When you are young, the seasons turn like a pinwheel.
Seasons slow over time and become a paddlewheel in muddy water. As you grow old you try to hang onto something. The last flower from a garden. A John Prine song about summer’s end.
Or a place you may never see again.
On the steamy Fourth of July weekend, 2012, I visited the Tommy Bartlett Show in the Wisconsin Dells with my award-winning videographer Jon Sall. The homespun big top on water was celebrating its 60th anniversary and there was a reunion with a dozen Bartlett skiers from the 1950s and 60s.
Jon shares my eye for the simple beauties of Americana and this was something [...]
ELDON, Mo.—During the 1960s and 70s, tiny Eldon, Mo. was known as “Gateway to the Lake of the Ozarks.” Old U.S. 54 curved through town like a rainbow. The Randles Court and Coffee Shop greeted tourists at the north end of a bend in the road. Clear sailing ahead, ten minutes to the lake.
Loyd A. Boots built what was originally called the Boots Cottage Court in the early 1930s in Eldon. He was from Bagnell, Mo. In 1931 the 2,500-foot long Bagnell Dam was constructed, which created the lake. Boots had a foot up on tourism. There were no motels at the Lake of the Ozarks. (In 1939 his brother Arthur opened his Boots Motel on old Route 66 in Carthage, [...]
Ilse Dietsche, 2014
People are saying there are lessons to be learned from these hard times. Lines of communication have been refreshed and some things are no longer taken for granted.
On the evening of April 2, I sent a short e -mail to Ilse Dietsche. I had not done this in a long time. I wrote about Ilse for this website in September 2014 when she decided to drive Route 66 alone.
Ilse was 86 years old in 2014.
Her determination and wonder became one of my all-time favorite travel stories.
I called her “The Grandma of the Mother Road.” I had Ilse and her daughter Christine on my [...]
Eugene Savage mural in Luau Lounge at Pier 39 (D. Hoekstra photo)
SAN FRANCISCO—The Bay Area is a great port for tiki bars.
There will always be a place in my heart for the Tonga Room, a rainy tiki paradise in the basement of the Fairmont Hotel that Anthony Bourdain called “the greatest place in the history of the world;” the newer but tragically hip Smuggler’s Cove in San Francisco and Trader Vic’s in Emeryville, Ca.
Last week I visited the Bay Area to see the Oakland Raiders before they relocate to Las Vegas next season. (I doubt they will play the low rider music of War during game breaks). [...]
