On the Road Again, Chapter 3

Self-pinboying at the tiny Potter lanes. (Photo (c) Bonnie J. Schupp)

Bowling in Nebraska

is a small-town wonder

with a back-home feel

If you seek a one-word definition for the American Heartland, Nebraska should suffice. It’s big and red, and mostly flat expanses of farm fields. One of the first sights we encounter on Friday morning is a red barn wearing a huge sign that says, simply: TRUMP.

But it’s not all THAT bad. On our 2014 trip, we met warm, interesting people, meandering occasionally off Interstate 80 to find a hay-bale church in Arthur, a federal meat animal research center at Clay Center, a military vehicles museum in Lexington, a child-oriented science and technology museum in Aurora, a pony express station in Gothenburg, and an odd tribute to big American automobiles known as Carhenge.

This time, we are in more of a hurry and Nebraska is more than 400 miles wide. We overnight in Sidney, a community heavy in hotel rooms but light in entertainment. Still, I find a Nebraska tourism magazine and it includes a mention of our next attraction, in the town of Potter 18 miles west along U.S. Highway 30 paralleling the interstate.

Pinbusters Paradise

Potter is listed as having a population of about 350. It also has a tiny downtown just above the busy railroad tracks, and a bowling alley. Not just any bowling alley, though – it is reputed to be the only DUCKPINS alley west of the Mississippi.

Duckpins, for those unaware, was born in our native city of Baltimore more than a century ago… and it is a sport Bonnie and I enjoyed as kids. (She was a two-week champion on the televised children’s bowling show Pinbusters.) Many of the lanes have closed over the past two decades, with perhaps half a dozen surviving in the metro area. It features smaller pins, supposedly named for the way they flew up in the air like ducks when hit by the smallish, roughly six-pound ball. It is more difficult in scoring than with the bigger tenpins, but each frame allows for three balls being rolled rather than two.

We quickly find the building, but the upstairs bowling alley is closed – the door locked. There’s an adjacent flea market store, and the woman presiding over the counter calls a friend for advice on how we could check out the bowling alley. All it takes is the numbers for the door’s digital lock and, presto!, she leads us up a wide stairway – each step bearing an event in the history of Potter.

Then she leaves us, asking only that we turn off the lights and close the door when we’re done.

There’s just three lanes, and it’s the old style of manually resetting the pins and rolling the balls back along a double-sided chute. In the absence of a “pinboy” to do the work, it’s a self-service bowling alley.

 I take off my shoes, so as not to damage the restored wooden floor, and roll a ball down the middle lane. I put a spin on the ball, so it curves from right to left but misses the headpin – taking out some of the others. I run down the lane to remove “deadwood” pins, then run back and roll another ball. And another.

After I reset all 10 pins, Bonnie shoots a cellphone video as I try again. The ball hits a good spot, and the pins scatter with the instant whacking sound of the impact. I’m a child again. More than half a century of time is erased. 

On the wall is a printed history of duckpins, noting its birth and rise in popularity around Baltimore and bearing a photo of perhaps its most celebrated bowler holding a ball: Baltimore native Babe Ruth.

There’s an old dime-a-weigh scale, a jukebox, a record/tape/eight-track audio player with boxes of albums and tapes to choose from, and a couple of quarter-a-game pinball machines. So naturally I turn one on to give it a try – falling well short of the score needed to win a replay.

All that’s missing here, I think, is a tavern-style shuffleboard table. But there in a back room, behold! – a half-size table, with metal pucks and well-dusted with sawdust for slide action. And there’s a room full of long tables and chairs set up for Bingo.

Before leaving town early Saturday afternoon, we check in with the nice woman at the antiques and flea market, A Collective Gathering, and learn the row of buildings is owned by a nonprofit which aims to keep alive its businesses, including the store and bowling/community center, a café, and across the road a library/reading room building.

Potter may be a tiny town, but it's got spunk.

 

Next chapter: A Colorado weekend

On The Road Again, Chapter 2

 

The long and dusty road... in search of a peculiar tree. (Photos (c) Bonnie J. Schupp)

Search for Iowan oddities

makes for a swine time...

but the pig had the day off

On Thursday, we resumed our westward drive through Iowa and began engaging in a favorite highway pastime – searching for quirky places using the cellphone app of RoadsideAmerica.com.

And that brought us to the town of Newton, in quest of a celebrity pig.

Dawn Bleekman displays Joy's Wonder Woman costume.

The  pig’s name is Joy and, according to Roadside America, she has a starring role at the 1928-vintage Capitol II Theatre in the center of town. We were uncertain whether the movie house would be open on a Thursday afternoon, but decided to check it out. Unfortunately, no movie was showing and Joy was not at work – but the theater door was open, and in the lobby we met owner Dawn Bleeker who, with her husband, bought the bankrupt movie house in 2012.

Dawn has been pretty much obsessed with pigs since her childhood, and for about eight years has had Joy, an American mini-pig, as a pet. She and her husband even installed a ramp for Joy to climb into their bed to sleep with them. The pig is potty-trained, ringing a bell when she needs to go outside. And they go everywhere together, even to work. And that’s how Joy became an attraction for patrons at the Capitol, as she wandered around during shows in search of dropped popcorn.

Predictably, a movie-plot-style crisis ensued as government bureaucracy took action in the name of health and public safety. Pigs were not allowed in movie theaters. Pigs were not allowed in establishments where food (as in popcorn and candy) was being sold. But the Bleekers got a law changed on pigs as pets, and variances on health department rules, so Joy could remain a star attraction. Just not roaming the aisles.

During shows, she is in residence in the theater office where Joy’s star decorates the lobby door. And she wears outfits for occasional promotions, like her Wonder Woman costume during the run of that movie a few months ago. She even has a Facebook presence at http://www.capitol2.com/joy_s_page.

A Tree Grows in Brayton

From Newton, we set off in search of a tree pretty much in the middle of a four-way intersection (and in the middle of nowhere) in the very rural western Iowa community of Brayton. Directions are dicey, for streets with names like 750^th and 350^th in, as I say, the middle of nowhere. They must have run out of clever names. But there’s a sign on the roadside pointing the way to “Landmark Tree 6 Miles.” 

Against Bonnie’s better judgment, I choose signage over the written directions and, after about fifteen miles of mostly dirt and rutted roads, we end up treeless and pretty much back where we started.

This definitely beats a speed bump.

Turned out the written directions, taking a shorter but equally dusty and gravelly route, were correct and we found the huge, century-old tree (decorated with a little graffiti), in the middle of a dirt-paved intersection (whose name signs did not entirely agree – but by then, who cared?). The tree was an oddity, and the drive an unforgettable hour of bemusement.

We overnighted in Council Bluffs, in our second of three nights in Marriott hotels… cheap or free, courtesy of our Marriott credit card and the 87,500 “points” it came with. Our first night, in Ohio, cost $55 plus 8,000 points. Council Bluffs was a Springhill Suites luxury room at 15,000 points; and our upcoming night at a Fairfield hotel in Nebraska ran just 10,000 points. The latter two included equally free buffet breakfasts.

Next chapter: Bowling in Nebraska

On the Road Again, 2018 Edition

David and Bonnie set out anew

to explore a vast America,

this time going bi-coastal

 

A Newton pig, duckpin bowling where you’d least expect, horses and old friends… these are the ingredients from just the opening days of a road trip in search of the real America. We’ve been here before, on the highways and byways of the nation. But this time will be our first coast-to-coast haul, a month-long journey we expect could cover 8,000 miles of territory and the amazing sights and people along the way.

Our last such adventure four years ago was prompted by a nephew’s wedding in Colorado, and the odd idea of driving instead of flying. This time, it’s a rodeo in Utah, some 2,200 miles from our Maryland home. But why stop there? Utah is practically in the backyard of California. What? Another 700 or 800 miles? 

A winter-equipped mail truck  at the Iowa 80 Trucking Museum

Sunblock. Bug repellent. A couple of books. Tuesday morning’s newspaper. In the house, doublecheck the stove is turned off, toaster unplugged, water shut off, water heater on pilot, windows locked, air conditioning/heat off. 

We pull off the driveway at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, May 8, destined for our first important stop two days hence: Visiting old friend and Baltimore Sun newspaper colleague Lynn Anderson Davy, and meeting for the first time her husband Benoit and young children Alice and Gaston in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

It’s a long haul for opening the trip, close to 950 miles, arriving on Wednesday evening. But not too fast. In our 2014 trip, we earned a speed camera ticket along a stretch of Cedar Rapids interstate highway.

We spent the first night on the road in Ohio, at a Courtyard by Marriott, and the next day make a familiar stop soon after crossing the border: The Iowa 80 Trucking Museum, a short distance from an enterprise claiming to be the world's  biggest truck stop.

 We had been there four years ago, but the museum was closed. This time, we had better luck and spent nearly an hour exploring the free museum built by truck stop founder Bill Moon to house his fascinating collection of vehicles – the oldest on display dating to 1910.

An hour later, we arrived in Cedar Rapids.

A French-American Love Story

David, with Lynn Anderson Davy in Cedar Rapids

Lynn and Benoit are a story about the random nature of existence. We all have, or should have, stories about why we exist.  For Alice and Gaston, it’s about their mother Lynn’s years in Baltimore, buying a small house in the artsy Hampden neighborhood, renting out a spare bedroom, and having a French tenant who suggested she join him in checking out a meet-up group for people who speak or are learning the French language to socialize. And that’s where she met Benoit, a French engineer living in the Baltimore area working for a French-owned company engaged in manufacturing yeast.

She quit the newspaper, and the couple moved for a few years to France where the children were born—and Lynn earned a second master’s degree, in public relations. They moved back a couple of years ago when Benoit’s company sent him to a plant in Cedar Rapids. And Lynn was hired for a communications job at the University of Iowa in nearby Iowa City. 

Lynn and I have kept up with each other since her time in France, thanks to Facebook. I probably waste too much time online, keeping up with the lives of many dozens of newspaper friends who, caught up in the fast decline of print media, have become part of a global diaspora. 

Cedar Rapids was close enough to our route westward for a real hug.

Next chapter: Roadside Attractions