The Spirit of 76

Historic preservation is a funny business. As a nation, America has always been forward-looking and progressive, but at the same we citizens have strong and sentimental attachments to the past. Things change, new habits replace old favorites, but our embrace of an ever-improving future often conflicts with desires to maintain some continuity with the way things used to be.

The questions surrounding preservation of the past for future generations usually only make the news when a big battle rages, like when Disney wanted to build a theme park on the Civil War battlefields of Manassas, when WalMart’s bland mega-boxes threaten the livelihood of favorite local shops, or when homespun corner cafes can’t compete with deep-pocketed chains (“Friends don’t let Friends Drink Starbucks”, etc).

News-worthy or not, these issues pop up everywhere, whether it’s to do with saving Howard Johnson’s orange roofs back east, Stuckey’s in the Deep South or iconic 1950s “Googie” restuarants in Southern California. Sometimes a small and usually very vocal group manages to ride to the rescue of threatened landmarks, but, more often than not, the old favorites have faded away before we really begin to appreciate what we are losing. One of my favorite writers, the late great J.B. Jackson, wrote an essay he called “The Necessity for Ruins,” about how the value of the “old” is often only revealed after it’s extinct. However you look at it, it’s all very much as Joni Mitchell sang: “You don’t know what you got till it’s gone."

My musings of the importance of things past were set off by a recent news item a friend sent documenting a campaign against the mindless destruction of one of the cherished landmarks of my young life: the giant orange “Union 76” balls, spinning above the forecourt of my favorite gas stations. The Union 76 balls first arrived on planet Earth the same year I did, in 1962, for the World’s Fair in Seattle (when the landmark Space Needle, the Monorail and more also arrived on the scene).

{And just to add another layer of confusion to my digressions, these orange Union 76 balls also played a part in the creation of another car culture icon – antennae balls. (You know, those 2-inch styrofoam balls people put at the tip of their car antennaes…). Well, according to the semi-offical History of Antennae Balls, Union 76 created these car-toppers in 1967, so these balls are infinitely more significant than most people think.}

Anyway, to get back to the point: in this age of monopolizing mega-corporations, it seems that these eye-catchingly attractive symbols are simply too quirky to survive. Since 2002, when Union 76 (or Unocal) was swallowed up by the ConocoPhillips regime (which earlier absorbed another much-loved icon, the Phillips 66 brand), the Union 76 logo has been threatened with extinction. First the color scheme was sacrificed, as California orange gave way to Conoco red, and over the past few years almost all of the 18,000 or so big orange spinning balls have been replaced by flat rectangular red plastic signs.

Fortunately, the 76 balls saga may yet have something of a happy ending, thanks to a year-long petition campaign waged by admirers of the orange globes. Though most will be replaced, a few particularly prominent balls will be saved, and many of the others will be offered to museums and public collections.

Stay tuned!

CARS! on Route 66...

Having spent a couple of rainy afternoons watching and re-watching last year's excellent Pixar movie CARS, which is out on DVD, I did my best to explain to my boys which of the "scenes" in the film we could actually go visit some day. Hoping to strengthen my case for a Mother Road road trip, I did some web research and came across this enjoyable Route 66 website, which compares the settings in the film to famous scenes and personalities of the real Route 66.

Hope you like it as much as I do.

I Have A Dream

This upcoming weekend marks Martin Luther King Day, and for those interested in paying respect, or in visiting any of the key scenes of his life, here is a short and selective biography of the civil rights leader, focusing on real, Road Trip-worthy places (and a few web sites) where you can get a sense of his admirable life and troubled times.

Martin Luther King, Jr was born on January 15, 1929, in the “Sweet Auburn” section of Atlanta Georgia. His birthplace has been evocatively restored, and the surrounding neighborhood includes his family church and the King Center for Non Violent Social Change, where Dr King is interred.

Following in the politically active footsteps of his father, Martin Luther King Jr. joined the NAACP and became a Baptist minister, after attending Morehouse College and Boston University, where he got his PhD (hence the title "Dr."). In 1953, at the age of 24, he accepted his first pastorship, at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Here Dr King first came into the public eye, helping to maintain the year-long bus boycott that followed Rosa Parks’ legendary refusal to move to the back of the bus.

Despite numerous death threats and assaults, Dr. King continued to campaign fearlessly and peacefully for justice and civil rights, most famously at the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Dr King delivered his unforgettable “I Have a Dream” speech to a crowd of 250,000 supporters. In 1964 Dr King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, at age 35 its youngest-ever recipient. The next year found Dr King back in Alabama at the heart of the struggle to secure voting rights, as he helped lead a march to the state capitol in Montgomery from Selma, where local activists had been battling to increase the political representation of the black majority population. Selma is a great place to get a sense of the Civil Rights struggles, home to the National Voting Rights Museum and an icon of the times, the Edmund Pettus Bridge where the Civil Rights marchers were brutally attacked by racist mobs. The entire route between Selma and Montgomery is now preserved and interpreted as a National Historic Trail.

Despite the increasing violence of the later 1960s, Dr King maintained his non-violent approach, moving into a low-income section of Chicago to highlight the fact that racial inequality was not solely a concern of the Deep South. Increasingly involved in protests against the Vietnam War, Dr. King continued to support efforts to obtain racial equality, and in March 1968 came to Memphis in support of black sanitation workers on strike for equal pay. The day after giving a prophetic speech anticipating his own death, on Apreril 4 1968 Dr King was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel, which now houses the National Civil Rights Museum.

As with the Kennedy assassinations, Dr King’s death has generated reams of conspiracy theories, but on the anniversary of his birth I prefer to focus on his contributions, to which I hope this brief blog does some justice. So, while you’re enjoying the day off school or off work, I hope you can take another moment or two to think about Dr King’s legacy, and maybe plan a trip to visit some of these emotionally-charged, history-rich places.

Happy Birthday Elvis Presley! 72 years ago today, The King was born in a two-room shack in Tupelo, Mississippi. Though it's been half a century since he burst upon the world's consciousness, and 30 years since his sudden death in 1977, his presence is still felt around the world, mostly through his music but also through a unique pop culture afterlife of Elvis impersonators, National Enquirer sightings and a range of merchandise that is truly mind-boggling.

Along with Tupelo, the key site for an Elvis Birthday pilgrimage is his longtime Memphis home (and burial place), Graceland, on Elvis Presley Boulevard (US-51) about a mile south of I-55 amid a clutter of burger joints and muffler shops. At age 21, flush with his early success, Elvis paid $100,000 for what was then one of the grandest houses in town. Splurge on a $30 combination “Platinum Tour” ticket and you can tour the mansion as well as the other “collections,” such as the King’s private jet or his car collection. (Many of his cars, including his famous pink 1955 Cadillac, are arrayed as if at a drive-in movie—with a big screen playing his race car scenes from Viva Las Vegas on a continuous loop—it’s my favorite stop in the whole shebang.)

Of course, Elvis is everywhere, but there's at least one other very special spot where you can commune with his spirit: Elvis' favorite Route 66 motel room, across from the very good museum in Clinton, Oklahoma.

For more on Elvis, check out the offical elvis.com website.