Late '60s Postcard Relics

Ahead of our family's move to San Antonio in the summer of 1968, my grandmother took me to her home in Alamo Heights, mostly (I realize now) so I wouldn't be in the way of moving preparations. During that visit, I went with Grandma to the world's fair -- HemisFair '68, it was called. She got this card for me, and we sent it to my mother and brothers back in North Texas. "We had a good time at the Fair," my grandmother wrote. I signed it with my name.

I don't specifically remember going to the fair with Grandma, but I suspect that any memories of that visit have bundled with a later visit with my mother and brothers, after they'd moved to town. I don't remember the September 15 monorail accident at all, but I must have heard about it.

The card isn't dated, but it is postmarked July 12, 1968. The cancellation mark on the stamp mentions HemisFair. The front depicts the Institute of Texan Cultures, a worthwhile museum that's still in operation.

In summer of 1969, so famed for Apollo 11 and Woodstock's crowd control issues and the murderous doings of the Manson family, we headed out on the comparatively new Interstate system for a drive around the South: Texas to Oklahoma to Arkansas to Tennessee to (briefly) Georgia to Alabama to Mississippi to Louisiana and back to Texas. Chattanooga was as far east as we got, and we stayed here.

On that trip, we'd previously stayed only in one- or two-story properties, so a five-story motor lodge was positively enormous. When you're eight. Again, my memories of the place are sparse, though there was the thrill of staying on the fourth floor, and I'm pretty sure a vending machine at the Chattanooga Howard Johnson's cheated me.

Cursory investigation reveals that there's only one Howard Johnson's in metro Chattanooga these days, in Cleveland, Tenn., which isn't the property on the card. If the structure is still there, it's flagged by another brand, and probably renovated beyond recognition. HoJo is a Wyndham Hotel Group brand now, incidentally, and I can't remember the last time I saw one. I never did associate Howard Johnson's with ice cream or food; for whatever reason, we didn't eat at them much when on the road. Mainly, they were the motels with orange roofs where we occasionally stayed.

According to Wiki at least, the brand is a b-school example of how not to deal with an adverse economy, especially if you're in the customer service business. The spikes in the price of gasoline beginning in 1973 cut into U.S. car travel, and so the company "attempted to streamline company operations and cut costs, such as serving cheaper food and having fewer employees. It proved disastrous as guests were finding this new era of Howard Johnson's restaurants and motor lodges unsatisfactory, compared to the services they had come to know for years." Oops.

Item From the Past: PHC '85

My brother Jay and sister-in-law Deb introduced me to A Prairie Home Companion sometime in the early '80s during a visit to their home, and I've been an irregular listener ever since, enough to know most of the schtick. Some parts of show are admirable, a few parts annoying.

In the summer of 1985, the show came to the Tennessee Performing Arts Center in Nashville and I went. I didn't write anything about it at the time that I can put my hands on now, but I enjoyed the show and do remember a few things. But not who any of the guests were, or what the monologue was about, as it happens.

Mainly I remember that Garrison Keillor warmed up the audience up before the broadcast actually started, and that involved inviting Lamar Alexander up on stage to play a little piano. Alexander was governor of Tennessee at the time and a skillful pianist besides. Keillor made some small talk with the governor, including something like, "You're from East Tenneesse, aren't you, Mr. Governor? [Alexander grew up near Knoxville.] You guys were on our side during the war."

Between the Rivers

On June 19, I overnighted at the Piney Campground of Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area. For years, I've been intrigued by the green splotch on U.S. maps between Tennessee and Kentucky usually just called Land Between the Lakes, but not intrigued enough to visit. Or even learn that much about it. Just one of those things involving inertia; it would have been an easy trip from Nashville when I lived there, but I never made it.

Interesting story, the creation of Land Between the Lakes. Entirely too interesting, if you ask the people who were kicked off their land in the 1960s by the TVA to create the recreation area after the damming of the Cumberland River that created Lake Barkley. (The damming of the Tennessee River had occurred in the '40s to create Kentucky Lake -- and why wasn't it called Lake Kentucky, which sounds better?) I'm not an expert on the incident, but my impression is that the people who once lived in the area -- Between the Rivers, they called it -- were evicted as ignominiously as Indians, except that they weren't required to live together somewhere else.

Still, the lakes are pretty, and they clearly offer a lot of recreation to a lot of people. This is Kentucky Lake, from the shore of the Piney Campground.

A few reminders of the former occupants remain. One, south of Golden Pond on the Trace, the main road through the recreation area, was impossible to miss from the road.

This is what remains of the Great Western Furnace, in Tennessee, built in the 1854 for smelting iron ore. You'd think such a facility would have been a target for attack during the Civil War, but no. "It closed in 1856," the historical market says, "due to lack of ore and to a slave insurrection by the furnace crew."

Whatever it did to the living residents, the federal government could not bring itself to destroy Between the Rivers cemeteries, of which there are many. I visited one north of Golden Pond, in Kentucky, though I've misplaced my notes about the name of the cemetery. It was a quiet, good-looking rural cemetery.

One Levi Brown, who passed in 1931, is presumably at rest under this homemade stone. It was probably all his relatives could afford, but it seems to have held up well.

T.S. Stribling

I had to sit down and figure this out: author T.S. Stribling is my second cousin, twice removed -- by one reckoning, since there's a spot in our ancestry at which two first cousins marry. But for now, it's enough to know that a common ancestor of ours was John Birdsong Stribling (ca. 1790-1875). One of John Birdsong Stribling's grandsons was Christopher Columbus Alvarado Thomas Stribling, who was T.S. (Thomas Sigismund) Stribling's father, and who served the Union; and another grandson was Samuel Henderson Stribling, who was my great-grandfather, and who served the Confederacy. If your family goes back long enough on this continent, you're bound to find such circumstances.

One of these days, I need to post about Adm. C.K. Stribling of the U.S. Navy, whose son John served in the Confederate Navy. I also need to visit the Naval Academy in Annapolis, so I can walk down the Stribling Walk.

T.S. Stribling (1881-1965), man of letters, lived part of his life in Clifton, Tennessee. I'll say at this point that I've never read any of his books, though somewhere at my mother's house is an aged copy of The Store (1932), which earned him his Pulitzer. Some time ago, I noticed that Clifton has a small museum in his honor, though I didn't investigate further until I was planning to visit Shiloh.

Then I noticed that Clifton wasn't far downriver from Shiloh. So I dropped in to visit Tom Stribling's visible legacy early in the afternoon of June 19, en route to Land Between the Lakes. I missed his '20s-vintage Craftsman Bungalow house the first time I drove by, turned around, then found it to be not only a museum, but Clifton's library. I told the librarian on duty that I too was a Stribling, though I'd have to sit down and figure out exactly what sort of cousin I was (see above). She invited me to take the tour, refreshing in its informality -- take down the ropes and go into the rooms and look around at my leisure.

So I did, examining T.S. Stribling's sturdy desk and manual typewriter, the collection of books and other items in his office, his wife's piano, and even more books in their large personal library upstairs. (Other downstairs rooms had the municipal collection, along with computers, where I checked my e-mail.) It's a Stribling house all right. It has many, many books. It's also probably the only Stribling house that will ever be on the National Register of Historic Places.

Et Cetera, Et Cetera, Et Cetera

Outside Lafayette, Indiana, I spotted a white pickup with large red letters painted on the side: Jesus Christ is Lord, Not a Swear Word.

Later, during a brief traffic jam, I noticed that a different pickup, ahead of us, had a couple of metal orbs hanging from its towing hitch. Though a little larger than natural size, these orbs strongly resembled human balls. Some people wear their hearts on their sleeves. Not this chap.

At some distance from Louisville, we picked up WNAS, 88.1 FM. Its music selection was all over the place, but mostly good. Turns out it's a high school radio station with more power than most. If the the idea is to teach students about the radio business, such an eclectic format isn't going to cut it. On the other hand, real-world, for-profit radio formats tend to be as bland as slim milk, and running a student radio station that way would be no fun at all.

I saw a White Castle in Nashville. This is wrong. Nashville is south of the invisible White Castle-Krystal line. Nashville is Krystal (makes noise when opened) territory. I can understand Kentucky having both, since it's a border state, but not Tennessee.

The Elliston Place Soda Shop in Nashville is still in business. In fact, it looks very much like it did in the 1980s -- which probably wasn't so different than in the 1940s. When I first took Yuriko to Nashville in late 1992, we had milk shakes there. She remembered that milk shake so fondly that she insisted that we go again this time for more, and I hardly needed persuading. Someday, it will close -- sic transit gloria mundi -- and Nashville will be a poorer place for it.

Nashville's already a poorer place for the demise of Mack's Country Cooking, a meat-and-three (there's a web site for everything, eh?) I visited often, alone and with greasy-spoon companions. But at least the San Antonio Taco Co. survives, serving real South Texas Mexican food. We had lunch there this trip, and it's as good as it was 20+ years ago, which explained the crowds on a summer afternoon in 2008.

Centennial Park in Nashville, besides sporting the world's only full-scale replica of the Parthenon, now has a lovely little garden not far from that edifice. It is dedicated to children who die from domestic violence, with some of their names carved in stone along the brickwalk.

Sparta, Tennessee, advertises itself as the home of Benny Martin. Sounded familiar, but I had to look him up later. The Calfkiller River also runs through Sparta. I had to look that up, too. It's a tributary of the Caney Fork, a tributary of the Cumberland, and I like that name as much as Fawnskin, Calif.

The mosquitoes weren't so bad at the Crosby campground in the Great Smoky Mountains NP. But arachnophobes would have had a hard time at the campground bathrooms, which featured cinderblock walls. Close inspection revealed a good number of orange daddy-long-leg-type spiders hanging out on the walls, doing their silent little dances. Once you noticed them, you couldn't un-notice them. A lot of moths also called the park home, and some number of them wanted to call the inside of our tent home. Ann was alarmed at the prospect.

This is the Appalachian Trail as it reaches Clingman's Dome. An old friend of mine hiked the entire thing 20 years ago this year, a feat I greatly admire.

It rained on us only twice during this trip. Once was while we were touring Mammoth Cave, on June 28. When we emerged, water was pouring through rivulets into the cave entrance, and on the hillsides near the cave. On the Fourth of July, it rained near and in Frankfort, Ky., causing us to opt out of the municipal fireworks show.

This is a creek (crick) in the Smokies. The girls enjoyed it immensely.

This is a waterfall above a crick on Cherokee land, just outside the national park. The girls enjoyed this immensely as well.

This is Mingus Mill, just inside the park. In the days when it ground grain, it was powered by water diverted from a nearby crick, and though now an exhibit, the water still flows. The girls found a way to enjoy this immensely too, by standing next to the water trough and putting objects in the water -- leaves, twigs, even small rocks -- and watching them zip away on the fairly fast current.

The Biltmore house has a vast collection of fine art, elegant furniture, and historic artifacts set in an interesting layout among a lot of fascinating detail. My favorite room? The bowling alley in the basement. My favorite item? Napoleon's chess set.

Besides the capitol, there are many other historic structures in Frankfort, Ky. On one block is the home of John Crittenden -- a footnote character in American history. President-elect Zachary Taylor stayed at Crittenden's on his way to his inauguration in 1849. Ever the busy fellow, Taylor stayed at nearby Liberty Hall as well, whose guest list over the years also included James Monroe and Andrew Jackson. The building itself was closed, but there was a lush little garden in the back yard, full of flowers and their bee and butterfly attendants. No other people were around.

In the parking lot of a chain restaurant in Morristown, Tennessee, a stranger asked me for money -- enough to fix her car, she said. A skinny blonde woman in her 30s, she talked with a deep Southern accent at an incongruous high clip, so fast that Yuriko and Lilly both later said she couldn't understand her. In her rapid talk, she packed in a lot: her stranded kids, her broken car, other good Samaritans who had helped some, the incentive check that hadn't arrived. She referred to the Good Lord a few times, and held her pocketbook open in such a way that I could see the words JESUS SAVES clearly. I told her that we carried little cash, at which he suggested that I go with her to an auto parts store to buy the part. "I'm sorry, I can't help you," I said, and I must have sounded unmovable, because she was gone a few seconds later.

Con woman? I'm inclined to think so. If not, she suffered because too many people are con artists. Maybe she really was trying to get her car fixed, but without paying for it. Yuriko suggested that she would later find a man more partial to skinny blondes, and be able to con him. Maybe.

Unfortunately, we didn't have time to stop at Cumberland Gap National Historic Park. It would have been another Daniel Boone site to see. But we did pass through the Cumberland Gap Tunnel, nearly a mile long. Now that's a tunnel. It's also an example of a big public works project of the 1990s, which will probably not be remembered as a heyday of such projects.

Finally, we brought home a souvenir fly swatter from the Bluegrass Inn, Frankfort, Ky., because it says the name of the motel on it, along with "Complements of..." The motel was decent enough, though a little tired, and I like the fly swatter. But is a fly swatter really the best item to associate with your motel? Just wondering.

Two More Boneyards of Note

On the grounds of the capitol in Raleigh, NC, there's a curious statue depicting three US presidents -- Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk and Andrew Johnson (see "Three Presidents" at this site). Are not these three closely associated with Tennessee during their adult lives and political careers? Are they not presidents from Tennessee? They are, but North Carolina claims them too, since they were all born in North Carolina (unless Jackson was actually born in South Carolina, which is another story).

I saw the Three Presidents back in the mid-90s, not this trip, since we didn't make it to Raleigh. We did, however, drop by Andrew Johnson's hometown: Greeneville, Tennessee. I believe it's a good time to recall the life and career of the 17th President of the United States, since 2008 is the bicentennial of his birth -- a fact noted by lamppost banners flying in Greeneville. He was born in late December 1808, in fact, making him about six weeks older than Abraham Lincoln.

The Andrew Johnson National Historic Site features a replica of his log-cabin tailor shop (behind glass), the modest house he owned as a tailor and local politician, and, a few blocks away, the larger residence he bought as he succeeded in antebellum Tennessee politics. There's also a small museum that includes a short simplified version of his life and time in office in the form of a video, ready for viewing on demand. Former Sen. Fred Thompson voiced Johnson's parts, whenever his public statements or papers were quoted. That's probably as close as Thompson's getting to the presidency.

A few other people were there on the Fourth of July when we visited, but Johnson isn't a top-draw president. At the Andrew Johnson National Cemetery, not far from his houses, no one else was there that afternoon. A hilltop obelisk topped by an eagle marks the grave of the president and his wife Eliza. His place is marked:

ANDREW JOHNSON
Seventeenth President of the United States
His Faith in the People Never Wavered

Maybe, but he must have had bitter doubts about their elected representatives in Congress. Other Johnson family members are buried elsewhere on the hilltop, and on the slope of the hill, scores of servicemen rest, not just those of the Civil War era, but some down to our time.

At Mammoth Cave National Park, on the surface not far from what's called the Historic Entrance -- where people touring the cave in the 19th century would have entered, and where those taking the "Historic Tour" still do -- is the Old Guide's Cemetery. While waiting for that very tour, I took the short walk to the cemetery. It's a tumbledown, weedy place with many broken headstones, and others worn beyond reading.

Steven Bishop, a famed Mammoth Cave explorer and guide before the Civil War, reposes there. He's credited with exploring miles of the cave, discovering many passages and features -- truly going where no man had gone before. He had no flashlights nor acetylene gas lamps, which is remarkable enough, but the astonishing thing about Bishop is that he did all that discovery, and was famed as a guide, while he was someone else's property, for he was a mulatto slave owned by the cave's owner.

The cemetery is fenced, and Bishop's stone is toward the back. Just legible, it says:

STEPHEN BISHOP
First Guide & Explorer of the Mammoth Cave
Died June 15, 1859
Aged 37 Years

Actually, he died in 1857, having been freed the year before. More about Steven Bishop here.

Biscuits & Gravy at Toomey's

Yesterday evening, after spending much of the day with a friend of hers, Lilly came home and asked if we could play Monopoly. At her friend's house, she said, she'd played "Chicago Monopoly."

"What's that?" I asked. "You have to get your alderman's approval to buy a house or hotel?"

"Huh?"

"Never mind."

It look me a moment to realize she meant the Chicago variety of the game, the one that features Chicago place names, rather than Atlantic City's. I might have mentioned this before, but I'm a purist in matters of Monopoly -- you have to be a purist in something -- and consider all variations bogus, mere exercises in expanding market share, except for the Waddingtons UK version, which was created not long after the US version.

I might feel differently if the variations I've seen made any socioeconomic sense. Highly expensive real estate always substitutes for Boardwalk and Park Place, but poor or scary neighborhoods never take the place of Mediterranean and Baltic avenues, for instance. No doubt Hasbro figures that would be inviting angry reactions.

Anyway, as we played, I looked through my wad of receipts from the trip and came to the conclusion that we spent $357.29 on gas over the ten days, though that only counts gas purchased away from home. Since the tank didn't come back quite as high as it was when we left, I'll add about $30 for the actual gas expense and then round it up: $390. I'd estimated a 2,000-mile trip would take $400 in gas money, so I was pretty close.

I didn't write down per gallon costs at each purchase location, and it turns out that not every receipt states the price that way, though many do. Generally speaking, though, the further south and east we went, the lower the price got. In Indianapolis, we paid $4.16; in East Tennessee, $3.90; Nashville and Frankfort, Ky., were somewhere between those.

Most of the gas stations were only fuel acquisition points, units of corporate multi-facility owners and operators with mostly familiar brands, out to sell high-margin food and other items besides gasoline. Then there was Toomey's Country Market, not far from Crosby, Tenn., which also sold gas and grocery items, but had a little restaurant in back.

On July 3, we constituted a lot of the breakfast rush. Besides us, there was a table of three -- a man, his daughter, and her son, probably -- and a man by himself. The waitress was also the cook, the only person attending to breakfast, so it took a little while to get our order. It was a good find on the whole, especially the biscuits and gravy. A backroad restaurant in the South that can't do biscuits and gravy might as well close up.

The Roads Ahead

The best-known road that we drove last week was the section of US 441, also known as the Newfound Gap Road, that crosses Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It is a windy little road, ascending to a point near Clingman's Dome, Tennessee, and then descending into North Carolina -- or the other way around, depending on which way you drive it. Verdant beyond belief in early July, the road also has pretty much everything you'd want in a mountain road any time of year, such as winding switchbacks and access to various historic structures and hiking trails. Plus scenic overlooks. A lot of scenic overlooks; after the first few, you quit getting out of the car.

At about Mile 10 (I think), still in Tennessee, there's the Mother of All Switchbacks, a place where the road loops completely around and passes over itself -- or loops around and passes under itself, depending. The warning sign describing this particular bit of road topography is pictured here (see November 10) -- a memorable sign.

I'm astonished that the photographer got a photo of that sign at all, since stopping or pulling over on the Newfound Gap Road is risky business. While smooth (partly repaved in recent years, I read), most of the road has no shoulder, and traffic is heavy. The park is the most popular one in the entire national park system -- 9.4 million visitors in 2007, according to the National Park Service. One any given day in the summer, a large number of that total seems to be on Newfound Gap Road, which made for a number white-knuckle moments, especially at when traffic appeared three and four and five RVs deep on the other side of the road, just as you hit a switchback. Carefree highway, it's not.

Unsurprisingly, Newfound Gap Road passes through Newfound Gap, a location some distance lower than Clingman's Dome, the highest point in the park, but important enough that the dedication of the park was held there on September 2, 1940. The occasion was considered important enough that President Roosevelt himself came to speak, from a platform of stones built for the occasion by the CCC. A plaque marks the spot now; less obvious is the fact that the Tennessee-North Carolina border runs through the site. Through the plaque, I've read, which is a fitting bit of symbolism to mark the cooperation of the two states in putting the park together.

Ann took this picture of the place, with only a little help from me.

Interstate 40, which skirts the park to the east, has its own share of curves, along with enough mountainous landscapes to count as scenic. Like stretches of I-89 in Vermont or I-10 in Louisiana or the Mackinac Bridge, it makes the case that the Interstate system is not completely a bore.

In fact, a little bit more of a bore would have suited me. Along much of I-40 from the park to Asheville, trucks aren't allowed in the left lane, and are required to go slower than cars. The result was long lines of trucks in the right lane -- six or eight. Drivers of lesser vehicles, such as a dark green Sienna all the way from Illinois, either had to hang behind the trucks, or pass the trucks on the left, between them and the concrete barrier, through a couple of serious curves.

Despite their obvious dangers, I-40 and the Newfound Gap Road were good driving roads. Better, however, was a piece of the as-yet unfinished Foothills Parkway, tucked away just north of the park, connecting the town of Crosby, Tenn., with I-40. At five miles or so, it was an abbreviated Newfound Gap Road, with some similar scenery, but almost no traffic. An obscure gem of a road.

Goodyear Nipple

Posting photos is the refuge of an indolent blogger, but lately for-profit writing has taken up most of my total writing time. That isn't remotely a bad thing, of course.

Still, this too is a September memory. It's my "nipple" shot of the Goodyear Blimp Columbia at the Smyrna, Tennessee, airport in mid-September 1986. I rode on the blimp shortly after taking the picture, which I wrote about some time ago (see March 9 & 10, 2003, on the original BTST).

I did some looking around and found out that Columbia was retired in 1992. I also found this intriguing story from the FAQ section of the Goodyear Blimp web site.

"Q: What is the story behind the 'ghost blimp'?

"A: Early in World War II, the Navy blimp L-8 left Moffet Field in California on a routine anti-submarine patrol flight over the Pacific. Two Naval officers, Lieutenant Cody and Ensign Adams, were aboard When L-8 had been out for about an hour, Cody radioed that they had spotted an oil slick and were investigating. Then nothing. This message was the last ever heard from the two men. Later that same day, the blimp was spotted nudged against a cliff on a beach south of San Francisco. As rescuers approached, the ship dislodged itself and drifted inland. It floated down in Daly City, made a perfect landing on its one wheel, and came to a stop in an intersection. No one was aboard the L-8, and no one has even been able to account for the disappearance of Cody and Adams. The throttles were at idle, everything was working normally, there was fuel in the tanks and the cabin door was open. Some local volunteer firemen slashed the envelope, completely destroying it, in the mistaken belief that the crew might be trapped inside. Only the car was saved. Goodyear donated the gondola to the National Museum of Naval Aviation at Pensacola, Florida. It is currently being restored and will soon be on display."

Niagara Falls Syndrome

When we visited Lilacia Park in Lombard, Ill., on Saturday I was reminded of something an old friend put in a letter to me some years ago. In a previous letter I’d described to Stephanie, my old friend and correspondent after I moved away from Nashville, how my students at the time, all Japanese, were familiar with Niagara Falls as a destination. A number of them, in fact, had been there.

Ah, for the long-gone days – the early 1990s in this case -- when I had several regular correspondents on paper. Stephanie wrote back and said:

“You know, it’s sad that half of your students have taken the trouble and spent the money to come to Niagara Falls. All those foreigners wanting just one representatively American sight to remember always – if only someone would tell them they’re about a hundred years too late. I don’t know, maybe I was there on a bad day, but to me it was about as exciting as a municipal water-purification plant. Nothing was attractive or awesome about it, I guess because of the encroaching concrete and cars and because someone had told me the durn thing is artificial now anyhow: The water flows and rushes and falls mechanically. Big hairy deal, Niagara Falls. Now Foster Falls, that’s something. Fall Creek Falls, that’s worth a trip. Maybe they’d be ruined, too, by fame and high traffic.

“That’s the problem with most world travel. Most of it probably a real bad investment and a huge waste of time, because no one knows how to find out where to go. No Japanese person is going to fly to Nashville, rent a car and drive to Chester County, rent a cabin on the lake at Chickasaw State Park, and wake up every morning to gaze from his deck upon the cattails and the glassy lake… I’m convinced that most world travel – and much domestic travel – suffers from the Niagara Falls syndrome.”

I don’t entirely agree with all that, but there’s more than a little truth to it even now, in the Internet age (Stephanie was writing pre-Internet) with all its pots and cans of information available instantly. No one from very far away would seek out Lilacia Park in May, a few amazingly lush acres in the western suburbs of Chicago adorned with not only dozens and dozens of varieties of lilacs, but also many other flowers and bushes in their glory. By the look of things on Saturday afternoon, when the weather was flawlessly warm, not many people from nearby were there either.

When far from home, I still think it’s good to seek out famed places – I was impressed enough by Niagara, though I’ve seen more obscure falls that are impressive, too, including Tennessee’s Fall Creek Falls. But it’s also important to pay attention for the opportunity to run across an obscure gem. Sometimes it’s as easy as a slight variation from the beaten path.

My Kind of Sights

I ought to know better than to pick up a book like Michigan: Off the Beaten Path, but for 12.5¢ at a resale shop over the weekend, even the 1999 edition of this book was too good to pass up. Its age is hardly a problem, since it’s easy enough to check via the Internet if a site still exists. I own a copy of the Illinois book in the series (even a little older), which has pointed me to some interesting sites over the years, such as the Egyptian Theater just off Main Street in DeKalb, a rare surviving example – I don’t think there were many in the first place – of Egyptian revival architecture.

While visiting DeKalb one day a few years ago, I was going to content myself with checking out the exterior of the Egyptian, but noticed that a live theatre performance was finishing. So I took the opportunity to go in swimming against the current, as if I’d forgotten something, to peek at the interior. The only other place I’ve seen like it is the First Presbyterian Church in Nashville, an Egyptian revival design by William Strickland, who also did the Tennessee State Capitol.

A book like Off the Beaten Path, whatever the state, has the unfortunate effect making me want to see the places I happen across while browsing its pages. After all, who wouldn’t want to go to suburban Lansing to the Travelers Club International Restaurant and Tuba Museum? Or, a little closer to where we live, ride the Saugatuck Chain Ferry across the Kalamazoo River, which has been in operation since 1838? Or see the very first roadside table in the nation (1929) in Ionia County?