MILWAUKEE—When you’ve been in lockdown for nearly a year, the only way to go is up.
Last summer I found socially distant minor league baseball in Franklin, Wis., southwest of Milwaukee. I drove along South Howell Avenue near Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport. I noticed a few airport-themed restaurants and bars along the gritty ribbon of highway. It reminded me of the 1980s and going to the Baby Doll Polka Club, across the street from Midway Airport in Chicago. I recalled a simpler time when people might stop to watch airplanes take off into places more exotic than the South Side of Chicago or the South Side of Milwaukee.
So, last Friday I drove back to [...]
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 [...]
