I expect some comments about the things that Pr.
Roosevelt got wrong, but I have a real appreciation for one thing he and his
Administration got right. The Civilian Conservation Corps.
Established
in 1933, it was a government program run by the Army that accepted
young men 17-25 and put them to work. The CCC built Skyline Drive, Big
Bend National Park, over 700 state parks, over 3,400 firetowers, fought
wildfires, worked at flood relief, and a long list of projects. At it's
largest, in 1935, there were 500,000 men involved, overall 3 million served. Most of them starting wearing a different uniform in 1942 and the program was shut down.
We ran into the legacy of the CCC everywhere. The style of the work they did is iconic. Driving into a park, you might only need to see one building to know the CCC had been involved and we saw it over and over.
I'll bet most of them were a lot skinnier than the buff statue Ms. ASM has taken a shine to. The statue and plaque are a monument to the CCC at Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park in North Dakota. We'll visit the park in my next post.
This song is an anthem from Old America. I listened to this as a teenager, and you (Old Farts) know how old I am. This is from a time when politics was not Uber Alles, and when Americans could have civil conversations even if they were in opposite parties.
ASM836 has been posting about how he went on a road trip and found that Old America is sill here. This song sings to that, even if Arlo was a Commie Bastard - and son of a Commie Bastard - but he endorsed Ron Paul (!). Because back then we were always America First, even back in the 1970s. I think that this proves my point, that we shouldn't hate Americans because they are in the other political party.
Riding on the City of New Orleans Illinois Central, Monday morning rail; There are fifteen cars and fifteen restless riders, Three conductors, twenty five sacks of mail. They're all out on a southbound odyssey The train rolls out of Kankakee Rolling past the houses, farms and fields, Passing trains that have no names Freight yards full of old black men, And the graveyards of the rusted automobiles.
Singing, "Good morning, America, how are you? Say, don't you know me? I'm your native son. I'm the train they call the City of New Orleans. And I'll be gone five hundred miles when day is done."
I was dealing cards with the old men in the club car, It's a penny a point, there ain't no-one keeping score. Won't you pass the paper bag that holds that bottle, You can feel the wheels a-rumbling through the floor. And the sons of Pullman porters and the sons of engineers Ride their fathers' magic carpet made of steam; Mothers with their babes asleep, rocking to the gentle beat, The rhythm of the rails is all they dream.
Singing, "Good morning, America, how are you? Say, don't you know me? I'm your native son. I'm the train they call the City of New Orleans. And I'll be gone five hundred miles when day is done."
Nighttime on the City of New Orleans, Changing cars in Memphis, Tennessee. It's halfway home, and we'll be there by morning, Through the Mississippi darkness rolling down to the sea. But all the towns and people seem to fade into a bad dream, The old steel rail it ain't heard the news, The conductor sings his song again, it's, "Passengers will please refrain..." This train's got the disappearing railroad blues.
Singing, "Good night, America, how are you? Say, don't you know me? I'm your native son. I'm the train they call the City of New Orleans. And I'll be gone five hundred miles when day is done."
Singing, "Good night, America, how are you? Say, don't you know me? I'm your native son. I'm the train they call the City of New Orleans. And I'll be gone a long, long time when the day is done."
As with all great songs about America, this is bitter sweet. This was once the artery that pumped blood between America's different regions. Now - in the 1970s - it was dying as a passenger system.
But people remembered what it was. Here's the Highwaymen who did this almost as well as Arlo. Waylon makes this almost what it was. Sure, Willie carries this, but watch Waylon.
America is not gone. Art tells us what it was, and is, and can be.
That's what ASM826 is telling us. America is here. Just look around.
It might the Cougars, the Owls, the Warriors, or any other of a thousand team names. When you get to the outskirts of a town with a high school, there will be a sign, a statue, or a billboard with the team mascot welcoming you. When you walk into the gas station or the grocery store, there will be pictures of the team. High school football matters to these towns. There's history and bragging rights on the line.
In Oakley Kansas, it was the Plainsmen.
There's even a variant in the small towns in Texas. They play six man football. There's just not enough kids in the school to field an eleven man team. Here's today's look at America.
It's been some time since we had a blogshoot here. Please leave a comment to this post if you'd consider attending one in the greater Tampa area in January or February. My co-blogger and Brother-From-Another-Mother ASM826 has said he will come , so all the Cool Kids will be there.
This story starts with water. A reliable year round stream that over millennia cut a canyon in western Kansas. The water attracted game of all sorts and the combination attracted people. The canyon is the site of the northernmost Pueblo settlement ever discovered. Later it was home to the Apache and the last battle between native tribes and the U.S. Army in Kansas was fought here. By the 1880s, Herbert Steele and his wife had homesteaded the area.
The Steeles donated the first part of the land for use as a park in 1928. A dam was built the following year creating the lake that exists today. Historic Lake Scott State Park was developed over the following decades. There is the battle site, the sandstone home of the Steeles, the Pueblo ruins, swimming, fishing, hiking and mountain bike trails, and a visitor center.
In the visitor center we learned that there was a museum in the nearby town of Scott City. Since we needed groceries and a laundromat, we went to town. Scott City has a population of about 4,000. Like so many of the cities across the west, it is a railroad town. It's just big enough to still have some businesses and it seemed to be thriving.
We did our laundry and went to the El Quartelejo Museum. There's an artist's gallery, rooms dedicated to the eras in local history, and something else. As you enter, there's a large room filled with tables, a full kitchen, one table with a jigsaw puzzle to work on, a social space. On a weekday afternoon there were a dozen, mostly older, people sitting in small groups engaged in conversation. We were the outliers, tourists in the off season.
We toured the exhibits, but as we came back out we were engaged by a couple of ladies, The usual questions, where you from, where you going, where you staying? We asked about the town, who they were, and they told us in turn. Then they asked if we had eaten lunch and they told us this story.
There's a local place, called Mom and Pop's Burger Stop.
(That link is Facebook, but it's what they are using for a website.)
Several months before, they had a kitchen fire, destroyed the inside of
the building. They rebuilt. But they didn't rebuild alone. People from
the community did fundraisers to help the staff with expenses. People
volunteered time and skills to clean, hang sheet rock, paint. The
reopening had been a couple of days before and we should go eat there.
I recommend the buffalo burger.
But I recommend the people even more. The back room is occasionally used by a local organization called Scott City Feathers and Lead for hunter safety classes. There are watch parties for the local high school football games. (Go Beavers!) They donate proceeds to do everything from help with food needs to paying funeral expenses. The people we met that day were just doing what seemed to be right. A community, alive and well.
Scott City. A little place on the far western side of Kansas.
Being raised in the very rural parts of Kansas led me to believe that everything was simple, everything made sense and that anything was possible.
It is the Soldier, not the minister Who has given us freedom of religion. It is the Soldier, not the reporter Who has given us freedom of the press. It is the Soldier, not the poet Who has given us freedom of speech. It is the Soldier, not the campus organizer Who has given us freedom to protest. It is the Soldier, not the lawyer Who has given us the right to a fair trial. It is the Soldier, not the politician Who has given us the right to vote. It is the Soldier who salutes the flag, Who serves beneath the flag, And whose coffin is draped by the flag, Who gives the protester the right he abuses to burn the flag.
Today is Veteran's Day in the United States, a day where we recognize what veterans have done for this nation, and for the world. In other countries it's a day of sadness, reflecting on the loss of those young men and women who served in Flander's Fields and other places. Here, we we reflect on this on Memorial Day in May - originally called Decoration Day after the War Between The States, and chosen in May because there were flowers in bloom everywhere, suitable for decorating the graves of the loved and lost.
But today we recognize the accomplishments of veterans, living and dead. This video popped up in my video feed, and while at times sounding a bit propogandistic, it seems to me to be (as the Mythbusters used to say), plausible.
How Americans introduced WWII German POWs to Thanksgiving dinner.
I say plausible because while I haven't verified any of the claims in the video, I've posted before about LTC Gail Halvorsen:
He
was a kid who liked to fly, joining the Civil Air Patrol in 1942 and
then the brand new US Air Force when he was old enough to sign up. He
missed World War II because of his age but found himself in the left
hand seat of a C-54 in Germany, 1948. That's when Stalin cut Berlin off
from the Free World and the Berlin Airlift started.
[Then] Lt.
Halvorsen was at Tempelhof Airport one day when he saw some kids
standing on the other side of a chain link fence. They told him not to
worry if the weather was bad and he couldn't bring in food. You see,
they said, they could live on very little food but if they lost their
freedom they thought they would never get it back. Smart kids.
Halvorsen
wanted to do something for them and told them that he'd drop some gum
from his plane. They'd know it was him because he'd wiggle his wings.
He and his co-pilot pooled their candy rations for the next day's
flight. Because it was heavy, they made little parachutes out of
handkerchiefs.
...
They
called him the "Candy Bomber" and when the word got to the Press it
became a sensation back in the States. School children and candy
manufacturers donated candy for the children of Berlin. In just a few
months Lt. Halvorsen couldn't keep up with all the candy and
handkerchief parachutes that were arriving in the mail. Pretty much
everyone in his unit was now aRosienbomber (as
the German kids called them - "Raisin Bomber". Halvorsen himself was
known as "Uncle Wiggly Wings" because of his signal that he was about to
drop sweets.
Operation"Little Vittles"dropped 23 tons of candy in a quarter million handkerchief parachute loads. Halvorsen was awarded the Großes Bundesverdienstkreuz, Germany's highest award.
Like I said, plausible. American veterans came from the pool of American citizians, and pretty much returned to that pool of Americaness. One of the seldom considered accomplishments of the Greatest Generation was not just that they won the war, but that they won the peace afterwords. At least with Western Europe, although post-1992 it seems like Eastern Europe as well.
They did it because they were Americans. Yes, they could afford to be generous to the defeated, but they did it more or less unconsciously because that was who they were. In my mind, this was the greatest hour of American veterans, and the Americans who stood behind them.
And so while this is a day of sadness overseas, let me be the first to wish you a happy Veteran's Day. Thanks to all who served, including Grandpa, Dad, Uncle Dick, nephew Daniel, The Queen Of The World's son, our Son-In-Law (just retiring from the Navy), and last but by no means least our very own ASM826. The citizens - of whom you were once part and to which you returned - are proud indeed that of the members of its own Armed Forces.
Things looked bleak for Great Britain in 1940. France had fallen and even with the "Miracle of Dunkirk" the British Army didn't really have the hardware to fight the Nazi war machine. All that stood between them and Hitler was the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force, but everyone expected an invasion at any time.
And so a whole bunch of pillboxes were built on likely landing beaches. The problem, of course, is that a pillbox looks like, well, a pillbox, and the Luftwaffe would target them as a matter of course.
And so the Brits built a disguised one.
It looked like an old ruined cottage but was newly built from reinforced concrete with gun ports instead of windows. Pretty cool. And what's also cool is that it's Grade II listed as a historic building.
Via a wikiwander, I ran across this fabulously strange classical music tip o' the hat to the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt. No joke.
Bohuslav Martinů was a Czech composer who like many others fled to the United States to escape the Nazis. While there, he wrote this in tribute to what was America's finest fighter-bomber and the role it played to free his people.
The map in the last post shows all but two of our camping stops. I made that with Mapquest and they have a limit of 26 (A-Z) stops on any planning map. So there's a couple of stops in the long straight stretches that I took out so I could show the main loop.
Two of the stops are to visit family, although we did stay in a campground at one of them.
This is the second long trip we have made. Two years ago we made a trip of similar distance and time. That was on different roads with different destinations. The planning for this trip was deliberately structured to take us to new locations. For example, this trip went to the Michigan UP and out across the northern states. The previous trip included Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Some of the upcoming posts will likely be from the first trip as well.
Our route was roughly planned and the parks were picked months in advance. We went out in August, when parks are busy, and had to make our reservations through Labor Day at a minimum. Later in the trip we were in more remote areas, with parks mostly empty, and we were free to roam. We carried a paper atlas in addition to having the internet. Looking at the larger map of a state gives a perspective that a set of directions in a phone or GPS lacks. We went out to see something of America, to not try to rush anywhere,
and to explore as deeply as possible the places we happened to choose.
Wherever you go, however long you stay on the road, you only see a
minuscule fraction of the country. For every road you take, there are
hundreds you do not. For every town you stop in, there are thousands you
drive past. For every park you choose to camp in, there are dozens you
didn't visit. If you pick a trail to hike or ride, the rest of the park remains unexplored. When you are in a town, if you pick an old diner for lunch, you didn't visit every other restaurant you might have chosen.
We ate out rarely, it was scarcely any harder to cook in the campsites than it is at home. The camper has a microwave/convection oven, a two burner stove, a small fridge and a sink. In addition, I have a Coleman stove to cook outside with and there are always grills available.
America has an amazing state park system. Every park we visited was a gem.
My next post is going to start in the middle of the trip, in the middle of the country. It was while we were exploring the nearby town on our first trip that I began paying attention to how much of America is still out there. It's going to start with a little place called "Mom and Pop's Burger Stop".
We have just returned from a two month, seven thousand mile, road trip across America.
We traveled on two lane roads as much as possible, avoiding interstates, and made a point of stopping and exploring small towns and cities along with the parks we were camping in. Our transportation was a mid-size pickup pulling an eighteen foot mini RV.
We stayed in state parks almost every place we stopped. Our routine was to travel no more than three hundred miles at a time and to stay at least two nights at every park. This gave us time to stop when something seemed interesting and a full day to unhook the camper and go exploring the local area.
We went looking and what we found was that America is still there.
This is the first in a series of posts on our adventure.
For any American who had the great and priceless privilege of being raised
in a small town there always remains with him nostalgic memories... And
the older he grows the more he senses what he owed to the simple honesty
and neighborliness, the integrity that he saw all around him in those
days.
