovered that he possessed little interest in farming itself, so he set up shop

• BY TONY CRAIG

VOLLIS SIMPSON WHIRLIGIG PARK is located at 301 Goldsboro Street South, Wilson, North Carolina 27893. Phone (252) 243-8440 or visit wilsonwhirligigpark.org for more information.

as a farm-equipment mechanic. Simpson’s mechanical gifts were already in evidence: During the war, while stationed on the isle of Saipan, he used parts from a scrapped B-29 to build a washing machine so the men in his unit could easily clean their uniforms. Simpson had powered his washing machine with a windmill. Back in Lucama, Simpson put aside pieces of the machines he worked on, plus an accumulation of road signs and other salvage items he collected. When he retired in 1985, he was left with lots of free time and a good amount of metal. Soon, Simpson began to make things that spun. “I’m not the type to sit down and do nothing,” he later explained.

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AIR PLAY: Artist Vollis Simpson built his whirligigs from all manner of things, including old air conditioner motors and tricycle frames. Mule Train [right] is the heaviest artwork in the park. Weighing more than thirteen thousand pounds, it sports a twenty-four-foot fan. When the wind blows, its two beasts of burden appear to “pull” its wagon.

Making the World Go Round Any discarded machine or compelling piece of scrap Simpson could salvage became potential material for his fanciful whirligigs—turbine ventilators, milkshake mixers, exhaust fans, bicycles, ceiling fans, and I-beams. He cut antiquated road signs into small squares and surfaced his whirligigs with them so the sculptures would be reflective at night. He fashioned whimsical figures out of sheet metal—characters that included a pair of life-size lumberjacks sawing away at a stubborn log and two mules pulling a covered wagon—and incorporated them in his spinning, sky-high displays. Each piece was in some way connected to Vollis, his time spent in the war, or life in a farming community. “I worked ten years putting it out there, [including] every weekend, give or take a little bit on Sunday,” Simpson would recount. “When I’ve got something to do, I’ll work all day.” As the count of the whirligigs increased, locals began to notice. Many voiced contempt for the colorful attractions. Some called Simpson’s farm “Acid Park,” a reference to the trippy sensations one might feel from watching all the gyrations. Asked what his neighbors made of his calling, Simpson said: “Well, they think I’m crazy. I was called everything.” Fortunately for him, time has a way of changing minds, usually for the better. Simpson never thought of himself as an artist until people began referring to him as one. With the rise of the Internet, Vollis’ whirligigs found fame outside of Lucama, and Simpson received commissions to make pieces for the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. In 2009, some of Simpson’s work appeared in the Christmas windows of the venerable Bergdorf Goodman department store on New York’s Fifth Avenue. He had truly found widespread success.

SPACE INVADERS: [Right] Satellite Tub was the first whirligig mounted on Simpson’s farm. Its center is fashioned from a washing machine drum and its bicycle-wheeled arms conceived to cast UFO-like shadows on the ground. Simpson himself [above] enjoyed toying with perspective.

“He has lived to see what he thought of as a hobby for himself and quirky entertainment for the neighbors become part of a seriously regarded corner of the art world,” said a profile of Simpson in The New York Times. But by this time, Simpson’s advancing years had made it impossible for him to climb up to his contraptions to lubricate the bearings. Rust and kudzu now covered the mechanisms that had been out in the elements for three decades. Many no longer spun at all.

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LAND OF THE WAVE: Everything moves at Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park—even the pilot in Waving Bomber [above] is rigged to salute in the wind. [Right] Saw Dog features lumberjacks tackling a tough log; the stronger the breeze, the faster the woodsmen work. [Below] The whirligig titled V. Simpson is named after the artist himself. It’s a lively piece crafted with fourteen bicycle rims and two school bus mirrors.

FLIGHTS OF FANCY: [Left] While BBB Blue Star recalls a Ferris wheel, Duckie [above] is small whirligig named for its use of a cast iron, anatine piggy bank. It’s merely one of Simpson’s contrivances to incorporate flying fowl in his designs. [Opposite] The park’s tallest whirligig is the nearly sixty-foot Christmas Tree, an impression of a yuletide Tannenbaum created with two thousand hand-trimmed reflectors.

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In 2010, civic leaders in search of a way to revitalize downtown Wilson proposed an idea that sounded like pure fantasy were it not for the fact that it was destined to be realized: Move Simpson’s whirligigs to the empty Barnes auto parts warehouse, disassemble and restore them, then mount them in a new two-acre city park as a tourist draw. With the help of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kresge Foundation, the North Carolina Arts Council, and other sources, eventually more than two million dollars was raised to fund the unique project. Fortunately, Simpson was able-bodied enough to supervise the move and train the volunteer restorers, many of them mechanics retired from the nearby Bridgestone Firestone plant, on the finer points of his process. As the whirligigs were relocated and reassembled, failed ball-bearings were replaced, languishing pieces were reconstructed, and all were coated with a new paint and an epoxy to preserve their integrity and minimize future maintenance coasts. And though Simpson did not live to see the park dedicated (he died on May 31, 2013), his son Leonard and other members of the Simpson family did. “What’s comforting for all of us here today,” Leonard Simpson says, “is that he knew the people who have made this possible.” Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park officially opened in November of 2017, its twirling grounds augmented with an alfresco stage for music concerts and an open-air shelter to serve a farmers’ market and other events. Before the whirligigs were moved from the property, Simpson’s farm had become the number one tourist attraction in Wilson County, and his machines retain their appeal in their new location. The stars of the collection continue to be the multicolored themed whirligigs, each one with a name plaque at its base. These are impressive enough during the day due to their size, but at night the park takes on a different light: Push buttons cause low-level spotlights to shine up at the reflectors, and create a dramatic, even profound sight against the stars as the world whirls merrily along. d TONY CRAIG is a staff photographer for AMERICAN ROAD and a producer of animated films. He is a North Carolina native. Vollis Simpson workshop portrait courtesy Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park. Mule Train and V. Simpson night photos © William Howard. Additional photos by the author.

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PARK PLACE

Your Curbside Calendar Jan. 10–12, Plymouth, Mich.—Ice Festival. Watch the Dueling Chainsaws Competition in Kellogg Park as dazzling ice carving displays light up the evening. Enjoy a hundred feet of tubing fun, a petting zoo, and live entertainment. plymouthicefestival.com

Feb. 1, Lake View, Iowa—Arctic Open. Can’t play golf on a regular course during the winter? Lake View Men’s Club hosts a tournament on the frozen waters of Black Hawk Lake. After the rounds, warm up with some local cuisine. lakeviewlifestyle.com

Feb. 22–23, Church Point, La.—Courir de Mardi Gras. Come downtown for a children’s parade and Main Street parade and see colorful costumed horseback riders, wagons, and buggies. Chase chickens or catch a greased pig. churchpointmardigras.com

Jan. 11–19, Scottsdale, Ariz.—Barrett–Jackson Automobilia. Auction for one–of–a–kind automotive collectibles, from dealership signs, hood mascots, and transportation toys to gas pumps, racing posters, and garage relics. barrett–jackson.com

Feb. 1–3, Aiken, S.C.—Antique Show. The Aiken Center for the Arts hosts this show and sale featuring vintage pieces for gardens, furniture, paintings, lighting, jewelry, and rugs. Attend a design workshop or lecture. aikenantiqueshow.com

Feb. 28–Mar. 8, Anchorage, Alaska—Fur Rendezvous. Celebrate eighty-five years of wacky winter fun. Bundle up for outhouse races, native arts market, snowshoe softball, snow sculptures, a sled–dog race, and “running of the reindeer.” furrondy.net

Jan. 15–19, Tampa, Fla.—RV Supershow. Must-see show for RV and travel enthusiasts at the Florida State Fairgrounds. Find all types of RVs from small travel trailers to bus conversion luxury motorhomes, and check out RV products. frvta.org

Feb. 7–9, Lava Hot Springs, Idaho—Fire & Ice Winterfest. Celebrate winter with the Portneuf River Polar Bear Float Parade, Kids Water Carnival, and Casino Night. See skiers descend the mountain with lit torches. idahohighcountry.org

Feb. 29–Mar. 1, Louisville, Ky.—Kyana Swap Meet. Largest indoor auto swap meet in the US with more than 250,000 square feet at the Kentucky State Fair and Exposition Center. Shop auto parts, vintage, cars, hot rods, and antiques. kyanaswapmeet.com

Jan. 15–Feb. 22, Fargo, N.Dak.—Frostival. Embrace the cool of winter “North of Normal” in Fargo, West Fargo, and Moorhead. Have fun with cardboard sled races, winter kickball, disc golf, bouncy castles, and snow sculptures. frostival.com

Feb. 7–9, Lutherville–Timonium, Md.—Motorcycle Show. See the East Coast’s largest and most prestigious custom, antique, and vintage bike display and competitions. Check out the swap meet at the State Fairgrounds. internationalmotorcycleshow.com

Mar. 5–8, Hollister, Calif.—VCT Boot Camp. Boot camp for restorers of vintage camper trailers. Beginners are welcome! Attend demonstrations and classes including “Kitschy Camper Crafts” and “Wood Finishing Interiors.” vintagecampertrailers.com

Jan. 17–19, Wichita, Kans.—Cars for Charities Rod & Custom Car Show. Car junkies see why it’s one of the longest–running car shows in the country, since 1957. Bring the kids for face painting and balloon animals. carsforcharitiesshow.com

Feb. 7–9, Saratoga, Wyo.—Skijoring Races. Take a side trip off the Lincoln Highway to Saratoga to watch a horseback rider pull a skier via rope through a course with jumps and obstacles down an eight–hundred–foot straight track. wyomingcarboncounty.com

Mar. 6–8, Mobile, Ala.—Vintage Market Days. Vintage, vintage–inspired, architectural salvage, repurposed finds, jewelry, and clothing all indoors at The Grounds. Enjoy live music and sample the food trucks. vintagemarketdays.com

Jan. 18–19, Leavenworth, Wash.—Bavarian Icefest. Stop along the Cascade Loop and see the village still decked out in lights. Play games and see snow sculptures and live ice carving, plus a snowshoe demo and fireworks show. leavenworth.org

Feb. 7–9, Whitefish, Mont.—Whitefish Winter Carnival. Yetis, Viking princesses, and penguins head to town for this loosely based Nordic tradition. Enjoy a parade, kiddie carnival, snowboarding, and fireworks. whitefishwintercarnival.com

Mar. 8, Las Cruces, N.Mex.—Cowboy Days. New Mexico Farm & Ranch Heritage Museum honors the state’s ranching traditions. Experience cowboy and wood–carving demonstrations, chuck wagon cooking, and pony and stagecoach rides. nmfarmandranchmuseum.org

Jan. 18–19, Syracuse, N.Y.—Salt City Winter Antiques Show. Explore more than two hundred exhibitors and dealers offering everything antique. Find jewelry, furniture, iron and tin ware, home décor, Oriental rugs, and art. allmanpromotions.com

Feb. 8, Buffalo, Minn.—Kites on Ice Festival. Come to frozen Buffalo Lake and see displays of kites of every size, shape, and color! See stunt kites flying to music. Attend a building workshop; play in cornhole tournament. buffalochamber.org

Mar. 9–31, North Platte, Neb.—Sandhill Crane Migration. Celebrate the migration of 100,000 cranes in the Platte River valley. Take a two–hour tour and observe, video, and photograph feeding, loafing, and dancing grounds. visitnorthplatte.com/crane

Jan. 21–Feb. 9, Rapid City, S.Dak.—Black Hills Stock Show and Rodeo. Come to the region’s largest trade show, livestock sales, and competition. Events include cattle show, team roping, and American Quarter Horse show. blackhillsstockshow.com

Feb. 8–9, Savannah, Ga.—Colonial Faire & Muster. Experience eighteenth-century life in colonial Georgia at Wormsloe Historic Site. See authentic military encampment, demonstrations, period dance, and costume interpreters. visitsavannah.com

Mar. 13–15, Sandy, Utah—AutoRama–Salt Lake. Premier car show with the latest displays of cars including racing, vintage, and classics. See all things cars with parts and vendors at Mountain America Exposition Center. facebook.com/saltlakeautorama

Jan. 23–26, Blowing Rock, N.C.—Winterfest. Have a chilly time with art, wine, downtown shopping, a fashion show, and polar bear plunge. Taste WinterFeast with culinary delights from fifteen restaurants under one roof. blowingrockwinterfest.com

Feb. 13–15, Lebanon, Tenn.—Heart of Tennessee Antique Show. Visit Wilson County Exposition Center for a showcase of folk art, antique furniture, and handmade quilts. Shop home décor, pottery, and seasonal plants. heartoftennesseeantiqueshow.com

Mar. 14–15, Northwest Pa.—Maple Taste and Tour Weekend. Tour working maple syrup sugarhouses, each one different and unique. Some operate with wood or natural gas. Purchase and take some syrup or other maple products home. visitcrawford.org

Jan. 24–25, Clifton Forge, Va.—Blues Festival. Join headliner Bobby “Blackhat” Walters and blues bands at the Historic Masonic Theatre in the Alleghany Highlands for two evenings sure to turn off those winter blues. visitalleghanyhighlands.com

Feb. 13–17, Masontown, W.Va.—Frostburn 2020. Come to Marvin’s Mountaintop as Burning Man’s desert spirit meets the winter tundra. Bring your gear for winter camping, check out the art, listen to music, and sit by a campfire. frostburn.org

Mar. 14–15, St. Charles, Ill.—Spring Fox Valley Antiques Show & Sale. Original antiques offered by more than fifty dealers from fifteen states. See country, folk art, period, and primitive antiques indoors at Kane County Fairgrounds. csada.com

Jan. 24–26, Cleveland—Motorcycle Show. Check out the new bikes and latest in gear, parts, and accessories. Watch original and aftermarket manufacturers, demo rides, free gear check, custom bike show, and kid’s zone. motorcycleshows.com

Feb. 14–16, Bend, Ore.—Winterfest. Celebrate all things winter in Old Mill District. Watch ice carved into stunning sculptures or warm up to creative fire pits—from spaceships to fire–breathing dragons. Music and fine art. oregonwinterfest.com

Mar. 16–21, New London, Wis.—St. Patrick’s Day Grande Parade and Irish Fest. Enjoy song, dance, and Irish caroling. Parade features bagpipe and marching bands, clowns, specialty units, and floats. Taste corned beef and cabbage. newdublin.com

Jan. 24–26, Tulsa, Okla.—Green Country Home & Garden Show. Get a jump-start on home improvement projects or get decorating ideas from professionals. Check out products and services from roofing and cookware to spas and windows. coxradiotulsa.com

Feb. 14–16, Indianapolis—Motorcycle and Powersports Expo. Assembly of two– and four–wheel vehicles with Big Show Bikes motorcycle exhibit. Leveridge Motorcycle Salvage, collector of barn finds, shares hidden treasures. indianamotorcycleexpo.com

Mar. 17, Hot Springs, Ark.—World’s Shortest St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Watch wild collection of marchers, strutters, dancers, and colorful floats travel 98 feet along Bridge Street. Comedian Cheech Marin will be grand marshal. shorteststpats.com

Jan. 25, Mount Holly, N.J.—Fire and Ice Festival. Watch professional and amateur ice carvers turn three-hundredpound ice blocks into works of art. Taste the best chili in town, made by professional chefs, and wash it down with craft beer. fireandicefestival.com

Feb. 21–22, Manitou Springs, Colo.—Carnivale Weekend. Dress in your best costume for the masquerade CarniBall. Taste what aspiring and professional chefs cook up at Mumbo Jumbo Gumbo Cook–off. Grab some beads for the parade. manitousprings.org

Mar. 21, Cuba, Mo.—Running the Rails on Route 66. Run or walk four miles through downtown from Main Street to Route 66. Come with a team (five or more) or enter the race by yourself. Bring the kids for a one–mile Fun Run. racetotherocker.com

Jan. 31–Feb. 2, Canton, Tex.—Battle on the Mountain Civil War Reenactment. Watch history come alive as the infantry marches in formation, the cavalry charges on horseback, and the cannon fire roars. See the Texican Wild West show! tourtexas.com

Feb. 21–23, Pahrump, Nev.—Hot Air Balloon Festival. More than thirty hot air balloon pilots from the western states gather for this family event. Enjoy hot air balloon rides, music, entertainment, vendors, and great food. visitpahrump.com

Mar. 21, New Bedford, Mass.—Polar Plunge. Be bold, get cold at East Beach for this Special Olympics Massachusetts fundraiser. After the icy plunge, enjoy food, music, and costume awards. specialolympicsma.org/event/new– bedford–polar–plunge

Please verify dates before attending events • For more great shows and festivals—and to post your event—visit our online calendar at americanroadmagazine.com/calendar.html.

AMERICAN ROAD

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THE AMERICAN ROAD ® WEAR COLLECTION

AMERICAN ROAD ® BACK ISSUES

AMERICAN ROAD POLO ®

The American Road Polo is a 50/50 cotton blend to minimize shrinkage. Shirts are available in blue, red, ash, and tan. Ladies’ sizes are now available!

Order now! Limited back issues are available!

Volume II, Number 1 (Spring 2004)

Volume XII, Number 2 (Summer 2014)

Volume II, Number 3 (Autumn 2004)

Volume XII, Number 3 (Autumn 2014)

Volume IX, Number 4 (Winter 2011)

Volume XII, Number 4 (Winter 2014)

Volume X, Number 2 (Summer 2012)

Volume XIII, Number 1 (Spring 2015)

Volume X, Number 3 (Autumn 2012)

Volume XIII, Number 2 (Summer 2015)

Volume X, Number 4 (Winter 2012)

Volume XIII, Number 3 (Autumn 2015)

Volume XI, Number 2 (Summer 2013)

Volume XIII, Number 4 (Winter 2015)

Volume XI, Number 3 (Autumn 2013)

Volume XIV, Number 1 (Spring 2016)

Volume XI, Number 4 (Winter 2013)

Volume XIV, Number 2 (Summer 2016)

Volume XII, Number 1 (Spring 2014)

Volume XIV, Number 3 (Autumn 2016)

Features include “Gimme 3C” (a tour of Ohio’s 3C Highway) and “Highway 49er” (California Highway 49). $7.95 + s&h*

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AMERICAN ROAD HAT ®

This six-panel, relaxed-fit cap with adjustable self-fabric back and brass-colored bucklesnap fastener and grommet is perfect for cruises and rallies!

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The EZ66 Guide for Travelers is the ultimate guide for finding and exploring famous Route 66, whether you’re driving from the West or the East. Its maps and directions are comprehensive yet easy to follow, and this 4th edition has been completely updated. Also includes attractions, tips, other sources, and games.

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GUIDED 66 TOUR by david knudson The Guided 66 Tour book helps you get the most out of your trip down the Mother Road. It’s like having a personal tour guide with years of Route 66 experience riding along with you. It includes recommendations for dining and lodging establishments and can be used in conjunction with the EZ66 Guide for Travelers.

Features include “Bank Shot” (Old Washington State Road Number 8) and “American Road’s Water Works.” $7.95 + s&h* Features include “Wonderland Way”—an article that traces Indiana’s early scenic route—and “Alice in Postcard Land.” $7.95 + s&h*

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Features include “Flicker Highway” (American Road’s Silent Movie Route), “Silent Star Cars,” and “American Road ’s Silent Era Films.” $7.95 + s&h* Features “American Road’s Washington Irving Route” and “American Road’s Top 12 Classic Travel Books.” $7.95 + s&h* Features include “Gulf Course” (Alabama Coastal Connection National Scenic Byway) and “Dawn Wells’ ThreeHour Tours.” $7.95 + s&h* Features include “American Road ’s Seven Wonders of the Road,” “American Road ’s Mythic Proportions,” and “Revisiting O Brother, Where Art Thou?” $7.95 + s&h* Features include “American Road ’s Popeye vs. Superman Route,” “Comic Book Cars,” and an interview with Zippy the Pinhead creator, Bill Griffith. $7.95 + s&h* Features include “American Road’s Henry David Thoreau Cape Cod Route,” “The Road to Slabsides,” and “American Road’s Top 12 Nature Books.” $7.95 + s&h*

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Features include “Trail of the Ancients” (Trail of the Ancients Scenic Byway in Colorado and Utah) and “New York’s Finger Lakes: Between the Rocks and a Soft Space.” $7.95 + s&h*

Volume XV, Number 1 (Spring 2017)

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AMERICAN ROAD

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AMERICAN CROSSROAD

ACROSS 1. Prophetic Bible book 5. Bishop’s headdress 10. Animal in sheep’s clothing 14. Silent 18. Individual facts 19. Intense hatred 20. Constellation: the ram 22. Ireland 23. Related by blood 24. Mends a shoe 25. Set again 26. Old 27. Main Street painter Norman 29. Steps descending to a river 30. Flowering shrubs 32. The Golden ___ 33. Deluge 35. Constellation: the lion 36. Domesticates 40. Salivate 41. Leutze masterpiece: Washington Crossing the ___ 46. Capital of Yemen 47. Ventilated 49. Duchess of York 50. Limb of a felled tree 51. Fragments 52. Salt of uric acid 53. Web-footed aquatic bird 54. Malarial fever 55. Shelter 56. Bedouin 57. Murder by suffocation 58. Schemes 59. Bird painter John James 61. One of many for Pauline 62. Theatrical dance 63. And not

64. Cow skull painter Georgia 66. Highest mountain in Crete 67. Woman who is a vagabond 70. He took many trips 71. Type of paint 75. Modify 76. Containing meal 77. Embankment 78. Dined 79. Ultimate 80. Consumes 81. The positive electrode 83. Growl 84. Feminine pronoun 85. Short gaiters 87. Elector 88. Look at amorously 89. Bierstadt masterpiece: Looking Down ___ Valley 91. Serves lunch 93. Follows orders 94. Arizona Holliday 95. Volume measure 96. Spun by spiders 98. Slander 101. Large marine food fish 102. Artist with a Mother 107. Exclamation to express sorrow 108. Frosting 110. Bitterly pungent 112. Stimulate 113. City? You bet! 114. Mooch 115. Connected series of rooms 116. Greek goddess of strife 117. Observed 118. Alcoholic beverage 119. Mr. Pumpkin Eater 120. Apiece

DOWN 1. Sixth month of the Jewish calendar 2. Mackerel shark 3. Auricular 4. Subsided 5. Grandma of art 6. Graven images 7. Up to the time of 8. Regret 9. Printer’s measures 10. Campbell’s soup painter Andy 11. Mountain nymph 12. Catalog 13. Sum charged 14. Pasture field 15. Exhort 16. Stratum 17. Finishes 21. Brooklyn Bridge painter Joseph 28. Used to be 29. Sticky substance 31. She’s less than a mile ahead 33. Worry 34. Vein-like deposit 36. Small hand drum 37. Farewell 38. Measured 39. Abstract being 40. Dull 41. Show indistinctly 42. Sea eagle 43. Alternative name for Beta Persei 44. 66, for one 45. Excrete 47. Luminous atmospheric phenomenon 48. Country yours truly led

“’Art and Soul” 49. Letter cross-line 53. Resembling turf 54. Alleviate 56. Fail at a premature stage 57. The Champ Oscar-winner Wallace 58. Military chaplain 60. Not appropriate 61. Chimes 62. Wrangle 64. Salt of oleic acid 65. English poet 67. Paralyze 68. The Gem State 69. Lawsuits 71. Helper 72. Depression-era photographer Dorothea 73. Rome 74. Goddess of tillage 76. Flesh 77. “Polka” clothing designs 81. Affirm with confidence 82. Protuberance 83. Lump 85. Urban haze 86. Outing 90. American inventor 91. Type of paint 92. Seventh letter of the Greek alphabet 93. Observation 95. Sudden forward thrust 96. Color on an American flag 97. Duck with soft down 98. The red planet 99. On sheltered side 100. Alley 101. Periodic movement of the sea 102. Sealed document 103. Of thou 104. Constellation: the lyre 105. Heroic 106. Twentieth letter of the Hebrew alphabet 109. Taxicab 110. Viper 111. Stimulus

See page 108 for puzzle solution. For additional archived travel-themed puzzles, visit americanroadmagazine.com/crossroad. 112

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