2009
Let me tell you about my book.
April 19: Carmel, Indiana
“It’s pronounced CAR-mal,” said the clerk at the Kwik Trip where Marge and I stopped for directions. “You’re not in California.”
Where we were going was better than California—The Mystery Company in Carmel, Indiana, Jim Huang’s mystery bookstore, for an appearance by the Five Star All Stars: Mike Black and me.
Marge and I had as much fun touring the town’s Arts & Design District where, at the corner of Main Street and Range Line Road, you find a plaque that tells you here in 1924 the town fathers installed the nation’s first traffic light. Leslie Haines, whom surely you recall, invented it. The light is now in the old train station.
Here, too, in the district is a series of statues that are, like that old light, traffic stoppers. Marge and I looked at one another when we saw the first one—a World War II sailor kissing a nurse—and said, “Did we see what we think we saw?” We drove around the block for a second look. Got out of the car and took pictures.
More recent town fathers bought the better part of a dozen statues, all very real looking people, from J. Seward Johnson, considered the Normal Rockwell of American sculptors. The sculptures are a part of his “Man on the Street” series.
Johnson says of his work, “Realism has the capacity to reach everyone.” And it does.
You read what you want; I’ll read what I want.
Are you taking notes?
Don’t let me interrupt.
Eleven secret herbs and spices?I’m listening.
April 20: Corbin, Kentucky
It all started here in 1955. The new I-75 bypassed Harlan Sanders’ motel and café, so, at age 65, he auctioned off his businesses and went on the road to build a new one, franchising Kentucky Fried Chicken. We all know how that worked out.
The café and a part of the motel are still here, now both a museum and a working KFC where you can dine on original recipe, extra crispy or the new grilled chicken. The Colonel is here, too, or at least his statue.
April 22: Knoxville, Tennessee
They do things big in Knoxville—a World’s Fair in 1982, and the Sunsphere is still there towering above the city, and big public art. My favorite, known as The Oarsman, a David Phelps sculpture, was installed in 1988 in a plaza at the corner of Church and Gay Streets, in front of what is now the Sun Trust Bank. A number of Phelps’ big bronzes are like this one in that they grow out of the ground.
What’s he saying, “Hey, fella, take the oars, would you, so I can get a bucket of chicken?”
Wish I could sing like he
did—the guy behind me.
April 29: Canonsburg, Pennsylvania
Canonsburg, population less than 10,000, seems to be home to about everybody: singers Perry Como and Bobby Vinton; the members of The Four Coins, a vocal group popular in the 1950s and ’60s; NFL head coach Marty Schottenheimer; New York Giants’ superstar Doug Kotar; Olympic gold medalist Kurt Angle and bronze medalist Bill Schmidt [the only American ever to medal in the javelin throw]; Theodosius Lazor, Metropolitan Bishop for the Orthodox Church in America; and Jonathan Letterman, the father of battlefield medicine during the Civil War.
But only Como is honored with a statue in front of City Hall. He sings all day, every day, Como on CD piped out through a sound system. And somewhere in this town is his barbershop, or at least the building that housed his barbershop. Yes, Perry Como was a barber before he broke into the music world.
April 30: Cambridge, Ohio
Ohio is home to cowboy film, radio, and TV stars Leonard Slye and William Boyd. You know them as Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy. Rogers grew up down near the Ohio River at Duck Run, 12 miles north of Portsmouth, Boyd the first seven years in Cambridge.
And Cambridge is where we found the Hopalong Cassidy Museum, Howard Cherry, proprietor. Here’s where the two cowboy stars come together. Cherry knew Rogers and was a friend. He owns a number of Rogers’ film and television outfits, and wears them on occasion for publicity photos.
Hey, Hoppy, you’ll love this story.
Howard and me with my book, of course.
April 30: Zanesville, Ohio
Alan Cottrill does things big and small in his sculpture studio and nearby bronze foundry in this city, a sculptor whose everything is bold. Statues line the sidewalk outside his building: a soldier, an old-timey guy who could be Johnny Appleseed, Tiger Woods whacking a golf ball, a cowboy on a bucking horse, and a half-dozen more. Cottrill started in Washington, Pennsylvania, but got in a ruckus with the city fathers in 2002 and moved everything here, to his hometown. Yet he does commissions in and around Washington. Here in Zanesville, though, Cottrill displays a copy of everything he’s ever sculpted—more than 300 bronze pieces.
He’s success personified. Cottrill made his fortune in the franchise business; he created Four Star Pizza. With money in his pocket, he became an art collector and took up painting. In 1990, he turned to clay and found it, as he said, “the mistress I’ve traveled the world in search of.”
See, right here on page 218, there is a horse in the book.
© Jerry Peterson.
