Planes, No Trains, and Automobiles

At the end of August, I went to the shore for a few days of not doing much of anything. I’m not really good at not doing much of anything. In fact, if we had played Not Doing Much of Anything in high school gym class, I would have been picked last. Accordingly, after about 15 minutes of not doing much of anything, I resolved to do something—even just once thing—every day. Early on, I scratched training for a marathon and writing The Great American Novel off the might-do list. I needed something to do, but I didn't need that much to do! I rode my bike around the island (14 miles), walked to Stone Harbor Point and back (5.62 miles), and cleaned the garage. Not much, but it felt as if I'd done something.

One of days when I was doing my 5.62 miles along the beach, I saw a B-24—yes, the WWII vintage bomber—fly overhead. That’s not something you see every day. So I called my brother Rob who knows about these things and he told me that it had to be from the Commemorative Air Force and I should look at its web site to find out what the deal was. A quick trip to the interwebs told me that the B-24 was spending a few days at the Cape May County Airport, otherwise known as the former Wildwood Naval Air station. I decided to head over there that very afternoon.

I’d never seen a B-24 in person, but I remembered that one of my father’s competitors in the insurance business flew a B-24. My father, the self-described world’s best pilot, could get under this man’s skin instantly at social functions by referring to him as an airplane driver, rather than as a pilot. This is something my father, the former fighter jock, particularly enjoyed. He was a better pilot, better looking, got laid more, could hold more liquor, and do a better job solving the NYT Crossword in pen (at least after he met my mother), than any old airplane driver and he made sure that the airplane driver knew it.

I’d been to the Cape May County Airport once before and thought it was a sad sort of place that must have about 23 customers per year. On this visit, however, it was packed. I practically had to park in Delaware and then I had to wait in line to pay my $10 admission fee. They were having some sort of expo to cash in on the visit of the vintage planes. In addition to checking out the exhibits, you could sample beer or buy some sort of contraption to keep the flotsam and jetsam out of your gutters and downspouts..

The B-24 and its cousin, a B-17, were parked on the tarmac outside the hanger that houses the Naval Air Station Wildwood Museum. The bombers’ friend, a P-51 Mustang, was also part of the exhibition, but it was undergoing some “procedure” so it wasn’t available for my viewing pleasure. You could ride in all the planes, too. That, however, was not for the faint of wallet. The fare was $450 for a thirty minute ride on the B-17 or B-24 and $3,200 in the P-51. Yeah, I passed. But I did think about it.

They need to tell people not to smoke in the bomb bay?

I took the self-guided tour of both the B-17 and B-24, the pride of our military industrial complex circa 1944. They seemed as if they’d be scary as hell to fly in, let alone with people shooting at you while you bombed Germany. Seeing the planes and hearing about the conditions in which men served on them really does fill you with awe for the accomplishments of the guys of the greatest generation.

No one told me that Tom of Finland did US Navy Recruiting posters.

Nothing makes a better backdrop for a jazz combo than an  old German V-2 rocket.

Some think that had James A. Garfield been treated in an airplane hanger in New Jersey, he'd be alive today.

After I toured the planes I walked through the exhibits again. The museum has a nice enough collection mixed in with a bunch of cheesy stuff, especially the mannequins depicting wounded soldiers. Even with a huge crowd—which there was—the place look as if you could drop a few million bucks into it before anyone even noticed. Still, it was nice to see people soaking up some American history for a change.

Interestingly enough, this was not the logo on the back of my mother's Studebaker.

I thought the vintage planes were about as vintage as Cape May County events got until I checked out Twitter on my iPhone on October 3 and saw that there was a vintage auto car show and race in Wildwood. My friends Bruce and Martha the phone Luddites--as in flip phones with broken screens—give me a hard time about my close relationship with my iPhone, but had it not been for my iPhone and Twitter account, we’d have never found this this thing. Thank you Cape May County Herald for posting something about it!

The Wildwoods (as in North Wildwood, Wildwood, West Wildwood and Wildwood Crest) are just across Hereford Inlet from Stone Harbor but they might as well be a million miles away. My grandparents started going to the Jersey shore in the 1930s and my mother told me even then Wildwood was “pretty rough”. If your favorite dying northeastern city had a few miles of nice beach next to its downtown, that would be Wildwood.

Frankie Avalon buys a Kohr Brothers ice cream cone in Wildwood back in the day.

The city has started a heroic job of rebranding itself with its 1950s doo-wop era architecture but the place has large sections of town where no one has put the bop in the bop shoo bop.

The car show was in the parking area next to the Wildwood Convention Center. Most of the cars were from the 1950s and early 1960s—usually tricked out in some way. There were lots of low riders.

Interestingly enough, they don't sell these bumper stickers at Nuns' Beach.

It was all pretty informal—the cars didn’t even have signs in the windows to identify them. I had to ask someone sitting at a table selling t-shirts where the car races on the beach were. He said they were about 10 blocks up the Boardwalk and that I should just look for the large Ferris Wheel.

The Boardwalk is well, something you just have to see to believe. It hasn’t changed very much since my last visit, longer ago than I care to remember. It’s sort of like the midway at a low end county fair, except instead of smelling of cotton candy and farm smells, it smells of cotton candy and ocean smells, in addition to cigars, someone who used too much Axe body spray, and someone who didn’t use enough Axe body spray. As my college friend Peggy would say, it’s quite something.

There are lots of shops selling things that make you scratch your head and say to yourself “Who buys this stuff?”

In October some places are closed. I couldn’t check out Paul’s Balls.

Grabbing a wiener wasn't an option either. Yep, it's right there by Paul's Balls. I think both Paul's Balls and Grab a Wiener would do really well in Rehoboth Beach.

After our ten block walk, we were near the large Ferris Wheel and could see the tents that presumably marked the race course out on the beach. For whatever reason, Wildwood is one of the rare places on the shore where Mother Nature deposits sand rather than taking it away, so it's quite a walk from The Boardwalk to the beach.

The tents marked the site of the weekend’s main event, something called The Race of Gentlemen. Yes, it sounds as if it should have been sponsored by Ralph Lauren or perhaps Vineyard Vines. Elaborate tailgate parties spilling from vintage woodies, women in pink and green, men in rowing blazers, top shelf liquor, that sort of thing. WRONG.

The event turned out to be unlike any car gathering I’ve been to, and as someone who comes from a family of motor heads I’ve been to my share. It was a gathering of hipsters with old cars and motorcycles. Come to think of it, I think the only way to get a hipster to the beach would be to lure him with an old car or motorcycle.

I think this guy is the mascot for the Oiler's Car Club.

I think the event was sponsored by Harley Davidson and perhaps—I wasn’t quite sure—Old Crow Whiskey. You could have told me that it was sponsored by Zap Comix and I’d have believed it. There wasn’t much info about it online, so I really didn’t know what to expect.

I couldn’t believe that they’d really race cars on the beach. Who did they think they were, Barney Oldfield?

 

None of the cars were newer than 1930-ish. A long time had passed since anyone had described any of them as "cherry". The motorcycles were of the same vintage and condition.

There were about twenty cars, and a few were still spattered with sand as if they'd just been in a race. The collection of cars was way more Abramson’s Junk Yard than the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. Actually, it was more Abramson’s Junk Yard than it was Port Royal Speedway, even on Hot Pants Night. Several of the cars were being tinkered with by their owners.

Kinda makes me want to take up surfing.

No one seemed concerned about the effects of salt water or even sand on their machines. According to the event’s web site, admission was supposed to be $30, but it looked as if the person selling tickets had said "Screw it!" some time ago so we walked in for free. I even walked around looking for someone to pay since the experience was certainly worth the thirty bucks.

There were half sheet pans under cars and motorcycles everywhere. Apparently the racing gentlemen were concerned about keeping dripping engine fluids off the beach.

Trust me, it was just coffee.

They really went all out with the potato chip display.

Food wise, well, it wasn't exactly a spread to send Alice Waters into orgasmic hosannas. Unless they were hiding the food booths at an undisclosed location, there seemed to be a choice of coffee, beer, potato chips, and pork rinds. There was special booth just for the artisanal free range heirloom pork rinds. Crazy.

There was a very strong hipster vibe, in other words it was a pastel-free zone. In a fashion nod to Henry Ford’s remark about the color of cars, you could wear any color you wanted to as long as it were black. Skinny jeans and tats were the order of the day.

 

We missed the racing on the beach since the tide had come in. It looked as if the finish line, or perhaps that was the reviewing stand, were about to float away in several feet of water. We did however, see people do donuts and hear lots of engine revving by cars in various stages of tune up.

Four young women asked me to take their photo and so in lieu of listening to the unsolicited advice from one of my friends on how to do it, I handed her the camera so she could do the honors. I asked if they wanted to put their beer cups down for the photo but they were having none of that. Apparently their mothers know that they are not as pure as the driven 1930 Ford V-8.

A nice old Mercury at the doo-wop WaWa.

Some guy doing security told us to come back at 8:00 for the bonfire. Perhaps they'd grabbed some wieners and were going to be roasting them--it didn't seem like a s'mores sort of crowd. In the end, the bonfire interfered with the obligatory visit to Fred's. That meant I never had to come clean to a tattooed hipster that I didn't know the difference between a banger and a flatty.

My friends and I said to ourselves that we’d come back at 7:00 am the next day--when the tide was out-- to see the racing. Big surprise: that didn't happen. But I think we all believed we would when we said it.

I hope the Race of Gentlemen returns to Wildwood next year and isn't just motor racing's version of Brigadoon,  fading into the ocean mists (and a cloud of exhaust smoke) off an improbable spot at the Jersey Shore.

For more info on the Race of Gentlemen, check out this New York Times article:  Race of Gentlemen Looks Back to Simpler Time

And this great video on Vimeo-- Race of the Gentlemen

James A. Garfield, Gone but Only Mostly Forgotten

As always, I’m a bit behind in my posts. As Maxwell Smart would have said, sorry about that!

Late in the summer, I met an old friend in the booming metropolis of Mentor, Ohio so that we could take in the James A. Garfield National Historic Site. Yes, that’s right, I took a break from hanging out with A-List, above the fold, Bold-Faced Names to do something even more A-list, above the fold, and bold-faced for a change. And what’s the most A-list, above the fold, bold-faced-est thing that you can think of within 221 miles of State College in a west northwest direction? That’s right, the James A. Garfield National Historic Site.

In the unlikely event that you were dozing during the nanosecond when President Garfield was mentioned in your high school history class, James A. Garfield was president in the era when presidents looked like Brooklyn hipsters but without the tats, ear-gauges, or skinny jeans. That’s right, he was one of those shaggy-bearded white guys who served as president between Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. He was the last president born in a log cabin and the first president whose mother lived long enough to attend her son's inauguration.

As Candice Millard’s book Destiny of the Republic will tell you far better than I can, four months after his inauguration he was shot by a crazy person in a train station in Washington, D.C. and then had to endure the best medical care America. This consisted of doctors poking him with dirty medical instruments until he died a couple of months later. This was before submitting insurance forms until you die became standard American medical practice.

Garfield is well known among American History geeks for his "Front Porch Campaign". Instead of gallivanting across the country, he let voters come to him and so he gave many campaign speeches from his front porch. Although the correspondence has unfortunately been lost, oral history tells us that one of his neighbors narked on him and so Garfield received numerous nastygrams from his neighborhood association. Political speeches and large torchlit gatherings of the hoi polloi were specifically prohibited in the Arboreal Dell Farmettes of Mentor Neighborhood Association covenants. Garfield is said to have remarked to his wife that this was what they got for living near Democrats.

After her husband's untimely demise (he didn't live to his first Presidential payday. Seriously.) Mrs. Garfield, a woman with the unfortunate name of Lucretia, collected all of her late husband’s papers and stored them in a fireproof vault that she’d added to the family home. I don’t know if she did anything especially creepy like going into the vault to caress and talk to the papers, but she still had them right there, next to the family’s living room. You could say--if you were prone to fits of hyperbole--that this was America's first presidential library. For it to truly have counted as the first presidential library she would also have to have opened the requisite gift shoppe and licensed her husband's image to manufacturers of specialty items such as coffee mugs, spittoons, and guest soaps.

The site’s been a museum forever, has lots of artifacts that belonged to the Garfields, and employs guides who are knowledgeable without being patronizing. If you’re a windmill aficionado, there’s even one of those to check out. There is even a restored "gas house", something near and dear to fart joke lovers everywhere.

On the Wandering Wahoo Scale of Presidential Site Choiceness, this one rates four and half stars. It didn't reach the coveted five star ranking because there were no completely crazy folks on the tour asking questions like “President Garfield, was he a Scientologist?”  Or, “I heard that Carol Doda was President Garfield’s secretary’s great granddaughter. Do you know if she’s been here?”

After our tour, my friend and I drove to the nearby town of Willoughby to find a trendy boite where we could eat lunch. The town was having some sort of parade, always a good time in my book. We stopped in an secondhand store where I almost bought talking Richard Nixon Doll. Yes, if you pushed the button it really would say “I am not a crook.” Now that marriage equality has come to both the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the Presbyterian Church USA, the Nixon doll would have made a nice spousal unit for the Talking Moses Doll that’s a perennial favorite in my church's annual fundraising auction. After thinking about RMN, the Doll, for precisely 18 1/2 minutes--the length of the gap in the Watergate tapes, I decided that Moses could remain a bachelor for another year, or at least until I found a doll with a less pronounced five o'clock shadow.

I'll be going back to Ohio--it has plenty of other presidential sites to check out. I'm not sure if Carol Doda has been to any of them but I'm certainly going to ask.


James A. Garfield Historic Site
8095 Mentor Avenue
Mentor, Ohio 44060.
(440) 255-8722
N.B.  The Garfield Home is closed from September 2 through March, 2015 for the installation of a new geothermal heating and air conditioning system. The Visitor Center and Grounds will remain open during this time; Tuesday-Saturday 10am-5pm.

The Miss Cumberland Ag Expo Pageant

The other day I had the opportunity to be pageant judge. That’s right a beauty, I mean scholarship, pageant. My friend Lizzie asked our mutual friend Terra and me if we would be interested in the gig. Judging a pageant is a doofus hipster-wannabe blogger’s dream come true. We both jumped at the chance, and so put the Cumberland Ag Expo on our dance cards.

In case you were wondering, I have excellent qualifications in the pageant judging department. I watched the Miss America Pageant on TV about 30 years ago. I’ve seen both The Bachelor and The Bachelorette at least once, and watched a few seasons of Project Runway. And last but not least, I’ve scoped out a million people in bars, some of whom were actual women.

To get to the expo, you drove about 75 miles from State College into deepest, darkest, farm-y-ist, Pennsylvania. We were well past the point where people can spell in English. While the drive was beautiful, I thought for a moment or two that I was going to have to change the voice on the GPS to the Sacagawea setting.

The Cumberland Ag Expo is one of the 109 county and community fairs in Pennsylvania. I learned this factoid from my colleague on the judging panel, Michelle, who works in the county fair office (big shock, there is one) in the state government in Harrisburg. I didn’t ask her if she makes the state regulations regarding what people can or can’t deep fry at a fair, but my guess is that’s she’s probably in on the ground floor of that deal.

My default county fair is the Centre County Grange Fair and Encampment which takes place each year in late August.  It’s a great honkin’ thing with a midway, farm animals, exhibits, commercial booths, big time entertainment, and of course, its trademark camping in tents and campers. It’s sort of like the all-white middle-class slightly-redneck version of Woodstock, only without the bad hair, bell bottoms, drugs, booze, mud, and Janis Joplin. I wasn’t expecting the Cumberland Ag Expo to be quite like that, but more like its fetching country cousin, the Perry County Fair, which has most of the things the Grange Fair has, only in the smaller, cuter, and less deep-fried version.

The Cumberland Ag Expo fair was somewhat—ok, lots—smaller than those two fairs. There are several ways to judge the size of county fairs. You can look at the size of the fairgrounds, the number of exhibits, or even audience numbers. I, however, use the industry standard metric: the number of funnel cake trailers. The Cumberland Ag Expo had just one. And it wasn’t the standard white metal and glass concessionaire’s trailer. This one looked like a repurposed 1940s film noir-esque house trailer. It was the kind of place where you pray that the semi-hot farm boy who picked you up at the bar doesn’t live.

There were a handful of buildings on the fairgrounds, all built in the non-quaint local vernacular materials of metal and concrete block. While functional, no one would ever call them architectural gems. Since it had been unusually rainy, the grounds were green and muddy.

Our gig was on the opening day of the event, so the expo hadn’t really hit its stride in terms of audience numbers. There was a smattering of cars I the parking lot. And I do mean a smattering.When we pulled into the parking lot I thought all the cars must belong to people working there.

There wasn’t a midway, so I wouldn’t be able to do a star turn at a cotton candy stand—a skill I picked up at the Reedsville Fireman’s Carnival. There weren’t barns filled with freshly scrubbed farm animals, so there was no danger my of lapsing into a reverie about life as a gentleman farmer with a herd of polled Herefords grazing in the distance creating Tumblr-worthy photo ops. There were no commercial vendors, so I was spared the chance of walking by the booth of the local Rock of Ages dealer and seeing a Polaroid of a headstone belonging to a dead person who just happened to be my father.

The exhibit building was starting to fill with things. There were the standard fresh cabbages and beets as well as beans and canned meat (ugh).  There was even a display of canned lard. That’s right, canned lard. I asked a woman how they judged the stuff other than by looks and she said she was just arranging the jars and didn’t know anything about that. While she didn’t provide much info, she was doing a top notice job of arranging the jars of canned goods.  If any readers know how about judging canned lard, please contact me, I’m dying to know.

After a dinner of fair fare (hot sausage sandwich and french fries) it was time to wander to over to the stage for the pageant.

Terra and I met the other judge—the previously mentioned lovely woman from the county fair office in the state government—and heard our very complicated instructions. Seriously, the launch sequence for an inter-continental ballistic missile can’t be as complicated as the process of completing those score sheets. We were to judge the young women on a variety of criteria including Poise, Personality, Communication, Appearance, and Answer to Question—I was so hoping they’d ask the contestants if they were in favor of world peace!

Before things got underway officially, my fellow judges and I had a quick chat with the four contestants. That’s right, four. One for each prize. The women were very nice, quite attractive, and couldn't have been more polite. But they were also evidence of the sorry state of teaching English grammar in schools. My mother, the grammarian, would have disqualified all of the contestants since, to a woman, they all were significantly lacking in the standard English department.

The pageant started late and the first order of business was the presentation of a giant check from the state fair office to the fair organizers.  Every time I see a giant check presentation I wish someone would show up with a giant deposit slip. Hasn’t happened yet, but hope springs eternal.

After giant check business was over, the contestants came on stage in casual clothes and introduced themselves to the audience. Each young woman gave a little speech about what she liked about living in Cumberland County.

Then there was a break in the action while the contestants changed into evening wear. The pageant emcee and his wife used this opportunity to provide a “musical interlude” backed up by keyboard and steel drum. The other visiting agri-royalty, the Newville Fair Queen, the Newville Fair Sweethart, the Cumberland Dairy Princess, and the Pennsylvania Pickled Beet and Egg Dowager Countess took the opportunity to do some impromptu dance numbers, presumably to demonstrate that they, too, were gifted when it came to Poise and Appearance. Interestingly enough, after about 30 seconds of that tomfoolery, the Dairy Princess channeled her inner Queen Victoria and sat back down with that We Are Not Amused  look on her face while the lesser royals cavorted.

Mr. Emcee and his wife’s cover of I Will Survive was something I wasn’t sure I’d survive. I leaned over to Terra and said, “This song as practically the gay national anthem, and this version, well, the only way it could be worse would be if they were in blackface.”

After I Will Survive was beaten to death, the contestants came back onstage and walked about in their evening gowns demonstrating their poise and appearance not to mention their ability to pick out an evening gown. My fellow judges and I got down to the hard work of voting two off the island. It was much more difficult than I thought it would be since each young woman had strengths and weaknesses. The emcee delivered the bad news as both young women put on brave faces while accepting their consolation bouquets.

We were finally down to the final two and the old Ask Each Contestant a Question While the Rest Wait in a Soundproof Booth portion of the evening. Only in this case, it was a soundproof concrete block room that passed for backstage. The pageant committee had decided to ask each woman about childhood memories, so I never did learn if they were actually in favor of world peace. I'm hoping so. After both speeches, my fellow judges put our heads together and came to consensus on our choices for the first runner up and the winner. I completed the official score sheet and handed it to the emcee.

Without too much fanfare, he announced “And the winner of the Miss Cumberland Ag Expo is….”

And then he read the wrong name.

The technical term for that in pageant land is EPIC FAIL.

After a few seconds, he did a one-eighty and announced that the real winner was really Hetty Lynch and not Paige Ezell. Yikes.

It was quite something indeed.

Paige, the first runner up, was incredibly gracious about the snafu. I’m not sure that I would have been, especially if I’d been wearing a high heels and evening gown in a beauty pageant all evening.

Hetty, the winner, was magnanimous in victory and greeted her subjects just as all pageant winners do—with tears of joy.

About two seconds after the end of the pageant, while the stage was still filled with photographers, the expo committee started the baked goods auction, something they didn’t do when I watched the Miss America Pageant on TV 30 years ago.

Before Terra and I started back to State College I headed to the john since a full bladder, the suspension on a Ford Ranger, and country roads can be a dangerous mix. While I was in the can, one of the non-winning contestants walked by Terra close enough so that Terra could hear her say “I’m so fucking pissed…”

Terra didn’t think the contestant saw her and didn't find out why the contestant was upset. Perhaps her pineapple upside down cake didn’t fetch the price in the bake sale that it should have? Or perhaps she left her entry of canned lard at home? Or perhaps she was just a sore loser, or as Shakespeare might have said, that unhappy lies the head that doesn’t wear the crown.

P.S. Because of the emcee's goof in announcing the names of the prize winners, the pageant's organizers did their best to make amends by giving Paige the same scholarship that they awarded Hetty. She might not have won, but she'll have a story she can dine out on for the rest of her life.