Thursday Updates &c.

Cerulean days. Thursday dusk on the deck.

It’s come to my attention that Jim Varney did occasionally perform live with Gonzo Theatre. At least, the Tennessean posted an image of him doing stand-up at the Municipal Auditorium in downtown Nashville on November 14, 1982, describing him as a member of the troupe. So maybe he was sometimes; but not specifically on the night we went, and he isn’t in the publicity shot I have in my possession. A Tennessean article about Gonzo Theatre from the year before doesn’t mention him either.

Argh, we could have seen Varney live but, being ignorant young’uns, we didn’t know about the show. Bet he was a hoot and a half.

We were out and about the evening NBC broadcast the Olympic Parade of Nations nearly two weeks ago, so we didn’t see that. Since then, I haven’t felt much like following the Games. But occasionally I look at the medal counts. I see that the UK has 57 and France 56 thus far. Is that the count that the French really care about? No hope to best China or the U.S. (or even Australia), but maybe they’ll top the limeys.

What do the French call the British when they’re in a derogatory mood, anyway? One source says rostbifs.

I also checked the nations that so far have a single bronze. They are:

Including one for the Refugee Olympic Team. How about that.

“Boxer Cindy Ngamba became the first-ever Refugee Olympic Team athlete to win a medal this week, giving the team its first piece of hardware since its creation nearly a decade ago,” NPR reports.

“Ngamba was born in the Central African country of Cameroon and moved to Bolton, England, at age 11, according to her official biography. She took up soccer at a local youth club, where she discovered boxing by chance at age 15.

Ngamba, who is gay, cannot return to Cameroon, where same-sex sexual relations are punishable by up to five years in prison… Ngamba qualified for the Refugee Olympic Team earlier this year, becoming the first boxer to do so.”

Good for her. Hope she gets to stay in the UK.

Gonzovision ’82

It’s entirely possible that this is the only place this photograph is posted anywhere. Considering the imponderable size of all the servers everywhere, that would be something. But also completely trivial, since there’s no end of physical images tucked away collecting dust.Gonzo Theater - Gonzovision Nashville 1982

I’ve had this physical print in my possession for more than 40 years. How exactly I got it in the first place, I don’t remember. It looks like a publicity shot, with the white border trimmed out for scanning, though nothing was printed there to indicate who they are, which seems like a serious lapse. Maybe that cost extra, or they couldn’t agree on a name yet.

But I know them (mostly). The five people were the members of a short-lived comedy troupe in Nashville, Gonzo Theatre.

One reference to the troupe online I’ve found is at a page on Newspapers.com depicting the July 18, 1982 Daily News-Journal of Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

The entirety of the text: NASHVILLE July 23, 31 “Gonzovision” will be presented by the writers of Gonzo Theatre every weekend at The Cannery, 811 Palmer Place.

The troupe name was Gonzo Theatre and the show was called Gonzovision. On the back of the photo, someone else wrote Gonzovision, and I added 1982.

On July 23 that year – very likely, since on the 31st I was caving in rural Tennessee – I went with some of my friends to The Cannery to see Gonzovision (the venue is still around as Cannery Hall). I remember being entertained, but otherwise not much else about the show. At one point, one of the troupe pretended to be Bob Dylan, another pretended to be Ethel Merman, and they did a duet. That was funny.

Also, there was a well-known local politico in the audience, who was red-nose drunk at the time, and the troupe spent some time making fun of him. I wish I could remember who that was, and what they said, but my notes are silent on the matter. Even 20 years ago, I couldn’t remember much more about the skits.

All this brings to mind Jim Varney. Not because he was a member of the troupe at that moment – he had better, and far more remunerative things to do at that time. Rather, some of the members of Gonzo Theatre would soon be in the very first Ernest movie, Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam, a flick that took a bit of my money and about an hour and a half of my time for little in return.

Lee Johnson is at top left of the photo. He’s no doubt the reason we knew about the show at all, since we were tight with his younger brother Mike. Mac Bennett, whose career in movies was very brief, is top right. Sometime later, I heard him recite from memory, at a party and with great verve, a translation of Baudelaire’s “Get Drunk.”

Jackie Welch is bottom left. These days she’s “a professional life coach and president of Visions Manifest Coaching Services,” according to imdb, but whose web site doesn’t exist anymore. She has had a minor career in the movies – including a couple of other Ernest movies, Ernest Goes to Jail and Ernest Scared Stupid, and the short-lived TV show, Hey, Vern, It’s Ernest. Too bad Varney died when he did (2000) or she might have been in such epics as Ernest Goes to War, Ernest Rockets to Mars and Ernest and the Zombie Apocalypse, which surely would have been made in the 2010s.

I can’t remember the name of fellow in the lower center, who looks to be the head of the troupe, but I do know that to the right of him was Daniel Butler, who was also in Ernest movies, but is better known (relatively speaking) for a thing called America’s Dumbest Criminals. Again, too bad Varney’s career was cut short: Butler could have been his counterpart in My Dinner With Ernest.

Pretty Sure It Will Be Dry February As Well

Not only are we rid of January today, it was the most pleasant weather I can ever remember on a February 1 in northern Illinois: sun out sometimes, temps touching about 50 F.

YouTube algorithms are getting better at their game. Or so it seems. Today they suggested a Mexican ska band, Mexican Nutty Stompers, who have just released an album. The song, “Souvenir.” I was the 83rd listener.

Never mind the delight in finding Mexican ska when you didn’t such a thing existed, whoever the lead singer is, she’s got some voice. I might look into finding out her name, but for now the voice is more than enough.

A snippet from a press release that came a few weeks ago:

Embrace the spirit of Dry January with Hotel ZaZa Memorial City. Dine in at Hotel ZAZA’s Tipping Point Restaurant and Terrace and indulge in exclusive mocktail specials, crafted to make your taste buds dance without the spirits. Throughout the month of January, enjoy a selection of zero-proof concoctions, each priced at just $8.

Closer to my wheelhouse, but not quite in it. Still, I learned a couple of things from the release. One, Hotel ZaZa Memorial City is in Houston. Zaza is a collection of boutique hotels in Texas, in fact, with locations in Austin and Dallas too. I wasn’t familiar with the brand, but it looks posh all right. Also, this is the essence of the luxury hotel business: serving drinks at what would be a very reasonable price, if they contained any alcohol.

Dry January. I had to look around for more information on that, and it turned out to be a thing. Not sure if it’s just a thing of the chattering classes, or has stronger purchase on the steep slopes of American culture, but anyway you can find mainstream articles about it. Never heard of any of that. I’m late to the party, as usual. Or the non-party, considering no alcohol is served. As we all know, alcohol is essential to any fun party. That’s true in song and story.

The concept is simple enough to be a thing: Dry January just means not drinking alcohol during January, presumably timed to come after personal bacchanals in December. The hotel is using the concept to sell mocktails, but people do seem to use the idea to improve their lives. Good for them. I found it a little hard to imagine, though. Every January is Dry January for me.

I did order, and drink, an Old Fashioned at the bar of the Nashville Italian restaurant where we had dinner on the last full night with my friends in November. We were waiting for a table, so we all sat at the bar, enjoying some lively conversation with each other.

We also spent a few minutes watching the bartender, a nattily dressed slip of an African-American young man, maybe 30, who seemed to be everywhere behind the bar doing everything all the time, but mostly assembling the various liquors for his cocktail creations. With an economy and grace to his movements that spoke of years of practice. He was an artist.

So I wanted to order something from him. But what? As I later explained to my friends, a little part of every man wants to be Don Draper, so the drink in front of me was my homage to the character, and a vehicle to provide a nice tip for the bartender.

A little more than 12 years before ordering the Old Fashioned in Nashville, I ordered one in Appleton, Wisconsin on a press trip because I recently heard of the drink on Mad Men and was curious.

But mixed drinks haven’t been how I’ve usually spent my money over the years. All those years later in Nashville, I nursed my Old Fashioned a while – I’m not a hard-drinking TV character, after all – and concluded that I hadn’t had a bar cocktail between those two times, only occasional beer and wine, most of which wasn’t at bars anyway. What’s the term for that? Not teetotaler. Quasi-totaler?

Pre-Thanksgiving Assortment

Regards for Thanksgiving, back to posting November 27 or so. In the meantime, eat, drink and be indolent.

I woke up this morning from some sort of dream, trying to remember these three kinds of to-dos: shindigs, hullabaloos and hootenannies. I’m pretty sure I could call Full Moon Bluegrass a hootenanny. Otherwise, my experience with them is thin. Also, I forgot about hoedowns. The unconscious is a funny place.

Gentle rain last night, and all through the early morning. I cracked the window very slightly to listen as I drifted off. Still raining when I went to the bathroom not long before dawn. Maybe that put me to mind of folk music parties.

A couple of recent flags, including one that I saw in full flutter after I entered Tennessee just north of Nashville.

A distinctive design. The three stars represent, of course, the Grand Divisions of Tennessee, a thing unique to the state. Distinct legal entities, but also acknowledging historical and cultural distinctions.

I remember when Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander joined Garrison Keillor on stage during the pre-broadcast warmup for A Prairie Home Companion when the show came to Nashville in 1985. The governor played a little on the piano – he was really good, as I recall – and bantered with Keillor.

When it came up that Alexander had grown up in East Tennessee, Keillor said, “You guys were on our side during the war, weren’t you?”

In Texas, I saw a Space Force flag on a pole. First time ever.

That arrowhead design looks suspiciously familiar. Can’t quite put my finger on it.

Heard some blatherskite on the radio recently about planning one’s “celebration of life.” There’s that absurd euphemism again, standing in for funeral. Apparently it’s caught on. I suspect that undertakers and their marketing people are behind this.

I insist that my survivors, if they want to have some kind of formal event to mark my shuffling off this mortal coil, call it a funeral. It doesn’t need to have any of the trappings of a conventional funeral here in North America, just the term.

That got me to thinking, “mortal coil”? Sure, it’s Shakespeare, Hamlet in particular, but why coil? First place to look: my copy of Onions, which I haven’t opened in entirely too long. That is, a volume called A Shakespeare Glossary by C.T. Onions. I have a revised edition published in 1986.

Coil, n.

1. Noisy disturbance, tumult. Comedy of Errors: What a coil is there, Dromio?

2. Fuss, ado. Much Ado About Nothing: yonder’s old coil at home. Hamlet: When we have shuffled off this mortal coil.

So a coil’s a noisy bit of business. An Elizabethan meaning worth bringing back, but I doubt that’s going to happen. Thus your mortal coil would be the fuss of being alive, of which there’s a fair amount, including sound and fury and signifying… a different play, one that I won’t name.

Centennial Park and the Vanderbilt Ramble

On Saturday the sun came up in Nashville and we weren’t there to greet it, having stuffed ourselves with hot chicken and beer the night before, and then engaged in conversation until fairly late. On the other other hand, we were there to see the sun set later that day from the roof deck.

Between those moments, we did a lot of walking. First we set out from our well-located short-term apartment along side streets past the site of our residence in the early ’80s, which was also the place we built an isolation tank for ourselves, then to Centennial Park, the crown jewel among Nashville parks.

On Saturday morning we merely crossed the park, where one of our number had been arrested for drinking beer in public 40-plus years ago, exiting it at the end (or beginning) of the short Elliston Place. We noted the buildings and businesses gone from that street – such as Rotier’s and its barbecue chicken without peer – and additions, none of any particular character.

The Elliston Place Soda Shop still serves tasty meat-and-threes, wonderful breakfasts, and incredible milkshakes, though in a larger location next door to its original site, where it reopened in 2021. The look is about right, a larger space but still a close homage to the original. The real test was the food, and the place passed with flying colors.

Then came the Vanderbilt Ramble: along sidewalks and across greens, past dorms and classrooms and other buildings, many tied to specific sets of memories: McGill Hall, Sarratt Student Center, the Main Library, Furman Hall, and 21st Avenue to the former Peabody Campus, where we noted that Oxford House had vanished, replaced by a parking garage still under construction; East Hall is still that and West Hall that; but Confederate Memorial Hall is merely Memorial Hall and the Social-Religious Building is named for some chancellor or other. Former Social-Religious has ten pillars out front, which to this day I believe stand for the Ten Commandments. On its expansive front steps, every day once upon a time, a blind student practiced his bagpipes. He wasn’t bad.

Further wanderings took us through Hillsboro Village, a storefront shopping district that existed 40+ years ago, though most of the shops are different these days. Returning to campus, we passed through the blocks of fraternity and sorority houses, once marked by regular streets, which are now pedestrian walkways. We had little to do with them in our student days, though one of us pledged ATO, which didn’t take. I noted the spot where I had a short springtime conversation with a tipsy future vodka billionaire. Indeed, besides going to the same junior high and high school as I did, he spent one year at VU.

The arboretum that is the Vanderbilt campus, including Peabody, was near peak coloration, a blaze of leaves in places. Many trees are enormous and stood well before anyone on campus today was born. The day was warm and campus alive with people, though never crowded anywhere. Students went about their weekend business, and paid no attention to the oldsters wandering by, with their collective recollections trailing behind them.

On Sunday afternoon, we spent more time in Centennial Park, legacy of a long-ago expo.Centennial Park

The temporary art building, a replica of the Parthenon, was rebuilt in the 1920s to be more permanent, and it abides. So does Athena inside.Centennial Park Centennial Park

She wears the world’s largest sandals, probably.Centennial Park

Though Steve and Rich had never seen her, Athena isn’t exactly new, having been completed by sculptor Alan LeQuire in 1990. I’ve visited a few times in the years since.

Much more recent (2016) is the Tennessee Women’s Suffrage Monument, also done by Alan LeQuire. None of us had seen it.Centennial Park Centennial Park

We visited a few other spots in the park, but forget to visit the new Taylor Swift Bench. Oops.

Friends

Drove from metro Nashville to metro Chicago yesterday, which takes pretty much all day, but remains doable for me. Also doable is a day in which I walk four or five miles. That wasn’t yesterday, but Saturday.

Old friends, the kind you’ve known for decades, exist if you’re inclined toward close friends in the first place — and further inclined to put some effort in keeping up. A lot of people drift away. I’m fortunate in that I have a dozen old friends at least, not including that handful who have died. This fall I saw most of them, in person, first in Austin and then Nashville, and including some in the Chicago area that I visited before my recent travels. I played a large part in organizing the meetings, because it’s a thing much desired.

Austin, October 22, 2023: Me, Catherine, Tom, Jae.

Nashville, November 4, 2023: Dan, Rich, me, Steve.

I’ve known the six individuals in the pictures who are not me a total 231 years, and while I haven’t been in contact with every one of them each one of those years, the continuity is there.

After returning from Texas a week ago on Sunday, I left for Nashville last Thursday. The trip had been quite a while in planning. It’s about 500 miles, so a serious commitment of driving time. I left early in the afternoon and drove not quite all that way, but rather far enough to overnight in Cave City, Kentucky, at Wigwam Village No. 2, a preserved tourist court with a faux teepee theme.

The next morning I drove to Nashville and had lunch at the home of Stephanie and her husband Wendall; I’ve known her since 1986. Later, Dan arrived from his home in Alabama, and early that evening, Dan and I picked up Rich and Steve, who had flown in from Massachusetts. We began our visit at a Nashville hot chicken joint that didn’t exist in our student days 40+ years ago.

From Friday evening to Monday morning, we hung out, conversing and laughing and playing cards and listening to music and eating and drinking and walking and driving around the city from our short-term rental apartment near the Vanderbilt campus. For much of Saturday, another old VU friend of ours, Margaret, a Tennessee resident originally from Kentucky, joined us with her husband Dave, as we walked around Vanderbilt, and then had dinner at a Korean storefront – another thing Nashville didn’t have all those decades ago. Among many pleasurable walks I’ve ever taken, this was one of the best.

Late Sunday morning, the four of us visited the grave of our mutual friend Mike, and spent much of the rest of the day in Nashville’s Centennial Park, including the inside of the Parthenon, which neither Rich nor Steve had seen since the monumental statue of Athena had been put in. Dinner at an Italian restaurant capped things off. Dan returned home Sunday night and I took Rich and Steve to the airport Monday morning, after which I drove the 500 miles home, stopping a little while in Louisville.

A complete carpi diem sort of weekend. We had a gas.

Das Volkswagen

RIP, Marianne Savalli Vanness. I knew her at Vanderbilt during my senior year, when we both worked on the student newspaper, the Vanderbilt Hustler, and had a number of friends in common.

I hadn’t seen her or had any contact with her since 1983, except for a nominal link on Facebook, but her obituary isn’t exaggerating about “her warm and generous spirit and her love of laughter.” We weren’t close, but I knew her well enough to know that was true even then.

Not mentioned in the obit, because why would it be – she played a part in the movie Das Volkswagen. Forty years ago, on April 21, 1983, I attended the world premiere of Das Volkswagen, in fact its only screening in front of an audience that I know of. For the film class that I took at the time.

During my last semester at Vanderbilt, one of my easy classes was Film. We watched movies (Bonnie and Clyde, Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Meshes of the Afternoon, among a number of others) and wrote papers about them. Also, in groups of three, we were lent 8mm cameras and made three different movies throughout the semester, which were then shown to the class.

By definition, they were collegiate efforts, some better than others. Our first assignment was to make a silent movie with a certain number of shots, not very many. I partnered with my friends Dan and Steve, who were also in the class, to make The Going Away Party. In it, Dan’s character has taken a bath; he puts on a towel and emerges from the bathroom, only to find a party in progress that he clearly hadn’t known about. A girl in a frilly black blouse and black slacks, wearing the kind of fancy black mask you might see at a masque, immediately pays attention to Dan, including stroking his newly shaved face. Through emphatic gestures, Dan tells her to stay right there; he’ll get dressed in the bathroom, and be right back. So in the bathroom, door closed, Dan hastily dresses, opens the door and finds – nothing. The party is gone.

The inspiration had been, and more than one person noticed this, “Splish Splash,” the Bobby Darin song. It was a fun little movie. We had filmed the party sequences during an actual party one Saturday evening at our rented house, the fondly remembered 207 31st St. N. in Nashville, where we threw a half-dozen parties at least, including the Lonely Existential Blender Blues Party (it’s good, I think, to have a few named parties in one’s past).

The girl in black, who wasn’t in our film class, was a frequent attendee at our parties, and rumored to be a bondage enthusiast, something I did not confirm one way or the other. She hammed up her part just right, though.

I made another movie with a couple of underclassmen I didn’t know that well, and it was forgettable. For the third and final movie of the class, a sound movie – it might have even counted as the final exam – I partnered with Steve again, and a girl in the class who didn’t actually want to help much in making a movie. But Steve and I didn’t mind, since we knew what we wanted to make: a parody of Das Boot, which had been screened at the Vanderbilt Cinema not long before.

That was possible because Steve drove a Volkswagen. So we made Das Volkswagen, the story of a crowded small car out on a vaguely defined mission on the dangerous-for-some-reason streets of Nashville. To make it more submarine-like, I made a periscope from a empty paper towel roll and a couple of empty toilet paper rolls, taped together.

Like Das Boot, our movie kicked off with loading the crew into the car, including jamming (by simple trick photography) an impossible number of items (suitcases, skis, etc.) in the front trunk. We filmed that scene at our rundown driveway at 207 31st St. N.

Steve was the driver. I sat in the front passenger seat, operating the camera most of the time as we drove along. Crammed in the back were variously three or four people we’d recruited with the promise of lunch, one of whom was Marianne Savalli. I filmed their antics sometimes as well.

During post-production, we added the voice of another friend of ours, who did a decent comic German accent, as a narrator. I don’t remember exactly what he said during the scene loading the crew, but something like, “It vas a virgin crew, and exzitement vas high.” Periodically through the movie, he narratived further, and he added some actual German, including some obscenities, and told us (off microphone) that “Der Volkswagen,” not Das, was grammatically correct. Our answer to that: who cares?

We had the sound library of student radio station WRVU available for the production, and so added music and sound effects. We used part of “The Imperial March,” (Darth Vader’s Theme) for the movie’s opening, because it was ominous-sounding, and we also used the immortal song “Da Da Da” for one or two of the driving scenes. Because it was German rock ‘n’ roll whose lyricism transcends mere language, I guess.

After loading Das Volkswagen on the driveway, we filmed driving around a few streets and making odd faces with odd sound effects thrown in. Sometimes I’d pass the camera to the back seat, and one of them would film me pretending to look through the periscope. Then came my big moment: I turned from the periscope to the back seat, and announced to the camera with a demented face, “Das McDonald’s!” The crew responded enthusiastically.

I then filmed the car inside and outside as it went through a McDonald’s drive-through and got the lunch we’d promised for everyone. Which we ate as part of the movie.

Afterward, we returned to the streets, but soon Das Volkswagen crashed into another car and, presumably, all hands were lost. Of course, it was a simulated accident. When we approached cars stopped at a light, I zoomed the lens toward the car ahead of us, as quickly as I could; then cut to black. Later, we added the sound effect of a comic car crash, something you might hear in a cartoon, with tires screeching, breaking glass and the sound of one of the hubcaps rolling away. The End. Or rather, Das Ende.

It all sounds juvenile. And it was. But damned if it wasn’t funny. April 21 came around, and we showed it to the class, who laughed hardily at most of the gags. Among my in-class moments at college, it was a high point. Even the professor laughed. We got an A.

Uncle Walt’s Band, 1982

Nearly two years ago, media distribution company Orchard Enterprises provided 21 songs to YouTube, cuts on a collection called Uncle Walt’s Band Anthology. Subtitled — and it really captures the essence of that band — “Those Boys From Carolina, They Sure Enough Could Sing…”

Sure enough. The three-man band, Walter Hyatt, Champ Hood and David Ball, all originally from Spartanburg, SC, existed for a few years in the early 1970s and again in the late ’70s and early ’80s. They produced four original albums, did solo work, and played with a good number of other musicians in Austin and Nashville over the years. Those few reviews one can find about Uncle Walt’s Band tend to characterize them as Americana, and I supposed they were — a mix of American styles by South Carolina musicians who honed their skills in Nashville and Austin both.

Though fondly remembered by a few, especially other musicians, wider fame eluded Uncle Walt’s Band. I already knew that, but the point is hammered home by looking at the view count for some of their wonderful songs on Anthology — such as the fun “Seat of Logic” (only 533 views after two years, not 533,000 as by rights it ought to be); the winsome “Ruby” (only 569 views); and the sweetly melancholic “High Hill” (only 344 views); and on and on.

Forty years ago this evening I had the exceptionally good fortune of seeing Uncle Walt’s Band live in Nashville. “Crystalline sound,” I wrote in the diary I kept at the time, along with other unhelpful scraps when it comes to remembering it now. Still, the show was some of the best live music I saw in college, or ever really. A less fanciful way to characterize the gentlemen who played for us that evening would be near-perfect three-voice close harmony, with guitar, fiddle and bass.

I had taken a month-long trip not long before that evening, returning to Nashville less than a week earlier, with plans to attend summer school, but not take it all that seriously. That is exactly what I did and I don’t regret a moment of it. While I was away, my friend Dan had obtained the records Uncle Walt’s Band (a renaming and reissue of the 1974 Blame It On The Bossanova) and An American in Texas (1980, the same year the band appeared on Austin City Limits).

To put it in music biz terms, those records were in heavy rotation around the house where Dan and Rich lived, and where Mike, Steve and I were constant visitors that summer. As soon as I returned to Nashville, I heard it too. Then we got wind of the fact that Uncle Walt’s Band was playing live on Saturday the 12th at a place called The Sutler. We couldn’t believe our luck, and we weren’t about to miss that.

At time I called The Sutler “a tavern next to a bowling alley, a bakery and a restaurant,” which it was, though I didn’t record its address on 8th Ave. South in the Melrose neighborhood. That was further than we usually went, though (I know now), not that far from campus. Dive might not quite have been the word for the place, but it certainly wasn’t posh, and while I’m pretty sure I went there a few times in later years, I only remember seeing UWB there, and the joint’s last iteration closed only this year. It was standing room only for a while, but eventually we got a table. We stayed for the whole show. My mind’s eye can visualize it even now, and my mind’s ear can hear a crystalline echo of their sound.

UWB broke up for the last time the year after we saw them, but their musical presence that summer made an impression on me. Enough that in the late ’80s, when I was visiting Austin, I noticed a small poster somewhere advertising a show by Walter Hyatt at the famed Waterloo Ice House on on Congress Ave. We have to go to that, I told Tom Jones, whom I was visiting, and so we did.

During one of the breaks in that show, I asked Hyatt where I could buy copies of the two records that I remembered so fondly from the summer of ’82 — I think I even mentioned the show at The Sutler — since finding obscure music was more of a chore in those days. He gave me an address to send a check to, and soon after I did, I received an audio cassette of Uncle Walt’s Band and An American in Texas, which I listened to periodically over the years and own to this day.

Forty years is a long time, and time has taken its toll. Walter Hyatt died in the ValuJet Flight 592 crash in 1996 and Champ Hood died of cancer in 2001. David Ball has had a successful career as a country musician and is now pushing 70.

One more thing: I didn’t realize until the other day that the subtitle, “Those Boys From Carolina…” was no random pick. Lyle Lovett, Texan of distinct hair and winning ways with song, mentioned UWB in a song he recorded long after the band was gone, but before Walter Hyatt died, the amusing “That’s Right, You’re Not From Texas.”

Those boys from Carolina,
They sure enough could sing.
But when they came on down to Texas,
We all showed them how to swing.

Southern Loop ’21 Scraps

Near-summer weather to a tee visited northern Illinois over the weekend — next week will be chillier, I read — with cloud puffs ambling along the completely pleasant warm air, except maybe for persistent strong gusts of wind, a mild sirocco. Those gusts didn’t keep us from walking the dog or me from idling on our deck, reading or resting my eyeballs, but they did put the kibosh on taking any meals as a family out there.

My stop in New Madrid, Missouri, on April 10 was brief, but long enough to get a look at the handsome county courthouse.

New Madrid County Courthouse

“Cornerstone ceremonies were July 4, 1915, for the Classical Greek Revival style building of white sandstone and porcelain brick with a copper box laid in the northeast corner containing copies of all New Madrid County and St. Louis newspapers and carefully prepared historical events, including the names of the citizens who contributed the $20,000, names of all county officers, etc.,” says the courthouse web site. Sounds like a dull time capsule, but never mind.

“Additional funds for finishing the courthouse and jail were authorized early in 1917, but no bids were received… Finally, W. W. Taylor, a master builder from Cape Girardeau, superintended final interior work, which included marble stairways with cast iron railings and a large rotunda with a stained glass window in the ceiling that was completed in January 1919.”

Closed on Sunday. Maybe closed for the pandemic, anyway, so the marble and stained glass and more weren’t visible to me. Hope the courthouse was built to resist seismic events (as much as possible 100 years ago), or refit in more recent years.

A survey marker at Fort Pillow State Historic Site, Tennessee. Always interesting to run across one.

A view of the Mississippi at Fort Pillow.
Fort Pillow

A retail scene from Clarksdale, Mississippi. Something Amazon cannot replace.
Clarksdale Mississippi
Despite the glowing neon, the shop — called Cat Head — wasn’t open on a Sunday morning.

Keep the Blues Alive

A scene from rural Mississippi, where perhaps the landowner recognizes no political authority.
Jolly Roger Mississippi

Even in small-town Mississippi, you’ll see these.
Vicksburg scooter

The American Rose Center is a 118-acre wooded spot just west of Shreveport, and home to the national headquarters of the American Rose Society.
American Rose Center

I was a few weeks too early. A few roses were in bloom, but not many. Mostly still buds, and a lot of them. Even so, lovely grounds.American Rose Center

American Rose Center
Including a Japanese-style pavilion.

American Rose Center

American Rose Center
As I said, a few blooms.

American Rose Center

American Rose Center
You don’t have to go all the way to Corsicana, Texas, to buy a fruitcake at the Collins Street Bakery. There’s a store just off I-20 in Lindale, Texas, with a cafe and a towering sign. I stopped and bought a big fruitcake, which is mostly gone now, eaten a bit at a time by me, Jay, Yuriko and Ann.Collins Street Bakery Lindale

Collins Street Bakery Lindale

In Grand Saline, Texas, a town that salt built, is a structure called the Salt Palace Museum and Visitors Center, which is on Main Street.

Salt Palace Museum and Visitors Center
Palace it is not, though it is built partly of salt, and there’s a big block of salt to examine out front.

Salt Palace Museum and Visitors Center

When in Paris, Texas, what does one naturally go to see? The Paris, Texas, Eiffel Tower, of course. Despite the rain.
Paris Texas Eiffel Tower

Less well known is a memorial to the Paris Tornado of 1982. It killed 10 people, injured many more, and did a lot of property damage.Paris Tornado 1982 Memorial

It’s in the same park as this sad-looking memorial.
Bywaters Park Memorial

That’s the Bywaters Park Memorial, with a plaque that says: In grateful memory of J.K. Bywaters, who gave this park to the people of the city he loved so well. 1916.

In Fort Smith, Arkansas, I spotted this mural.
First National Bank Fort Smith Brain mural

Which is on the backside of this building — First National Bank — next to the bank’s drive-through lanes.
First National Bank Fort Smith Brain mural

In Bella Vista, Arkansas, which is in the extreme northwest part of the state just south of the Missouri line, is the Mildred B. Cooper Memorial Chapel, a structure dating from 1988, designed by designed by E. Fay Jones and Maurice Jennings. Jones is best known for the Thorncrown Chapel, also in Arkansas.

Mildred Cooper Chapel
Sure, the sign said an event was in progress. A wedding, of course, since my visit was on a Saturday. But I saw people clearly dressed for a wedding pouring into the parking lot as I arrived, so I figured I might have caught the place between weddings.

No. People were still inside, with some kind of event going on, so I figure as soon as one wedding ceremony is over on a warm spring Saturday at Mildred B. Cooper, another gets underway. I took a good look at the exterior, anyway. Understated elegance.
Mildred Cooper Chapel

In Collinsville, Illinois, you can see the “world’s largest catsup bottle.”

Collinsville catsup bottle

Collinsville catsup bottle

It has its own fan club and web site.

“This unique 170 ft. tall water tower was built in 1949 by the W.E. Caldwell Company for the G.S. Suppiger catsup bottling plant — bottlers of Brooks old original rich & tangy catsup,” the site says.

Philistines almost had it torn down. “In 1995, due to the efforts of the Catsup Bottle Preservation Group, this landmark roadside attraction was saved from demolition and beautifully restored to its original appearance,” the site continues.

The Pink Elephant Antique Mall in Livingston, Illinois, not far northeast of St. Louis, has a big pink elephant in front, as I’ve posted. But that’s not all. Not by a long shot.

This is the mall — a complex of buildings stuffed with antiques, collectibles and other junk. There’s a diner, too.
Pink Elephant Antique Mall

I didn’t inspect them closely, but I take the statues out front to be made of fiberglass (maybe cast in Wisconsin).

Pink Elephant Antique Mall

Pink Elephant Antique Mall

Pink Elephant Antique Mall

A sign under that fellow wearing the MAGA hat — now, what was his name again? — said NOT A POLITICAL STATEMENT. LOVE HIM OR HATE HIM.

Finally, the grounds included something I’ve long wanted to see, but never had gotten around to, a Futuro House.Pink Elephant Antique Mall

The windows, some completely open, were at about eye level for me. Ever wonder what’s in a Futuro House?
Pink Elephant Antique Mall
Not much, at least this one.

West Tennessee Dash

On April 10, after leaving Illinois via a white-knuckle, two-lane bridge across the Mississippi into the state of Missouri, I headed south to catch the ferry back across the river at Hickman, Kentucky (green arrow). The point of this exercise was to continue from Hickman on small roads to the Kentucky Bend, marked here with a pink arrow.

There’s nothing distinctive about the Kentucky Bend except its odd status as an exclave of the commonwealth of Kentucky. I’d planned to snap a picture of whatever sign was at the Tennessee-Kentucky border at that point, and maybe visit the small cemetery just inside the bend.

It wasn’t to be. When I got to the ferry, the Mississippi looked a mite testy, swollen from the storms the night before, and probably other spring rains. A phone call confirmed that the ferry wasn’t running.Hickman Ferry

Without the ferry crossing, visiting the Kentucky Bend would have meant considerable backtracking, so I blew it off, and continued southward in Missouri. I got a glimpse of the bend from the riverfront at New Madrid, but I didn’t linger because I needed to find a bathroom.

Later I crossed into Tennessee on I-155 and soon connected with U.S. 51, which goes straight into Memphis. Despite the years I lived in Tennessee once upon a time, it was a part of the state I’d never seen, except for Memphis itself.

I didn’t quite make the straight shot into the city. Not far from U.S. 51 is Fort Pillow State Historic Park, site of the Battle of Fort Pillow, also known as the Fort Pillow Massacre, on bluffs overlooking the Mississippi. It’s been a state park for 50 years now. The day was as brilliant and warm as a spring day could be by that time, a contrast from the cool rain and less lush conditions further north.

Fort Pillow State Historic Park

I only spent a little while at the museum and visitor center, but got the impression that the bloody history of Fort Pillow isn’t emphasized. Be that as it may, I was keen to see whatever was left of the fort, or what had been rebuilt. Signs pointed the way.
Fort Pillow State Historic Park
An longer interpretive sign at this clearing said Nathan Bedford Forrest set up his command there.
Fort Pillow State Historic Park
On the trail went.Fort Pillow State Historic Park Fort Pillow State Historic Park Fort Pillow State Historic Park

It would have been nice had the FORT –> signs said how far was left to go. Also, I couldn’t quite follow the track I was taking, as compared to the map I acquired at the visitors center, which was a little unusual. Anyway, I climbed another couple of rises and came to a spot where I could just barely see the river.
Fort Pillow State Historic Park

I figured surely there must be earthworks or something at such a high point, but I didn’t see anything. Then I noticed another FORT –> sign pointing me down another staircase. That meant I’d have to go up again somewhere, because forts aren’t built in lower places. Then to return, I’d have go down and then up again. I didn’t have the energy for all that, I decided, so I made my way back. Still, I had a good walk. By the end of the day, I’d walked about two and a half miles.

Besides, I wanted to get to Memphis. When I arrived about an hour later, I found a spot in Mud Island Park with a view of the skyline.
Where the hell is Memphis?

The Hernando de Soto Bridge. More bridges ought to be named after explorers.Where the hell is Memphis?

Back on the mainland, I found the Memphis Pyramid. It wasn’t hard to spot.
Memphis Pyramid

Or more formally, Bass Pro Shops at the Pyramid.
Memphis Pyramid
Taller than the Pyramid of the Sun in Mexico, according to this source, but somehow that ancient Mesoamerican structure has much more of a presence. The Memphis Pyramid has been standing for 30 years now, and seems to be making it as a retail store, after failing as a municipal arena.
Memphis Pyramid

The blue-lit structure is an elevator to a view from the top of the pyramid.
Memphis Pyramid

Probably worth the price, but the line was long, so I headed for the exit. But I couldn’t leave without buying something to support the Memphis Pyramid, so I bought a box of Moon Pies.