The blue swallow, the flamingo, the Lincoln motor court . . . these classics still welcome you for the night
The mid-1970s Holiday Inn slogan, “the best surprise is no surprise,” may have reflected a comforting predictability in road travel, but it also signaled a decline in one of its greatest pleasures: being in a place very different from home. Before long, backlit plastic replaced the Holiday Inn’s exuberantly tacky “Great Sign,” and another roadside icon transformed itself into an interchangeable component of a nationwide neighborhood. In Duluth, Georgia, a prototype Holiday Inn has begun an impressive effort to reclaim the sprightly spirit radiated by the original sign.
But why not search for an original, a mom-and-pop motel that has clung to the highway despite the homogenization of interstate culture? Along with my photographer colleague and wife, Jenny Wood, I have spent the past 10 years seeking out classic roadside motels that never forgot their roots. Our newest book, Motel America: A State-by-State Tour Guide to Nostalgic Stopovers (Collectors Press), features photographs, interviews, and stories about some of the nation’s most timeless budget stops, from neon beauties to dusty no-tell motels. Here are a few of our favorites.
Naturally, you’ll want to start on a trip along the greatest two-laner of them all, Route 66, the “Mother Road” of John Steinbeck’s . The highway, now mostly known as I-40, wanders diagonally from downtown Chicago southwest toward the Pacific Coast. Along the way be sure to stop by Lebanon, Missouri’s Munger Moss Motel. Maintaining a towering neon sign, Bob and Ramona Lehman have preserved a Mother Road institution since 1971. Nearby Rolla hides the remains of John’s Modern Cabins, where Burma Shave-style signs warn, “Photograph these while you’re here. The wrecking ball is looming near.” After crossing into Oklahoma, check out Chandler’s Lincoln Motel. Built in 1939, this site earns its reputation as the nicest motel in the Sooner State. But the one must-stop along the Mother Road remains the Blue Swallow Motel in Tucumcari, New Mexico. There can be few more genuinely classic roadside experiences than sitting under the glow of the neon bird as the cars of your less fortunate fellow travelers roll on past through the twinkling dusk. In California the essential Route 66 stop awaits in Barstow at the Route 66 Motel, where Ved and Mridu Shandil demonstrate through their loving restoration of a former fleabag the potential for the most windblown city to possess the nicest digs, if you care to look.
Beyond Route 66 you’ll find similarly classic lodgings in every part of the country. At the Lincoln Motor Court in Manns Choice, Pennsylvania, Deb and Bob Altizer maintain 1940s cabins that offer all the charm of country life and none of the distractions of our modern era (like telephones). East of Salina, Kansas, the Simmer Motel presents possibly the most comfortable beds you’ll find outside the big city. In Coeur d’Alêne, Idaho, the Flamingo Motel has branched into fancy “theme rooms,” but the Magic Fingers boxes still work. California’s Madonna Inn, in San Luis Obispo, sneaks into the list despite its once-in-a-lifetime prices. On the way out of town, snap a photo of the Motel Inn, also in San Luis Obispo. You’re standing on hallowed ground; here the first roadside inn was called a motel.
Finally, don’t forget to spend a night in a teepee at one of three surviving Wigwam Villages in Cave City, Kentucky; Holbrook, Arizona; or Rialto, California. These wonderful examples of mimetic architecture are the surviving relies of Frank A. Redford’s tiny chain of Indian-themed motels. For a while the Rialto version was politely ignored in enthusiasts’ celebrations of the Wigwam Village—probably because of its long-running slogan, “Do it in a Teepee.” But new management has taken over, the suggestive sign has been replaced, and fresh paint has appeared once more on the tall, 10-sided rooms—one more mom-and-pop motel back from the brink.
—Andrew Wood
The Buyable Past
Miniature Sewing Machines
Isaac Merritt Singer devised the first commercially viable sewing machine, in 1850; by the time of his death in 1875, his company’s annual sales exceeded 500,000 machines. Not long afterward miniature sewing machines began to appear.
Model names like Baby, Junior Miss, and Little Lady indicate that they were designed for youngsters, but marketers shrewdly pitched them to adults as well. A 1926 magazine ad stated that Singer’s No. 20 was “so easy to set up and use that both you and mother will find it convenient for quick sewing. And it is so small and compact that you can tuck it in the corner of a bag or trunk for use on trips or vacations.”
Though minis were often called “toy” sewing machines, they were also sold as effective household tools. “This machine is not a toy or experiment, but . . . does the work of the regular chain stitch machines, which are usually very high priced,” the 1903 Sears, Roebuck catalogue said of the Perfection Automatic, which cost $2.00 or $3.50, depending on the version.
Vintage miniature sewing machines remain affordable and are often showcased on eBay. Patricia T. O’Conner, the author of the popular grammar book , collects them there and has made numerous finds starting at less than $50, a sum that might buy a circa 1950 Betsy Ross with a handsome geometric design embossed on its arm. O’Conner spent $250 for her most expensive machine, a 1940s American Girl in mint condition in its original carton, complete with its instruction manual and all its supplied accessories. Examples that cost more than $1,000 are truly exceptional, she reports.
O’Conner says collectors insist on machines in good working order and adds that the models most in demand are from anywhere between the World War I era, when their inner workings were perfected, through the mid-1950s, after which their styling became pedestrian. Except for a few pressed-metal examples, the best pieces tend to have cast-iron bodies. Those with plastic ones aren’t collectible—at least not yet.
—David Lander
To Learn More
The Father of Us All
How do you bring to life the founder who shaped the modern world but did it mainly by pen?
With the advent of an impressive exhibition devoted to Alexander Hamilton, the editors asked Richard Brookhiser, a biographer of Hamilton and the historian curator of the show, how he went about rendering his subject in three dimensions.
Alexander Hamilton lived by the pen. He published his first journalism, a description of a hurricane, when he was a teenager in his native West Indies, and he wrote his last political advice, a letter pleading for national unity, the night before his fatal duel with Aaron Burr. The Federalist papers (51 out of 85 by him) are in every good bookstore and on many college reading lists. How do you explain such a verbal man in the visual medium of a museum exhibition? On September 10 the NewYork Historical Society will commemorate its own bicentennial, and the bicentennial of Hamilton’s death, by opening “Alexander Hamilton: The Man Who Made Modern America” (the show will be up through February 2005 and then go on tour).
Great shows need great objects, and we will have a full quota, from the New-York Historical Society’s holdings, from the Gilder Lehrman Collection, now on deposit there, and from loans from other institutions. Hamilton attended the Constitutional Convention, and we will show a first draft, an eyes-only printing for the convention, with the cross-outs and marginal notes of another delegate, Pierce Butler. (The preamble of this version begins, clunkily, “We the People of the States of New-Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode-Island and Providence Plantations,” and so on through Georgia.) What committee memo was ever more important? Among the many nondocumentary objects—paintings, busts, weapons, money, furniture—perhaps the most unusual is a pair of slave shackles from around 1800. Hamilton was a lifelong advocate of manumission, and here is what he was up against in its most wrenching form, for these shackles were made to fit the wrists of a child.
Objects are experienced in space and must be presented with flair. Ralph Appelbaum Associates, the design firm, devised a one-two punch for one of the best-known yet most opaque events of Hamilton’s life, his duel with Vice President Burr. In the middle of the main room, the very pistols the gentlemen used will rest in a case, displayed like the chic killing machines they are (their .544-caliber bullets weighed an ounce apiece). On either side will stand two specially commissioned life-size bronze statues of the duelists, bronze arms raised, bronze pistols pointed, only 25 feet apart —the distance Hamilton and Burr were. It will be dramatic and alarming.
Original minds, proud of their ideas, create conflict, and exhibitions must reflect that. Hamilton helped found the first American two-party system, Federalists versus Jefferson and Madison’s Republicans (ancestors not of the GOP but of today’s Democrats). They fought over constitutional construction, foreign policy, and Hamilton’s financial program, and like all politicians, then as now, they found themselves taking strange positions. We will show a copy of Hamilton’s pamphlet assailing President John Adams, nominally the head of his own Federalist party, on the eve of the election of 1800, and a letter to his fellow Federalist Harrison Gray Otis, written after the returns were in, giving Hamilton’s solution to the Electoral College deadlock that had ensued. “In a choice of Evils,” he wrote, ”. . . Jefferson is in my view less dangerous than Burr.”
An exhibition can show wonderful things in a striking setting and throb with passion and debate. But if it is all about the past, why did we come? The theme running through the Hamilton show, like a bass line, is that the exhibition is not contained solely within the walls of the New-York Historical Society. When we leave and return to modern New York and America, we are still in Hamilton’s world—the world of opportunity and danger that he saw, the world of work, wealth, liberty, and national strength that he hoped to create. Inside, among the jottings, pamphlets, and personal items, we will show, on screens, continuous loops of footage of our world: men and women in uniform, newsrooms, the Stock Exchange. Outside, if we have done our job well, the visitor will see a great city and country and think that if Hamilton could see them, he would say, “This is what I worked for; this is what I came here to build. Now use it.”
Why Do We Say That?
“Boondoggle”
Generations of summer campers have whiled away rainy days plaiting leather or plastic cords into lanyards or other ornamental gadgets known as boondoggles—a harmless enough activity. In politics, though, boondoggle has become an attack term for government programs that are regarded (by the speaker or writer) as frivolous, wasteful, unnecessary, or designed to siphon off public funds for private benefit.
Of course, one person’s boon can be another’s boondoggle. Thus Dick Armey, the former House majority leader, told readers of The Wall Street Journal last November that he “was in Congress long enough to know how demonstration projects really work. For liberal spending boondoggles, they become entrenched parts of the federal government. But, on needed reforms, demonstration projects mean a quiet, obscure death.” Or as a letter writer to the Washington Post contended on January 21 this year: “NASA’s decision to cancel the Hubble telescope program to free up money for President Bush’s moonMars boondoggle is sickening.”
Boondoggle burst into the world with something of a bang, becoming an attack term immediately after its first recorded appearance in print. This occurred on April 4, 1935, in an account in The New York Times of an investigation into public-relief expenditures. Testifying the previous day before a committee of the Board of Aldermen (predecessors of today’s gender-neutral City Council), a Robert Marshall of Brooklyn said that he had been paid to teach “boon doggies.” Asked what he meant by this, he explained that “boon doggies is simply a term applied back in pioneer days to what we call gadgets today. . . . They may be making belts in leather, or maybe belts by weaving ropes, or it might be belts by working with canvas, maybe a tent or a sleeping bag.”
Mr. Marshall’s testimony, together with that of other witnesses who told of teaching tap dancing, manipulating shadow puppets, and building “A Temple of Time” (a watch and clock collection) for New York University, inspired the story’s headline, which began: $3,187,000 RELIEF IS SPENT TO TEACH JOBLESS TO PLAY, With the subhead, “BOON DOGGLES” MADE.
The word was off and running. In the next presidential election, in 1936, boondoggle was employed widely as both a noun and a verb by Republican critics of New Deal relief agencies. Boondoggling became a general term for what the GOP perceived as governmental wastefulness, and the responsible administrators were boondogglers. Nor could President Roosevelt pass this one up. He turned the word back upon the Republicans, describing international loans made under the GOP as foreign boondoggling.
Boondoggle’s prehistory remains hidden. The word has a quintessentially American ring, like rambunctious, sockdolager, and splendiferous, all of which were popularized in the exuberantly written Davy Crockett almanacs of the 183Os. Some dictionaries credit Robert H. Link, a scoutmaster in Rochester, New York, with coining the word about 1925, as a nonsense nickname for his son, which he later extended to braided thongs. In this case, boondoggle may have been disseminated at an international scouting jamboree in England in 1929. Lacking printed examples of the word’s use before 1935, however, we don’t really know how and when it arose.
What is certain is that boondoggle has taken on a life of its own. Although usually employed in a political context, it shows commendable versatility, as evidenced by a definition that appeared in the Los Angeles Times Magazine in May 1992: “boondoggle n. Business trip whose location is chosen for travel/ vacation motives.”
—Hugh Rawson
Hiroshima Re-Reconsidered
A New Book Makes A Persuasive Case For Our Use Of Atomic Bombs
Anyone interested in the controversy over the use of atomic bombs against Japan should read Enola Gay and the Court of History, by Robert P. Newman (Peter Lang, 220 pages, $26.00). For years Newman has pitted his scholarship against Hiroshima revisionists, who maintain that Japan was willing to surrender as early as the spring of 1945, provided it could retain its Emperor, and that Harry S. Truman and his advisers knew this but wanted the war to continue until the bombs became available. Supposedly, the real reason for using the bombs was to deploy “atomic diplomacy” against the Soviet Union, and officials conspired to mislead the American people by falsely claiming that they had acted to prevent massive casualties on both sides.
Newman believes this interpretation is a hoax, and in each chapter of his scrupulous book he dissects a different aspect of the debate. In one, he examines the much-cited United States Strategic Bombing Survey, a postwar study consisting largely of interviews with former Japanese officials. Its most famous conclusion was that the Japanese would have surrendered by November 1, 1945, “even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” In a fundamental sense the Survey is irrelevant, because whatever information it contained was unavailable to Truman when he made his decision. But Newman also shows that the man in charge of preparing the final reports, Paul Nitze, was a devotee of conventional bombing who cooked the results to fit his convictions. With one questionable exception, all of those interviewed actually claimed that Japan would have fought to the bitter end.
Newman’s chapter on the ill-fated Enola Gay exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum in 1995 is especially telling. The in-house people who prepared the text to accompany the B-29 that dropped the Hiroshima bomb lacked expertise and seem to have relied almost exclusively on revisionist advisers. The result was a farrago of phantom quotations, misleading analyses, and an absurdly low casualty projection for the invasion of Japan. Those responsible for the exhibition tried to cast the controversy as one between “modern scholarly research” and some dotty old vets whose memories (as the museum’s then director put it) amounted to little more than a “largely fictitious, comforting story.” But as it turned out, the scholarship was shoddy, the senile recollections correct.
—Robert Maddox
Screenings
The Marx Brothers
It may be apocryphal, but the legend persists that Benito Mussolini banned the Marx Brothers’ 1933 antiwar film Duck Soup from being shown in Italy. If he didn’t, he should have. The word subversive has been much devalued by overuse, but surely no comics were more worthy of the label than the Marxes. No one else has ever been able to approach their combination of anarchy and method or match their range of appeal. The Farrelly brothers, God help us, have announced that they intend to re-create the Three Stooges, but outside of sketch comedy and the like, no one has dared, or ever will dare, to re-create Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and (sometimes, though not in their new DVD set) Zeppo. The Marx Brothers have never gone out of fashion and never will; they were simply, for a short while, unavailable.
The seven-movie, five-DVD set from Warner Home Video goes a long way toward rectifying this. For once, the bonus material is a real bonus, including a pair of documentaries on the Marx Brothers, an interview with Groucho, genial commentary by Leonard Maltin, and, for six of the seven films, the original theatrical trailers. While the set omits Duck Soup and the brothers’ other freewheeling early efforts from 1929 to 1933, it does include two classics, A Night at the Opera (1935) and A Day at the Races (1937). Along with these come five later films of uneven quality: Room Service (1938), adapted from a Broadway play (and less uneasily than one might fear); At the Circus (1939), far from their best, although it does have Groucho singing “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady"; Go West (1940) and The Big Store (1943), both barely watchable (in the former, Groucho ties a bandanna around someone’s mouth and says, accurately, “This is the best gag in the picture"); and the surprisingly good A Night in Casablanca (1946), a loose takeoff on the Bogart-Bergman classic.
But A Night at the Opera and its “companion,” A Day at the Races, are worth the price by themselves. Many fans think Duck Soup is the Marxes’ best film, and I agree, but A Night at the Opera, their most popular, contains four of the funniest sequences in movie history. There’s the famous scene in which at least 20 people crowd into Groucho’s tiny stateroom on an ocean liner; the hotel room switch, in which the brothers transfer all the furniture from one room to another while being pursued by a detective; Groucho and Chico’s “sanity clause” routine; and, of course, the immortal trashing of Verdi’s II Trovatore.
A Day at the Races has no such sensational set pieces, but it does contain some of the most quoted Marx Brothers absurdities, like this one from Groucho as he takes Harpo’s pulse: “Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped.” (Less inspiring is a sequence in which Harpo visits the African-American section of town and elicits all sorts of stereotypical behavior, culminating in a group sing of “All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm.”)
The Marx Brothers and DVDs are a match made in heaven. No other comedies so reward repeated viewings. After hearing a line like “You big bully, stop picking on that little bully” four times, you begin to understand it. On the fifth, you realize you have no idea at all what it means.
—Allen Barra
On The Road To Freedom
They call it a slave pen, but it’s really a cage. the wooden structure, 20 by 30 feet and two stories high, imprisoned slaves who had been bought by a Kentucky dealer until he could dispose of them. Inside, men were chained in place, while women could move about, cooking in a fireplace and doing their best to deal with the tight quarters, tiny windows, and complete lack of sanitation. The pen, later converted to a barn, was bought and restored by the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, in Cincinnati, and will form the centerpiece of that museum when it opens on August 23. Other exhibits will tell the story of the secret network that helped 50,000 slaves escape to freedom and of the people who risked their lives to keep it running. In keeping with the second part of its name, the museum will also examine issues in freedom and human rights worldwide, past and present, and encourage visitors to take action in their own communities. For more information, see the center’s Web site, www.freedomcenter.org.
