The Urge to be Someplace Else

Recently I was driving along the empty rolling hills and mountains of rural southwest Pennsylvania when I saw a sign and an arrow:

“Johnstown Flood Memorial,” the sign said.

I know about the flood, having interviewed an actual survivor of it back in the 70s.  And I of course knew it happened in Johnstown, but that city was still several miles down the road from where I was.

So why put a memorial to the flood out here in the middle of nowhere, I thought.

When I arrived at the memorial and got out of the car I remembered why.  The small visitors center overlooked a large green valley.

The valley used to be full of water, a reservoir created when the South Fork Dam was built on the Little Conemaugh River in the 1800s.   Constructed as part of a cross-state canal system, the lake and its dam later became the property and playground of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, an exclusive and private mountain lake retreat whose membership grew to include more than 50 wealthy Pittsburgh steel, coal, and railroad industrialists.

At 3:15 pm on May 31, 1889, the earthen dam collapsed.  In minutes the valley was empty of water and in less than an hour, after scouring small settlements along the river to bare rock, a massive wall of water slammed into the heart of Johnstown, 14 miles downstream, killing 2,209 people.

Interestingly, Johnstown’s recovery from this disaster was the first major relief effort for the fledgling American Red Cross and the work was led by founder Clara Barton herself.  She would spend five months there.

I recall my interview with a female flood survivor back in 1978, one of few still alive then.  She was in her early 90s, putting her at about toddler age when the flood hit.

Unfortunately for me, her memories were less than vivid and devoid of the kind of detail I needed to make it a good first person survivor tale.  The story made the paper, barely, the woman’s sparse recollections padded with lots of history.

Just as I am padding out this post with some old photos, below.

I have been taking photos of repurposed gas stations and posting them here since about 2013.

My favorite remains the first one that caught my eye and got me started: Goobers Laundromat in Lucedale, Mississippi.

As a structure, it’s not much, sort of ramshackle and lacking the classic lines of most of the the old gas stations I’ve encountered since.

But as a concept, particularly the name and the use of the former pump island as a raised planting area, it grabbed me, hard.

Since then I have photographed hundreds of recycled, empty and falling apart gas stations all over the U.S. and even internationally, if you count a three-day jaunt across a lower bit of Canada and a two-week trip to Ethiopia.

The major reuse of old stations is definitely for auto repair shops and used car lots. Those are so common I don’t even bother photographing them any more, unless there is something really unique about the building.

A popular runnerup seems to be as pizza restaurants and I titled this post Pizza Pizza in honor of these two I found recently in Charlotte, NC.  Both of them make good use of the old overhangs as outdoor seating areas.

And just in case the title of this post is ringing a bell and you can’t figure out why, here it is: Pizza! Pizza!, said quickly with the words run together, was a long-running advertising slogan for the Little Caesars pizza chain.

That catchphrase, coined in 1979, twenty years after the company was founded, was meant to convey that the price for one of its competitors’ pies would buy you two pizzas at Little Caesars. And they came in that unwieldy, long, two-pizza box inside a long paper bag.

Have you noticed, by the way, that the Caesar character in the chain’s advertising has lost his chest hair? And that the design on his togo now contains the letters L and C instead of being just a random pattern?

Then

Now

And as long as we’re knee-deep in the trivia weeds, I should note that the chain cannot use its Pizza! Pizza! catchphrase in Canada. A company there, Pizza Pizza, founded in 1967, years before Caesars thought that up, objected.

So in our neighbor to the north, the company uses “Two Pizzas!” along with “Delivery! Delivery!”, “Quality! Quality!” or other such double-word tag lines.

Other former gas stations selling pizzas and the rest of my finds from my recent jaunt through Georgia, the Carolinas, the Virginias and Pennyslvania are here.

And no pizza post would be complete without me confessing that I do love pizza and always have.  So much so that back when I started calling my daughter Jennifer Juice because of her love of apple juice I became known as Papa Pizza.

Three-quarters of a century! I feel like an elephant!

I’ve never paid a whole lot of attention to my birthdays. Or anyone’s for that matter.
Usually when asked how old I am I have to do the math.

And when the birth year is 1944 that is a little tricky, especially after we passed the year 1999. And I was never good at math.

For some reason responding to the age question got easier when I hit 70. I guess maybe I started paying a bit more attention to it all. As in, “Well, that’s the last time I’ll have to get the house painted!”

Now when asked I just have to recall if it’s an odd year or an even one, and if we’re beyond March 22:  Bingo! I can quickly come up with the right answer.

Anyway, this turning 75 thing is apparently a milestone. I sort of knew something was going on when about four days before my birthday an inch-high stack of birthday cards arrived in the mailbox. That’s about how many I normally get over a ten-year period.

When the same thing happened the next day I asked Sue: “Did you by any chance launch a birthday card campaign this year?”

Indeed she had, and it was very effective. I even got a card from a relative who doesn’t walk yet, much less read or write. I wonder how she managed to get hold of a stamp….

So thanks all. It’s been fun.

And if you’re expecting some wisdom about your cosmic queries from atop this major milestone, don’t hold your breath.

I don’t even ask those questions of myself, much less try to answer them. Because whenever I’ve tried, my mind shorts out and all I want to do is take a nap.

Every once in a while I run across a recycled gas station that really impresses me.  This little gem in West Palm Beach, Florida, is a perfectly maintained, classic two-bay station, complete with two outside-access bathrooms.

Go here to see my entire collection of repurposed gas stations.

Some of you may know that 50 years ago I lived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

I inhabited a nice, ground-floor apartment in the middle of the old commercial heart of the city and lived there happily for two years, thriving on the teeming city life around me, the friends I had in town and my job at Haile Selassie University.

I visited Addis Ababa last November for the first time since then.

The three-story apartment building I used to live in is still standing, so far at least spared from the demolition of most of its nearby neighbors for the building of a park.

The bottom floor, where my apartment was,  has become a beer store.  Appropriate I guess, given the amount of beer consumed there during my tenure.

To read about my visit to Ethiopia with my daughter Jennifer and look at the photos, go here.

Around my old neighborhood in the Piazza area. This is the liquor store that now occupies what used to be my ground-floor apartment.

Around my old neighborhood in the Piazza area. Here I am, standing in front of the beer store that is now where my kitchen and living room used to be in this 3-story apartment building.

Around my old neighborhood in the Piazza area. Another view of my apartment building. House to the left of it, where the laundry is hanging, was the landlady’s.

If you would like to see more photos from my visit go here.

I really don’t have to travel to see wildlife in action.  This happened yesterday in my backyard.  (All photos by Ron Haines)

I found two more recycled gas stations down here in South Florida the other day on my drive up US 1 in West Palm Beach to go to the gym.

They’ve been under my nose for a long time, just waiting for me to realize what they are.

I am all set for my chess-playing grandchildren when they visit in February, thanks to

The Grands on their home field. (Photo by Ryan  Ford)

the creative and energetic woman who drew my name in the Haines Secret Santa pool this season.

What you are looking at below is a totally hand-made chess set fashioned from an assortment of nuts, bolts and other small items.

And that includes the board, which came home from the hardware store as a blank piece of square tile.

Who is this marvelous person, you ask? It’s Kristen Haines, wife of nephew Ben and daughter-in-law of brother Roger.

And, she says, she did it all with only ONE trip to Lowe’s! Now that’s organization and planning, that’s what that is.

I can hardly replace a light bulb without at least two trips.

Thanks, Kristen.

The term Mr. Big around my house is a reference to the very large, orange iguana that hangs out on the dock in the backyard.  That’s what we call him.

He’s the king of the dock.  Or was until a week or so ago.  Another Mr. Big entered the picture and apparently my dock isn’t big enough for two Mr. Bigs.

Sue saw the battle.  I wasn’t home.  Lots of tussling, someone hung off the edge of the dock over the water for a while and there appeared to be an injured leg.  One of them slunk off and the battle was over.

Fast forward to just the other day. The second one reappeared again.  There was a brief tussle and one of them went into the water.  It all happened before I got the camera out.

But later on, they were back both back and I was able to get the photo below.  Unfortunately, the interloper decided not to push things and soon left the yard.

But one of these days I hope to have a great video of an epic battle to share with you.

Cheap hotels can be a very mixed bag.  I usually try to find something on my road trips for under $40 a night and feel positively profligate if I spend more than $60.

That attitude has netted me some interesting extremes;  all the way from an old but clean and well-tended facility in Oklahoma that offered a coupon for a complete two-egg breakfast at a nearby restaurant in the morning to a scruffy establishment in Maine where the room temperature never got much above 60 in January and the morning pastries looked stale even through the cellophane.

I’m not sure I’ll ever top the Sands Motel in Grants, New Mexico, though.    It was Where Elvis Slept.  Maybe.

I got the Elvis suite, Room 123, complete with sign on the door, photos on the wall and a framed copy of the “Affidavit for Application for Marriage” to Priscilla Beaulieu screwed securely to the wall next to the mirror.

Yes, $35 a night plus tax got me the room that Elvis supposedly stayed in the night before he went to Vegas to marry Priscilla.

True, or just a good story?  I don’t know for sure, but it seems a stretch.  The motel doesn’t claim much.  No signs around, no yellowed newspaper clippings.  “You’ll have to check the records,” was the response when I asked if there was any proof.

Questions of the two local papers yielded me no responses at all, much less any substantiation.  The county historical society said it had no confirming documents. And an account of those times from Marty Lacker, a co-best man at the wedding, says that Elvis and his entourage stayed in Palm Springs the night before the wedding.

So another great story wobbling I’m afraid.

Grants, named after three brothers named Grant who garnered a contract to build a railroad through the area in the 1880s and built a work camp there, is not a stranger to celebrities.

Bob Hope, traveling through Cibola County by train, was stranded there by a snowstorm back in 1946.  One of the teachers at the high school convinced the comedian to put on a show for the students.

The Von Trapp family stayed in town in the late 1940s and sang at the local Catholic Church.

And Vivian Vance of I Love Lucy fame and her husband had a vacation cabin nearby.   She was from Albuquerque, just 80 miles away, and her brother lived in Grants.  Rumor had it she was going to retire there, but she never did.

On a more somber note, Liz Taylor’s husband Mike Todd was killed near Grants in a plane crash in 1958. His plane iced up during a thunderstorm in the mountains southwest of town.

Grants was also home to an airway beacon, a rotating white light sometimes with red and green signals atop a tall tower.  Next to the tower was a large concrete pad in the shape of an arrow.  Back in the early quaint days of airplane navigation there were some 1500 of these in the US, marking airway corridors for pilots to follow.

Meanwhile, if any of you Enquiring minds out there wants to dig into this Elvis story deeper, let me know what you find out.